The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins

In Cyprus, the Gothic cathedral of Famagusta became the Turkish mosque of Lala Mustafa Pasha, named for the leader of the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1570. As late as the 1990s, the Balkan wars witnessed a number of Orthodox churches transformed into mosques.

In Hagia Sophia, some glorious mosaics were covered with whitewash for centuries, and, when revealed in the nineteenth century, they proved to be some of the great works of Byzantine art.

Earlier in the eighth century, indeed, Saint John Damascene saw Islam not as a new religion but as a Christian heresy, the sect of the Ishmaelites

Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians saw Muhammad as a schismatic rather than the leader of an alien faith.

transcribed (emphatically, not composed) by the Prophet Muhammad from about the year 610 onward. But for scholars who do not accept that interpretation, and who try to trace the origins of that text, the Quran seems to grow out of Christian and Jewish sources, and it is often difficult to separate the two influences. Even what appear to be strongly Semitic currents might have flowed from the Syriac-speaking churches.

Most of the Quranic stories about Mary and Jesus find their parallels not in the canonical four Gospels but in apocryphal texts that circulated widely in the East, such as the Protevangelium of James and the Arabic Infancy Gospel.

The Quran cites the miracle in which the infant Jesus shaped a bird out of clay and then breathed life into it, a tale also found in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. The Quran also presents the death of Jesus in exactly the language of those heretical Eastern Christians known as the Docetists, who saw the event as an illusion rather than a concrete reality:

One sura includes the common Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, the saintly young men who escaped a persecution by sleeping many years in a cave.18 So strong are these connections that over the past half century scholars have questioned whether the Quran could even have originated in Arabia, or whether it was collected or constructed somewhere else with a prominent Christian and Jewish population, perhaps in Syria or Mesopotamia.

When the Quran was constructed, he notes, the only Arabic schools were in southern Mesopotamia, at al-Anbar and al-Hirah, where “the Arabs of that region had been Christianized and instructed by Syrian Christians.

whatever the scholarly verdict on Luxenberg’s theory, there is no doubt that Eastern Christians were a well-known presence in the Arabian world, and influenced the early development of Islam.

Christianity had deep roots in Bahrain by the fourth century,

The church had other sees in Oman and Yemen.

the island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen had “clergy who receive their ordination in Persia, and are sent on to the island, and there is also a multitude of Christians.” The Christian presence a...

when Muslims encountered Ethiopian Christianity, as they must have done, they found a form of Christianity that included many Judaic customs, including circumcision and strict food regulations, which would become standard within Islam.

Najran in Yemen became the scene of a mass martyrdom in 523 when a Jewish king slaughtered thousands of Christian believers, a massacre stopped only by Ethiopian intervention.

Gnostic-tinged groups on the fringes of Islam include the Druze, who teach reincarnation.

image breaking (iconoclasm)

mosques appeared as they did precisely because they were imitating Byzantine Christian churches of the sixth and seventh centuries.

Other influences came into play in the design of mosques, especially from Persia, but the major sources were Christian.

Arab conquerors had scant experience in monumental architecture, they naturally turned to the available experts to build their mosques, and that normally meant Christian designers and craftsmen.

Dome of the Rock—designed as a martyrium in the most fashionable Byzantine style—explicitly to compete with the Christian structures that still dominated city skylines across the Middle East:

If you take a Middle Byzantine martyrium, and take out the icons and images—which is roughly what the iconoclasts did during the eighth century—what you are left with looks uncannily like a mosque.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Hagia Sophia became the classic model for other great mosques of the Ottoman golden age, including the Süleymaniye.

The greatest Turkish architect and mosque builder was the brilliant Sinan (1489–1588), who was born a Greek Christian

A former Christian used a former Byzantine church as the model for the glorious mosques that awed visitors to Turkey and are today see...

A modern Christian transported back in time to the Near East of the sixth or seventh century would be struck at the many resemblances between the Christianity of that time and the modern world of Islam.

Modern Christians are struck by the severity of Ramadan, which forbids believers to eat or drink during daylight hours for the space of a month, a severe discipline in hot climates. Yet this was in fact close to the oldest Christian practice of Lent.

Muslims saw prostration as eccentric Christian behavior, exactly as many modern Christians are puzzled by Muslim styles of prayer. In the eighth and ninth centuries, what divided Muslims and Christians was not whether they prostrated themselves, but whether this was appropriate behavior before an icon or holy image, as Christians believed, or solely before God, as Muslims advocated.

“Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention: it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.”

What Westerners call the Middle Ages was to Muslims the golden age of their faith, and central to that era were the great Sufi brotherhoods,

the thirteenth-century mystic Rumi was a great Sufi. Since the Sufi orders (tariqat) led the expansion of Islam beyond the faith’s original core in the Middle East, it is impossible to understand the Islam of North Africa or most of Asia without a grasp of Sufi tradition.38 Although scholars debate the origins of Sufism, some of the parallels to Eastern Christianity are overwhelming, particularly in terms of practices of mystical prayer and devotion.

Probably by the fourth or fifth century, Eastern Christian monks developed the technique of the Jesus Prayer or Prayer of the Heart, the repetition of a simple mantralike petition many thousands of times in order to create a trancelike state of devotion in which the prayer pervades one’s very being.

Through repeating this prayer, which in its usual form was “Jesus, have mercy on me a sinner,”

Russian spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim.

With this ancient tradition in mind, we recall that the most characteristic Sufi devotion involves the multiple recitation of the central proclamation “La ilaha illa'llah” (“There is no god but God”). In their dhikr, remembrance, Sufis recite these words, the shahada, thousands of times each day, exactly as Egyptian or Syrian monks recite the Prayer of the Heart.

Sufi practices parallel those of the monks and hermits, in lands that had been overwhelmingly Christian.

Sufi derives from the Arabic word for “wool,” the material of an ascetic’s garment. This costume followed the practice of the Nestorian churches, whose bishops and higher clergy were expected to wear wool, rather than linen or silk, as a sign of simplicity and devotion.

Muslims inherited truly ancient sayings attributed to Jesus that date back to the first or second century, and which appear in apocryphal Gospels.

Across what had been the Christian Middle East, common religious practice continued to be a matter of saints and shrines, healing and pilgrimage.

the “catholic” character of Sufi practice certainly attracted former Christians living under Muslim rule, and made their transition to the new religious order much easier and more attractive.

Rumi was reputedly never happier than when communing with the Christian monks of the house of Saint Chariton, near Iconium (Konya). Rumi’s followers founded the Mevlevi order, which won many adherents for Islam among the Christian populations of the battered Anatolian cities.

From the completion of the Muslim conquest in the fifteenth century until the final purge of Christianity in the twentieth, Christians and Muslims not only coexisted in Asia Minor, but also shared many devotional practices and venerated the same holy men and women.

the Church is an anvil that has worn out many a hammer.”

Nothing so clearly indicates the imminent revival of a religion as a rising torrent of prophecies about its demise.

Certainly by the sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Christians lived in Christian states, and most of them on the European continent, where networks of Christian nations could provide mutual support and defense. Christians might bemoan the persistence of church-state affiliations, but without such alliances there might today be no Christians left to experience those regrets. Otherwise, Christianity might be a footnote in Islamic or Chinese history textbooks, alongside Manichaeanism.

Christians in Mesopotamia and China who came to be seen as tools of the Mongol conquerors.

The worst period for Middle Eastern Christians followed the social and religious revolution introduced by the Mongol regime in the thirteenth century; and the later Japanese state faced a genuine threat from predatory European colonial powers. In such circumstances, states launched brutal and enduring persecutions, which over decades or centuries could not fail to take their effect. The question of time frame is also important. Although Communist regimes devastated churches and other religious bodies, they had only a few decades to impose their will. In contrast, Christian communities suffered sporadic persecutions over many centuries.

Rare indeed is the religion that can withstand a full thousand years of extreme maltreatment.

In the Middle East also, higher education and better access to contraception have resulted in Christian communities having much lower birthrates than Muslim neighbors, so that Christians have progressively lost their share of population.

From the earliest days of the Muslim expansion, new regimes sponsored the migration of Arab and Muslim peoples into what had been Coptic or Syriac territories, reducing the relative power of older-stock populations and their cultures—and their faiths.