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Incendiary Affordances: The Damascus Fire of 1340
Shahab Ahmad Room - Alwaleed Hall
AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74, New Cairo, 11835, Egypt
Details
In late April 1340, two spectacular fires raged in Damascus: the flames engulfed several markets and extended to nearby madrasas and parts of the Umayyad Mosque, the ritual heart of the city. So grand was the melee, so tragic the loss that Damascenes thought the world “had turned upside down.” Inquiries quickly revealed a case of arson starring two Byzantine monks reportedly skilled in bomb-making. Soon, a wider conspiracy was allegedly uncovered, implicating a dozen Damascene Christian bureaucrats. The monks escaped to Cyprus, but the local conspirators were publicly executed, and a significant sum was extorted from the Damascene Christian community, the funds earmarked for reconstruction.
This lecture presents a close study of the events using a newly-discovered manuscript featuring a ‘dossier’ of six texts related to the incident.
Speakers
Tamer El-Leithy
Tamer el-Leithy is Assistant Professor, in the History Department at Johns Hopkins University. In a former life, he studied Economics at AUC and then worked as an economist for an oil company. Drudgery ensued. So when he read a historical novel set in 15th-century Cairo, he quickly saw the light and discovered a passion for medieval history. That conversion led him to graduate school in Cairo, Cambridge (MPhil), and Princeton (PhD), where he studied medieval Middle Eastern history. El-Leithy was a Junior Research Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, then taught at NYU’s Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department, before moving to Johns Hopkins University.
His forthcoming book, The Last New Muslims. Mass Conversion and Religious Difference in late-medieval Egypt examines the 14th-century wave of Coptic Christian conversions to Islam—including the pivotal conversions of Coptic lay elites, who had played a critical role in the community’s cultural patronage and economic support; the process thus had significant ripples extending throughout the wider community. He is currently working on a second monograph, The Deep Grammar of Religious Transformation: Arabization and Coptic Christianity in medieval Egypt, a longue-durée history of the cultural consequences of Arabization for the Coptic Christian community and religious tradition in Egypt (ca. 11th-13th centuries). The language change (Coptic to Arabic, ca 10th-11th c.) was not only comparatively late; it also ushered in remarkably generative cultural changes, marked by the emergence of new Coptic genres and disciplines and a closer entanglement with wider Arabic-speaking and Islamic contexts.