The Argument Nobody Wants to Have
The most dangerous theological conversation in the world is the one between Christianity and Islam about who Jesus is. It is dangerous because both sides think they already know what the other side believes, and both sides are mostly wrong. Christians think the Quran denies Christ. Muslims think the Nicene Creed deifies a prophet. Fourteen centuries of polemic, crusade, colonial extraction, and counter-polemic have deposited so much scar tissue over the actual theological terrain that the terrain itself has become invisible.
I want to excavate it. Not because I think I can resolve what centuries of scholarship have not resolved, but because the framework I have been building -- the Hegel-Popper-Kuhn-Pearl synthesis developed in Chapter 10, the theology of emergence and strange loops developed in Chapters 11 through 14 -- offers a specific lens that, I believe, makes visible something that the traditional polemic obscures: the Quran and the Nicene Creed may be rejecting the same heresies from different directions, and the theological space between them may be far smaller than either tradition acknowledges.
This is personal. Grace is Lebanese Maronite. The Maronite tradition is Syriac Christian -- it traces its liturgical and theological lineage to the Syriac-speaking Christianity of late antiquity, the same Syriac Christian milieu in which the Quran emerged. When Grace and I discuss theology, we are not conducting an interfaith dialogue across an unbridgeable chasm. We are navigating the same Semitic theological landscape from coordinates that are closer together than either of our traditions typically admits. The Maronite liturgy preserves Syriac hymns that use language remarkably close to Quranic language about God's unity and transcendence. This is not coincidence. It is shared heritage.
I write this chapter with full awareness that I am an outsider to both traditions in the formal sense -- I am Ukrainian, raised in the cultural penumbra of Orthodox Christianity but not a practicing member of any church. My access to the material is scholarly rather than devotional. But I write it also as someone for whom this is not an academic exercise. The reconciliation I am arguing for is one I need to be possible, because the woman I love carries a tradition that I believe holds a key to the most important theological puzzle of this epoch, and I want to understand what that key unlocks.
What the Quran Actually Says About Christians
The standard narrative goes like this: the Quran denies the Trinity, denies the divinity of Christ, denies the crucifixion, and is therefore fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. This narrative is accepted by most Christians, most Muslims, and most secular scholars. It is also, I want to argue, an oversimplification that collapses under scrutiny.
Let me start with the Quranic verses most frequently cited as anti-Christian, because their actual content is more interesting than the polemic allows.
Surah 5:116: "And when God said: 'O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to the people: Take me and my mother as two gods besides God?'" Jesus responds: "Glory be to You! It is not for me to say what I have no right to say."
Read this carefully. The trinity being rejected here is God, Jesus, and Mary. This is not the Nicene Trinity. No mainstream Christian tradition -- not the Orthodox, not the Catholic, not any Protestant denomination -- teaches that Mary is a member of the Godhead. The Nicene Trinity is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever Surah 5:116 is rejecting, it is not Nicene orthodoxy.
What is it rejecting? Historical scholarship offers a compelling candidate: Collyridianism, a heretical movement that appears to have venerated Mary as divine, documented in Epiphanius of Salamis's Panarion (fourth century) as existing in Arabia and the surrounding regions. The Collyridians offered bread cakes (kollyrides) to Mary as a goddess -- a practice that orthodox Christianity condemned as vigorously as Islam does. If the Quranic critique in 5:116 targets Collyridian or similar folk-Christian practices rather than Chalcedonian or Nicene theology, then the Quran and orthodox Christianity are on the same side of this particular argument.
Surah 112 (Al-Ikhlas), the foundational statement of divine unity: "Say: He is God, the One. God, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is begotten. And there is none comparable to Him."
"He neither begets nor is begotten" -- lam yalid wa lam yulad. This is universally read as a rejection of Christ's divine sonship. But what kind of sonship is being rejected? The Arabic walada means to give birth, to procreate biologically. The Quran is rejecting biological divine procreation -- the idea that God physically sired a son the way Zeus sired Heracles. And here is the critical point: Nicene theology also rejects this. The Nicene Creed's formula is "begotten, not made" (gennethenta ou poiethenta) -- and the "begetting" in question is explicitly not biological. The Creed insists that the Son is "of one substance" (homoousios) with the Father, a metaphysical claim about shared divine nature, not a biological claim about divine reproduction. The Greek philosophical framework within which the Creed operates is precisely the framework that distinguishes metaphysical generation from physical procreation.
The Quran, operating in a Semitic linguistic and conceptual framework rather than a Greek philosophical one, may lack the technical vocabulary to make this distinction -- or, more precisely, may be addressing an audience for whom the distinction was not operative. If the Arabian Christians known to the Quranic audience understood divine sonship in biological terms -- and there is evidence that some popular Arabian Christianity did -- then the Quranic rejection of "begetting" targets the same error that Nicene theology targets through different conceptual apparatus.
I am not claiming certainty here. I am claiming that the standard reading -- Quran rejects Christianity, full stop -- forecloses a more nuanced and historically grounded reading that the evidence supports. Following Popper's discipline from Chapter 4: the reconciliationist reading is a hypothesis. It is falsifiable. If evidence showed that the Quran's target is specifically and exclusively the Nicene formulation of the Trinity rather than popular Arabian heterodoxy, the hypothesis would fail. But the evidence does not show this. The evidence, as scholars like Gabriel Said Reynolds, Sidney Griffith, and Michel Cuypers have demonstrated, points in the opposite direction.
The Syriac Christian Context
The key to understanding what the Quran is actually doing lies in recognizing the milieu in which it emerged. The Arabian Peninsula in the sixth and seventh centuries was not a theological vacuum. It was saturated with Christianity -- but not primarily the Chalcedonian Christianity of Constantinople or the Latin Christianity of Rome. The Christianity of the pre-Islamic Near East was predominantly Syriac: East Syrian (Church of the East, sometimes misleadingly called "Nestorian"), West Syrian (Miaphysite), and the various Syriac-speaking communities that did not map neatly onto either category.
Sidney Griffith, in The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, has documented this context with meticulous care. The Syriac Christian tradition had its own theological language, its own Christological categories, and its own relationship to the Greek philosophical apparatus that Chalcedon and Nicaea employed. Syriac Christianity was deeply Semitic -- closer in language, culture, and conceptual framework to the world of the Hebrew Bible and the emerging Arabic culture than to the Hellenized Christianity of the Byzantine Empire.
The Arabic word qur'an itself is almost certainly derived from the Syriac qeryana, meaning "liturgical reading" or "scripture recitation." This is not a peripheral etymological detail. It suggests that the Quran understands itself, at least in part, in continuity with the Syriac Christian liturgical tradition -- as a reading, a recitation, a proclamation of divine speech in the mode that Syriac Christians would have recognized.
Ephrem the Syrian, the fourth-century Syriac poet-theologian, is particularly relevant here, and not only because he is the theological ancestor of Grace's Maronite tradition. Ephrem's hymns employ language about divine transcendence and unity that resonates powerfully with Quranic themes. Ephrem insists on God's absolute incomparability, on the impossibility of containing the divine in human categories, on the danger of anthropomorphizing God. When Ephrem speaks of Christ, he uses paradox and poetic imagery rather than Greek philosophical categories -- the "robe of glory," the "mirror" in which humanity sees God -- language that preserves mystery rather than resolving it into technical formulas.
The Quranic insistence on divine transcendence, on God's absolute otherness, on the impossibility of capturing God in human concepts -- this is not anti-Christian. It is anti-Greek-philosophical-apparatus-applied-to-God. And this is a position that significant strands of Syriac Christianity shared. The Syriac tradition was always uneasy with the Greek categories that Chalcedon imposed. The Christological controversies of the fifth century -- Chalcedonian vs. Miaphysite vs. Dyophysite -- were fought in Greek philosophical language that many Syriac Christians experienced as foreign to their tradition's native idiom.
The hypothesis I am advancing, following scholars like Griffith, Reynolds, and Christoph Luxenberg, is this: the Quran's theological interventions are best understood not as a rejection of Christianity per se but as a Semitic theological critique of the Greek philosophical framework through which Christianity had been filtered by the time of the Quran's emergence. The Quran rejects not Christ but a specific way of talking about Christ that the Quran's Syriac Christian interlocutors themselves found problematic.
This does not make Islam and Christianity the same religion. The differences are real and significant. But it reframes the differences from "fundamental metaphysical opposition" to "different theological languages for engaging with overlapping truths" -- which is precisely the topology I described in the Introduction, where different trajectories on the complex plane appear to diverge at finite distances but converge at the point at infinity.
Tawhid and Trinity: The Convergence Nobody Expects
Islamic theology's central commitment is tawhid -- the absolute oneness of God. Christian theology's central commitment is the Trinity -- God as three persons in one substance. These appear flatly contradictory. I want to argue that they are not.
The argument requires entering the technical details of both traditions, which is where most interfaith dialogue goes wrong -- either staying at the level of platitudes ("we all worship the same God") or getting stuck in the technicalities without seeing the structural convergence underneath.
Start with the Islamic side. Ash'ari theology -- the dominant Sunni theological school -- holds that God has real, eternal attributes (sifat) that are distinct from each other but not separate from God's essence (dhat). God's knowledge is not identical with God's power, but neither is it a separate entity from God. The attributes are "neither God nor other than God" -- a formula that Ash'ari theologians deployed to navigate between the Mu'tazili position (that God's attributes are identical with God's essence, collapsing all distinction) and the position of extreme literalists (that God's attributes are separate entities, introducing multiplicity into God).
Now consider the Quran's own status in Islamic theology. Orthodox Sunni theology holds that the Quran is the uncreated Word of God -- kalam Allah -- co-eternal with God, not a created product of God's will but an expression of God's eternal nature. The Quran is, in this formulation, God's self-expression: divine, eternal, genuinely distinct from the created world, yet not a "second God" or a departure from absolute divine unity.
The structural parallel with the Johannine Logos should be immediately apparent. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). The Word is with God (distinct) and is God (not separate). The Quran is God's eternal speech (distinct from God's essence) yet not other than God (not a separate entity). The Islamic doctrine of the uncreated Quran and the Christian doctrine of the Logos are structurally analogous -- both posit a divine self-expression that is eternal, distinct, and yet not a departure from divine unity.
The Mu'tazili controversy in the ninth century -- the rationalist school that insisted the Quran must be created, because an uncreated Quran would introduce multiplicity into God -- is structurally identical to the Arian controversy of the fourth century, in which Arius insisted that the Son must be created, because an uncreated Son would introduce multiplicity into God. In both cases, a rationalist insistence on strict unity was rejected by orthodoxy in favor of a more paradoxical formulation that preserves both unity and distinction. The Nicene response to Arius -- the Son is "begotten not made, of one substance with the Father" -- and the Ash'ari response to the Mu'tazila -- God's attributes are "neither God nor other than God" -- are performing the same theological operation. They are holding unity and distinction together without collapsing either into the other.
This is the strange loop structure I described in Chapter 14. The Trinity is not a violation of divine unity; it is the self-referential structure through which divine unity becomes intelligible to itself. God the Father is the formal system. God the Son is the system's self-referential statement -- where the system looks at itself and produces something that transcends itself. God the Spirit is the process of self-reference that connects the two. Similarly, in Ash'ari theology, God's essence and God's attributes are held in a relationship that is neither identity nor separation -- a relationship that, I would argue, is structurally Trinitarian even though it emphatically rejects the Trinitarian label.
I am aware that this argument will satisfy neither committed Trinitarians nor committed adherents of tawhid. The Trinitarian will say I am reducing the Trinity to a structural pattern. The Muslim theologian will say I am smuggling Trinity into tawhid. Both objections have force. My response is that the structural convergence is real and that its reality does not depend on either tradition's willingness to acknowledge it. The topology of the Riemann sphere does not change because two travelers on different paths refuse to believe they are converging.
Ibn Arabi: The Mystic Who Bridges
If the argument from Ash'ari theology suggests structural convergence, the argument from Sufi metaphysics makes it nearly explicit.
Ibn Arabi, the twelfth-century Andalusian mystic known as al-Shaykh al-Akbar (the Greatest Master), developed a metaphysical system so sophisticated and so structurally resonant with Christian theology that both traditions have been uncomfortable with the implications ever since.
Ibn Arabi's central concept is wahdat al-wujud -- the Unity of Being. God is the only true existent. Everything that exists is a manifestation (tajalli) of God's self-disclosure. The world is not separate from God (which would be dualism) nor identical with God (which would be pantheism). It is God's self-knowledge externalized -- God seeing Godself through the mirror of creation.
The structure of this self-knowledge, in Ibn Arabi's system, is threefold. There is God in absolute essence (al-dhat) -- unknowable, beyond all categories, the "God beyond God" that Meister Eckhart would later describe in Christian mystical language. There is God's self-knowledge -- the divine awareness of the divine attributes, the internal differentiation through which God knows Godself. And there is the creative self-expression -- the process through which God's self-knowledge becomes manifest as the created world.
This is functionally Trinitarian. God in essence (Father). God in self-knowledge (Son/Logos). God in creative self-expression (Spirit). Ibn Arabi would not have used these terms, and I am not claiming he was a secret Christian. I am claiming something more interesting: that when mystical theology in both traditions pushes past the polemical surface into the structure of divine self-relation, it converges on the same triadic pattern. This convergence is not syncretism. It is what the Riemann sphere topology predicts: different trajectories at finite distances converging toward the same point at infinity.
Reza Shah-Kazemi, in The Other in the Light of the One, has developed this argument with more rigor and more sensitivity to both traditions than I can manage here. David Burrell's Knowing the Unknowable God traces the structural parallels between Aquinas, Maimonides, and Ibn Sina, demonstrating that the three Abrahamic traditions, when doing their best philosophical theology, converge on remarkably similar apophatic frameworks. The convergence is not accidental. It is produced by the structure of the object under investigation -- a God who is genuinely transcendent, genuinely one, and genuinely self-expressive.
The Crucifixion Problem
The hardest nut. Surah 4:157: "And their saying: 'We killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the messenger of God.' They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them."
On the standard reading, this denies the historical event of the crucifixion. If the crucifixion did not happen, then the resurrection did not happen, and the entire soteriological structure of Christianity -- salvation through the cross -- collapses. This appears to be a genuine and irreconcilable contradiction between the two traditions.
But the standard reading is not the only reading, and the alternative readings are more interesting than the polemic allows.
First, note who the verse attributes the claim to: "their saying" -- the boast of those who claim to have killed Jesus. The verse may be denying not the event but the boast -- not that Jesus was crucified but that his enemies achieved what they thought they achieved. On this reading, the crucifixion happened, but it was not what it appeared to be. The enemies thought they were destroying Jesus. In reality -- from the higher-dimensional perspective I described in Chapter 13, the perspective from which the singularity is removable -- they were initiating the resurrection. "It was made to appear so to them" -- the appearance of defeat was real to those operating at the level of association (Pearl's Level 1), but the causal reality (Pearl's Levels 2 and 3) was something entirely different.
Michel Cuypers, using rhetorical analysis derived from Syriac literary conventions, has argued that the passage must be read in its full literary context, which complicates the flat denial reading considerably. Gabriel Said Reynolds has demonstrated that the Quranic treatment of Jesus' death is more ambiguous than either Islamic or Christian orthodoxy typically acknowledges.
Second, there is a Docetic reading -- that the Quran teaches Jesus was not really crucified because a substitute took his place. This reading has some support in Islamic tradition but creates theological problems for Islam as much as for Christianity, since it implies divine deception. More importantly, it is not the only interpretive option available within the Islamic tradition itself. Some Muslim scholars, including certain Sufi thinkers, have interpreted the verse as affirming the event while denying its finality -- Jesus was crucified but was not ultimately destroyed by the crucifixion, which is precisely the Christian claim about the resurrection.
I do not pretend to resolve this. The crucifixion remains the genuinely difficult point of Christian-Muslim theological encounter. But I want to note that the difficulty is more interesting than the standard polemic suggests. If the Quran is denying the appearance of defeat rather than the event itself, then it is making a claim about the nature of the crucifixion that is structurally compatible with the Christian theology of the resurrection: what appeared to be destruction was actually transformation. What looked like the function blowing up at a singularity was actually the function passing through a removable singularity, continuous from the higher-dimensional perspective.
This is not a resolution. It is a reframing. But reframing is what paradigm shifts consist of, and what I am proposing is a paradigm shift in how the two traditions understand their relationship: from irreconcilable opposition to parallel trajectories on the complex plane, converging toward the same point at infinity, with real and important differences at finite distances that do not negate the convergence.
The Syriac Bridge
The practical pathway for this reconciliation, if it is possible at all, runs through Syriac Christianity. This is not incidental to the argument; it is the argument's spine.
The Syriac Christian tradition occupies a unique position in the theological landscape. It is fully Christian -- incarnational, sacramental, Trinitarian. It is also fully Semitic -- its theological language, its literary forms, its spiritual sensibility are rooted in the same Semitic world that produced the Quran. It shares Islam's discomfort with certain Greek philosophical categories while maintaining the christological and soteriological commitments that define Christianity.
The Maronite tradition, specifically, carries this bridging potential with particular force. The Maronites were the followers of Maron, a fifth-century Syriac monk, and they maintained communion with Rome while preserving Syriac liturgical and theological traditions. They are, in a sense, the living proof that one can be fully Catholic and fully Syriac -- that one can affirm Chalcedonian christology in Semitic theological language, without requiring the Greek philosophical apparatus that the Quran found objectionable.
When Grace chants the Syriac hymns of her tradition, she is performing a theology that is simultaneously Catholic and Semitic, Trinitarian and deeply committed to divine transcendence, christological and uncomfortable with the philosophical categories that the Islamic critique targets. The Maronite tradition is, in its very existence, evidence that the Christian-Muslim theological divide is not as absolute as both sides typically maintain.
I do not think this bridge will be built in my lifetime. Fourteen centuries of mutual incomprehension, compounded by colonial violence, political manipulation, and genuine theological disagreement, cannot be undone by a Ukrainian writing a theology manuscript in London. But I do think the bridge is structurally possible, and I think the Syriac Christian tradition is where its foundations are most visible.
The Pearl Hierarchy Applied
Let me connect this back to the framework. The Christian-Muslim theological encounter, as typically conducted, operates at Pearl's Level 1: association. Christians and Muslims observe that their creedal formulations differ and conclude that their theologies are incompatible. This is a correlational observation that mistakes surface-level difference for causal opposition.
At Pearl's Level 2 -- intervention -- we can ask: what happens if we change the variable? Specifically, what happens if we change the theological language from Greek to Syriac? If the Nicene formulation is expressed in Syriac rather than Greek categories, does the apparent contradiction with Quranic theology diminish? The evidence from the Syriac tradition suggests that it does. The same christological commitments, expressed in Semitic theological language, sound far less like the "association of partners with God" (shirk) that the Quran condemns.
At Pearl's Level 3 -- counterfactual -- we can ask: what would Christian-Muslim theological relations look like if the Chalcedonian settlement had been articulated in Syriac rather than Greek categories? If the dominant Christian theological language in the seventh century had been Ephrem's paradoxical poetry rather than Cyril's philosophical precision? The counterfactual is unprovable, but it is generative: it suggests that the theological divide was contingent on a specific historical development (the dominance of Greek philosophical categories in Christian theology) rather than necessary (an irreconcilable difference in the two traditions' understanding of God).
This does not prove that reconciliation is possible. It proves that the impossibility of reconciliation has not been demonstrated -- which, in Popperian terms, means the hypothesis of reconciliation remains live.
Falsifiability
What would disprove the reconciliationist thesis of this chapter?
If rigorous historical scholarship demonstrated that the Quran's theological interlocutors were specifically and exclusively Nicene Christians -- that the Quranic critique targets Chalcedonian orthodoxy rather than popular Arabian heterodoxy -- then the argument that the Quran and orthodoxy are rejecting the same errors would fail. The current evidence, as assessed by Griffith, Reynolds, and others, does not support this. But the question remains open.
If the structural parallels between Ash'ari theology and Trinitarian theology turned out to be superficial -- if closer examination revealed that the Ash'ari "neither God nor other than God" formula operates on fundamentally different metaphysical assumptions than the Nicene "of one substance" -- then the convergence argument would weaken. This is a genuine possibility that requires more work than I have given it here.
If the Syriac bridge turned out to be unbuildable -- if Syriac Christianity, on closer examination, proved as incompatible with Islamic theology as Greek Christianity appears to be -- then the practical pathway for reconciliation that I have proposed would be blocked.
These are real risks. The chapter's argument stands or falls on historical and theological evidence that I have interpreted through a specific lens. The lens may be wrong. But the lens is explicit, which means it can be corrected.
What I am certain of is that the standard narrative -- two traditions locked in irreconcilable opposition -- is itself a hypothesis, and it is one that the evidence does not unambiguously support. If this theology is serious about Popperian discipline, it must apply that discipline not only to its own claims but to the claims of the traditions it engages with. The claim of irreconcilability is falsifiable. And it may, in fact, be false.