The theological gulf between Islam and Christianity is immense, and this means that any contact between the two religions is bound to be fraught.  The easy way would be for Christians to avoid saying anything that would be offensive to Muslims, but that would amount to a vow of silence, and would make contact dishonest and pointless.  It is the offensive bits, like Christ being God’s Son, we have to talk about.

Many centuries have passed since there was any meaningful dialogue between Muslims and Christians, mainly because the two religions are like chalk and cheese.  Christianity is a profoundly theological faith: Islam, like Judaism, is a way of life.  Jews have the Torah, Muslims have Sharia, but while both appear to build on the Old Testament, the two sets of laws have diverged widely.  There is no parallel in Judaism to Islam’s attitudes towards women, nor would Judaism tolerate the thousand-lash floggings which besmirch the name of Saudi Arabia; something we should stop condoning on the principle, ‘It’s a sovereign state, and that’s their way.’  In Verwoerd’s South Africa, apartheid was their way, and the world responded with crippling sanctions.  Why go pussy-footing around Saudi Arabia?

Anyway, as I was going to say, because Islam is first and foremost a way of life it has no detailed theology of, for example, sin and salvation; and where it does venture into theology it is usually only to deny Christian beliefs.

Which is not to say but that there are things we seem to agree on, not least with regard to Jesus.  Muslims agree that he was born of a virgin, that he performed wondrous miracles of healing, that he raised the dead, and that he was a great prophet: indeed, next to Mohammed, the very greatest.

Yet when all is said and done, Islamic theology is much more negative than positive.  It’s a theology of denial, and the most remarkable of its denials is that Christ was never crucified.  God, it is claimed, would never have allowed such a fate to befall a great prophet.  Instead, he was taken up to heaven, and some other man was crucified in his place (some have suggested it was Judas Iscariot).

This is no small thing.  The cross is at the heart of Christianity as God’s sublime act of redemption and the supreme expression of his love.  A Christianity without the crucifixion would be a completely different religion; and, of course, if there was no cross there was no resurrection.  Apart from all else, these denials reduce the New Testament gospels to complete fabrications.

The other no less drastic denial is Islam’s abhorrence of the idea that Jesus was the Son of God.  The objection doesn’t take the form of lodging a rival claim to the effect that it was Mohammed, not Jesus, who was the Son.  It takes the much more radical ground that God couldn’t have a Son, because a ‘son’ implies sexual intercourse, and Muslims seem unable to separate the idea that Jesus was God’s Son from the idea that there was sexual intercourse between God and the Virgin Mary: an idea that Christians have always rejected with abhorrence.  The child in Mary’s womb was created not by some grotesque act of divine fornication, but by the same power as once said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.

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