This paper explores the rhetoric and ideology of interfaith polemics in early Arabic Christian theology. Christian minorities living within the Islamic empires and polities of the early Middle Ages developed a distinctive genre of theological literature designed to refute the religion of Islam’s claim to truth and to argue instead for Christianity’s rightful claim to that status. Their status as minorities sometimes put them in a precarious positions with respect to state power, while at the same time allowing them to participate often quite freely in intellectual conversations of the period. This paper uses the example of a treatise written by Habib ibn Khidmah Abu Ra’itah, a Syrian Christian bishop living in the early 9th century, to reveal how power structures inform theological and religious literature. Specifically, by closely analyzing the rhetoric of religious violence in this treatise, this paper argues that the characterization of Islam as a religion of war appears in this treatise and others like it due to the political conditions under which it was written, i.e., during a period of Islamic imperial dominance. The paper looks in detail at the specific hermeneutic assumptions and devices that Abu Ra’itah uses to achieve this interpretation of Islamic sacred history, while at the same time shielding his own sacred history from the same accusation. The paper concludes with reflections on the contemporary usage of this characterization, and its possible historical origin in these 9th century Christian theological sources. In other words, the paper seeks to explore how discourses of power can structure theological reasoning and thereby produce theological arguments that can serve immediate social or political purposes in interfaith relations, whether in ninth century Baghdad or twenty first century America.