Book review: What Every Christian Needs to Know about the Qur'an by James R. White

Purchase: Westminster | Amazon

One of the best Christian introductory work to Islam that I read and much more academically rigorous than most. For those familiar with the author James White, he is a Christian apologist who has debated and written on many issues over the past decades. Since the mid-2000s, James White started focusing a lot on Islam, beginning with his debut debate with the foremost Islamic apologist Shabir Ally in 2006 at BIOLA university. White was led to specialize in Islam largely because of his love for the persecuted Church today, many of whom live in Islamic land. The thing that stood out to me in this work is White’s familiarity with Arabic and careful interaction with the primary sources. It’s not just the Qur’an but he is able to engage in “Hadith Science.” He does all this while also balancing his work with an awareness of the need of his readers to have explained to them definitions and concepts in Islamic theology. In my estimation, the best part of the book were chapters 4, 8, 9 and 11. I have been hesitant in the past when I hear Christian apologist say that the Qur’an and the early Islamic community has a misunderstanding of the Trinity (to include Mary in place of the Holy Spirit) but James White has done a masterful job of showing from early Islamic sources that this was what they believed in chapter four of the book. In chapter eight James White shows how the Qur’an and the early Muslim community did not believe that the Bible was corrupted textually but instead they presupposes otherwise. If you only have one work on Islam in your bookshelf, I would say this would be it. I have this on my shelf with all the highlights and notes for future references.

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