Christianity, Arabia and early Islam

  Extracts from Christendom and Islam: Their Contacts and Cultures Down the Centuries by W. Wilson Cash, an old book that I am editing for reprinting in my free time... this has become another fun project for learning. Wilson speaks particularly to the need for indigenous and faithful Christ-following for every community.  As the book's title implies, he also speaks to the nature of earlier Islam in relation to Christianity.

In the expansion of Christianity in that period there seems to have been no idea of making the Church indigenous. On the other hand, everything seems to have been done to emphasize its Greek character. Harnack says, “There are no pre-Mohammed translations of the Bible into Arabic, and that is strong proof that Christianity has not found any footing at all among the Arabs in early times.” Bell, too, tells us in The Origin of Islam in its Christian Environment (page 17) that “the language of Christianity in the East was Aramaic or Syriac and there is no evidence of a Christian Church using Arabic in its services.” [...]

It is significant that Mohammed supplied for the Arabs just those elements which, if they had been provided by Christianity at an earlier date, would have made the Church a national, indigenous body with its own Arab expression. He gave them a book in their own tongue, and composed in a style that was beloved by all Arabs. They were illiterate, but they would listen for hours together to recitals of stories mainly taken from the Bible, stories spoken not in dull prose but in a rhythm that has a peculiar charm for all who know the language. He presented religion to them as a great adventure, and he centered their faith in the simple dogma of the unity of God. He attracted his followers to himself and made Islam a matter of personal loyalty and allegiance. Every Arab who became a Mohammedan felt that the Prophet belonged to him. He was a son of the desert. He lived their life and understood their point of view. While they had refused to give up their idols and their pagan customs for the Christian appeal, they readily accepted Islam. To them one faith was foreign and the symbol of a foreign power, the other was indigenous and offered security and independence.

 

“Had Christianity produced a deep impression upon Arabia it would no doubt have burst through the conventions which confined poetry to the subject and temper of the old desert life, or at least have produced a religious literature of its own. But it was left to Islam to bring that impulse, if indeed Islam did convey it to the Arabs of the desert.” (Bell, p, 50.)

 

It is doubtful indeed whether the Scriptures were ever translated into any of the North African vernaculars.

 

When Constantine the Great gave his patronage to Christianity and made the Christian faith a factor in State policy, he was laying the foundations for the collapse of Christianity four centuries later through an invading Moslem army.

 

[Early] Islam to many was a lay movement and appeared very much like a simplified and reformed Christianity.