Resurrecting Ibn Taimiyah’s Fallacious Arguments About Christianity

by Louis Palme (November 2012)

Back in the 13^th Century, Islamic scholar Ibn Taimiyah wrote a voluminous refutation of Christian positions relative to Islam. A few years ago, that study was translated and reduced to a 406 page book, Answering Those Who Altered the Religion of Jesus Christ. The book is posted in PDF format on the Internet at: http://ahlalhadeeth.wordpress.com/books/authors/ibn-taymiyyah/  This website calls Taimiyah’s book one of the most important Islamic books in print today.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/pact-umar.asp ) So Taimiyah tried to address some of the presumed or hypothetical Christian objections to submitting to Islam – a work intended for a sympathetic Muslim audience. The arguments are long and tedious, but set forth below are the principal points made by Taimiyah, along with a 21^st Century Christian response.

http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/syllabi/r/rennie/rel151/mss.htm) plus hundreds of partial texts, and many of those same original documents are the sources for new translations of the Bible. For example the Greek Bible, Codex Sinaiticus (330-360 AD), was at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt prior to the birth of Muhammad, and it is still a principal reference for new Bible translations. 

If Muhammad once praised the Christians, it was Muhammad who changed, and not the Bible.

It is curious that in the 21^st Century clash of civilizations, Islamic apologists have not developed new responses to the rejection of Islam by Christians, but rather, have resurrected the writings of a 13^th Century scholar for their arguments.

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