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C h A P T e r 1 0 Paul of Antioch ‫سلوب‬ ‫يكاطنألا‬ Sidney H. Griffith Paul, a monk of Antioch, whose Letter to a Muslim Friend was well known among both Christian and Muslim scholars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was the scholarly, early thirteenth-century Arab Orthodox bishop of Sidon in today’s Lebanon. While almost nothing is known of his life, except for tidbits that can be gleaned from his writings, some two dozen Arabic theological and philosophical texts are attributed to Paul among the surviving Arabic manuscripts of the Middle Ages.1 A selection of five of these Arabic works, deemed to be surely authentic, were edited in a critical edition and published in a French translation in 1964.2 Several other texts attributed to him, notably three treatises on philosophical themes, about which there has been some discussion concerning their authenticity, were published earlier and translated into German.3 But with the exception of the Letter to a Muslim Friend, scant scholarly attention has been paid to the works of this important Arabic-speaking Christian theologian. Paul of Antioch wrote on the major themes and topics that had engaged the attention of earlier Arabic-speaking Christian thinkers: the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the oneness of God, the union of divine and human natures in Christ, Christ’s miracles, the entry of Jews and Gentiles into Christianity,4 the confessional differences among the several Christian communities, along with philosophical topics such as good and evil, free will, and predestination. His work is characterized by a thorough familiarity with earlier Arab Christian thought both within the Arab Orthodox tradition and beyond it; for example, in several places he alludes to and reflects his reading of the work of the writer of the Church of the East, Elias of Nisibis (975–1046). What is more, Paul’s writing in general, and not just in the Letter to a Muslim Friend or in other texts directed to Muslim queries, reveals 217 Paul of Antioch a predilection on his part for an Arabic idiom that is distinctly Islamic in much of its vocabulary and turns of phrase, reflecting the broader intellectual and cultural milieu in which he lived. This feature of his work raises the question of his intended audience. While in several of his treatises he speaks of replying to questions posed by Muslims, and he even addresses Muslims, it nevertheless seems that Paul’s fellow Arabic-speaking Christians are his primary audience, to whom he hoped to show how Christian convictions can be reasonably explained from a Christian perspective in the learned discourse of the now dominant Islamic intellectual establishment, including a Christian reading of passages from the Qurʾan. This primary purpose, of course, does not exclude an appeal to a Muslim readership as well, as is notably the case in the Letter to a Muslim Friend, which did in fact elicit a Muslim response. It is unclear just when Paul of Antioch composed his Letter to a Muslim Friend;5 it has to have been sometime after the death, in 1046, of Elias of Nisibis, whose work Paul quoted in his other treatises, and before the year 1232, when the earliest surviving copy of Paul’s text was made.6 Given these parameters, and the fact that the Muslim jurist Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Idris al-Qarafi (1228–85) included a refutation of Paul’s arguments point by point in his anti-Christian polemics,7 albeit without naming the bishop or his letter, it seems reasonable to think that Paul of Antioch, whose theology was thoroughly Orthodox in its confessional profile, flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century,8 at a time when there was no longer any Crusader or Latin presence in Sidon.9 This period would also be the chronological framework within which his Letter would the more readily have come to the attention of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi in Cairo, just a few years after its composition. And given this Muslim response, it would also be the right time for Paul’s letter to have come to the attention of the anonymous Arabic-speaking Christian apologist in Cyprus, who in the early years of the fourteenth century edited and expanded Paul’s letter and sent copies to two prominent Muslim scholars of the day—to Ibn Taymiyya (1263– 1328) in 1316 and to Ibn Abi Talib al-Dimashqi (d.1327) in 132110 —both of whom wrote...

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