A striking fact has changed my view of Islam: that for 400 years, between the Islamic victories of the seventh century until the end of the 11th century, a half of the world's professing Christians lived under Muslim rule.
Those were the centuries of St Bede and St Dunstan in England, of the foundations of the congregation of Cluny and the order of Chartreuse in France. The life of the other half of the body of Christians is quite unknown to those of us who do not read Arabic or Syriac. At best we have heard of St John of Damascus (died 749), who worked as a top civil servant in the Umayyad caliphate.
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