What Should I Do If a Christian Man Starts Praying for Me?

Answered by Shaykh Yusuf Weltch

Question

What would I have done if a Christian man started praying for me without me asking?

Answer

In the Name of Allah, the Most Merciful and Compassionate.

It is not an obligation for you to stop the Christian man from praying for you. He has been given by Allah Most High a choice to worship who and how he wishes. It is not permissible for us to stop someone from performing an act of worship even if they are not Muslim.

As Muslims, we obviously don’t believe that praying to other than Allah Most High will bring any avail.

Summary

In general, whenever interacting with a person of the other religion, we want to be principled, but also merciful, respectful, and inclusive. The reason is that our ultimate goal with everyone we interact with or meet must be that this person enters Islam and reconnects with their Creator in the only way that Allah Most High will accept.

We are not the ones who guide, but this should and must be our hope for all creation, and we must act in a way that will likely lead to that result.

Hope this helps
Allah knows best
[Shaykh] Yusuf Weltch
Checked and Approved by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani

Shaykh Yusuf Weltch teaches Arabic, Islamic law, and spirituality. After accepting Islam in 2008, he completed four years at the Darul Uloom Seminary in New York, where he studied Arabic and the traditional sciences.

He then traveled to Tarim, Yemen, where he studied for three years in Dar al-Mustafa under some of the most outstanding scholars of our time, including Habib Umar Bin Hafiz, Habib Kadhim al-Saqqaf, and Shaykh Umar al-Khatib.

In Tarim, Shaykh Yusuf completed the memorization of the Quran and studied beliefs, legal methodology, hadith methodology, Quranic exegesis, Islamic history, and several texts on spirituality. He joined the SeekersGuidance faculty in the summer of 2019.