the ethiopian jihad
& THE GOLDEN AGE OF GE’EZ

Throughout the 1530s, the Christian kingdom of the Ethiopian highlands faced an existential threat – an armed rebellion by its Muslim vassals led by the charismatic Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm (d. 1543). During the so-called jihād of Imam Aḥmad (ca. 1529-1543), one of the kingdom’s ecclesiastical authorities, the abbot Enbaqom (d. 1565), penned a valiant polemic in the form of a letter to the derided rebel leader. This letter, recounted as a treatise titled The Gateway of Faith, contains several Qurʾanic terms, phrases and passages translated masterfully into Classical Ethiopic, or Geʿez. Enbaqom cites the translations as evidence for the abiding truths of Christianity based on the Imam’s scripture, ‘your Qurʾan’ (qwərʾanka). In the wake of the crisis of sedition and apostasy, The Gateway affirmed the Geʿez-reading Christian elites in the enduring supremacy of miaphysite, monastic Orthodoxy over the empire’s restive Muslim subjects.

Enbaqom’s Qurʾan translations are artefacts of a Red Sea literary genius, a uniquely Erythraean confluence of linguistic agility and interpretive precision. As literary objects, they are late medieval vestiges of the cultural connectivity between Africa and Arabia that stretched far back into antiquity. Like the Qurʾan itself a thousand years prior, Enbaqom’s writings are discursive relics of the trans-Erythraean exchange. Both the original and its translation are examples of Red Sea literature. Such a transhistorical hermeneutic framing allows us to evade what Alexis Wick identified as the “racial-cultural taxonomies [that] render the Red Sea unimaginable except in the strictest topographical sense” and to bring the literary worlds of the African and Arabian shores into a “unitary frame of analysis.”

Like the Psalm citations of the fourth-century Axumite royal inscriptions and the Genesis retellings of the seventh-century Sura al-Baqarah, the sixteenth-century treatise of Enbaqom is an exegetical translation of scripture that responds to rapid religio-political transformations in the Red Sea world. The Gateway indicates a characteristic feature of Red Sea literature, namely the translatory mode of scriptural interpretation. This essay is an introduction to Enbaqom’s translations, their Erythraean circumstances and exegetical strategies. It examines how, through an array of translatory tactics, Enbaqom recast the Arabic Qurʾan as a Geʿez Christology. With great literary subtlety, he marshals the Qurʾanic imaginary into an affirmation of Orthodoxy, its miaphysite theology and monastic practices. The purpose of this investigation is to show that Enbaqom’s translations are not literary eccentricities but manifestation of the deep linguistic and literary ties between the two shores of the Red Sea, of which the Qurʾan itself is a testimony.

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EXCERPT FROM THE LETTER OF ENBAQOM or "ANQASA AMIN"
(Please do not cite without permission)

"Know, O Imam, that the number of scripts that exist in the world are twenty. Eight are of the house of Shem: Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and others. And of the House of Japheth, there are seven: Frankish, Latin, Greek, and others. And of the children of Ham, there are five: Coptic, Abyssinian, Nubian, and others. And in these scripts the gospel of Christ was written. 

Understand, O reader, may God guide you to the way of life, and know that as one people and one language, if they wished to establish the law of falsehood and unite in a singular conspiracy, this would be possible. As for those, for each there is their own worship and for each there is their own language, and they are far apart, one country from another, how will it be possible for them to gather from the peripheries and falsely establish a faith of the Gospel? This is impossible, for at this time the children of Adam persist in the worship of idols. There are those who worship the sun and the moon and the stars, and there are those that worship the sea and the rivers, and there are those that worship trees and birds, livestock, and beasts. All such have abandoned their worship and believed in Christ, and they have written down the Gospel in each of their languages. For Christ, after his ascent into the sky sent his spirit upon the apostles and he equipped them to converse in the speech of every creature, and there was nothing impossible for them.

And for this reason, we say that the Gospel of Christ is far from doubt and there is no defect in it, or falsehood, or scandal. As for the scripture of the Jews, it was written in one language, which was Hebrew, and therefore it is possible for there to be scandal in it or doubt upon it, for they are one tribe. As for the scripture of the Muslims, similarly, is written in one language, which is Arabic. And for this reason, it is said at the beginning of your Quran about the writing of the Gospel, "I praise this book in which there is no doubt."

Listen then, for there are those among men who leave the faith of their fathers and enter the faith of others under duress, fearing the whip, the sword, and the strike of the spear. And there are those that enter the faith of others because of their love of eating and drinking, the pleasure of the world, and the love of women, that which lures them to the flesh of the heart. And there are those that are stripped of their faith by the practice of magic.

...

O Imam, know that I too before was like you, zealous for the law of Islam, and one day while I was reciting the book of the Quran,  I came upon where it says: " And God said to Jesus Christ, the son of Mary: "I will cause you to die, and I will raise you up to myself and I will purify you of the infidels and I will place those who follow you above the infidels until Judgment Day." And then I said in my heart, who are those who follow Christ, the son of Mary, whom He placed above the infidels? Is it not the Christian people? And who refused to follow him except my own kinsmen? And thereafter, I began to supplicate to the one who created me to reveal to me the faith that is agreeable and, through the abundant mercy of Christ, be gracious toward to me.

The Quran says: "And for Mary, the daughter of ʾƏmrān, who behaved rightly with the womb of chastity. We breathed into her from the spirit, and she believed the word of her creator, and she was from among the obedient." Therefore see, O reader, and understand, that God did not say: We breathed into her from the spirit of angels, nor does he say from the spirit of men, rather he says: "We breathed our spirit into her." Furthermore, He says: "We sent to her Our spirit and it appeared to her a perfect man." For all the Muslim people believe that Christ was the spirit of God, and they say ʿIsā rawḥa əllāh. So, if you say that the spirit of God is a creation then you lie and blaspheme against your Lord, and your own book is a witness against you. For "the angel said to Mary: 'God has chosen you from men and angels. Behold, you will conceive and bear a son.' And Maryam said to the angel: 'How will this be as I know no man?' And the angel said to her: 'There is no deed that is impossible for God.' 'Look at this desiccated tree-trunk.' And there it was, next to her, the tree-trunk of a desiccated date-palm, and suddenly it grew green and became a large date-palm, and it bore a ripe date and it fell in front of her And the angel said to Maryam: 'Eat, drink, and rejoice.' And when she gave birth, her relatives said to her: 'What have you become?' 'Your father and your mother did not sin.' And she said to them: 'Ask my child and he will tell you.' And the child spoke to them on the day of his birth, and he said to them: 'As for me, God sent me and blessed am I, peace upon me on the day of my birth, the day of my death, and the day of my resurrection to life.'"

...

You say to us that you venerate trees, stones, and images. God forbid  that we worship wood and stone  instead of our creator. But our Lord Himself commanded us in the Torah and in the Prophets to make an altar  in order to offer up sacrifice, and that we depict His images, and that they be continually depicted before us, such that we do not forget his remembrance. 

And were we to defile his altar with our sins, he would raze it by fire, and destroy it by the axe and the hatchet in the hand of heathens or others. If the spirit of God is within the altar and the image, then they cannot be damaged. And the priests who serve them fear approaching them that they do not kill them. For God said to Moses: "Make for me an ark from wood that does not rot  and make the image of two cherubs and their wings will shade the ark. I will be manifest to you from there and I will speak to you from between the cherubs." 

And we Christians, we have done nothing that our creator has not commanded us to do in the Torah and the Prophets and the Gospel . And your Qur'an  is our testimony in regards to them, that they descended from God and, thus, it is not to the ark and the image and the words  that we worship,  rather we worship the power of God that is present upon the ark and the image, for as soon as the spirit of God departs from the ark and the image, they would cease [to be venerated].  For had a man, who is mortal, a chalice of crystal or gold, or of silver, and there was an unclean worm  inside it, would he not break it? Or if he had a house that he loved and there was a  spirit of disease in it or a spirit of demons, would he not raze it by fire? Thus too, we Christians, when we angered our Lord, and defiled his temple, he razed it by fire. 

As for you, Muslims, you blaspheme against the ark of God in your ignorance, and you do not understand that which He says in your Qur'an: " Behold, it shall be a sign to you when he  brings to you an ark from your Lord, in which is a command and comfort."  L0ok how the scripture of the Jews and your scripture testifies to the ark of the Christians and their images."

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