Coptic Christianity, Fatimid to Mamluk

By this period Egypt's Christians had lived under Muslim rule for four centuries, and the shape of their life was set by that: a poll tax, stretches of tolerance under the Fatimids alternating with sharp episodes of persecution, and a slow shift out of Coptic and into Arabic as the everyday language. What they did with Arabic is the surprise. In the thirteenth century a single Cairo family, the sons of al-Assal, produced a body of work — canon law, theology, biblical scholarship, philosophy, and Coptic grammars and dictionaries written in Arabic to keep the old language from being lost entirely — that amounted to a renaissance of Coptic learning in a new tongue. Their patriarch for part of that stretch, Cyril III ibn Laqlaq, was a learned and combative man who spent his reign gathering the church's authority into his own hands.