Even Angels Ask

Jafar Lang is an American mathematics professor who converted to Islam and told the story of his conversion in his book The Struggle for Faith, which was translated and published by Dar Al Fikr in Damascus in 1998. In this book, Dr. Lang briefly mentioned his journey to Islam when he said: “I was born a Christian, then at the age of eighteen I became an atheist due to some rational objections to the idea of ​​God in Christianity. I remained an atheist for the next ten years. I read an interpretation of the Qur’an at the age of twenty-eight and found in it coherent and logical answers to my questions. This led me to believe in God through Islam and through that reading, and thus I became a Muslim.”
The book (Even Angels Ask) is Dr. Lang’s second book, and he wrote it after spending a year in Saudi Arabia, and this must have something to do with this book. This latest book contains the same qualities as the first book, such as complete honesty, common sense, a precise level of religious investigation, and an exciting swing between the talents of storytelling and presenting the faith. Once again, the author (if only he were a mathematician) makes it clear that he cannot believe in a religion unless this religion is subject to rationality, thought and spirituality, and this religion is Islam. Islam is the creed of the thinking man. When the author claims that religious (Christian) doctrines in the modern age do nothing but increase the crisis of faith and religion, he echoes what Muhammad Asad, one of the prominent Islamic thinkers of the twentieth century and author of Islam at the Crossroads in 1934, said when he predicted that the doubts raised by the Nicene Creed, especially about the ideas of incarnation and the Trinity, would not only turn intellectuals away from their churches but also from belief in God. In his remarks, Dr. Lang approaches Karen Armstrong, author of On God, in which the author says: Judaism has suffered from its inwardness and decline as a religion when it considered its people “the people of God,” while Christianity has suffered from the opposite, that is, from its universality, by absorbing many cultures and traditions within itself. According to Dr. Lang, Islam has been placed in the middle to avoid both dangerous dilemmas.