T.S. Baker

Answered by people who lived it

What about other religions? Isn’t Christianity just one of many?

The people worth hearing on this are not those raised inside Christianity, but those who knew another religion from the inside — studied it, taught it, argued for it — and left. Maulvi Imad-ud-din translated the Quran and preached in the great mosques of India for years before concluding it could not give him what he sought; Brahmin scholars like Nehemiah Goreh and Krishna Mohan Banerjea did the same from within Hinduism. Their testimonies are not comparisons made from the outside, but verdicts from within.

A fourth-generation Muslim scholar who had translated the Quran into Urdu and was appointed to preach the Koran in the great royal mosque at Agra, Imad-ud-din did not reject Islam from ignorance of it:

As long as I remained there I preached the Koran constantly in the streets, and houses, and mosques, and many people repented of their sins, and regarded me as one of the saints of God, and came and touched my knees with their hands. But still my soul found no rest.
Imad-ud-din Lahiz, A Muslim Brought to Christ (1884) — his own account · read the full testimony · clean edition $1.99 · free source

Nehemiah Goreh — born Nilakantha Goreh, a celebrated Sanskrit pandit of Benares who had written in defense of Hinduism — put the case to the Hindu reformers of the Brahmo Samaj, having reasoned his way across the divide himself:

Christianity alone, it seems, teaches men true religion. The experience of the whole world seems to show that without the help of Christianity man has no power to find it out by his reason.
Nehemiah Goreh, A Letter to the Brahmos from a Converted Brahman of Benares (1868) · read the full testimony · clean edition $1.99 · free source

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