Accusations of Disloyalty in Medieval Arabic Polemics from Egypt: Texts and Subtexts

Accusations of disloyalty were a standard feature of Arabic polemical texts written by Muslims against Christians and Jews in Egypt during the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods (tenth–sixteenth c. CE). Christian elites in particular were often depicted as a fifth column that might collude with their Frankish or Mongol coreligionists to the detriment of Muslim polities and rulers. Historians frequently recognize that such charges functioned as a means of discrediting specific competitors in the estimation of powerful audiences; they were not, in other words, dispassionate descriptions of how contemporary Christians thought and felt. The proposed presentation will extend this insight, reading charges of disloyalty as inverted evidence of the loyalty that Arabophone Christians habitually practiced in their relations with Muslim rulers in the same period. To accuse a Christian enemy of disloyalty, though sometimes an effective tactic, also inevitably meant drawing attention to broad patterns of loyalty and submission that Christians in premodern Muslim-ruled states customarily observed. It also cemented polemical practices that could be turned against Muslim adversaries who were accused, for example, of being excessively/insufficiently pious, or of belonging to an objectionable Muslim sect or school of law, either of which could call the loyalty of the accused into question. While this study will focus on polemical works and passages by such authors as al-Ṭurṭūshī, Ibn al-Ṣayrafī, Ibn al-Nābulusī, Ghāzī ibn al-Wāsiṭī, and al-Ṭarasūsī, it will also utilize contemporary Christian sources, notably Siyar al-bīʿa al-muqaddasa (conventionally known as History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria), to explore literary evidence of practices by which non-Muslims expressed loyalty to Muslim rulers. Polemics highlighted the exceptions that proved the general rule of pragmatic loyalty that allowed non-Muslim communities to persist and sometimes to thrive in pre-Ottoman Islamic Egypt.