And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”

On December 10, 2015, Hawkins posted a picture of herself wearing an Islamic headscarf and wrote: “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. Qureshi (who died at the age of 34) was responding to a controversy that started with a Facebook post by Larycia Hawkins, the first female African-American tenured professor at evangelical Wheaton College. How can it be said that Christians and Muslims worship the same God? For Christians, Jesus is certainly God, and for Muslims Jesus is certainly not God. Let’s start with the obvious: Christians believe Jesus is God, but the Quran is so opposed to this belief that it condemns Jesus worshipers to Hell ( 5.72). Nabeel Qureshi, a Muslim-background Christian believer and author of Seeking Allah Finding Jesus, argues that the problem begins with the Qur’an’s position on Jesus: The God of Islam cannot be the true God, they hold, and the spread of Islam is necessarily a threat to the Church. Yet other Christians feel the challenge from Muslims more acutely than they do the challenge of the nones. During a recent seminar on Islamic Origins at Notre Dame a Christian student raised some concern with “ideas that will inevitably antagonize Muslims,” adding, “Muslims are our allies against secularism.” The urge to recognize commonality with Muslims is felt more strongly by many Christians these days in the West, as the number of “nones” continues to grow and religion is pushed out of the public sphere. Many hold up the piety of Muslims, particularly in their fidelity to prayer, as an example to be emulated.

Yet many Christians are eager to emphasize what we hold in common with Muslims. Muslims disagree with Christians on a number of things, including the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and the authority of the Bible. In his 1984 book Muhammad and the Christian the Anglican bishop Kenneth Cragg writes, “The answer to the vexed question, ‘Is the God of Islam and the God of the Gospel the same?’ can only rightly be ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’.” The concern that led Cragg to this answer, or rather this failure to answer, is one shared by many orthodox Christians interested in friendship with Muslims. Should Muslims, like Jews, be counted as fellow believers? Or is Allah a different God, the creation of Muhammad and fundamentally unlike the God of the Bible? Christians regularly ask whether the God of Islam is the God of Christianity. Most questions I address are not about jihad or sharia, but about Allah. How are Christians responding? The media often suggests that American Christians (especially Evangelicals) have turned Islamophobic, but at the talks I give around the country I encounter more curiosity about Islam than hatred or fear. The growth of Islam in America means that Christians are interacting with Muslims more than ever before. According to a 2017 Pew Study, the Muslim American population is “growing rapidly” through a combination of immigration, conversion, and a high fertility rate. Islam is on the rise in the United States.

Divine divinity wishing well