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Was Anyone Listening? Christian Apologetics Against Islam as a Literary Genre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
By the middle of the eighth century, a new genre of Christian writing had developed among those Christians living within the Islamic empire, that of apologetics intended to defend Christianity against attacks from Muslims. Although the Islamic empire had come into existence a century earlier, a series of changes took place in the mid eighth century, including the rise of the Abbasid caliphal dynasty and the stabilization of the empires border with Byzantium, which led to more stable internal politics. In this new atmosphere, Christian authors began to consider, for the first time, the theological ramifications of an empire that was ruled by Muslims, but which still had a majority Christian population. The purpose of this essay is to enter into the ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the genre of Christian apologetics produced under Islam in the eighth and ninth centuries. There are two competing perspectives on studying these works. One argues for them as historical sources authentically representing an ongoing dialogue between Christians and Muslims during a period commonly known as the Golden Age of Islam. The other argues that these texts are literary creations; at its most extreme, this school of thought asserts that these texts are purely fictional, creating a world of Christian rhetorical superiority in the face of mass conversion from Christianity to Islam.
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References
1 The historicizing school is the older of the two, as most of the nineteenth-century scholars who first edited and translated these works in the West accepted them as authentic. Thus Alphonse Mingana in his edition of The Dialogue of the Patriarch Timothy argues for it as a basically accurate translation (from Arabic to Syriac) of a real exchange between a religious head and a political head: Mingana, A., ed., Woodbrooke Studies: Christian Documents in Syriac, Arabic, and Garshñni, Edited and Translated with a Critical Apparatus, 2 (Cambridge, 1928), 11–13 Google Scholar. In the same work, he also argued for the authenticity of The Apology of al-Kindi, as did both Sir William Muir and Anton Tien in their 1882 edition. See Muir, William, ‘The Apology of al-Kindi: An Essay on its Age and Authorship, Read Before the Royal Asiatic Society’, in Newman, N. A., ed., The Early Christian-Muslim Dialogue: A Collection of Documents from the First Three Islamic Centuries (632–900 AD) (Hatfield, PA, 1993), 376–9 Google Scholar. By contrast, Newman, who brought together many of these apologies in his work, generally argued for them as literary creations, citing the same irregularities and problems discussed in the current essay as sufficient evidence against the nineteenth-century consensus.
2 The three sects were divided primarily by issues of Christology, in particular the question of the relation between the divine and human natures of Christ. The Chalcedonian interpretation was supported by the Byzantine Empire, and even after the rise of Islam it continued to survive among the urban populations of the Levant and Syria, with most of its proponents writing in Greek well into the ninth century. The Monophysite community was anti-Chalcedonian, and in particular after the rise of Islam it wrote in the vernacular languages, most importantly Armenian, Syriac in the Levant and Syria, and Coptic in Egypt. The Nestorian community had established itself in the Persian Empire by the late fifth century, with a large population in Mesopotamia, writing in Syriac. There was also a small but active Monophysite community in Mesopotamia, and both the Monophysites and Nestorians established and supported monasteries throughout the formerly Persian territories.
3 Among extant apologetics, two Monophysite and one Nestorian version of this model survive: the dialogue of an anonymous monk and the amir in Jerusalem and that between the governor of Damascus and the Monophysite Patriarch Joseph in the case of the former, and the dialogue of the caliph and the Nestorian Patriarch Timothy in the case of the latter.
4 See Arthur Jeffery’s introduction, ‘Ghevond’s Text of the Correspondence between ‘Umar II and Leo III’, in Newman, ed., Dialogue, 57–9.
5 Madelung, W. et al., ‘Madjlis’, in Bearman, P. et al., eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (2010), online at <http://www.brillonline.rd/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_COM-0606>, accessed 12 July 2010Google Scholar.
6 For a discussion on these claims of protection and their historicity, see Griffith, Sidney H., ‘The Monk in the Emir’s Majlis ’, in Lazarus-Yafeh, Hava et al., eds, The Majlis: Interreligious Encounters in Medieval Islam (Wiesbaden, 1999), 13–65 Google Scholar.
7 Mingana, ed., Woodbrooke, 2: 17.
8 Ibid. 17–23.
9 Ibid. 92.
10 Ibid. 63.
11 ‘The Apology of al-Kindi’, ed. Anton Tien, in Newman, ed., Dialogue, 381–545, at 383.
12 Ibid. 411.
13 Ibid. 412.
14 Jeffery, ‘Ghevond’s Text’, 73.
15 Ibid.
16 That is, the Byzantines; the Syriac term ruhmoiyo can mean Latin-speaking, Byzantine or Melkite, depending on the context.
17 Mingana, ed., Woodbrooke, 2: 62.