Early Christian responses to Islam aimed to slow conversions away from Christianity

Evidence

The invasions could look quite different depending on one’s perspective: an orthodox Christian safe in Constantinople bewailing the loss of territory, a Melkite thrust into the role of dhimmi by the new masters, or a Monophysite happy to be liberated from Byzantine oppression. Yet members of all the Christian communities eventually had to face an unpleasant fact: Islam was here to stay. God’s scourge showed no signs of wishing to go away or to convert to Christianity. On the contrary, society was becoming slowly Arabized, in language and in social customs, and more and more Christians were converting to Islam. Greekand Syriac-speaking Christians had begun to feel like foreigners in their own lands. Gradually, Islam came to be seen as a religious, and not merely military, threat. Christian writers needed to come to terms with it and offer arguments to refute it, not in order to convert Muslims to Christianity but to slow down the tide of conversions from Christianity to Islam. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 314

Categorization

• SEED: The internal divisions among seventh-century Christians (Orthodox, Melkite, Monophysite) responding so differently to the same invasion is a strong lens for understanding how external domination lands on already-fractured societies — could pair with modern proxy-war scholarship.