Christ and Muhammad did not see or hear God

Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami:

Christ and Muhammad did not see or hear God. Both of them conversed with Him through a medium. This medium in the case of Christ was the Holy Ghost and it was Zebrail in the case of Muhammad. Zebrail mercifully took up Muhammad on the back of a borak (a species of animal ?) and made him see the ‘Nur Elahi’ or the Light of God. At the sight of this ‘Light of God’ Muhammad fainted and could not see what was there in the Light. Our scriptures say that in the Light there is Krishna. He is discernible only to the eyes chastened by willing selfless service of His most loving devotees.

The service of the unknown God is necessarily vague and devoid of that real love and life which characterise the service of the concrete Absolute viz. Krishna. This real love of Krishna which is the highest and only duty is self-manifest as the eternal function of the individual souls. The Christian and the Muhammadans have, therefore, no cause to differ from the Vaishnava. Every being, be he Christian, Muhammedan or Hindu, man, woman, tree or cat, is potentially a Vaishnava. The only difference between one individual soul and another consists in the greater or lesser degree of realisation of love for the real, personal God viz. Sri Krishna. None need then quarrel with a true Vaishnava.

All apparent religious differences are truly adjusted in Vaishnavism. What the true Muhamadans and Christians find in the Koran and the Bible is fully and properly realised in the transcendental perfection of the religion of the Bhagabat. All those historical religions will one day admit that they are approaches towards the fully manifest eternal religion embodied in the Bhagabat, only a glimpse of whose distant reflection they have been enabled to attain.

(from the article “Monotheism”, published in the Harmonist newspaper of Sri Gaudiya Math, OCTOBER, 1925)