Muslims regard Christians as “People of the Book,” and Jesus Christ as a forerunner of the Prophet Muhammad; these two facts have colored Muslim attitudes toward Christianity and Christians, in particular the tolerance shown Christians and other religious faiths under the Ottomans. Christianity and Islam have been in close contact for centuries, as the spread of Islam in the first millennium supplanted Christian communities in North Africa and the Middle East; an overview of the history of Islam illustrates the continuity in relations between the two faiths over the centuries, from the Umayyads and Abbasids to the Seljuks and Ottomans, including during the era of the Crusades.
