Praying in big beautiful mosques is great and all, but that anxiety when you walk back to the shoe rack is too real. We’ve all had our encounters with sandal thievery, but would it ever lead you to live in a CHURCH? Apparently things got that bad for this 16th c. Cairene saint:

Ibrāhīm ʿUṣayfīr was what we call an “unruly” friend of God. He had his run-of-the-mill powers: sleeping with wolves, walking on water, milk-like urine. But he’d also (quite comically) gather children at the front of funeral processions while shouting “Zalābiya! Harees!”

Despite his humorous side, however, he was also a little bit intense, to say the least, so when he’d fall into a state of spiritual rapture, all of the neighbors would immediately lock their doors.

A good example of this madness was that when the local muazzin would recite “God is greater” (Allāhu akbar), he would retort, “He’s only glorifying Muslims over Christians!” and proceed to throw rocks at the man. His links to Christianity though went beyond this…

He was widely known for sleeping in the churches of Cairo alongside monks. When asked why, he replied that “I slept at the Azhar Mosque on many occasions, and they would steal my turban and sandals. I’ve slept alongside the monks for TEN years and they’ve never stolen a thing!”

His sensitivity towards Christianity far exceeded his companionship with monks though. He used to say that there was no divine reward in store for the Muslim fast, since during Ramadan they would eat continuously from Isha to Fajr (guilty as charged)…

In fact, he surmised that if you calculated it, Muslims ended up eating more while fasting than when they’re not! (And let’s be real, we all know about that Ramadan weight gain). He juxtaposed this to the practice of Christians, who would break their fasts with bread and oil.

On his account, only those who avoided meat (like the Christians) were fasting in reality (yaṣūm ḥaqīqa): the Muslim fast, on the other hand, was invalid (bāṭil), since they’d spend their days eating chicken and meat.

What’s great about the curious life of Ibrāhīm ʿUṣayfīr is that despite the apparent foreignness of his world (one enchanted by saints and their miracles), we can relate to him at a basic human level:

i.e., the sense of frustration as our co-religionists wrong us, the tendency to look outward in order to substantiate the failings of our own community, and even the need to bring some comic relief to moments of tragedy.

At a historical level, however, it also tells us a lot about the complexity of Muslim-Christian relations in medieval Islamic society.

That a widely-revered saint would reside with Christians for so long and exhibit such sympathies towards Christianity undermines the popular view of a religiously segregated society in premodern Islam.

The case of Ibrāhīm strongly supports Jack Tannous’ observation that “it was possible for one to be a Muslim and yet make use of many distinctively ‘Christian’ religious elements in one’s everyday existence.” (“The Making of the Medieval Middle East,” 361)

Though importantly, this interaction wasn’t limited to the possibly exceptional cases of more “syncretic” Muslims. Take the case of the Ḥanbalī jurist Najm al-Dīn al-Ṭūfī, who lived in Egypt some two centuries earlier.

Despite devoting an entire treatise to the refutation of Christian doctrine (al-Intiṣārāt al-Islāmiyya), it’s very likely that he lived in the house of a Christian during his time in Qūṣ (a predominantly Coptic town in Upper Egypt) (see GAL 2:132)

So though the past is indeed a foreign country, it’s also a fundamentally human one, as complex and rich as our own. And though it’s no longer common for people to walk on water, a bunch of unattended shoes are bound to catch the eye of thieves…

In which case heed the lines of the Urdu poet Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914):

“ Apne jooton se rahien sare namazi hoshiar/ Ek buzurgh atey hain masjid mein Khizr ki surat” (Those who come to offer namaz should take care of their shoes. An old man with the countenance of Khizr comes and, impliedly, steals them).

The source for Ibrāhīm's bio is Munāwī's al-Kawākib al-Durriyya.