Copto-Arabic literature

Coptic was used alongside Arabic in the administration of the country and some bilingual documents were produced in the 7th century.

[1] It gradually replaced Coptic as both the spoken and literary language of the Copts in a process that took several centuries.

This process was much slower in Egypt than in Syria and Palestine, where the populace spoke Aramaic, a language much closer to Arabic.

[2] The first Copto-Arabic authors are the Melkite patriarch Eutychius (d. 940) and the Coptic Orthodox bishop Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 987).

Eutychius also wrote an apologetic treatise defending the Melkite faith against both Coptic Orthodoxy and Islam, entitled Kitāb al-jadal bayn al-mukhālif wa-l-Naṣrānī.

[1] Sāwīrus's friend and contemporary, Būluṣ ibn Rajāʾ, a convert from Islam, wrote in Arabic a critique of his old faith, the Kitāb al-wāḍiḥ bi-l-ḥaqq, that was later translated into Latin and had a major influence in the West.

The brothers al-ʿAssāl also wrote in defence of the literary merit of the New Testament and produced a bilingual Coptic–Arabic dictionary and a Coptic grammar in Arabic.

[1] The encyclopaedic work of Ibn Sibāʿ (c. 1300) on the offices and traditions of the Coptic church marks the start of a decline of Copto-Arabic writing.

There was a flowering of modern Coptic literature in Arabic following the assassination of the Prime Minister Boutros Ghali in 1910 and the Congress of Asyūṭ in 1911.

Copto-Arabic apocalyptic was usually pseudonymous served to allow criticism of Islamic authorities from the safety of (feigned) temporal distance.

It incorporated the legend of the Last Roman Emperor, but always portrayed the Coptic church was triumphant over the Chalcedonian.

Two similarly titled works followed, one in eight questions by Marqus ibn al-Qunbar and one in twenty-two chapters by the future Cyril III.

Copto-Arabic grammatical writing was inspired entirely by the existing Arabic linguistic tradition practised among Muslims.

Much more influential was the Taʾrīkh baṭārikat al-Iskandariyya l-Qibṭ, a series of biographies of the Coptic Orthodox patriarchs.

[16] In the late 12th century, Abū al-Makārim began a guidebook on the churches and monasteries of Egypt.

It was expanded in the early 13th century with the addition of numerous historical notices into the History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt.

[1] Copto-Arabic theology prior to the 13th century was primarily didactic, pastoral and apologetico-polemic (directed at either other Christian denominations or Islam).

In the 13th century there was a turn towards a more systematic, even encyclopaedic, approach based in logic and philosophy and heavily influenced by Islamic kalām.