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Introduction
And when they brought him to stand before the king and all of the soldiers, armies, lords of nations, and rulers, he was not afraid of the majesty of the king nor was his heart distressed by the soldiers who surrounded him, nor from the torture that he was promised. He was brave in his answer to the king and his armies, -when the king asked him, 'Oh Christian one, heed me and leave the religion of your fathers and I will forgive what they have said about you in the testimony which those who accompanied you from the countryside brought with them and in which there are the inappropriate words which came out of your mouth.' So the martyr took courage in the power of Christ, glory be upon him, and he said, 'Oh king, everything that they said and wrote about me, and sent to you is true. Not a word of it is a lie, but all of it I have said with my heart and all of my senses. I am publicly a Christian!'1
The above quotation is from the martyrology of Saint Salib (d. 1512 CE), a Coptic Christian who was condemned to death in the late Mamluk era and whose story was recorded soon after. The "king" in the narrative, whom we identify as Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, is pleading with Salib to renounce his religion so that he would be saved from execution for blasphemy. Immediately one is struck by the resolve in Salib's voice and by his choice of words, which are interspersed with the Egyptian dialect. He is portrayed as steadfast and proud as he stands before the Sultan's majesty, and his diction and confident demeanor give him a heroic air; it is clearly a scene intended to inspire a Christian audience. The saint is presented, in a sense, as a champion of the Coptic Christian community that had few opportunities to take pride in or to publicly declare its religious beliefs.
The attention to detail in this Copto-Arabic martyrology - the choice of words, the meticulous description of Salib's surroundings, and the subsequent narration of Salib's judgment, suffering, and execution - renders the text an important source for Coptic and Egyptian literary and social history.2...