When a Muslim engages in conversation with a Christian friend about faith and scripture, the instinct is often to go on the offensive — to dismantle the Bible, expose its contradictions, and win the argument. But what if that approach, however intellectually satisfying, is fundamentally counter-productive to the spirit of Islamic da’wah? This episode of The Deen Show tackles exactly that scenario: a Muslim viewer asks how to respond when her Christian friend says she feels closer to God when reading the Bible — and the answer from guest Yusuf Estes is both surprising and deeply rooted in Islamic principle.
Why Broadly Attacking the Bible Backfires — and What the Quran Actually Says
Yusuf Estes, a former Christian minister who continued studying the Bible in Greek and Hebrew for two and a half years even after embracing Islam, makes a nuanced case that every Muslim in interfaith dialogue needs to hear. Criticising the Bible wholesale is spiritually risky — not because the Bible is infallible, but because it originally came from Allah. The Quran commands belief in the books that came before, and traces of divine truth may still remain within the Biblical text. To broadly attack it is to risk disparaging words that may still carry the light of revelation. Moreover, many Biblical teachings — the Psalms, the parables of Jesus, passages from Ecclesiastes and Jeremiah — closely parallel Quranic wisdom and the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. To dismiss the Bible entirely is, in a very real sense, to criticise the Quran and Sunnah alongside it.
“You don’t have to build any bridges — the bridges are already there. You just have to help people clear the way to see them and come on over to Islam.” — Yusuf Estes
- The Quran affirms belief in previous scriptures — attacking the Bible wholesale contradicts this foundational Islamic principle
- Numbers 23:19 states: “God is not a man, and God is not the son of man” — a powerful point of Quranic alignment already within the Old Testament
- Mark 12:29 records Jesus affirming: “The Lord thy God is one Lord” — the same pure tawhid that Islam proclaims
- Semitic languages (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew) have no upper or lower case, dismantling the “capital-S Son” argument used to elevate Jesus above other “sons of God” in scripture
- Demolishing someone’s faith without offering a path forward is, as Estes puts it, like sinking their ship and giving them no lifeboat
Feelings Are Not Evidence — The Need for Objective Truth in Interfaith Dialogue
A second and equally vital insight emerges from the co-panellist: emotional experience cannot be the criterion for scriptural truth. A Hindu who reads the Bhagavad Gita may feel profound serenity — that feeling does not make it divinely preserved revelation. The question is not how a text makes someone feel, but whether it has been transmitted faithfully from its divine source. On that front, it is not Muslims alone who acknowledge that the Bible has undergone change — Christian scholarship itself has documented extensive alteration, interpolation, and manuscript divergence across four differing Gospel traditions. The Quran, by contrast, remains a single, memorised, preserved text, unchanged across more than 1,400 years and still carrying Allah’s own divine challenge to humanity.
- Emotional peace from a text is subjective — it cannot serve as proof of that text’s divine preservation or doctrinal truth
- It is Christian scholars — not just Muslims — who have documented contradictions, additions, and manuscript divergence within the Bible
- The Quran’s internal challenge stands firm: “If it were from other than Allah, they would find within it many contradictions” (Surah An-Nisa: 82)
- Muslims respect what remains of truth in the Bible — Allah’s declaration of the People of the Book as closest to the believers reflects this dignity
- The goal of dialogue is never to leave someone spiritually homeless; it is to gently guide them toward the fullness of Islam with wisdom and patience
“We need to look at things not from an emotional perspective — not just how I feel — but ask: what is the objective reality? It is not Muslims saying the book has been changed; it is Christian scholarship who have said the book has been changed.” — Co-panellist on The Deen Show
The wisdom woven through this conversation is ultimately a masterclass in da’wah — inviting people to Islam with hikmah and maw’idhah hasanah, as Allah commands in Surah An-Nahl (16:125). The believer’s role is not to win arguments but to open hearts: to highlight the shared truths between Islam and Christianity, to demonstrate that the Quran confirms and completes what came before it, and to trust that sincere seekers who ask “Your will be done, O God” are already walking a path that leads, by Allah’s permission, to the shahada. As Yusuf Estes reminds us with rare honesty, it is Allah who guides — not us. Our calling is to be patient, knowledgeable, and compassionate companions on someone else’s spiritual journey, to pray for them sincerely, and to remember that even the most unlikely hearts — like his own father’s — can be turned by the One who holds all of them.
