 If you want me to continue with my work, it is crucial to support the channel via Patreon. Moreover, make sure to subscribe to Bobby's Perspective on Rumble. All the links are in the description box below. May Allah bless you all. Alright guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, it is always amazing to see revered stories to Islam. However, it is even more impressive when we see certain scholars, certain academics embrace Islam. This is why we're going to check out today a Christian historian accepts Islam by the channel Aido Dawah. Before we jump into the video guys, as always, if you enjoy the content, leave me a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell as well so you're up to date every single time I upload new videos. If you want to further support the channel, all the links are in the description box below. And now with no further ado, let's have a look. Assalamu alaikum. Wa alaikum salam. What is your name? My name is Thomas. Where are you from? I'm from Wales in the UK. Mostly in Wales, I went to university in London for my undergraduates. I went to do a Masters in Durham in the north of England. And also when I was training to be a teacher, I studied my PGCE in the north as well. Growing up, were you exposed to any religion? My parents were both Sunday school teachers in a Baptist chapel. I did believe when I was very, very young, but I was very cynical and questioning. The university I went to, you could do an extra qualification alongside your degree called the Association of Kings College. I'd say about half the course was the history of the Bible. And the more I looked into it, there were just a few issues that I couldn't quite reconcile myself with as much as I tried to believe. Coming to terms with the Trinity and the more you look into it, the more you realise that there have been church councils for almost as long as there has been Christianity arguing about the minute differences in even terminology trying to explain what Christianity actually means. 200 years after the ascension of Jesus Christ, peace and blessings be upon him, a guy named Tertullian, who's the first who coined the word Trinity, who's considered the founder of Western theology today. Ever since, the idea of Jesus's divinity started picking up amongst Christian churches. During that period, a Presbyter priest named Arius protested against the bishop of Alexandria. After hearing a sermon in which Alexander said, the son is just like the father. Arius argued that this could not be so, because that would mean God suffered and Jesus had a beginning and only God is eternal. Consequently, there must have been a time before his creation when he was not. Arius Doctrine, or the idea of Arianism, in which stated that Jesus is a human, spread rapidly amongst the Christian world. So as I said a billion times before here on this channel, I come from an Orthodox Christian background and Arianism is seen as the greatest heresy against Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy sees itself as the only right way. This is what Orthodoxy means, of course, and they've been fighting all the heresies. You can read books on that subject, such as Against Heresies by Saint, quote unquote, Iranias. So after establishing what Christianity means, according to those creeds, they went out and fought those heresies. Yet again, they persecuted the people that said anything against the Trinity, that said anything against the divinity of Christ. And therefore, they weeded Arianism out of existence, even though Arianism was the closest Christianity ever got to monotheism. And many confusion arose within the Christian community, with many different ideas on who Jesus was. And that led the Roman Emperor, Constantine, to gather all Christians bishops in a council meeting called the Council of Nicea, that took place in 325 AD. Constantine wanted to end the theological dispute amongst churches and other issues that Christians differed, such as when should they celebrate Easter. During the Council of Nicea, the bishops argued back and forth whether Jesus was a human God or part God. The discussion took a long, tedious time, actually several months, and they ended the dispute with voting instead of sticking to what the Scripture said about Jesus. So yes, they voted. That is absolutely correct. However, to say that they did not base it on Scripture at all, and they just based it upon their own opinion, would be not accurate either. That would be a misrepresentation of course. You do have very ambiguous statements within the Bible. This is what led to the Trinity in the first place. And therefore, when a Trinitarian speaks, he of course bases it on his Scripture as well. We have to be fair here. No, it's not that Jesus says I'm God. No, it's not that you find the word Trinity within the Bible, not at all. However, that ambiguity that you can find within the Bible can lead to further confusion, which it did, of course. And therefore, those church fathers pre-assumed that those ambiguous statements actually describe a Trinity. The document called The Profession of the Faith of the 318 Fathers. In summary, this document is the theology or creed of Christians today. This theology is not a divine order, nor it was ever mentioned by God, Jesus, or any of the previous prophets who came before. This creed is an epistemic belief that is based on compromise and voting instead of a divine order. So yes, it's correct that it was no direct revelation from God through a prophet, nor was it said by Jesus, may peace be upon him. However, the assumption of the church is, of course, that they received the Holy Spirit. In their view, the Holy Spirit is God, and the church fathers inherit the Holy Spirit. Therefore, everything they decide is guided by the Holy Spirit, hence God. And therefore, if you twist and turn all of this, you come to the conclusion that God guided the church and came to the Council of Nicaea, came to the creed of Christianity. The Christian are not saying I'm believing this, but the theology of the creed of the Jews, because this is what the Old Testament said, that there is only one God. Yet, they still wanted to hold on to the Trinity, but three does not equal to one, so they had to come up with a non-contradiction scheme. The idea that the Roman Empire, as cool as it was, and as much as I liked studying it, that could literally kill God, so I couldn't quite grasp that for God to be everything that God is meant to be, while simultaneously also being killed on the cross, if Jesus is meant to be God, because in my mind, God shouldn't be able to be killed. You know, I've been reflecting a lot about the crucifixion coming from a Christian background myself, of course. And you know what? Even if you would grant, God can do whatever he wants, he decided to come to earth as a human being. He decided to take the shape of a human being, and we're gonna grant that assumption, because God can do whatever he wants. Fine, but if the initial motivation for coming to earth was to forgive sins, why then would God need to sacrifice himself? I find this concept so much more irrational, if you think about it, because you have a God that can do everything, and now he wants to forgive our sins. Okay, forgive him! If God decided to forgive sins, then he will just forgive sins. That's it, he can forgive a sin, he can partner sin, or he can choose not to. He is God, he can do whatever he wants. I agree there, fine, but it is exactly that forgiveness and that mercy of God that makes the crucifixion absolutely implausible, because a God that can forgive whoever he wants just does that. He doesn't then need to send himself, send his son, that is himself, sacrifices only son, that is actually God, kill himself, crucify the flesh in order to then forgive us. Don't you see how ridiculous that is? The more time passes since I rejected Christianity, the crazier this concept seems. I don't even understand how I ever believed it in the first place, I really do not know. During the time of me being a Christian, I of course made myself believe those things, but now I see that I had to be taught those concepts, because ultimately they're absolutely man-made. No human being out of his own nature would ever come up with such a story, because it is nonsensical. Yet again, in Islam, we do not believe that God is a human in the first place. But as I said, even if we grant that assumption based upon that God can do everything, it becomes even more needless, because if God can do everything, he doesn't need to come into the earth to forgive sins. In two minds about it, because you have days where I'm thinking, I wish I believed as firmly as these people did. Other times, I'm sort of convincing myself that I'm somehow superior, because I know that what they believe is nonsense. There was a year where I started going to church, partially because I could speak to the minister then, ask him a few of my burning questions about religion. If Jesus are meant to be unfathomably forgiving, you can't even imagine how merciful they are and forgiving they are. Well, why can't they forgive someone for not believing in Jesus then? He was very friendly, but he'd mostly shut them down with, oh, that's a dangerous question to ask. You can't say that you might be more forgiving. Yes, and his question about forgiveness is, of course, legitimate. What if Jesus, which is God in Christianity, can forgive all sins? He's so merciful. Why doesn't he forgive the people that do not believe that Jesus is God? Sure, that's an issue, but moreover, yet again, if God is Jesus and God is so forgiving, why does he sacrifice himself? Why would God need to crucify himself in order to forgive us? Is that really a God that you want to pray to? Tell us about your journey towards exploring Islam. Towards the end of university, I still wanted to go back and study a bit more ancient history, so I did end up eventually then to study a masters. Whenever I could, I did try to travel a bit more as well. I started going on these solo holidays, so I went to Turkey and I just wanted to see the Roman temples. I love traveling along. And then because I went to Turkey with its own modern people, culture and heritage, I wanted to learn more about that. So I read this giant book on the Ottoman Empire by Lord Kinras called The Ottoman Centuries. It became a bit obsessed with Ottoman history for a while, but then to understand the history, you need to understand what they believed and obviously you go visit a mosque and you can't really ignore what it's built for, what these books mean, what the people who made it believe. There was a moment where I was in the square between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and the call to prayer was going to sort of give you tingles and I remember thinking, I wish I was a Muslim. It does feel like there's something peaceful. Yeah. You know, you get a very nice sense of tranquility whenever you enter these places. Like when you hear the call to prayer like that, you just want to answer the call to prayer. You want to go, you get the feeling that you want to go pray, but I think I'm still at that point pursuing the history, but it did really get me interested because I started hearing more and more about the life and the sort of mannerisms of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. So even really little things had a huge impact on me. I think one thing that made me really, really start to admire and think, you know, I'd like to be like this man is hearing about how he was with cats. So it's something I'd never really come into contact with with a religion before. And I know in Turkey, they've got sort of a bit of reputation for being particularly nice to cats. There's even a mosque and the endowment says specifically that part of the condition of the mosque is it has to feed all of the street cats in the area. So I sort of knew that when I thought maybe it was like a Turkish culture, but yeah, I didn't realise that maybe there was some sort of connection to some background in the religion as well. I've always loved animals. And that was one of the things I found a bit strange about some Christians is that no kindness towards animals will know it's down to your own personal beliefs. Then there's no sort of no encouragement in there have no soul beyond I just want to use what he said about the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam to shed some light on this particular subject that also many enemies of Islam use. When you hear enemies of Islam speak, they talk about the Prophet in a very, very bad light. And they want to tell you that Islam is wrong because of the Prophet even this read the claim of the entire Islam crowd. They want to depict the Prophet as this violent, disgusting, vile, vile man. And once you know the truth about him, then you will see what Islam really is and you will exit Islam. But isn't it very, very interesting that we see revert after revert talking about the specific character of Prophet Muhammad. And this is actually what made them embrace Islam. Moreover, even if you go back historically and you see the followers of Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, they followed this man as well. So if he was such an evil, bad, bad man, why would so many people start to follow him? Isn't that contradictory? So I would really urge you to look into it if you are honest. Because if we look at the facts, a revert has nothing to lose in that sense. A revert has his religion and now he saw some flaws in his own religion. Something is unsatisfactory within his own religion, so he chooses to leave his religion in the first place. In order to embrace Islam, you have to leave your religion first. And now the question is, if you look at Islam as something that hasn't been given to you by your parents, you haven't been born into it, right? You are looking at it objectively. You are discerning. You're looking at the facts. Take me for example. It took me over two years reading the Quran, reading the Hadith, fact checking all the claims that the Haters made. It took me over two years of honest, genuine research. And then I still embraced Islam. How can that be, right? I watched all the David Wood videos. I watched all of that content and still I embraced Islam. So if you're honest, you would do your own research and not take those YouTubers' word for it. It's not just about the religion itself, but about the the prophets and especially Muhammad. But I think just with time, there's, Islam is so compelling that you end up coming back to it and you discover it in unexpected places. Tell me. Well, you know, I'm a historian and I'm quite into world history or ancient history and there's a surprising amount of time there's an Islamic influence. So I'm trying to learn about Indian history and medieval India. It's almost impossible to escape the influence of Islam or Islamic influence or Islamic culture. You know, people on India going on Hajj causes these links that maybe otherwise wouldn't have existed. If you're trying to study the history of medicine or science as well, you will frequently end up back when they say, you know, I'll actually, a lot of these ideas survive because not not because of Europeans, but because of well, Arabs or Persians really, then if you want to start studying 19th century medicine, for example, there's no way of doing that without acknowledging that some key figures are like Abbas and Ibn Sina that existed as part of a tradition that we call the golden age of Islam. I really needed to be sure, and I didn't want to commit to anything until I was sure. And I'm just a naturally questioning person all the time, slightly to my own annoyance. There was a lot of peeling about Islam out of all the Abrahamic religions. It definitely was the one that was consistent, made sense, had an internal consistency. There wasn't any drawback that would make me think that doesn't quite make sense. There's something off there, something must be rewritten perhaps. By that point, I was convinced that the Prophet landed, peace be upon him, was probably one of the most good people to have ever existed. And I was already thinking I want to be more like him, so I'd hear Sina and I'd be like, I might follow it because if he did it then it's probably a good idea. So I was almost treating him like a role model or a philosopher or something, because I couldn't quite get myself to say I firmly 100% believe in God. I felt like I'd done as much by that point as I could do on my own. So that'd give me the motivation to start looking into it again. But I reached that point then where I was like, I can't just do this as Thomas, I need to maybe be part of a community. Maybe I'll call my friend Iskander. So it's just a casual text like, oh, do you mind if I pop along to the mosque next time you're going? Just have a look to see what it's like. And he called me straight away. He wanted to know exactly how I was feeling, what was going on. And I talked to him about looking into Islam, trying to learn how to pray. He asked me just point blank, do you believe? And I was just like, you know, as a matter of fact, I think I do. But I met Iskander in the mosque and the Imam found out. And as soon as he found out, he was like, you know, you can, you can do it in front of people here after we pray. I ended up reciting my shahada in front of a load of strangers. Most of them I'd never met before in my life. How did you feel when you took your shahada? Yeah, it was a strange experience because obviously I was very happy for myself. But straight afterwards, dozens of strangers come and greet you and they, some of them look like they're almost about to cry. They look genuinely happy for you. All right, guys, this is it for today's video. I'm going to cut it off here. If you want to watch the whole video, head over to the channel, IdoDawa. And there you can see Tomo's whole reversion story and many other stories of reversions to Islam. As I said throughout the video, if you're honest, if you're genuine, if you really are a truth seeker, you will check the source material yourself. You will read the Qur'an yourself. You will read the Hadith yourself. You will study Islam yourself before you come to a conclusion. But unfortunately, and this is not surprising, of course, most people nowadays won't do that. They simply watch certain people on YouTube and then they just copycat what they heard there. Those people, of course, have their own interest at hand. 99.9% of those anti-Islamic channels are, of course, run by Christian apologists. So, of course, if you are a Christian yourself and you're born in a Christian country and then you see certain Christians on YouTube talking bad about Islam, it is likelier that you will believe them rather than the other side. That is just human nature. It's absolutely normal to side with a camp to take a team and say, yes, we are right. Those guys are wrong. Everybody has their own biases. And therefore, the information presented to you by certain Christians is much more appealing. That is normal. When I was a Christian, I listened to David Wood and without fact checking it, I took it as truthful. It seemed right. Hey, he's citing a source. Therefore, it must be right. No, it is not. Do your own research. Think about logically. It is absolutely unjustifiable that so many people reverse to Islam after actually doing the research themselves. You saw a historian, you see doctors, you see intellectuals, people that really study Islam for 10, 20 years even, and then they finally accept Islam. How can that be? People that actually did the work, actually researched Islam, they then in turn accept Islam. But people that are sitting on the Internet are the loudest, they of course have not researched Islam. It would be an absolute impossibility that a person aside from the subject now, let's not think about Islam, there is a person that is studying a certain subject for two or three or more years, honestly, as objectively as the person can, taking their own biases aside, and generally looking at the information presented after dissecting the evidence, looking at every possible subject of the matter, they come to the conclusion that this is sufficient evidence to accept the claim as truth. This would be absolutely impossible if it is true what the entire Islam crowd claims. Don't you see? If it is really true what a David Wood says, then a person that sits there objectively has no affiliation to Islam prior to the conversion has absolutely no need in that sense to convert, but converts anyways after doing his objective research. Don't you see how mutually exclusive those two statements are, those two actions are? Because yet again the entire Islam crowd will tell you, Muhammad bad. That's what they say, right? And then you see a person looking into the seerah, looking into the path of Muhammad into the way of the Prophet and based upon the way of the Prophet Sallahu alaihi wa sallam, they accept Islam. So now if that would be only one person, you might be right. The David Woods etc. are correct and that one person just got it wrong. That person is stupid, didn't do enough research. Fine. But we see thousands of reverts storming to Islam after examining Islam, after examining the claims made about the Prophet, after examining the claims that Islam makes. And what does Islam claim? Honestly people like to confuse this, they like to make it more complicated than it is. Islam says there is no God worthy of worship, but God. There is only one God worthy of worship. This God is not a trinity. This God has no partners. This God is unique. There is absolutely nothing like Him. Doesn't this make sense? Would you like to worship a God that is like something else that you can find within creation? How does this make sense to you? Christians say I cannot worship Allah because I cannot understand Him. Jesus came to us so we can understand God. Of course you cannot understand God and let's be completely honest here. True Christians don't even claim that because they say that the essence of God is ultimately unknowable. So how does this make sense? There is the essence of God that is unknowable. Out of His essence you have the trinity, you have the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And through that we kind of can understand God. But fully knowing Him is impossible because His essence is unknowable. Blah, blah, blah and more blah. This essence that you try to describe, this is Allah. That one essence, that one God. This is Allah. This is what we worship. We do not worship any type of concept late upon a God. Anything that tries to humanize Him. Anything that tries to make it more digestible for us. Anything that tries to make Him human so our limited finite mind can understand the infinite. This is not what we try to do. No, quite the opposite. In Islam we accept God for who He truly is. He is greater than anything. He is absolutely pure. He is the almighty. He is the creator, the maker, the originator, the provider, the extender, the withholder, the all hearing, all seeing, the sustainer, the majestic, the all wise, the most loving, the absolute truth. This is what God is. This is what we worship. All right guys, this is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave the thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to further support this channel, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support, guys. And as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.