Christian apologists writing in Arabic could concede Islam’s legitimacy while disputing its truth

Evidence

Abû Qurrah places himself in a (fictional) nonsectarian viewpoint and attempts to prove the superiority of Christianity in rational, objective terms. While his teacher John of Damascus portrayed Islam in Melkite terms as a Christological heresy, Abû Qurrah attempts to justify Christianity through the vocabulary and ideas of the mutakallimûn of ‘Abbasid Baghdad. He calmly accepts the existence of Islam on the political and social level: we are all seekers of truth, he seems to be saying to Muslims; you just happen to be wrong. Abû Qurrah, like the anonymous Christian who wrote the first Arab apology for Christianity a few years earlier, was an Arab who thought and wrote using the vocabulary of the Koran and the intellectual categories of his Muslim contemporaries. The Muslim intellectuals of Baghdad are not the horrible barbarians of Sophronios or pseudo-Methodius; they are his companions. Yet they are companions who have erroneously picked the wrong religion for understandable but insuffi- cient reasons. Islam is the religion of enjoyment of this world; Christianity is the religion of the next. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 380

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mutakallimûn as Baghdad’s rationalist Muslim theologians whose vocabulary a Christian could borrow.
• XREF: connects to: The claim that Muslims refuse to dispute became Christian dogma