Michael Philip Penn, When Christians first Met Muslims.Interview by Abdalrahman Aboelmajd

    No doubt, Muslim tradition recorded many meetings, Heraclius' line of questioning a story of Heraclius and his meeting with Abu Sufyan, a member of the Quraish tribe, a cousin and an enemy of prophet Muhammad, Was anybody amongst his ancestors a king, Have you ever accused him of telling lies before his claim (to be a Prophet), Does he break his promises, Abu Sufyan responses no.

prophet Muhammad sent a letter to Heraclius inviting him to Islam as well as Heraclius' response. In summary, Heraclius recognizing, Muhammad as God's messenger and that he wanted to become a Muslim. However, faced with pressure from his subjects, he changed his mind, I wondered why Muslim tradition excluded in most western accounts.  

    We have a fresh opportunity to reflect about When Christians First Met Muslims. At this point, Michael Penn will speak not only about his views on his recent book, but also about Syriac Christians and their relationship to Islam.

Michael Philip Penn is a professor of religion at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

and the author of When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam,

Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press), and Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church (University of Pennsylvania Press).

Q : First of all, we thank you for agreeing this interview, I wonder what prompted you to take up When Christians first met Muslims.

MP: As part of a larger research project on early Christian reactions to the rise of Islam, I discovered that the world's oldest, largest, and most diverse collection of early Christian writings about Muslims was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Because few now read this language, most modern accounts of Christian-Muslim relations exclude these important texts. In order to make these works more widely available,  I decided to translate the earliest of these from Syriac into English and to provide short, critical introductions to each of them.

Q: Why is The year 630 a turning point not simply for world history but also for the modern study of world history?

MP: In my work I use the correspondence of both the Byzantine emperor Heraclius entering Jerusalem and Muhammad returning to Mecca--in the same year--as a way to introduce my readership to some important historical background regarding both early Christianity and early Islam immediately prior to the Islamic conquests.

Q: Originally called orientalists and more recently Islamicists, these historians were often trained in Western universities but consciously went in the opposite direction than Heraclius, why?

MP: Until recently most scholar of Islam have been trained in classical Arabic but not Syriac and thus were unable to read many of the earliest Christian writings concerning Muslims.

What about Christians of Najran who faced prophet Muhammad at Madina and Mubahala?

MP: Because we do not have surviving written records from these Christians, there were not texts from them to include in my book.

Q: I read your work I found you almost certainly focus on military engagements, don’t you?

MP: Although the very earliest Syriac sources on Islam do have a predominate focus on the Islamic conquests, very quickly that concern moves to the periphery and their focus is much more on how Christians could flourish under Islamic rule.

Abdalrahman: Thank you very much, Professor Penn.