Christian-Muslim Debate is maintained by Adnan Khan, a professed agnostic from a nominally Muslim background. After he realized the comment on this page regarding the fact that he is an agnostic, he quickly added a statement about his agnosticism to the introductory paragraph of his site, on November 4th, 1997. This is commendable even though it is only a reaction. We have no objections against more honesty in his self-representation, after he let people believe for over half a year that he is Muslim, since for most people this would have been implicit in the original site name "Answers to Polemics against Islam" and the defense of Islam (without any critique) throughout the site.
Since Mr. Khan's site is the only non-Muslim one reacting to our web site, and it is created to aid the Muslim attack on the Bible, I placed it under the category of Muslim responses since I didn't want to create a new section with only one link.
The name "Christian-Muslim Debate" must be a joke since the site consists to 70% not of Muslim but of atheist arguments and articles. There is very little genuinely Muslim on his site. The main site linked by him is infidels.org and these pages are mainly an extension of it, given that Adnan Khan is Farrell Till's disciple, and Mr. Till is one of the main players at the atheist site.
The Use of Atheist Material by Muslims is a general issue that needs to be addressed and we ask you to read it carefully before continuing with the provided responses to particular items on Mr. Khan's site in the remainder of this page.
Mr. Khan has a great love for atheist web sites, the favorite being the Internet Infidels of whom he links many pages. As some good responses to "Internet Infidels" I want to recommend in particular Tekton Apologetics Ministries and The Christian Think Tank. Our site is about Muslim-Christian dialog and we will focus on that.
The Messiah: His page of articles against the Messiah, supposedly is a rebuttal to the article by Jay Smith but none of his links actually responds to Jay Smith's article Who is the Messiah?
Instead he presents a battery of mostly atheist attacks on the claim of the existence or fulfilment of Messianic prophecies. But he is not as fond to point out the scholarly Christian responses to the atheists as he is to list many attacks against the Bible. For example Jim Lippard's The Fabulous Prophecies Of The Messiah have found scholarly rebuttals by Dr. James D. Price and Glenn Miller. Maybe that is the reason that Adnan Khan prefered to not list this paper by Lippard (so that leaving off the direct responses isn't so implicating) but instead presents the rehash of the same arguments by Mr. Till and others?
And there is a problem which Mr. Khan might not have realized, and which he as an atheist/agnostic and unbeliever in the Qur'an might not care about very much anyway, but it is detrimental to the truth claim of Qur'an. Mr. Khan with his sources tries to show that Jesus did not fulfill the messianic prophecies. This obviously means that he was not the Messiah since the Messiah's identity is defined by these prophecies. Since the Qur'an does say that Jesus is the Messiah, this page (if true) would actually show that the Qur'an makes a false claim. I guess Mr. Khan was a bit overeager here.
Trinity: After receiving quite some flak over this issue on the Muslim-Christian Dialog list Mr. Khan had finally at least the decency to put a question mark after "Christians" in his reference to the Jehovah's Witness brochure on the Trinity as a counter argument to the Trinity. But he has never actually investigated the truthfulness of this site. Here a critical look at this material exposing their deceitful out of context quotes and more.
Mr. Khan then introduces his featured pages about Christian atrocities with this telling paragraph:
Jochen Katz has added a link to the site called "Documenting the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world", even though he admits that no generalization should be made by these sad incidents and is not helpful in discussion which was supposed to be dialog of doctrine and theology. These sad incidents are of course against teachings of Islam. Anyhow here are some links which will show that most brutal atrocities committed by any religion in history unfortunately is Christianity.
He realizes that I point out that we need to investigate the teachings and cannot just blindly identify deeds of certain individuals with the religion. He claims they have nothing to do with Islam, but then in the next sentence he claims exactly that for Christianity, namely that it is the most brutal religion because of atrocities committed by some who called themselves Christians. Suddenly there is no more need to research the authentic teachings and judge the religion from these. That is what one usually calls bigotry.
What really is Jesus' teaching about the Sword?
The contributions on this page come yet again mainly from an atheist site: Why Christians Suck. A response to their site can be found at the Critique of atheist sites by Solid Rock Ministries as well as a general response (to atheists) to the issue of Christian atrocities. In particular, a selection of links with information on Hitler, who for propaganda reasons is claimed to be a true Christian, can be found in this page on Hitler.
One also wonders how come that these atheists forgot the 20 million butchered by the atheist Stalin and the 50 million butchered by the atheist Mao? Let us not talk about the several millions of Pol Pot, then Cuba and Vietnam and ... oh, and since this is supposedly to aid Muslims in their attack on Christianity, let us ask as well about the Muslim butchers like Idi Amin ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]), Saddam Hussein (does anybody not know about his genocide against the Kurds in Northern Iraq and the Shiites in Southern Iraq?), etc. I hope it is clear that Mr. Khan's approach is one nonsense argument. Furthermore, Mr. Khan actively reads the Islamic newsgroups and has certainly not overlooked these postings (or the news on TV) on the Luxor killings by "pious Muslims" blowing up tourists to get their innocent Sheikh free... for example
(Please let me know if you have a way achieving links to specific newsgroup articles through using the DejaNews Message-ID Search Form (or otherwise) in a more visually pleasing fashion.)We do not need and will not use such non-Christian material in order to make our arguments, but since Mr. Khan sets a certain tone with his methods, here is something that could be put against it, should any Muslim really want to argue on this level: Hindu pages of Zulfikar Khan and others have some documentation about the Muslim atrocities in India for example: Zulifar Khan, Anwar Shaikh, Arun Shourie, KIN, Arvind Gosh, [1], [2], ... shall we really go on?
Also, one wonders why Mr. Khan forgot to mention these atheist pages ([1], [2], [3]), since he does link to the Christian subsection of the first one, ... but admittedly, most atheists don't think that the Islamic threat is intellectually substantial enough to waste much energy on it. This results in the fact, that there are currently very few atheist pages responding to Islam. But obviously that will change as Islam grows and becomes a larger influence in the West.
Mr. Khan (and some of his fans) might ponder that there are actually Two kinds of Christianities since he seems to have heard of only one of them. Or maybe he insists on this one sided presentation for some reason?
I do wonder especially why atheist/agnostic Mr. Khan propagates a page about Conversions to Islam instead of conversions to agnosticism? In particular when he has this to say about the intelligence of Muslims? But motivations are not always rational.
Originally I had written on this page: "Furthermore, just an observation, the article on "Why you should accept the Qur'an" that was announced at the end of his Bible Criticism page has been waiting for publication many many months by now (since Spring 1997). Can it be so difficult to collect a few links? Or does he fear that Muslims will not be as tolerant and supportive when collecting all the strong reasons against the Qur'an in one place and still selling it as a Muslim page? Is he actually interested to ever complete this project? Maybe we can soon celebrate one year of waiting for part two?" Beginning of November 1997 he changed the Bible Criticism page and now this project about the Qur'an has been dropped completely. The note at the end of the file is gone. You may draw your own conclusions. Instead, there is now a link to yet more articles by his favorite atheist Farrell Till, responding to the archeology part of Walid's book. He does not display the Christian responses from the mailing list though. Nor any links to other web sites carrying material on this issue. Therefore we produced a collection of links to history and archaeology issues to aid your investigation.
I had stated "Khan has many rebuttal links in regard to Dr. Morey, but he has not repaired his link to Dr. Morey's material even though he has known about Dr. Morey's site for at least 4 months as of November 1997." But isn't it miraculous? One day after Adnan reads the above sentence, the link to Dr. Morey's site is updated!! Something that was of no interest when informed about privately over email many months ago. No, it is not "whining" as Adnan says in his response to my comments on his site. This is called effective communication. :-) I had commented on many more missing links to responses, and to further Qur'an contradictions which never were added into his list. But some of them he has repaired and would be cumbersome to comment on all these changes.
In our mailing list debates, I posed what I thought to become one of many unanswered questions to Mr. Khan, but to my surprise and against his habits, this time he gave an answer. In it he openly admits that in his opinion there is no proof for the divine origin of the Qur'an. Nevertheless he has many links on his site claiming just that, titled "Proofs of the Divine origin of the Quran", "The Amazing Qur'an", "On The Inimitability and Authenticity of the Qur'an" (all of them "proof" articles), etc. A much stronger statement by Adnan Khan in regard to his opinion on the Qur'an can be found in this later posting. But it took the provocation by a Muslim participant to get it out of him.
Mr. Khan obviously has little interest to tell the readers of his web site what he actually believes. He is only interested to find weapons to attack Christianity. And he uses Muslims to this end. Whether the arguments are true or not, are of little concern to him. I have high respect for those, who are interested in truth, and present wrong arguments because they themselves believe them to be true. That is still honest. But I have little respect for those who have no interest in truth and will actively spread those arguments they are convinced to be false, only because it suits their agenda of attack on a certain group. In his first answer above, Mr. Khan also made a statement about religionists being hypocrites. I wonder if he knows the meaning of the word.
Some trivia: "Comments on `comments about comments' ..."
Originally I had the statement "These sites are a compliment: Muslims are taking us serious" under my list of Muslim sites in response to "Answering Islam", but I am trying to cut down on making comments in the main link sections. Three days after I took it off, Adnan inserts the same comment on his page to the fact that I comment on his site and thinks his imitation is a either a great insight or a great joke (not sure what his smiley means). But the fact that he comments on my comments means now he is taking me ever more seriously as well. And soon we will have infinite seriousness in a recursive feedback reaction!
Yes, I do take Adnan Khan's site serious. This is obvious. And I wonder why anybody would be surprised by it. Just as serious as I take Ahmed Deedat. Not because his material is so good on a scholarly level, but because many don't have the background to look through it. It has the potential to deceive many. I take it serious for the same reasons as the Holocaust site has to take serious those people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.
In particular, Adnan Khan responds to the second part of my above comment on his Messiah page. And claims that "I do have a link to Dr. Price's article on my Biblical Criticism Link page" as if that would answer why he hasn't on his page about the topic of the Messiah. But it is trying to fudge the issue. He has not created a link in the file he produced himself. In the mentioned file the link is buried in some hundred other links and is not put there by Mr. Khan at all since he only downloaded Robert Squires' Bible Criticism Page from Mr. Squires' Islamic Awareness site. The fact that it exists on a page that he didn't produce yourself, has nothing to do with the question. It is not in the category where the topic of the Messiah is discussed.
Why did I not inform him about my comments on his page? Was I afraid? He knows better than that. I have never shunned confrontation with him. But it makes good rethorics to claim fear on the other side. No, in fact, for many weeks I announced to him a great number changes on my pages of added material relevant to the categories he responds to. He hardly ever responded either by email or by updating his site. I finally just gave up. I have no obligation to send him information he is not acknowledging. I originally did so out of courtesy, but there was no point in continuing this. In fact, informing him about issues via this web page is a lot quicker and more effective. He reacts to my messages a lot faster now.
Also he speculates whether I am afraid to link to his comments about my comments page, and does so in the guise of not speculating. Clever, eh? Ad hominem in a way that pretends to not be ad hominem. As if the reader wouldn't realize that. No, I was not afraid, nor did I forget. Above I am linking to Mr.Khan's home page and on the very first screen each visitor receives, is the link to his comments with large introduction to it. I think that is prominent enough so that nobody can miss it. If he had buried it deeper into his site, then I would add an extra link. But it isn't necessary, because of the prominence he gives to me.
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