Why I Became a Christian

Why I Became a Christian is the conversion testimony of Sultan Muhammad Paul, an Afghan-born Muslim scholar. Born in 1881 to a military family near Kabul, he lost his father and several relatives to the political purges of Emir Abdur Rahman Khan, was raised partly in exile in India, and trained as an Islamic scholar in Delhi and Bombay under some of the leading mawlavis of his day.

He founded two successive societies for the express purpose of training young Muslims to debate and refute Christian missionaries in public. In the course of that debating life he began reading the Bible himself, at first only to find fault with it. He found instead that he could not answer, from within Islam, the one question that mattered to him: how does a sinner actually attain salvation? A systematic search through the Quran, the Hadith, the Zoroastrian Avesta, and the Arya Samaj's Satyarth Prakash left him convinced that none of them offered a real answer — and that the New Testament did.

He was baptized at St. Paul's Church, Bombay, on 6 August 1903, and sent away from the city that same day for his own safety. He later served as an Anglican clergyman. His testimony survives through an unusual chain: told in Urdu, translated into English in 1926–1927, and translated again into German for a missionary magazine in 1928 — the printing translated here, since neither the Urdu original nor the 1926/1927 English translation is known to survive in any copy we could locate.

No copy of the Urdu original or the 1926/1927 English translation is known to survive in any library or archive we could locate (checked: HathiTrust, Internet Archive, WorldCat, and Forman Christian College's own Urdu-language digital archive). The 1928 German printing, in a missionary magazine held at Cornell University and digitized by HathiTrust, is the only complete text of this testimony we could find anywhere — confirmed public domain in the United States. Ours is a new English translation of that German text. Scripture is quoted from the Berean Standard Bible rather than translated afresh, and the author's Quran citations are given from Pickthall's translation; two Quran verse numbers printed incorrectly in the German, and one left uncited, are corrected against the Quran text itself. Both choices, and the full accounting of what was corrected, are stated in the edition's acknowledgements.

This is a new English translation of “Warum Maulwi Sultan Mohammed Paul Christ wurde,” printed in two installments (pp.17–28 and 49–57) in Evangelisches Missions-Magazin, n.s. v.72, 1928, translated into German by W. Zavelstein-Müller from a 1927 English translation of Sultan Muhammad Paul's Urdu testimony by Ernest Paxton Janvier (The Milton Stewart Evangelistic Fund, Allahabad, 1926–1927). The German printing is confirmed public domain in the United States (HathiTrust, Cornell University Library copy). Neither the Urdu original nor the 1926/1927 English translation is known to survive in any copy we located.

The translation was produced by T.S. Baker Books using machine translation, checked section by section against the German, with attention to two classes of error specific to a text this heavy with citation: a re-translated Bible or Quran quotation that reads fluently but is not the verse an English or Arabic reader would recognize, and a hadith or Quran citation number that has drifted across three languages and forty years.

Every Bible quotation in this edition is given in the Berean Standard Bible's actual wording, not translated fresh from the German paraphrase. Every Quran quotation is given in Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall's translation, for the same reason — and because Pickthall is the reference translation the source pamphlet's own English-language sister edition names for the same purpose. Two Quran verse numbers were printed incorrectly in the German (the Abraham prayer, corrected to 14:41; the “there is not one of you” verse, corrected to 19:71–72) and one verse was quoted with no citation number at all (corrected to 11:118–119); all three are confirmed against the Quran text itself. Six of the testimony's eight hadith citations now carry a checkable modern reference (Sahih al-Bukhari and/or Sahih Muslim, by number); two remain attributed only as the German attributes them, to Tirmidhi, because no more specific modern number could be confirmed.

Dated vocabulary has been given its ordinary modern English form: Muhammedaner is rendered “Muslim” and Koran “Quran” throughout. Personal and place names follow the spellings a present-day reader will recognize, checked where possible against documented 19th-century Afghan royal history — the Emirs and princes named in the opening family history (Sher Ali Khan, Abdur Rahman Khan, Ayub Khan, Yaqub Khan) are real, documented figures whose relationships to one another match the account given here.

Two passages in the German printing itself were damaged or garbled — a missing verb in one sentence, and a hadith citation that runs together with an unrelated sentence about the Prophet's own justice. Both are reconstructed here on the sense of the passage and, where possible, against a closely parallel English source; both are marked as reconstructions in the translator's working notes, which are available on request.

The free German source is linked on this book's page, and we encourage any reader who wants to check our translation against it to do so. If you find an error, we would be glad to hear of it and correct it.