The Slow Birth of Islam: How Syriac Christians Watched a Religion Take Shape
When the armies of Islam emerged from Arabia in the seventh century, the first Christians they encountered were not the Greek-speaking Byzantines of Constantinople nor the Latin Christians of Rome, but the Syriac-speaking Christian communities of the Middle East. These Christians—centered in Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and Persia—spoke Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic closely related to the language of Jesus. They represented a rich and ancient tradition that flourished beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, shaped not by emperors and councils of Constantinople, but by a Semitic cultural world in which Jews, Persians, Arabs, and Christians lived in continuous interaction.
Unlike the Byzantine Church, which wielded imperial authority and rooted its identity in Hellenistic culture, Syriac Christianity was politically marginal and linguistically Semitic. Its primary branches—the East Syrian Church (often labeled “Nestorian”) and the West Syrian Church (later called “Jacobite” or Miaphysite)—had endured theological conflict and, at times, persecution from the imperial church. Their distance from Byzantine power meant they developed their own liturgical life, intellectual traditions, and monastic networks, extending not only through the Levant and Mesopotamia but across Persia and deep into Central Asia and even China.
This distinct position placed them at the very center of Islam’s emergence. While Europe still knew Islam only through rumor, Syriac Christians were living under early Muslim rule, negotiating coexistence, and witnessing the transformation of the Near East firsthand. Their bishops interacted with early caliphs, their scholars served in administration and translation bureaus, and their communities shared cities, markets, and at times households with Muslims. In the centuries that followed, Syriac monasteries and centers of learning would play a crucial role in translating Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, laying foundations for the intellectual culture of the Abbasid world.
Yet despite this proximity—geographical, cultural, and linguistic—the voices of Syriac Christians have been largely neglected in modern accounts of early Islam. For generations, historians focused overwhelmingly on Greek and Latin sources, languages tied to imperial power and European academic training. As a result, our historical imagination has often been shaped by writers who met Islam mainly on battlefields, or who viewed it from a distance. The extensive and often more intimate Syriac corpus—consisting of chronicles, letters, apocalypses, legal writings, and marginal notes penned by those living through the first and second generations of Islamic rule—remained in obscurity. Only recently have scholars begun to appreciate that these Syriac texts form the earliest and most detailed non-Islamic record of Islam’s beginnings.
What emerges from these sources is not a simple narrative of hostility, nor a romantic picture of harmony, but a complex, evolving relationship. Syriac Christians struggled to make theological sense of being ruled by a people outside their Scriptural worldview; they debated whether Arab power was divine punishment, a temporary trial, or a providential reshaping of the Christian world. Their writings reveal fear, adaptation, curiosity, rivalry, and collaboration—all unfolding at a time when Christianity and Islam had yet to harden into the sharply bounded identities familiar today.
Recovering these Syriac voices allows us to see the early Islamic world not as an abrupt civilizational rupture but as a shared cultural and religious landscape, where boundaries were fluid and identities still forming. It invites us to move beyond inherited narratives of inevitable conflict and instead to understand the rise of Islam through the eyes of the Christians who lived through it—often with uncertainty, sometimes with hope, and always with a sense that history was unfolding in unexpected ways.
This re-centering of Syriac sources is not merely an academic correction; it reopens the question of how religious communities encounter and imagine one another. In listening to the earliest Christian witnesses of Islam—long overlooked, speaking in the language of the prophets—we gain a fuller, more human understanding of a world remade, and perhaps a clearer lens through which to view our own.
The Invention of Religious Categories
To understand this evolution, it helps to recall a broader truth about religious categories: they are often retrofitted to the past, not born fully formed at the outset. As Tomoko Masuzawa argues, prior to the nineteenth century there was no unified concept of Buddhism to consolidate disparate observations gathered across Asia—Buddhism as such came to life, perhaps for the first time, in a European philological workshop. Similarly, historians of South Asia have shown how Hinduism emerged under British colonial classification as a unifying label for disparate beliefs and communities.
This slow emergence of Islam as a distinct category has an older parallel—one embedded at the very core of Christian history itself. When Jesus walked in Galilee, there was no such thing as “Christianity” as a separate religion. Jesus taught in synagogues, debated Pharisees within Jewish legal discourse, observed Jewish festivals, and affirmed the Torah. His earliest followers prayed in the Temple, kept Jewish dietary norms, and understood themselves not as founders of a new religion but as Jews awaiting the fulfillment of Israel’s promises.
For decades after the crucifixion, the Jesus movement lived inside Judaism. The apostles disputed halakhah, not church canon; According to the Acts, Paul himself insisted he had not abandoned the faith of his ancestors. The question that animated the first generation was not whether Gentiles could join a new faith, but whether Gentiles could join Israel without circumcision and Torah-observance. It was only across time, crisis, and communal negotiation—in councils, polemics, and eventually imperial patronage—that “Christianity” crystallized into a self-standing religious identity. Only retrospectively do we see clear lines; at the time, boundaries were porous, contested, and often invisible.
This is not to equate the two histories, but to recognize the shared human pattern beneath them. Religious identities rarely appear in sudden revelation or binary opposition. They grow, overlap, borrow, dispute, and gradually differentiate. The early Christians did not wake up one morning and decide they were no longer Jews—and likewise, early Syriac writers did not immediately perceive the Arab polity as a new religion. It took generations, shared life, and eventually political and legal enforcement for both Christianity and Islam to solidify as distinct confessions in the imagination of their neighbors. Rarely are religious identities born fully named. They emerge, and only later do we look back and pretend the categories were obvious all along. Categories harden; they do not descend fully articulated. The same was true for the first Syriac Christians’ encounter with their new rulers.
First Contact: Arabs, Not Muslims (630s–680s)
In the earliest Syriac records, the newcomers are not yet a religious community at all, but Ṭayyāyē—Arabs—who suddenly hold power. Seventh-century chroniclers treat the upheaval as political and ethnic, not doctrinal. They did not expect the new rulers to endure, and they certainly did not imagine a durable rival religion. For most of the seventh century, Syriac authors did not speak of Islam as a religion nor imagine a clash of civilizations.
The very first reference to the conquests appears in humble form: a single-page eyewitness report from 637, scrawled on a blank page of a Gospel manuscript, describing battles between Byzantine forces and “the Arabs of Muhammad”. The fragmentary Account of 637 mentions Muhammad’s name in a purely military context, with no hint of religious significance. Around 660, the Khuzistan Chronicle described “the Sons of Ishmael” and their leader Muhammad sweeping across Persia, but again the frame remains one of divine punishment and providence, not theology. The Arab armies are a scourge, not yet adherents of a distinct creed.
What’s striking about these early decades is not merely the absence of religious framing, but the active depiction of Muslim rulers as benevolent toward Christianity. The East Syrian catholicos Isho’yahb III, writing before his death in 659, offered this remarkably measured assessment:
For also these ṭayyāyē to whom at this time God has given rule over the world, behold [how] they are toward us. Not only, as you know, do they not oppose Christianity. Rather, they are givers of praise to our faith, givers of honor to our Lord’s priests and holy ones, and givers of aid to churches and monasteries. — East Syrian catholicos Isho’yahb III (d. 659)
Writing in 687, the East Syrian monk John bar Penkāyē described the reign of Caliph Mu’āwiya (661–680) as a time when justice flourished, great peace prevailed, and everyone was allowed to conduct themselves as they wanted. He noted that the Arabs upheld worship of one God according to ancient law and followed the tradition of their instructor Muhammad.
Justice flourished in his days and there was great peace in the regions he controlled. He allowed everyone to conduct himself as he wanted. For, as I said above, they upheld a certain commandment from him who was their guide concerning the Christian people and the monastic order. By this one’s guidance they also upheld the worship of one God in accord with the customs of ancient law. — John bar Penkāyē’s Book of Main Points (687 CE) Regarding Caliph Mu’āwiya (r. 661 to 680 CE)
But John, despite increased knowledge of Muslim practices, still did not present his conquerors as a separate religious entity the way he portrayed Judaism or Zoroastrianism—perhaps because, from his apocalyptic perspective, he did not believe they would endure long enough to justify having their own religion.
The Maronite Chronicle from the 660s describes Mu’āwiya judging a theological debate between the Maronites and the Miaphysites, then praying at Christian holy sites in Jerusalem—at Golgotha, Gethsemane, and Mary’s tomb—though he refused to mint coins with a cross. This portrait of a caliph who adjudicates intra-Christian debates and prays at Christian shrines while avoiding Christian symbols reminds us that seventh-century religious identities defy our attempts to place them in neatly bounded categories.
Even when chroniclers invoke scripture and divine judgment, they frame the conquests as punishment for Christian sin, not as theological confrontation. For most seventh-century Syriac Christians, the most devastating geopolitical changes came not with the Islamic conquests of the 630s but from the Byzantine-Persian wars from 602 to 628, which were far more destructive. The Arab takeover, by comparison, seemed almost mundane—just another regime change in a region accustomed to shifting powers.
If we combine information from all seventh-century sources prior to the second civil war, the sum total would be: these people, most often called Arabs, were relatively benevolent toward Christianity and could be helpful allies when battling other Christians; they had a faith whose content remained unspecified; they may have provided financial disincentives for remaining Christian; they kept the covenant of Abraham (likely a reference to circumcision); one of their rulers prayed at Christian holy sites but minted coins without the cross. From the perspective of Syriac Christians, this did not make a religion.
The Turning Point: ʿAbd al-Malik’s Religious Program (685–705)
A decisive shift occurred with the consolidation of Umayyad rule under Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 685–705) after the second fitna (civil war), who took an active role in championing Islam and Arabization, promoting it as the state-sponsored, superseding religion and custom of the empire. Arabic became the new state-sanctioned language for all governmental affairs. New coinage, inscriptions, state slogans, and the monumental Dome of the Rock signaled that the caliphate now foregrounded Islam as a religious identity.
Yet even as ʿAbd al-Malik promoted Islamic identity, the administrative structure remained fundamentally ethnic. Throughout much of the seventh and early eighth centuries, admission into the Muslim community was reserved exclusively for Arabs—religious conversion was predicated on ethnic conversion, and for a non-Arab to become Muslim, that individual first had to gain membership in an Arab tribe by becoming the client of an Arab sponsor. What mattered most was not creed but Arabness.
The desire of ʿAbd al-Malik and his descendants to promote Arabization through their religion motivated them to change coinage by replacing Christian iconography with Islamic phrases and correlating legal rights with religious affiliation. Only after this increasing emphasis on religious distinction did Syriac authors begin drawing greater attention to their conquerors’ religion.
Syriac writers responded with a new apocalyptic intensity. The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, written around 691, explained the Arab conquests as divine punishment for Christian sexual depravity, describing in graphic detail how Christians had abandoned moral restraint.
It was not because God loves them that He allowed them to enter and take control of the Christians’ kingdom, rather on account of the iniquity and sin done by Christians, the like of which was not done by any previous generation. For men would clad themselves in the wanton clothes of prostitutes and would adorn themselves like virgins. Standing openly on the cities’ streets, shamelessly rabid with drunkenness and lasciviousness, they would have sex with each other. Prostitutes also would openly stand on the streets. A man would enter, fornicate, and go out. And his son would come and defile himself in the very same woman. Brothers, fathers, and sons together would all defile themselves in one woman. — Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (c. after 2nd fitna 690/691)
A year or two later, the Edessene Apocalypse modified this apocalyptic schema, specifying that the Sons of Ishmael would ultimately be defeated in Mecca and that Christ’s final victory would follow two reconquests of Jerusalem. These apocalyptic texts reveal Christians struggling to make sense of a power that was beginning to articulate its own religious claims.
The Economic Incentive: ʿUmar II’s Tax Reform (717–720)
A crucial transformation came with Umayyad Caliph ʿUmar II (r. 717–720), who exempted converts to Islam from the poll tax. Though his policy took decades to implement consistently, it represented a fundamental shift: the caliphate now tied fiscal privilege to faith rather than lineage, and Islam began to transcend tribal boundaries to imagine itself as a universal confession. For the first time, the caliphate presented a religion that, at least in theory, transcended ethnic difference.
For Syriac Christians observing these developments, the implications were profound. Their conquerors were no longer only an ethnic power who ruled by sword and census—they were becoming a religious competitor that demanded theological reckoning as well as political accommodation.
Blurred Boundaries and Porous Categories (Late 7th–Early 8th Century)
By the early eighth century, anxiety over shared sacred life becomes visible in small but telling legal gestures. Jacob of Edessa (d. 708) issued a ruling forbidding the use of a cloth embroidered with the “Hagarene confession of faith” as a Christian altar covering. The very need for such a decision reveals congregations that did not yet see the Muslim declaration as fundamentally incompatible with Christian space—a porous world slowly being fenced.
This ambiguity becomes even more striking when we consider what Jacob was prohibiting. Many late seventh-century witnesses to the shahāda (Muslim confession of faith) did not yet include a reference to Muhammad, but simply read, “There is no God but God.” Without Muhammad’s name, such a declaration could seem broadly monotheistic rather than distinctly Islamic—which may explain why some Christians saw no problem draping it over their altars.
Another manuscript moment captures this conceptual fog graphically. In British Library manuscript Add. 14,643, dated paleographically to the mid-eighth century, a Syriac translator calmly wrote: “A notice concerning: the life of Muhammad the messenger of God.” A later scribe, disturbed by this phrasing, erased the word “messenger” and altered the text to read “The record that Muhammad [is] of God is rejected”. On the page itself, we watch boundaries harden in real time. The eighth-century stratum challenges our assumption of sharp early distinctions between Christianity and Islam—here was a bilingual Christian scribe with access to an Arabic caliph list who apparently considered unproblematic the claim that Muhammad was God’s messenger. The later stratum shows that this degree of religious overlap became unacceptable to subsequent generations.
By the early eighth century, Jacob of Edessa could describe Muslim practices with some specificity: Muslims prayed toward the Kaaba; they believed Jesus was the Messiah, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God, but not God’s son; and they had a written profession of faith. Yet the early eighth-century text John and the Emir suggested that Christians and Muslims had different views of scriptural authority—Muslims accepted Moses and his books but did not recognize the entire Old Testament as canonical.
The Bēt Ḥālē Disputation from the 720s depicted a Christian monk telling a Muslim notable that Muhammad had proclaimed the one true God and even believed in the Trinity, but aware of Arab propensity toward idolatry, Muhammad did not teach them all the doctrines he had learned from a Christian monk named Bahira. The text implied that if Muslims truly knew what their prophet had known, they too would be Christian. This was not flattery but rhetorical annexation—an attempt to claim Islam as incomplete Christianity.
The Abbasid Transformation: Shared Intellectual Life (750–850)
The change from Umayyad to Abbasid rule in 750 dramatically affected Syriac Christians’ collective memories of the conquests in terms of both how often they wrote about the 630s and how they chose to remember them. In 767, Caliph al-Mansur moved the capital of the Islamic empire from Damascus to the newly constructed city of Baghdad, and early Abbasid society began a widespread translation project to render all available Greek science and philosophy into Arabic. Because many of these works had already been translated from Greek into Syriac, Syriac scholars became active participants in the Abbasid translation movement.
Aristotelian logic became a common intellectual currency shared by Christians and Muslims, and several early Abbasid rulers popularized public religious debates that provided formalized venues for religious exchange. At the same time, cities developed increasingly mixed populations that, combined with ongoing Arabicization, facilitated everyday contact between Christians and Muslims.
It is within this sophisticated cosmopolitan context that we encounter the most elaborate Christian engagement with Islam: the celebrated dialogue between Timothy I, Patriarch of the Church of the East (780–823), and Caliph al-Mahdi (r. 775–785). Timothy began by listing reasons why Muhammad was praiseworthy—a man who walked on the paths of the prophets. He stated that because of Muhammad’s monotheism, God honored him exceedingly and subjected two powerful kingdoms to his control: the Persian kingdom that worshipped creatures instead of the Creator, and the Byzantine kingdom that attributed suffering and mortality to the one who cannot suffer and die.
This was a radical departure from earlier commemorations. Christian authors in the first century following the conquests had been adamant that God giving military success to the Arabs had nothing to do with their relative virtue—it was purely about punishing Christian sin. Now, nearly a century and a half later, the head of the East Syrian church openly proclaimed that God gave victory directly to Muhammad as a sign of divine approval.
Yet Timothy remained uncompromising on one crucial point: however much Muhammad may have walked on the path of the prophets, he was definitively not himself a prophet, because he never performed any miracles and scripture never foretold his coming. When al-Mahdi charged that Christians had purposefully tampered with scriptural texts and removed all biblical references to Muhammad’s prophethood, Timothy listed several objections ranging from outright denials to innovative reasoning—for instance, that Christians’ and Jews’ hatred for each other would have prevented them from making the same changes to the biblical text.
More audaciously, Timothy did not limit his scriptural exegesis to the Bible. He argued that the Quran’s use of the first-person plural for God and the appearance of mysterious letters preceding several Quranic chapters proved that Muhammad knew of the Trinity—he openly taught about one God but professed the Trinity with symbols such as “His word” and “His spirit,” and with the three letters at the beginning of chapters. From this perspective, either the Quran was not legitimate Scripture or it also belonged to Christianity. Syriac authors took the Quranic depiction of Christians as “people of the book” at its most literal to argue that the book in question might well be Christian.
At the same time, Timothy deployed an old polemical category, calling Muslims the “new Jews” for rejecting Christ’s divinity—a label Syriac Christianity had long used against theological opponents, now applied to Muslims. Muslims’ rejection of Jesus’ divinity, incarnation, death, and resurrection made them Jew-like in Timothy’s theological framework. The new religious other was placed inside an inherited theological frame rather than recognized as genuinely novel.
Naming the Unnamed: The Birth of “Islam” as a Category
Crucially, language itself evolved to accommodate the new reality. Syriac writers long had abstract nouns for “Judaism” and “Christianity,” but none for “Islam”—only in a late eighth-century chronicle does a writer coin one: mashlmānutā, literally “Muslimness,” a term that would not appear again in extant texts until the twelfth century. Around the same moment, the Chronicle of Zuqnin (c. 775–780) distinguished older “Arabs” from Abbasid-era “Persians,” and described Muslim practices—prayer, scripture, ablution—with religious specificity. For the first time, in some ninth-century texts the term Arab took on such religious valence that “a Christian Arab” became a contradiction in terms—all Arabs were, by definition, Muslims.
A conceptual and lexical category had finally crystallized. Yet even for mid-ninth-century Syriac writers, the conceptual boundaries of Christianity and Islam remained extremely porous.
The Rhetoric of Restraint: Syriac vs. Byzantine Polemic
What stands out across this entire period is how restrained Syriac writing remains compared to Greek and Latin Christian polemic. Where Byzantine authors caricatured Muhammad as demonic or apocalyptic, Syriac texts never portrayed Muhammad as the harbinger of the Antichrist or spoke of him as blasphemous and obscene; he was not depicted as demon-possessed, an idol-worshiper, or someone who received his teaching from a wicked angel. The need to live under Muslim rule—to share markets, courts, and sometimes even shrines—produced a cooler, more analytical tone. Polemic existed, but rarely in the register of hysteria that characterized Byzantine and Latin sources.
This difference was not merely rhetorical but reflected lived reality. Syriac Christians ate with Muslims, married Muslims, bequeathed estates to Muslim heirs, taught Muslim children, and were soldiers in Muslim armies. There are references to Muslims requesting Christian exorcists, attending church, seeking healing from Christian holy men, visiting Christian shrines, and endowing Christian monasteries—as well as Christians attending Muslim festivals, becoming circumcised, and referring to Muhammad as God’s messenger.
The architectural record captures this shared sacred life with particular vividness. In the early eighth century, Umayyad Caliph Hishām (r. 724–743) built a mosque in Rusafa immediately north of the basilica housing the relics of Saint Sergius, despite geological instability, and constructed a door in the mosque’s qibla wall opening directly into the church courtyard—resulting in Christians and Muslims sharing a common hall and providing Muslim worshippers quicker access to Sergius’s shrine.
Legal sources from this period reveal similar porosity. Around 770, Isho’bokht stated that a Christian man could not marry a non-Christian woman, nor a Christian woman a non-Christian man; in 805, Timothy I ruled differently depending on gender—a Christian woman could not marry a non-Christian lest she and her children convert, but a Christian man could marry a non-Christian woman if he believed she would subsequently convert to Christianity. That such rulings needed articulation suggests intermarriage was sufficiently common to attract ecclesiastical attention.
On interfaith inheritance, Timothy I ruled that if a Christian bequeathed his estate to a Muslim, the bequest should not be honored if other God-fearing Christians were nearby—but if there were no good Christians in the area, inheritance by a Muslim should be considered legitimate. These legal judgments reveal communities where the boundaries between Muslim and Christian households remained fluid enough to require careful regulation.
Memory Reshaped: Dionysius and the Conquests as Liberation
Two ninth-century developments complete the arc. First, Dionysius of Tel Maḥrē (d. 845) retold the conquests not as catastrophe but as partial deliverance from Byzantine persecution—he accused the Byzantines of torturing the native population and claimed that Syriac Christians welcomed the Arabs on their successful return from defeating the Byzantines. This retrospective reveals how political memory shifts with present interests.
Almost two hundred years after the conquests, Dionysius wrote a radically different version in which Arab military victory served not simply as punishment for Byzantine theological error but also as redemption for Syriac orthodoxy—though the first two hundred years of Syriac conquest accounts easily disprove the widespread myth that during the conquests, Syriac Christians conspired with Muslims against the Byzantines. Dionysius’s accounts reveal much more about the ninth century than they do about the seventh.
The Architecture of Separation: The Pact of ʿUmar
Second, under Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847–861), Christian involvement in the translation movement continued and the caliph even had a Christian chief physician, but he ended the tradition of open religious debates, enacted a series of anti-Christian measures, and imprisoned many Christians. It may also have been under al-Mutawakkil’s reign that traditions concerning non-Muslim communities more fully consolidated into the so-called Pact of ʿUmar, which established sumptuary laws to distinguish non-Muslims from Muslims, forbade new church construction, and regulated public displays of Christian worship.
During the early eighth century and beyond, a set of legal traditions designed to differentiate non-Muslims from Muslims began to reach its classical form—rules that Muslim authors attributed to Caliph ʿUmar (d. 644) but which actually evolved across the eighth and ninth centuries. What had begun as coexistence among neighbors now became a legal and social architecture of separation, carving confessional identity into the fabric of daily life.
The conceptual line that seventh-century writers barely glimpsed had now been carved into law, architecture, and public life.
Conclusion: Watching Religion Form in Real Time
In this story, no one wakes up one day and decides, “Islam has arrived.” Instead, the category accretes: first Arabs, then Arabs who pray differently, then bearers of a cryptic scripture, then rhetorical “new Jews,” then intellectual rivals in Baghdad, and only finally Muslims—a clearly defined community with its own name.
What the Syriac record provides is an opportunity to observe religion forming in real time, not as a fixed essence, but as a gradual condensation: policy, polemic, and proximity cooling into identity. And in that longue durée, we see something else: a world in which coexistence preceded boundary, where Christians ate with Muslims, debated them, translated science with them, married them, and sometimes even called Muhammad a messenger of God without blinking.
The Syriac archive reminds us that religious difference, like memory itself, is made. It is chiseled, contested, erased, rewritten. Before Islam was a category in law or consciousness, it was a neighbor. Only later does it harden into a world-dividing noun. And in watching that process unfold, we glimpse not only the birth of Islam in Christian eyes, but the birth of religion as a way to map the world at all.
This gradual crystallization challenges modern assumptions about ancient religious identity. It suggests that the sharp boundaries we now take for granted—the clear lines separating Christian from Muslim, orthodoxy from heresy, insider from outsider—are themselves historical products, shaped by political pressures, economic incentives, theological disputes, and the slow accumulation of everyday practice. The Syriac Christians who lived through Islam’s emergence did not inherit these categories; they participated, often reluctantly, in their construction.
Perhaps most importantly, this history reveals that religious identities need not be eternal and fixed to be meaningful. The fact that “Islam” as a conceptual category took generations to solidify does not make it any less real or significant. Rather, it reminds us that all religious traditions—including our own—have origin stories more complex and contingent than we usually admit. In an age when religious difference is often presented as primordial and unbridgeable, the Syriac witness offers a different vision: one in which boundaries are drawn, negotiated, and redrawn; where yesterday’s neighbor becomes today’s theological rival; and where the categories that seem most natural and inevitable are actually the product of human choices, made in specific historical moments, for reasons we can trace and understand.
The Syriac Christians who watched Islam take shape were not passive observers but active participants in a shared world—translating texts, debating doctrines, crafting legal rulings, and ultimately helping to define the very categories by which we still understand religious difference today. Their voices, long neglected, invite us to imagine other ways of encountering religious otherness: less certain, more curious, and always aware that the boundaries we inherit are not walls built by God but lines drawn by human hands, capable of being redrawn again.
Source:
“Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World” by Michael Philip Penn
