The Encounter of Eastern Christianity and Early Islam.

• Author: Reynolds, Gabriel Said
• Position: Book review

The Encounter of Eastern Christianity and Early Islam. Edited by EMMANOUELA GRYPEOU, MARK N. SWANSON, and DAVID THOMAS. Leiden: BRILL, 2006. Pp. vi + 338. $191.

In her lucid introduction to the Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam, Emmanouela Grypeou describes the work as the product of a 2003 workshop at the University of Erfurt, the goal of which was to investigate how conflicts in the sixth/early seventh century between Byzantium and local Christian communities in the eastern Mediterranean affected the rise of Islam in that region. In fact, the papers in the Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam range well beyond this topic. They address historical controversies regarding the rise of Islam and the Byzantine reaction thereto, various responses to Islam's rise in Syriac, Coptic, Greek, and Arabic Christian literature, and Christian (and, to a lesser extent, Islamic) theological developments encouraged by the dynamic of religious competition in the Islamic world. It is perhaps regrettable that the papers are not grouped into coherent sections, but nevertheless they are generally well written and thought-provoking, and the volume as a whole is excellent.

In the opening article "Islam and Oriens Christianus: Makka 610-622 AD" Irfan Shahid argues trenchantly that there was a significant Ethiopian Christian presence in Muhammad's Mecca. He even speculates (p. 15), in light of the seafaring vocabulary in the Quran, that the Prophet himself travelled to Ethiopia. Shahid also notes that some early Arabic poets, including Adi b. Zayd and Umayya b. Abi I-Salt, were Christians, and from there argues that a robust Arab Christianity also existed in the Prophet's milieu, and indeed was a fundamental influence on the rise of Islam (a line of argument that goes back to C. Huart's 1904 article "Une nouvelle source du Coran").

Daniel Sahas turns to the tradition of the patriarch Sophronius's surrender of Jerusalem to the caliph Umar. He notes that the more famous elements thereof, such as Umar's refusal to pray in the Anastasis, appear only with Eutychius (Said b. Batriq; d. 940). Still, Sahas insists that there must be an historical basis to this tradition. However, this tradition seems to match too well the interests of a threatened Christian community; a more sophisticated reading thereof leads to an image not of Muslim-Christian harmony, but of disharmony. Such sophistication is seen in "Copts and the Islam of the Seventh...