Le Mäṣḥafä Seddät et le Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša : un cas de contact entre manuscrits islamiques et manuscrits chrétiens d’Éthiopie au XVIe siècle ?

The Mäṣḥafä Seddät (“Book of Persecution”) is the Christian version of the description of the wars initiated by Imām Aḥmad from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn sultanate against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia between the 1520’s and the year 1543. In the first half of the eighteenth century, this short text in ge‘ez was inserted into the text of the so-called “short chronicles”. But the Mäṣḥafä Seddät is independently known in three Christian manuscripts and was probably written at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century, by an ecclesiastic of a monastery of Enfrāz in Bagémder. This paper proposes the hypothesis that to compose his text, the author had access to and was largely inspired by a copy of the Arabic text of the Futūḥ al-Ḥabaša (“The Conquest of Abyssinia”), the Islamic account of the wars of imām Aḥmad written in Harar in the middle of the sixteenth century by a Muslim scholar. This possible case of contact between a Muslim text from the Barr Sa‘d ad-Dīn and a Christian author from the highlands provides an opportunity to question the commonly accepted separation between the Islamic and the Christian manuscripts produced in Ethiopia in the sixteenth century.