On April 9, 1904, the funeral procession of Gaudenzio Bonfigli, the Catholic Archbishop of Alexandria, weaved through the streets of the city heading towards the Cathedral of St. Catherine. Mounted police led the procession, followed by bands and banners of Catholic religious orders and schools. In the middle lay the body, and subsequent rows of mourners, government representatives, diplomatic and consular corps, the judiciary, clergy, state administrators, municipal representatives, various “foreign” communities, bankers, traders and notables marched behind. It must have been a grand sight, a public spectacle of mourning and power orchestrated by the French consulate in Alexandria. This paper takes Bonfigli’s funeral as its lens to explore the meeting point between the religious ritual of mourning and the demonstration of power and authority. Using documents found in the French diplomatic archives, including correspondence between various consulates and governmental administrators planning the memorial, the funeral plan and seating chart, and newspaper articles documenting Bonfigli’s death and burial, I argue that this funeral represented much more than the religious burial of a well-known man. Taking place just one day after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, this funeral also reflected the delicate dance of European power rivalries in Alexandria. The performance of mourning laid out in this procession and funeral was the result of days of negotiations between the French consulate, the Italian consulate, the British colonial government and various Egyptian national and municipal governmental representatives in Alexandria. It was not a haphazard event; determining the participants and their role in the funeral reflected the position of those involved in the broader political spectrum. The Archbishop’s funeral illuminates the use of religious ritual and diplomatic authority between various European communities to exercise and announce their power in the shadow of British colonial rule in Egypt.

The Representations of the Paulicians in Early Islamic Sources The area stretching from Anatolia to Armenia in the east witnessed interesting cultural and political interactions between Muslims and other religious sects. One of these groups, the Paulicians, caught the attention of early Muslim historians and heresiographers. Their name occurs in Islamic sources usually as Baylaqani or Bauliya which seems to have been derived from the Greek word Paulikianoi. The Paulicians were an active Christian religious and political movement in the region between Antioch and Armenia during the 6th- 12th centuries, but they were viewed by the Byzantine Orthodox Church as a heresy. Hence, Muslims and Paulicians had military cooperation against their common enemy—Byzantium. Since almost nothing of the Paulicians’ records reached us, our only information on this group is based on sources that are hostile to them. Most of the information about the Paulicians can be found primarily in Greek and Armenian sources. This proposed paper examines the representations of Paulicians in early Islamic sources. An emphasis will be placed on religious views of the Paulicians and the reasons behind Muslims’ interest in their doctrines. The paper particularly investigates the way in which Muslim scholars employed Paulician religious views, regarding the Divinity of Jesus and the Trinity, in their polemic argumentation against Christians. The Paulicians’ claim that “Christ was not born of Mary, but He brought His body from heaven and passed through Mary as through pipe,” therefore, functions as an important facet of the Islamic arguments that Jesus is devoid of divine attributes. Additionally, this paper investigates the extent to which certain Islamic sects, such as the Mu‘tazalites, incorporated certain Paulician ideas into their theological ideology. Such is the case with the Mu‘tazalite scholar, Ahmad ibn Ha’it, whom some Islamic scholars attack vehemently accusing him for the incorporation of some Christian dualistic views into Mu‘tazilite theology.

The Ottoman Empire, centered in the Eastern Mediterranean and perhaps the most centralized of the early modern Muslim states, provides the best documented case for the study of pre-modern Muslim majority rule over non-Muslims. The third largest settlement of the empire after the sixteenth century, the Syrian city of Aleppo was home to large minority communities of Christians and Jews, whose interactions with Muslim authorities were complex and changed over time. In the present study I examine selected aspects of the non-Muslim experience in Aleppo in the seventeenth century, a time when the Ottoman state, with its capital in Istanbul, was to a degree decentralizing and thus renegotiating the distribution of power with local provincial power groups, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Using previously unexamined tax surveys housed in the Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives, I begin with an overview of residential patterns and assess the degree to which houses owned by Muslims, Christians, and Jews were spatially integrated or segregated, and differentiated by their appraised tax value. Second, using the records of the local law courts I examine the degree to which Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted in the work place. Organized into guilds, or professional associations, artisans and traders of all three religions came to the court to register appointments, record internal agreements, and petition state authorities, but the extent of their inter-religious collaboration had clearly defined limits. Third and finally, I consider change over time, namely, the evolving contestation between the decentralizing Muslim central state and the increasingly assertive local Muslim majority, specifically over the assessment of property taxes imposed on non-Muslims. Preliminary findings using a balance of central state and local sources suggest that the Ottoman central state, ruling over a large but increasingly restive non-Muslim population in the Balkans and Anatolia in addition to Syria, strove to legitimate its authority among that population through carefully calibrated and judicious tax assessments, even while newly emerging provincial Muslim power groups, namely, the urban notables (a’yan), sought heavier tax assessments on non-Muslims as a symbolic and material proof of their own ascendancy. Taken together, the study of residential, professional, and fiscal patterns will yield a complex and shifting picture of the status of non-Muslims in one Early Modern Muslim society, with emphasis on the possibilities and limits of non-Muslim integration into the whole.

This paper explores the rhetoric and ideology of interfaith polemics in early Arabic Christian theology. Christian minorities living within the Islamic empires and polities of the early Middle Ages developed a distinctive genre of theological literature designed to refute the religion of Islam’s claim to truth and to argue instead for Christianity’s rightful claim to that status. Their status as minorities sometimes put them in a precarious positions with respect to state power, while at the same time allowing them to participate often quite freely in intellectual conversations of the period. This paper uses the example of a treatise written by Habib ibn Khidmah Abu Ra’itah, a Syrian Christian bishop living in the early 9th century, to reveal how power structures inform theological and religious literature. Specifically, by closely analyzing the rhetoric of religious violence in this treatise, this paper argues that the characterization of Islam as a religion of war appears in this treatise and others like it due to the political conditions under which it was written, i.e., during a period of Islamic imperial dominance. The paper looks in detail at the specific hermeneutic assumptions and devices that Abu Ra’itah uses to achieve this interpretation of Islamic sacred history, while at the same time shielding his own sacred history from the same accusation. The paper concludes with reflections on the contemporary usage of this characterization, and its possible historical origin in these 9th century Christian theological sources. In other words, the paper seeks to explore how discourses of power can structure theological reasoning and thereby produce theological arguments that can serve immediate social or political purposes in interfaith relations, whether in ninth century Baghdad or twenty first century America.