Ibn ˛Abd al-Hakam,s Futūh Miṣr (“The Conquest of Egypt”, henceforth FM∖ probably completed at some point in the 860s, begins with a se¬ries of reports from Muhammad (hadīths) which foresee the conquest of Egypt and charge the Muslims to treat the Coptic population well, referring to their protected status and genealogical kinship with the Arabs. This paper will seek to understand how the Muslim historical traditions collated by the author combine to construct an identity for the Copts, and through that construction assert and justify their minority status in Muslim Egypt. While most secondary literature follows later practice in using the term Copts to describe either the population of Egypt at the time of the conquest or the members of the anti-Chalcedonian church, it is important to note that, to my knowledge, there is no use of the term qibt in Arabic documentary or literary sources before the eighth century, with terms such as the ‘people of the land’ (ahi al-ard) or the ‘people of the dhimma’ (ahi al-dhimma) more generally being used. Ibn ˛Abd al-Hakam is one of the earliest literary sources through which we may explore the parameters defining this relatively novel Arabic usage, which was perhaps still being negotiated, from the Arab-Muslim side.

The Futūh Miṣr and its author FM itself is a fairly typical example of early Islamic historical writing, be¬ing a collection of usually short historical eyewitness accounts (khabars), each affirmed by a chain of authorities professing to describe the trans-mission of the account from the eyewitness to the author (isnad). As suggested by its title, the focus is regional: the first forty-five pages are concerned with the status and merits of the Copts and the pre-Islamic history of Egypt; about one-hundred-and-forty pages are then devoted to the Arab conquest of Egypt and the concurrent settlement and ad¬ministrative arrangements; roughly twenty pages apiece document the conquest of North Africa and then Spain; twenty pages recount the his-tory of the Islamic judges (qādīs) of Egypt up to the author's time; and a final seventy pages recount hadīths transmitted on the authority of companions who settled in Egypt.