Islam rises in the desert
Muhammad and the new faith
In a cave on Mount Hira above Mecca, a forty-year-old merchant named Muhammad receives, according to Islamic tradition, the first revelation of the Quran. The angel Gabriel appears. The command is simple and terrifying: Read.
Muhammad cannot read. He is, by all accounts, illiterate. And yet the words come.
By the time of his death in 632 AD, Muhammad has unified most of the Arabian Peninsula under a new faith that is simultaneously a theology, a legal system, a political order, and a military force. Within a century of his death, Islam controls territory from Spain to Central Asia — an expansion more rapid than any in history, absorbing lands that had been Christian for centuries.
The church that Volume 2 ended with — Gregory the Great sending Augustine to England, Irish monks preserving civilization, Justinian building Hagia Sophia — suddenly finds half its world gone. Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Carthage, all the great centers of early Christianity: under Muslim rule within a generation.
This is not a story the church has always told honestly. Islam's rise is not simply persecution. It is a theological challenge — a claim that the Christian account of Jesus is wrong, that the Trinity is blasphemy, that the gospel has been corrupted, that the final and complete revelation came to Muhammad.
The church in Volume 3 must find its way in a world where a rival faith claims to have superseded it. The conversation between Christianity and Islam will shape world history for the next fourteen centuries and is not finished.
“We believe in God and in what has been revealed to us, and what was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the tribes, and in what was given to Moses and Jesus.”
— Quran 2:136
“He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”
The rise of Islam is the most significant geopolitical fact in the history of the church after Constantine. It permanently altered the geography of Christianity, destroyed the great centers of early Christian learning, and posed the deepest theological challenge the church had faced.
The church's responses ranged from serious intellectual engagement — John of Damascus's careful refutation of Islamic theology — to violent military crusade, to the quiet patient witness of communities that lived under Muslim rule for centuries without surrendering their faith.
God made all nations from one man, Acts says, and marked out their appointed times. The rise of Islam was not outside his knowledge or his purposes — even if those purposes remain difficult to read.
How do you engage seriously and respectfully with the theological claims of a faith that challenges your own at its center?