It wasn’t too long ago that we had addressed a controversial accusation that is frequently thrown around by internet Christians, i.e., the claim that “Muslims worship the Black Stone.” While doing so, we also demonstrated how such a charge only reveals the extremely weak and pathetic level of apologetics employed by these desperate Christians.
Another common allegation that is levied against Islam by these Christians, which is just as equally ludicrous and moronic, is the assertion that Allah—Glorified and Sublime be He—is supposedly the “Moon-God,” i.e., some sort of pre-Islamic lunar deity that is linked to the wider Middle Eastern “fertility cults,” and they say that Muslims continue to worship this “Moon-God” to this day.
Highly exalted is He — [far] above what they say! — and most high with the greatest sublimity. (Qur’an, 17:43)
This idiotic myth was popularized by the late Christian-Evangelical pastor from the United States, Robert Morey. He was a self-styled crusader against Islam and had pushed this lie in many books since 1994.
Unfortunately, this very obvious and very stupid lie has become commonplace among Christians in the United States, especially the Evangelicals. A 2006 Council on American–Islamic Relations report found that (p.2) “nearly 10 percent [of Americans] said Muslims believe in a moon god.”
The reason behind this strange phenomenon is that many influential Evangelical public figures, such as the televangelist Pat Robertson, had shamelessly peddled this cock and bull story. And according to a 2004 New York Times report, Robertson had gone and parroted this claim in Israel of all places.
Anyway, I won’t be going through the (numerous and well-argued) Islamic responses to such a blatant misrepresentation of the defining Islamic belief of Tawhid. Instead, what I’ll be producing here is the disproving of this bogus claim by two Christian—in fact Evangelical—missionaries: the Caner brothers, Ergun and Emir. This way, no credible Christian can just ignore, dismiss, and disregard the refutation with the wave of a hand.
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Like most “ex-Muslim” grifters, the personal background of the Caner brothers has come under a lot of scrutiny. Did they really grow up in Turkïye, the country of their father, as they have often claimed; or did they grow up in the United States, as attested to by the evidence? If they were indeed raised as “devout Muslims,” why can’t they recite something as basic as the Shahadah (the Muslim testification of faith), something that Muslim children learn and memorize as toddlers?
For instance, an article published in the HuffPost highlights:
Caner does not know the difference between Islam’s article of faith and the first chapter of the Qur’an. He’s claimed that the lunar month of Ramadan lasts for 40 days. In his book, he writes that he performed all of the rakats (daily prayers). The actual word is salah. It’s not a difference most people would know, but he says he is an expert on Islam. Muslims, he once said, followed something he called the “tobaad.” He’s claimed to have debated Muslim scholars who’ve never heard of him. Court records from his parent’s divorce indicate that he was in Ohio when he was a young child, long before his alleged move from Turkey. On his books, his middle name is Mehmet (Muhammad in Turkish), yet it is listed as Michael on his concealed-weapons permit in Virginia. Before 9/11, he went by E. Michael Caner.
In one speech, Caner told a crowd that outside the mosque in Kabul there was a sign that read, “Do not teach the women to read and write.” The story may or may not be true, but Caner, to give authority to the tale, told the crowd what was written in the native tongue: “bahasha uwtara muwtara seeteeroh.” That’s neither Dari nor Arabic nor Urdu nor Turkish nor Pashtu. It is an entirely made up language.
All of that aside, let’s take a look at what the Caner brothers have to say about the “Moon-God” theory as, indeed, they have actually demonstrated a small level of intellectual courage by exposing the nonsense theory for what it is. They even call out their fellow Evangelical Robert Morey in the process, before proceeding to provide their three main counter-arguments to the claim.
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The brothers write in More Than a Prophet: An Insider’s Response to Muslim Beliefs About Jesus and Christianity (Kregel Publications, 2003, pp.26–27):
Robert A. Morey submits the thesis that Muhammad actually took both the word Allah and the nature of Allah from a pre-Islamic Arabian mythology.
[…]
First, Muhammad believed in Allah’s absolute separation from creation, not identification with it. Further, the Qur’an clearly stipulates in surah 41:37: “Among his Signs are the Night and the Day and the Sun and Moon. Prostrate (adore) not to the Sun and the Moon but prostrate to Allah, Who created them, if it is Him you wish to serve.”
Second, whatever might have contributed to Muhammad’s theology, the historical criticism of Islamic doctrine has little to do with the beliefs of the modern Muslim. For fifteen hundred years, Muslims have held to the tawhid nature of Allah.
[…]
Third, Morey makes the common mistake of relying on Christian sources for his citations. Muslims correctly assert that Christian scholarship is hardly an unbiased observer in proving anything about Islam. His hundreds of citations from Christian academic works seem unfair, at best, to Muslims.
In an unusually rare moment of honesty, the Caner brothers have very succinctly debunked the ridiculous lie with simple facts and basic logic, even though this meant they had to expose and throw a fellow Christian-Evangelical missionary under the bus.
Any Christian who still condones and espouses such an evident falsehood regarding the very fundamentals of Islam must be made to answer some serious questions. For starters, if a couple of self-proclaimed enemies of Islam are able to discard and abandon this argument because of how completely dim-witted it is—to the extent that they felt it necessary to name and shame their closest theological kith and kin for his dishonesty while doing so, in order to try and make Christians look less bad—, don’t you think that by continuing to spread such fictional tales, you destroy any semblance of credibility you may have left?
Of course Christians have to lie how else can they justify worshiping a man god . They have to resort to whataboutism.
Ergun Caner, that guy is funny, there are old videos on youtube that expose how much he lies, he makes up stuff about Islam then litterally speaks a bunch of nonsensical gibberish pretending it is arabic or some other foreign language.
It wouldn’t surprise me if he is a donme.