This weird hadith about Jesus summarizes Islam perfectly
We read in the hadith literature,
“Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “Jesus, seeing a man stealing, asked him, ‘Did you steal?, He said, ‘No, by Allah, besides Whom there is none who has the right to be worshipped’ Jesus said, ‘I believe in Allah and suspect my eyes.”
(Sahih Bukhari Book 60 Hadith 114)
This is Islam in a nutshell.
Jesus, or more accurately the very stupid caricature of Jesus in Islam, literally sees something happen with His eyes. He witnesses a theft — and the phrasing of the hadith confirms a theft did in fact take place — but immediately Allah’s name is mentioned, Jesus (the caricature) refuses to use His brain! He refuses to acknowledge reality and instead “believes in Allah”.
Now a Muslim might have the brightest mind on the planet but the minute it comes to applying that mind to critically assess their own religion, the brain ceases to work!
You can show a Muslim, from today till Jesus returns, how evil Muhammad is, how stupid and immoral the teachings of Allah are. You can literally show them these things from the Quran and the Hadith but if the implication of these things is that Islam is false and the logical response would be to leave Islam, they will suspect their eyes and choose to believe in Allah!
The second thing is that the guy who stole in the hadith was clearly lying when he invoked the name of Allah yet the caricature of Jesus believed him! This is illustrative of how Muslims LOVE being lied to in the name of Allah by their apologists. Whether it is the miraculously perfect preservation of the Quran dot for dot, letter for letter from the time of Muhammad or whether it is Rebecca being three years old when Isaac married her or whether it is the Bible being corrupted, they keep going back to the same guys that keep lying to them again and again in the name of Allah. Yet even if these lies are easy to spot and can be debunked with literally a google search, they choose to once again suspect their eyes and believe in Allah.
The third thing to note from the hadith is that the Muslim in question had no compunction about stealing and then lying to Jesus (the caricature) about it in the name of Allah! This is hardly surprising given Muhammad himself stole Bible characters and stories from various sources he never bothered to credit and passed it off as as revelation from Allah. Muhammad had no compunction stealing from caravans and then couching it in terms of “holy war” in the name of Allah. This tells you everything you need to know about a religion that explicitly endorses lying about the fact you believe in it in certain circumstances (Taqiyya), see Surah 16:106.
Reality to the Muslim is through the prism of Allah alone. Anything that contradicts that prism has to be suspected and Allah/Muhammad are to be believed at all costs even on a basis as flimsy as somebody clearly lying in the name of Allah.
Islam has no theology and no basis in history. This is why Allah is terrified of questions because the minute you dare to ask a question, you are on your way out of it,
“O you who have believed, do not ask about things which, if they are shown to you, will distress you. But if you ask about them while the Qur’ān is being revealed, they will be shown to you. Allāh has pardoned it [i.e., that which is past]; and Allāh is Forgiving and Forbearing.
A people asked such [questions] before you; then they became thereby disbelievers.”
(Surah 5:101–102)
This is again why a Muslim is to mindlessly obey Muhammad without question,
“But no, by the Lord, they can have no (real) Faith, until they make thee judge in all disputes between them, and find in their souls no resistance against Thy decisions, but accept them with the fullest conviction.”
(Surah 4:65)
Islam has thrived on violent subjugation of non-Muslim populations, asking no deep questions about the religion and beheading those who do. Your average Muslim has the exact same mentality as the caricature of Jesus, so as frustrating as it is engaging with Muslims sometimes, people reaching out to them will do well to bear this in mind.
