Christian-Muslim Relations 600 - 1500
Get access
Subject: Middle East and Islamic Studies
General Editor: David Thomas, Alex Mallett
Associate Editors: Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Johannes Pahlitzsch, Barbara Roggema, Mark Swanson, Herman Teule and John Tolan
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History Online is a general online history of relations between the faiths. It covers the period from 600 to 1500, when encounters took place through the extended Mediterranean basin and are recorded in Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin and other languages. Christian Muslim Relations Online comprises introductory essays on the treatment of Christians in the Qur’an, Qur’an commentaries, biographies of the Prophet, Hadith and Sunni law, and of Muslims in canon law, and the main body of more than two hundred detailed entries on all the works recorded, whether surviving or lost.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Associate Editors: Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Johannes Pahlitzsch, Barbara Roggema, Mark Swanson, Herman Teule and John Tolan
Christian-Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History Online is a general online history of relations between the faiths. It covers the period from 600 to 1500, when encounters took place through the extended Mediterranean basin and are recorded in Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin and other languages. Christian Muslim Relations Online comprises introductory essays on the treatment of Christians in the Qur’an, Qur’an commentaries, biographies of the Prophet, Hadith and Sunni law, and of Muslims in canon law, and the main body of more than two hundred detailed entries on all the works recorded, whether surviving or lost.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Dalā'il al-nubuwwa
(290 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Al-Bāhilī l-Baṣrī Date: Unknown; before about 915 Original Language: Arabic
Description Almost nothing is known about this work, not even its proper title. It is not listed among al-Bāhilī’s works by Ibn al-Nadīm, and the only reference is given by ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
Tathbīt, p. 511, who mentions it together with other works about the miracles of Muḥammad that are not referred to in the Qurʾān. From what ʿAbd al-Jabbār says about these works, it appears that this one, like the others mentioned with it, made the point that even though the mirac…
[Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa]
(143 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn Isḥāq ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Bishr al-Ḥarbī Date: before 898 Original Language: Arabic
Description A work about proofs of prophethood is mentioned by Ḥājjī Khalīfa,
Kashf al-ẓunūn ʿan asmā l-kutub wa-l-funūn, 7 vols, ed. G. Flügel, Leipzig, 1835-58, iii, p. 237, though nothing else is known about it. It would probably have been a typical example of the genre, and it may have listed and commented on biblical proof verses and also refuted arguments from Christians.
Significance It presumably employed similar arguments to those in contemporary…
Dalā’il al-nubuwwa
(305 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Al-Wāsiṭī Date: Unknown, before 919 Original Language: Arabic
Description The only reference to this work is given by ʿAbd al-Jabbār,
Tathbīt, pp. 352-53. He names al-Wāsiṭī among others who wrote to expound and defend the prophethood of Muḥammad by adducing references from books of the Bible, though he does not give actual titles. He explains that al-Wāsiṭī and the other authors, among them Ibn Qutayba (q.v.), Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā ibn al-Munajjim (q.v.) and al-Zuhayrī (q.v.), wrote in response to Q 2…
Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa
(124 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Abū Bakr ʿAbdallāh ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUbayd ibn Abī l-Dunyā Date: Before 894 Original Language: Arabic
Description The work is listed among Ibn Abī l-Dunyā’s works in MS Damascus, Dār al-Kutub al-Ẓāhiriyya – Majmūʿa 42, fols 57-59, and, based upon this, is mentioned by al-Munajjid, ‘
Muʿjam muṣannafāt Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’, p. 586. It would have been an example of the ‘proofs of prophethood’ genre, and it may have listed and commented on biblical proof verses and also refuted arguments from Christians.
Significance It presumably employed similar arguments to thos…
Dalā’il al-nubuwwa
(307 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Al-Zuhayrī Date: Unknown; before 995 Original Language: Arabic
Description The only reference to this work is given by ʿAbd al-Jabbār (
Tathbīt, pp. 352-53). He names al-Zuhayrī among others who wrote to expound and defend the prophethood of Muḥammad by adducing references from books of the Bible, though he does not give actual titles. He explains that al-Zuhayrī and the other authors, among them Ibn Qutayba (q.v.), Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā ibn al-Munajjim (q.v.) and al-Wāsiṭī (q.v.), wrote in response to …
Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa
(507 words)
Proofs of prophethood
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdallāh ibn Qutayba Date: Mid-9th c. Original Language: Arabic
Description The original is lost, and its extent and scope can no longer be known. Only relatively short quotations in Ibn al-Jawzī and a few other authors, including Ibn Ḥazm, remain. These include verses from Genesis that are used to show how Islam will abrogate the Jewish law and bring all other dispensations to an end, and also from Isaiah and other prophets from the Hebrew Bible, as well as a few from the G…
Dalāʾil al-nubuwwa, ‘Proofs of prophethood’
(121 words)
-
Abū Dāwūd Sulaymān ibn al-Ashʿath al-Sijistānī Date: Unknown Original Language: Arabic
Description The work is mentioned by Hajjī Khalīfa,
Kashf al-ẓunūn, iii, p. 237, on the authority of Ibn Ḥajar,
Tahdhīb al-tahdhīb. While the work may well have largely comprised lists of Hadiths, it could also have listed and commented on biblical proof verses and also replied to arguments from Christians.
Significance It presumably employed similar arguments to those in contemporary works of the kind, and may have both used earlier works and fed later works in the genre.
Manuscripts --
Editions &…
Dāniyāl al-Suryānī l-Mārdīnī; (= Daniel ibn al-Khaṭṭāb?)
(894 words)
Daniel al-Mārdīnī Date of Birth: Possibly 1327 Place of Birth: In or near Mardin Date of Death: After 1382 Place of Death: Perhaps Mardin
Biography The author of the
Kitāb uṣūl al-dīn (‘The fundamentals of religion’) described below was a West-Syrian (‘Jacobite’) monk who, in the MSS of the work, is regularly identified as Dāniyāl (Daniel) ibn al-Khaṭṭāb. Early 20th-century scholarship identified two possibilities for saying more about this author. First, F. Nau discovered and in 1905 published the story of
rabban Daniel of Mardin, a scholarly monk who in 1382 was arrested a…
Dante Alighieri
(699 words)
Dante Date of Birth: May/June 1265 Place of Birth: Florence Date of Death: 14 September 1321 Place of Death: Ravenna
Biography Dante was born in Florence in 1265. As a young man he was a member of the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries, and he also took an active part in the public life of the city. In 1289, he was among the cavalry at the battle of Campaldino, and possibly the battle of Caprona. Between 1295 and 1297, he was a member of the Council to the Captain of the People, and the Council of the Hundred, before…
Das Rolandslied
(2,648 words)
The Song of Roland
Pfaffe Konrad Date: About 1170 Original Language: Middle High German
Description The
Rolandslied by Pfaffe Konrad is a translation (or better, an adaptation) of the
Chanson de Roland (q.v.), based on the military defeat of Charlemagne at Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in 778. None of the extant manuscripts of the
Chanson de Roland was Konrad’s direct source. With respect to the plot, the
Rolandslied bears the closest affinities to the version attested in the Oxford manuscript, but, with its 9094 verses, the German rendering doubles the length o…
David of Damascus
(281 words)
Biography David was a 9th-century Melkite metropolitan of Damascus. In the year 884, a controversy between him and his patriarch occasioned an exchange of letters, some written by him, others written in his defense. Taken as a whole, these letters show David to have been a figure of some standing in the church, able not only to resist the will of his patriarch, but also to summon the assistance of a variety of powerful allies, including the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria and the most powerfu…
Dawit‘ erēc‘ Baluec‘i
(96 words)
Biography The author of the text informs readers that he is the son of the sister of Grigor, the protagonist of the narrative, and that he had studied under his uncle’s tutelage to become a priest. He says that he was an eyewitness to the events he describes.
Primary Sources of Information The only primary source for the author’s biography is the martyrology itself.
Secondary Sources of Information H. Ačaṙyan,
Hayoc‘ anjnanunneri baṙaran, vol. 2, Yerevan, 1944, p. 45
Works on Christian-Muslim Relations Vkayabanut‘iwn Grigori Baluec‘woy, Simēoni ew Kirakosi S. Peter Cowe
Al-Dāwudī
(343 words)
Abū Jaʽfar Aḥmad ibn Naṣr al-Dāwudī al-Asadī Date of Birth: Unknown; mid-10th century Place of Birth: Ifrīqiya Date of Death: 1011-12 Place of Death: Tilimsān
Biography Al-Dāwudī was a Mālikī jurist born in the north of Ifrīqiya. He travelled to Tripoli in Libya, where he started to write his commentary on Mālik’s
Al-muwaṭṭaʾ, and later moved to Tilimsān, where he was the
faqīh of the city. (Qaddūrī, pp. 169-70, shows that his
shuhra is not al-Rawādī, but al-Dāwudī. The mistaken reading is given by Steinschneider and Brockelmann, and copied by Epalza and Devillard.
Pace Steinschneider, …
Débat du Chrestien et du Sarrazin
(731 words)
‘Debate between a Christian and a Saracen’
Jean Germain Date: 1450 Original Language: French
Description The
Débat du Chrestien et du Sarrazin, also known as
Trésor des simples contre Mahomet and
Cinq livres contre la secte de Mahomet, is Jean’s
magnum opus. Dedicated to his patron, the Duke of Burgundy, it is a massive encyclopedic work of anti-Muslim polemics in five books. It contains little that is new, except for its language: Jean makes available to a French-speaking audience an anthology of anti-Muslim polemical literature translated from the Latin: Petrus Alfonsi’s
Dialogi (q.…
De bello a Christianis contra barbaros gesto
(1,455 words)
De bello'On the war fought by the Christians against the barbarians'
Benedetto Accolti Date: May-July 1464 Original Language: Latin
Description Accolti's history of the First Crusade, consisting of 92 pages (in the
Recueil des historiens des croisades) and of 111 folios (in the presentation manuscript, Florence Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pl. 54.6), was his longest work. He begins the first book with an account of the rise of Islam and the loss to Christianity of the holy lands, and goes on to recount Peter the Hermit and Po…
De expugnatione Lyxbonensi
(381 words)
Unknown author; probably Raol, a Norman-French priest Date of Birth: Unknown Place of Birth: Unknown; possibly Normandy Date of Death: Unknown; latter part of the 12th century Place of Death: Unknown
Biography Raol was a Norman-French priest who wrote an account of the northern European crusading expedition that helped King Afonso I Henriques of Portugal (1128-85) conquer the city of Lisbon in October 1147. This was a temporary stop for the crusaders who were en route to the main target of the campaign in the Levant. This work…
De expugnatione Lyxbonensi
(944 words)
The conquest of Lisbon
De expugnatione Lyxbonensi Date: 1147 or soon after Original Language: Latin
Description The modern English edition and translation is 65 pages of Latin, with an opposing-page translation. The work, in the form of an epistolary narrative, is primarily a description of the conquest of Lisbon (October 1147) by an army of northern European crusaders during the Second Crusade. It was probably written originally as a diary and then shaped into its literary form of an epistolary narrative during the winter of…
De fide catholica. Contra haereticos, Valdenses, Iudaeos et paganos
(567 words)
'On the Catholic faith. Against heretics, Waldensians, Jews and pagans'
Alan of Lille Date: After 1180, but presumably before 1187 Original Language: Latin
Description
De doctrina catholica is to be seen in the context of the preaching missions of the Cistercians against heretics in the south of France. Alan also discusses heretical positions in his theological summa
Quoniam homines. There are also connections to the
Distinctiones dictionum theologicarum (Summa modis).
De doctrina catholica is dedicated to William VIII, Lord of Montpellier. The work is divided into four book…
De fide et legibus
(1,732 words)
‘On faith and laws’
William of Auvergne Date: Unknown; probably between about 1220 and 1240 Original Language: Latin
Description
De fide et legibus is one of the seven treatises that make up William’s
Magisterium divinale ac sapientiale; internal evidence indicates it was written after his
De sacramentis and
De virtutibus et moribus. The first section,
De fide, is much shorter than the second,
De legibus (in the 1674 edition, 17 pages for the former as compared with 85 pages for the latter), and the two sections read like two separate treatises – each has it…
De fine
(646 words)
'The goal'
Ramon Llull Date: 1304 Original Language: Latin
Description This work is dedicated to showing how the infidel can be converted to Christianity and the Holy Land recaptured from the Muslims. Llull divides the work into three parts, of which the most important is the first, dealing with preaching to the infidel. This was the central pivot of his life’s mission, and one that he viewed as just as important as fighting the Muslims. Llull proposes the setting up of four monasteries where the relevant…