could He then hold him accountable for Adam’s sin, when Adam is but his remote forefather? Such a notion might have had the slightest plausibility only if Adam had never repented—yet Allah has told us that Adam did repent.
They further claim that the crucifixion—one of the gravest of sins and crimes—was the very act by which Allah delivered Adam and his descendants from the punishment of Hell and by which He punished Iblis. But Iblis has persisted in disobedience from the moment he refused to bow to Adam and whispered temptation to him, right up to the mission of the Messiah; all that time the Lord was fully able to punish him, while the children of Adam in no way deserved to be punished for their father’s offense.
Such statements are sheer fables that sensible people can only laugh at, fictions unworthy even of the most ignorant and tyrannical of rulers. How, then, can they still maintain that they are portraying Allah as just, and that His justice requires that He not command a human being to learn what he is able to learn—knowledge that would secure his well-being in this life and the next? They even use such fantasies as grounds for denying His Book and His messengers, for insisting on altering the first Scripture and rejecting the final Scripture, even though this entails opposing Moses, Jesus, and all the other prophets and messengers!
The Christians say: “The Messiah—who, in their view, unites both divinity and humanity—allowed the unbelievers to crucify him only so that he might outwit Iblis and bring punishment upon him. He hid his true identity from Iblis so that it would not be recognised, and he let his enemies seize him, beat him, spit in his face, press thorns upon his head, and crucify him. He outwardly showed dread of death and cried, ‘My God, why have You empowered my enemies over me?’ so that he might remain concealed from Iblis, who would then have no idea that he was God or the Son of God. Iblis, they say, meant to carry his soul down to Hell just as he had taken the souls of Noah and Abraham…”