Coptica v. 16 2017

Fakhr al-Dawlah ibn al-Muʾtaman

77

Escape to the Monastery

When Fakhr al-Dawlah decided to abandon his life as a Muslim grandee— including his bureaucratic responsibilities—he departed for the Monastery of St. Antony in the Eastern Desert. Obviously, there were other places where al-Fakhr could have embraced the monastic life. While the monasteries of the Wadī l-Naṭrūn were in decline in the late 14 th century (probably having been depopulated by the Black Death that struck Egypt at mid-century), other monasteries were inhabited and active, including Dayr Shahrān to the south of Old Cairo, which had been made famous by its great saint Barsūm the Naked at the beginning of the century, or Dayr al-Muḥarraq in Upper Egypt, outside of which Patriarch Matthew had spent time as a hermit. Dayr Shahrān, however, was easily accessible from Cairo, while Dayr al-Muḥarraq could easily be reached by sailing upriver. By contrast, the monasteries of the Eastern Desert (that is, the Monastery of St. Antony and the smaller Monastery of St. Paul), in addition to being blessed by the presence of saintly monks such as Marqus al-Anṭūnī and his disciple al- qummuṣ Ibrāhīm al-Fānī, 24 were far away from Cairo —nearly at the edge of the world, a place almost out of reach and largely out of mind. It is not surprising that the Monasteries of the Eastern Desert have regularly throughout their history played a role as a place of refuge or of exile. 25 The Life of Marqus al-Anṭūnī provides a good example in a story about a Muslim Copt named Karīm al-Dīn ibn Mukānis, who is well known from Islamic histories and biographical dictionaries as a financial administrator who regularly got into trouble with the ruling Mamlūks and who, on several occasions, simply fled and disappeared—for a time, that is, before reappearing and eventually being appointed to some new position. 26 What we read in the Life of Marqus al-Anṭūnī fits this pattern perfectly. According to it, Karīm al-Dīn had fallen afoul of the sultan Barqūq, fled Cairo, and showed up at the Monastery of St. Antony disguised as a farm overseer. Marqus al-Anṭūnī recognized the disguised bureaucrat, reassured and blessed him, and sent him back to the sultan—who received him with 24 Ibrāhīm al-Fānī is the fourth great saint of the period, and in the litany to the saints ( majma‘ al-qiddīsīn ) of the Coptic Psalmody is mentioned (as the Hēgoumenos Abra’am) along with Barsūm the Naked (Abba Parsoma), Anbā Ruways (Abba Tegi), and Marqus al-Anṭūnī (Abba Markos). In addition to the works mentioned in footnote 2 above, see Asuka Tsuji, “Notes on the Arabic Life of Ibrahim al-Fani: A Coptic Saint of the Fourteenth Century,” in Christianity and Monasticism in Middle Egypt: al-Minya and Asyut , ed. Gawdat Gabra and Hany N. Takla (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2015), 153-60. 25 See, for example, Mark N. Swanson, “The Monastery of St. Paul in Historical Context,” in The Cave Church of Paul the Hermit at the Monastery of St. Paul, Egypt , ed. William Lyster (Cairo: American Research Center in Egypt; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42-59. 26 For the story in the Life of Marqus al-Anṭūnī: MS Monastery of St. Paul, Hist. 115, ff. 68v- 69v (Miracle #13). For an English translation of this story and discussion of what we know about Karīm al-Dīn from Islamic sources, see Swanson, “The Saint and the Muslim Copts.”