Christianity seen by Muslims and Islam seen by Christians in the Period of Early Islamic Rule in the Middle East

Abstract

Abstract This paper highlights a context where Christians lived under Muslim rule. Muslim critique of Christianity was widespread, and Christians had to react to Muslim dominance by finding ways of responding to criticisms without incurring punishment for rebellious attitudes to their rulers. In the first two centuries after the Arab conquest of the largely Christian Middle East, Muslims viewed Christians as needing correction for their mistaken beliefs about the oneness of God in their deviant Trinity, about the humanity of Jesus in their insistence on his divine status, about the death of Jesus by crucifixion when this had not happened, and for their failure to recognise the finality of the Prophet Muḥammad in their suppression of testimony to his coming in the Bible. Christians viewed Muslims as heretics who had diverted from the true Christian faith in the Trinity and the divinity and crucifixion of Jesus and who looked for prophecies of Muḥammad in the Bible that did not exist. Muslims and Christians searched each other’s scriptures to persuade the other that their interpretations might need correcting. As the centuries passed in the Middle East, Christians steadily embraced Islam. By the time of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, the vast majority of the population were Muslims.