7 - Polemic Dialogues between Christians and Muslims in the Seventeenth Century

Summary

The literary genre of dialogues between Christians and Muslims is ancient, going back to the first centuries of Islam, and it has roots in Islamic as well as Eastern Christian culture. In the time of the Abbasids, the Christian Arabic writers working in the court milieu and aspiring to equality with the Muslim mutakallimūn (theologians) devoted themselves to this type of literature. It is difficult to determine to what extent these texts were linked to actual dialogues among Muslims and Christians. Nevertheless, there is evidence from this period on the practice of majlis, the sessions in which members of various religions were invited to explain their beliefs.

These sessions were no longer practised in the seventeenth century, in the Sunni surroundings of the Ottoman Empire, but we do have evidence of such meetings at the Mughal court in India and the Shiʿi Safavid court in Isfahan at that time. Christian apologetics and disputations from the first centuries of Islam were then known only in part. The Catholic disputational dialogues against Islam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were embedded in a more general practice of disputation in the Europe of this period.

Here we will focus especially on the production of two French missionaries, both of whom lived in Aleppo in the 1670s. In 1679, Michel Febvre (alias Justinien de Neuvy) published a Latin pamphlet entitled Praecipuae obiectiones quae vulgo solent fieri per modum interrogationis à Mahumeticae legis sectatoribus, Iudaeis, et Haereticis Orientalibus adversus Catholicos, earumque solutiones (The Main Objections Commonly Made in an Interrogative Form by the Followers of the Law of Mahomet, the Jews and the Eastern Heretics against Catholics, and Their Solutions), which appeared also in Arabic and Armenian translations. The same Capuchin, in two successive chapters of his Theatre de la Turquie (1682), included a ‘Method to Be Followed in order to Confute the Errors of the Turks, and the Abuses of Their Sect’ and ‘Another Method to Convince the Turks on Their Errors’.