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From earliest times, Muslims were a visible presence along the Indian Ocean of East Africa, coming from different locations in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and elsewhere. Islam moved inland in Kenya and surrounding countries during the nineteenth century, largely brought by traders. Kenyan Islam is divided along structural, ethnic, personality, geographical, and doctrinal lines, resulting in a divided community, accounting for perhaps 30% of the population. Despite the influence of Iran and Libya, Kenya has successfully contained radical Islam, especially following the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, but Islamic discontent is unabated since the root causes of societal discontent remain unresolved. The short‐lived effort by Shaikh Khalid Balala proved more of an irritant than a threat to the government, which continues to dole out bits of patronage to coastal and Somali Muslims in the country's northeast.

This chapter focuses on the most consequential kind of Christian–Muslim interaction: conversion. It considers legitimate and illegitimate reasons for converting from one religion to another. For some Christian leaders, becoming a Muslim was something that people did out of a number of motivations, some of them more unholy than others: in addition to a desire for material benefits or a drive for status and power, there were family or tribal connections that drew people to convert. There was also an attraction to a religious framework that allowed a greater range of human behaviors and activities. People might also become Muslims under compulsion. Tellingly, these leaders could not conceive that a person might convert out of sincere religious motivation. Conversions that took place with reference to doctrines or beliefs were seen as cases where people had been deceived or had acted out of a lack of education and ignorance.

This chapter looks at the observation that a person who was actually learned in both his own religious tradition and in the Islamic tradition would never convert for anything other than nontheological reasons. Most Christians and Muslims were not learned in their own religious tradition, much less in that of a rival religion, and will have been ill-equipped or simply unable to discuss and debate religious difference at the level of sophisticated theology in a proper and informed way. For this reason, if when speaking about Christian–Muslim relations, one's focus is on difference at the level of doctrinal theology, one will gain only a distorted understanding of seventh- and eighth-century realities. One will overlook the existence of a layering and continuum of knowledge in the Christian community and fail to take into account the reality that most conversions by Christians to Islam will have been conversions of simple Christians into simple Muslims.

This concluding chapter argues that late Roman Syria was a place where linguistic frontiers did not translate into cultural boundaries. The Arab conquests of the seventh century did not change this; instead, the prestige their new scripture enjoyed added a third literary language, Arabic, to the mix of a region with an already rich history of intercultural exchange. Moreover, religious dynamics continued as they had for centuries—viewed against the background of post-Chalcedonian Christian–Christian interaction, the scope and nature of Christian–Muslim interaction looks very familiar. Ultimately, in trying to place the existence of the Middle East's population of simple Christians not just into this story, but at its center, this book has attempted to capture some of the excitement and interest of this process in a way that does justice to all of the people living there, not just a small subset of them.

This chapter looks at Spanish administration of northern Morocco after the Rif War. As the physical border between Spain and Morocco disintegrated, Spanish colonial administrators looked for ways to promote “Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood” while preserving religious, social, and sexual boundaries between Moroccan Muslims, Jews, and Spanish settlers. While much scholarship in this area has been dedicated to exposing the Spanish colonial rhetoric of brotherhood to be a ruse, this chapter takes seriously the notion that the Spanish colonial administration attempted to distinguish itself from its French counterpart—even to the point of weakening the positions of the sovereign Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla. It aimed to demonstrate greater respect for local customs and traditions and to elevate the zone’s Muslim “caliph” to the status of sovereign, although in other ways its practices resembled the French model.

This chapter details the course of Christian–Muslim relations in the Islamic world in the twentieth century. It presents two case studies. The first focuses on Egypt, which in the first part of the twentieth century was the intellectual and publishing hub of the Muslim world, and hence was regarded by Western Christians as the key to its regeneration by the Christian gospel and “modern” ideas of reform. Egypt was also the home of Africa's oldest church, the Coptic Orthodox Church. The second case study examines a younger Christian community within a younger nation, that of the church in Indonesia. The Egyptian case study highlights the dissonance between the post-Enlightenment political philosophy of individual rights and freedom of religion that undergirds Western academic discourse on the subject of interreligious relations and the markedly different concept of religious toleration that prevails in Muslim majority states.

This chapter discusses genre as an alternative to assessing the racial and gendered stakes of Christian-Muslim conversion. It studies what happens when a romance plot is forced into a tragicomic structure and reveals the inability of the early modern stage to visualize Christian redemption for a female character after Islamic sexual contamination. The chapter also determines a slippage between embodiment and spirituality — or religious and racial identity — that is crucially mediated via the generic structures of plays.

The Dominican, Ellul, begins the chapter with an excursus on the historical relationship of his native Malta with Islam and Muslims. This history, combined with migration and contemporary relations with the Arab world, colours the island’s Christian-Muslim relations. The author’s own life fits into the pattern with family links to Libya and an initiation into Islamic studies at IDEO before going for formal studies to PISAI. Teaching assignments in Rome and Malta, collaborative work with the PCID and local Muslim-Christian dialogue on Malta shape the engagement. The chapter charts the proud history of Dominican involvement in the field since the 13th century, notes with approval a speech by Pope Benedict XVI in Cologne, and points the way to a future based on reconciliation, acceptance, human dignity and mutual trust before God as two religious communities.

Marshall, a priest of the Church of England, began his encounter with Islamic studies at Oxford, before moving to Selly Oak and a doctorate on Qur’anic themes. Inspired by his English mentor, Kenneth Cragg, amongst others, a pressing need to explore more deeply central Christian doctrines in the light of Islam is outlined, which resulted eventually in training other Christian ministers to respond to Islam with confidence, humility and academic rigour. A textually-orientated theologian, the author worked on the writings on Christianity of Isma’il al-Faruqi. An appointment to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s staff led to a leading role as academic director of the Building Bridges seminar, many opportunities to teach in Christian seminaries, and to guide the development of the National Christian-Muslim Forum to work at grass-roots level.

In the final chapter, the editors attempt to draw out pointers from the foregoing. These include: the importance of Centres for Christian-Muslim study and inspirational teachers, the crucial role played by ecclesiastical documents, visionary leaders and solid theology in delineating the vision, the contribution of Catholic religious orders to supply and support personnel and the sacrificial dedication needed for the work, the way in which this apostolate can be seen as priestly ministry, the need for serious study of languages and theology, the demand for a new generation of teachers and the resources to support their work, the requirement for an appropriate spirituality to nourish students and teachers, the crucial role played by studying with Muslim teachers and fellow-students so that the friendships thus engendered can provide an intuitive knowledge of the lived faith of the other, and finally the need for a Kingdom-orientated theology of mission to feed into the wider Church.

This chapter sketches two influential and roughly opposed examples of how moderns approach questions about the inter-relation of “Islam” and “the West” (as if each were monolithic), and of the work that the past is asked to do in the construction of our present. It shows how models that posit a history of synthesis or “alliance” between Islam and the West quickly reproduce the “clashes” or oppositions that they pretend to overcome, while bi-polar models that insist on Islam’s exclusion from or irreducible opposition to the triumphs of Europe and the West fare no better. Despite their seeming political differences, this chapter demonstrates that to the extent that these two major modes—clash and alliance, opposition and synthesis—for understanding the Christian West’s relationship to Islam (or Judaism) are equally dialectical, they are equally fantastic, and equally complicit in producing the dangers that they deplore.

This chapter moves beyond the chronological and geographic parameters of the rest of the book to describe the broader implications of the Christian application of the word “Saracens” to Muslims. Contemporaries of the Muslim invasion, such as the Patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius, initially did not comprehend that the invasions were launched by followers of a new religion and called them Saracens, thinking that they were just ordinary nomadic raiders. Once it became clear that the Muslim attacks were something different, the term stuck, and some Christians engaged in polemical arguments with tropes previously connected to the pre-Islamic Saracen image. Authors, such as John of Damascus, wrapped these rhetorical descriptions together into a neat package, defining the standard Christian understanding of Islam for centuries. This chapter also examines the transformations of the Sinai after the Muslim conquest, and concludes with a brief discussion of Christian-Muslim relations.

Examines the diffusion throughout Western Europe of Latin translations of Islamic texts, such as the Qur’an, the Doctrina Mochometi, and the Liber scale Machometi. The Latin translations of the Qur’an by Robert of Ketton (1143), and by Marcos of Toledo (1210), and of the Liber scale Machometi by Bonaventure of Siena (1263) could have been known to Dante. Dante’s master, Brunetto Latini, was ambassador to the court of King Alfonso X the Wise. Also in Florence at the time of Dante were Riccoldo of Monte Croce and Ramón Martí, who had deep familiarity with texts translated in Spain, and drew on them in their polemics against Islam.

Kenneth Cragg divided his life between the Arab world, North America and Europe as bishop and academic. He has been prolific in writing on Christian-Muslim themes. This chapter addresses themes from the perspective of both faiths, including the relationship of all humanity to God, scripture, human weakness, the relationship between dialogue and witness, and the centrality of Joseph/Yusuf as a common figure of forbearance in our world. The chapter touches on the clarification of terms, the secular encounter, the consequences for power of the migration from Mecca to Medina and the contemporary consequences of violence. Emphasis is given to the importance of the Meccan model for the contemporary global situation and for inter-faith dialogue.

Borrmans spent his life at PISAI, the Catholic centre for Islamic studies in Rome, after studies in his native France, Tunisia and Algeria. This chapter covers sixty years of engagement in the crucible of Christian-Muslim relations in the spirit of Vatican II as a member of the Missionaries of Africa. A particular relationship is charted with great Francophone contributors such as Anawati, Arkoun and Louis Massignon, the great scholar of al-Hallaj. At the centre of dialogue in the Church, an involvement with PCID and the Journées Romaines come alive through personal experience. At the heart of this Christian experience lies the spiritual encounter with Islam for the service of all, the fulfilment of the world and genuine human co-operation before God.

The spirit of Africa was imbibed by von Sicard, who grew up there and studied in South Africa before moving on to Uppsala, Hartford, and Cairo. The journey is marked by figures like Tor Andrae, F.A. Klein, the shaykhs of al-Azhar and Sayyid Akhtar Rizvi of the Bilal Mission and immersion in Swahili language and culture. It is argued that the days of polemic and apologetic are past, to be replaced by diapraxis–growing through shared social action for the common good – and an open, sincere experience of intellectual, spiritual and humanist dimensions. The shared languages should be used to promote Christian-Muslim understanding. Human growth is directed towards God-consciousness. This is the African approach to which we are called: a sincere respect for the views and ways of others.