“Then He Stabbed Me with a Spear”: Aggressive Sacred Images and Interreligious Polemics

Abstract

This paper studies Coptic communal identity in early Islamic Egypt by analyzing two hagiographical narratives from the Christian Copto-Arabic text The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. The narratives relate incidents of sacred images that become ‘aggressive’ when they retaliate against insults. Although the relation between religious violence and sacred art has merited much scholarly attention, the focus is usually on humans as the aggressors and sacred art as the victim. The reverse is scarcer, and its rarity means we miss an opportunity to rethink such narratives as communicative modes of rhetoric to be contextually interpreted. Here I argue that these aggressive sacred images were tools of power within a polemic religious discourse aimed at proclaiming divine truth, undergirding it with supernatural power, and ultimately shaping Coptic communal identity around this discourse.