Thanks for your reply [to a previous question about whether a Christian can marry a Muslim]...however I would like to comment on your response. The Islamic faith DOES permit marriage between women of the book (Muslims, Christians, Jews) to Muslim men. Secondly, the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths believe in the SAME god. These three faiths are intertwined and have foundations within Judaism. Allah= "God" in Arabic. These three religions are not radically different from another but in fact, have many similarities.
Answer
The Islamic faith may permit marriage between Jewish and Christian women and Muslim men. I don’t dispute that. The Qur’an (Sura 2.221) says “Do not marry a pagan woman until they believe.” It also allows marriage to “the chaste from among the believing women and the chaste from among those who have been given the Book.” Most Islamic scholars consider the “people of the Book” to be Jews and Christians and “you who were given the Book” to be Muslims. That last passage, however, seems to include non-Muslims among “those who have been given the Book.” In either case, the woman is generally expected to convert to Islam. Any man who marries a woman who doesn’t convert will have difficulties in dealing with other Muslim men. As I indicated in my previous response, a Christian woman may not be allowed to practice her religion, thus forcing her to convert. American Muslims may be a little more lenient in this matter.
One of the biggest fictions about Islam is that they worship the same God as the Christians or the Jews. “Allah” may have come to mean “God,” but was originally the name of one of the minor deities of the Arabic peninsula. When Muhammed received the Qur’an he said it came from this one of the gods of the neighborhood, and claimed that he was the One God and all others were not real gods. But even if you accept that Allah is supposed to be the same God as that of the Jews or Christians, then he must have changed his whole nature in the 400 years between Jesus and Muhammed.
Several differences may serve to make the point. The God worshipped by Christians is a God of peace, history notwithstanding. Christianity advocates being at peace with all men. It advocates peaceful spreading of a gospel of grace to willing converts. Islam, on the other hand, advocates spreading the word through force, and endorses killing unbelievers. Regardless of the doctrines proposed by John Calvin, the Christian scriptures indicate that man has free will, and may choose to believe God or not. Islam teaches that God will save those he chooses to save, whether they want to be saved or not, and especially that one who obeys Allah all his life may be rejected merely because Allah chooses to reject him for no apparent reason, or simply because the person is a woman.
If they are the same person, one wonders why Allah and God can’t agree on history. The Jewish scriptures tell of Isaac as the heir of Abraham who was placed on an altar and saved at the last minute, while Islam says Ishmael was that person. The standard explanation for the difference is that the Jews corrupted the writings for their own purposes, but that Allah says it was Ishmael. That leaves a god who either changed history, or didn’t care when history was rewritten by someone else. The Isaac account dates back at least to several years before Jesus was born, according to documentary evidence. If that is so, and if Jesus was truly a prophet of Allah as it says in Qur’an, would he not correct the error, instead of perpetuating it as he did (Matthew 8:11; Mark 12:26; Luke 13:28, 20:37)? How could a prophet of Allah not correct such a gross error?
Most importantly, a Christian can not believe they are the same God because Christians believe that Jesus is the “only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14) and the “son of God” (Matthew 16:16-17). They believe that God allowed his son to die on a cross, a sinless sacrifice, so that men could be saved from their sins through faith in him. They believe that “there is no other name under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12) They believe that if God had been able to save man in any other way, surely he would have done so, but he didn’t. They (we) believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the focal point of all history, the one forward to whom all the Old Testament scriptures point and backward to whom all the New Testament scriptures point. All of this is repudiated by the Allah of Islam, who says in his Qur’an that it is error to think that one could call himself a son of Allah and that Jesus did not die on a cross. It is inconceivable to think that the God who said, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17) could also say “Allah is only one God; far be It from His glory that He should have a son.” (Sura 4:171)
A Christian can not believe that the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam are one and the same. Nor do I know of any Muslim that truly believes that, either. There may be some in both groups that believe it, but in doing so they necessarily compromise their faith.