Christians wrote theology in Muslim terms inside early Abbasid court debates

Evidence

While John of Damascus portrayed Muslim doctrine from a Greek Christian perspective as a Christological heresy, his pupil Theodore Abû Qurrah (d. c. 820) attempted to justify Christianity in the terms of Muslim theology. Abû Qurrah played a role in the intellectual fervor of early ‘Abbasid Baghdad: he was one of the mutakallimûn (theologians) who pondered and debated the relations between revealed truth and reason; he was a Christian mutakallim who, in the free-wheeling intellectual atmosphere of the day, could argue philosophy and theology with Muslims in the caliph’s court. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 375

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to John of Damascus portraying Islam as a Christological heresy (the chapter’s opening, and a theme running through the whole book on how Christians framed Islam).
• DEFINE: Defines mutakallimûn as court theologians debating revealed truth versus reason.