Category: Articles

Jeannette Cooperman interviews Prof. Lamin Sanneh, author of Summoned From the Margin about his conversion from Muslim to Catholicism.

A little boy grows up Muslim, falls in love with Catholicism, and winds up one of the world’s foremost scholars on both traditions.

Lamin Sanneh grew up in Gambia, where years were measured by the number of rains you’d seen. He carried the blood of the nyanchos, an ancient African royal line. His grandfather was an Islamic scholar. His father had many wives. Lonely, thoughtful, restless in a way he didn’t understand, Sanneh discovered Christianity and asked to convert, to his family’s chagrin, when he was a teenager. The Methodists stalled; the Catholics were initially reluctant. Finally, just before he left Africa to study in the U.S., he persuaded a minister to baptize him. Years later, he was accepted into the Catholic Church.

Today, Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale Divinity School. Pope John Paul II appointed him to the Pontifical Commission of the Historical Sciences; Pope Benedict XVI asked him to serve on the Pontifical Commission on Religious Relations with Muslims. He’s written a long list of acclaimed books and articles about Islam and Christianity.

Sanneh writes easily, his prose mixing formal elegance with a dry sense of humor. But only recently, at the urging of his children, did he write a more personal book, a memoir titled Summoned From the Margin. It’s the story of his conversion.—Jeannette Cooperman