Although almost invisible in contemporary Arabic historiography, one of the most important long-term developments taking place in the countryside of early Islamic Egypt was the massive expansion of landholding by Arabs and other Muslims during the early Abbasid period. This phenomenon would create the conditions necessary for the appearance of Muslim communities and institutions in villages and provincial towns. Indeed, it was an essential precursor for the 'arabization' and 'islamization' of rural Egypt. A new landholding elite and their social power made it possible for other Muslims, including new converts, to pursue economic opportunities in the countryside. Between 750 and 860 CE, the Muslim presence outside Fustat (Old Cairo) went from being mostly a smattering of officials and soldiers to encompassing a wide social and economic spectrum ranging from craftsmen and landless agricultural workers to wealthy merchants, tax contractors, and big landowners. At the same time, however, these changes were of course also having profound consequences for the social, economic, and cultural life of the indigenous Christian population. The dominance of traditional elites and institutions was severely eroded, including that of the Church and the extensive network of monasteries dotting the Egyptian countryside. A dwindling class of big Christian landowners, who had long provided community leaders and performed a variety of administrative and juridical functions, saw those roles increasingly taken over by the new Muslim elites. And the cultural landscape was radically altered as the use of Arabic became increasingly common in towns and villages, and the first mosques began to appear in a landscape that only a generation or two before had been entirely Christian. Although individuals and the Church adapted quickly to the changed circumstances of this period, their social and economic power was much reduced. This paper will survey both the reasons for these changes in patterns of landholding in this period, as well as the impact this had on local populations. Although based primarily on documentary evidence found in Greek, Coptic, and Arabic papyri and inscriptions from Egypt, it will also investigate the role played by the evolving legal discourses and administrative practices of the early Abbasid empire.

Pseudo-debate texts, which claim to record religious dialogues between prominent Christians and Muslims, quickly spread under Abbasid rule. Historically, while such debates did take place, most of the texts in circulations were factious. Still, these contentious narratives provide an invaluable window onto the popular apologetic and polemical strategies employed by each faith-community. Most debate texts hail from Syria and many have survived in Syriac and Arabic, but there is also a small dossier of analogous texts from Egypt, which have not been the subject of academic study. This paper surveys this literary corpus, which survives in Coptic fragments and two unedited Arabic manuscripts, and contextualizes it within the frameworks of Abbasid and Fatimid policies, as well as Arab Christian studies. The primary focus will be on the topics addressed and the stratagems employed in these debate texts and how they compare to normative apologetic texts, such as those of Abu Qurrah and Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa'. Untimely, these texts manifest yet another aspect of the complex socio-religious process by which Christians, Muslims, and Jews reinforced their confessional and communal identities under caliphal rule.

In the mid-thirteenth century, the author of the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, the contemporary chronicle of the Coptic Orthodox patriarchate, describes an event in which Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Kamil (r. 1218-1238) visited the monastic center of Wadi Natrun en route while en route to Cairo. During that visit, the sultan purportedly lavished praise and gifts on the community, particularly that of the Monastery of St. Macarius, the most prominent of the monasteries that were active at the time. This paper will examine the historicity of this event and, more importantly, its legal and political implications for the sultan and the Coptic community. It will place this visit into the context of al-Malik al-Kamil's surprisingly supportive policies and personal approach to dhimmi communities under his reign, despite the regional pressure of the Crusades and the legal precedent of sumptuary laws regarding non-Muslims throughout the Islamic lands. Finally, this paper will place this event into a wider context of monastic visitations by Muslim rulers throughout the Middle Period, evidence of a complex and dynamic relationship between Islamic authorities and those dhimmi communities which were under their legal, political, and military jurisdiction.

Coptic Christians were forced to navigate questions of sameness and difference in their daily lives. Despite sectarian differences Coptic cultural identity was complex and interwoven with strands that emphasized both hetro and homogeneity with their Muslim neighbors. In this presentation I will demonstrate that in sixteenth century Cairo an important venue for demonstrating sameness was the Islamic courts. Some scholars have suggested that recourse to Islamic courts was an act of an embattled minority. But evidence suggests that for the relatively well-off urban Coptic communities in the Cairo, the Islamic court was not only the preferred but likely perceived to be the only legitimate venue for registering transactions involving property, including sales, inheritance and waqf. This conclusion is based on evidence from property records dating from 1505 to 1601 kept at the archive of the Coptic patriarch in Abbasiyya. And finally, case studies will explore a few key legal practices which both Muslims and Coptic Christians shared. Exploration of the ways in which Coptic Christians negotiated Cairo's Islamic courts are suggestive of the shared currents of culture that underlie both Muslim and Coptic daily life in the sixteenth century, and also the degree to which further work is required to understand the depth and variety of Coptic Muslim interactions.