Christian-Muslim relations

At the very beginning of Islam, when the nascent community in Mecca was increasingly ostracised and under attack from fellow Arabs, the Christian emperor of Abyssinia at one point gave the first Muslims shelter and succour. For him, Muhammad was in the line of God-fearing prophets and quite clearly proclaiming a form of faith in God which, if not in the mode of Christian orthodoxy, certainly positioned Muhammad and the Muslims as not alone in being on the margins of that orthodoxy as, indeed, was he. During Muhammad’s time at Medina, where the Muslim community and polity were forged — following the first decade of Muhammad’s prophetic role in Mecca, where he was rejected - a delegation of Christians from Najran were welcomed by Muhammad and permitted to pray in the mosque that had only recently been built. A pact was concluded whereby the Christians “were granted full protection by Muslims of their churches and their possession in return for the payment of taxes” (Afsaruddin 2008, 13).

The origins and development of Islam took place in dialogue and encounter with Christianity, something which “has always made the engagement of Muslims and Christians a most particular dialogue” (Madigan 2013, 245). However, part of this has been the competitive if not conflictual and combative engagement in missionary endeavours by both faiths: “The concept of missionary activity has been central in theological terms and in practice to both Christianity and Islam from the earliest days of their existence. . . . their closeness both religiously and geographically has produced more conflict than mutual understanding” (Tejirian and Simon 2012, xi). Further, and allied to missionary rivalry, a combination of theological similarity and dissimilarity, together with emerging political rivalry as the Islamic empire evolved, resulted in an ambiguous stance towards Christians and Christianity at best; a wholly negative one at worst. Yet, as Afsaruddin notes, given the early Muslim community manifested a “spirit of inclusiveness . . . toward Jews and Christians” (Afsaruddin 2008, 198), there is arguably within the foundation of Islam a positive reference point for dialogue and interreligious relationships with Christians today. Indeed, throughout the history of Christian-Muslim relations there have been many more nuanced forms and dynamics of relationship between the followers of these two faiths than many today probably realise.

As Charles Tieszen has remarked:

History is replete with examples of cooperation and cross-fertilization, of examples where adherents of one community received care, inspiration, or companionship from adherents of the other. Even so, examples of antagonism, dominance, and even violence between the two communities abound as well. Navigating one’s way through the ambiguities of this history . . . can be daunting.

(Tieszen 2018, xiv)

Similarly, Mona Siddiqui reminds us that there is no one single account, or dominant authoritative voice, when it comes to the history of Christian-Muslim interaction, for both “are lived religions with complex histories of conflict and coexistence which have influenced mutual perceptions and understandings over centuries” (Siddiqui 2013, 1). As Islam expanded to take in many formerly Christian areas of North Africa and the Mediterranean basin, Muslims critiqued and derided Christianity’s complex theological doctrines, especially rejecting the ideas of Trinity and incarnation and asserting that, as with Jews, Christians had corrupted their original scriptures. Only the Qur’an was the pure unadulterated Word of God, and the stance of the Qur’an in respect of Christians and Christianity “is at best ambiguous, offering both to those in favour of dialogue and to those against it ample scriptural support” (Madigan 2013, 245).

David Thomas (2018, 3) is one who has observed that “the beliefs and practices which at first glimpse bear close resemblances . . . have led to Christians and Muslims through history repeatedly producing images of one another that distort the truth, often to the point of destruction”. To be sure, it is difficult to change misrepresentations and distorted images once they are “firmly rooted in the general outlook of a whole cultural community” (Watt 1991, 111). Negative portrayals and assessments of one side by the other exist still today in some quarters. But negativity is not the only or last word. Even though misperception and reciprocal reproach have tended to predominate, Thomas (2018, 4) suggests the thread “of mutual recognition and respect” is an important element and needs to be explored and investigated even more fully than has so far been the case. There is evidence of this thread throughout the history of the relationship (cf. Pratt 2020a) as well as evidence in our own day of deepened mutual inquiry and serious dialogical engagement, as we will discover below. From the outset there have been threads of common connection and similarity that have allowed for detente and the sense of being religious allies, not rivals. At other times, for various and often extraneous reasons, this has been reversed as each sees the other in directly competitive terms. Indeed, for much of the history of relations between the two faiths, their followers

tended to regard one another as defective versions of themselves, Muslims looking on Christians as errant monotheists who had abandoned their pristine revelation and in consequence had slipped into irrational and unviable beliefs about God, and Christians seeing Muslims as deniers of the true forms of belief because they had adopted the deceptive versions given in the Qur’an.

(Thomas 2018, 4)

Daniel Madigan once observed that, from the perspective of Christianity, “the Muslim is . . . the other who is problematic because too-much-like-us, or perhaps even claiming-to-be-us” for, indeed, in some ways

Islam presents the same quandary to the Christian as Christianity does to the Jew: it clearly grows out of the same matrix, and yet it proposes an alternative reading of the same figures and the same history of God’s engagement with humanity, a reading it claims is more valid, and definitive.

(Madigan 2013, 244)

Jorgen Nielsen has argued that discussion about relations between Christians and Muslims is often couched within a context of what might be called the

“Crusades syndrome”. He uses the term expansively, to denote a mindset and a clutch of presuppositions and received motifs of prejudicial assumption. Crusade language embraces a

whole range of conscious memory of a history of conflict on both sides of the Mediterranean, a memory which to a great extent is mythology. This starts with the earliest capture of the Byzantine provinces of the Middle East and North Africa by Arab Muslim expansion, the Muslim conquest and the Christian re-conquest of Spain and southern Italy, the Crusades themselves, and the growth of the Ottoman Empire in the ruins of Byzantium.

(Nielsen 2015, 416)

The crusade motif was later revived in the 19th century within the context of imperial discourse among European powers and famously applied at the beginning of the 20th century by President George W. Bush in respect to the so-called war on terror. There are now many in the Muslim world who see an ideological advantage in keeping alive the judgement that opposition to, or even a critique of Islam, is proof positive of the West’s (and others’) continuing crusade against this religion.