The Stream

On June 22, 2025, the Mar Elias (St. Elijah) Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus, Syria became a scene of unspeakable tragedy. An Islamic suicide bomber slipped into the sanctuary during Divine Liturgy, opened fire on the faithful, and detonated his explosive vest. Twenty‑five Christians — men, women, and children — were killed. More than 60 others were wounded, many critically.

The church was destroyed; wooden pews were splintered, stained glass shattered, and blood ran along the tiled floor.

And yet, amid the wreckage, one portrait endured: The centuries‑old icon of St. John of Damascus, a son of this very city, remained unscathed. The symbolism cannot be ignored: Muslim terrorists bombed a Damascus church, but the icon of the man who, nearly 13 centuries ago offered the first theological critique of Islam and its prophet remained untouched.

Who Was John of Damascus?

John of Damascus (AD 675–749) lived under the Umayyad Caliphate, a Christian in a Muslim‑ruled world. Fluent in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic, he served briefly as a civil administrator before withdrawing to the monastery of Mar Saba, where he became a towering theologian and defender of the faith.

In his Fount of Knowledge, particularly the section known as Concerning Heresy, not only did he pen the earliest systematic Christian response to Islam — which he referred to as the “heresy of the Ishmaelites” — but he was the first to dismiss the founder of Islam as a false prophe

A false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in [the Arabs’] midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven [the Koran]. He had set down some ridiculous compositions in this book of his and he gave it to them as an object of veneration.

In short, John accused Muhammad of borrowing biblical fragments, twisting them, and producing a creed that denied Christ’s divinity and rejected the crucifixion. He openly ridiculed the explanation Muslims gave for the Koran’s origin: that Muhammad received it “in his dreams.”

To John, Islam was not only theologically deficient but morally compromised. He criticized its allowance of polygamy and easy divorce, and he charged that Muhammad retroactively sanctified his own behavior — most infamously by taking the wife (Zaynab) of his own adopted son (Zayd), and then banning adoption altogether to justify his adultery. John even accused Muslims of idol worship, claiming that the Black Stone of the Kaʿbah was once the head of a pagan statue, and he scoffed at the way they condemned Christians for venerating the cross and sacred images.

Far-Sighted and Unafraid

How striking, then, that the painting of this man — the first to confront Islam with reason and polemic — should survive an attack carried out in Islam’s name. It’s as if the icon itself, glinting unbroken amid rubble and blood, silently testifies that faith and ideas outlast hate and destruction. John of Damascus devoted his life to defending the incarnation and the veneration of images, insisting that matter could bear witness to divine truth because God became man in Christ. That his own likeness endured while the sanctuary was scarred and parishioners lay dying is almost a living illustration of his theology.

Incidentally, the funerals that followed the bombing were suffused with grief and defiance. Hundreds of Christians crowded the Church of the Holy Cross, their chants of Kyrie eleison — “Lord, have mercy” — echoing through streets still smelling of smoke. Priests bore caskets draped in white, and Patriarch John X denounced the “criminal hatred that stalks the faithful.”

There is a yet another profound historical continuity in this moment. John of Damascus lived as a barely tolerated second‑class citizen under the caliphs. He wielded the pen where he could not wield the sword, exposing what he saw as the theological hollowness of a faith that denied the heart of the Gospel. Today, zealots invoke that same faith to shatter the lives of his spiritual descendants. Where John once engaged with words, his modern adversaries resort to bombs and bullets.

And yet, the outcome is the same as it was in his time: the Christian witness endures. The unbroken icon, surviving where lives and walls have fallen, speaks without words. It reminds us that terror can destroy bodies and buildings but not the truths they signify. It connects eighth‑century Damascus to the present in a single, unbroken line of faith, suffering, and resistance.

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Muslim extremists in 2025 achieved what they sought in the moment: they murdered innocent Christians at prayer. But in the long view of history, their act only underscored the relevance of the man whose icon they could not touch, and who was first to systematically expose their prophet. St. John of Damascus saw, with clarity and courage, the dangers of a creed that denied Christ while wielding temporal power. His voice, preserved in parchment and now echoed in surviving, if blood stained, iconography, continues to confront an ideology that expresses itself in hate and death.

In the end, the bombers have written nothing. Their names will fade, as the names of so many persecutors have faded before them. But the face of John still looks out from his icon, serene and unbroken, in the very city where he once walked and prayed — a silent witness to the endurance of faith over fear and truth over terror.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.