The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam.

Jones, Richard J.

The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. By Sidney H. Griffith. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 220. $35.

This book tells "the story of the religious, cultural, and intellectual achievements of the Arabophone Christians, distilling forty years of scholarly labor into a graceful overview of the ancient but still-living churches of the East. The author, Sidney Griffith, admires the theological inventiveness, rationality, and linguistic skill of Arabic-speaking Christians. He invites today's diminished Christian communities of the Middle East and also the churches planted in or by the West to hear these voices of Christians who articulated their faith in concepts and language shaped by the Qur'an.

One Arabic-speaking Christian intellectual portrayed by Griffith is Yahya ibn 'Adi, born in 893 in the city of Tikrit (modern-day Iraq). Yahya became head of the Baghdad Aristotelians, using Greek logic in the Arabic language as an auxiliary discipline to defend the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. "He was convinced that in the end reason could serve the interests of revelation, and devotion to philosophy could preserve the decencies of life in common." He argued: "Men are a single tribe [qabil], related to one another; humanity unites them. The adornment of the divine power is in all of them and in each one of them, and it is the rational soul." Yahya moved in aristocratic circles close to the caliph, but he preferred scholars, monks, and ascetics, who chose "clothing of hair and coarse material, traveling on foot, obscurity, attendance at churches and mosques and so forth, and abhorrence for luxurious living." The task of the spiritually serious, Yahya said, is to "give people an interest in eternal life" (p. 125).

Griffith is realistic about the limited impact these five centuries of Arabophone theological effort had on Islam. One Islamic thinker who responded to what he perceived to be Christian error was Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), who remains authoritative among self-conscious Muslims today. In the wake of the Mongol conquest of once-tolerant Abbasid Baghdad, Ibn Taymiyyah turned his intellect against the internal Christian threat. The primary readers of Arabophone theologians, however, were their fellow Christians in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Egypt, and Spain.

In today's English-speaking world, Griffith's lucid reintroduction of these thinkers should be welcomed both by Christians seeking to honor non-European expressions of Christian faith and by Muslims interested in reconciling Islamic ways of knowing with the Western commitment to empirical knowledge and ideas of cause and effect.

Richard J. Jones is Professor of Mission and World Religions at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia.