The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam is the work of Sidney H. Griffith (Princeton University Press. 2008 ISBN 978-0-691-13015-6). The beautiful cover illustration is that of Ibn Baktish’ abd the Emir Sa’lad-Din in Discussion. (The British Library Oriental Manuscript – 2984 – Thirteenth century Arabic, ff.101v-102. Arabic translation of Aristotle’s “Animals and their uses”, by permission of the British Library, London.)
Sidney H. Griffith is professor in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine and The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic. A Faithful Presence, essays for Kenneth Cragg (Melisende, 2003) was Professor Griffith’s expressive essay, Theology and the Arab Christian: The Case of the ‘Melkite’ Creed.
For our present professor and author The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is a steady literary discussion of our time. There is a clear presentation of Christian-Muslim divisions amongst most multi-faith fanatics and activists, but for many believers these are a simple and straightforward examination of Muslim and Christian reality in the Arabic-speaking world. There are too many religious challenges in the Middle East, though it is only too clear that these reports and narratives are faced by extremists, certainly not by rational Islamic scholars or theologically literate Oriental Christians in a variety of faith systems or denominations, but by revolutionary fanatics of any faith traditions. There is most clearly a great deal to be learnt from the works of Christians and Muslims and most of these scholars and writers are intelligently engaged in the distinct and contrasting worlds of Faith. No doubt there is a very strong and full tradition of unbelievers in most countries throughout the whole world. Religious fanaticism has become a curse in Eastern and Western Europe and in the Middle East. The most interesting text produced by Professor Griffith at the Catholic University is that which is concerned with the study of Christian and Islamic culture and intellectual life. Real scholars do meet.
This volume bursts with the wonders of Islamic and Christian history through expressive narrative. But above all it has some fluid references to the literal and inward language of Coptic Orthodoxy. Modern scholars and historians used many Coptic language texts. But it was essential to create Arabic literature for the Copts, in the three or four centuries which followed this indispensable verbal communication within Islam itself. Severus ibn al-Muqaffa was a Copt who produced Christian texts in Arabic in the tenth century. Coptic and Muslim scholars of the thirteenth century were deeply committed to the cultivation of theological and philosophical thought, most certainly within a range of more closely expressive fields of inter-faith dialogue and scholarship. Of course a number of exchanges may have been a little bitter or aggressive but they were real. The Coptic Orthodox Christians under the authority of Islamic cultures worked carefully to develop the language of Islamic Arabia. This was essential. (It may be noted that the Index in this volume is in error, referring with gross inaccuracy to ‘Coptics’ and ‘Orthodox Coptics of Egypt’: p.214).
It is certainly clear that Copts and Armenians preserved their own communal, liturgical and ecclesiastical identities. No doubt the slightly larger number of Copts in Upper Egypt produced astonishing literary productions in Arabic. It has been noted that the narrative of John of Phanijöit in Cairo was a thirteenth-century Coptic saint. He had at one point converted to Islam but had repented and returned to Coptic Orthodoxy. He was arrested, submitted to trial and executed. Becoming a sincere and holy martyr, remaining true to faith under duress, and knowing that even the Muslim authorities admired him for his martyrdom, he continued to be verified in his Coptic tradition. It is essentially clear that martyrdom is expressed throughout the Middle Ages in the Middle East, though too obviously within the modern world itself.
Not all westerners will embrace the one hundred and seventy-nine pages of Sidney Griffith’s excellent text. But it is most surely essential for Christians—in the Middle East and in the West—to have learnt the narrative of Arab Christianity and to reflect upon the power of political Islam, rather than the more dedicated and individual expression of devotional and spiritual Islam. As Kenneth Cragg has noted, in The Arab Christian: A History of the Middle East (1991), ‘when Christians began to speak Arabic they were bound over to a language that is bound over to Islam.’ The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam is an admirable examination of Islamic and Arab Christian history and by general consent a powerfully expressed and beautifully admired text.