كتاب منهج دراسة الأديان بين الشيخ رحمت الله الهندي والقس فندر
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since both Islam and Christianity claim to be God's final revelation, one must be right, one wrong. Logic demands, he says, that both cannot be right. Therefore, their respective claims should be tried at the bar of reason. Next, he establishes five a priori conditions of the true faith: (1) the true faith must fulfill the human yearning for pardon and justification; (2) it must contravene neither conscience nor natural morality; (3) its God must be just and holy, rewarding the good, punishing the evil; (4) its God must be one, immortal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient; and (5) the way of salvation must be made clear through gradual progress in the knowledge of God; a theophany (revelation) must stand at its center. Section 1 examines the Bible, rejecting traditional Muslim charges of abrogation (naksh) and of corruption (tahrif). Section 2 presents Christian doctrines within the framework of his criteria, establishing their rational basis. Section 3 tests Islam's claim and finds it wanting. Readers thus have a choice: between the Lord Jesus Christ, who went about doing good, and Muhammad the prophet of the sword.
Pfander's pietist background colors his approach. His aim is clearly to satisfy people's "spiritual cravings" for forgiveness, renewal, anti fellowship with God, but his criteria and tests appear to elevate reason above feeling. Although, in early editions, he emphatically rejected reason as a means to obtain knowledge of God, in later editions he seems to argue more from reason than from revelation, which, given his pietist background, remains something of an enigma.]17[As one subsequent critic says, he wrote not "to touch Muslim hearts but to convince their minds."]18[Even William Muir thought he wrote of the Trinity as reflected in the natural world's examples of plurality in unity, so that this seemed to be "an obligatory argument, as if from the nature of things Deity must exist in trinity," which gave his opponents "unfounded advantage."]19[
The Debate
At Agra, Pfander's sequels to his Mizan were rendered into Urdu. All three books were widely distributed. Not only their style and idiom but also their binding were designed to resemble popular Muslim tracts. Muslims
