The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group, instructed America this week that Muslims, Christians and Jewish people all worship the same deity.
“[F]rom an Islamic perspective, there is only one deity worshiped by Muslims, Christians and Jews,” CAIR’s national executive director Nihad Awad explains.
“In fact, the Muslim declaration of faith (shahada) states: ‘There is no god but God,'” Awad adds.
Awad goes on to discuss at some length his views on the words “God” and “Allah.”
“‘Allah’ is merely the Arabic translation for ‘God,'” Awad observes, and “all Arabic-speaking Christians refer to ‘Allah’ in their prayers.”
“Islam’s Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: ‘Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all people to Jesus, the son of Mary,'” the CAIR executive adds. “The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.”
Awad ends his essay by quoting a few Quran verses and suggesting that the unholy trio of ISIS, Donald Trump and Ben Carson exhibit similar “forms of religious and political extremism.”
“The purveyors of different forms of extremism feed off each other to reinforce their own bigotry and to gain unthinking and uncritical support,” Awad warns concerning ISIS, Carson and Trump.
Awad’s brief essay is entitled “Our Religion Is One – Muslims And Christians Worship The Same God.” He wrote it in response to Wheaton College’s announced intention to fire political science professor Larycia Hawkins after Hawkins announced she would wear a hijab until Christmas — in solidarity with Muslims facing bigotry. (RELATED: Christian College Wants To Fire Prof Who Said Christians, Muslims Worship Same God)
At the heart of the dispute at the evangelical Christian college in suburban Chicago is Hawkins’s claim in a Dec. 10 Facebook post that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” Hawkins said at the time. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
The school’s move to terminate Hawkins could also be partially driven by previous clashes with administrators on matters of religious orthodoxy. Last year, she was questioned over photos that showed her attending a house party the day of Chicago’s gay pride parade. Several years ago, she landed in hot water over a paper the school thought might endorse Marxism.
CAIR is most notable, of course, because the organizations was listed by the U.S. government as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme that provided funding to the terror group Hamas.
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