ABSTRACT
Islam originated in a world of major religious rivalries. The warfare that was waged around the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries between the Byzantine and Sasanian empires was characterized as competition between Christian monotheism and Persian dualism (Arab merchants in the new Islamic era would have grown used to new Byzantine coins bearing the sign of the True Cross which the emperor Heraclius seized back from Sasanian possession in 628). Within the Byzantine empire, and wherever else they met, there was endemic rivalry between Jews and Christians over God’s relationship with the created world, and among Christians themselves there was unremitting debate over the precise manner in which the divine and human natures had united in the person of Jesus Christ. In its home environment of Mecca the nascent faith was confronted with the ancestral polytheism of Arabia, and its first martyrs were victims of staunch followers of the old ways.
