In his study of a pre-Islamic Ancient South Arabian inscription Ahmad Al-Jallad (“A Pre-Islamic Basmalah,” JSAI) suggests that the Qur’anic basmalah might be a sort of response to the Christian trinitarian formula (from Matthew 28), “In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit.” While this particular proposal may be difficult to prove definitively, Al-Jallad’s suggestion may be taken as a possible lens through which to view other elements of the Qur’an. If Al-Jallad is correct about the basmalah, then the Qur’an is not imitating a Christian formula but responding to it. I would like to ask more broadly if the Qur’an – even in those passages that do not explicitly address Jesus, Christians or Christianity – might be developing its own theological formulas in response to Christian ideas. In part this paper is a response to a certain hermeneutic of attentiveness to the author’s real or imagined conversation partners (something applied to the Qur’an already by Angelika Neuwirth in her Islam and Late Antiquity; 2019). Put otherwise, I will heed Tor Andrae’s (Les origines de l’islam, p. 100) warning not to see religious creation as a “windowless monad” but think through how Christianity was a conversation partner for the Qur’an’s emergence. I will look specifically at the Qur’an’s portrayal of Abraham (especially in Q 2:124–140 and Q 3:65–68), at the Qur’anic idea of fear of God in its Meccan material (an idea explored by Nicolai Sinai in his The Qur’an: A Historical Critical Introduction, ch. 7) and at Sūrat al-Fātiḥa, taking serious a claim of exegetes such as Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201; Zād al-masīr), among others, that its final verse alludes to Jews and Christians. I will also comment on recently studies of paleo-Arabic inscriptions from the Arabian Peninsula (including those by Al-Jallad, Nehmé, and Robin), a number of which are explicitly Christian, to make an historical case for the idea of Christianity as a conversation partner of the Qur’an.