Arab Christians and the Qur'an from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period.

• Author: Sahner, Christian C.

Arab Christians and the Qur'an from the Origins of Islam to the Medieval Period. Edited by MARK BEAUMONT. History of Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 35. Leiden: BRILL, 2018. Pp. xiv + 216. $120,6104.

The present volume contains a collection of essays stemming from the seventh Woodbrooke-Mingana Symposium on Arab Christianity and Islam, which took place in Birmingham (UK) in September 2013. It brings together nine articles from prominent scholars of Middle Eastern Christianity and its relationship to Islam with the goal of exploring how Arabophone Christians engaged with the Quran during the medieval period. Each in their own way, the essays reveal the considerable knowledge of the Quran that existed within Christian circles at the time. They also underscore the diversity of interpretations to which the Quran was subjected, much of it polemical in spirit, but some of it surprisingly levelheaded--even admiring.

To study Christian attitudes toward the Quran is aiso to consider Muslim attitudes toward the Bible. Indeed, these essays testify to the ways in which Christians and Muslims engaged in a constant game of exegetical "one-upmanship," probing the scriptures of their religious rivals in order to buttress their own arguments. At the same time, the groups read their own holy books defensively in order to fend off the most trenchant critiques of the other side.

The essays in this volume constitute a welcome contribution to the current flowering of research on the early encounter between Christianity and Islam in the post-conquest period. From the perspective of this book, the encounter is most visible through the eyes of religious elites, who strove to construct effective polemics against their religious competitors by interpreting and weaponizing their sacred scriptures. Put differently, the book is committed to understanding how learned clergy--bishops, priests, and monks, along with their Muslim counterparts among the religious scholars and the jurists--read the Quran and Bible to make important points about theology, salvation history, communal identity, and a host of other important themes.

Although the collected essays fix their gaze on the intellectual upper echelons of Christian society, it is easy to see how these debates reverberated at all levels of the church, including among the lower clergy and the laity. There, knowledge of the Quran was just as important as among the elites for rebutting charges of scriptural corruption...