The first Christians to meet Muslims were not Latin-speaking Christians from the western Mediterranean or Greek-speaking Christians from Constantinople but rather Christians from northern Mesopotamia who spoke the Aramaic dialect of Syriac. Living under Muslim rule from the seventh century to the present, Syriac Christians wrote the first and most extensive accounts of Islam, describing a complicated set of religious and cultural exchanges not reducible to the solely antagonistic. Through its critical introductions and new translations of this invaluable historical material, When Christians First Met Muslims allows scholars, students, and the general public to explore the earliest interactions between what eventually became the world’s two largest religions, shedding new light on Islamic history and Christian-Muslim relations.
Author
Michael Penn is a specialist in the history of early Christianity. He explores how ancient Christian communities forged their own identity, especially in the context of religious and ethnic pluralism. Professor Penn's first book Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning. Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration with a Smith College computer science professor that uses recent advances in the automated analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of middle eastern Christianity and the manuscripts they produced. Before joining the Mount Holyoke College Department of Religion in 2002, Professor Penn was a postdoctoral fellow at Brandeis University, and taught religion and Women Studies courses at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has also been a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. In addition, he has held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA. Professor Penn's class offerings include courses in the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament and seminars such as "What Didn’t Make It into the Bible," "Sex and the Early Church," and “Early Christian-Muslim Relations.”
