A Coptic Historian and “the Caliph of the Armenians”: Cross-cultural Dynamics and Rhetorical Strategies in al-Mufaḍḍal Ibn abī l-Faḍā’il

In narrating the Mamluk conquest of the Armenian stronghold of Hṙomkla (1292 AD), see of the Armenian Catholicosate, the Egyptian Coptic historian al-Mufaḍḍal Ibn Abī l-Faḍā’il (d. after 1358) described the Catholicos as “Caliph of the Armenians” (khalīfat al-Arman), instead of using the more common expression “Patriarch of the Armenians” (baṭrak al-Arman). On the one hand, the wording “Caliph of the Armenians” was not completely new and it had already been used by the Muslim historian Ibn al-Dawādārī, who was al-Mufaḍḍal’s direct source on this event. On the other hand, close textual and contextual analysis of al-Mufaḍḍal’s work suggests that, in using such formula, this Coptic author was not passively following his Muslim source but making a deliberate choice, most plausibly related to his peculiar vision of interreligious relations in Mamluk Egyptian society, against the background of the system of “discriminating protection” (dhimma) that was applied to Christians and Jews under Islamic rule. Although systematic examination of representations of religious diversity throughout al-Mufaḍḍal’s work is still to be done, the elements analyzed so far seem to indicate that al-Mufaḍḍal aimed at connotating foreign Christian communities in ethnic and political terms rather then in religious term, so as to “dechristianize” their image in the eyes of the Muslim “public opinion”. This may be understood as a rhetorical strategy instrumental to deny any possible association between foreign Christian groups – that were actual or potential enemies of the Mamluk “State”- and the Egyptian Coptic Christians, that al-Mufaḍḍal constantly represented, conversely, as loyal subjects and supporters of the Mamluks and of the socio-political order that the Sultan “embodied” and preserved.