Do Christians and Muslims worship the same deity?
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same deity? It has become one of the most pressing and controversial questions in the world in the last fifteen years. The question was stirred up in earnest in 2001 in the aftermath of fundamentalist Muslims flying hijacked commercial jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. And tragically the question has been stirred up time and time again in the decade and a half since, after a wave of major terrorist attacks, undertaken in the name of Allah. Recent months have brought large-scale tragedies in Paris, Orlando, and now Istanbul and Baghdad. After each attack, fresh voices either demonize Islam or seek to dispel any notions that Islam itself might be the problem. But however important the sociology and politics may be for secularists, beneath it lies the all-important question for Christians and Muslims: Is the Islamic notion of Allah compatible with the Christian belief in God? I had the privilege of putting t