On Theodore Abū Qurrah

A worthy read from Thicket & Thorp on Theodore Abū Qurrah - a defender of the faith who used the lexicon of the Muslims to articulate Christian truth (his book is available here). The full blog post is here.

Theodore Abū Qurrah was the first Christian writer whose name has come down to us to write in Arabic. As such, he is particularly interesting for his early approach to presenting Christian theology and praxis in an environment that had already become heavily Islamicized by his lifetime (755-830 AD) a hundred years after the Arab conquest and the establishment of the Umayyid state in Syria. One of the changes Abū Qurrah dealt with in his writings was the change in Christian attitude towards icons, or, more specifically, the public veneration of icons in church. In early Islam particularly, depictions of humans was, if not completely proscribed, considered with extreme suspicion if not outright declaration of being forbidden. While this attitude has hardly ever really been universal, and is by no means universal now (while in Fes I purchased a wonderful poster of scenes from the Qu’ran and Islamic legend, plus a local saint, which I will eventually get around to scanning onto my computer and posting one of these days, ان شاء الله), the iconoclastic current of Islam has always been strong, and was particularly hostile to Christian iconography in Abū Qurrah’s day.

More specifically, Christians were being mocked by their Muslim neighbors, and accused of being idolatrous, because of their veneration of icons. Now, granted, being mocked and insulted is a hardly out and out persecution, but in a miliue that had become heavily Islamicized, and with Muslims occupying the highest positions, this sort of mockery had a deep impact. Plus, Christianity had already undergone the massive shock of Islamic conquest, which by itself tended to weaken the hold of Christian dogma on the masses. Mocking icons and calling them idols was only one more element in the weakening and dissolution of Christianity as a popular religion (something Abū Qurrah states in his defense of icons in fact). Not only were icons themselves mocked, but the depiction of Christ crucified was a particular object of scorn, as the Qur’an states very explicitly that Christ was not crucified, and for Sunni Islam the crucifixion is very incongruous with the way God is expected to act (Shia Islam, on the other hand, very much embraces the idea of redemptive suffering and shame, but that is another story).

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Complete article here.