Moving Mountains and the Politics of Memory

Coptic hagiographical texts from Islamic Egypt record a curious miracle—Christians prayed for a mountain to move, and it did! The earliest account comes from the tenth century and the accounts continued expanding until the 18th century, gaining more fantastical elements in the meantime. Over time, it entered the liturgical calendar, ritual fasts, and sacred geography, thus ensuring its embeddedness in Coptic cultural memory until today. In this paper, I argue that the development of this narrative over time—textually, ritually, and materially—was a function of the politics of religious memory. Using the theories of Jan Assman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, I trace the role of politics in the formation, preservation, and transformation of this narrative as it developed and became embedded in Coptic cultural memory.