Coptica v. 16 2017

86 Mark N. Swanson

than you!” 22 Then he lifted his eyes to the heavens, which opened up in torrents of rain: the caravan stopped in its tracks, the monks sat and rested, and all drank their fill from the water that collected in pools all around them. Later, when the party finally did reach Itfīḥ on the banks of the Nile, they discovered that God had again intervened on their behalf, because orders had arrived from Cairo that the monks were to be released and allowed to return to their monastery. 23 From its inception, the literature of Christian monasticism has portrayed women as a dangerous Other possessing seductive power that even the most pious of monks might find difficult to resist. 24 Christian literature in response to Islam, from its inception, has portrayed the Islamic faith as sexually permissive, at odds with the ascetic demands of serious Christian discipleship. 25 Where these literatures intersect, as in our accounts of Christian holy men in Islamic Egypt, it is hardly surprising that one stock character should be that of the Muslim seductress. 26 The Miracles of Anbā Ruways, set as they are in Cairo where men and women, Christians and Muslims, might regularly encounter one another, provides us with the best examples. 27 Miracle #12 (in the set of 14 miracles 22 MS Monastery of St. Paul, hist. 115, f. 60r-v; cf. HPEC 3.3, p. 239. 23 MS Monastery of St. Paul, hist. 115, ff. 60v-61r; cf. HPEC 3.3, p. 239. The Life of Marqus gives the more detailed account, providing, for example, the detail that the party reached the Nile River town of Iṭfīḥ. 24 A classic study is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 25 Early Arabic Christian texts on discerning the true religion regularly identify the license afforded the passions as one human (and not divine) reason for which a person might give up one religion for another, alongside other reasons such as coercion, gain in wealth or status, and simplicity or elegance of doctrine. Christian apologists writing in Arabic regularly argued— with one eye to Islam—that such reasons were absent from the earliest spread of Christianity. See, e.g., Sidney H. Griffith, “Comparative Religion in the Apologetics of the First Christian Arabic Theologians,” Proceedings of the PMR Conference (Villanova, PA) 4 (1979): 63-87; reprinted in The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2002), Chapter I. 26 In addition, Maged Mikhail has observed in the Coptic and Copto-Arabic hagiographical literature a shift, around the end of the 11 th century, towards a more negative portrayal of women; Maged S.A. Mikhail, The Legacy of Demetrius of Alexandria, 189-232 CE: The Form and Function of Hagiography in Late Antique and Islamic Egypt (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), here pp. 66-69. This observation fits, incidentally, with my own work on The Martyrdom of Jirjis (Muzāḥim) : in the (probably) early 11 th -century Life , Jirjis’s wife Saywālā or Sayūlā is one of the heroes of the story, who provides backbone for her wavering husband— but then she largely disappears in the epitome found in the Synaxarium . See Mark N. Swanson, “The Other Hero of The Martyrdom of Jirjis (Muzāḥim) : Saywālā the Confessor,” Coptica 11 (2012): 1-14. 27 For an example in addition to the one presented below, see my other essay in this volume, “The Story of Fakhr al-Dawlah ibn al-Muʾtaman,” which presents Miracle #13 in the set of 14 preserved in MS Paris ar. 282, ff. 112r-143r. I gave a brief introduction to this set of miracles in Mark N. Swanson, “The ‘Urban Ministry’ of Anbā Ruways,” in Graeco-Latina et Orientalia: The Seductress