Information about Gabriel al-Qilai is mostly found in the work of the historian patriarch
Estephan El Douaihy, which was most often relevant to al-Qilai. Patriarch Douaihy protested al-Qilai's conversion to
Catholicism, due to his belief in
Roman Orthodoxy for the Maronites. Gabriel al-Qilai was the son of Butrus al-Qilā'i and was born in the village of
Lehfed of the
Byblos District. The word Qilāi refers to a house in a rocky area. According to a custom, he was entrusted to a priest named Ibrāhīm ibn Dray to learn from him the Syriac and the reading of the liturgical books. According to the Patriarch Douaihy he was afflicted in his youth of ophthalmia which was the cause of his breakup with his fiancee and his withdrawal from society. Towards 1470, he went on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem with another young man named John. In this city, he adhered the
Custody of the Holy Land of the Franciscan order. The recruitment of two young Maronites in the order was assigned to the Flemish brother Gryphon of Courtrai (born in 1405 and died at St. Francis Convent in
Famagusta on 18 July 1475), attached in 1450 to his death at the Franciscan mission of
Mount Lebanon and loaded relations with the Maronites. The two young Lebanese completed their last year of novitiate in the convent of
Mount Zion. After their vows, they were sent to
Venice to complete their training. Gabriel followed to Italy (in Venice and
Rome) to study
liberal arts and
theology, a trip that lasted at least seven years. He himself said that he stayed in Rome for seven months and performed with his friend Jean theological training at
Aracoeli convent. In the eulogy he made with his friend John in Italy when they were often subjected to people who accused the
Maronite Church of
heresy, a vigorous defense of their church. Both were ordained priests in Italy. They headed back to the East around the years 1483/85. Then, until his episcopal consecration in 1507, the life of Ibn al-Qilai took place between Qannoubine (the center of the Maronite Church),
Beirut (where there was a Franciscan monastery, Saint-Sauveur), and
Jerusalem (where there was a Franciscan monastery, Mount Zion). At that time, the Maronite Church was torn between his long-standing ties with the papacy and the strong presence in
Lebanon of the
Jacobite Church, of which it was culturally very close (mainly liturgy and the use of Western
Syriac). Noah Lebanese Bqoufa (born in
Ehden, in the heart of the Maronite country) was Patriarch of Antioch of the Jacobites from 1493 to 1509. There were no less than two convents in the region of Ehden that were occupied by Ethiopian monks members of the
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, in the same communion that the
Syriac Orthodox Church). Also a muqaddam (local chief) named Abdel Min'im Ayyub († 1495) had joined the Jacobite cause. Ibn al-Qilai was particularly devoted to the fight against the Jacobite influences (who won, apparently, his native village of Lehfed and of his relatives) to secure the Maronites to the
Catholic Church. On November 23, 1494, the Franciscan friar Francesco Suriano, then
custos of the Holy Land, sent an unfriendly letter to Maronite Patriarch Simeon Hadath: he marveled that he was elected in 1492 but has not yet sent anyone to Rome to request the
pallium (the confirmation of his election); "enemies" of the new primate, grouped in
Cyprus where the Maronite Church was well established, accused him of breaking the union with the papacy; Suriano asked the Patriarch to justify and renew in writing, with the bishops, priests and lay leaders of the Maronite nation, their membership of the Catholic Church. Then Gabriel ibn al-Qilai was sent by Suriano to investigate charges and collect the new act of faith of the patriarch and his people. Ibn al-Qilai devoted himself to this task in Lebanon until at least 1499. In 1507, the bishop of the Maronites of Cyprus Joseph Kasaphani died and he was elected to succeed him. He first lived in the Saints Nuhra and Anthony convent of Nicosia, the traditional seat of the Maronite bishops, and then transferred the seat to Saint-Georges Convent of Tala. Relations between the Maronite and Latin hierarchies in Cyprus were appalling: in 1514, Ibn al-Qilai wrote to
Pope Leo X to complain about the nuisance that the Latin bishops to property inflicted the great Maronite monastery of Saint John Khuzbandu. The pope replied in 1515, confirming the rights of the Maronites and sent two other letters on this subject, to the Latin archbishop and the Venetian governor of the island. Bishop al-Qilai died in 1516 in Cyprus. ==Work==