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The phrase ‘Islamo-Christian civilization’ first appeared in 2004 in the book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization by historian Richard W. Bulliet. It was coined with a twofold purpose. First, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it was proposed as a way of focusing on the shared history and characteristics of the Islamic and Christian religious communities, rather than on past and current episodes of enmity between them. It followed the pattern of ‘Judaeo-Christian civilization’, a phrase that came into vogue in the 1950s as an oblique avowal of the post-Holocaust mood of interfaith reconciliation in Europe and America. Secondly, it was proposed as a way of encouraging historical and conceptual investigation of the great extent of overlap and parallel growth between the two religions that manifested itself in myriad ways over many centuries. It took as an axiom this notion: the greater the recognition of a sibling relationship between Islam and Christianity, the better the prospects for peaceful coexistence in future years.
Half of the people in the world profess either Christianity or Islam. Within each of these vast communities there are variant interpretations that stray far from the earliest versions of the faith. As a rule, believers who define their faith by adherence to what they understand those earliest versions to be exhibit hostility toward, or at most grudging toleration of, interpretations that came into being at a later point in time. Within Christianity, Catholics went through centuries of militant opposition to Protestants, and many Protestants and Catholics find it difficult to grant full acceptance to Mormonism, Christian Science, and other comparatively recent interpretations of Christianity. Within Islam, it is difficult to assign chronological priority to either Sunnism or Shiʿism, but Sufi organizations and branches of Shiʿism that emerged at comparatively late dates, such as the Nuṣairīs and the Druze, initially encountered hostility from the older versions of the faith. Interpretations that have emerged even more recently, such as the Bahais and the Aḥmadis, still face widespread rejection as versions of Islam.
For later versions of a faith to encounter difficulty in establishing their legitimacy in the eyes of those who adhere to earlier versions is normal in religious history, but this does not generally prevent the sundry versions being gathered under a single umbrella for purposes of identification. That is to say, when people speak of Christianity today, they group Catholics, eastern Orthodox, and Protestants together despite the undeniable histories of enmity within Christendom, just as estimates of the world Muslim population group Sunnis and Shiʿis together despite their manifest differences, and in some contexts, murderous hostility. This being the case, how difficult can it be to look beyond the historical episodes of Muslim–Christian warfare and vilification, which were no greater in dogmatic intensity or bloodthirstiness than those between Catholics and Protestants or between Sunnis and Shiʿites, and group Christianity and Islam together as a single Islamo-Christian civilization encompassing half the world?
If we go back to the early days of Islam, it is apparent that the first Muslims were no more certain that they were pioneers of a new religion than were the first followers of Jesus. Scholars sometimes use the term ‘believers’, muʾminun in Arabic, for Muhammad’s earliest followers and refer to the early community that formed around Jesus’ disciples after the crucifixion as ‘the Jesus movement’ in order to account for the time that elapsed before the words Muslim and Christian became fixed as the signifiers of new faith communities. When the distinctiveness of Islam became universally recognized remains a matter of debate, but medieval sources reflecting Christian viewpoints on the matter express ambivalence for several centuries. To medieval Christians, it seemed quite possible that Islam was a Christian heresy, just as Protestantism would seem to be to Roman Catholics a millennium later. After all, many Germanic peoples followed the Egyptian bishop Arius in his Unitarian teaching that Jesus was not truly or fully God, but rather a man who became divinized at the time of his baptism. Yet the Arians are always classified as Christians, albeit of heretical belief.
The Gospel of Barnabas, an account of the life of Jesus dating in the extant Italian and Spanish versions to the sixteenth century, provides evidence that some Christians and/or Muslims—the actual author is unknown—never gave up the idea that the two religions were one. Not only does the ‘gospel’ mirror the details about Jesus’ life contained in the Quran while including the substance of the New Testament Gospels, but it explicitly ‘predicts’ the coming of Muhammad, as when God says: ‘“When I shall send thee into the world I shall send thee as my messenger of salvation, and thy word shall be true, insomuch that heaven and earth shall fail, but thy faith shall never fail.” Mohammed is his blessed name’ (Barnabas 97.10).
Was it political and military success that reified Islam’s position as a separate faith? Or was it perhaps the bewilderment and fear of the Christians who saw the majority of their brothers and sisters in faith absorbed within the Muslim caliphate, ultimately to convert in large numbers to Islam over a period of some four centuries? There is no way of telling. If one looks, however, at the earliest widespread public avowal of Islam accessible to people of all faiths, namely, the gold and silver coinage in Arabic script that began to be issued in year seventy-six of the hijra, it is easier to see the caliphate as an economic power focused on the Arab people than as the institutional embodiment of a new religion. There was no iconic equivalent of the cross to symbolize doctrinal difference, and the words of the Quran that appeared on the coins would have conveyed very little to most people in an era when fewer than 5 per cent of the population of the caliphate could actually read the Arabic script.
What would have made Islam seem like a branch of Christianity rather than an absolutely separate religion? First and foremost, quranic revelation portrayed Jesus as a divine messenger who brought a sacred book to the Israelites and predicted the coming of Muhammad: ‘Jesus, the son of Mary, said: “O children of Israel! Behold, I am an apostle of God unto you, [sent] to confirm the truth of whatever there still remains of the Torah, and to give [you] glad tidings of an apostle who shall come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad [i.e. Muhammad]”’ (Q. 61: 6). The virginity of Mary was similarly affirmed. Jesus’ death on the cross was denied, but that was not an unheard-of view among early Christians who followed the so-called Docetist heresy.
Close Muslim readers of the New Testament further pointed to passages that could be taken to imply that Jesus would send another ‘Comforter’ or ‘Intercessor’—Greek paraklētos, sometimes taken as a misspelling of periklytos meaning ‘praised one’, i.e. Muhammad—to care for people after his own departure. ‘Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgement’ (John 16: 7–8). And again: ‘If you love Me, keep My commandments. Then I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Paraclete to be with you forever. He is the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive, for it does not see Him nor know Him, but you know Him, for He is ever with you and will be in you’ (John 14: 16–17).
Eminent Muslim scholars repeatedly interpreted these passages as predictions of the coming of Muhammad, or as intimations of the End Times of the world when a Messiah (‘anointed one’), known to both Sunni and Shiʿite Muslims as the Mahdī (‘the right guide’), would come to redeem a sinful world. In that eschatological context, which was elaborated extensively in the collections of Muhammad’s sayings, or ḥadīth, Muslim tradition strongly affirmed that Jesus would return in the End Times to combat and defeat the demonic Antichrist, known to Muslims as the Dajjāl, and thus pave the way for the arrival of the Mahdī, who would preside over a millennium of peace and justice.
Christian theologians, naturally, did not share these Muslim interpretations. They saw John’s verses dealing with the Paraclete as references to the Holy Spirit, one of the three components of the Trinity, despite the implication in the cited verses that the Paraclete had not yet arrived while the Holy Spirit figured in Jesus’ baptism. But the effort of the Muslims to see Muhammad’s coming predicted in the Bible, both in the Old and the New Testaments, was parallel to the systematic Christian effort to interpret the Old Testament as a prediction of the coming of Jesus Christ and his church. Both Muslims and Christians, in other words, sought to portray their spiritual founders as fulfilling prophecies found in earlier scripture.
In hindsight, it seems apparent that Islam was not just a new version of Christianity. Rather, they did indeed become separate religions regardless of any ambiguity, or efforts at doctrinal reconciliation, that may have existed in the first centuries after Muhammad. Yet hindsight changes depending on how far past the history is that one is scrutinizing. It is easy to find Protestant and Catholic leaders around the year 1600 who denied the validity of one another’s faith, just as it is easy to find Catholic and Orthodox leaders in 1100 who rejected one another’s version of Christianity, or Protestant preachers today who cannot accept the Mormon brand of Christianity. Eventually, however, once many battles had been fought, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians came grudgingly to accept one another as Christians. And they may all eventually agree to accept under the Christian umbrella the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and Korea’s Unification Church, established by Sun Myung Moon, who represents himself as the Messiah and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
By some measures, Islam is closer to Christianity doctrinally than either the Mormons or the Unification Church. To be sure, Islam denies the Trinity, as have various Christian sects over the centuries from the Arians to the Unitarians. But the revelations contained in the Quran and the traditions preserved in the ḥadīth echo and reiterate the traditions of the Jews and Christians who were living at the time of Muhammad and contain almost none of the extra-biblical content that pervades the Book of Mormon, especially in its account of Jesus appearing in the Americas after his resurrection and his establishment there of a community of believers. Nor is there any quranic parallel to Sun Myung Moon’s claim that he is the Messiah who has come to complete the unfinished mission of Jesus. Muhammad is one of God’s Messengers, not a Messiah. If a sufficient degree of hindsight someday allows the Mormons and the Unification Church to be fully accepted as parts of the world Christian community, then it would be absurd to deny the possibility of a similar reconceptualization of Islam.
Except that Muslims would thereby lose their independent identity and history as a separate and remarkably successful religion. There are Muslims who do, in fact, consider themselves Christians by virtue of the reverence they feel for Jesus as a Messenger of God, but they subordinate this sort of affiliation to their primary identity as Muslims. Are there Christians who feel that they are also Muslims? Perhaps, particularly among those individuals who are attracted to Sufism. But no amount of hindsight is likely to see the concept of Christianity engrossed into the concept of Islam, if only because the former is six centuries older than the latter.
The term Islamo-Christian recommends itself as an epithet signifying the vast degree of overlap between the two faiths, a degree of overlap that is significantly greater than the overlap suggested by the commonplace term Judaeo-Christian. Use of this term encourages a comparison between Islam and Christianity that can yield valuable insights into each religion’s history and institutional structure. What follows outlines some of the lessons that can be learned by exploring the common characteristics of Islamo-Christian civilization.
Both Christianity and Islam emerged from the philosophical, institutional, and cultural milieu of Hellenism. Over time, the major Latin and Greek writings of the Hellenistic era became available to people of both faiths in their own languages. The learned elite valued these works as essential underpinnings of their culture and worked diligently to refine and augment them, and to harmonize them with their scriptures. When Christians became aware of the trove of Hellenistic lore available in Arabic translations of classical texts, they eagerly rendered those works into Latin. By contrast, when Muslims with a knowledge of these texts travelled to India and China, they found no special interest in what they contained. Practitioners of Chinese or Ayurvedic medicine were not eager for the insights of Galen, nor did Confucian and Hindu philosophers seek enlightenment in the works of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. This Hellenistic substrate accounts for many of the shared cultural traits of Islamo-Christian civilization, as well as for the great dissimilarity among Muslim and Christian cultural traits in the lands outside the ambit of Hellenism that the two religions spread to from the fourteenth century, mostly in Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the western hemisphere.
Islam and Christianity obviously share certain scriptural elements present in the Old Testament. Does this make it plausible to conceive of a Judaeo-Islamo-Christian civilization? Not easily. Islam recognizes parts of the Torah, particularly the accounts of the creation, some patriarchal stories from Noah to Moses, and a few tales from the era of David and Solomon, but not the books of prophecy. Of the New Testament, the four Gospels make a limited contribution to Muslim belief, but the later books virtually none. In addition, Islamic law bears similarities to Jewish law, particularly in the techniques by which the law is derived from sacred sources. As for Christianity, the Old Testament is accepted in toto, but not Jewish law. Judaism, of course, makes no recognition of non-Judaic elements in the New Testament and the Quran. What the three faiths share, therefore, is mostly cosmology and whatever lessons can be read into the tales of the patriarchs and kings. The absence of common scripture-based engagement with Christology, salvation, proselytization, and apocalypse, which arise in Christianity and Islam but only minimally, if at all, in Judaism, provides a narrow base on which to postulate a tripartite civilizational identity. The social reality of Judaism being restricted to a small, kinship defined, population after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, and of Christianity and Islam becoming enormous, multi-ethnic, world-spanning religious systems in the subsequent centuries, underlines this limitation.
Most versions of Islam and Christianity incorporate an expectation that individual believers will be awarded the pleasures of Paradise or the torments of Hellfire in a last judgement that will bring earthly history to an end. Islamo-Christian imaginings of the End Times anticipate a Messiah, known to Muslims as the Mahdī; an alluring demonic figure, the Antichrist for Christians and the Dajjāl for Muslims, whom the naive will follow to their doom; and the reappearance of Jesus, as the Messiah for Christians and as the heroic slayer of the Dajjāl for Muslims.
Both components of Islamo-Christian civilization have experienced repeated episodes of millenarian expectations, often accompanied by social or political turmoil, and repeated anxieties about God punishing the community for moral wrongdoing. Christians and Muslims alike saw the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century as punishments for sin. Some Christians felt the same way about the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the Black Death of 1348, the Ottoman conquests of the fifteenth century, and even the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Some Muslims similarly saw the Crusades as a divine punishment.
Though both religions have differing and complex, but generally parallel, ideas about what will determine a believer’s fate in the hereafter, punishing sin in the here and now can inspire wide support. In Islam, the phrase ‘commanding the right and forbidding the wrong’ has a long history of warranting intrusive action to correct wayward groups or individuals. Destroying wine jars and breaking musical instruments constituted a theme for this kind of corrective behaviour. Though it has been argued that this is a uniquely Muslim behaviour pattern, it has in fact been extremely common in American Protestantism. Twentieth-century Muslim leaders sometimes praised America’s prohibition movement, including physical attacks on saloons, as a highpoint of Christian culture. Moreover, Protestants and Catholics alike participated in crazed witch-hunts that tortured and killed tens of thousands of women who were regarded by their neighbours as social deviates.
Hyper-awareness of the imminence of divine judgement and the wages of sin has recurred repeatedly among both Christians and Muslims. Islamic tradition maintains that a renewer or revivifier of the faith, called a mujaddid, will appear at the beginning of each century. Calls upon Christians to repent of their sins and live every day as Jesus would have them live have again and again found receptive audiences. Polling has revealed that over half of America’s evangelical Protestants expect the End Times to occur before the year 2050. Messianic expectations, with parallel emphases on forswearing sinful behaviours, excite many Muslims as well.
It may well be that these forceful and recurrent expectations contribute to some elements of Islamo-Christian civilization being inclined to expect change rather than embrace unchanging tradition. The idea of ‘progress’ is not without theological underpinnings.
Both branches of Islamo-Christian civilization accepted spiritual and mystic otherworldliness even as they elaborated clerical, legal, and governmental structures that focused on the mundane world. In Christianity, otherworldliness first took the form of individuals and groups living apart from society as monks and nuns, and later became manifest in the doctrines and lifestyles of certain groups of Protestants, like the Quakers. In Islam, an early proliferation of non-communal ascetics and mystics (Sufis) evolved into an ever-growing network of Sufi brotherhoods after the thirteenth century. Individual Sufis in the early centuries were ecstatic mystics seeking union with God. Within the brotherhood structure, ecstasy was routinized. A shaikh could guide a devotee toward divine union, but most brethren never attained such a level.
Several concerns that contributed to the eventual emergence of Protestantism simultaneously, that is, in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, contributed to the coalescence of Islamic spirituality into brotherhoods (turuq). The languages of common people became spiritual vehicles alongside Latin and Arabic. Expressions of Islamic mysticism filled volumes of poetry in Persian, Turkish, and Urdu. Christian mystics produced parallel works in Provençal, German, and other languages. Christians and Muslims alike attributed charisma to local saintly figures who were not always credentialled as clergy or ʿulamā. Movements led by people like Peter Waldo and John Wycliffe stirred Christians. In Islam, Sufi shaikhs and descendants of the prophet received local allegiance and, after their deaths, shrine visitations. Collective religious expression grew alongside a more passive witnessing of church pageantry, or a similarly passive reverence for the strictures of Islamic law. Sufi brotherhoods instituted dhikrs, or vocal or performance remembrances of God, in which all brethren took part. Protestants instituted congregational singing. Christians who were poor in worldly goods but spiritually rich formed communes of Beguines and Beghards outside the framework of monastic institutions, while in Islam a proliferation of Sufi convents and rules of behaviour manifested a parallel devotion to poverty in the name of God. Overall, the monopoly on religious authority claimed by Christian clergy and Muslim legists (fuqahā) came into question.
Why these changes in the popular attitudes of Christians and Muslims toward their respective faiths took place simultaneously in Islam and Christianity is uncertain. But their eventual resolution in the growth of Protestantism and the proliferation of Sufi brotherhoods strongly affected the religious environments of the two faiths after 1500. Conflict with the Catholic hierarchy led Protestants to emphasize militancy more than otherworldliness. In Islam the emphasis was reversed, though some Sufi orders did become militarized.
Seeking and welcoming converts has characterized both Islam and Christianity throughout their histories. Requirements for ‘membership’ have generally been low, often amounting to little more than a willingness of proselytes to self-identify as Muslims or Christians. This has made possible a large array of sects, pietistic groups, and syncretic movements catering to individuals who take comfort in retaining some elements of their old religious traditions after formal or nominal adoption of a Christian or Muslim identity. Conversion rituals and traditions explicitly exclude membership qualifications based on language, colour, ethnicity, or previous religious identity.
Throughout history, Islamo-Christian civilization has been inextricably intertwined with governing and legal institutions. Though modern Christians living in secular societies often cite Jesus’ command to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s as a basis for a strict separation of church and state, Christianity has a consistent history of maximal involvement with governing structures from the time of the Emperor Constantine (c.320) down to the nineteenth century. Many Christians continue today to believe that their religious and moral views should be taken into account by the state. For its part, Islam has a governing tradition that goes back to the prophet Muhammad, develops in a series of avowedly religious caliphates, sultanates, and emirates, and continues to appeal to many Muslims today despite a general turn toward secular governance in the nineteenth century.
As a legal system, the elaboration of canon law by the Roman Catholic church lost much of its relevance in the course of the Wars of Religion between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century. Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity never adumbrated law codes comparable to those of the Catholic church. Islamic law, or sharīʿa, a much more extensive and elaborate phenomenon, suffered considerable shrinkage in the nineteenth century as civil, commercial, and criminal codes derived from European sources were adopted by secularizing governments. Unlike canon law, however, it remains a touchstone of Muslim identity and thus a significant factor in political affairs. Inasmuch as the sharīʿa never encountered a delegitimizing force as substantial as the Peace of Westphalia that confined Europe’s legal systems within national boundaries and thus made law a matter of kings and parliaments rather than of popes and church councils claiming universal jurisdiction, Islamic law still retains a claim to supra-national authority that puts it at odds to some degree with the modern nation-state system.
Islamo-Christian civilization is steeped in religiously sanctioned violence, but it can also embrace toleration. At its outset Christianity suffered persecution; but once in power, it eventually extirpated virtually every pagan cult in Europe. In some instances, the violence took the form of warfare followed by forced baptism of the defeated survivors. Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons are a case in point. During his first campaign he destroyed Irminsul, the pillar or tree trunk the Saxons believed sustained the world; and after his last he ruled that anyone persisting in their pagan belief should be killed. Later the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic region exercised a similar degree of warlike violence against the pagan Prussians. More often, however, bans on pagan beliefs and traditions were ordered and enforced by the Christian clergy without extensive bloodshed—unless one includes the witch-hunting craze. Zero tolerance of paganism was nevertheless assumed.
Ironically, despite explicit quranic condemnations of idol-worship, the Arab conquests that established the Muslim caliphate involved little or no forced conversion or slaughter of unbelievers. This is because the prior spread of Christianity through the Middle East and North Africa had already eliminated paganism from most areas outside the Arabian peninsula proper, and even there modern scholars have cast doubt on its extent. The Quran mandated tolerance for the Christian and Jewish populations that predominated in the conquest areas west of Iran, and the Arabs extended similar tolerance de facto to the Zoroastrians of Iran and Buddhists of Central Asia.
Contemporary Muslim and Christian spiritual leaders often renounce past violence and embrace, to a greater or lesser degree, some form of ecumenism. Yet each religion reserves the right to defend itself, as a religious community, when it feels it is under attack by the other. For an Osama bin Laden, this has meant portraying ‘Crusaders and Jews’ as groups that have been killing and injuring Muslims for decades. For President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, this has meant recognizing what are called militant jihadist groups as a worldwide enemy. As leaders of a secular republic, both presidents have explicitly eschewed making a connection between these groups and the religion of Islam per se. However, many Christians in the United States and Europe do make such a connection. The degree of mutual distrust vividly recalls centuries of enmity between Catholics and Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians, and Sunnis and Shiʿites.
Drawing on their Hellenistic philosophical substrate, both religions attribute great importance to words and language. Philosophically, this takes the form of identifying Jesus with a Neoplatonic logos and ascribing (co-)eternal status to the Quran as God’s word. Muslims further consider the Arabic language the chosen vehicle of God’s utterance to the extent of relegating all translations into other languages to a distinctly lower level of truth and reliability. Christians accepted the fact that the Bible was composed in Hebrew and Greek, but they place great reliance on translations, first into Latin and later into vernacular languages. Many regard the words of the Bible as literally true and divinely inspired regardless of the language they encounter them in. Memorization of the Quran in Arabic became a hallmark of Islam at a very early point. Memorization of the Mass, the psalter, and favourite hymns has played an important role in some Christian communities, but has often been confined to the clergy.
Writing systems stand in for religious identity. Texts in the Arabic, Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, or Ethiopian scripts are typically taken as visual religious signifiers regardless of the actual language or the import of the words. Calligraphy became a medium of artistic expression in all of these sacred scripts.
Religious specialists form a core element of both Muslim and Christian societies though they do not have a monopoly on scriptural knowledge. Catholic and Orthodox priests do exercise a monopoly over certain sacred rituals that is more clearly delineated in doctrine than are the ritual roles of mosque leaders (imams) and religious judges (qāḍīs) in Islam. This is less the case in Protestantism. Over the past two centuries it has become increasingly common for Christian laypeople and Muslims without formal religious credentials to play active roles in debating, interpreting, and innovating matters of faith.
The movement away from seeing clergy as the moral core of society contributed strongly to the emergence of currents of secular modernity in European Christianity from the seventeenth century onward, and from the nineteenth century onward in Islam, where the equivalent of the clergy are known as ʿulamā. This temporal difference explains many of the discordant views Muslims and Christians have entertained of one other in recent times, but overall, Islamo-Christian civilization shares a fairly consistent tradition of ordinary believers respecting or deferring to clergy/ʿulamā on matters of faith and morals. Clerical roles in, and in remonstrance against, government have recurred in both faiths.
Though Christianity and Islam have not been unique as religions developing high-level educational institutions, they have expanded their institutional structures beyond those of any other faith. The common Hellenistic substrate of Islamo-Christian civilization partly accounts for this, though religious concerns long outpaced scientific or secular ones. Similarities in the organization of Muslim madrasas (higher Islamic colleges) and Christian universities, both of which proliferated from the fourteenth century onward, have suggested direct influences across confessional boundaries. This cannot be proven, but it is entirely plausible.
Law played a more important role in Islamic institutions than in Christian ones, where theology predominated. Both focused on training young men to address the concerns of their societies, unlike pre-university monastic practices that kept Christian scholars isolated from secular society. The Muslim focus on law fed graduates into legal and teaching careers while Christian theology entertained metaphysical discussions that paved the way for scientific enquiry. In the absence of a hereditary aristocracy, Muslim military and administrative elites often received specialized education within their respective institutions leading in modern times to a sharp divide between religious and governmental educational practices.
In the absence of the Roman Catholic commitment to clerical celibacy, whole families of Muslim scholars worked to advance various intellectual programmes. Family networks gave the ʿulamā a partial structural independence from state authority parallel to that which was secured in Christian society by the ecclesiastical hierarchy headed by the pope. Though the rise of Protestantism fractured the unity of the Roman church, the nascent Protestant denominations held fast to their doctrinal independence, and families of Protestant clerics sometimes came to resemble those of leading Muslim ʿulamā.
Missionary outreach became an important area of activity for educated clerics. Sufi shaikhs, who were often highly educated, gained particular prominence in forging syncretic relations with peoples in new lands who were in the process of shifting their identities to Islam. More normative, madrasa-trained, scholars played a missionary role in bringing heterodox communities, many of them originally inspired by Sufism, closer to the views of the Muslim mainstream. Christian missionaries played a similar dual role. Many devoted their careers to improving the lives and morals of other Christians. Others focused on bringing unbelievers into the fold.
At the present day, the United States and Saudi Arabia stand out in the commitment of some of their most devout citizens to missionary activity around the world. As at earlier points in history, some of this activity is doctrinally fundamentalist and revivalist in character while other movements operate through good works and personal witness for the faith in a spirit of ecumenical cooperation.
The life or death of a catchphrase is inconsequential. However, Muslims and Christians will continue to interact far into a seemingly indefinite future. Whether their interaction will incline toward growing conflict or mutual tolerance cannot be predicted, but people who hope for the latter need tools to help their cause along. Viewing the two religions as estranged siblings that have the potential to rediscover, or reinvent, their family ties, and in so doing discover a peaceful modus vivendi, can be such a tool. Hysterical diatribes attributing the vilest of motives or the most sordid and deceitful origins to one side or the other can lead in the opposite direction.
As a matter of history, there is no denying the intimacy of contact and closeness of relationships between Islam and Christianity, just as there is no denying their eras of interfaith warfare and of constructive cultural borrowing. Judaism, the religion with the closest claim to being a third partner in faith, has, at least since 70 ce, lacked the numbers, the zeal for converts, the agency of state power, and the apocalyptic dreams of the other two. Despite the profundity of Judaism’s contributions to both of its offshoots in the scriptural, legal, ethical, and philosophical arenas, its historical interactions with them have taken the form of discrimination, persecution, exclusion, and grudging tolerance rather than crusades, jihads, conquests, reconquests, and imperial domination. The details of the relations among the three, and separately between Jews and Christians and between Jews and Muslims, warrant close attention, both historically and today. But the bigger challenge is to understand the past, and prepare for the future, of relations between Islam and Christianity. The concept of Islamo-Christian civilization can be of value in that enterprise.