Christian-Muslim history not all hostileThat's an exaggeration, but it's very true that there are treasure troves of Syriac manuscripts crying out to be studied and very few researchers to study them. The focus of this article is Syriac and Muslim-Christian relations, but ancient apocalypses do get a mention.
By Rich Barlow | June 9, 2007
From the Crusades to 9/11, history has given many laypeople a tale of unrelenting hostility between Christians and Muslims. Michael Penn, who teaches religion and gender studies at Mount Holyoke College, is assembling a different picture by poking in an obscure nook of history.
He recently was awarded $120,000 in grants, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, for research into Syriac Christians who, he says, "arguably have the most direct relationship with Muslims" during Islam's formative years. Populating what is today Iran, Iraq, and eastern Turkey, these Christians lived under Muslim occupation from shortly after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 634. Few moderns know the Syriac language, so troves of documents from the period were largely ignored until Penn began burrowing into archives at the British Library and elsewhere.
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Cogratulations to Professor Penn.
(I haven't meant to neglect you all, but I've been very busy in the last week with the New Testament and Hebrew Bible searches, among other things, and it really has been a quiet week in the news.)