Because it is only ETHIOPIA and her Almighty God EGZIABHER Who the anti-Christians from Arabia are terrified of. Remember of Prester John of Ethiopia? By coincidence that the inauguration of the President of the United States is taking place almost on the very day of “Ethiopian” Epiphany?
According to one of the 268 stories in the Ta’amra Maryam, “The Miracles of the Virgin Mary,” a popular Ethiopian theme, Emperor Dawit prayed to The Virgin Mary before raiding anti-Christian Egypt. In reply she advised the emperor, in the name of God, to divert the Nile. The river is referred to in the leg-ends as the „Abbay“ or the „Geyon“, the Biblical river of paradise that flows through the land of Ethiopia (Genesis 2:13) . When the Egyptians saw that their waters had receded, they sued for peace and promised never again to be the foes of Christianity.
In the 15th century, Emperors Dawit and Yishaq were very successful in fighting the infidel Muslims (pay attention how they project to call us “infidels”) in the Horn of Africa. After Emperor Yishaq defeated Islamic Ifat by capturing Zeilla in 1415, the Mamluk Sultan Barsbay retaliated, as he did when he came to power in 1422, by closing the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem. Emperor Yishaq lost no time in taking revenage on mosques and Muslims in Ethiopia, while Barsbay responded by threatening to harm the Copts in Egypt.
With the ascension of the ascension of the greatest of the Solomonian emperor, Zar’a Ya’qob (Seed of Jacob) (1434—1468), to power, the European-Nile connection became central to general Ethiopian strategy. Zar’a Ya’qob launched wars against Muslim Adan and stove to spread Christianity with the help of a united church.
When Sultan Jaqmaq (1438—1453) came to power, he renewed the Mamluks’ attacks against crusaders stationed in Cyprus and Rodes in the eastern Mediterranean. H was especially angered by Coptic participation in the anti-Islamic coordination effort at the Council of Florence (remember this council) and ordered the Coptic Patriarch to report any communication he received from Zar’a Ya’qob. There followed a chain of anti-Coptic actions in Egypt, including new taxes and the burning of churches.
In November 1443 a delegation from Zar’a Ya’qob handed this letter to Sultan Jaqmaq:
From the righteous…. Zar’a Ya’qob….King of Kings of Ethiopia…
To the noble, elevated Imam, the royal Sultan al-Zahir Jaqmaq, sultan of the Muslims and of Islam in Egypt and Syria. It is our goal to renew the understandings that existed between our predecessors. Let these understandings remain preserved without interruption. You, may the good Lord save you, know well what the shepherd needs to do with his sheep. Our father the Patriarch and our brothers the Christians, who are under your government and under your noble kingdom, are very few, weak, and poor. They cannot be more numerous than just one Islamic community in one of the regions of our country. And you, may the good Lord save you, are not aware of the Muslims under our government, that we are the rulers of their kings and and we always treat them well, and their kings live with us wearing golden crowns and riding horses? And are you not aware, you and your Sultan, that the River Nile is flowing to you from our country and that we are capable of preventing the floods that irrigate your country? Nothing keeps us from so doing, only the belief in God and the care for his slaves. We have presented to you what you need to know and you should know what you have to do.
Zar’a Ya’qob’s letter created little understanding. Jaqmaq responded by sending an emissary bearing gifts and an evasive reply. When Zar’a Ya’qob detained the emissary, Jaqmaq detained the Patriarch in Cairo, forcing him to write to the Ethiopian requesting the emissary’s release. Before his release, however, the Egyptian prisoner was taken to observe Zar’a Ya’qob inflict yet another defeat on Adal’s sultan, Shihab al-Din, in 1445. When Jaqmaq wrote to the new Adalite sultan suggesting that he make peace with Zar’a Ya’qob, the latter responded in 1449 that the Ethiopian Emperor had built a navy of 200 ships in preparation for an attack on Mecca and aimed to destroy the Kaaba. He further warned that Zar’a Ya’qob was contemplating blocking the Nile.
Zar’a Ya’qob brought Ethiopia’s awareness of the Nile’s political significance to its peak. He also added significant religious and cultural dimensions to this awareness by overseeing the competion of the translation and modification fo the Ta’amara Maryam. This collection of narratives included The Virgin Mary‘s advice to fight Egypt and Islam by diverting the Geyon, the Nile. Zar’a Ya’qob institutionalized the veneration of Mary as preeminent among the saints of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and in 1441 he introduced the reading of passages from the Ta’amra Maryam as a major ritual on Sundays. The Nile legacy of the Virgin Mary, together with that of the entire Solomonian period, was to endure. The idea that the Geyon was part of Ethiopia’s biblical heritage, that Ethiopia dominated its flow, and that Ethiopian control of the river was sanctioned by heaven remained part of the Christian Ethiopian ethos.
Raf’ sha’n al-hubshan. Al-Suyuti – in the last section he addresses mythical concepts of future catastrophes and contains short quotation about the destruction of various places all over the world. According to one such tradition, Egypt will be destroyed due to the drying up of the Nile. According to another, Mecca will be destroyed by the Ethiopians.
In defense of Orthodoxy, he nevertheless introduced dramatic innovations in Church life and policy. Many of these changes had to do with the liturgical cycle; after a Christmas Day victory over an invading Muslim army which greatly outnumbered his own, Zara Yaqob decreed that from then on Christmas would be celebrated every month, and went on to add numerous other monthly feasts as well. Intensely devoted to the Mother of God (and greatly impressed by reports of her contemporary miraculous apparition at Metmaq, Egypt), the emperor required that every church have an altar dedicated in her honor, and ordered all 33 of her festivals to be observed as if they were Sundays no matter when they fell in the week. Several classic works of Ge’ez literature date from his reign, most of them in some way connected to veneration of the Theotokos; among them is a translation of the Western European Miracles of the Virgin.
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