On 5 August 2026 an Evangelical apologist on X repeated the familiar assurance-of-salvation argument against Islam. A meme placed Qur’an 46:9 beside John 6:47 and John 14:6, implying that Christianity offers certainty while Islam leaves believers anxiously counting deeds.
The argument opens on a misreading. Qur’an 46:9 does not present Muhammad, ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam, as uncertain about his salvation. The verse states that he holds no independent knowledge of what Allah has not revealed: “I only follow what is revealed to me.” So it concerns ʿilm al-ghayb, knowledge of the unseen. Turning an epistemic limitation into a soteriological confession is a category error.
Matthew 7:21–23 answers this. The passage shows Jesus rejecting people who call him “Lord,” prophesy in his name, cast out demons, and perform mighty works. They are convinced they belong to him, yet he tells them, “I never knew you.” An Evangelical will answer that these people never held saving faith to begin with. But that answer reintroduces the very uncertainty the argument was built to remove. A person can sincerely believe himself saved while holding a faith that does not save. So “whoever believes has eternal life” supplies no subjective certainty at all. The question then moves back a step, to whether one’s own belief is the genuine article. The assurance on offer is the assurance Jesus himself withholds.
Her next move screenshotted Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4093, with the claim that a Muslim could spend a lifetime praying and doing good, forget one rule about trousers below the ankles, and land in Hell for it. That is a caricature. A fiqh ruling on dress does not define the doctrine of salvation. The jurists differed over garments worn below the ankle absent arrogance. None of them held that one accidental hemline erases a lifetime of faith and guarantees damnation.
The narration carries its own qualifier: “Allah will not look at him who trails his lower garment conceitedly.” The operative sin is khuyalāʾ, arrogance. The Prophet’s own practice settles the point. Abū Bakr, raḍiya Allāhu ʿanhu, said his garment sometimes slipped below the line despite his care. The Prophet told him he was not among those the ruling condemned (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5784). The qualifier sat in her screenshot, and she argued as though it were not there.
Islam does not teach that a Muslim purchases Paradise at an arbitrary quota of good deeds. The Prophet said it plainly: “No one among you will enter Paradise by his deeds. They said: Not even you, O Messenger of Allah? He said: Not even me, unless Allah encompasses me with mercy from Him” (see Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 6463; also Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 2816). Deeds are the evidence of īmān, and they place Allah in no one’s debt. Entry into Paradise rests on divine mercy. The Prophet placed himself under that principle alongside the rest of the ummah.
Her own canon is more complicated than the slogan admits. Paul grounds justification in faith apart from works of the law (Romans 3:28; Ephesians 2:8–9). James insists that faith without works is dead and that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone (James 2:17, 24). The tension ran sharp enough that Luther, in his 1522 preface to the New Testament, called James “eine rechte stroherne Epistel,” a right strawy epistle, that in his words had “nothing of the nature of the gospel about it,” and ranked it below the books he judged to carry the Gospel. The Christian traditions have spent centuries harmonising the two, and that labour is the proof: faith, works, and assurance do not collapse into a meme.