Patristic Studies and the Emergence of Islam

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This paper argues for a closer engagement by patristic scholarship with the issues and problems about the emergence of Islam. It starts by discussing recent trends among historians of late antiquity and Islamicists alike to reconceive early Islam as a late antique religion, and moves to suggest that what we now know about the historical background, together with the intense theological debates that were going on among Christians in the eastern Mediterranean during the sixth and seventh centuries provide a ‘thick’ context for Qur’anic themes. Especially (but not only) in view of the recent tendency to absorb early Islam into late antiquity, patristic scholarship and Qur’anic and early Islamic scholarship would do well to come closer together.