Many excellent scholars study Islam. Many other scholars explore the changing face of global Christianity. Rarely do those experts look at the two worlds—Muslim and Christian—side by side, which is a pity: when we do, we see some remarkable parallels and connections that shed light on both.
Theological discussions of the relationship between Christianity and other religions have been at a steady simmer at least since the 1973 publication of John Hick’s God and the Universe of Faiths. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Hick’s pluralism became the reigning orthodoxy as it was taken up by many others, including Paul Knitter and Wilfred Cantwell Smith. But by the early 1990s, that orthodoxy was severely crippled as postmodern theories penetrated the academy.