💭

When I was Muslim, Surah 5:32 was my favorite verse to quote. “Whoever kills a soul, it is as if he killed all of mankind.” I put it in every debate. Every conversation about Islam and peace. It felt like the most beautiful verse in the Quran. Then I read it slowly. The verse doesn’t say Allah revealed this to Muhammad. It says: “We decreed upon the CHILDREN OF ISRAEL…” Wait. Decreed where? When? I went looking. Bro, then I found it. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5. A rabbinic commentary on Cain and Abel, written down around 200 AD like four centuries before the Quran. Rabbis discussed why Genesis says Abel’s “bloods” (plural) cry out and concluded: whoever destroys one soul, it is as if he destroyed an entire world. Insane that it was word for word, with the exact same context. Bro, the same Cain and Abel story it’s attached to in Surah 5. What I thought was the most beautiful verse in the Quran turned out to be a rabbi’s classroom commentary... Literally, that’s when the question changed for me. It went from “isn't this verse beautiful?” to: What the heck is a rabbinic homily doing inside a book that claims to be the eternal, uncreated speech of God?! Because there are only two options. Either Allah quoted the rabbis. Or a man in Arabia heard Jewish teachers and repeated what they said... The crazy part is, the Bible predicted men would do this. “I am against the prophets who steal my words from one another.” ( Jeremiah 23:30) That was the start of my journey toward Christ. I stopped defending the borrowed word of the Quran. I found the Living Word. PRAISE MY KING JESUS CHRIST, I’M FREE!