You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There is no doubt that religion, throughout human history, has influenced and shaped the cultural and social institutions of societies and governed human behavior and morals through theological ethics and religious faith.
In the case of Christianity, many treatises about Christian ethics have been written in Western societies to the majority of Christians who live in the west. However, as the author pointed out, there has been a dearth of writings for minority Christians who live in a non-Christian Muslim context to guide them and help navigate a difficult and sometimes hostile religious and political environment; or, stated otherwise, what it means to be and behave as a Christian in a non-Christian Muslim social and cultural context. This is an ethical question with a theological base.
“It is deplorable that very little or no effort has been made, especially on the part of Western Christianity, to understand and appreciate the predicament of Eastern Christianity in the Muslim context. Irreparable damage has been done to the very Existence of Eastern Christianity by the Crusades in old times and by various forms of colonialism more recently.”
Before the rise of Islam, Christianity had utilized the philosophical concepts and sophisticated terminologies of the Greeks in their doctrinal formulation; on the other hand, Islam started with a minimum amount of doctrine and a maximum content of ethics. But when Arabic established itself as the official language in countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, it became possible to express Christian theological ideas in the Arabic language, which the Muslims theologians could well understand. By the beginning of the 13th century, various ethnic communities had already lost their native languages and had adopted Arabic as their mother tongue. And, as the author emphasized, it is for this reason that the 13th century offers a more mature and developed form of Christian theological thinking and writing in the Muslim context than the p