On the early influence of Christianity on Islam

Source: The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died, Philip Jenkins, HarperOne, 2008, pp. 194-197. Minus endnotes.

 

 

Within those mosques, too, Muslim worship and practice often recall older styles. A modern Christian transported back in time to the Near East of the sixth or seventh century would be struck at the many resemblances between the Christianity of that time and the modern world of Islam. It is not always easy to tell whether Muslims were influenced by practices they witnessed in Ethiopia or the eastern Syriac world, because the two were so closely related, but somewhere they observed the Christian practice of fasting, which shaped the Islamic custom of Ramadan. Modern Christians are struck by the severity of Ramadan, which forbids believers to eat or drink during daylight hours for the space of a month, a severe discipline in hot climates. Yet this was in fact close to the oldest Christian practice of Lent. Here, for instance, is the Ethiopian practice as followed during the sixteenth century: “This fast follows the old law, for they do not eat at midday, and when the sun is setting they go to church and confess and communicate and then go to supper.” Even when allowed to eat, “they eat nothing that has suffered death, nor milk, nor cheese, nor eggs, nor butter, nor honey, nor drink wine. Thus during the fast days they eat only bread of millet, wheat and pulse, all mixed together, spinach and herbs cooked with oil.” A Jesuit observer noted, “The severity of their fasts is equal to that of the primitive church. In Lent they never eat till after sunset.”

Another surprising continuity involves the prostrations, rak'a, that are so common a feature of Muslim prayers, and which to Western eyes surely denote characteristically “Oriental” behavior. Yet these, too, have undeniable Christian precedents. The earliest Christians prayed standing, but kneeling or prostration became increasingly common in the early centuries, especially for penitential prayer. Sinners approached God in the manner of a poor mortal abased before a king or emperor. As Saint Augustine recorded, “They who pray do with the members of their body that which befits suppliants; they fix their knees, stretch forth their hands, or even prostrate themselves on the ground.” Early saints’ lives boast how many prostrations their heroes would perform to show their love of God. Nestorian Christians genuflected often, especially during the penitential season of Lent. Far from prostration being a traditional Arabic practice, many Arabs saw the new practice both as humiliating and as a foreign import associated with protocol-fixated Christian courts and churches.

Originally, Muslims saw prostration as eccentric Christian behavior, exactly as many modern Christians are puzzled by Muslim styles of prayer. In the eighth and ninth centuries, what divided Muslims and Christians was not whether they prostrated themselves, but whether this was appropriate behavior before an icon or holy image, as Christians believed, or solely before God, as Muslims advocated. As William Dalrymple observes, witnessing Christians prostrating themselves in the monastery of Mar Gabriel, “Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention: it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.”

Nor would early Eastern Christians have been amazed by Muslim attitudes toward women. Now, scholars disagree on just how secluded early Muslim women were expected to be, and some quite conservative Muslim authorities challenge the idea that Muhammad demanded the extreme policies that are today found in a society like Saudi Arabia. But Muslims were not alone in expecting some form of veiling, or in keeping women secluded from the world, as had been expected in both classical Greece and ancient Persia. Early Christian women covered their heads in church, where men and women were segregated by sex and probably entered by separate doors. Eastern Christian societies also used forms of head covering and veiling, although it is not always easy to distinguish references to head covering—something like a modern Muslim headscarf—from descriptions of a facial veil. Byzantine women were supposed to remain in the gynaeceum, the women’s quarters, until married, and even after marriage they wore a veil in public. One story from Mesopotamia tells how, around the year 770, authorities made extortionate tax demands, humiliating those who refused to pay. For the Christian chronicler recording the event, one of the worst official atrocities involved the violation of women’s seclusion. Agents dragged respectable Christian women from their houses, so that “women who were never seen in the street…became ignominious in the midst of men.” As in other matters, later Muslim practice largely preserves the normal expectations of early Eastern Christianity.

In their religious rhetoric, also, Muslims strove to present their faith as the true successor to older Christianity. This approach was critical when debating Near Eastern Christians, whose scriptures were familiar and venerated, yet somehow Muslims had both to assert the claims of Muhammad and to establish the Muslim view of Jesus. They accomplished this by reading prophecies retroactively into Christian texts, or by cultivating alternative scriptures. Often, they argued that the Christian Gospels would speak more directly to Muslim needs if they were the “real” Gospels, and had not been adulterated by devious churchmen. One weapon in such debates was the Gospel of Barnabas, a pseudo-Gospel originally constructed in the fourteenth century but probably using some ancient early sources, perhaps even the Diatessaron. The Gospel of Barnabas as we have it is the life of Jesus retold from a Muslim perspective, culminating with Jesus prophesying the coming of Muhammad, while other texts told of the evil deceptions wrought by Saint Paul. (“Others preached, and yet preach, that Jesus is the Son of God, among whom is Paul deceived.”) These ideas had a powerful impact in religious controversy and are regularly cited in accounts of conversion to Islam, especially in the Balkans. Even in the 1990s, Dalrymple still found Turkish Muslim leaders appalled that Christians clung on stubbornly to their false gospels rather than acknowledging the plain truth of Barnabas. If not in the Catholic sense, Muslims still care about claiming an authentic apostolic succession: Jesus matters.