Now thanks to Yahya Snow’s diligent investigations we discover Jonathan has made another offensive blunder.  This newbie claims that the “vast majority of white converts to Islam from Christianity know next to nothing about Christianity”.

This is ironic. As I posted before on this blog one Saturday afternoon I sent several hours at Regents Park Mosque with Jonathan discussing Christianity, the Bible, New Testament scholarship and theology. I found him to be an intelligent man but with a superficial grasp of the academic understanding of the Bible and a narrow fundamentalist grasp of Christian theology. If I was his Religious Studies teacher I would give him a (generous) C- mark for his understanding of the Bible and Christianity, commenting that he needs to do much more primary reading and critical thinking before he even thinks of lecturing other people (including Muslims) about faith.

The white converts to Islam from a Christian background I know are way above Jonathan’s pay grade, both intellectually and in terms of expertise in Christianity and Islam.

Here is a random selection of converts to Islam from Christianity that Jonathan appears to be ignorant of:

Dr Timothy Winter, also known as Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, is a British Sunni Muslim shaykh, researcher, writer and academic. He is the Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, Director of Studies (Theology and Religious Studies) at Wolfson College Cambridge and the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University. His work includes publications on Islamic theology and Muslim-Christian relations. In 2003 he was awarded the Pilkington Teaching Prize by Cambridge University and in 2007 he was awarded the King Abdullah I Prize for Islamic Thought for his short booklet Bombing Without Moonlight. He has consistently been included in the “500 Most Influential Muslims” list published annually by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre and was ranked in 2012 as the 50th most influential.

Winter recently wrote an excellent chapter in a volume of essays by distinguished scholars Debating Christian Theism called ‘The Trinity is Incoherent’. Jonathan might benefit from reading it. See also his article on the Trinity 

Hamza Yusuf (born Mark Hanson) is an American Islamic scholar, and co-founder of Zaytuna College. He is a proponent of classical learning in Islam and has promoted Islamic sciences and classical teaching methodologies throughout the world. He grew up a practicing Greek Orthodox Christian and attended prep schools on both the east and west coasts. In 1977, after a near-death experience and reading the Qur’an, he converted to Islam from Christianity (he seemed destined for the Greek Orthodox priesthood at his early age). He is an advisor to the Center for Islamic Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom reported that “Hamza Yusuf is arguably the west’s most influential Islamic scholar.”

Hamza Yusuf has a scholarly appreciation of Christianity far in advance of Jonathan’s.

Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown is a Muslim American Islamic scholar and author. Since 2012, he has been associate professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. In 2014, he was appointed Chair of Islamic Civilization. He is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law.

His family was Episcopalian Christian. He was raised as an Anglican and converted to Islam in 1997.

I have met with and spoken to Professor Brown and read most of his books. His academic grasp of Christian theology and the Bible befits a Professor in Islamic Studies and Muslim-Christian Understanding in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

I could go on and on. There are many highly educated white converts to Islam from a Christian background. Jonathan appears to know nothing of them. This says much more about him than the caliber of former Christians, now Muslim believers, out there.

***

The following article is reblogged from Yahya Snow’s Blog

Categories: Bible, Islam, Missionaries, Utterly idiotic