The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque

Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam

Sidney H. Griffith

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780691146287
  9780691130156
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400834020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

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.

Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• I: “People of the Gospel,” “People of the Book”: Christians and Christianity in the World of Islam
• II: Apocalypse and the Arabs: The First Christian Responses to the Challenge of Islam
• III: Christian Theology in Arabic: A New Development in Church Life
• IV: The Shape of Christian Theology in Arabic: The Genres and Strategies of Christian Discourse in the World of Islam
• V: Christian Philosophy in Baghdad and Beyond: A Major Partner in the Development of Classical Islamic Intellectual Culture
• VI: What Has Baghdad to Do with Constantinople or Rome?: Oriental Christian Self-Definition in the World of Islam
• VII: Between the Crescent and the Cross: Convivencia, the Clash of Theologies, and Interreligious Dialogue
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX