The Letter to the Christians

At the foot of Mount Sinai there is a monastery, Saint Catherine's, that has kept its lamps lit for some fourteen hundred years, longer than almost any house of prayer still standing. Part of why it survived is a single document its monks have guarded all that time: a letter, a covenant, which by their tradition the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, granted to them and to Christians everywhere, and sealed with the print of his own hand. It is called the Ashtiname, a Persian word for a letter of reconciliation. What it asks is not what people who fear Islam expect it to ask.

What the letter promises

The covenant does not call the Christian away from his faith. It does the opposite, it places him under guard. Wherever monks and pilgrims gather, it says, in a mountain or a valley or a church, we are behind them and we shall protect them, their persons and their property. No church is to be pulled down, nothing carried off from it. No bishop is to be driven from his seat, no monk from his monastery, no pilgrim turned back from his road. No Christian is to be forced out of his religion. A Christian woman married to a Muslim is to keep her own faith and her own prayers, free of coercion. They are not to be overtaxed, not made to bear arms, not dragged into anyone's wars. And then the line that turns the whole thing over: for the Muslims are to fight for them. The protection runs one direction only. The weight of it falls on the believer, not on the believed.

But is it real?

This is a project built on the words trust, but verify, so the question has to be asked plainly. Is the letter genuine? The honest answer is that it is both old and contested. Certified copies hang in the monastery's library, some witnessed by Muslim judges. Caliphs and sultans renewed its protections for a thousand years; under Ottoman rule the governor of Egypt reaffirmed it every year; a court in Pakistan cited it as still binding within our own lifetimes. And yet historians since the nineteenth century have questioned parts of it, the list of witnesses, the silence of the earliest sources. We will not wave that argument away. But notice what does not hang on it. The spirit of the letter is not resting on a single sheet of parchment. It is written into the Quran, and the Quran is not the thing in question.

Where the Quran says it too

Read the book this project is about and the covenant stops looking like a generous exception and starts looking like a faithful application. The Quran forbids forcing belief on anyone at all: there is no compulsion in religion (2:256). It tells the believer in as many words that God does not forbid you to be kind and just toward those who have not fought you over your faith or driven you from your homes, and that God loves the just (60:8). It commands that any disagreement with the People of the Book be carried only in the best way, and that the believer say, our God and your God are one (29:46), and that very verse is quoted inside the letter itself. It counts the Christians near: the closest in affection to the believers, it says, are those who say we are Christians, for among them are humble people devoted to learning who are not given to arrogance (5:82).

And then there is the verse that ought to settle it. Explaining why God lets people hold one another in check, the Quran names what would be lost if He did not: that monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques, where God's name is much remembered, would be torn down (22:40). Read it slowly. The book sets the church beside the mosque, in the same line, and grieves the ruin of either in the same breath. A scripture that mourns the fall of a church is not a scripture that licenses its burning.

This was never a side to be on

So let it be said as plainly as the letter says it. A believer who reads this book and then raises a hand against a Christian, against his person, his church, his right to pray, has not stumbled over a hard verse. He has broken a covenant and contradicted the verse it stands on. To protect your Christian neighbour is not tolerance, not a favour, not diplomacy. In the Quran's own framing it is obedience, and in the Prophet's letter it is a command said to run until the end of the world. None of this was ever Muslims against Christians, or any people against any other. The book says God made us into peoples and tribes so that we would come to know one another, not so that the strong would erase the weak (49:13). And it holds the same horizon open to the believer, the Jew, the Christian, and everyone who believes in God and the Last Day and does good: their reward is with their Lord, and no fear will be upon them, nor will they grieve (2:62).

This project counts letters in a book and finds a structure no one has been able to explain. But the book those letters spell is not a weapon, and the people who first kept watch over its words also kept a promise to the very people some now imagine it is aimed against. If you are a Christian reading this, you are not an opponent here. By the words the Prophet is said to have set his own hand to, you are under protection. Count with us, in peace.

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