The Holy Fathers on Islam

Within ten years of the death of Muhammad, the Arab armies had taken Damascus, Jerusalem and Alexandria. For the next eight centuries the Orthodox Church lived beside Islam, and very often under its rule.

This volume gathers, in a complete new translation from the Greek and Old Church Slavonic, what the Holy Fathers and the Byzantine writers who followed them said about the new faith: from the eyewitnesses of the conquest to the patriarch who set out the Christian faith for Sultan Mehmed II after the fall of Constantinople.

Part One - The First Encounter (7th century): the Teaching of Jacob on "the prophet who came with the Saracens"; St Sophronios of Jerusalem; St Maximus the Confessor; St Anastasios of Sinai.

Part Two - Under the Caliphate (8th-9th centuries): St John of Damascus on the heresy of the Ishmaelites and his disputations with a Saracen; Theodore Abu Qurra; the life of Muhammad in the chronicle of St Theophanes the Confessor and of George the Monk; St Cyril, Apostle of the Slavs, at the court of the caliph; Niketas of Byzantium's refutation of the Qur'an.

Part Three - The Last Centuries of Byzantium (12th-15th centuries): Euthymios Zigabenos; the disputation at Melitene; Bartholomew of Edessa; Niketas Choniates and the Byzantine rite of abjuration for converts from Islam; St Gregory Palamas in Turkish captivity; the emperor-monk John Cantacuzenus; the dialogues of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos with a Muslim scholar, including the famous Seventh Dialogue; and Gennadios Scholarios before Sultan Mehmed II.

Every text is introduced and annotated. The historical setting is explained, the passages of the Qur'an are identified, and legend is distinguished from history. A source book for all who wish to know how the Church has confessed Christ in the face of Islam, "with meekness and fear".