Georges Berbary
The emergence of Islam in the Arabian peninsula inflicted internal conflict upon the Byzantine/eastern Roman Empire, along with foreign wars, particularly the long-term war with the Persians, the last of which broke out in the seventh century. Islam, since the death of Muhammad in AD 632, occupied areas that were under the control of the Romans. The Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab took control in Palestine; Amr Ibn al-Aas, at the head of a small army, took over Egypt between 639 and 641.
Arabs could not open the non-Chalcedonean Christian kingdom of Nubia; a truce between them was held with political and commercial terms, including: non-assault while Egypt was to be given a number of slaves, and Nubia was to be given certain amount of wheat, lentils, and other items every year in exchange.
Historians often wrote about the ease of the Islamic conquest of Egypt, along with the other areas captured by the Arabs. The welcome given to the Muslims was a result of restlessness among the Christians, due to the taxes imposed by Constantinople, and the forcing of the non-Chalcedonean majority to follow the Chalcedonean creed. But we find other cases where the Chalcedoneans were the first to welcome the conquerors, such as the Patriarch Sophronius in Jerusalem, and Sargon, the grandfather of John of Damascus in Damascus. Sawiris Ibn al-Muqaffa’ claims in The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria that the welcome of the Coptic population to the conquerors was an attempt to appease the Muslim power and a sign of the aid provided by Egypt’s population to the conquerors (Troupeau 2001: 461). The eschatological interpretation of history claims that the conquest was only a divine punishment to the eastern Romans, who converted to the infidel Chalcedonean doctrine, as described by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ (Sévère d’Achmounein 2006: 538, 579).
After the Islamic conquest, a gradual legal status of Christians was formed, including Copts. In the beginning, we have the Qur’anic verse that orders fighting against the People of the Book, who do not practice the true religion, “until they give the jizyah (poll tax) willingly while they are humbled” (Qur’an 9:29), which was the leading motto of the Muslims that defined the quality of the relationship with the Christians. In addition, the contracts concluded by the caliphs with the Christians, were similar to the one between Muhammad and the people of Najran (631). The contracts were all centered around these basic principles: Christians had to pay tribute, provide a variety of services for the Muslim army, and adhere to restrictions on building churches and establishing rituals. In return for these duties, the Muslim commanders had to ensure to the Christians the protection of their lives, their parents, and their offspring and possessions. Dhimmitude is the bail, and the Christian beneficiaries of this guaranty were named accordingly “dhimmis” (Troupeau 2001: 461).
After the conquest, the services for the military armies were canceled, and the increased restrictions on the Copts aggravated. In addition to the tribute imposed on them, to retain their lands, the Copts were obliged to pay the kharadj tax. Several attempts were made to expel the Copts from their official positions, especially after the Arabization of the dawaween (bureaucracy or bureaus), when Arabic became the official language of Egypt. These restrictions led to the introversion of the Copts, while many of them chose to convert to the new religion. The relatively hard situation, encountered by Christians, who lived in Egypt, was the result of the rulers’ state of mind. The Copts, who never surrendered their faith, subsided further and further into minority status and non-influential presence.
Copts, who came under the Tulunid dynasty (868–905) and the Ikhshids (935–960), were treated with forbearance. Then came the Fatimids (969–1171), and with them Christians experienced a marked tolerance, along with some severe persecution. The latter situation was rare, and the Christians of the country did not suffer from it until the reign of al-Hakim1 (1012–1015), who turned against the Christians, persecuted them to the utmost, killing thousands of people, dismissed them from administrative offices, forced them to convert to Islam and turned loose the Egyptian mob to demolish Coptic churches. But apparently the Caliph al-Zaher allowed those, who were forced to change their religion, to return to their original faith. We note that this period witnessed a church revival. The center of Coptic Christianity shifted from Alexandria to the new capital, Cairo, the center of the Fatimid Caliph. This points to an adaptation, by the Copts, to the prevailing rule; this was obvious through the harmony an adaptation in the relationship and the seeking of mediation by the king of Nubia and Abyssinia of the patriarch or the Fatimid Caliph (Coptic Center for Social Studies 2001: 528).
During this era, the Copts spread all over Egypt, and adopted the Arabic language, which contributed to the cultural and civilizational integration of the fabric of the country. They were engaged in the administrative offices of the Empire. They were picked by the Fatimids, who were Shi’ite, perhaps fearing the hostility of the Sunnis, who made up the majority of the population, a fact that raised the ire of Egyptians again.
The Copts did not encounter persecution during the Ayyubids’ reign (1171–1250), nor a marked tolerance from the part of Salah Eddin, who barred them from certain control and financial offices (Coptic Center for Social Studies 2001: 530). The Copts kept their loyalty to the Arabs during the Crusades. The Crusaders prevented the Copts from fulfilling their binding religious obligation to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and they hired Latin Clergy instead of local religious men.
The rebellion against the Crusaders and the support of the Arabs resulted in a revival in the Coptic Church in the thirteenth century, a period which ended, as soon as the Ayyubids were defeated by the Mamluks. The church, under the rule of these Mamluks, returned to repression (Berbary 2013: 369–372). Coptic sources are silent about the conditions of Christians in the country from the fourteenth century until the nineteenth century (Mitri 1988: 12). What is noteworthy in the Islamic sources, or the writings of pilgrims and travelers, is the study of architectural history of the Coptic monasteries, and the decline of the creative theological thought until the nineteenth century.
Egypt’s Christians suffered, in the fourteenth century, from persecution leading to a significant decline in their numbers. And they participated during the same long era, in the unionist synods held in Florence (1442), but the effort did not lead to unity; and the Franciscans did not give up and continued to send missionaries to Egypt, followed, in subsequent centuries, by other Catholic missionaries and by Evangelicals. They succeeded in creating the Coptic Catholic Church in 1578, and the Evangelical community was established later in the mid-nineteenth century.
Egypt remained, throughout the Ottoman rule (1517–1805), independent and yet controlled by the High Porte governor, the Awjaq2 and Mamluks; and most people stayed away from politics. Muslims and Christians lived, in this system, in a difficult economic situation, for Egypt did not keep pace with international trade (Atiya 1968: 99). Then people opted for independence, and later found what they wanted in the independence movement led by Muhammad Ali, who despite his Albanian roots, was closer to the ambition and aspirations of the Egyptians, than to those who came to power before him (Marcos 2001: 673–683).
The Copts did not constitute, in Egyptian society during the Ottoman era, a prosperous bourgeoisie. They worked in general in agriculture and management. Some of them were retailers and owners of small workshops. They did not participate, like the other Christians in the Middle East, in dealing with foreigners; consequently they did not benefit from the millet system, devised by Ottoman rule. While most sects strove towards differentiation from each other, the Copts opted to integrate, more and more, in Egyptian society at the expense of seeking foreign sponsors.
The so-called foreign sponsorship was the outcome of several developments in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans awarded major European countries privileges, benefiting from immunity rights and tax exemptions, and their consulates became states within a state. These privileges led to a reduction in the burdens for foreign merchants and increased costs on Egyptian merchants. This prompted the Muslims and Copts alike to abandon business, and to walk away from foreign trade. The traders resorted, with their consulates, to Jews as agents and translators. In addition to these privileges, European powers were granted the right of religious protection, and the result of these capitulations was the development of the Catholic and Evangelical missions, which began to flourish.
This series of developments did not strengthen Christians in the east, dispersed as they were into small groups that were neither monolithic nor equal. If every foreign country sought to protect a religion in the Sultanate, Copts remained in harmony with their history in the rejection of any foreign intervention, whether Byzantine, Crusader, or later Israeli, and fought any call for external protection (Marcos 2001: 676–677). When the Coptic Patriarch received the Consul of Russia, and the latter offered Russian protection for the Copts, then the Patriarch asked the consul: “Is the Russian Tsar going to die?” When the answer was yes, he said to him: “Why do I put myself and my family under the protection of the mortal, while we are all under the protection of He who does not die.”
The Copts shifted to agriculture and manual work in order to avoid trade. Agriculture was no marginal activity, for it was and still is the one of the major economic and productive sectors. History relates that the Patriarch of Alexandria used to put pressure on the Roman Emperor by preventing wheat from being shipped to Constantinople. Thus agriculture continued to be an essential source of Egypt’s livelihood and agricultural cycles and times of sowing, harvesting and irrigation are still linked to the Coptic calendar, inherited from the ancient Egyptians (Marcos 2001: 673–683).
Copts also contributed to the manual production of jewelry, copper and fabric, architecture and perfumery. Sometimes they assumed leadership positions, such as in the union of carpenters which was led by a Copt. In other areas, they were involved in management positions and it seems that this happened with the Arabization of the bureaucracy which took place in the early Islamic periods. They refrained from managing only occasionally, but they continued in the financial management sector (Marcos 2001: 678–679) during the Ayyubid era or even the Mamluk or the Ottoman, just as they had been present before in the previously mentioned Islamic ages, in particular the Fatimid era.
Napoleon descended on the shores of Egypt in 1798, and used the Copts in a number of administrative functions exactly as they had been hired by the Mamluks and their predecessors. Many see the French campaign as the beginning of Egypt’s modern history due to several considerations. But those interested in the relations between Copts and Muslims choose the emergence of the state under Muhammad Ali (1805) as a turning point. It marks the beginning of the formation of the Egyptian national community in the modern era.
The personality of Muhammad Ali blended ancient and modern currents. He was a Mamluk and an Ottoman, but at the same time, he destroyed the Turkish and the Mamluk states. He undertook the process of “Egyptianizing” the state starting with the army; he maintained the traditional role of the Copts in the management of the financial affairs of the state (Bishri 1980: 45–46). We read in a report presented by the English envoy John Bowring to the Foreign Minister of Britain in 1837, that:
The influence of the Copts is undoubtedly an increasing one, and they will probably occupy no small part of the field in the future history of Egypt. Theirs have been centuries of cruel sufferings, persecutions, and humiliations. In the eyes of the Turks they have always been the pariahs of the Egyptian people; yet they are an amicable, pacific, and intelligent race, whose worst vices have grown out of their seeking shelter from wrong and robbery. A certain sympathy, perhaps the result of common sufferings, exists between the Copts and the Arabs. They are the surveyors, the scribes, the arithmeticians, the measurers, the clerks; in a word, the learned men of the land. They are to the counting-house and the pen what the fellah is to the field and the plough. The Coptic race appears nearly stationary as to numbers; I have reason to believe that in some of the agricultural districts they sometimes adopt the Mussulman creed, though that subjects them to the conscription, from which as Christians they are free. There are 12 Episcopal districts, and the bishops elect the patriarch, who exercises not only an ecclesiastical, but frequently a sort of judicial authority among them, and his decrees are most reverently submitted to. They employ the ancient Egyptian or Coptic language in their religious services, but it is translated into Arabic for the benefit of the laity. The patriarch informed me that he calculated the number of Copts at about 150,000. I conceive this is too low an estimate. A great many of them are employed in the public offices; their average instruction is far superior to that of the Mussulmans, but between them and European settlers there is scarcely any intercourse, and as little is known of their domestic habits as of those of the Mahomedans. Their females are equally secluded, and they have their harems like other Orientals. In the remoter parts of Egypt they practice polygamy, and circumcise their children. They occupy a particular quarter in Cairo; few of them are opulent, few engaged in commerce on a large scale. They have many schools in which elementary instruction is communicated, but none where the higher branches of knowledge are taught. Intoxication is a frequent vice among the Copts. (Bowring 1840: 6–8)
It appears that in this period Copts were not enlisted in the army. They were exempted until 1855 when the Khedive decided to cancel the tribute and young Copts were enrolled in the Egyptian army. It is noted that the Copts did not participate in the scientific mission of Muhammad Ali to Europe. The Christians who went to Europe at the expense of the state were non-Egyptians, such as Greeks and Armenians (Mitri 1988: 19). With the emergence of the first parliamentary assembly in Egypt, during the reign of Ismail (1866), the Copts pursued their full rights to run the elections.
Coptic patriarchs sought, like all other Christian communities in Egypt, to achieve a church Renaissance. The Coptic Church achievements have been numerous over the last two centuries: from the founding of the Faculty of Theology, to Sunday schools, the introduction of religious education in public schools, to establishing a press in the mid-nineteenth century and using it for official religious publications. These activities had a purpose. The Coptic Patriarchate sought to respond to the missionaries using the same means, to launch of missionary work in Africa, and to grant to the bishops of Eritrea and Ethiopia the title of Patriarch. Pastoral work resumed in Sudan. There was a more effective engagement in the Egyptian civil society. The high proportion of university-educated is to be noted, and some of them were settled in the monasteries.
In the early twentieth century, a strong stream of the national movement against the British presence in Egypt emerged. Though Muslims and Copts equally supported the movement, the two groups found it difficult to collaborate. A crisis arose between 1908–1911 and it was the toughest in the modern era between the Copts and Muslims. The Copts criticized Muslims for their mistreatment of Copts, and unfavorably compared the unhappy present with the glorious past days of the Fatimids. They noted that the Copts had welcomed the Arab Conquest, recalling the commandment of Muhammad about the Copts: “You will conquer Egypt . . . so command its people to good. They have right to security and ties of kinship” (¸ Sahı-h Muslim). The Muslims’ reply to the crisis confirmed the Islamic character of Egypt, with the proof that this character does not negate the protection of Copts, past and present.
The Coptic Egyptian Prime Minister Boutros Gha-lı- was assassinated in that period; this event was followed by a general Coptic Congress. It was supported by the Coptic Church but other parties perceived it negatively, for fear of harming national unity. Issues raised in the Congress included: a Sunday holiday for Copts, a call for an end to religious discrimination in state employment, and proportionate representation in parliament. Some Muslims convened the Egyptian Congress which rejected the principle of sects’ rights and Sunday as holiday. But with these conferences, tensions began to fade in favor of the national independence movement.
This movement crystallized around the revolutionary events of 1919. Saad Zaghloul, and the spokesperson Father Sergius, led the anti-British campaign for independence. The latter was the last of the priests who stood on the pulpit of Al-Azhar, and in other mosques, addressing the audience. He said that he was an Egyptian first, second, and third, and that the nation does not know a Muslim or a Copt, but it recognizes only volunteers, without distinction between a white turban and a black turban. He preached in the streets and squares, he gave also speeches from the window of the train when traveling or when in exile.
There is someone else who had a far-reaching impact in various Egyptian situations, at that era: Makram Obeid. He was the minister of finance who resigned and began to claim independence. He criticized the British in Egypt because they were sowing discord between the Muslims and the Copts. “In vain you are trying to disunite us, you misjudge the blood of our fathers that runs in our veins, and the blood of our children that was shed in our streets, in vain you keep reminding us of the divisions that we had washed with our tears” (Mitri 1988: 26).
It is worth noting that the Copts refused, when setting up the Egyptian Constitution, to be assigned a certain quota, because it constituted for them the ghetto model they had already refused and would continue to reject, because they did not want to lose their national unity and their integration in the Egyptian fabric.
Indeed, the Copts of today are the rightful heirs to the people of ancient Egypt. Stemming from their agricultural experience, they show respect for the land, and offer prayers and rituals associated with the seasons of the year. All of this gave the Copts a patriotic tendency and constant quest, under successive regimes, to value the principle of citizenship.
Today they live with other Christian denominations – the Greek Orthodox, the Catholic Copts and the Anglicans – maintaining their hope for the future in the face of disappointments. In light of the so-called Arab Spring, they seek not to be overshadowed by the spread of fundamentalism, nor to be dismayed by the continuing emigration of Copts from Egypt. They hope to remain citizens, with equal rights and duties, to participate in building Egypt – which is the aspiration of every faithful Egyptian. They look for a new political constitution that will make this possible.