Dr. Jason Welle is assistant professor of comparative theology at Boston College. His areas of academic interest include Christian-Muslim relations, Islamic mysticism, the Franciscan tradition, and ethics. He is the author of Companionship and Virtue in Classical Sufism: The Contribution of al-Sulamī (I.B. Tauris, London, 2024) and numerous articles and translations. After serving in a variety of positions at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, he took up his current position at Boston College in 2023. Professor Welle is presently working on a monograph on the Franciscan tradition’s engagement with Islam.

This interview touches on the life and legacy of St. Francis of Assisi, his famed encounter with the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kāmil, Ramon Llull, Tommaso Obicini, Louis Massignon, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, and the Franciscan order in Egypt, among other topics. The interview was conducted with Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor of Dialogue Across Borders.

Excerpt

MA: Let’s fast forward to Francis’s encounter with al-Malik al-Kāmil (c.1177-1238), the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt. One interpretation of this encounter is that Francis opposed the ongoing war; another is that he went primarily to evangelize. What happened there, and why has this encounter been so significant over the centuries?

JW: During the Fifth Crusade, Francis announced to his brothers his intention to go to the mission in what he called Syria, which referred to the entire East. After a brief stop, they arrived in Damietta, a port city in Northern Egypt, where the story of Francis and the Sultan plays out. What happened is that Francis and at least one brother arrived at the Crusader camp when the Crusaders were planning an assault on the Muslim fortress in Damietta.

Sources say that Francis tried to discourage the troops from fighting in this battle, saying it would not go well for them. It's unclear,from the sources, whether Francis's opposition to this battle was a principled one, what we would now call pacifism, that Christians should not be fighting Muslims at all and that war is not a Christian thing, or whether it was Francis's spirit of prophecy that somehow knew that the battle would go badly on that day. One way to read the sources is that they should have waited another week or another month before laying siege. Francis tried to discourage them, but they laid the siege, and in the end, it went very badly. The Christian troops suffered heavy losses. They pulled back, which led to a temporary ceasefire.

At that time, Francis went to Cardinal Pelagius, who was leading the troops, and asked permission to cross the battle lines unarmed and to try to meet the Sultan. Thus, Francis and one of his brothers crossed no man's land unarmed and simply said, "Take me to your leader." Somehow, they are ushered into the Muslim camp and end up encountering the Sultan. It seems safest to hypothesize that the Muslims thought that these people were bringing some kind of a message or were involved in some kind of diplomacy or something like this. They were welcomed in and may even have spent as much as two weeks in the Muslim camp.

We don't know on how many occasions Francis spoke with the Sultan. All the sources are in Latin, some written by Franciscans, some by non-Franciscans. Although the sources are in Latin, they are very consistent in speaking about the Sultan welcoming Francis, listening to him, and treating him with respect. These sources generally talk about two motives for Francis's activity: one is the desire for martyrdom, which was a common hagiographical trope at the time, and another is preaching to the Sultan to convert him. In this sense, we might call it a peacemaking mission. If I convert the leader and his army, there will be peace because we will all share the same faith. In any case, the sources primarily discuss his intentions. If Francis preached to the Sultan, we don't really know what he said or how he would have said it. He likely didn't have a translator. Some people in the Sultan’s court spoke Latin, but the sources don't offer much insight into what exactly this encounter looked like. What we do know is that after some time, Francis was allowed to leave and given a bill of safe passage. He got out of there alive, which is a very strange.

Now, if I can return to the question of intention, many fans of St. Francis today claim that he wanted to engage in dialogue with the Sultan to promote understanding through a peacemaking mission. The sources don't actually talk about any of that. The sources talk about his desire for martyrdom and his desire to preach. Both are common hagiographical tropes. The claim that Francis wanted to be a martyr, on one hand, makes sense, since Francis was formed by the hagiographical lives of the saints. It would not surprise me if he wanted to become like them. However, I believe that if you had asked Francis about his plans and intentions before the journey or while travelling to Egypt, he would not have been able to provide a clear answer. I read Francis as someone who is generally so caught up in the Spirit that his answer probably would have changed from hour to hour. He would have talked about preaching the gospel, peace, brotherhood, witness, and a number of other things.

The more significant thing for me is not what his intention was. It's what happened afterwards. Francis returned to Italy and by then the fraternity had grown exponentially. There were many internal divisions in the fraternity, and it became clear that they needed a written rule of life with official approval from the Pope. Francis set out to try to write a rule and wrote this chapter about the brothers going on a mission. These were the first rules for a Catholic religious community to include a chapter on mission, and Francis described those who went "intersaraceno" among the Saracens and other non-believers. He said that there are two ways the brothers can go among the non-believers; one involves avoiding arguments, submitting to the Saracens, and accepting their authority, while consistently demonstrating your Christian faith. The other way, when the brothers see that it is pleasing to the Lord, is to preach the Gospel openly and call the non-believers to baptism in the name of the Holy Trinity. Francis identified these two alternatives. The first one is a non-proselytizing mission of presence among Muslims. In the midst of the Crusades, the idea that a missionary could establish a non-proselytizing presence that avoided disputes with them was a revolution.

What did Francis want when he went to the Sultan? What did he think was going to happen? I don't know exactly, but whatever happened while he was in Egypt, he came back home thinking about what it could be like for his brothers to live among the Muslims, as a peaceful, non-proselytizing presence among them.

The Pope disapproved of the rule Francis authored although this was unrelated to this particular chapter. Rather, the rule needed to be condensed and revised to fix some things that were canonically ambiguous. The approved rule was still very profound, but the novel element of the two ways of living among the Saracens belonged to the earlier, unapproved rule, and therefore did not circulate widely within the order. People know the story about Francis' encounter with the Sultan because it was part of all the hagiographical tradition. But those accounts portray Francis as someone who desires martyrdom, who desires to preach and convert the infidels. The possibility of this peaceful presence was only fleetingly understood.