| When Islam was half as old it is today, Egypt was swept by mass conversions that irrevocably altered its religious history and demographic composition. In the early 8th/14th century, unprecedented pressures delivered a final blow to the Coptic Christian community's hitherto privileged status and triggered a pivotal wave of conversion to Islam. While conversion protected lives and jobs, it did not guarantee immunity: many converts fell prey to the hostile suspicions of their new co-religionists, provoking further regulation and Muslim anxieties of influence. Conversion rendered Copts socially marginal, but concomitantly culturally central.; By supplementing traditional Muslim narrative sources with unpublished documents and Coptic legal and religious manuscripts, I investigate different registers on which conversion was experienced, negotiated, and represented.; The first section explores responses to the conversion wave. Through the single-generation conversion ruse, individual converts maintained their progeny as non-Muslims while remaining within the framework of Islamic law. In the late 8th/14th-century, dozens of Copts and converts publicly blasphemed and apostatized in a purposeful attempt to secure their execution, or martyrdom. A clandestine, if equally subversive, alternative appeared in the Rite of the Jar, a quasi-rebaptism through which converts reverted to Christianity.; The second part examines representations of converts in Muslim biographical dictionaries. By studying epithets applied to converts and tropes of suspicion, I argue that this literature constitutes a discursive response to converts' resistance practices. By following six generations of a convert family, I demonstrate the dynamics of assimilation into Muslim society.; The third section investigates everyday social practices of converts and compares these to the suspicious charges of Muslim authors. Residential and patronage patterns locate converts in relation to their former and new religious communities. Based on previously unexamined legal documents, I reconstruct a convert family and map the practical effects of their conversion.; Coptic converts changed more than their personal religion: mass conversions had significant effects on Coptic Christianity (and, ultimately, on Islam). My final section uses an unpublished manuscript of the correspondence of Patriarch Yuh&dotbelow;anna XIII (1484--1524 A.D.) as a prism onto the long-term consequences of conversion within Coptic culture. |
