No event during the first millennium was more
unexpected, more calamitous, and more
consequential for Christianity than the rise of
Islam. Few irruptions in history have transformed
societies so completely and irrevocably as did the
conquest and expansion of the Arabs in the
seventh century. And none came with greater
swiftness. Within a decade three major cities in
the Byzantine Christian Empire”Damascus in 635,
Jerusalem in 638, and Alexandria in 641”fell to
the invaders.
When reports began to circulate that something
unusual was happening in the Arabian Peninsula,
the Byzantines were preoccupied with the
Sassanians in Persia who had sacked Jerusalem
in 614 and made off with the relic of the True
Cross. And in the West they were menaced by the
Avars, a Mongolian people who had moved into
the Balkans and were threatening Constantinople.
Rumors about the emergence of a powerful leader
among the Arabs in the distant Hijaz seemed no
cause for alarm.
Even on the eve of the conquest of Jerusalem,
when Arab armies had encircled the holy city and
blocked the road to Bethlehem, the patriarch of
Jerusalem, Sophronius, assured the faithful: “We
will laugh at the demise of our enemies the
Saracens [as Christians first called the Muslims]
and in a short time see their destruction and
complete ruin.” Fourteen hundred years later the
Muslims are still in Jerusalem, and with each
passing decade Islam figures larger in the minds
of Christians, penetrates more deeply into
Christian societies, and, by its fixed and
impermeable tenancy of a large part of the globe,
circumscribes the practice of Christianity.
From the day Caliph Umar was met by the
patriarch Sophronius in Jerusalem in the mid-
seventh century, Christianity has found itself face
to face with Islam. Though the circumstances
have varied from place to place and century to
century, Islam has always presented a challenge.
Yet, in the course of a long history, during which
Islam expanded all over the world, Christians,
with the exception of those who lived in the ­
Middle East in the early centuries of Muslim rule,
have seldom taken Islam with the seriousness it
deserves or recognized it for what it is”a religion
in the biblical tradition in which piety is wedded
to statecraft. A “complacent ignorance” (in the
phrase of the modern scholar Lamin Sanneh) has
prevailed, especially in the West.
Before the Muslim conquest, Christians could look
back confidently on six hundred years of steady
growth and expansion. By the year 300, churches
were found in all the cities of the Roman Empire,
from Spain and North Africa in the west to Egypt
and Syria in the east, as well as in Asia Minor
and the Balkans. In the fourth century the
Armenians embraced the new religion, and on the
eastern shore of the Black Sea the preaching of
St. Nino led to the conversion of the Iberian royal
house and the adoption of the Christian faith by
the Georgians. To the south, Christianity reached
Ethiopia in the fourth century and Nubia a century
later. And there were Christian communities in
Roman Gaul already in the second century and in
Britain by the third century.
No less impressive was the spread of Christianity
eastward. Accustomed to the colorful maps of
Paul’s missionary journeys printed in study Bibles,
we are inclined to think that the initial expansion
took place in the Mediterranean world. But in the
vast region east of Jerusalem”Syria, Jordan, and
Iraq, where Aramaic was the lingua franca ”the
majority of people had become Christian by the
seventh century. The Christian gospel was carried
even farther east to ancient Persia, and from
there it traveled along the Silk Road into Central
Asia: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan. At some
point during the first six centuries it reached the
western shore of India and even China. In the
seventh century, the global center of Christianity
lay not in Europe but to the east of Jerusalem.
Though the peoples of this vast area spoke many
languages and had different customs, through
Christianity they were linked together in the
confession of the creed of Nicaea. They baptized
their infants in the name of the Father and of the
Son and of the Holy Spirit, offered the sacrifice of
the Eucharist in their churches, were governed by
bishops, revered the lives of ascetic men and
women living in monastic communities, and had
in common a holy book.
Archaeologists have uncovered fragments of
ancient Christian texts that make the point
powerfully. At both Antrim in Northern Ireland and
in Panjikent, near Samarkand, in present-day
Uzbekistan, copybooks were found from about the
year 700 (wax on wood in Ireland and potsherds
in Asia), each containing verses from the Psalms.
In Ireland, the schoolboy whose language was
Irish had written the psalm verses in Latin, and in
Panjikent, the boy whose language was Soghdian
had written his lesson in Syriac.
When one considers the extent of Christianity in
the year 600, the deep roots Christians had set
down all over the world as they knew it, and the
interconnectedness of the churches, it is no
wonder that Christians had difficulty grasping
that the Arab armies occupying their cities were
not simply conquerors seeking booty but heralds
of a spiritually potent religion and architects of a
new civilization.
The first recorded comment of a Christian reaction
to Muhammad dates from only a couple of years
after his death. When tales of a prophet among
the Arabs reached Christian Syria, someone asked
an old man, “What can you tell me about the
prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?”
The old man groaned deeply and said, “He is
false, for the prophets do not come armed with a
sword.” He had in mind of course the Hebrew
prophets, Elijah or Isaiah or Amos. A prophet is
one called to speak for God.
But his memory of the Bible was imperfect, for he
had overlooked the greatest of the prophets
before Jesus: Moses. Like the later prophets,
Moses was certainly called to speak for God, but,
unlike Isaiah or Ezekiel, Moses was also a
political and military leader and, let it not be
forgotten, a lawgiver. And he carried a sword: In
the Book of Numbers, we learn that he armed a
thousand men from each tribe of Israel to take
vengeance on the Midianites.
It is this biblical prophet, Moses, who was the
model for Muhammad. Though Muslims see
Abraham as the first to believe in the one
God”and thus the first muslim and the ancestor of
the Arabs through Ishmael”the prophet mentioned
most often in the Qur’an is Moses. Muhammad
was, like Moses in the words of St. Stephen in the
Acts of the Apostles, “powerful in words and
deeds.”
And the early spread of Islam was an affair of
deeds: vigorous, venturesome, irresistible deeds.
In the span of less than a hundred years, Arab
commanders made their way from the edge of
Egypt along the North African littoral until they
reached the Atlantic Ocean. From the Arabian
Peninsula they also advanced northeast through
Persia and across the Asian steppes to India. The
Arabs reached Sind, today a province in Pakistan,
in 711. And within the same decade, after
crossing the Straight of Gibraltar into Christian
Spain, they crossed the Pyrenees and penetrated
southern France, to be halted finally at the battle
of Poitiers in 732.
By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslims
had created in these disparate and distant regions
a new community formed by common beliefs and
practices and held together in a loose unity by
the caliphate established in the ancient Christian
city of Damascus. As new territories were
conquered, garrison towns arose. The Arabs
brought their wives and children, built mosques,
and over time founded such new cities as Basra
and Kufah in Iraq, Fustat (old Cairo) in Egypt, and
Kairouan in Tunisia. By keeping themselves apart
initially from the local societies, they were able to
maintain their identity in a sea of strange people
and gradually displace the culture that had
dominated the region for a thousand years.
Soon Islam began to take hold among the
conquered peoples”and one reason was that they
were already familiar with the biblical tradition on
which the Qur’an drew. For example, an entire
surah is devoted to the biblical Joseph, the son of
the patriarch Jacob, viceroy of Egypt.
At first Arabic was spoken only by the Arabs, but
by the end of the seventh century, during the
caliphates of Abd-al-Malik and his son Hisham,
Arabic became the language of administration,
commerce, and learning as well as of religion. To
replace the Byzantine currency, gold coins were
minted with Arabic legends carrying a reproach to
Christians: “There is no god but God alone. He
has no companion.” A public cult supported by
political authority was established, calling for an
annual month of fasting, prayer five times a day,
recitation of the Qur’an on Fridays, and the
khutba , an address before prayers.
In other ways Abd-al-Malik claimed the public
space for Islam. In a dramatic political gesture,
he built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, altering forever the skyline
and character of the holy city. On interior as well
as exterior walls, inscriptions emphatically
proclaim the central tenets of Islam. “There is no
god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.” The
phrase “God has no companion,” an explicit
critique of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity,
occurs no less than five times. Abd-al-Malik also
appointed judges to administer the emerging body
of law on matters of ritual, marriage, inheritance,
and property. Over time, the law of Shari’a, more
an evolving body of social practices than a fixed
code, became a defining mark of Muslim identity.
Its significance for the Muslim is as much
psychological as legal, which helps explain why it
packs such emotional force in Muslim countries
to this day.
Within the space of a century, the movement
inaugurated by the prophet Muhammad had
planted a permanent political and religious rival to
Christianity in historic Christian lands. Its
advance both to the West and to the East meant
that a large part of the globe was claimed for
Islam, fulfilling the words of the Qur’an: “We
appointed you successors on the earth after
them.” For Christians these territories proved
irrecoverable. Four hundred years later, when the
Crusaders arrived in the East, the Arab historian
Ibn Athir said that they had entered “the lands of
Islam.”
Little of this was apparent to Christian observers
in the early years, or at least few were willing to
acknowledge what was happening before their
eyes. John of Damascus, who lived during the
reign of Abd-al Malik at the beginning of the
eighth century, wrote a polemical account of
Muhammad based on his reading of the Qur’an.
But in his book he places Muhammad in the
section on “heresies” and depicts him as a
descendant of the arch-heretic Arius: a teacher of
a truncated version of Christian truth. At some
abstract level that may be true, and it does show
that he thought Islam and Christianity share a
common spiritual lineage, but it is noteworthy
that he treats Muhammad solely in theological or
religious terms, ignoring the cultural and political
changes that he wrought.
About the same time, a monk writing in Syriac in
the region of Basra had a keener sense of what
Islam meant for Christians. In a dialogue between
a Christian monk and a Muslim official, he has the
Muslim official say: If your religion is true, “why
has God handed you over into our hands?”
By the year 750, a hundred years after the
conquest of Jerusalem, at least 50 percent of the
world’s Christians found themselves under
Muslim hegemony. In some regions, most notably
North Africa, Christianity went into precipitous
decline. At the time of the Arab conquest there
were more than three hundred bishops in the
area, but by the tenth century Pope Benedict VII
could not find three bishops to consecrate a new
bishop. Today there is no indigenous Christianity
in the region, no communities of Christians whose
history can be traced to antiquity. Though
originally conquered by the sword, most of the
subject peoples eventually embraced the religion
of their conquerors. By a gradual process of soft
coercion, Islam was able to gain the loyalty and
kindle the affections of those who were
subjugated and make them part of the Muslim
umma ”no small accomplishment.
In greater Syria”including the Holy Land, Egypt,
and Iraq”the rights and privileges of Christians
were limited by their legal status as dhimmis :
members of a restricted and inferior minority
subject to an onerous tax. Still, Christian
intellectual life flourished. In the early centuries
under Islam, Christians participated in the
vigorous and enterprising culture being created by
the Muslims. They gradually made the transition
to Arabic”a delicate undertaking, because much of
the religious vocabulary in Arabic came from the
Qur’an. They wrote apologetic works in defense of
Christianity and engaged in debate with Muslim
thinkers on points of practice, doctrine, and
philosophy. Even a partial listing of Christian
thinkers writing in Arabic during this period is
impressive: theologians such as Theodore Abu-
Qurrah (a bishop in Harran, in southeastern
Turkey) and Timothy I (catholicos of the Church
of the East in Baghdad), such translators as
Anthony David of Baghdad and Stephen of
Ramlah in Palestine, and such philosophers as
Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Yahya ibn Adi in Baghdad.
Though their names have been mostly forgotten,
their writings have endured, offering a precious
resource for Christians as they address Islam
today. continue reading at: www.firstthings.com/article/2009/01/001-christianity-face-to-face-with-islam

no summary? Too long

Islam my foot

Tazmode: no summary? Too long

Read the first two paragraph only. Just way too long

every sentence is important,in few minutes you'll be trough