John of Damascus and Islam makes valuable contributions to our understanding of John and his intellectual and social context. Schadler disabuses scholars of some assumptions about the term “heresy” that have hindered our ability to read and understand John’s claims about the origins of Islam, and he helps us reclaim John—and his Christian community more generally—as a knowledgeable perspective on the diverse and shifting world of early Islam. His final chapter discusses John’s intellectual relationship to the ninth-century Syrian bishop Theodore Abū Qurra, the first Arabic-language Christian theological writer whose name we know, who was deeply influenced by John.

Peter Schadler. John of Damascus and Islam: Christian Heresiology and the Intellectual Background to Earliest Christian-Muslim Relations. The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, Volume 34. Brill 2017.

From Marginalia. Review by Joshua Mugler, Georgetown University