At age 23, I accepted the message of Jesus and him as my Savior and Lord. My situation since then has been like a beggar finding food and now wants to tell other beggars where to find it. We live in a world where, in the name of interfaith and so-called bridge building, Christians who have been blessed with the truth sadly let Muslims die, having no hope of assurance of eternal life. If we love Muslims, we should be sharing the Gospel of Jesus with them.
Like the Jews of Paul’s day, Muslims, too, are very zealous for God. But their zealousness is in the wrong place. Like Paul’s heart cried for his fellow Jews, my heart cries for Muslims to know Christ and the assurance of eternal life he gives. I love them all. It is not the Muslims but the ideology of Islam that is the problem. The ideology and faith that is very much ‘works’ related and still a Muslim is not sure whether God will accept him in His paradise as only martyrs in the way of Allah have Qur’anic assurance. Although the Qur’an talks about rewards for good deeds, it also states that God has created some to lead them into the straight path of God and others to lead them astray (Sura 6:39).
As a young Muslim, this was my dilemma. From one scholar of Islam to the other, I studied. My question was how could we be sure that we are on the right path, doing the right things that Allah has commanded, and that we have the assurance that we love him so much by keeping all the commands that He now, in return, is loving us. Well, there was no easy answer. I looked into the life of Muhammad and found Muhammad saying to his companions: `No one of you will enter Paradise through his good works.' They said: `Not even you, O Apostle of God?' `Not even I,' he replied, `unless God covers me with His grace and mercy.'" (Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim). I asked, how can one get this covering of His grace and mercy? Neither the Qur’an nor the Ahadith tells how. Well, one night, scared of death, hiding in a secure place, as there was a war between India and Pakistan, and because of the air raid, shells were falling, I was reciting verses of the Qur'an one after another from memory. All of sudden it seemed like I was asked, 'Do you believe what you are reciting?' And indeed, in my heart and mind, I said, yes, I do. The next question came, so why don’t you act upon them? When was the last time you read what was revealed to Moses and given through Jesus? You say you believe in them but do not act upon them. You say you do not make any distinction among them, yet you claim whatever Moses and Jesus brought is corrupted. Well, I was reciting Sura 3:84.
The next day I got myself a Bible. Although at age 13 I had been given the Gospel of John and, at age 15, a Gideon NT, I always thought the message was corrupted and only the message of Islam was intact. Now at the age of 20, I started reading the Bible carefully. To make the whole story short, I found what I was looking for one day. I found God’s grace and mercy I was looking for. Right in the first chapter of John, I found that the law was given through Moses, but grace has been granted through Jesus (John 1:17). While the Qur’an was offering me, conditional love of Allah, that it is I who had to take the initiative to love him first and still not know whether he loved me, the Christian Scripture was telling me that before I loved Him, he has loved me (1 John 4:19). There was Muhammad in the Qur’an who does not know what will happen to him or me (Sura 46:9), here was Jesus who knew where he came from and where he was going and he assured me, 'Believe in me, and you will have eternal life' (John 8:14; 5:24; 11:26). Here was Muhammad who said to his own daughter Fatima, I cannot save you. Here is Jesus, who claims, believe in me, and you will have eternal life.