Raymond Ibrahim, 04/20/26
Let’s carefully unpack this troubling claim.
On April 14, Tucker Carlson asserted:
The people in charge don’t want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus. Islam reveres Him as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes He performed miracles, and states that He will return to Earth to defeat the Antichrist.
This is a perfect example of how a set of words can be true—literally speaking, what Tucker wrote is true—but can also mean antithetical things to antithetical audiences, in this case, Muslims and Christians.
Put differently, the “Jesus” Muslims love (known in Arabic as ‘Isa) behaves more like a faithful Muslim and sometime jihadist, not the Son of God proclaimed by the New Testament—which Muslims believe is fake news (or, in the Koran’s words, “distorted” and “corrupted,” from h-r-f, ح ر ف).
Here’s Tucker’s confusion: yes, when it comes to Jesus Christ, Muslims agree to a number of things that Christians agree to—certainly in comparison to Jews: Muslims believe Jesus was born of a virgin, was sinless, performed miracles, and will return in the end times.
Again, on the surface, surely this would seem to suggest that “Muslims love Jesus”?
Not if you dig a little deeper (continue reading below…)
As it happens, Muslims not only reject, but forcefully condemn the most cardinal aspects of Christ; they condemn—because the Koran itself condemns—the idea that Jesus was crucified, died and resurrected.
Put differently, Muslims condemn the entire Gospel message (e.g., Jn. 3:16, 1 Cor. 15).
They especially condemn the notion that Jesus is the “Son of God.” Indeed, the Koran (e.g., 5:72) goes so far as to thunder that “Infidels are they who say God is the Christ, son of Mary!”
For the record, in Islamic terminology, to be classified as an “infidel” (s. kafir) is to be classified as an existential enemy who must always be hated, fought, and ideally subjugated, one way or another. (Hence why Muslims have, from the very start of their religion in the seventh century, attacked, killed, and conquered Christians, and destroyed their churches.)
The truth is, Islam appropriated Jesus as a way to validate itself—specifically by transforming Christ into a figure that supports Muhammad’s new claims.
Consider what some of the most canonical hadiths say about Jesus:
In one, Jesus approvingly quotes the shahada and makes Muhammad his own equal—thereby contradicting the oldest Christian Creed (1 Cor. 15: 3-7): “Whoever testifies that there is no god but Allah, alone with no partner,” the Muslim Jesus says, “and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger, and that Jesus is His servant and messenger … Allah will admit him to paradise for saying that.”
In another hadith, a woman says to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that suckled you.” To this, a shocked Jesus replies: “No, but blessed is he who reads the Qur’an and follows what is in it!”
Then there are all the hadiths where Muhammad insists on making himself Jesus’s equal.
Thus, when Muhammad’s child-bride, Aisha, asked the prophet: “If I outlive you, would you permit me to be buried beside you?” “No,” Muhammad responded: “in that place there is only room for my grave, for Abu Bakr’s grave [Muhammad’s companion], for ‘Umar’s grave [another companion], and for the grave of Jesus son of Mary.” (Incidentally, Muhammad is said to be engaged in sexual intercourse with Mary in paradise—but that is another story…)
In another account, Muhammad says, “The biblical prophets are siblings of the same lineage. I and Jesus too are siblings because he prophesied me and there are no prophets between me and him.”
But it is only when the Muslim Jesus returns in Islam’s version of the “end times” that he truly shines. According to Islamic teaching, he will return to “break the crosses, slaughter the pigs, end the jizya tax on non-Muslims, making warfare against the People of the Book (e.g. Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, etc.) and others licit,” to quote professors James E. Lindsay and Suleiman Mourad in their Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period where the aforementioned hadiths were quoted from.
In other words, Jesus—to prove to all those foolish Christians that he was never crucified (and therefore never died and was never resurrected)—is going to break every cross he can find (thereby validating what Muslims had been engaged in from the very beginning and up to the present); he is going to slaughter all the swine—as a reminder to pork-eating Christians that pigs are not halal/kosher; and finally he is going to abolish jizya—meaning from having three choices (convert to Islam, pay jizya and embrace second-class status, or die), Jesus will now give Christians only two choices: Islam or death.
This is the “Jesus” that Muslims “love”—an impostor, a fraud, a doppelganger