How Daniel Haqiqatjou's arguments backfire on Islamic theology

Daniel Haqiqatjou's critiques of Christianity are a mixture of arrogance and ignorance that would make even basic seminary students wince. Yet his growing influence on YouTube and X demands a thorough response, not because his arguments are sophisticated, but because they represent a particularly dangerous form of pseudo-scholarship that misleads both Muslims and Christians about the nature of Christian theology.

What makes Haqiqatjou's work particularly annoying is its veneer of academic respectability. Armed with his Harvard education, he presents himself as a sophisticated critic of Christian thought while demonstrating a level of theological understanding that wouldn't pass muster in a first-year seminary course. His work consistently reveals a pattern of willful misrepresentation that serves his own agenda rather than truth.

His misunderstanding of everything

Nowhere is Haqiqatjou's theological poverty more evident than in his attacks on the doctrine of the Trinity. His arguments betray not just disagreement but fundamental miscomprehension. When he smugly declares the Trinity "logically impossible" with his simplistic "1+1+1 can't equal 1" arguments, he merely proves he hasn't bothered to engage with two millennia of Christian theological development.

The sophisticated metaphysical framework developed by the Church Fathers, the careful distinctions between essence and persons, the profound mystical theology undergirding Trinitarian thought - all of this might as well not exist in his universe. He attacks a caricature of Christian doctrine while ignoring the actual theological tradition he claims to critique.

His treatment of Christian history fares no better. Haqiqatjou's narrative about early Christian pacifism being merely a result of powerlessness rather than principle represents historical revisionism at its worst (read here). Has he never read the accounts of martyrs who went joyfully to their deaths rather than compromise their faith?

His simplistic narrative about "Constantine corrupting Christianity" reads like a Dan Brown novel rather than serious historical analysis. The complex theological developments before Constantine, the continued existence of Christian pacifist traditions throughout history, the sophisticated development of Just War theory, the ongoing tension between church and state in Christian thought - all of this vanishes in favor of a cartoonish narrative of corruption and decline.

When Haqiqatjou turns to Scripture, his arguments descend into pure amateurism. His attempts to find "contradictions" in the Bible reveal not scholarly insight but rather the confusion of someone who has never seriously engaged with biblical scholarship. He cherry-picks verses without understanding literary context, historical background, or different genres within Scripture. When he triumphantly points out supposed "contradictions" in the Gospels, he sounds like a freshman who just discovered biblical criticism and thinks he's discovered something scholars haven't noticed for centuries.

The self-defeating nature of his arguments

Yet perhaps the most devastating aspect of Haqiqatjou's work is how his arguments spectacularly backfire on Islamic theology. He deploys argumentative strategies that, if applied consistently, would demolish numerous Islamic doctrines.

The Divine Attributes Dilemma

Consider his rationalistic attacks on the Trinity. Haqiqatjou claims that any complexity in God is logically impossible, that absolute divine unity permits no distinction whatsoever. Yet this same argument, if taken seriously, would wreak havoc with Islamic theology's understanding of divine attributes.

The Quran affirms that Allah has multiple eternal attributes - knowledge, power, speech, will, and life among others. These attributes are considered eternal and uncreated, yet somehow don't compromise divine unity (tawhid). The classical Islamic theological tradition spent centuries wrestling with how Allah could have multiple eternal attributes without compromising His absolute oneness.

The Mu'tazilites denied the reality of the attributes to preserve divine simplicity. The Ash'aris and Maturidis developed complex theories about attributes being "neither identical to nor other than" the divine essence. These are precisely the kinds of sophisticated theological distinctions that Haqiqatjou mockingly dismisses when Christians make them about the Trinity.

The Divine Speech Contradiction

His attacks on the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation inadvertently undermine the Islamic doctrine of the Quran as the uncreated speech of Allah. Islamic theology holds that Allah's speech is an eternal attribute, yet somehow this eternal speech became manifested in time through the revelation of the Quran. The parallels to the Christian doctrine of the eternal Word becoming incarnate in time are striking.

The very philosophical tools Haqiqatjou uses to attack the Incarnation could be turned against the Islamic doctrine of divine speech. How can something eternal become temporal? How can the infinite be contained in the finite? These are questions that Islamic theology must answer just as much as Christian theology.

The Historical Criticism Boomerang

Perhaps most devastating is how Haqiqatjou's historical skepticism toward Christian sources would demolish Islamic historical claims if applied consistently. He demands extraordinary evidence for Christian claims about Jesus while accepting traditional Islamic accounts with minimal scrutiny.

The Quran was compiled years after Muhammad's death, yet Haqiqatjou accepts its perfect preservation while questioning the reliability of the Gospels. The hadith literature was collected centuries after Muhammad, involving complex chains of oral transmission, yet Haqiqatjou readily accepts authentic hadiths while dismissing early Christian testimony about Jesus.

The Textual Problem

His arguments about textual corruption in the Bible ignore how the same methods of textual criticism, if applied to early Islamic manuscripts, raise similar questions about variant readings (qira'at) in the Quranic text. The Sana'a manuscript, with its palimpsest showing textual variations, poses similar challenges to simplistic notions of perfect preservation that Haqiqatjou never addresses.

The miracle double standard

His skepticism toward Christian miracle claims while accepting Islamic ones wholesale reveals a striking double standard. He demands historical-critical proof for the resurrection but accepts the night journey (isra and mi'raj) without similar scrutiny. He questions the virgin birth accounts in the Gospels while accepting the Quranic version unquestioningly.

At the heart of Haqiqatjou's contradictions lies Islam's fundamental difficulty with Christianity. Islam must simultaneously affirm Jesus as a prophet while denying core Christian claims about His nature and work. His arguments not only fail to engage seriously with Christian theology but also unwittingly undermine Islamic theological positions.

image source: Screenshot YouTube/The Muslim Skeptic