By Dr. Magda Mahmoud
Media Scholar•Author•Strategic Communication Expert
Editor’s Note
This English edition is published at the request of Professor Jeffrey Lang. After his wife read the Arabic article to him, he expressed his wish to read the complete series in English.
Commenting on the article, Professor Jeffrey Lang said:
“The author understands me. Most people don’t realize that the books are a continuation, but she does. Smart lady.”
This translation is published in appreciation of Professor Jeffrey Lang’s remarkable intellectual journey and his enduring contribution to the dialogue between reason, faith, and the search for truth.
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Even Angels Ask… Why Was the Qur’an Never Afraid of Human Questions?
There are those who believe that faith begins when questions come to an end. Yet the truth that Jeffrey Lang discovered was completely different. He realized that genuine faith begins when a person dares to ask the right question and then has the patience to seek its answer sincerely.
For this reason, he did not choose an ordinary title for his most famous book. Instead, he selected a title carrying profound significance: Even Angels Ask. It is as if the first message he wished to convey to the reader was that asking questions is neither a flaw nor a rebellion against God; rather, it is an essential part of the journey toward knowledge.
The Qur’an itself tells us that the angels asked:
“Will You place upon it one who will spread corruption and shed blood?”
Their question was not an objection to God’s wisdom but a request for understanding. The Divine answer came:
“Indeed, I know that which you do not know.”
From this point begins Jeffrey Lang’s intellectual journey. If even the angels asked questions, why should human beings fear asking them?
Lang believes that the greatest crisis in our world today is not the lack of information but the abundance of ready-made answers that close the door to independent thinking. How many young people carry questions in their hearts about God, destiny, suffering, and death, yet remain afraid to express them, fearing they will be accused of having weak faith? Over time, these questions do not disappear; instead, they grow silently until they become a barrier separating a person from his Lord.
Jeffrey Lang himself lived through this experience. He was not searching for a new religion; he was searching for a meaning capable of explaining the world around him. He asked: Why did God create us when He is completely independent of us? Why does evil exist? Why does God allow suffering? Why do innocent people die?
As he recounts in his writings, these questions kept him away from faith for many years. Yet when he finally read the Qur’an, he was astonished to discover that these issues were not forbidden topics. Rather, they formed part of the very dialogue that the Qur’an opens with humanity.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is that Jeffrey Lang does not offer complicated philosophical answers. Instead, he invites the reader to approach the Qur’an as though it were speaking directly to him. In his view, the Qur’an does not merely answer questions; sometimes it reveals the very questions hidden deep within the soul—questions a person could never fully express in words.
This is why, when Lang read the Qur’an for the first time, he felt that its verses were not speaking about people who had lived fourteen centuries earlier. They were speaking about him—his journey, his fears, his loneliness, and his long search for truth.
Lang devotes considerable attention to the problem of evil because it was the greatest intellectual obstacle in his own life. How can God be Merciful while the world is filled with wars, diseases, and loss?
From the Qur’an, however, he arrived at a different understanding. Life is not Paradise; it is the road leading toward it. Trials are not evidence of the absence of Divine mercy; they may instead be the means through which a person grows in maturity, compassion, and faith. The Qur’an does not promise a life without pain; rather, it teaches that pain itself can become a gateway to wisdom when properly understood.
Among the ideas Lang repeatedly emphasizes is that human beings are incapable of seeing the complete picture. We observe only a single moment in time, whereas God knows the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. What appears to us today as absolute evil may conceal a greater good that we cannot perceive until years later—or perhaps not until we stand before God Himself.
Here Lang recalls the meaning of the Qur’anic verse:
“Perhaps you dislike something while it is good for you.”
He explains that the limitations of human knowledge inevitably make our judgments concerning God’s decrees incomplete.
Perhaps one of the book’s greatest strengths is that it rebuilds the relationship between reason and faith. In contemporary culture, people are often presented with only two choices: either think and lose your faith, or believe and stop thinking.
Jeffrey Lang found a third path in the Qur’an. He argues that an honest intellect does not lead a person away from God but toward Him, and that reflecting upon the universe, the human soul, and existence is not a threat to faith but one of its greatest gateways.
For this reason, the influence of the book has extended far beyond new Muslims. It has also deeply affected countless young people who were born into Muslim families yet searched for answers capable of satisfying their minds before bringing peace to their hearts.
Within its pages, they discovered a message affirming that Islam is not afraid of questions. It does not close the door to dialogue, nor does it ask people to bury their intellects. Rather, it asks them to use their minds honestly and responsibly, distinguishing between questions that sincerely seek truth and questions raised merely for argument’s sake.
Perhaps this explains why the book has remained alive in the hearts of thousands of readers around the world. It does not simply provide new information; it transforms the reader’s way of seeing God, the Qur’an, and even himself.
It reminds us that the road to certainty does not always begin with an answer. Sometimes it begins with a sincere question, and that a heart that searches honestly will never be abandoned by God, no matter how long the journey may be.
Jeffrey Lang wished to tell us that the Qur’an was not revealed to prevent people from thinking but to guide them toward thinking correctly—a kind of thinking that frees the mind from illusion, liberates the heart from fear, and restores humanity’s confidence that God never rejects those who sincerely seek Him. Instead, He opens the doors of knowledge to those who honestly search for the truth.
Herein lies the greatness of this remarkable book. It does not merely answer questions; it gives readers the courage to ask them. Then it gently leads them to the Qur’an—not simply to read its words, but to discover that every verse may contain the answer to a question that has lived silently within their hearts for years without anyone ever hearing it.
Yet the deepest truth Jeffrey Lang discovered after years of searching is that the hardest questions are not the ones we ask God, but the ones we ask ourselves.
This is precisely what we shall explore in the next article as we read together his profound book Struggling to Surrender, discovering that faith is not the end of the journey—but its true beginning.
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