Coptica v. 16 2017

78 Mark N. Swanson

kindness. What is important for us to notice is this: for a Copt (even a Muslim Copt) with a need to disappear, to “drop off the map,” the Monastery of St. Antony was the place to go. In our story today, Fakhr al-Dawlah expresses his anxiety about what would happen when Sultan Barqūq found him missing; recall that Anbā Ruways assured him that he would “divert” the sultan from seeking him, and that, indeed, when Barqūq heard that Fakhr al-Dawlah had gone to the Monastery of St. Antony, “the Lord brought inattentiveness upon him.” 27 In fact, Fakhr al-Dawlah’s anxiety was well placed. The monasteries of the Eastern Desert were indeed distant from Cairo—but not so distant that a search party could not be dispatched there. Another one of the miracles of Marqus al-Anṭūnī, from his days as a young monk at the Monastery of St. Paul, relates how he (miraculously) foresaw and prepared for the arrival of just such a search party from Cairo, sent by the sultan to seek someone who had fled and become a monk. (The search party, which arrived cold and hungry, was surprised when hot water and a hearty meal were waiting for them at the monastery. The text does not tell us whether or not they found the fugitive and took him back to Cairo!) 28 The story of Fakhr al-Dawlah fits with other witnesses: the Monastery of St. Antony was a place of refuge—up to a point. It was far away from Cairo, but not so far that an angry sultan could not dispatch a search party. An additional measure of divine intervention was necessary to keep the fugitive safe from the sultan. Students of early Church history are familiar with the battles that were fought in the early Christian centuries over the possible readmission to the Christian fold of those who had denied or in some other way compromised their Christian faith during one of the waves of Roman persecution. While rigorist groups such as the Donatists in North Africa or the Melitians in Egypt, who refused the readmission of penitent apostates, were eventually sidelined, even the more lenient Catholic practice remained quite rigorous: apostates could be readmitted to the Christian communion, but often only after long and demanding periods of penance. 29 Against that background, it is somewhat surprising to discover that Christians who had converted to Islam and then repented of it were, in general, readily welcomed back into the Christian fold in the churches within the Dār al-Islām, and that without long periods of penance. A Melkite text from Mt. Sinai tells the story of a Christian Arab named Qays al-Ghassānī, The Readmission of the Apostate

27 MS Paris ar. 282, f. 136r-v. 28 MS Monastery of St. Paul, Hist. 115, ff. 55v-56v (Miracle # 4).

29 One especially helpful study of this is Tim Vivian, St. Peter of Alexandria, Bishop and Martyr (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), Chapter 3 (“The Canonical Letter,” on issues of apostasy and penance). See the very helpful Table 3 on p. 144.