Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World.

• Author: Cook, David

Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World. By CHRISTIAN C. SAHNER. Princeton: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. xxi + 335, illus. $39.95, [pounds sterling]34 (cloth); $27.95, [pounds sterling]22 (paper).

It is rare in the contemporary study of the classical Islamic world that one can say a book is truly original. But such is the truth with regard to Christian Sahner's study Christian Martyrs under Islam. The book covers a subject that has not been researched in monograph form at all.

It would be an understatement to say that the task of assembling Christian martyrs under the Muslims is daunting. The material of individual martyrdoms has been growing for over a century, but has never previously been presented in the aggregate. Most probably the reason is the number of languages that one has to master in order to cover the subject. These include Latin and Greek (of course), Arabic

(especially Christian Arabic), Syriac in a number of dialects, Coptic, Georgian. Armenian. Old Church Slavonic, with Ge (c) ez being quite helpful as well.

Sahner acquits himself well in this regard, and demonstrates his mastery of the material taken from the widest range of sources. Based upon these sources, Sahner manages to collect approximately fourteen individuals or groups that apostasized--according to the various definitions of apostasy--as well as about half a dozen individuals or groups who blasphemed, usually against the Prophet Muhammad.

In each of these cases, through chapters one to three the pattern of his presentation is the same: presenting the Christian account, then seeing whether there is any confirming Muslim account (which there usually is not). If there is no Muslim account, then Sahner examines the secondary evidence that could indicate whether the narrative has a factual basis or not. If this is not possible, then the Christian account is at least placed within an overall historical context. All of the martyrdoms are taken from the first three centuries of Islam.

Of the martyrdom stories, comparatively few can be said to have much of a historical leg to stand upon. This is an oddity, because one feels that such a genre would have been obviously desirable, given Christianity's rich history of pre-lslamic martyrdom, which, as Sahner alludes to (p. 4), would have been familiar to the Christians during the early period of Islam, and provided a framework for confronting Islam (if Christians wished to...