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Orthodoxy and Islam in the Middle East: The Seventh to the Sixteenth Centuries
Conflict or concord? Histories of Islam from its early seventh century beginnings in Arabia often portray its explosive growth into the wider Middle East as a story of struggle and conquest of the Christian people of Greater Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Alternatively these histories suggest that as often as not the conquerors were welcomed by the conquered and their existing monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Judaism tolerated and even allowed to flourish. In this short but in depth survey of the almost nine centuries that passed from the beginning of the spread of Islam up to the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Syria and Egypt beginning in 1516, Constantin Panchenko offers a more complex portrayal that opens up fresh vistas of understanding of these centuries focusing on the impact that the coming of Islam had on the Orthodox Christian communities of the Middle East and in particular the interplay of their Greek cultural heritage and experience of increasing Arabization.
216 pages, Paperback
Published April 20, 2021
About the author
Constantin A. Panchenko
4 books2 followersConstantin A. Panchenko is an Associate Professor, Department of Middle and Near East History, Institute of Asian and African Studies, at the Lomonosov Moscow State University.
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July 20, 2025
The book is relatively short for the colossal period of time it covers while still managing to pack a lot of information in; it was readable, but it was able to do this only because it expects a pretty high degree of context knowledge on the historical timelines from the reader.
There were a lot of good nuggets that I picked up through this text, but the main thrust of this story is that the world of Late Antique ecclesiastical controversy was fossilized under indifferent but mostly tolerant Muslim rule for about a century, until in the later Umayyad period the solidification of Islam as a governing ideology clarified the second-class status of Christians (and other religious minorities) who underwent centuries of sporadic but progressive decline as persecution, instability, warfare, environmental degradation, social and demographic changes, and institutional decay took their toll. The Church was losing flock and became increasingly reliant on foreign backers for financial and logistical support until hitting a crunch point under the Mamluks in the 13th-15th centuries, as the reaction to the Crusades and Mongol Invasions not just by the political elites but by the Muslim public and proto-civil society sank in.
The tragedy of this is that Eastern Christians never asked for any of it - since the Arab conquests, they were almost always passive victims of historical circumstance with little in the way of historical agency. While many Eastern Christians held highly notable roles in intelligentsia or bureaucracy, they were never really able to arbitrage this into an ability to organize and protect themselves, and in many cases this perception of their power as uppity dhimmis or fifth-columnists by the Muslim masses or ulema ended up making whatever privileges they did have into a liability.
This gave me a much greater appreciation for the Ottomans, who provided stability, structure, and comparatively impartial rule to what had been a chronically war-torn and unstable region. Though not fondly remembered in much of the Orthodox world today, and for good reasons, in Egypt and the Levant Ottoman rule may have stayed the death sentence that hung over the Christian East and permitted for a new flourishing of connected Eastern Mediterranean culture unseen since the conquest. Given the return of pervasive ethnic and religious conflict and mistrust, self-concerned foreign influences, and centrifugal political forces that have set in since the decline of Ottoman rule, I worry that we have been watching what this book might record as another “Crisis of the Christian East” unfolding before our own eyes over the last century continuing through today.
There were a lot of good nuggets that I picked up through this text, but the main thrust of this story is that the world of Late Antique ecclesiastical controversy was fossilized under indifferent but mostly tolerant Muslim rule for about a century, until in the later Umayyad period the solidification of Islam as a governing ideology clarified the second-class status of Christians (and other religious minorities) who underwent centuries of sporadic but progressive decline as persecution, instability, warfare, environmental degradation, social and demographic changes, and institutional decay took their toll. The Church was losing flock and became increasingly reliant on foreign backers for financial and logistical support until hitting a crunch point under the Mamluks in the 13th-15th centuries, as the reaction to the Crusades and Mongol Invasions not just by the political elites but by the Muslim public and proto-civil society sank in.
The tragedy of this is that Eastern Christians never asked for any of it - since the Arab conquests, they were almost always passive victims of historical circumstance with little in the way of historical agency. While many Eastern Christians held highly notable roles in intelligentsia or bureaucracy, they were never really able to arbitrage this into an ability to organize and protect themselves, and in many cases this perception of their power as uppity dhimmis or fifth-columnists by the Muslim masses or ulema ended up making whatever privileges they did have into a liability.
This gave me a much greater appreciation for the Ottomans, who provided stability, structure, and comparatively impartial rule to what had been a chronically war-torn and unstable region. Though not fondly remembered in much of the Orthodox world today, and for good reasons, in Egypt and the Levant Ottoman rule may have stayed the death sentence that hung over the Christian East and permitted for a new flourishing of connected Eastern Mediterranean culture unseen since the conquest. Given the return of pervasive ethnic and religious conflict and mistrust, self-concerned foreign influences, and centrifugal political forces that have set in since the decline of Ottoman rule, I worry that we have been watching what this book might record as another “Crisis of the Christian East” unfolding before our own eyes over the last century continuing through today.
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