#Mar Awgin of Clysma

[apenitentialprayer]

Friends of God, Mystic Visions, and Saintly Translationes

In addition to Ṭalḥa’s undecayed body itself, other narrative features of its discovery also echo late antique hagiography. Within the variant versions of this narrative found across several texts, Ṭalḥa’s exhumation is almost invariably occasioned by his appearance in a dream. This dreamer sometimes goes unnamed, as in 'Abd al-Razzaq's report of a nameless relative of Ṭalḥa receiving a visit from Ṭalḥa. Often, however, Ṭalḥa’s daughter ‘Ā’isha is specified as the one who receives Ṭalḥa’s message and who, as a result, unearths her father's body. For example:

‘Ā’isha bt. Ṭalḥa b. Ubayd Allāh saw her father -​Ṭalḥa b. Ubayd Allāh- in a dream. He said to her, “O daughter, remove me from this place! The moisture has annoyed me.” She reported this thirty years or so after [he died]. She removed him from this place and he was fresh with nothing changed upon him.

In another version, an unnamed man describes his dream of Ṭalḥa complaining about his flooding grave to ‘Ā’isha bt. Ṭalḥa, who uncovers the body and finds that “he had not changed, except for some little hairs on one side of his beard or head.” While the dreamer varies, all these versions depict Ṭalḥa’s body being uncovered as a result of his appearance in a dream, demanding that he be moved to a new location. This recurrent theme strongly recalls late antique relic inventiones, in which a deceased holy person commonly appears in a dream or vision to guide someone to his or her relics in order to translate them to a new location. For example, the Passio of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste recounts how -after their charred remains are dumped in a river- the forty martyrs appear to a bishop and tell him, “Our relics are hidden in the river: come at night and get us out!” In the Syriac life of the Mesopotamian monk Benjamin of Nehardea, Benjamin visits the famous monasteries of Mount Izla, where the buried saint Mār Awgin (the traditional founder of Mesopotamia monasticism) appears to him in a vision, saying:

The foul heresy of Nestorius and Bar Sawma -servants of men, not of God- will, in the future, hold rule over our monastery and the land of the east. So take my body and the bodies of the ten blessed ancients that lay buried with me in my monastery on Mount Izla. Take them and place them in the monastery of Mār Solomon, below the monastery of Noṭpo, near Mardin, towards the east.

The saints’ expressed reasons for wanting to be moved vary in these different texts, ranging from the Forty Martyrs’ desire to be saved from a watery grave to Mār Awgin’s heresiological concern about who might have control of his burial place. In all these cases, the movement of the saint’s relics is precipitated by a dream or vision, demanding that a new location be found for the endangered saintly remains.

- Adam Bursi (A Holy Heretical Body: Ṭalḥa b. 'Ubayd Allāh's Corpse and Early Islamic Sectarianism)