Coptica v. 16 2017

76 Mark N. Swanson

text when he describes his plight to Anbā Ruways, but the bonds are now those of the Enemy , Satan, from which he cannot free himself. The clear implication of the text is that this Muslim woman, from the professional entertainers (more literally, the “masters of amusement,” arbāb al-lahw ), is an instrument of the Devil. The dangers that Muslim women pose to Coptic men seems to be something of a theme in the Life of Anbā Ruways, where we have not just one but three miracle stories in which the saint delivers Coptic men from inappropriate relationships with Muslim women. In one of them, a woman from the Muslim elite fell passionately in love with a deacon named Abū l- Faraj ibn Quzmān “because of the excellence of his chant and the sweetness of his voice.” Anbā Ruways broke up an amorous tryst between the two of them—just in time to save them both from the murderous rage of her husband. (Or, at least, Abū l-Faraj was saved. We’re not told how the Muslim woman fared.) 21 In another story, a Coptic secretary named Ṣadaqah ibn ʿAjīn repented of his affair with a Muslim woman: he received forgiveness, but the woman was immediately afflicted with a disease in her legs which prevented her from seeking out her lover. 22 In both of these stories, the passion of the woman is emphasized: the passion aroused in a woman by the sound of a deacon chanting the liturgy, or the passion that can only be confined by a disease that restricts movement. Perhaps in these stories we can perceive something of the pain that the conversions of highly-placed Coptic men created for the Coptic Orthodox community—and something of a struggle to explain the phenomenon— especially when the conversions were not the result of a “Convert-or-be- dismissed!” ultimatum. Why did bright young Copts like Fakhr al-Dawlah convert to Islam? The Devil was involved; that much was clear. Ambition and desire for the world’s glory would certainly be part of an explanation. But the author of the Life of Anbā Ruways—like a number of other Christian writers 23 —adds another element: the seductive Muslim woman, whether portrayed as skilled in the arts of leisure, aroused by the sweetness of a voice, or moved by a momentary frisson of passion to drop everything and run after a lover.

21 Ibid., ff. 130v-133r (Miracle #11). 22 Ibid., ff. 133r-135v (Miracle #12).

23 The trope of the seductive Muslim woman is by no means confined to the Life of Anbā Ruways. It is, for example, presented as the reason for the conversion of John of Phanijōit; see the discussion, with examples from several other texts, in Jason R. Zaborowski, The Coptic Martyrdom of John of Phanijōit: Assimilation and Conversion to Islam in Thirteenth-Century Egypt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), esp. pp. 15-24. (“Hence the lust of a Saracen woman seduced John, and his conversion is somewhat of a passive event into which he ‘fell with her in fornication’; p. 16.)