I mentioned this book in a thread on this forum a while back, and now it's actually out and available.
The Orthodox Church in the Arab World 700-1700, An Anthology of Sources
Edited by Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger
Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2014
From the jacket:
“This collection makes an extremely important contribution to the history of medieval Christianity and the history of the medieval Near East, inasmuch as such Arabic Orthodox materials are not widely available. There is, so far as I am aware, no other comparable book on this subject in English.”
—Stephen J. Shoemaker, University of Oregon
“This book is impressive in both content and presentation. The editors have marshaled a team of leading scholars in the field to produce a series of translations of significant Christian Arabic works and have added an introduction that forms a comprehensive history of Christians within the Muslim world. They have produced a book that will be of immense help to the further understanding
of Eastern Christianity and the history of relations between Christians and Muslims.”
—David Thomas, University of Birmingham
Christian literature in Arabic is at least 1,300 years old, the oldest surviving texts dating from the 8th century. Yet in the Western historiography of Christianity, the Arab Christian Middle East is treated only peripherally, if at all. The first of its kind, this anthology makes accessible in English representative selections from major Arab Christian works written between the 8th and 17th centuries. Until now, several of these important texts have remained unpublished or unavailable in English. Translated by leading scholars, this anthology encompasses the major genres of Orthodox Christian literature in Arabic.
Included are representative samples of the most important Orthodox works written in Arabic: an 8th century Apology for the Christian Faith; a work by Theodore Abu Qurra on discerning the true religion; a disputation of the monk Abraham of Tiberias with the Muslims; lives of little-known saints and martyrs; the world history of Agapios; the devotional poetry of Sulayman al-Ghazzi; philosophical works of ‘Abdallah ibn al-Fadl; the mystical treatise the Noetic Paradise; a treatise on the priesthood by Agathon of Homs; the Letter to a Muslim Friend by Paul of Antioch; the unpublished notebook and diplomatic correspondence of thePatriarch Macarius; and Paul of Aleppo’s travel account that sheds light on the history of the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire, Southeastern Europe, and Russia.
