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Michael Philip Penn is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He is author of Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and editor of When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam.
List of contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. When Good Things Happened to Other People: Syriac Memories of the Islamic Conquests
Chapter 2. A Different Type of Difference-Making: Syriac Narratives of Religious Identity
Chapter 3. Using Muslims to Think With: Narratives of Islamic Rulers
Chapter 4. Blurring Boundaries: The Continuum Between Early Christianity and Early Islam
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Michael Philip Penn is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. He is author of Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and editor of When Christians First Met Muslims: A Sourcebook of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam.
Summary
The earliest and largest corpus of Christian writings on Islam was written in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Envisioning Islam shows how these previously neglected texts problematize modern perceptions of an exclusively hostile Christian reaction to Islam and revolutionize our understanding of the early Islamic world.
