ABSTRACT
The scholarship on contemporary Christian-Muslim relations in the greater area of the Middle East is wide open for development, and remains relatively under-theorised and thin in empirical terms. The scholarly gaps have only aggravated the failures in the policy and practitioner fields when it comes to understanding contemporary Muslim-Christian relations in the region. The analysis of the geopolitical changes in the Balkans, especially during the end of the nineteenth and the rise of the twentieth centuries in the light of the nationalist political movement, has not only demonstrated an ecclesial turn of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church, but has also determined in a new perspective the relations between Orthodoxy and Islam and the question of religious minorities. The recognition of the legal personality of the Patriarchate and the lack of clerical theological education and training are the most important challenges that the Orthodox Church faces in modern Turkey.
