SOURCE: "Of the Tractate of John of Damascus on Islam," in The Muslim World, Vol. 41, No. I (January 1951): 88-97.

In the essay that follows, Merrill discusses the response John of Damascus makes to the Muslim charge that Christianity encourages idolatry and polytheism, and documents the limits of the information about Islam available to John of Damascus.

"The first outstanding scholar to enter the field of polemic against the Moslem was John of Damascus. (He is) known to history as the most honored of the later theologians of the Greek Church.… His great dogmatic work on the Sources of Knowledge includes an important section 'Concerning Heresies,' and it is one chapter under this heading that deals with Moslems.¹ The topics the author selected and the arguments he used have been constantly repeated by similar champions from the eighth century to the twentieth.… Throughout all his controversial work John...