“The Concept of God in Mormonism and Islam”

For roughly 2.5 hours, Shabir Ally and a mean-spirited Mormon hack who goes under the name of “Daniel C. Peterson” discuss “The Concept of God in Mormonism and Islam” in this videotaped discussion:

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=n9T7E9lZdkU

Honestly, I don’t think that I knew that this video even existed, so I’m grateful to Matthew Wheeler for calling it to my attention.  It was obviously filmed a few years ago, since I’m visibly less debonair and handsome in it than I am now.

I remember this experience quite sharply.  It was sponsored by the Muslim Students Association at Idaho State University, in Pocatello.  It was supposed to be a friendly dialogue about common ground, of the kind in which I’ve participated several times both before and since.  (They had invited Elder Jeffrey Holland to represent the Latter-day Saints — he was a member of the Seventy at the time, not yet in the Twelve — but he had suggested my name, instead.)

As the event drew closer, I began to wonder about it.  I was picking up subtle vibes that it might not be as friendly as I had hoped.  And my suspicions were confirmed when, entering the hall where the event was to take place, I saw a whole table of Muslim-produced anti-Mormon pamphlets.  They weren’t very good, and I remember thinking to myself that the Muslims who wrote them could have profited by learning a few tricks of the anti-Mormon trade from our more experienced Evangelical friends.

You’ll note, early in my opening statement, my declaration that I didn’t intend the evening to be a debate.  That was an attempt to indicate that I hadn’t been invited to a debate, and that I didn’t want one.  My comment had no effect, however.

As I say, I had anticipated a nice little interfaith conversation, but I soon scrapped any notes I had for that kind of a meeting. My interlocutor, Shabir Ally, had come from Toronto to argue, and he was loaded for bear.  His principal avenue of attack, as I recall — I haven’t yet watched this video, and, frankly, it may take me a while to bring myself to do so — was against the deity of Christ, a topic for which I hadn’t planned or prepared.  (I had to improvise all evening.)  He had even brought with him a series of images showing pages from the specifically LDS edition of the King James Bible, for projection on a screen.

One funny aspect of the event was that, although there are many Mormons in Pocatello, there were few in the fairly large audience that night.  The LDS Institute director at Idaho State had apologized to me over an early dinner, saying that they were having a big event that evening for all of the  LDS students.  They’d planned it for a year.  So the audience that night was heavily Muslim, with quite a few Evangelicals joining them along with maybe two or three of my former students.

The organizer for the event was a Muslim physician at a hospital in Rexburg.  He’s the one who does the Muslim invocation at the beginning of the video.

I thought, once it became clear that night that I was defending the divinity of Christ from attack, that the Evangelicals in the audience might (at least temporarily) come over to my side.  But, so far as I could see, their hostility toward Mormonism was too strong to permit them to support me.

It was a very long evening.  It seemed much longer than 2.5 hours.

Afterwards, the ISU grad student who was the president of the Muslim Students Association took me aside and apologized for the “ambush” (his word).  He said that he had expected a cordial interfaith meeting, and that the Rexburg physician had turned the gathering in a direction that he himself strongly regretted and hadn’t expected.