Encountering God’s Grace in Islam: A Christian Reading of the Forty Hadith of Nawawī

This essay explores the idea of grace in Muslim tradition as a way to rectify the popular misconception about Islam using comparative theology. God’s grace is foundational in Islam and is instructive for Muslim practices, as demonstrated in the three interrelated aspects of God’s grace: salvation, human freedom, and social dimension. To limit the research’s scope, the essay will focus on the Forty Hadith of Nawawī, a popular book of selected hadiths derived primarily from the Sunni canonical hadith collections. The following section surveys the idea of grace in the tradition, focusing on the Qur’an and several prominent Muslim thinkers. The third section provides a brief explanation of hadith and the place of hadith in the Muslim community from a Sunni perspective. Finally, the fourth section elaborates on several examples from the Forty Hadith of Nawawī and how they are connected to the concept of God’s grace.