Has Nawaz converted to Christianity? Just days after Twitter removed a post of Bishop Brian Tamaki on the grounds of “hate speech”, the President of the International Muslim Association of New Zealand, Tahir Nawaz, has come out in support of Tamaki saying in an interview with Stuff “Your Lord and our Lord is not different. We have the same God.”
Bishop Brian Tamaki, who leads New Zealand’s Auckland based Destiny Church, is known as a fundamentally conservative Pentecostal who holds to the ancient Christian Trinitarian confessions that have been handed down through the centuries. Jesus Christ is Lord, God and Saviour. None of his congregation would be in any doubt about this.
While Christianity is the fastest growing religion in Islamic countries like Afghanistan and Iran, there has been almost zero coverage in NZ media of the many former New Zealand Muslims who have converted to Christianity since arriving in the country seeking refuge from Islamic governments overseas. This could be because there are still many extreme Islamists in NZ, such as Pakistani taxi driver Ishrat Malik who slit the throats of his wife and daughter. They had met for lunch with the Anglican vicar and his wife after a meeting of an ecumenical religious group in West Auckland.
It is not unusual for Muslims to convert to Christianity after they come into contact with Christians in the West. Some Islamic scholars hold that there are three sets of writings that must be read by pious muslims; the Torah, Gospels, and Koran. Surprisingly there is much within Islamic literature that verifies some of the outlandish claims of Christianity that support the deity of Christ. Examples may be found in the verses of surah 19 where support for the Christian claims of a virgin birth, from his mother Mary, and descent of the Trinitarian deified Holy Spirit, are found. Many verses testify of Jesus working miracles and surah 2:253 backs the Gospel claims that many people believed on him due to these works. There are an equal amount of Islamic preachers telling Muslims to never read the Gospels for themselves, they are only too aware of the testimony and conversions to Christianity that often inevitably follow.
The many New Zealand Islamists who hold that Mohammed visited Jerusalem during the night ride of surah 17.1 are forced to acknowledge that Mohammed saw Jesus in Heaven next to God, in line with visions of the Christian New Testament. Surah 3 has Jesus taken bodily into heaven, and Shahi Muslim 162a has record of Mohammed meeting Jesus there. While Christians would contend that the Temple the prophets tied their animals up next to was torn down centuries before, some of today’s New Zealand Muslims still pray five times a day because of commands given to Mohammed from this night journey on the flying donkey.
So either Tahir Nawaz has recently converted to Christianity, and now has the same Lord and God as Brian Tamaki and his followers, or he is, to use the Kiwi vernacular “full of sh*t,” and just spouting taqiya for the New Zealand media. After all, deceit has always been the key to advance Islam.