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C h A P T e r 4 Hagiography ‫ريس‬ ‫نيسيدقلا‬ John C. Lamoreaux The Arab Christian tradition is rich with saints and with works devoted to them. Such works come in many forms. They may be calendars marking their festivals, services or homilies in their honor, accounts of their lives and records of their wisdom, stories of the discovery of their relics or of miracles associated with their remains, their icons, and their monasteries. Such works are used daily in churches and monasteries. They are not written just for the study. The genre is practical and as such has two main ends: to regulate the veneration of the saints and to inspire in those venerating them saintly lives of their own. It is difficult to speak of Arab Orthodox hagiography separately from Byzantine hagiography. Both Middle Eastern Orthodox Christians and Byzantines had been bequeathed a shared tradition and had grown to maturity together. When Islam arrived on the scene, contacts between the two continued , especially in border lands, which were sometimes under Muslim rule, sometimes under the Byzantines, including the city of Antioch and its monastic centers, in which Arab Christians, Georgians, and Greeks lived side by side throughout those political and military transitions. Furthermore, Mount Sinai and the monasteries in and around Jerusalem were inhabited by monks from all over the Christian world. The diversity of their populations and their shared culture facilitated the transmission of hagiographic works. Cultus and literature were thus continually shared between the Arab Orthodox and their brothers and sisters across the border. This is especially true when works were written in Greek, as were so many Syro-Palestinian texts in the early centuries of Muslim rule, including popular works such as the life of Saint Theodore of Edessa1 or the hagiographic romance of Bar- 113 Hagiography laam and Ioasaph,*2 which so quickly spread beyond their lands of origin. But in what sense are these or other similar works written in or translated into Arabic to be regarded as “Arab Orthodox”? Such works and their authors may perhaps better be seen as regional participants in a religious tradition that transcends ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It is easier to speak of a distinct Arab Orthodox tradition of hagiography in the case of local saints: humble men and women from the hardscrabble farms of central Syria and rural Palestine, whose fame extended only to the villagers among whom they lived and died or to the residents of their own monastery. The Arab Christian tradition has preserved the memory of many hundreds of these forgotten saints.3 Some lived in the mountains of northern Iraq, others on farms in what is now southern Turkey; yet others flourished in monasteries at the desert’s edge in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Despite their intrinsic importance as eloquent witnesses to the Christian faith under Muslim rule, their lives, unfortunately, were seldom of interest to Orthodox Christian communities living outside the Muslim world. The present chapter treats of three such forgotten saints, all from the Orthodox Church of Syria and Palestine in the early centuries of its life under Muslim rule. Two were likely historical persons, while one is apparently a literary creation, to publicize the virtues of a regional church. Each of the three texts translated here recounts the martyrdom of a Muslim convert to Christianity—a capital crime in traditional Islamic law. The first text is set in Syria, in the closing years of the troubled eighth century. It tells of a noble Muslim tribesman named Rawh. He lives in Damascus , in an expropriated monastery, and constantly harasses the monastery ’s still-functioning church. On the altar-curtain of the church is painted an icon of its patron, Saint Theodore. One day, Rawh launches an arrow at this icon of the saint—in mid-flight, it turns and returns to strikes his hand. He next sees a Eucharistic vision: a priest kills and dismembers a child; congregants commune on its flesh and blood. He then receives a visitation from the saint himself. Now convinced of the truth of the Christian faith, Rawh goes to Jerusalem for baptism, only to be passed on to the monastic communities of the deserts of Jordan. Monks there baptize him, giving him the Christian name Anthony and tonsuring him a monk. On his return to Damascus, Anthony is apprehended for apostasy and sent to the caliph in Raqqa,† who orders his execution. Anthony is stoned and gibbeted on the * This famous Christian romance was apparently...

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