Introduction

Religious language is much less common in the twentieth-century accounts and analyses of encounters between west Asian and other majority-Muslim states and countries whose constitutions and cultures stem from Christian teachings. It is quite possibly the beliefs and practices which at first glimpse bear close resemblances that have led to Christians and Muslims through history repeatedly producing images of one another that distort the truth, often to the point of destruction. It has always been Christian dogma that Jesus embodied the last and complete revelation from God, with all stages in earlier times leading up as preparation for his coming. The first systematic history of polemical and apologetic works written by Arab Christians and Muslims was Moritz Steinschneider's Polemische und apologetische Literatur, which appeared in 1877. Later listings include Georg Graf's monumental Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur, which appeared between 1944 and 1953.