Christian religion (premodern Muslim positions) - Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE
[Article]
Thomas, David
Leiden
Brill
(2,981 words)
The attitudes of Muslims towards Christianity and Christians are strongly influenced by what they find in the Qurʾān. The details that the first generations of Muslims derived from encounters with Christians led them to believe that Christians had lost the pristine purity of their faith and fallen into serious doctrinal errors based on corrupt readings of their scriptures or, more often, corrupt transmission of the scriptural text. It fell to Muslims themselves, as the guardians of revealed truth, to expose the errors in the earlier tradition and to point their