and I clarified the facets of their polytheism: their lingering before statues and graves, worshipping them, and calling upon them for rescue.
He retorted, “We are not associating partners with God or worshipping them; we only seek their intercession—exactly as Muslims do when they come to the tomb of a righteous man, cling to the grille around it, and so forth.”
I replied, “That too is polytheism, and it has nothing to do with the true practice of Islam, even if the ignorant should do it.” He admitted that it was indeed polytheism; in fact, a priest who was present at this discussion, when it was read to him, said, “Yes—on that basis we are polytheists.”
Some Christians even say to certain Muslims, “We have a master and a lady—our master the Messiah and our lady Mary—while you have the master Ḥusayn and the lady Nafīsa.”
The Christians rejoice over the actions of the innovators and the uninformed among the Muslims that conform to their own religion and resemble it, and they wish such practices to gain strength and multiply. They would like their monks to be regarded like the devout worshippers among the Muslims and their priests like the Muslims’ judges, emulating the Muslims. For their more intelligent members do not deny the soundness of Islam; rather, they say, “This is a path to God, and that is a path to God.”
Consequently, many of the hypocrites who have outwardly embraced Islam find it easy to profess it, because in their eyes Muslims and Christians are like the followers of different schools within Islam. Indeed, they call entire religions “schools of thought,” even though it is well known that the adherents of the four legal schools—Ḥanafis, Mālikis, Shāfiʿīs, and Ḥanbalīs—share one and the same religion.
Anyone among them who obeys Allah and His Messenger according to his capacity is, by unanimous agreement of the Muslims, a believing and fortunate person.
When Christians think of religions in this way, the shift of one of them from his own faith seems to them no different from a person moving from one legal school to another—and this people often do out of desire or