Here is an authentic story of the early days of Islam, even as it blossomed alongside the Christian Church and flourished as a mainstream faith in the Near East, Asia, and then into Europe.Through the efforts of a youthful and bold Syrian prince, Abd al-Rahman ibn Umayya, Gothic Spain was uplifted to a culture of enlightenment just as the rest of Europe struggled with her own dark ages.With statesmanship and perseverance he vanquished his enemies, crushed his rebels, secured his frontiers and established an empire, uniting under his rule a country once divided into many factions...
Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "Christian-Muslim divide"--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule. Just who were the Christians in the Arabic-speaking milieu of Mohammed and the Qur'an? The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is the first book-length discussion in English of the cultural and intellectual life of such Christians indigenous to the Islamic world. Sidney Griffith offers an engaging overview of their initial reactions to the religious challenges they faced, the development of a new mode of presenting Christian doctrine as liturgical texts in their own languages gave way to Arabic, the Christian role in the philosophical life of early Baghdad, and the maturing of distinctive Oriental Christian denominations in t.. 
