Christian and Muslim Dialogues The Religious Uses of a Literary Form in the Early Islamic Middle East By David Bertaina (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011. 285 pages.)

Abstract

In his first book David Bertaina, assistant professor of religion in the University
of Illinois’ History Department (Springfield), makes an important contribution
to our knowledge of Christian-Muslim relations in the first five
centuries of the Islamic era. Also a scholar with the Institute of Catholic Culture
in McLean, VA, he is critical of many interreligious dialogues today, as
they tend to be straightjacketed by liberal ideals of tolerance and neutrality.
The result is that, unlike the robust and dynamic dialogue literature in the early
centuries of Islamdom that took “seriously the truth claims of its participants
in matters of faith and reason,” much of which passes now for interfaith conversation
avoids what is most precious to each side in the name of “neutrality.”
Another lesson we can draw from the past is the importance of highlighting
the issue of power when different communities of faith come together to debate. Not surprisingly, much interfaith dialogue today, he notes, can often feel
“oppressive” to Muslims, at least to some extent, as it did for Christians living
under Islamic rule – even in the heyday of cosmopolitan Abbasid Baghdad.
An historian and Semitic languages specialist, Bertaina trains his sights
on the ancient Near Eastern literary genre of interreligious dialogue, which
can be traced back to Plato and other early Greek writers, and which Christians
leveraged in their own polemics with Jews in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.
Between the second and fifth centuries AH, both Muslims and Christians used
the dialogue genre to communicate their own convictions about religious truth,
in both apologetic and polemical modes. While they were mostly addressing
their own communities, they also sought to persuade the religious other. In
fact, this was a discourse that also functioned as “a means to fulfill epistemic
commitments such as that of Christians to evangelization and Muslims to mission
(da’wa)” (p. 3) ...