Muslim-Christian Relations

We live in a happy time when, as I have tried to document on here for over a decade, scholarship devoted to Muslim-Christian relations, in which Eastern Christians take pride of place, is blossoming. A new book adds to the riches: David Thomas, ed., The Bloomsbury Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations, 600-1500 (Bloomsbury, 2022), 352pp.

About this collection we are told this:

This Reader brings together nearly 80 extracts from the major works left by Christians and Muslims that reflect their reciprocal knowledge and attitudes. It spans the period from the early 7th century, when Islam originated, to 1500.

The general introduction provides a historical and geographical summary of Christian-Muslim encounters in the period and a short account of the religious, intellectual and social circumstances in which encounters took place and works were written. Nearly all the translations are new, and a map is provided. Each of the six parts contains the following pedagogical features:

-A short introduction

-An introduction to each passage and author

-Notes explaining terms that readers might not have previously encountered

On the Christian side topics include: condemnations of the Qur'an as a fake and Mu?ammad as a fraud, depictions of Islam as a sign of the final judgement, and proofs that it was a Christian heresy. On the Muslim side they include: demonstrations of the Bible as corrupt, proofs that Christian doctrines were illogical, comments on the inferior status of Christians, and accounts of Christian and Muslim scholars in collaboration together.

A Prophet Has Arisen

I have previously been delighted to interview on here the author of this new book, Stephen J. Shoemaker, A Prophet Has Appeared: The Rise of Islam through Christian and Jewish Eyes, A Sourcebook (University of California Press, 2021), 322pp. 

About Shoemaker's latest, the publisher tells us this:

Early Islam has emerged as a lively site of historical investigation, and scholars have challenged the traditional accounts of Islamic origins by drawing attention to the wealth of non-Islamic sources that describe the rise of Islam. A Prophet Has Appeared brings this approach to the classroom. This collection provides students and scholars with carefully selected, introduced, and annotated materials from non-Islamic sources dating to the early years of Islam. These can be read alone or alongside the Qur'an and later Islamic materials. Applying historical-critical analysis, the volume moves these invaluable sources to more equal footing with later Islamic narratives about Muhammad and the formation of his new religious movement.

Included are new English translations of sources by twenty authors, originally written in not only Greek and Latin but also Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, and Arabic and spanning a geographic range from England to Egypt and Iran. Ideal for the classroom and personal library, this sourcebook provides readers with the tools to meaningfully approach a new, burgeoning area of Islamic studies.

Islam and Greek Nationalism

The complicated relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims, especially in the long twilight of the Ottoman Empire, continue to fascinate me; so too does the question of nationalism. Both of these come together in a new book I'm looking forward to reading: Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821-1940 by Stefanos Katsikas (Oxford University Press, 2021), 296pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Drawing from a wide range of archival and secondary Greek, Bulgarian, Ottoman, and Turkish sources, Islam and Nationalism in Modern Greece, 1821-1940 explores the way in which the Muslim populations of Greece were ruled by state authorities from the time of Greece's political emancipation from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s until the country's entrance into the Second World War, in October 1940. The book examines how state rule influenced the development of the Muslim population's collective identity as a minority and affected Muslim relations with the Greek authorities and Orthodox Christians.

Greece was the first country in the Balkans to become an independent state and a pioneer in experimenting with minority issues. Greece's ruling framework and many state administrative measures and patterns would serve as templates in other Christian Orthodox Balkan states with Muslim minorities (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Cyprus). Muslim religious officials were empowered with authority which they did not have in Ottoman times, and aspects of the Islamic law (Sharia) were incorporated into the state legal system to be used for Muslim family and property affairs. Religion remained a defining element in the political, social, and cultural life of the post-Ottoman Balkans; Stefanos Katsikas explores the role religious nationalism and public institutions have played in the development and preservation of religious and ethnic identity. Religion remains a key element of individual and collective identity but only as long as there are strong institutions and the political framework to support and maintain religious diversity.

Christianity and Islam in Post-Soviet Russia

When I teach, as I do every semester, my course on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam, I love the time we spend on Russia for it gives me a chance to upend a lot of silly notions that American Christians have about Russia, Russian Orthodoxy, and Islam, including in its Russian embodiment and context where there are many notably different practices from Islamic life in, say, the Arabic world. A recent book helps us further appreciate the unique challenges in the Russian context: Languages of Islam and Christianity in Post-Soviet Russia by Gulnaz Sibgatullina (Brill, 2020), 230pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

In her book, Gulnaz Sibgatullina examines the intricate relationship of religion, identity and language-related beliefs against the background of socio-political changes in post-Soviet Russia. Focusing on the Russian and Tatar languages, she explores how they simultaneously serve the needs of both Muslims and Christians living in the country today. 

Mapping linguistic strategies of missionaries, converts and religious authorities, Sibgatullina demonstrates how sacred vocabulary in each of the languages is being contested by a variety of social actors, often with competing agendas. These linguistic collisions not only affect meanings of the religious lexicon in Tatar and Russian but also drive a gradual convergence of Russia's Islam and Christianity. 

The Life of Mohammad and Early Islam

It is by no means uncommon for Eastern and other Christians in their more zealously apologetic works to portray themselves up against a hard-nosed enemy in Islam that brooked no tolerance of perceived ambiguity and ambivalence in certain Christian teachings, especially around the incarnation and Trinity. Even more common today, especially in America over the last two decades, one finds all sorts of reactionary commentators willing to portray Islam as an intolerant and incorrigibly violent "fundamentalist" tradition that brooks no uncertainty or ambiguity at all. To be sure, some Muslims figures, not least those associated with ISIS, themselves put forward this same version of Islam. Whether by ISIS or its opponents, such a portrait of Islam is seriously at odds with the developed tradition and invariably tendentious.

Two recent books will help us appreciate that both the life of Mohammad and the development of Islam, were, of course, far messier and more complex than extreme apologists for it, or extreme "Orientalist" opponents of it, like to admit. 

The first of these is simply a new translation of a major biography that has been around for some time in French: Muhammad, by Maxime Rodinson, trans. Anne Carter (NYRB Classics, 2021), 432pp. 

Tariq Ali has a very appreciative and helpfully contextualizing review of this biography in a recent issue of the London Review of Books. About this book we are told this by the publisher:

A classic secular history of the prophet Muhammad that vividly recreates the fascinating time in which Islam was born.

Maxime Rodinson, both a maverick Marxist and a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, first published his biography of Muhammad in 1960. The book, a classic in its field, has been widely read ever since. Rodinson, though deeply versed in scholarly studies of the Prophet, does not seek to add to it here but to introduce Muhammad, first of all, as “a man of flesh and blood” who led a life of extraordinary drama and shaped history as few others have. Equally, he seeks to lay out an understanding of Muhammad’s legacy and Islam as what he called an ideological movement, similar to the universalist religions of Christianity and Buddhism as well as the secular movement of Marxism, but possessing a singular commitment to “the deeply ingrained idea that Islam offers not only a path to salvation but (for many, above all) the ideal of a just society to be realized on earth.” 

Rodinson’s book begins by introducing the specific land and the larger world into which Muhammad was born and the development of his prophetic calling. It then follows the steps of his career and the way his leadership gave birth to a religion and a state. A final chapter considers the world as Islam has transformed it.

The second book looks to be equally important: A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam by Thomas Bauer. Translated by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall (Columbia University Press 336pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy?

In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions.

Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.

Muslim-Christian Dialogues

Forthcoming in March of this year is a book that will carefully examine some initiatives that I know Eastern Christians to have been especially involved with over the last decade or so: Contemporary Christian-Muslim Dialogue: Twenty-First Century Initiatives by Douglas Pratt (Routledge, March 2021), 232pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

This book introduces and examines the work of two significant 21st century Christian – Muslim dialogue initiatives – "Building Bridges" and the "Christian–Muslim Theological Forum" – and gives close attention to five theological themes that have been addressed in common by them.

An overview and analysis, including inception, development, outputs and significance, together with discussion of the select themes – community, scripture, prophecy, prayer and ethics – allows for an in-depth examination of significant contemporary Muslim and Christian scholarship on issues important to both faith communities. The result is a challenging encounter to, arguably, a widespread default presumption of irredeemable mutual hostility and inevitable mutual rejection with instances of violent extremism as a consequence.

Demonstrating the reality that deep interreligious engagement is possible between the two faiths today, this book should appeal to a wide readership, including upper undergraduate and graduate teaching as well as professionals and practitioners in the field of Christian-Muslim relations.

Muslims under Christian Rule, and Christians Under Muslim Rule

As you continue your Christmas feasting, and perhaps spending some gift cards you got, you would do well to consider this book set for release on the 30th of this month: Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross c.630 - 1923 by Luigi Andrea Berto  (Routledge, 2020), 178pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book examines the status that rulers of one faith conferred onto their subjects belonging to a different one, how the rulers handled relationships with them, and the interactions between subjects of the Muslim and Christian religions.

The chronological arc of this volume spans from the first conquests by the Arabs in the Near East in the 630s to the exchange between Turkey and Greece, in 1923, of the Orthodox Christians and Muslims residing in their territories. Through organized topics, Berto analyzes both similarities and differences in Christian and Muslim lands and emphasizes how coexistences and conflicts took directions that were not always inevitable. Primary sources are used to examine the mentality of those who composed them and of their audiences. In doing so, the book considers the nuances and all the features of the multifaceted experiences of Christian subjects under Muslim rule and of Muslim subjects under Christian rule.

Christians under the Crescent and Muslims under the Cross is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the relationships between Christians and Muslims, religious minorities, and the Near East and the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century.

Christians in Iraq in the 15th Century

If I had lots of time and money, and the requisite languages, I have long wanted to go and spend endless amounts of time immersed in Ottoman and Arab archives discovering new things about Muslim-Christian relations from the eighth century onward. As it is, I'll have to content myself with such books as the recently released Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq by Thomas A. Carlson, (Cambridge UP, 2020), 323pp. 

Christians in fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra were socially and culturally home in the Middle East, practicing their distinctive religion despite political instability. This insightful book challenges the normative Eurocentrism of scholarship on Christianity and the Islamic exceptionalism of much Middle Eastern history to reveal the often unexpected ways in which inter-religious interactions were peaceful or violent in this region. The multifaceted communal self-concept of the 'Church of the East' (so-called 'Nestorians') reveals cultural integration, with certain distinctive features. The process of patriarchal succession clearly borrowed ideas from surrounding Christian and Muslim groups, while public rituals and communal history reveal specifically Christian responses to concerns shared with Muslim neighbors. Drawing on sources from various languages, including Arabic, Armenian, Persian, and Syriac, this book opens new possibilities for understanding the rich, diverse, and fascinating society and culture that existed in Iraq during this time.

We are also given the Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. Coming into focus: the world of fifteenth-century Iraq and al-Jazīra
2. Muslim lords and their Christian flocks
3. Living with suspicious neighbors in a violent world
4. Interlude: concepts of communities
5. Bridges and barriers of doctrine
6. Practical theology in a dangerous time
7. Rituals: the texture of belonging
8. Desperate measures: the changing ecclesiastical hierarchy
9. The power of the past: communal history for present needs
Conclusion
Appendix A. Glossary
Appendix B. Lists of rulers and patriarchs
Appendix C. The patriarchal succession of the Church of the East
Appendix D. Dating the ritual for reception of heretics.

Eastern Christian Converts to Islam

One of the tasks I face with my students when looking at the history of Orthodox-Muslim encounters is to help them grasp the idea that one can belong more or less simultaneously to two seemingly divergent communities, and this is not necessarily experienced as "schizophrenic" in the pejorative sense. There is often a degree of overlap in multiple "identities" that some today find difficult to fathom. And the movement between communities is not simple, either, as though invasion at once begins a massive reversal rather than a long, drawn-out process.

All these phenomena are addressed in a new book: Conversion to Islam in the Premodern Age: A Sourcebook First Edition, eds., Nimrod Hurvitz, Christian C. Sahner, Uriel Simonsohn, and Luke Yarbrough (University of California Press, 2020, 366pp.).

About this book, the publisher tells us this:

Conversion to Islam is a phenomenon of immense significance in human history. At the outset of Islamic rule in the seventh century, Muslims constituted a tiny minority in most areas under their control. But by the beginning of the modern period, they formed the majority in most territories from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Across such diverse lands, peoples, and time periods, conversion was a complex, varied phenomenon. Converts lived in a world of overlapping and competing religious, cultural, social, and familial affiliations, and the effects of turning to Islam played out in every aspect of life. Conversion therefore provides a critical lens for world history, magnifying the constantly evolving array of beliefs, practices, and outlooks that constitute Islam around the globe. This groundbreaking collection of texts, translated from sources in a dozen languages from the seventh to the eighteenth centuries, presents the historical process of conversion to Islam in all its variety and unruly detail, through the eyes of both Muslim and non-Muslim observers.

Muslims in Russia

My favourite course to teach focuses on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam. We look at a number of countries with substantial Orthodox presence alongside Islam--both historic and current--and so that includes of course Russia, which presents a very different series of encounters from, say, Egypt or Lebanon. A new book looks especially at the jurisprudence of those encounters in the Romanov empire:  Sharīʿa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550-1917,
eds. Paolo Sartori, Danielle Ross (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 384pp.

Some of the virtues of this book, according to the publisher, are that it

• Studies the formulation, transmission and application of Islamic law under Russian colonial rule
• Presents the theory and application of Islamic law in the Volga-Ural region, the Kazakh Steppe, the north Caucasus and Central Asia from the 1550s to 1917
• Draws comparisons between Islamic law in Russia and elsewhere in the colonial world
• Based upon important, but largely unstudied print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian and the Turkic languages
• Brings together the work of an international collective of scholars of Islam in Russia

Additionally the publisher says this:

This book looks at how Islamic law was practiced in Russia from the conquest of the empire’s first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire’s Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and ‘customary’ law. Based upon difficult to access sources written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), it offers scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires.

Syria in the Crusades

If you have any interest in the history and rise of Islam, and of its encounters with Eastern Christians, and especially of the Crusades, then the name of Carole Hillenbrand needs to be on your bibliography. Her previous works, including her very large earlier book, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, are rich in detail.

She has a new book out, an impressive and diverse scholarly collection: Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-Existence, ed. Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 400pp.
,
About this collection the publisher tells us this:

Presenting numerous interconnected insights into life in Greater Syria in the twelfth century, this book covers a wide range of themes relating to Crusader-Muslim relations. Some chapters deal with various literary sources, including little-known Crusader chronicles, a jihad treatise, a lost Muslim history of the Franks, biographies, letters and poems. Other chapters look at material culture, from coins to urban development, internal relations between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims and between Crusader and Oriental Christians, and the role of the Turkmen. New insights into the career of Saladin are revealed, for example through the work of a little-known propagandist at his court, and Saladin's use of gift-giving for political purposes, as well as neglected aspects of the rule of his family dynasty, the Ayyubids, which succeeded him. Special attention is paid to the Christians residing in the Middle East, from Italians to Melkites and Armenians.

Islam and Christianity: Politics and Scriptures

The new Paulist Press catalogue landed here the other day and there I spied a new book that will be of interest to those who want to explore both the similarities and the differences in Islam and Christianity: Christopher Frechette, How the Qur'an Interprets the Bible (Paulist, 2020), 208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Non-Muslims are often surprised to learn that the Qur'an relates episodes and events from the lives of multiple characters who are also found in the biblical text. While the ways the two traditions present these stories often have much in common, they are never identical. Sometimes the Qur'an includes elements or themes that are not present in the biblical account. Such details point to ways in which the Qur an interprets prior traditions, and such interpretations are similar to how Jewish and Christian Scriptures also interpret prior traditions. Focusing on the lives and roles of a number of well-known characters, this introductory book explores and compares the interpretive dimensions of Islamic, Jewish, and Christians Scriptures.

Islamic Prophethood Understood Thomistically?

Christianity has never spoken with one voice on just about anything, including how Muhammad should be regarded. Some dismiss him as a delusional devil; others see him as saying things which Christians should regard as largely unobjectionable, if not conformable to their own tradition; others think he is advancing a species of Christian heresy largely derived from Arianism; and still other voices, ancient and modern, have still different views.

Along comes what seems to be a very careful new book giving painstaking consideration to these questions. Released just last month is Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy by Anna Bonta Moreland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 196pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Scholarly attempts to understand Islam in the West over the past several years have failed to take Islamic theology seriously. This book engages Islam from deep within the Christian tradition by addressing the question of the prophethood of Muhammad. Anna Bonta Moreland calls for a retrieval of Thomistic thought on prophecy to view Muhammad within a Christian theology of revelation, without either appropriating the prophet as an unwitting Christian or reducing both Christianity and Islam to a common denominator. This historical recovery leads to a more sophisticated understanding of Islam, one that honors the integrity of the Catholic tradition and, through that integrity, argues for the possibility in principle of Muhammad as a religious prophet.

Moreland sets the stage for this inquiry through an intertextual reading of the key Vatican II documents on Islam and on Christian revelation. She then uses Aquinas's treatment of prophecy to address the case of whether Muhammad is a prophet in Christian terms. The book examines the work of several Christian theologians, including W. Montgomery Watt, Hans Küng, Kenneth Cragg, David Kerr, and Jacques Jomier, O.P., and then draws upon the practice of analogical reasoning in the theology of religious pluralism to show that a term in one religion—in this case “prophecy”—can have purchase in another religious tradition. Muhammad Reconsidered not only is a constructive contribution to Catholic theology but also has enormous potential to help scholars reframe and comprehend Christian-Muslim relations.

Gregory Palamas and Islam

The fact that yesterday, on the Gregorian paschalion, was the second Sunday of Lent when Gregory Palamas is commemorated, and this coming Sunday the same feast of the same figure for those on the Julian paschalion, means that the father of hesychasm will be on a lot of minds this week. What better time to draw your attention to a book set for release next month by the widely respected scholar and theological translator Norman Russell, Gregory Palamas: The Hesychast Controversy and the Debate with Islam (Liverpool University Press, April 2020), 544pp.

Published as part of the Translated Texts for Byzantinists series of LUP, this collection, the publisher tells us, offers

--the first English translation of a dozen key texts by or relating to Gregory Palamas;
--fascinating first-hand accounts of fourteenth-century Christian debates with Muslim scholars;
--first English translation of all the Synodal Tomoi issued in defence of the hesychasts;
--detailed exposition of the historical context of a theological controversy that is still alive today.

Gregory Palamas, a monk of Mount Athos and metropolitan of Thessalonike from 1347 to 1357, was a leading fourteenth-century Byzantine intellectual. He was the chief spokesman for the hesychasts in the controversy bearing that name, which began when a charge of heresy was laid against him in 1340 and ended with his proclamation as a saint in 1368. Although excellent English translations of some of Palamas' theological writings are available, very few texts relating to his historical role have yet been translated. This book contains the first English translation of the contemporary Life of Palamas by Philotheos Kokkinos, which is our principal source of biographical information on him. Also translated into English for the first time are the Synodal Tomoi from 1341 to 1368, which chart the progress of the hesychast controversy from the viewpoint of the victors, together with the corpus of material relating to Palamas' year of captivity among the Turks, which offers a unique insight into conditions for Christians and Muslims in the early Ottoman emirate. The translations, all of which are based on critical texts, are preceded by introductions which set Palamas in his historical context and propose some changes to the conventional chronology of his life.

Muslims in Putin's Russia

In my courses on Eastern Christian-Muslim relations, perhaps the most fascinating case-study we examine is that of Russia, which presents a very different picture not just from the Arab world, but even from Muslims in other parts of Europe. A recently reprinted book sketches out that picture for us in further detail: Muslims in Putin's Russia: Discourse on Identity, Politics, and Security by Simona E. Merati (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 256pp.

This book, the publisher tells us,

offers a novel interpretation of Russian contemporary discourse on Islam and its influence on Russian state policies. It shifts the analytical perspective from the discussion about Russia's Islam as a potential security threat to a more comprehensive view of the relationships of Muslims with Russia as a state and a civilization. The work demonstrates how many Muslims increasingly express a sense of belonging to Russia and are increasingly willing to contribute to state building processes.

Religious Freedom and Islam

Every semester in my courses on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam, the question of religious freedom, and tolerance of Christian minorities in, e.g., Syria and Egypt, generates very considerable discussion. We have often had to go at the topic piecemeal because of a lack of comprehensive, contemporary and serious scholarly treatments of the topic. But now we have one forthcoming in Daniel Philpott, Religious Freedom in Islam: The Fate of a Universal Human Right in the Muslim World Today (Oxford UP, 2019), 348pp.

About this book we are told:

Since at least the attacks of September 11, 2001, one of the most pressing political questions of the age has been whether Islam is hostile to religious freedom. Daniel Philpott examines conditions on the ground in forty-seven Muslim-majority countries today and offers an honest, clear-eyed answer to this urgent question.

It is not, however, a simple answer. From a satellite view, the Muslim world looks unfree. But, Philpott shows, the truth is much more complex. Some one-fourth of Muslim-majority countries are in fact religiously free. Of the other countries, about forty percent are governed not by Islamists but by a hostile secularism imported from the West, while the other sixty percent are Islamist.

The picture that emerges is both honest and hopeful. Yes, most Muslim-majority countries are lacking in religious freedom. But, Philpott argues, the Islamic tradition carries within it "seeds of freedom," and he offers guidance for how to cultivate those seeds in order to expand religious freedom in the Muslim world and the world at large.

It is an urgent project. Religious freedom promotes goods like democracy and the advancement of women that are lacking in the Muslim-majority world and reduces ills like civil war, terrorism, and violence. Further, religious freedom is simply a matter of justice--not an exclusively Western value, but rather a universal right rooted in human nature. Its realization is critical to the aspirations of religious minorities and dissenters in Muslim countries, to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries or under secular dictatorships, and to relations between the West and the Muslim world.

In this thoughtful book, Philpott seeks to establish a constructive middle ground in a fiery and long-lasting debate over Islam.

Religious Minorities in the Middle East

It's been out for almost a year, but I just came across a collection of articles, The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East, edited by John Eibner and published last year by Lexington Books (276pp.).

Other books and collections that treat this topic do not seem to have the wide-ranging scope of this one, which I'm looking forward to reading.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Future of Religious Minorities in the Middle East addresses the domestic and international politics that have created conditions for contemporary religious cleansing in the Middle East. It provides a platform for a host of distinguished scholars, journalists, human rights activists, and political practitioners. The contributors come from diverse political, cultural, and religious backgrounds; each one drawing on a deep wellspring of scholarship, experience, sobriety, and passion. Collectively, they make a major contribution to understanding the dynamics of the mortal threat to the social pluralism upon which the survival of religious minorities depends.

Medieval Middle Eastern Christians

I've followed the work of the relatively young scholar Jack Tannous for some time, and been consistently impressed. So it is with eager anticipation that I look forward to the publication, next week, of his book The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton University Press, 2018), 664pp.

Bearing a slew of impressive recommendations, including from the well-known Byzantinist Averil Cameron, this book, the publisher tells us, is

A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story.

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.

What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Muslims Making Martyrs of Christians

In the wrong hands, narratives of early Islamic conquest of Christian Syria, Egypt, and Armenia can be turned into unrelenting and unambiguous tales of constant and total bloodshed and violence, the Christians always victims and the Muslims always violent. But we are increasingly seeing important studies published that complicate overly tidy and often tendentious tales of "chosen trauma" (Volkan). One such is set for publication next month: Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World by Christian C. Sahner (Princeton University Press, 2018), 360pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy.

Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire.

Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

Mohammad as Heretic, Islam as Heresy: Some Latin Views

If you survey the history of Christian thought on Islam, you find in the first millennium a question sometimes posed: is "Islam" just a heretical offshoot of Christianity--a strange kind of Arianism in Arab dress, say? Clearly some Christians, both Greek and Latin, thought that what we today call Islam was not a separate tradition but an unorthodox derivative of Christianity.

Some of those views are gathered together in a new book: Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad, trans. Julian Yolles and Jessica Weiss (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2018), 712pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians wrote about Islam and the life of Muhammad. These stories, ranging from the humorous to the vitriolic, both informed and warned audiences about what was regarded as a schismatic form of Christianity. Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad covers nearly five centuries of Christian writings on the prophet, including accounts from the farthest-flung reaches of medieval Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Byzantine Empire. Over time, authors portrayed Muhammad in many guises, among them: Theophanes’s influential ninth-century chronicle describing the prophet as the heretical leader of a Jewish conspiracy; Embrico of Mainz’s eleventh-century depiction of Muhammad as a former slave who is manipulated by a magician into performing unholy deeds; and Walter of Compiègne’s twelfth-century presentation of the founder of Islam as a likable but tricky serf ambitiously seeking upward social mobility.

The prose, verse, and epistolary texts in Medieval Latin Lives of Muhammad help trace the persistence of old clichés as well as the evolution of new attitudes toward Islam and its prophet in Western culture. This volume brings together a highly varied and fascinating set of Latin narratives and polemics never before translated into English.