The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World)

Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "Christian-Muslim divide"--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule. Just who were the Christians in the Arabic-speaking milieu of Mohammed and the Qur'an?

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is the first book-length discussion in English of the cultural and intellectual life of such Christians indigenous to the Islamic world. Sidney Griffith offers an engaging overview of their initial reactions to the religious challenges they faced, the development of a new mode of presenting Christian doctrine as liturgical texts in their own languages gave way to Arabic, the Christian role in the philosophical life of early Baghdad, and the maturing of distinctive Oriental Christian denominations in this context.

Offering a fuller understanding of the rise of Islam in its early years from the perspective of contemporary non-Muslims, this book reminds us that there is much to learn from the works of people who seriously engaged Muslims in their own world so long ago.

I have been studying Syriac with Sidney Griffith for two years now. I will be getting into another specialty of his this coming year: Christian-Muslim relations in the early centuries of Islam. That is why I decided to read this book. As it happens, there was more hidden treasure in this subject than I had suspected. Christians did not just live silently under Muslim domination; they interacted with Muslims at the highest levels. There was a very fruitful mutual exchange of ideas for several centuries. Each community helped shape the way in which the other expressed itself, and even the topics each chose to address.

In view of the rancorous relations currently prevailing between certain segments of the Muslim and Christian/Western communities, both sides would benefit from doing as Dr. Griffith suggests toward the end of this book and re-examining the records of these interactions. Many of them show that it is possible for Muslims and Christians to have intelligent conversations about theological matters without the constant bitterness and recriminations that now poison the atmosphere between the two sides.

While the author may have excellent academic credentials, his writing is filled with run-on sentences and hyperactive footnotes that seriously mar the readability of the text. The book reads more like an annotated transcription of a series of lectures than a coherent work, and the repetitions of textual snippets and repetition of dates is highly distracting. I would suggest that the next time Dr. Griffith writes a book that he tries the novel concept of reading the material aloud, so he can discover just how badly his style and phrasing plays to others. I suggest that his series editors might try the same exercise.