This important book, more than twenty-five years in the making, represents a significant contribution to the history of Christian-Muslim dialogue by an acknowledged expert on the interaction between indigenous Christians, particularly those of the Eastern Churches, and their Muslim rulers, resulting from the meteoric expansion of the new religion. Of value to the specialist, not least for the extensive bibliography provided, the book is nevertheless written in such a way as to be accessible to the general reader. It examines, within the period between the life of Muhammad and the mid-thirteenth century, the doctrinal, theological, apologetical and polemical responses of Syriac- and Arabic-speaking Christians to the challenges of Islam, their experience of living under Muslim rule, the role they played in the development of Islamic intellectual culture and their vital and often overlooked contribution to the dissemination of classical texts through translation into Arabic. Islam views itself as abrogating Christianity and accuses Christians of falsification of their Scripture. However, while not unaware, as the title indicates, of the difficulties experienced by Christians as a consequence their Qur'anically-sanctioned subaltern status as dhimmi in the land of Islam, the author argues that, nevertheless, for much of the period under consideration, the principal model of Muslim-Christian relations was characterised by an authentic convivencia, enabling Christians to have a significant formative influence on Islam, while concurrently clarifying and defining their own various ecclesial identities. In his final chapter, Griffith argues that western Christian thinkers in the field of comparative theology between Christianity and Islam would benefit from taking cognisance of the intellectual and cultural history and scholarly accomplishments of those Christians who lived for centuries in the world of Islam, and from an engagement with their literary output. It is interesting to note that they will find in these works, as Griffith demonstrates, a rejection of the currently pervasive notion of Islam as an ‘Abrahamic religion’. While future editions would benefit from the removal of outdated and pejorative references to ‘Nestorians’ ‘Jacobites’ and ‘Monophysites’, and a glossary of Arabic and technical terms would be helpful for the less specialised reader, Griffith's book should become required reading for those interested in the history and development of the Eastern Churches in an Islamic milieu and of Muslim-Christian polemic and interaction, and for those engaged today in promoting dialogue between Christianity and Islam, to whom it offers a deepened awareness of the long history of such dialogue, and an antidote to a perspective which sees the only possible paradigm for Muslim-Christian relations as a Huntingdonian ‘clash of cultures’.