Jonathan Edwards knew more about Islam than most intellectuals of his day. He owned a copy of the Quran, read dictionaries and encyclopedias of religion that discussed Islam, and wrote several thousand words of commentary on its history and theology in his theological notebooks. The religion and its major actors played significant roles in his History of the Work of Redemption. His settled views of Islam were not original; they seem to have derived mostly from secondary sources written by Reformed polemicists, and much of his writing against it was a function of his lifelong war with deism. Yet he raised questions which now seem prescient, accurately forecast that Islam would be one of the three most important religions geo-politically in the twenty-first century—along with Roman Catholicism and something like evangelical Protestantism—and constructed a theology of religions that can be helpful as we think of Islam today.
