“How keen their hearing and their sight will be on the Day they come back to Us!” (Maryam 38)

The Exalted One is saying, in effect: How perfectly they will hear and see when they stand before Us; yet the wrongdoers today—such as the Christians, who have oppressed themselves with their fabrication and their association of partners with Allah—are in evident error. They have deviated from the truth concerning the Messiah. Indeed, Allah has branded the Christians as misguided in His words:

“Say, People of the Scripture, do not go to extremes in your religion beyond what is true, and do not follow the desires of a people who went astray before, led many others astray, and strayed far from the even path.” (al-Māʾidah 77)

He also says:

“So that He may warn those who say, ‘Allah has taken a son.’ They have no knowledge of this, nor did their forefathers. Grave indeed is the word that comes from their mouths; they speak nothing but a lie.” (al-Kahf 4)

Ignorance of the religion is what predominates among them: they utter statements whose meaning they themselves do not grasp—words not transmitted from the Prophets that might merit acceptance, but rather inventions of their own making. If you ask them what those statements mean, they reply, “This cannot be comprehended by reason.” Thus they innovate phrases while fully aware that they do not understand them—phrases that contradict themselves, whose beginning undermines their ending. For that reason you will never find them united upon a single description of their object of worship. One observer even remarked, “If ten Christians were to sit together, they would part with eleven distinct opinions.”

Al-Rabīʿī said: “The Christians are the most divided of all people when it comes to their doctrines.”