A Muslim doesn’t deny that a crucifixion occurred. The traditional view is that someone else was crucified in Jesus’s place and made to look like him. So the historical evidence for a crucifixion doesn’t refute the Qur’an.

The substitution theory concedes that observers saw a crucifixion and therefore concedes the historical data; what it adds is a divine deception no witness could detect. The historian’s objection is not that this is impossible but that it is unfalsifiable and explains the evidence only by positing that the evidence is misleading by design. Christians also raise a theological objection: a God who deceives the disciples, the Jews, and the Romans into founding a religion on a false crucifixion, and lets it stand for six centuries, is hard to reconcile with the Qur’an’s own portrait of God as truthful. That exchange is the real debate.