Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt 1218-1250

By Kurt J. Werthmuller

Using the life and writings of Cyril III Ibn Laqlaq, 75th patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, along with a variety of Christian and Muslim chroniclers, this study explores the identity and context of the Christian community of Egypt and its relations with the leadership of the Ayyubid dynasty in the early thirteenth century. Kurt Werthmuller introduces new scholarship that illuminates the varied relationships between medieval Christians of Egypt and their Muslim neighbors. Demonstrating that the Coptic community was neither passive nor static, the author discusses the active role played by the Copts in the formation and evolution of their own identity within the wider political and societal context of this period. In particular, he examines the boundaries between Copts and the wider Egyptian society in the Ayyubid period in three "in-between spaces": patriarchal authority, religious conversion, and monasticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: May 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781617973802

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Coptic Identity

and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt

Coptic Identity

and Ayyubid Politics

in Egypt

1218–1250

Kurt J. Werthmuller

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

First published in 2010 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2010 Kurt J. Werthmuller

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Dar el Kutub No. 13992/09

ISBN 978 977 416 345 6

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wethmuller, Kurt

Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt, 1218–1250 / Kurt Werthmuller.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2010

p. cm.

ISBN 978 977 416 345 6

1. Egypt—History 640–1250

2. Copts—Egypt I. Title

932.023

1  2  3  4  5 15  14  13  12  11  10

Designed by Adam el-Sehemy

For Florence and Sophia

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 - Approaching Non-Muslim Identities in Islamic History

2 - State, Society, and the Copts under the Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Bahri Mamluks, 969–1382 CE

3 - Patriarchal Authority

4 - The Politics of Conversion and Apostasy

5 - Monks and Monasticism

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Timeline of Patriarchs of Alexandria and Ayyubid Rulers of Egypt

Appendix 2: Cyril III ibn Laqlaq’s correspondence

a. Letter to Ignatius, Patriarch of Antioch

b. Letter to the King of Ethiopia

c. Instructions to the Bearer of the Christian Convert

d. Letter to the Monks of Wadi al-‘Araba

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Ihave found in the course of writing this study that one of the most rewarding and humbling aspects of an historical project of this magnitude is the immense benefit of working with and learning from so many helpful and gracious individuals and organizations. There are, of course, some to whom I owe a tremendous debt, and without whose help and support none of the research, analysis, and writing of this study would have come together.

First, thanks to my doctoral advisor and mentor, Stephen Humphreys, whose unique blend of impeccable scholarship, encyclopedic knowledge, unending passion for learning, and genuine kindness made it a true privilege to work with him throughout my time at University of California, Santa Barbara. Second, I am also deeply indebted to the other members of my dissertation committee: Nancy Gallagher, who saved my doctoral preparation more than once with her patience and encouragement, and Hal Drake, whose pedagogical sense of humor and endless curiosity are often in my thoughts while in front of my own classroom.

I am also forever indebted to the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad program for granting me an unforgettable year of scholarship in Cairo, and to Abuna Wadiaё Abullif of the Franciscan Center for Christian Oriental Studies in Cairo, whose intimate knowledge of medieval Coptic life and, perhaps more importantly, of the FCCOS collection informed the framework for this study more than any other.

I am truly grateful to the American University in Cairo Press not only for adopting this book as one of their own, but also for their tremendous management and staff, which has made the publication process far less daunting than it once appeared. I am especially grateful to Neil Hewison for his initial advice and encouragement in the process, and Randi Danforth for her support and always-insightful ideas (not to mention coffee at Diwan). Many thanks as well to Debra Blome and Abdalla Hassan, who patiently shepherded me through various edits. Kathleen Scott and Jaroslaw Dobrowolski at the American Research Center in Egypt were a great help in making the series of monastery images readily available, from the fascinating original work of Betsy Bolman and Patrick Godeau at St. Anthony’s (certainly an inspiration for my own work on monasticism).

Furthermore, I owe many thanks to my parents, whose weekly trips to our modest public library during my childhood are largely to blame for my life of ideas. They have always supported my love for the Middle East, and they, too, have learned to ‘drink from the waters of the Nile.’ I am proud of them, and proud to be their son.

My deepest appreciation and gratitude belong to my wife, Florence, whose patience over the years as I wrote and revised this work, and her constant faith in my potential, have meant more to me than any fellowship or academic appointment. She has also been my irreplaceable research partner and translator extraordinaire: she likely never imagined our married life (or far too many late-night conversations) as revolving around a thirteenth-century Coptic patriarch for months at a time, but she has helped me bring him to life nevertheless.

Beyond these thanks and many others who remain unnamed, I dedicate this study to our daughter, Sophia Lily. I am constantly amazed that this little shaqiya girl—still an infant when I finished the first version of this study as a dissertation, and a full-fledged three-year-old by its completion as a book—could regularly pull me away from my books and keyboard with her giggles and mischief, and yet at the same time inspire me to complete this work to the best of my ability.

Introduction

While the expanse of Greater Cairo had likely spread into a metropolitan whole by the early thirteenth century CE , several urban centers still competed within its orbit for prominence. Al-Qahira, Cairo’s namesake, had originally served as the Fatimid dynasty’s sanctuary and seat, but had already been gradually giving way to the residential public when Saladin opened it up fully after the installation of his own Ayyubid system in the 1170s. In 1183–84 meanwhile, Saladin’s workers completed the construction of his massive citadel, which had become a familiar sight by the thirteenth century, gazing down on the action below from its imposing position on a spur of the Muqattam Hills. Fustat was Egypt’s first Islamic district, founded by ‘Amr ibn al-As at the conquest of the country in 641–42, to the south of Cairo’s future site; although it had once been a thriving commercial district, it had long since fallen into decline. Misr had been the main residential quarter of the area since antiquity, tucked in between Fustat and the Nile; by the twelfth century, it was home to an invigorating mix of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, although the latter group certainly enjoyed a social prominence and visibility there unlike any other urban center in the central Islamic lands. Medieval chroniclers, Muslim and Christian alike, generally conflated Misr and Fustat under the title of the former by this time, as the latter apparently no longer sufficiently active to warrant a distinct identity.

This was a dynamic and expansive urban landscape by 1218, where our story begins. The urban masses had steadily filled in the quarters of Cairo until it had become, as André Raymond describes it, a large and densely populated one, a bustling city where the individual lives in anonymity.¹ Muslims, Christians, and Jews mixed and mingled there in the markets and alleys, matching the traditional cosmopolitanism of Misr–Fustat, a stone’s throw to the south. Misr–Fustat had, in fact, borne the brunt of the violence that marked the latter years of Fatimid rule, in which Frankish Crusaders, Zangid authorities, and tenacious Fatimid soldiers wrestled for control of Egypt. In this chaos, afraid of a Frankish march on the city, the Zangid vizier Shawar (d. 1169) is said to have evacuated the residents of the district and ordered its burning— although there is little direct evidence of this as a cataclysmic torching. In fact, as a testament to the resilience of that community, it is clear that life had returned to a busy normalcy within the space of a few years; Ibn Jubayr, who visited the area a mere five years after these events, describes it as follows:

In Misr too are the remains of the destruction caused by the fire that occurred during the break-up of the ‘Ubaydi [Fatimid] dynasty in the year 564 [1169]. Most of the city has been restored, and buildings now adjoin each other without intermission. It is a large city, and the ancient relics to be seen in and about it attest to the size of its former boundaries.²

These communities continued to prosper in many respects, and lived in sufficiently close proximity to give rise to the sort of occasional outbursts that plague any such urban space, including sectarian tension over shared walls and sacred spaces (about which see below).

For an average Egyptian Muslim, Christian, or Jew making their way through the streets of Misr–Fustat in the early thirteenth century, in fact, the scars of the latter years of Fatimid rule would have been evident, but not overwhelming. Of far more significance would have been the ongoing confessional landmarks that dotted the cityscape: the ancient churches and monasteries of Qasr al-Shama‘, many of which remain in Old Cairo to this day, were still active, indeed thriving, and physically prominent along the thoroughfares of the city, while the Mosque of ‘Amr loomed close by. The busy port of Misr on the western side of the district—which has long since disappeared with the shift of the Nile’s course but was the only truly active port in Greater Cairo at the time—was still a commercial epicenter, and assured that traders and their heavy-laden donkey carts would still have had to push past the throngs of residents, noisy hawkers in front of their commercial stalls, day laborers, monks, shaykhs, and priests as they made their way through the district.

It was within this bustling, energetic setting that in 1218 CE the Coptic Orthodox community of Egypt reached one of its collectively lowest moments, during the reign of the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-‘Adil (r. 1200–18) and his governor in Egypt, his son al-Malik al-Kamil (r. 1218–38). At that time, the Coptic patriarch Yuhanna ibn Abi Ghalib (r. 1189–1216) had recently died and the Church was preparing to select his successor. Among the potential candidates was an unknown priest from the Fayyum by the name of Daud ibn Yuhanna ibn Laqlaq, a shrewd but apparently uneducated cleric with no knowledge even of the Coptic language—but he did have high ambitions for the see of St. Mark. Thanks to the support of some highranking advocates, both in the Church and in the service of the Ayyubid state, Daud ibn Laqlaq successfully petitioned the ruler al-‘Adil for the patriarchate—a surprising move in itself, given that one might assume that non-Muslims would rarely seek out unnecessary meddling from the Islamic authorities—but then found himself the butt of sharp criticism from a large contingent of bishops and lay members who were furious at his ambition and his political appeals to an authority outside of their confession.

Their grievances came to a climax just before Palm Sunday of that year, when they gathered below the Muqattam citadel, requesting that the governor, al-Kamil, overturn his father’s decision. This was surely a dramatic scene: protestors came out in droves for the event, and all or most of them gathered in the shadow of the imposing citadel, flickering candles in hand, to form a vocal and visible voice of opposition to Ibn Laqlaq’s election as well as to the sovereign’s involvement in the process. Al-Kamil did not overturn his father’s decision per se (although he did show himself to be quite capable of independent decisiveness in other affairs), but an angry mob did prevent Ibn Laqlaq’s appointment the following day. After such violent opposition, it is perhaps no surprise that his petition for the patriarchate quickly devolved into a chaotic mess.³ In fact, the patriarchate remained vacant for a full nineteen years, until Ibn Laqlaq’s successful accession in 1235. Even then, his election came only after bitter disputes among the Coptic leadership, a drastic decline in the number of bishops around the country, and the payment of a debilitating ‘fee’ to the sultanate for its approval of his candidacy. To make matters worse, Ibn Laqlaq’s eight-year reign as Cyril III, seventy-fifth Patriarch of Alexandria, never ceased to be controversial and divisive: it was marked by charges of corruption and frequent attempts to limit the patriarchate’s ecclesiastical authority, and it was followed by yet another long and bitter vacancy of seven years.

On the surface, this appears to have truly been one of the spiritually lowest eras in the Church of Alexandria’s long ecclesiastical history, marked by corruption and a collapse of confessional unity—a difficult moment, to be sure, even for such an ancient community, which had seen its share of hardships since St. Mark brought Christianity to the land of the Nile in the first century. In reality, though, it also highlighted some of the uniquely dynamic and surprisingly vital aspects of the medieval Coptic experience. Furthermore, it demonstrated the tangled and contradictory relationship which the non-Muslim communities of Egypt often shared with the regime of the Ayyubid family (not to mention ruling Islamic regimes in general), in this case most closely associated with the regimes of al-‘Adil, his son al-Kamil, and grandson al-Salih Nijm al-Din Ayyub.

This patriarchate and the Ayyubid rulers who played pivotal roles in its fortunes thus form a useful and thought-provoking starting point for the central focus of this book: the internal and external forces, both complementary and contradictory, which shaped Coptic identity during the reign of the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt. The following pages will demonstrate that while the Copts themselves played an active role in negotiating the boundaries of their communal identity during the Middle Period, those boundaries were also constantly redefined in turn by the situational politics and personal idiosyncrasies of the Muslim leadership. This is most evident in the Ayyubid era after Saladin, when Cyril III ibn Laqlaq put his controversial stamp on the Coptic patriarchate and the Ayyubid rulers al-‘Adil, al-Kamil, and others likewise left their mark on the history of Egypt and their wider dynastic possessions. In this sense, the long-delayed and bitterly contested patriarchate of Cyril ibn Laqlaq represented a broad spectrum of the ways in which the Christian community acted and interacted within medieval Egyptian state and society.

While this book is about the Coptic-Ayyubid model of these dynamics, I also intend that its lessons be abundantly clear for the study of non-Muslim communities within other, parallel contexts. The bottom line for historians, and for those merely interested in understanding how Islam and its religious minorities have coexisted over the centuries, is this: despite the tired assertions of many that Islam is and always has been an all-encompassing system and way of life, leaving no room for other influences among its adherents, medieval Islamic state and society (and in this case, Ayyubid society in Egypt) retained a vibrant non-Muslim community whose confessional loyalty remained—paradoxically—fiercely independent and yet deeply intertwined with the fortunes of its Muslim rulers. In this context as well as throughout the Islamic Middle Period, non-Muslims often found themselves pressured and yet privileged, marginalized and yet integrated, partly shaped by external forces and yet often clearly acting—rather than merely reacting—through internal agency and conscience. They may not have always been masters of their own sociopolitical destiny, but they made a bold bid for it and left their impact on wider society as a result.

The Relevance of Coptic and Egyptian Identity

Not all scholars would agree that a medieval Coptic identity existed, much less that it was a topic of any significance or worth within the wider context of medieval Islamicate society. Ulrich Haarmann, for example, has argued that while medieval Egyptian writers displayed an unmistakable sense of regional identity, the role of the Christian community in contributing to that identity had simply disappeared:

The civilization of medieval Egypt was essentially Arab and Muslim with no tangible Christian component, and with each century it became more so. Even those Copts who were not ready to abandon their own faith gradually adopted Arabic as their sole language. And together with Arabic they took over many of the profoundly Islamic values that were implicit in the language of the Qur’an. The furtive reminiscences of Coptic history were integrated into Muslim writing, remolded and arrayed as forebodings of Islam Triumphant, and thus lost their character as tokens of an alternative civilization.⁴

The deeper implication of Haarmann’s point, of course, is that the Copts had simply become irrelevant by the Middle Ages. Not only had they relinquished political dominance following the Islamic conquest of Egypt, but they had eventually lost their linguistic and cultural distinctions as well. Few historians have differed with Haarmann’s perspective; with some notable exceptions, most scholars have explicitly or implicitly agreed with what Coptic historian Leslie MacCoull has characterized as the "death of Coptic culture in the Middle Ages, the loss of a whole way of being human."⁵ Thus it is widely assumed that by the Middle Period of Islam, in which central Islamic rule had splintered into a series of overlapping and often rival polities, even as that faith itself had spread widely while dividing into rival sects and ideologies, Egypt was thoroughly and permanently defined by what Marshall Hodgson has termed Islamicate civilization.⁶ Hence, according to Haarmann et al., any and every community that fell within Egypt’s general borders was equally defined by Islam. Within this context, Islam and its combination of political and theological precepts externally bestowed upon the Copts and other non-Muslims their primary locus of identity, thoroughly subsumed within their role as ahl al-dhimma (‘people of the covenant,’ commonly translated as ‘protected peoples’).

I have no argument with Haarmann’s wider thesis behind the aforementioned article that Egypt held a unique identity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, nor with its assertion that, as the period progressed, the Islamic identity of Egypt became more prominent and dominant as non-Muslims dwindled in number and influence. However, his assertion—shared by many—regarding the lack of a tangible Christian component in the civilization of medieval Egypt is overly simplistic and is belied by the historical record. For example, Haarmann assumes that 1) language is the primary sign of culture and identity, and 2) any sense of Coptic historical narrative or ‘voice,’ once shifted to the language of its political rulers, was uniformly and completely subsumed by an Islamic one. In contrast to these assertions, I will argue in the coming pages that the story of the Coptic community of medieval Egypt demonstrates that culture and identity are far too complex to be located in (and therefore limited to) mere language or official sociopolitical designation. In fact, far from merely and passively assuming a state of ‘dhimmitude’ (a term and theory I will address below) as the hegemony of Islamic jurisprudence dictated, medieval Copts actively participated in the formation of their own identity. They also played key roles in the life of the wider Egyptian community, in concert with a dynamic sociopolitical context that had its own ways of transcending confessional boundaries when individual interests and economic loyalties called for cooperation and tolerance. It is in the porousness of these boundaries, the ‘in-between spaces’ in which Copts engaged with their Muslim rulers and fellow Egyptians, that we can most clearly see the vibrancy with which this community pursued its own priorities and carved out a sense of identity—of ‘being a Copt’—in the Ayyubid era.

It is clear in the archival and narrative record of this period that, specifically between 1218, when Daud ibn Laqlaq first tried and failed to secure the Coptic patriarchate, and 1243, when he eventually died, the identity of the Coptic community experienced some clear shifts in fortune, for both good and ill. Internally, it was during this time that medieval Copto-Arabic culture truly came into its own and Copts, from the isolation of the desert monasteries to the upper echelons of state and society, put their visible mark on the Egyptian political and religious landscape, even as the patriarch himself demonstrated remarkable and unprecedented ambition for ecclesiastical authority in Egypt and the wider region. Externally, the Ayyubid authorities—embodied by al-‘Adil, al-Kamil, and al-Salih in particular—reflected some of the ways in which the nuances of political circumstance and individual peculiarity were the most important (and least predictable) determinants of the individual and collective status of Egyptian non-Muslims, often over and above the specific ideals of Islamic jurisprudence.

The following chapters seek to describe the complexities of these dynamics, focusing on several specific ‘in-between spaces’ in which the boundaries of the medieval Coptic community came into question during the later Ayyubid era, from the latter years of al-‘Adil through the reign of al-Kamil. This chronological focus is in part due to the nature of the source material: while the entirety of Ayyubid history is rich in issues related to the non-Muslim communities in general, this study makes use of a specific series of letters from and to Cyril III ibn Laqlaq to form the nucleus of each analytical chapter, and thus the earlier years of the Ayyubid state