This collection of essays represents the fruits of a conference held at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz in 2004 on the subject of ‘Arab Christians – Christians in Arabia’. It concerns itself with all periods of Christianity in the Arab world, before Islam and up to the present time, that is, with ‘historical perspectives as much as current relations’ (p. v). The essays themselves may be classified into three thematic groups.

First, Pre-Islamic Christianity (Wolfgang Hage on varieties of Christianity in the Middle East before Islam; Thomas Weber on the visibility and accessibility of the holy places at pilgrimage sites in the early Christian Middle East; and Detlev Kreikenbom on Christianity in the city of Leptis Magna before the Islamic conquests); second, Christianity in the early Islamic world (Suleiman Mourad on the form of Christianity in Arabia at the time of Muhammad on the basis of the Qur'anic testimonies; Gabriel Reynolds on the link between the Qur'an's portrayal of Adam and his image in certain late antique Christian sources; Franz-Christoph Muth on citations of the Gospel in the ninth-century history of al-Ya'qubi; and Martin Tamcke on the dealings of the heads of the East Syrian Church with the Christians of East Arabia in the seventh century); and third, the Christianity of the modern Middle East (Stephan Dähne on two eighteenth-century Arabic sermons; Khalil Samir on Arab Christian culture from the sixteenth to the twentieth century; Youssef Courbage on the demographics of Christianity in the Middle East; and Ralph Ghadban on oriental Christians in Berlin). There are many interesting insights to be gleaned from the contributions to this volume, such as Muth's deduction that al-Ya'qubi must have used the Syriac peshitta for his section on Jesus, Courbage's finding on the basis of censuses that the number of Christians in the Middle East increased during the Ottoman period, and Reynolds's clever illustration of the interplay between the Qur'an and the late antique text known as the Cave of treasures. Moreover, some of the essays give useful surveys, such as that by Hage and in particular that by Samir, which open up a much neglected area of Middle East history. However, the conception of the volume is slightly odd. There seems to be an assumption that because we now call Christians of the Arab world Arab Christians the Christians of this region were always Arab. Yet pre-Islamic Leptis Magna was in no way Arab, nor in any obvious way were the early Christian pilgrimage sites. If the Muslim historian al-Ya'qubi draws upon the Syriac version of the Gospels what has that to do with Arab Christians or Christians in Arabia? The editors would have done better to derive their title and mission statement from their prefatory comment about the need to highlight ‘the participation of Christians [i.e. in general] in the cultural formation of the Arab World’ (p. v).