Here's another excellent lecture that touches on a fundamental point of Islamic theology with many ramifications to everyday life: rida which means the acceptance, satisfaction or perfect contentment with God's will or decree. There are some very interesting insights shared by British Sunni scholar and Sufi master Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad that I feel are also applicable to Christianity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxi8lJXqLP8
This one was good too, albeit a bit triumphalist. I agree that this topic is relevant to Christianity: scratch almost any Catholic, and you will find a semi-Pelagian right below the surface.
And why would I or any Catholic shy away from such a description? What you call "semi-Pelagianism" is the Patristic synergist doctrine and has never been condemned by the Church. But note that even you admit, by that term, that it is not Pelagianism; on the other hand, the Augustinianism, and moreso the Baneisianism, toward which you appear to have a peculiar bias for an "agnostic", I have no problem in declaring to be, looking past the scholastic word games, indistinguishable from Calvinism.
As expected, even for a Sufi, the conception of "acceptance, satisfaction or perfect contentment with God's will or decree" is from a perspective of law, authority and slavery. And of course, like Calvinism, it cannot resolve the logical contradiction inherent in its conception of Allah as the sole cosmic agent and the supposed ability of human beings to "choose" and be morally accountable for their actions, and has to talk about "mystery" and "miracles".
But as the speaker indicates, this is more of a problem for Christianity, where God is said to be love.
It's not a "problem" at all for Christianity, since it, not the vision of the dictatorial clockmaker of authoritarian, legalistic religions, is truth.
Allah, elusive with his ninety-nine names, is not so readily identified
Allah is quite readily identified by those with eyes to see:
Al-Mutakabbir The Proud
Al-Baari The Evolver
Al-Qaabid The Restricting One
Al-Muzil The Abaser
Al-Mumeet The Inflictor of Death
Al-Waahid The Only One
Al-Mu’akhkhir The Procrastinator
Ad-Daarr The Distressorand let's not forget the one left out from the list
Al-Makireena The Deceiverand the
Lord of Sirius, also the Morning Star.
1 The word of the Lord came again unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord God; Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God:
3 Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee:
4 With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures:
5 By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches:
6 Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God;
7 Behold, therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness.
8 They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.
9 Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.
10 Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of strangers: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God.
11 Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
12 Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.
13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.
15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.
16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.
17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.
18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.
19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.
12
“How you are fallen from heaven,
O [a]Lucifer, son of the morning!
How you are cut down to the ground,
You who weakened the nations!
13
For you have said in your heart:
‘I will ascend into heaven,
I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;
I will also sit on the mount of the congregation
On the farthest sides of the north;
14
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,
I will be like the Most High.’
15
Yet you shall be brought down to Sheol,
To the lowest depths of the Pit.
44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
3 And if our gospel be also hid, it is hid to them that are lost,
4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of unbelievers, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not shine unto them.
14: And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.
Hebrews 2: 14 That is why Jesus became one of us. That through his death he might bring to nothing the one having the means to cause death, that is, the Devil.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was not convincing the world that he does not exist; it was convincing the world that he is God. It's there, for all to see, but Christians seem to be struck with a peculiar blindness as to the nature and identity of Lucifer.
So is the lord of the devils:
Surah 19:83: See you not that We have sent the Shayatin against the disbelievers to push them to do evil.Surah 6:112: Thus have We appointed unto every Prophet an advesary, – evil one among men and jinns, inspiring each other with flowery discourses by way of deception.What a psychotic sociopath.
Surah 32:13: If We had so willed, We could certainly have brought every soul its true guidance: but the Word from Me will come true, “I will fill Hell with Jinns and men all together.Sahih al-Bukhari Book 60 Hadith 475 Once Allah's Apostle became sick and could not offer his night prayer (Tahajjud) for two or three nights. Then a lady (the wife of Abu Lahab) came and said, "O Muhammad! I think that your Satan has forsaken you, for I have not seen him with you for two or three nights!" On that Allah revealed: 'By the fore-noon, and by the night when it darkens, your Lord (O Muhammad) has neither forsaken you, nor hated you.' (93.1-3)
Islam is more Semitic than Christianity, and Semitism is alien to the Western mind.
What precisely is "the Western mind" and how can Christianity, which presumably shaped much of it, be alien to it?
Even though we were converted to a Semitic religion, it is easily the most Hellenistic of the three (Nietzsche referred to it as "Plato for the masses").
What do ancient Greeks have to do with Germans apart from their culture having influenced the German by way of Rome and eventually the Western Catholic adoption of classicla philosophy and the philo-Hellenism of the Renaissance?
There are relatively few converts among Europeans to Islam and Judaism. Orthodox Christianity probably stands the best chance as a serious option.
There are relatively few converts from any culturally entrenched religion into another. Even from a human perspective it requires mustering some degree of intelligence and indifference toward institutionalised authority in order to dare to question what one has been raised in. That might tell one something about actual faith and the fewness of the saved.