CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM

The history of Christian-Muslim or alternatively Muslim-Christian relations began at the inception of Islam in the first half of the sixth century of the Common Era. As Islam began to spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 c.e., the encounter between Muslims and Christians entered a new phase of military, political, and social interactions. A century later, while these kinds of interaction continued along the already far-flung borders of the new Islamic empire spreading from Spain to the Indus river, new patterns emerged within both majority Christian and majority Muslim polities. They reflected the weight of different theological and political contexts on daily social life, leading to a variety of mostly polemical and apologetic stances that Christians and Muslims developed regarding each other. This religious and political mix came to a head during the period of the major Crusades (twelfth to thirteenth centuries c.e.), creating the subsequent dominant paradigm in Christian-Muslim relations, the repercussions of which are still felt to this day, and especially since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. But not all historical periods or geographical locations were the same; pockets of mutually beneficial encounters existed here and there on both sides of the transient political borders. Moreover, the history of Christian-Muslim relations has not unfolded in isolation from other religious and, more recently, nonreligious worldviews.

The Period of the Prophet Muhammad's Life: Circa 570–632 c.e.

The history of the prophet Muhammad's life is difficult to ascertain with precision. Through a careful examination of pre-Islamic poems, the Qur˒an, early hadith, and biographies, all of which have entailed in the past century serious debates as to their validity as historical sources, it is nevertheless possible to suggest a likely course of events in this first period of Muslim-Christian encounters. Prior to 610 c.e., the year when the prophet Muhammad received the first Qur˒anic revelation, his encounters with Christians probably took place during his caravan trips into greater Syria, as the tradition of his meeting with the Christian monk Bahira would indicate. There may also have been occasional encounters with Christians of unknown theological leanings passing through Mecca. The biography of the prophet Muhammad mentions other kinds of encounters, not all of which are historically verifiable. For instance, soon after 610 c.e., the Prophet met with Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who was a cousin of the Prophet's wife Khadija. Waraqa ibn Nawfal was a Christian scholar who confirmed the Prophet's mission. Another encounter is said to have occurred in 615 c.e., when early converts to Islam migrated for a short while to the Christian kingdom of Axum (Abyssinia). In 628 c.e., a delegation of Christians from the town of Najran in South Arabia came to visit the Prophet in Medina, and sometime before the Prophet died, in 632 c.e., he would have sent letters to existing rulers such as the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and the Negus of Axum, as well as the Sassanian emperor Chosroes. These five instances demonstrate a variety of possible or imagined encounters, all of which have been used for various goals in Muslim-Christian relations, both at the time of their production and in subsequent interpretations.

The varieties of Qur˒anic passages addressing Christians directly or indirectly (as people of the book, together with Jews, for example) reflect the transforming nature of the prophet Muhammad's encounters with them as his own status changed over time. The same applies to the other two religious systems he interacted with in Arabia: Judaism and Meccan polytheism. In all three cases, the variation in tone, from tolerance to polemics, seems to reflect the extent to which his prophetic message was being accepted or rejected at each moment of his reception of Qur˒anic revelations, a process that lasted about twenty-three years. In terms of Christianity in particular, there is at best a conditional acceptance of Christians, and at worst a judgment associating them to both shirk (polytheism/idolatry) and kufr (unbelief). The various Christian voices referred to in the Qur˒an are, for the most part, not reflective of the major Christian theologies that Muslims would come to encounter soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad, in 632 c.e. These misperceptions of mainstream, seventh-century Christian theologies, by being preserved in the Qur˒an, negatively predisposed subsequent generations of Muslim interpreters of Christianity. A contextual sociopolitical reading of these various passages, harking back in part to the old Islamic hermeneutical principle of abrogation (in which later Qur˒anic revelations must take precedence over prior ones), is one way to make sense of their variety and, at times, contradictory nature. This is especially important when the passages are juxtaposed ahistorically, either within the period of the Prophet's life or for contemporary ideological purposes.

The First Islamic Conquests: 632–750 c.e.

During the Islamic empire's first phase of rapid expansion, between 632 and 750 c.e., two numerically important religious systems become incorporated under Muslim political control: Eastern Christianity, both Chalcedonian (i.e., Byzantinian) and non-Chalcedonian (especially Monophysite and Nestorian), and Zoroastrianism. By then, Jews constituted only a small minority of the population scattered across the newly conquered areas, and did not represent any political threat. The first to try to make sense of Islam as the religion of their new Muslim rulers were Eastern Christians, since Western (that is, Roman) Christians were not affected directly by the Muslim conquests until the later part of this period, and mostly in the Iberian Peninsula lying at the Western fringe of the new Islamic empire. In all cases, however, Christians perceived Islam within their own respective theological worldviews. As early as around 660 c.e., the arrival of Arab Muslims is interpreted by the Monophysite Armenian bishop Sebeos as a judgment of God in light of Genesis 21:12–13, according to which Muslims are identified as Arab descendants of Hagar and her son Ishmael, who were promised by God to become a great nation. This theological interpretation was linked to a political situation wherein most Monophysite and Nestorian Christians welcomed the arrival of Arab Muslims, for it put an end to their political subordination to the Byzantine Christians. As the new rulers took control over the course of the eighth century, new interpretations developed. For both Monophysites and Nestorians, Islam came to represent a judgment on the part of God against those who accepted the Christological definitions of the Council of Chalcedon (451 c.e.). As for those Eastern Christians under Muslim control who continued to support the Byzantine or Chalcedonian theology, such as the Melkite John of Damascus, they came to describe Islam as a Christian heresy.

The early Muslim conquerors followed the momentum built toward the end of the Prophet's life: The first phase of interaction with Christians (and Jews) was confrontational, and all Jews and Christians were expelled from the Arabian Peninsula. It was not until the later seventh and eighth centuries, when Muslim political conquests began to take root in majority Christian and Zoroastrian areas, that more lenient attitudes and practices developed, legitimized by a retrieval of the earlier and more tolerant Qur˒anic passages toward Christians in particular. These interpretations and legal elaborations were needed to formalize the relationship of Muslims to the Christians and Zoroastrians who formed a majority of the population in their respective western and eastern halves of the new (Islamic) Umayyad Empire (661–750 c.e.). This new political context also explains why, to the theological concept of the people of the book (ahl al-kitab), used by the prophet Muhammad to link the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic notions of divine revelation, was added a parallel and pragmatic concept of the people of the protective covenant (ahl al-dhimma), erroneously understood by some today as second-class citizenship. This concept was based on two Qur˒anic references (9:8, 10) initially referring to idolaters in general. This covenantal concept helped regulate Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians as political minorities who received protection from ruling Muslims in exchange for poll taxes. Yet, the situation and opportunities for advancement varied tremendously from one individual Christian to another, and from one geographical area or historical period to another. For example, many educated Christians reached high positions of power during the Umayyad and subsequent Abbasid dynasties, especially in the fields of medicine, philosophy, and administration.

The Stabilizing of Relations: 750–1085 c.e.

In the three centuries that followed the takeover of the central Islamic lands by the Abbasid dynasty in 750 c.e., the Islamic world rose to its apex of cultural, religious, and political efflorescence. This pax islamica resulted in much tolerance toward its internal religious minorities in general, albeit within an Islamic dhimmi paradigm of power. The translation of mostly Greek and Syriac philosophical and scientific works into Arabic during the middle of the ninth century culminated in the establishment of Caliph Al-Ma˒mun's (786–833 c.e.) bayt al-hikma (house of wisdom). It was later directed by the Nestorian Christian translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809–873 c.e.). As a positive example of Christian-Muslim relations at the center of the Abbasid Empire, the bayt al-hikma internally promoted intellectual pursuits of truth and resulted in a striking degree of interreligious tolerance and mutual influence, especially among the educated elite. Externally, as the empire's borders continued to be disputed, a pronounced antagonism arose among both Western European and Byzantine Christians, who feared the power of the then-greatest empire on earth. Among Western Christians, the most obvious development was linked to the slow Reconquista efforts in Spain that culminated in the Christian takeover of Toledo in 1085. This movement was fueled by very negative anti-Islamic rhetoric. As for Byzantine Christians, the continuing warfare also helped sustain more polemical views of Islam, building on the earlier notion that Islam was a heresy with the difference that authors now had access to original Qur˒anic and other Arabic writings (or translations of them) to sustain their polemical arguments. Yet, some Byzantine writers were more moderate, acknowledging some similarities between Christianity and Islam, such as the common basis in monotheism.

During the same period, an equally diverse spectrum of views on Christianity emerged among Muslims. While there was better access to mainline Christian theologies, greater knowledge did not always result in greater tolerance and understanding. Many factors explain the rise in Muslim polemical attitudes toward Christianity: changing demographic realities, wherein Christians were still the majority in many central areas of Islamdom, but the balance of numerical power was gradually shifting in favor of Islam; changing theological realities within the Muslim community, including the search for Islamic legitimization in Biblical roots; social competition, especially in times of economic difficulties; and the need to defend Islam against other major worldviews. But not all Muslim perceptions of Christianity were polemical, and not all Muslim authors lived in situations where the above factors were equally present. As different Christian theologies produced different perceptions of Islam, so did different Islamic theologies (Mu˓tazili, Ash˓ari, Maturidi, traditionalist, Sufi, and so on) produce different perceptions of Christianity.

The Period of the Crusades: 1085–1300 c.e.

After the fall of Toledo in 1085, Western Christians became embolded by the successes of what they have called the Reconquista. Their success was in sharp contrast to the Eastern Byzantine Christians, who had suffered great territorial losses at the hands of the Muslim Seljuk Turks in the aftermath of the battle of Manzikert in 1071. A decade later, Byzantine emperor Alexius (r. 1081–1118) took power and later requested help from Western Christians to fight back the Muslims. Pope Urban II responded with the preaching of the first Crusades in Clermont, France, in 1095. By the fall of 1096, a people's expedition was galvanized by Peter the Hermit. Numbering about twenty thousand, it ended up disintegrating before leaving Europe. In its wake, however, it left a trail of suffering. Many lives were lost, and whole Jewish communities were exterminated.

At the same time, an amalgamation of five armies from different parts of Western Europe responded to the call: they numbered between fifty and sixty thousand. They crossed over into Asia Minor in 1097, captured Antioch in 1098, and conquered Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. The Christian population of Jerusalem had been expelled from that city in fear of treachery just prior to the Crusader conquest. The Muslim governor, together with some of his military garrison, was allowed safe-conduct at the moment of the conquest, but the remaining Muslim and small Jewish civilian populations were massacred: More than forty thousand lives were taken. In contrast, when Saladin re-conquered Jerusalem in 1187, no blood was spilled upon entering the city. By 1302, the Crusaders had gradually lost control of all their small principalities on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

In contrast to this military approach to Muslim-Christian relations, smaller but significant rapprochements were taking place from the eleventh century onwards. They allowed for the transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world into Christian Europe, with the translation of Arabic works into Latin. This began primarily in Spain and Sicily with the rediscovery of the ancient Greek heritage, now greatly enriched by centuries of Muslim commentaries. This movement took place in both older monasteries and newer educational establishments such as language schools, colleges, and universities, first in Bologna, Salerno, Montpellier, Paris, and Oxford prior to 1200 With this rapid increase in efforts to understand the Muslim world, with key figures such as the Italian Francis of Assisi (1182–1226 c.e.) and the Spaniard Raymond Lull (c. 1232–1316 c.e.), important seeds of the later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European Renaissance were sown in the very midst of an internal Christian resistance to the Crusades.

The New Balance of Power: 1300–1500 c.e.

The defeat of the first Crusades did not end the desires of European Christians for expansion, nor did it stop certain Muslims from continuing their own. The Reconquista gradually expanded to include the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, ending with the fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Grenada in 1492. At the other end of the Mediterranean, Ottoman expansion crossed over into southeastern Europe in 1354, eventually ending the Byzantine Empire with the capture of Constantinople in 1453. They won the battle of Kosovo in 1389 and Nicopolis in 1396, making them rulers of the Balkans. The expansion stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529. A similar siege took place again in 1683, demonstrating the strong Ottoman pressures on Central and Eastern Europe for over a century and a half.

At the same time, by the end of the fifteenth century, the southwestern Europeans, especially the Spaniards and Portuguese, gained new strategic power through three combined discoveries: Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas in 1492; Vasco de Gama's navigation around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, which opened up a new spice trading route to Southeast Asia that avoided central Muslim lands; and Magellan and Pigafetta's westward circumnavigation of the earth by 1522 c.e. These discoveries suddenly enlarged the predominantly Mediterranean geographical scope of the first eight centuries of Christian-Muslim interactions into the beginnings of a global one, adding new Christian missionary pressures, especially in West Africa as well as South and Southeast Asia, where Muslim rule had been gradually expanding for centuries.

The New European Christian Rise in Power: 1500–1800 c.e.

In the sixteenth century, the rapid takeover of ocean routes worldwide ushered in a new age of European Christian power. It resulted in a gradual encroachment on increasingly vast areas of inhabited lands through a forceful combination of military, political, economic, and missionary activities. While these new, long-term processes were unfolding on the peripheries, the Ottoman Empire continued to be a threat to the central and eastern European Christian powers and the Mughal Empire slowed down European incursions into South Asia.

In between the Ottoman and Mughal empires, the Safavid Empire (based primarily in Iran) vied for control of central Islamic lands. Dynamic internal Muslim transformations continued to flower along traditional lines, both within those three centralized empires and on many peripheries of Islamic expansion, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and in southeastern and northwestern Asia. However, few understood the significance of the new technologies that led to the magnitude of the European encroachment along many peripheries of the Islamic world and their disruption of traditional internal sources of economic revenues, such as the spice and silk roads, due to new ocean trade routes. These technological threats were also ideational and symbolic, as with the new missionary efforts to spread worldwide the already embattled forms of European Christianity, even when conducted with greater sensitivity to local customs, as exemplified in the efforts of the first Jesuits in the later half of the sixteenth century in India, China, and Japan. These combined processes would subsequently increase in speed and depth, leading to tension and confrontation between Muslims and Christians worldwide on a much wider scale.

The Period of European Colonialism and Western Imperialism: 1800 onward

With Napoleon's brief conquest of Egypt in 1898, Europeans embarked on a political and military trajectory that would gradually make them colonial masters not only over majority Muslim countries, but over almost the entire planet. While this surge in European colonialism was particularly successful among the British, French, Dutch, and Russians, who divided up among themselves most of the Islamic world, it still remained strong among the older imperial powers of Spain and Portugal, while the newer national polities of Italy, Germany, and Belgium also vied for their share of the world. A few Muslim areas retained a degree of political independence, such as what later became Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and (to a lesser degree) Iran, which had to balance pressures from the British in the south and the Russians in the north, a prelude to the later pressures of the Cold War by their respective successors the United States and the Soviet Union. Thanks in part to large oil revenues, both Saudi Arabia and Iran would later become the launching pads for two distinct, transnational, and anti-Western Islamic political ideologies confronting Western imperialism: Khomeinism and Wahhabism. The first began with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the latter produced as one of its offshoots the extremist al-Qa˓ida, with the resulting terrorist attacks on key symbols of American global hegemony on 11 September 2001.

Intertwined with the growing European colonialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Christian missionary movement continued unabated, although it was now linked to a civilizational project of modernity understood as democracy and the rule of law within new nation-state structures. This European colonial project legitimized in the eyes of most Europeans their own increased militarization at home and the interconnected colonial control of peoples worldwide. European colonialism eventually fragmented the world, including the Islamic parts of it, into unavoidable yet often unmanageable semblances of nation-states. This project had to do as much with older competing Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christian identities as with newer, non-Christian philosophies (deism, atheism, utilitarianism, materialism, human rights, and the like), a point often misunderstood by many generations of Muslims who have reduced the modern West to Christianity. In turn, many Westerners, whether religious or not, have themselves simplistically essentialized the complexities of the Islamic world, wanting to believe that it is quintessentially unmodernizable. They have forgotten how many centuries it took Western Catholic and Protestant Christianities to come to terms with modernity, and fail to consider the ongoing struggles of parts of the Orthodox Christian world, not to mention vast numbers of Christians in economically disadvantaged areas around the world.

Orientalism is a long-standing, scientific tradition of interpretation of the Other developed in Western universities especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to explain "Eastern" realities from Morocco to Japan. This tradition reinforced the stereotype of Islam as unmodernizable. Orientalists only too often contributed to the rationale for colonial domination of the world, especially in Muslim areas. This explains why, since the late nineteenth century, many Muslims have become suspicious of efforts on the part of non-Muslim Westerners to interpret Islam. However, with increased migrations of Muslims from majority Muslim countries to the West and the increase in conversions to Islam among both European and U.S. citizens, especially among African Americans, together with the increased Westernization of important segments of majority Muslim countries, new Islamized Western and secularized Islamic identities have emerged in the last half century challenging the existence of a West/Islam dichotomy as was promulgated by orientalist thinking.

In addition to colonialist and orientalist discourses, the already complex internal Western dynamic spawned new competing economic and political ideologies, such as liberalism, socialism, and communism, eventually spreading the Cold War (1950–1989) unto the rest of the non-Western world, into newly formed nations that were already struggling to define themselves in the new, postcolonial era. This resulted in various hybrid forms of political ideology, such as pan-Arabism, Indonesian pancasila ideology, and the creation of Pakistan along ethnic rather than religious lines (even though Pakistani identity was initially the effort to transform a South Asian Muslim identity into a national/ethnic one). For every national case, the Islamic heritage in majority Muslim countries was problematized differently, resulting in a variety of Muslim and Islamic nationalisms that rivals the variety of secular and Christo-secular Western nationalisms.

The greatest force underlying the modernization (often reduced to Westernization) process ensuing from Western colonialism and post-colonial economic imperialism, most recently known under the concept of globalization, has come in the name of science and has been linked to a philosophy of positivism. These combined claims to truth have reinforced the various new technologies with which they are associated. While most Muslims have adopted Western scientific education as part of various nationalist educational projects, this ever-rapid increase in scientific knowledge has continued to provide a secularizing West its military and political superiority, undermining traditional faith-claims both at the center of power in the West and on the Muslim and other peripheries.

A resistance to positivist science and liberal Christianity first developed in the United States in the second decade of the twentieth century, taking the form of Christian Protestant fundamentalism. Fundamentalism later spread around the world under different names and varying forms, resulting in the ideologization of anticolonial and, later, anti-imperialist religious discourses. Eventually it fueled a few religious revolutions and coup d'etats, the most memorable being that of Iran in 1979. During the late 1980s and 1990s, another form of accommodation has led to the creation of a network of scholars engaged in the Islamization of Knowledge project. But by the end of the Cold War in 1989, Westerners and Muslims had lost a common enemy in communism; they could now turn more directly onto each other, in what is still often reduced to a simplistic West versus Islam dichotomy.

In contrast, mostly among educated and cosmopolitan elites, the late twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a genuine Christian-Muslim or Muslim-Christian dialogue. This new movement stressed the importance of listening to one another and learning from each other's tradition. This process, carefully attuned to ensuring a better power dynamic between its participants, has often led to common statements by Muslims and Christians on a variety of issues. Sponsored at times by international religious organizations, governments, or non-governmental organizations, these dialogues have opened up new avenues of understanding that aim to respect the differences and have built on the similarities that exist among Christians and Muslims. While participating in dialogue does not require a liberal theological point of view, it tends to attract religious people with such a perspective, often limiting the potential impact this approach could have on transforming the history of Christian-Muslims relations toward one of greater understanding and cooperation given the wealth of information now available on their shared history.

Conclusion

The history of Muslim-Christian relations includes a wide spectrum of interactions encompassing all aspects of human life. Two extreme interpretations need to be avoided because they are wrong historically. The first is reductionism. It is dangerous to reduce this complex history to one of endless confrontations between essentialized conceptualizations of Islam and Christianity, treating them as mutually exclusive realities that turn every Christian and Muslim into unavoidable enemies. The examples of constructive interactions between Muslims and Christians in both times of peace and war are too numerous to justify oversimplifying this history into one of military confrontations. The second danger is to deny the complex power dynamics that have always existed among Christians, Muslims, and others within Christian and post-Christian as well as Muslim and other societies. These dynamics reveal both destructive and constructive behaviors and patterns, as well as a spectrum of beliefs that range from inclusive to exclusive and are held by both sides in what have become the two numerically largest religious identities today. Knowing this history requires a sensitive understanding at the dawn of a yet insecure future for the human race.

See alsoBalkans, Islam in the ; Crusades ; European Culture and Islam ; Islam and Other Religions ; Judaism and Islam ; Religious Beliefs .

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Patrice C. Brodeur