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Diatribe, Discourse and Dialogue: Reflections on Jesus in the History of Christian-Muslim Encounters*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Mona Siddiqui
Mona Siddiqui*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

The history of Christian-Muslim encounter is a growing field in areas of Christian theology and Islamic Studies. While there is arguably no particular systematic discipline or approach, anyone who enters the history of the theological encounters between these two religions is met with a large body of work which reflects an unusual complexity and degree of nuance. These range from polemical and irenic approaches by those who were writing in response to critiques of their faith without any direct contact with one another, to those Muslim and Christian writers who lived and wrote within the shared culture and civilization of the Arab East.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 51: Christianity and Religious Plurality , 2015 , pp. 435 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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Footnotes

*

Many of the names and themes in this essay appear in my earlier book, Christians, Muslims and Jesus (New Haven, CT, 2013).

References

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6 See, for example, Ehinger, Jessica Lee, ‘Biblical History and the End of Times: Seventh-Century Christian Accounts of the Rise of Islam’, in Clarke, Peter D. and Methuen, Charlotte, eds, The Church on its Past, SCH 49 (Woodbridge, 2013), 52–62.Google Scholar

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16. Ibid.

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18 For a translation of Luther’s works, I have used Adam S. Francisco, Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics (Leiden, 2007), especially here 208, citing Luther, Verlegung des Alcoran (1542), which was a translation of Ricoldus de Monte Crucis, Confutatio Alcorani.

19 Luther, Eine Heerpredigt wider den Türkcn(1529), quoted in Francisco, Martin Luther, 113–;16.

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21 Zwemer, Samuel, Tlie Disintegration of Islam(London, 1916)Google Scholar.The book is based on a series of lectures Zwemer gave at Princeton, the purpose of the lectures being ’distinctly missionary’: ibid. 9—10.

22 Ibid. 10.

23 Ibid. 181-2.

24 ‘al-Tabarī, Ali Rabbān, Kitāb al-dīn wa-l-dawta, Tlie Book of Religion and Empire, transl. Mingana, A. (Manchester, 1922), 3.Google Scholar

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26 Quotations from Thomas, , Christian Doctrines,173–7.Google Scholar

27 Ibid. 132.

28 For an in-depth analysis, see Royster, James, ‘Personal Transformation in Ibn al-’Arabī and Meister Eckhart’, in Haddad, Yvonne Y. and Haddad, Wadi Z., eds, Christian-Muslim Encounters(Gainesville, FL, 1995), 158—79.Google Scholar

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31 Ibid. 118.

32 It is beyond the scope of this essay to go into further detail about these concepts, but for a useful collection of articles on Islamic theologies of other religions which deals with these terms, see Umar, Muhamaad Suheyl, ed., The Religious Other: Towards a Muslim Tlieology of Other Religions in a Post-Prophetic Age (Lahore, 2008).Google Scholar

33 An interesting analysis is Cimino, Richard, ‘“No God in Common“: American Evangelical Discourse on Islam after 9/11’, Review of Religious Research 47 (2005), 162–74.Google Scholar

34 See Volf, Miroslav, Allah: A Christian Response(New York, 2011).Google Scholar

35 Abdou Filali-Ansary,‘Jihad or Murder?’, online at: <http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/jihad-or-murder>, last accessed 10 September 2014.