Abu l-Makārim Saʿdullāh ibn Jirjis ibn Masʿūd (Arabic: ابو المكارم سعد الله بن جرجس بن مسعود) (d.1208) was a priest of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria in the thirteenth century. Abu al-Makarim is best known as the author of a famous work entitled History of Churches and Monasteries (Arabic: تاريخ ألكنائس وألأديرة). This was written around 1200.
Abu al-Makarim's work is one of the most important sources on the Coptic Church's life during his period and is frequently referenced by scholars of Coptic history.[1]
The work first became known in the West when a portion of a manuscript of it was purchased in 1674 in Ottoman Egypt for three piastres by Johann Michael Vansleb.[2] The manuscript is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, ms. arabe 307, which manuscript is dated 1338 CE.[3] A photographic copy of it is in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. This manuscript was edited and published by B.T.A. Evetts in 1895, with an English translation,[4] as if Abū Ṣāliḥ the Armenian was the author, when he was merely the owner of the manuscript, as determined by the scholars Ugo Zanetti and Johannes den Heijer.[5][6]
Another manuscript has since been discovered in Munich; and a third in Egypt.
An edition of the Egyptian manuscript was printed in Arabic in four volumes, with its volume 2 including the same portion published by Evetts and its volume 4 representing other travellers'[7] reports. This edition was published by the Coptic monk and bishop Samuel al-Suryānī, in 1984-1985, titled in Arabic History of the Churches and Monasteries in the Twelfth Century by Abu l-Makārim, wrongly attributed to Abū Ṣāliḥ, the Armenian.[8] An English translation of the first volume was published in Cairo, Abu al Makarem: History of the Churches and Monasteries in Lower Egypt in the Thirteenth Century in 1992.[9]
Clara Ten Hacken has made a translation of the portion of the full text which relates to ancient Antioch.[10]