Very unfortunately, Samuel Tadros has been blessed in the timing of his excellent survey of the past and present state of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Just as the book was appearing last summer, that community suddenly found itself facing pogroms and mob attacks resulting from the military overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Anxious to find current information about the Copts, the media often turned to Tadros, giving him ample opportunities to develop his argument. I’m sure he wishes that his topic could have remained in decent obscurity much longer than it has.
Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity (Hoover Institution Press Publications) (Volume 638)
Hoover Institution Press
262 pages
$19.95
Egypt’s Copts rightly claim descent from the land’s earliest inhabitants, the Egyptoi, whose language was that of the Pharaohs, and which still survives in Christian liturgies. They also occupy a unique position in Christian history. I sometimes fantasize about writing a History of Christianity from the Egyptian perspective. Without Egypt, we miss so many critical turning points in the making of the Christian faith. Ideas and language derived from Hellenistic Egypt are strongly marked in several early Christian writings, including the Gospel of John, and in texts like the Epistle of Barnabas. The 3rd century was the era of Origen, certainly a candidate for the title of the most brilliant and daring scholar in Christian history. Egypt was the main home of the monastic movement, which would transform the faith worldwide, and lay the foundation for the making of European civilization.
Modern Copts bear the burden of a history that is almost unimaginably rich.
In the 4th and 5th centuries, the patriarchs—popes—of Alexandria were pivotal to the church debates that established Christian orthodoxy for centuries to come. This was the era of Athanasius and Cyril, who were so crucial to the events at Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. Finally, Egyptian Christians of this era contributed powerfully to creating the Christian visual imagination, as they developed the tradition of icon painting. In the 6th century, Severus of Antioch complained that “Alexandrians think the sun rises just for them.” But why shouldn’t they? Egyptians had already done so much to establish Christian culture, art, and intellectual life. They made the faith we know.
In the 7th century, Egypt fell under Islamic rule, and at that point this ancient Christian tradition suddenly vanishes from most Western histories of Christianity. Yet Christians did not evaporate overnight, nor did they convert in significant numbers. If we read the great 10th-century History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, we find a picture of bishops and monks continuing to do much what they had always done, in a largely Christian countryside. In fact, they sound very much like their contemporaries in “Christian” Western Europe.
Yes, Christians sometimes faced persecution, but it was not a simple story. Some Muslim rulers were wise and benevolent, others were ruthless thugs. It sounds very much like the secular regimes that saints were confronting in contemporary Christian Europe, although the Muslim rulers were marginally less nervous about committing sacrilegious acts that could draw down divine anger. Often, when the History of the Patriarchs describes a brutal tyrant, it mentions that he was a terror to all the subjects, Muslim as well as Christian. Often, not always, this was equal-opportunity tyranny.
Oddly too, this church historian regards even the worst atrocities visited on Christians by Muslims as fairly minor compared to those inflicted by other Christians in past times. From the 5th through the 7th centuries, Egypt had usually been under the rule of Orthodox Chalcedonian Roman regimes, who were determined to enforce their will on the overwhelmingly Miaphysite Coptic Christians. Large sections of the History are devoted to the tortures, martyrdoms, and persecutions involved in that process, after which Muslim rule came almost as a relief.
What makes the History of the Patriarchs so striking is its combination of worlds that we often think of as radically separate, the medieval Christian and the “Oriental” Muslim. This is nowhere brought home more effectively than in the name of the work’s 10th-century compiler, the Bishop Severus, known as Severus ibn al-Muqaffa or (from his diocese) Severus of El Ashmunein. El Ashmunein is the name given to the ancient Egyptian and Hellenistic city otherwise known as Khmun, and later as Hermopolis Magna. Roman, Greek, and Arabic names merge together, very much as the cultures did in the Egypt of his time.
Severus certainly saw signs of trouble in his day, when the Coptic language was fading before the spread of Arabic. He made grudging concessions to this process, publishing works in Arabic himself. But even three centuries after the coming of Islam, he gives little impression of serving a church in danger of vanishing.
Not until the 14th century did persecution and discrimination really become intense. So appalling was this maltreatment that we can legitimately draw parallels between the lot of Egypt’s Copts and the fate of Jews in contemporary Western Europe. In both cases, communities might thrive and prosper for centuries, but they would become targets for extreme violence during eras of social and economic crisis. Copts and Jews were ideal scapegoats. And like Europe’s Jews, the Copts endured. In the early 20th century, native Christians still made up at least 15 percent of Egyptians, and some scholars think that is a serious underestimate. Even today, the figure is around 10 percent.
Modern Copts, therefore, bear the burden of a history that is almost unimaginably rich. Like Jews, they feel immense pride in their contributions to the wider world, together with amazed gratitude for their continued survival. At the same time, they wrestle to explain their repeated sufferings, often at the hands of countrymen to whom they have given so much. Copts struggle to explain the pogroms and atrocities of 1321, and now the horrors of 2013. They combine a fascination with ancient lineage and rootedness with an alarming sense of the transience of eras of peace and prosperity. They are the most devoted patriots of a nation that so often spurns them, rooted in the soil and the Nile mud yet repeatedly suspected as traitors.
Seeking to cope with these paradoxes, Coptic writers through the years have developed a number of mythological schemes for interpreting history, myths that Tadros ably describes—and does his best to avoid. For some thinkers, the Copts have since early Christian times been a martyr nation, stubbornly resisting ruthless assaults by the Roman Empire, and then by Muslims. Others, though, see Copts and Muslims as the two essential building blocks of Egypt past and present, two communities married in a common patriotic endeavor. As I have suggested, both narratives contain a great deal of truth, but both depend on highly selective historical memories.
Samuel Tadros, then, faces the very difficult task of trying to present a highly complex history in a very short space. He succeeds so well because he never forgets the central theme of the encounter with modernity. He avoids the temptation to explore early and medieval times in too great depth, and some three quarters of his text concerns the period since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt in 1798, the key date in modern Middle Eastern history.
For Copts, like Muslims, the European encounter was a revolutionary event, which demanded that Egypt adapt itself to a suddenly threatening modern world. But what exactly was that modernity? Could new attitudes to science and technology be imported without full-scale Westernization, with all that implied for political and social life? Modernity was a particularly sensitive issue for Middle Eastern Christians, who at all costs had to avoid giving any impression of representing a foreign fifth column, of being spies and agents working on behalf of European colonialism.
Like Christians elsewhere in the region, many Copts resolved this dilemma by becoming vocal and visible advocates of Egyptian nationalism and anti-imperialism, but of a particular kind. In order to escape Muslim hegemony, they favored a strong national state pledged to secularism. They would prove their national credentials by being super-patriots, by being more devoutly Egyptian than the most fervent Muslim. Often, that prescription would work, and for long decades. But on occasion it collapsed, and rarely so badly as it has in the past year. At such times, the old stereotypes emerge yet again: the Copts as plotters against the people; the Copts as secessionists; the Copts as tools of Israel and the West; the Copts as enemies of Egypt. Yes, the Copts, the people whose very name and entire cultural identity are taken from that same Egypt.
By no means does Tadros offer a solely political account. He pays due attention to the modern Coptic cultural revival and sketches the genuinely exciting spiritual rebirth of modern times, a phenomenon that clamors to be better known among Western Christians. Regrettably, though, most of his readers will be searching for clues to what looks like the early stages of a potentially catastrophic national and religious conflict.
In his last chapter, Tadros ominously draws attention to the swelling Coptic diaspora outside Egypt. He addresses “the bitterness of leaving, the peril of staying.” As he notes, “At a moment in the not so distant future, the center of gravity of the Coptic church will no longer be inside Egypt’s borders.” After two thousand years, it seems, that most ancient Christian community will have to learn to sing the Lord’s song in many strange countries—in new Egypts across the seas.
Philip Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. His book The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade is coming this Spring from HarperOne.
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
