The author stresses the importance of a religious dialogue between Christians and Muslims. He briefly sketches the history of Coptic Christianity in Egypt, from its beginning in the first century onward. Using this survey as an illustration, he argues that what needs to be recovered, for the purpose of the dialogue between Muslims and Christians today, is a new outlook and a new thesis: Islam, as well as accepting Christianity from its very inception, never tried seriously, as the ruling political system, to eradicate Coptic Christianity, nor did Islam ever engage seriously in doing so in any systematic manner. In fact, one is sufficiently safe to say that Islam ‘preserved’ Coptic Christianity in Egypt at a time when both the Eastern and the Western churches ‘wrote off’ Coptic Christianity as heresy, and when Copts were threatened by annihilation and extinction, physically and religiously. When both Christians and Muslims today are fully able to recognize this survival as divine mediation in history, Muslims will join Christians in welcoming the wise, courageous stand that Vatican II has initiated for dialogue, not only between Christians and Muslims, but also on behalf of both. Note, ref.
