Al-Wajal wal-tawaththuq bil-'amal, one of Ibn Abī al-Dunyā’s (d. 894) numerous adab works, exhorts the reader on fear of God and confidence in deed, through the example of St. Antony of Egypt. The Wajal consists of three distinct narrative units: Reports by Muhammad’s Companions and Successors, a framing story in which King Aṭnāws, on his death bed, advises his dignitaries to select a new leader, and a dialogue episode in which St. Antony explains his ascetic practices and narrates nine parables to exhort the king’s dignitaries. The framing story in the Wajal explicitly identifies the Antony in this text as St. Antony of Egypt, while the dialogue that is embedded within it preserves an interesting memory of Antony – as a narrator of stories on fear of God. This particular representation of Antony, with no known textual precedent in the Christian tradition, appears to be informed by both Antony’s persona in the Life of Antony written by Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373) and the saint’s image in the Apophthegmata Patrum. The Wajal integrates these various hagiographical traditions and presents a new memory of the saint, for a new (Muslim) audience, demonstrating the expansion of the saint’s hagiographical dossier in the Middle Ages. This paper contextualizes the Wajal within the broader literary and cultural expressions of Christianity and Islam in the early Middle Ages, emphasizing the role of Christian holy men as sources of universal piety and wisdom in Islamic literature and broader semiotic systems. Arguing against the usefulness of the category of pseudoepigraphy, this paper revisits important concepts such as authorship and transmission of hagiographical knowledge between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages in light of the representation of Antony in the Wajal.
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Middle East/Near East Studies