North African and West Asian Christianity (I)

The University of Edinburgh Press sent me a copy of a hefty and impressive new collection slated for publication this summer: Christianity in North Africa and West Asia, eds. Kenneth R. Ross, Mariz Tadros, and  Todd M. Johnson (UEP, 2018), 576pp. As I make my way through it, I'll post some more thoughts. As you'll see below, Chalcedonian, Oriental, Arabic, Coptic and other Eastern Christian groups are well represented.

The publisher's rather short and vague blurb doesn't do justice to the riches contained here:

This comprehensive reference volume covers every country in North Africa and West Asia, offering reliable demographic information and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners. It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends.

But the table of contents gives us more details:

Introduction
A Demographic Profile of Christianity in North Africa and West Asia, Gina A. Zurlo
Christianity in North Africa and West Asia, Mariz Tadros

Countries
Morocco and Western Sahara, Jack Wald
Algeria and Tunisia, Katia Boissevain
Libya, Akram HabibSudan, John Eibner　
Egypt, Samuel Tadros
Cyprus, Anastasia Yiangou
Turkey, Hratch Tchilingirian and Ed Alden
Syria, Razek Siriani
Lebanon, Charles Chartouni
Israel, David NeuhausPalestine, Bernard Sabella
Jordan, Paulo Maggiolini and Iyad TwalIraq, Herman Teule
The Gulf: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Yemen, Hrayr Jebejian
Armenia, Hratch Tchilingirian
Georgia and Azerbaijan, Silvia Serrano　

Major Christian Traditions
Anglicans, Yazid Said
Independents, Duane Alex Miller
Eastern Orthodox, George Tamer
Oriental Orthodox, Aho Shemunkasho
Protestants, Mitri Raheb
Catholics, Anthony O’Mahony
Evangelicals, Wafik Wahba
Pentecostals/Charismatics, Eric Newberg

Key Themes
Faith and Culture, Elizabeth Monier
Worship and Spirituality, Rima Nasrallah
Theology, George Sabra
Social and Political Context, Mark Farha
Mission and Evangelism, Heather Sharkey
Gender, Donna Rizk
Religious Freedom, Ewelina Ochab
Inter-religious Relations, Najib George Awad
Monastic Movements and Spirituality, Anna Poujeau
Ecclesiology, Gabriel Hachem
Christian Media, Sara Afshari
Displaced Populations, Kristian Girling

Conclusion
The Future of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mariz Tadros

Appendices
Christianity by Country
Methodology and Sources of Christian and Religious Affiliation, Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo
Index

Byzantine and Islamic North Africa

We live, happily, in a boom time for scholars concerned with early Christian-Muslim interactions and relations. I have documented many of these recent books on here over the years, and there are many more set for release this year, as we shall presently see, including this collection in the Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia series from Harvard University Press: Susan T. Stevens and Jonathan Conant, eds., North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam (2016, 328pp.).

About this book we are told:

The profound economic and strategic significance of the province of “Africa” made the Maghreb highly contested in the Byzantine period—by the Roman (Byzantine) empire, Berber kingdoms, and eventually also Muslim Arabs—as each group sought to gain, control, and exploit the region to its own advantage. Scholars have typically taken the failure of the Byzantine endeavor in Africa as a foregone conclusion. North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam reassesses this pessimistic vision both by examining those elements of Romano-African identity that provided continuity in a period of remarkable transition, and by seeking to understand the transformations in African society in the context of the larger post-Roman Mediterranean. Chapters in this book address topics including the legacy of Vandal rule in Africa, historiography and literature, art and architectural history, the archaeology of cities and their rural hinterlands, the economy, the family, theology, the cult of saints, Berbers, and the Islamic conquest, in an effort to consider the ways in which the imperial legacy was re-interpreted, re-imagined, and put to new uses in Byzantine and early Islamic Africa.

New Cistercian Publications

Cistercian Publications, an imprint of Liturgical Press, has a wide and impressive array of books devoted to Eastern Christianity, especially monasticism broadly defined. Among its recent offerings we find a translation of a work by one whom the East sometimes calls "Gregory the Dialogist": Gregory the Great: On the Song of Songs (Cistercian 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Gregory the Great (+604) was a master of the art of exegesis. His interpretations are theologically profound, methodologically fascinating, and historically influential. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in his exegesis of the Song of Songs. Gregory s interpretation of this popular Old Testament book not only owes much to Christian exegetes who preceded him, such as Origen, but also profoundly influenced later Western Latin exegetes, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. This volume includes all that Gregory had to say on the Song of Songs. This includes his Exposition on the Song of Songs, as well as the florilegia compiled by Paterius (Gregory s secretary) and the Venerable Bede, and, finally, William of Saint Thierry s Excerpts from the Books of Blessed Gregory on the Song of Songs. It is now the key resource for reading and studying Gregory s interpretation of the Song of Songs.

Another book of especially acute interest in this time of such strife in North Africa and the Middle East, from which Christians continue to flee by the thousands, and in which many more Christians have been killed, is Christian Salenson's Christian De Cherge: A Theology of Hope (Cistercian, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Christian de Chergé, prior of the Cistercian community at Tibhirine, Algeria, was assassinated with six of his fellow monks in 1996. De Chergé saw his monastic vocation as a call to be a person of prayer among persons who pray, that is, among the Muslim friends and neighbours with whom he and his brothers shared daily life. De Chergé's writings bear witness to an original thinker who insists on the value of interreligious dialogue for a more intelligent grasp of one's own faith. Christian Salenson shows us the personal, ecclesial, and theological foundations of de Chergé's vocation and the originality of his life and thought. He shows how the experience of a small monastery lost in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria contributes importantly to today's theological debates.

My friend Bill Mills has reviewed this book here.

Another book of interest  is Ambrose Criste and Carol Neel, trans., Anselm of Havelberg (Cistercian, 2010).

About this book the publisher says:

The Anticimenon of Anselm of Havelberg is both the outstanding medieval work on ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox and one of the period's most important explorations of the theology of history. This text's author was a bishop on Christianity's eastern frontier and companion to Norbert of Xanten, saint-founder of the Order of Premontre. The present volume, the first English translation of Anselm's Anticimenon, sets his work in the context of the early Premonstratensian (Norbertine) thought integral to the reform movement of his time. It renders Anselm's powerful voice audible to a modern English-speaking readership yearning, with him, for unity in the Church and understanding of the Holy Spirit's agency in human experience.

Libyan Christianity

With all the recent attention on Libya, and the conflict leading to the ouster of its dictator, a new book about Christianity in that country could not be more timely: Thomas C. Oden, Early Libyan Christianity: Uncovering a North African Tradition (IV Press, 2011), 336pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us: 

The chronicle of early Libyan Christianity is not a story for a Christian audience only but also for Muslims, especially those who have an African heritage. Just as Spain has a rich history of Islam, Libya has a rich history of Christianity. In both cases the history has centuries of experience to offer to a broken and conflicted world. Libyans will benefit by more clearly realizing this fact: the soil on which they walk daily has embedded in it five hundred years of Christian roots and residues. This does not imply any claim to any form of territorial or political legitimacy. It only asks for the accurate recollection of a story long forgotten. Nor is it a story whose audience primarily resides in schools and churches and mosques. It is for all who seek the truth that is revealed through the honest study of history.

All three of the monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—hark back to Abraham. All three impinge on Libyan history. All three agree on one crucial premise: The majesty of God is revealed in history. The providence of God is being worked out in actual personal histories. This history can be examined by skeptics and secularists, as well as those already convinced.Whether recognized or not, the truth of God’s presence is being revealed before our eyes daily through humans, according to Jews and Christians, with some analogies in Islam. This is a beginning point in the comparative exegesis of sacred texts of all three traditions. The Christian narrative will be informative to open-minded Muslims willing to listen to the ancient African background and ancestry of their own classic Muslim intellectual history. The Muslim phase of the African story emerges in the last half of the Common Era’s first millennium. The Muslim narrative will be illuminating to open-minded Christians without denying their faith. Christians will learn about how much of the spirit of Western intellectual achievement began in Africa, and in no small part in Libya. In doing so, they will learn of the ways in which Christians of Spain and Europe have been beneficiaries of Muslim philosophical, moral and scientific wisdom.Whether Christian or Muslim or secular or tradition-oriented, African youth have not had the opportunity to hear their own full story told. The texts and ideas and movements that Africa spawned before Europe discovered them must be more fully translated, disseminated and studied before this will happen.

Expanding Muslims and Shrinking Byzantines

Books about the encounter between Muslims and Eastern Christians in the seventh and subsequent centuries continue to emerge, shedding helpful light on a period and events still too little understood today. A recent such book, from an acclaimed Byzantinist, is that of Walter E. Kaegi, Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa (Cambridge UP, 2010), 366pp.


About this book, the publisher provides the following overview:

Who 'lost' Christian North Africa? Who won it and how? Walter Kaegi takes a fresh look at these perennial questions, with maps and on-site observations, in this exciting new book. Persisting clouds of suspicion and blame overshadowed many Byzantine attempts to defend North Africa, as Byzantines failed to meet the multiple challenges from different directions which ultimately overwhelmed them. While the Muslims forcefully and permanently turned Byzantine internal dynastic and religious problems and military unrest to their advantage, they brought their own strengths to a dynamic process that would take a long time to complete – the transformation of North Africa. An impartial comparative framework helps to sort through identity politics, 'Orientalism' charges and counter-charges, and institutional controversies; this book also includes a new study of the decisive battle of Sbeitla in 647, helping readers to understand what befell Byzantium, and indeed empires from Rome to the present.

The publisher further says of this book that it:

• Offers the first large-scale reinterpretation in English of the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the light of the Arabic, Greek and Latin sources, the latest modern scholarship, and visits to the sites with Maghribi scholars
• Surveys the cultural and historiographical dimensions of the end of Roman and Byzantine North Africa, with a separate chapter on 'historiographical hurdles' that block current understanding of Maghrib history
• Re-examines localities and terrain based on a reading of neglected Arabic sources and archives, travels, and on-site consultation

Kaegi is well known in treating these questions, having previously authored a book on Heraclius, Emperor of Byzantium who oversaw the initial invasions and feeble military responses of the Byzantine Christians. In addition, Kaegi is the author of the groundbreaking study Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquest, also from Cambridge University Press (1995).