The study of Muslim–Christian relations in the Middle East during the age of the ‘Gunpowder Empires’ has, until relatively recently, remained a rather marginal topic. Archival limitations can partially explain this neglect. The amount and the nature of the sources at our disposal varies considerably from one empire to the other. It would hardly come as a surprise to the initiated that the Ottoman archive is much richer than the Iranian and Mughal ones, which explains why Ottomanist scholarship on the matter has developed faster. In addition, the status of the Ottomans as the quintessential antagonist of Christendom in the Western imagination, the large number of Christian subjects in the Ottoman realm and the frontier wars fought between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs make the study of Muslim–Christian interactions in this empire an attractive scholarly endeavour.

In the Persianate world, the subject's appeal has lagged behind, not without justification. To begin with, the sources are more constrained in terms of both number and scope. Court chronicles, which comprise the most important indigenous body of documentation, are notably lacking in their portrayal of the non-elites, including of course, religious minorities. Other indigenous archives, which are often richer for social history, such as the Armenian and Georgian ones, pose an unsurmountable linguistic obstacle for many Iranologists (including myself ). Nonetheless, scholars with the adequate linguistic expertise, such as Vazken S. Ghougassian, Edmund Herzig, Gorgio Rota, Hirotake Maeda, Helen Giunashvili and Tamar Abuladze have provided us with important studies on the histories on these communities. For the broader picture however, European travelogues, together with missionary and diplomatic correspondence, remain indispensable despite the obvious limitations of their European gaze. Scholars of both the Iranian and Indian worlds at large, such as Rudi Matthee and Jorge Flores, to name only two major examples; as well as specialists on Catholic missions in Asia, such as John M. Flannery and Christian Windler, have produced important works of scholarship drawing partly from these sources.

Yet, the greatest obstacle to the development of scholarship on Muslim– Christian relations in the Persianate world is perhaps more thematic than archival: while the presence of indigenous and European Christians played an important role in both Iran and India, in neither place did Christians constitute the most important religious minority nor the major antagonists to the politically-dominant group.