Crosses, Icons and the Image of Christ in Edessa: The Place of Iconophobia in the Christian–Muslim Controversies of Early Islamic Times

Very early in the history of the controversies between Christians and Muslims in the early Islamic period, as recorded in texts written largely in Syriac and Arabic from the early eighth century onward, the issue of religious images and the right worship (as-sujūd) of the one God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad arose as an important topic of conversation. In one of the earliest Syriac texts to record an exchange between a Christian monk and a Muslim emir,1 the Disputation between a Monk of Bêt Hālê and a Muslim Arab, a conversation which is dated to the early 720’s and which took place at a monastery in the environs of Kufa and al-Hira in Iraq,2 the Arab reportedly challenged the monk with the statement, ‘It is a grievous thing that you worship (sāgdayton) images, crosses, and the bones of martyrs.’3