Download PDF | ( New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys) Hugh Goddard A History Of Christian Muslim Relations, Edinburgh University Press ( 2000).
225 Pages
Preface
Publishing projects often take a little longer than expected, but some take quite a lot longer than originally planned, so I am very grateful to my editors at Edinburgh University Press, Jane Feore and Nicola Carr, for their patience when a family crisis caused a delay in the submission of my typescript.
I am also grateful to Carole Hillenbrand, the Editor of the Islamic Surveys Series, and to David Kerr, my PhD supervisor many years ago and my on-going mentor. David is Director of Edinburgh’s Centre for the Study of Christianity in the non-Western world, and it was he who originally suggested the composition of this book. He also organised two very stimulating conferences in Edinburgh, which re-enthused me for the completion of the book when energy levels were flagging.
Note on Transliteration and Dates
I have transliterated Arabic names and terms in accordance with the system of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, with the exception of the Arabic letter jim, for which I have used ‘j’ rather than ‘dj’, and the Arabic letter qaf, for which I have used ‘q’ rather than ‘k’ with a dot underneath it. I have not used the full transliteration system for names and terms from other Islamic languages such as Persian, Turkish, or Urdu.
In order to provide a sense of where the individuals and movements discussed in this book fit into the historical development of the Christian and Muslim traditions, I have usually provided dates according to both the Christian (i.e. Common Era} and Islamic calendars. (In the early chapters, where only one date is given, it refers to the Christian Common Era calendar, since the Islamic calendar had not yet commenced.) This may appear somewhat complicated since the former is a solar calendar and the latter a lunar calendar, with the result that an Islamic year is ten or eleven days shorter than a Christian/ Common Era one, and an Islamic century is thus some three years shorter than a Christian/Common Era one. However, full conversion tables can be found in G. S. P. Freeman-Granville, The Muslim and Christian Calendars, 2nd edn., London: Collings, 1977 (which only goes up to 2000 ce}, and a convenient summary is as follows:
The start of the Islamic calendar [AH1] = 622 cz.
AH 700 began on 20 September 1300 cz. 2000 ce began in 1420 an.
Introduction
On 22, October 1997, in the House of Commons in London, a report by a Commission of the Runnymede Trust, an independent London-based trust which sponsors research in the field of social policy, was launched. The title of the report was Islamophobia: a challenge for us all, and in the report the members of the Commission, who included eight Muslims and two Jews, investigated the nature of anti-Muslim prejudice (Islamophobia), the situation of Muslim communities in Britain, media coverage of issues involving Muslims, and how areas such as the law, education and community projects might address some of the difficulties which Muslims encounter in the United Kingdom, not least violent attacks on their persons.!
Some of the comments which were made at the launch, and some of the media comment about the report, suggested that concern with Islam in Britain was a relatively new phenomenon, arising from the growth of a significant Muslim community in the country since 1945/ 1364. There was a certain irony, therefore, in the fact that those who attended the launch, in the Members’ Dining Room of the House of Commons, had, on their way in, passed two pictures which, had they noticed them, would have made it very clear that this is not the case. Involvement with Islam, in different ways, goes back a considerable way in British history.
The two pictures hang in St Stephen’s Hall, the main access route for the public to the Central Lobby, which links the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and they are part of a series of eight paintings which together depict ‘The Building of Britain’. The subjects of the paintings are as follows: King Alfred’s longships defeat the Danes (877/ 263); King John assents to Magna Carta (1215/612); The English people reading Wycliffe’s Bible (fourteenth/eighth century); Sir Thomas More refusing to grant Wolsey a subsidy (1523/929),; Queen Elizabeth commissions Raleigh to sail for America (1584/992), the Parliamentary Union of England and Scotland (1707/1119); and then the two paintings which involve Islam in different ways, namely Richard I leaving England for the Crusades (1189/585), and Sir Thomas Roe at the Court of Ajmir (1614/1023).
Taken together these two paintings, which are reproduced in miniature on the cover of this book, point firstly to the length of time during which one small part of the Christian world, England, has had some contact with the world of Islam, and secondly to the different forms which that relationship has taken over the course of the centuries. Richard I’s departure for the Third Crusade is an instance of Christians taking up the sword for the purpose of recovering the city of Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers — of Christians as aggressors against Muslims, in other words — whereas Sir Thomas Roe’s visit to the Moghul Emperor Jahangir is an example of Christians as supplicants to Muslims, seeking in this case trading privileges on behalf of King James I. The two pictures therefore portray Christian—Muslim relationships of a very different kind.
In the context of the history of the world as a whole, the relationship between the Christian and Muslim worlds is thus a long and tortuous one. Both communities have their geographical and historical origins in the Middle East, but during the course of their subsequent histories they have expanded in different directions and become influential in different regions of the world - Christianity in Europe and the Americas, Islam in Africa and Asia. During the past two centuries, however, as a result of trade, the growth of empires, and migration, both communities have become truly universal; there are now very few regions of the world in which Christians and Muslims are not found, even if in hugely different proportions.
In addition, over the course of the centuries, what might be called the balance of power between the two communities has swung backwards and forwards. Sometimes the initiative seems to have lain with the Muslim community, with the Christian world simply being compelled to react to developments outside itself, and sometimes the situation seems to have been reversed, with the initiative lying with the Christian world and the Muslim world finding itself in the position of responding. Broadly speaking these descriptions could be seen as fitting the medieval era and the modern era respectively, but today in some respects the situation may be seen as demonstrating a greater degree of balance between Christians and Muslims. Military and technological power may thus be seen as residing more in the Christian world, but religious conviction and motivation may be discerned as being more powerful in Islamic societies. Increasing globalisation in the fields of commerce and information also does much to facilitate interchange and encounter between Christians and Muslims.
In many situations, however, encounter and interchange lead not to the growth of mutual understanding and sympathy but to conflict. The 1990s/1410s have witnessed this most dramatically in Europe, in different regions of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia and Kosovo. But in other continents too, from the Philippines to the Sudan to Nigeria, conflicts have also arisen and continue to cause suspicion and mistrust. The legacy of past conflicts, from the Muslim Age of Expansion in the early centuries to the Crusades and European imperialism, thus continues to wield a powerful influence, and some of the mutual misunderstandings which have arisen in the past seem to persist with great vigour despite the efforts of some in both communities to foster a more accurate understanding of the other and a more positive attitude towards members of the other community.
In this situation, then, it is important for material to be available which may help both Christians and Muslims to understand how the two communities have reached the situation in which they find themselves today. A book which attempts to survey the relationship between Christians and Muslims over the centuries and across the whole geographical range of their encounter may therefore be timely.
The main structure of the book will be historical, surveying the development of the relationship between Christians and Muslims as it has unfolded across the centuries. Given the thesis outlined above, namely that at certain stages one community has been compelled to react to developments in the other while at other stages that situation has been reversed, it is important to make clear that Christian-Muslim relations over the centuries have developed on a kind of layer by layer basis: what happened in one community in one generation produced a reaction in the other community which in turn contributed to the development of formulations and attitudes in the first community in later generations. In Christian—Muslim relations, memories are long and thus the Crusades, for example, still exercise a powerful influence, many centuries later, in some parts of both the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Attention will also be given to the diversity of opinion which has usually existed in each community at any one time. For all their insistence on unity and unanimity neither Christians nor Muslims have managed to achieve these things for very long except with respect to a very few essential or core teachings and practices. There has thus usually been a spectrum of opinion in each community with reference to the other too. This is as true in the medieval Islamic world, with the divergent opinions of, for example, the ninth/third-century thinker alJahiz and the tenth/fourth-century group of philosophers known as the Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) concerning Christianity, as it is in the modern Christian world with the contrasting views of two Christian thinkers from the Reformed tradition, the Dutchman Hendrik Kraemer and the Canadian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, concerning Islam. The book will thus attempt to make clear the diversity which has existed and still exists within each community on the subject of the relationship with the other.
My hope is that a better understanding of the past, of the history of the relationship between Christians and Muslims, may help to promote deeper mutual comprehension in the present and a greater measure of collaboration rather than conflict in the future. There should be no illusions, however, about the extent of the obstacles which militate against the realisation of these hopes. Some Christians and some Muslims, perhaps even an increasing proportion of the membership of both communities, see the relationship as being intrinsically and essentially an adversarial one, but history itself points to the existence of a more positive irenical way of thinking among both Muslims and Christians at certain stages of their history. My hope is that this book may be a small contribution towards the promotion and expansion in influence of this latter perspective.*
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