Jenkins again: “in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue . . . . He duly consulted the bishop named Adam . . . . Adam had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese, and the two probably shared a knowledge of Persian.  Together, Budhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together... Read more

Islam took over areas once Christian, but Christianity left its mark on the conquerors.  Jenkins writes: “No worthwhile history of Islam could omit the history of the Sufi orders, whose practices often recall the bygone world of the Christian monks.  It was the Christian monastics who had sought ecstasy and unity with the divine by the ceaseless repetition of prayers, a practice that would become central to the Sufi tradition.  Once dead, Sufi adepts continued to attract devotees to their... Read more

Philip Jenkins writes, “we need to realize that such incidents of decline and disappearance [like the decline of Christianity he recounts in his book] are quite frequent, however little they are studied or discussed.  Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian history.”  In a footnote, he notes that there have been studies of the erasure of Christianity in Japan (given fictional form in Endo’s Silence ), but finds only a few, dated studies of the decline of... Read more

Philip Jenkin’s earlier books turn the world upside down – south is up, north is down.  His recent The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died does the same for eastern ad western Christianity.  As the subtitle indicates, the book is about the rise and suppression of Christianity in the lands east of Byzantium, in Syria, modern day Iraq and Iran, China and India, and south... Read more

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India explores the clash between modernization and tradition in contemporary India.  Early on, he illustrates with several anecdotes from his travels: “Outside Jodhpur, I visited a shrine and pilgrimage centre that has formed around an Enfield Bullet motorbike.  Initially erected as a memorial to its own, after the latter suffered a fatal crash, the bike has now become a centre of pilgrimage, attracting pilgrims – especially devout truck drivers... Read more