Published in The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, eds.

Moshe Bildstein, Adam Silverstein,

Guy Stroumsa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015

Islamo-Christian Civilization

Richard W. Bulliet

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 two-fold 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 “Judeo-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 the 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 Nusairīs and the Druze, initially encountered hostility
from the older versions of the faith. Interpretations that have emerged even more recently, such as the
Baha’is 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,

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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’s 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

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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 five
percent 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 judgment” (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’s 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

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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.

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 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 Judeo-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.

HELLENISM

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 traveled 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.

ABRAHAMIC SCRIPTURE

Islam and Christianity obviously share certain scriptural elements present in the Old Testament. Does this
make it plausible to conceive of a Judeo-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

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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.

SIN AND SALVATION

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 judgment 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 naïve 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 behavior. Though it has been argued that this is
a uniquely Muslim behavior 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 neighbors as social deviates.

Hyper-awareness of the imminence of divine judgment 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

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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 foreswearing sinful
behaviors, 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.

SPIRITUALITY AND MYSTICISM

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 through 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 credentialed 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 physical 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 behavior 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.

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 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.

CONVERSION

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 family
descent, language, color, ethnicity, or previous religious identity.

STATE AND LAW

Throughout history, Islamo-Christian civilization has been inextricably intertwined with governing and
legal institutions. Though modern Christians living in secular societies often cite Jesus’s command to
render unto Caesar’s 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

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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.

VIOLENCE AND TOLERATION

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
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.

WORD AND LANGUAGE

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Drawing on its Hellenistic philosophical substrate, both religions attribute great importance to words and
language. Philosophically, this takes the form of identifying Jesus with a neo-Platonic logos (Greek
“word”) 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 favorite 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.

CLERGY

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
(imāms) 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.

EDUCATION AND MISSION

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

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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 an 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 programs. 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 FUTURE OF ISLAMO-CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION

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

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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.

SUGGESTED READING

Aslan, Reza. 2011. No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, updated edition. New
York: Random House.

Bulliet, Richard W. 2004. The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization. New York: Columbia University
Press.

Cook, Michael. 2001. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Donner, Fred M.. 2010. Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

George Makdisi. 1984. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.

Toland, John V. 2002. Saracens. New York: Columbia University Press.

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