The rise of Islam and the churches of the East

The rise of Islam

From about 610, in Mecca in Arabia, Muhammad (c. 570–632) began to preach a new message. Muslims believe that the one God, called Allah in Arabic, sent down the Qur'an to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, and that he is the last of the prophets after Abraham, Moses and Jesus (Arabic-speaking Christians call God Allah too). The name Islam means wholehearted surrender to God. Muslims honour Jesus as a great prophet born of the virgin Mary, but do not accept that he is the Son of God or that he died on the cross. How to respect other faiths as their own believers state them while bearing witness to the gospel is taught in the Apologetics course's Is Jesus the only way? and Before Korea's religions and culture.

Peter wrote to Christians living among neighbours who did not believe:

But in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you. But respond with gentleness and respect

1 Peter 3:15

John Wesley explains why it must be with meekness: "For anger would hurt your cause as well as your soul" Wesley.

By Muhammad's death in 632 many tribes of Arabia were united under Islam, and the armies of the caliphs who followed him moved north. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) and Persian empires were exhausted by long wars with each other. The Arabs took Damascus around 635 and Syria after their victory at the Yarmuk in 636, and Egypt in the few years from 639. The Persian empire fell, and within a century Muslim rule reached from Spain in the west to Central Asia in the east.

After a long siege Jerusalem surrendered around 638 (some scholars prefer 637), and the patriarch Sophronius handed the city over to the caliph Umar. Later accounts say that Umar promised to protect the people's lives, property and churches, and that he declined to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over Christ's tomb; how much of these stories and of the written terms goes back to that day, scholars debate. For the Christians of Egypt and Syria who had not received the council of Chalcedon, there was another side. Constantinople's emperors, who held to Chalcedon, had long harassed them, and the Coptic church remembers how its patriarch Benjamin came out of hiding under the guarantee of the Arab general Amr. The theology of that division is the Theology course's Chalcedon: one person, two natures.

Under Muslim rule

Islamic law counted Jews and Christians as peoples who had received Scripture, and let them live as protected people, dhimmi, paying a poll tax, the jizya. Christians kept their worship and their churches and settled matters such as marriage by their own church law. But building new churches or carrying crosses openly was often forbidden, and no Christian might preach to Muslims or receive a Muslim into the church. These limits were loose under some rulers and harsh under others. Conversion to Islam came slowly, over centuries, and in many places Christians long remained the majority.

Christians served in that society as officials, physicians and scholars. In ninth-century Baghdad Christian scholars such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq of the Church of the East translated Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic. John of Damascus (died 749) came of a family that had long managed the caliphs' finances; he is said to have served at the caliph's court himself before becoming a monk at the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem. He left the Eastern church a classic summary of the Greek Fathers, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. In a chapter near the end of his On Heresies he treated Islam as a heresy broken off from Christianity and criticised it sharply; Muslims, who understand Islam as the recovery of Abraham's original faith, do not recognise themselves in his account.

Christians in such lands could read as their own the letter Jeremiah sent to the exiles in Babylon:

Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper.

Jeremiah 29:7

Matthew Henry comments, "They are directed to seek the good of the country where they were captives" Matthew Henry.

Alopen at Chang'an, 635

Meanwhile the Church of the East, which had grown up in the Persian empire, was carrying the gospel east along the Silk Road. In 635 its missionary Alopen came with his scriptures to Chang'an, the capital of Tang China. The emperor Taizong sent an official to receive him and had the scriptures translated in the palace library; in 638 he allowed the teaching to be spread as good for the people and built a monastery for it in Chang'an. The story is told in Chinese and Syriac on the Xi'an Stele, set up in Chang'an in 781. The stone records how the church spread under later emperors and met trials too, and at its head is carved a cross rising from a lotus amid clouds.

The stele explains Christ's teaching in words borrowed from Buddhism and Daoism. Some scholars see wise translation; others think the gospel's clarity was blurred. When the emperor Wuzong banned foreign religions, Buddhism above all, in 845, the Church of the East was hard hit, and within little more than a century it seems to have vanished from China. It returned under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, and disappeared again when the Yuan fell. The buried stele was found again early in the seventeenth century, and Jesuit missionaries in China made it known in the West.

Churches that remained as minorities, and today

The Coptic church of Egypt, the Syriac Orthodox and the Armenian churches, and the Orthodox of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria, who received Chalcedon, have kept up their worship under Muslim rule from generation to generation. The Church of the East, its patriarch seated in Baghdad, planted churches across Central Asia, India and China, but was shattered by Timur's campaigns, among other blows, at the end of the fourteenth century. Its heirs, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholic Church in communion with Rome, live today in Iraq and around the world. There were peaceful times, but in 1009 the caliph al-Hakim of Egypt destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and around 1915 vast numbers of Armenians and Syriac Christians were killed in the Ottoman empire. Today war and persecution are still driving many from their ancient homes.

Western Christians wounded these churches too: the crusaders we shall meet later harmed not only Muslims and Jews but Eastern Christians as well (see Popes, emperors and the Crusades). Hebrews says:

Remember those in prison as if you were bound with them, and those who are mistreated as if you were suffering with them.

Hebrews 13:3

Wesley gives the reason: "Seeing ye are members one of another" Wesley.

This chapter shows that the church is not the West's alone. The gospel reached China in the seventh century, and churches praying in Arabic, Syriac and Coptic kept the faith for more than a thousand years as minorities without power. They sought the peace of the cities where they lived and gave their neighbours the reason for their hope. We too can respect neighbours of other faiths, bear witness with gentleness and respect, and remember our suffering brothers and sisters. The next lesson, Icons and the mission to the Slavs, turns to the struggle over icons in Byzantium and to the missionaries who went to the Slavs.

Practice