Christianity’s closed canon left no grounds to reciprocate Muslim tolerance

Evidence

Yet their new role of protected, second-class minority was unprecedented: nothing in the writings of earlier Christians described anything remotely like it. If Islam tolerated Judaism and Christianity as expressions of valid (though superseded) revelation (as Christians in theory tolerated Judaism), there was no place in the Christian scheme of history for a later legitimate revelation. Christians had no solid theological grounds for showing the same tolerance toward their Muslim overlords that they received from them. As a result, these Arabized churchmen, some of whom held important positions in the Umayyad administration, preferred to keep an awkward silence about the religion of their new overlords and benefactors. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 579

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the asymmetry in Milgrom’s work on institutions emerging where information differs — here the asymmetry is theological, there it’s economic.
• SEED: An essay angle: the dhimmi relationship as the first modern case of religious pluralism built on asymmetric theology, and whether tolerance requires theological openness or just power asymmetry.