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Book Review: Religion and the Individual

existence, and also of the threat to its continuance posed by the combination of Israeli expansionism and Muslim renewal. Kenneth Cragg, once Assistant Bishop in the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, and thoroughly versed in Islam and its relations with Christianity, has written a masterly survey of the development of Arab Christianity, with an assessment of its prospects. He traces the origin and early growth of Christianity among the Arab tribes, and analyses the situation of the Arab Christians after the Islamic conquest of the Middle East. Condemned to an inferior social and political status within the House of Islam, Arab Christians before long became a minority in what had been the heartlands of Christianity. They found it difficult to maintain their identity as Arab Christians in a society whose Arab cultural identity was inseparable from Islam. Their standing in the eyes of their Muslim rulers was not improved by the Crusades and subsequent Western Christian incursions into the Islamic world. Kenneth Cragg continues the story through the centuries of Ottoman rule in the Middle East. He describes the part played by Arab Christians in the growth of Arab nationalism, which, inevitably bound up with Islam, has posed fresh problems for the identity of Arab Christians. He then deals with the specific situation of Arab Christians in Egypt, the Lebanon, and Israel. Two final chapters consider the expression of Arab Christianity in poetry, art and liturgy, and the future of Arab Christianity. Bishop Cragg is clear that Arab Christianity has a future, but it has to be alongside Islam. At the same time, he highlights the difficulties of any kind of religious dialogue between the two, by showing how alien is the Christian Arabic of translations of the Bible to Arabs brought up on the language of the Qur'an, The theological categories of incarnation and Trinity remain no less alien to the Muslim religious mind now than when the two religions first confronted each other. The Arab Christian is not easy reading; but the concentration it demands is well repaid by the understanding it gives of the past, present, and possible future of a Christianity too little known in the West.