Amongst the collection of icons at St Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, is a small panel depicting a woman wearing a black veil kneeling before the equestrian saint Sergios (fig. 1). The icon is one of a group of thirteenth-century Sinai icons, many of equestrian saints, whose date and provenance has been a matter of debate. But lacking from this debate has been interpretation of the icon as an indicator of a particular social, religious and political field. The intrusion of the material world of the viewer in this icon, through the gesture of the kneeling woman, enables it to be interpreted as a personal prayer, an act of supplication for protection at the critical period before the final loss of Latin Syria to the Mamluks. It was arguably commissioned from one of the Syrian Orthodox artists whose work can be seen displayed in the churches to the east and south of Tripoli. This identifies an intense period of activity in wallpainting and icon production in Syria during the middle to second quarter of the thirteenth century of which work at the end of the century in Cyprus was the continuation. Looked at from the perspective of the woman herself, the icon raises issues of the role of women in the patronage and veneration of icons in the Latin East.
The article surveys the cultural relations in Egypt between Christians and Muslims before the Ottomans by means of a selection of churches in Old Cairo and of mosques in the growing city of al-Qāhira. It examines these buildings and aspects of them in the light of the changing status of the Christian population from majority to minority, categorising them into four key phases, from the rise of Islam to the coming of the Ottomans. It discusses shared features of architectural decoration and style, and notes that while some of these are used neutrally and interchangeably between monuments of the two faiths, others which are sited at key locations, such as on a façade or in a main sanctuary, arguably function as political or religious statements. Such features suggest that cultural identity was expressed by the two faiths within a common frame of visual reference.
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