Armanjani BR - DIMMID

John Andrew Morrow, Muhammad and the Christians: Commemorating the Covenants of the Prophet

In this book, John Andrew Morrow attempts to illustrate how Christian communities received the treatises that shaped relations between Muslims and Christians in the formative years of the Islamic tradition and how the Prophet and the early Islamic community may have implemented them.[1] The pledges of the Prophet Muhammad to protect Christians are believed to have included commitments with secular and religious communities as well as local and regional governing bodies. There is also a belief that this legacy is present in several geographic areas.While some scholars have questioned the authenticity of these treaties, Morrow tries to provide evidence for their authenticity.[2]

The book’s first chapter, entitled “The Qur’anicity of the Prophet’s Covenants,” argues for the Quranic foundations of the promises that the Prophet Muhammad is believed to have made with Christians. According to Morrow, his study shows that the covenants are consonant with what he calls “the Qur’anic cosmovision.”[3] The book’s second chapter, entitled “Muhammad, Mount Sinai, and the Mystical Eagle: Unearthing the Mythic Substrata,” provides an analysis of the Covenant of the Prophet Muhammad that has been preserved by the monks from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt. Morrow states that this chapter “sieves through legends and symbols . . . in search of original truth.”[4] Morrow’s third chapter, entitled “Gabriel Sionita and the Covenant at the University of Cambridge,” discusses the Covenant with the Christians of the World, which was published in 1630 by Gabriel Sionita. This chapter argues that the text, which Sionita copied, was reproduced from an official Ottoman document.[5]

The book’s fourth chapter, entitled “The Arabic Garshuni Covenant of the Prophet from Mar Behnam Monastery in Iraq,” examines an early twentieth century copy of the treatise between Muhammad and the Christians, which was written in Arabic using the Syriac script.[6] The fifth chapter, entitled “The Art of the Covenant: Symbolic Representations and their Significance,” examines artwork related to Muhammad’s covenants.[7] The sixth chapter, entitled “The Christians of Najran: Two Conflicting, Incompatible, and Irreconcilable Portraits,” analyzes some of the interactions between the Christians of that city, which is in the southern part of Saudi Arabia near that country’s border with Yemen, and the Prophet Muhammad.[8] In this vein, the chapter examines “two conflicting and incompatible portraits: one of mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence on the part of an Islam of love [and] . . . mercy, and the other of humiliation and subjugation on the part of an imperialist and supremacist Islam.”[9] The book’s final chapter, entitled “Were the Covenants of the Prophet Ever Negated? Imam al-Shafi`i’s Covenant of Protection and the Covenant of the Prophet,” argues that the covenants of the Prophet Muhammad were not completely negated.[10] In that regard, Morrow states his belief that despite “minor divergences including word choice, style, syntax and sentence structure . . . the covenants that were granted to various faith communities are strikingly similar in structure and content.”[11]

Among other weaknesses, Muhammad and the Christians is overly detailed, poorly written, and difficult to read. For example, in Morrow’s attempt to argue that Muhammad “wrote documents to Jews and Christians . . . that are in harmony with the covenants,” he provides a list of several dozen scholars’ names that is approximately half a page long and embedded in a grammatically incorrect paragraph.[12] Such stylistic and grammatical problems are present in several other parts of the book.

Morrow also engages in diatribes against individuals and groups who disagree with his arguments. For example, he states,

The opponents of the covenants of the Prophet are almost invariably Islamists or Islamophobes. They are either Muslim fundamentalists who follow in the footsteps of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their extremist predecessors, or they are Zionists, Christian fundamentalists, or secular atheists. Either way, they share the same violent and intolerant vision of Islam and reinforce each other’s narrative. They are two sides of the same coin. Prejudiced, biased, and bigoted, they are oblivious to the scholarship on the subject or ignore it altogether, repeating, ad nauseum, their unfounded allegations that the covenants of the Prophet are late forgeries without providing any evidence to support their claims. Who forged them? When? Where is the proof? Some of these cynics do not even understand what is meant by ‘the covenants of the Prophet Muhammad.’[13]

Such ad hominem attacks against scholarly skeptics of Morrow’s assertions leave little room for scholarly discussions about the authenticity of the covenants. Gabriel Said Reynolds and Amidu Olalekan Sanni are two of many scholars who reject Morrow’s claims on several grounds, including lack of evidence that the covenants, to which Morrow refers, originated in the seventh century, and the fact that those texts are written in the languages of later Christians and express many of their concerns and priorities.[14]

While Morrow’s desire to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue may be commendable, his narrow and uncritical approach to the texts, which he purports to analyze, have led him to significant distortions and inaccuracies. Prospective readers of Morrow’s book would be well advised to approach it carefully, and with the knowledge that it represents one side of an ongoing scholarly debate.

Notes

[1]Marianne Farina, CSC, foreword to Muhammad and the Christians: Commemorating the Covenants of the Prophet, by John Andrew Morrow (Washington: Academica Press, 2025), xxiii.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Morrow, Muhammad and the Christians: Commemorating the Covenants of the Prophet, xxxiii, 1-38.

[4]Ibid., xxxiii; 39-72.

[5]Ibid., xxxiii; 73-90.

[6]Ibid., xxxiii-xxxiv; 91-122.

[7]Ibid., xxxiv; 123-156.

[8]Ibid., xxxiv; 157-194.

[9]Ibid., xxxiv.

[10]Ibid., xxxiv; 195.

[11]Ibid, 195.

[12]Ibid., xxix.

[13]Ibid., xxvi.

[14]Gabriel Said Reynolds, review of The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World, translated by John Andrew Morrow, First Things, February 1, 2014. [Reynolds’s book review is the second one on that web page].

Amidu Olalekan Sanni, review of The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World, translated by John Andrew Morrow, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 35, no. 4 (2015): 589-592.

Jon Armajani holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies with a focus in Islamic and Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara; an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary; and a B.A. from Oberlin College. He is Professor of Theology at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University in Minnesota, where he teaches courses in Islam, Christianity, Interreligious Dialogue, and the History and Politics of the Middle East. His latest book is Shia Islam and Politics.