Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

50 t CHAPTER TWO
The Christians of Arabia
Although there is abundant material on a Christian presence in
Arabia, our sources are principally literary ones from the high Hellenic
tradition, both secular and ecclesiastical. The first dwell
chiefly on the political relations between the empire and its federated
Arab allies among the nomads, and it is clear that religion,
more specifically conversion to Christianity from the indigenous
polytheism, had a major role to play, as a condition for entering
into a treaty relationship with the Roman state and then in the
fierce sectarian strife that shook the Middle Eastern Churches of
the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries. But the ecclesiastical writers
provide some sense of what, besides politics, attracted the Arab
tribes to Christianity, to wit, the example of Christian holy men
already living in remote outposts where they were accessible to the
nomads, even at a great distance, and the miracles that they and
others could still perform in the name of Christ.
Though we can chart certain events in its history, describing the
substance and practice of Arab Christianity is far more difficult.
That the Christian Arabs constituted a kind of “church” is evident
from the fact that there were bishops consecrated for their use at
the camps of the Arab federates who patrolled the frontiers. Monasticism
was particularly cultivated among them, and many of its
more popular reflexes such as the veneration of holy men and of
relics are attested. We do not know much about the actual Christian
Arab cultus, an ignorance hinged to substantial doubts as to
whether there was even available an Arabic translation of the New
Testament, and its inevitable corollary, that the language of worship
and piety was not Arabic but Syriac or Christian Aramaic.
We are, in consequence, ill informed about the quality of the
Christianity beyond the immediate borderlands of the great empires,
or, to be more precise, of the milieu from which Islam
emerged. That there were some Christians at Mecca can scarcely
be doubted, and the Quran, and hence Muhammad, know about
the Gospel, Jesus, Mary, churches, monks, and monasteries. Indeed,
the Quran’s version of Christianity is a notorious hybrid, as
we have seen, and it ill conforms with any existing model.