Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (34 page)

Some customs survived, as I learned in St. Mark’s Church, because they were thought worthy of inclusion in new Christian rites. Early Christian clergy of Egypt were in many recorded cases either temple priests who had become Christian or children of temple priests. A hymn such as “Pek Ethronos,” which I heard at St. Mark’s in Kensington, would have been very familiar to them. It just needed some amendments so that it would be addressed to Jesus Christ. Cymbals, too, had been used in the worship of the old gods. For a time, they were banned by the Christian church, but it later relented; they are still used in Coptic rites today.

Coptic, Armenian, and Syrian churches, on one hand, and Byzantines and Europeans, on the other, disagreed with each other at the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon about the nature of Christ. Putting the difference crudely, the Copts felt that the council was not firm enough in taking a stand against those who wanted to distinguish between Jesus as man and Jesus as God. The Copts were emphatic that Jesus had only one nature, and they still refer to themselves as Miaphysites (
mia physis
meaning “one nature” in Greek). The upshot was that the Coptic patriarch rejected the council; although Egypt was then part of the Byzantine Empire, the patriarch and not the emperor was the true ruler of Egypt. Relations between the Copts and Byzantium suffered. The dispute reflected other tensions as well—perhaps among them the long-standing dislike that the Copts had for foreign rule. Certainly the religious divide deepened that dislike, and Copts did little to resist when the Muslim Arabs invaded Egypt in the seventh century. Relations soured somewhat when the new Muslim government imposed heavy taxes on the non-Muslim population; rebellions followed. Still, most Egyptians remained Christian until the tenth century, and Coptic was still a common language until the thirteenth century, when Arabic was gradually enforced. In the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, anti-Christian riots became more frequent, and the authorities imposed laws to curb the Copts’ influence and status. When the German monk Johann Vansleb explored Egypt in 1672, he reported that the Copts were “so fearful from continued tyrannies that at the least noise they trembled like leaves.”

Admiration for the pharaohs is a recent phenomenon among both Copts and Muslims. In the Koran, the pharaoh who famously refused to allow Moses and the Jews to leave Egypt features prominently. He is described as “one of the corrupters,” having set himself up as a god, exalted himself, and despised the poor. Unlike the “Sabians” in Harran, therefore, the pharaohs were always clearly defined as idolaters and their religious sites were regarded with suspicion. One early Muslim ruler reputedly wanted to demolish the pyramids. According to the medieval historian al-Maqrizi, a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic did manage to smash the Sphinx’s nose, apparently enraged by the fact that local peasants were making offerings to it as a god (a rare reference to the possibility that, covertly, the old gods were still worshiped). Nor would the average person living in Egypt necessarily have seen “Egyptian” as an identity. William Browne, a British visitor to Cairo in the eighteenth century, reported that the local merchants referred to themselves simply as Arabs. The term
Copts,
originally used to describe indigenous Egyptians, was by this stage applied exclusively to Christians.

During the nineteenth century, however, this attitude began to change. The catalyst was a series of discoveries, initially by Western archaeologists, that revealed the skill and artistic achievements of the ancient Egyptians. Archaeologists uncovered the temple of Abu Simbel, guarded by sixty-five-foot-high statues of Pharaoh Rameses II, in 1813. In 1817 they found the tomb of Seti in the Valley of the Kings, complete with painters’ brushes still on its floor beneath bright blue and golden pictures showing the progress of the pharaoh’s soul in the afterlife. In Europe and America, these and other discoveries contributed to “Egyptomania”—an enthusiasm for imitating ancient Egyptian architecture.

This coincided with cultural and political shifts within Egypt itself. In the nineteenth century Egypt and Sudan, though officially provinces of the empire of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, were actually governed as a separate entity by the Mohammad Ali dynasty—named after its founder, a successful Albanian adventurer who established his power base by inviting his rivals to a banquet and then slaughtering them all as they went home. Despite this bloody beginning, the dynasty was a force for reform and modernization in Egypt.

Ismail, the dynasty’s third member, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, was particularly ambitious. He curbed the slave trade, built Africa’s biggest railway, and began the digging of the Suez Canal. He also opened the first Egyptian Museum, a predecessor of the one that sits in Tahrir Square, in 1863. It was designed in a pharaonic style. To reassure devout Muslims who hesitated to emulate the polytheistic pharaohs, a religious scholar named Tahtawi offered reassurance that the pharaohs were really “Sabians” who worshiped one god in different forms. In 1864 a pupil of Tahtawi’s named Abu’l Suud wrote a history of ancient Egypt calling on its modern-day people to imitate their ancestors “in working together as true Egyptians and true patriots, for the renaissance of Egypt.” From 1867 onward, the pyramids appeared on Egyptian stamps.

This was not just a romantic movement of nostalgia for the past. It had relevance to Egypt’s status in the world. The glories of Egypt’s history enabled Ismail to look European rulers in the face. They also constituted a basis for seeing Egypt not as a province of the Ottoman Empire but as the independent country that Ismail wanted it to be. This emphasis on Egypt’s separate identity influenced Ismail’s attitude toward religion as well. Ismail reproved a Muslim minister who spoke of a government employee contemptuously as “this Coptic official”; he turned to the author and retorted, “All are Egyptians alike.” This assertion of equality between Christians and Muslims (as well as of a unifying national identity) was significant: only in 1855 had Christians been released from the special
jizya
tax imposed on them as non-Muslims. But Ismail granted land for Coptic schools; included Copts in a sort of proto-parliament he created, called the Advisory Council of Representatives; and appointed one Copt as chief of the government’s official press and another as head of the finance administration. At the end of his reign he appointed an Armenian Christian, Nubar Pasha, as his prime minister. The country’s Jews also benefited from the new atmosphere of religious openness: Ismail encouraged the Jewish Egyptian playwright Yacoub Sanoo’a by praising him as “Egypt’s Molière.” Religious emancipation, the celebration of Egypt’s ancient heritage, and the project of building an Egyptian state went hand in hand.

No wonder, then, that educated Copts embraced ancient Egypt, even though the Christian Bible is scarcely kinder about it than the Koran. They created a Rameses social club and a journal named
Pharaoh
. There were even efforts to revive Coptic as an everyday language. Vansleb had written in the 1670s that he had “had the satisfaction of seeing the man with whom the Coptic language wholly shall die out.” Now, at the start of the twentieth century, a Coptic antiquarian named Claudius Labib insisted that his children speak the language at home. A Coptic Museum opened in 1908 to celebrate the Egyptian cultural achievements of the post-pharaonic age.

By 1919 Copts were at least as well off as their Muslim countrymen: they owned 20 percent of the country’s agricultural land, according to a British estimate, which also assessed that this was well above their proportion of the population. The prime minister that year, Youssef Wahba, was a Copt (the third Christian to serve in that position). But by this time the political context had changed from Ismail’s day. The government was dominated behind the scenes by Britain—which had become Egypt’s biggest creditor, and then effectively its administrator, when Ismail’s ambitious spending plans had sunk his country into debt. As well as featuring in the government, the Copts were also active alongside Muslims in the burgeoning movement for Egyptian independence from British control: demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square in 1919 under the banner of a conjoined crescent and cross. When the Egyptian nationalist Wafd Party, led by a visionary leader called Saad Zaghloul, put together a delegation of seven Egyptian representatives to go to the British ambassador and demand independence, Zaghloul was careful to include a Copt. A Christian priest even preached from the pulpit of the country’s premier mosque, al-Azhar, in 1919, for the first time in history. “If the British stay in Egypt under the pretense of protecting Copts,” the priest, Father Sargious, declared, “let all Copts die and Muslims live free.”

In Cairo during my visit in 2011 there were reminders of that time. Near Tahrir Square, opposite an antique bookstore whose outer wall was blotched with bloodstains, a man wearing a shirt that said “Guns don’t kill. Governments do” was selling T-shirts marked with a crescent and cross. I saw that symbol painted on walls across the city. By evoking the spirit of 1919, the people who painted it were stressing national unity in the face of those who wanted to foment differences between Christians and Muslims.

This crescent and cross symbol, which I photographed in 2011, was in the strongly Muslim area of Cairo around the al-Azhar mosque. It symbolized the desire of Christians and Muslims to overcome their differences and work together for freedom. Photo by the author

Not all of the Egyptian politicians who called for independence in the 1920s and 1930s, though, were as open-minded as Zaghloul. In 1928, a group of laborers at the British military camp in the port city of Ismailiyya visited Hassan al-Banna, a well-educated opponent of secularism, and told him: “We see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.” They took an oath to be soldiers for Islam, but al-Banna chose for the group a more innocuous title: the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the first demands that the Brotherhood made of the Egyptian government was that it ban alcohol and crack down on prostitution, which had become rife during World War I, when foreign soldiers were stationed in Egypt. The Brotherhood called for the British to withdraw from Egypt. But it also had larger ambitions: to unify all Muslim lands under a caliph who would impose strict Islamic law.

Coptic politician William Makram Ebeid tried to find common ground with the Brotherhood and was the only politician to protest when the Egyptian government dissolved the movement in 1948. He was also the only politician to attend Hassan al-Banna’s funeral after the latter’s killing by government agents the year after. In return, the Brotherhood claimed to have no quarrel with Copts. In practice, however, the new Islamist movements wanted to undermine their secular rivals. Attacking the Copts, who often played a part in the country’s secular parties, helped them in this mission. In the 1940s, Islamist rhetoric led to church burnings, beatings of priests, and attacks on Coptic ceremonies. In the meantime, al-Banna’s emphasis on the struggle against Christian foreigners inevitably colored the Brotherhood’s discourse about Christianity in general. The Brotherhood did not share Ismail’s enthusiasm for Egypt as a country in which all citizens would be equal. Instead, al-Banna was proud of Egypt principally because of its historical role in defending Islam against the Crusaders, which was not a vision of history that offered much real dignity to the Copts. The movement offered Copts a position of peaceful inferiority, not the equality offered by some secular nationalists.

When independence truly came, it brought to power neither Zaghloul-style liberals nor Islamists. In 1952 Farouq, Mohammad Ali’s great-great-grandson, was deposed by a group of previously unknown army officers. One of these, Mohammad Neguib, became president. Four years later he was removed by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who then achieved the withdrawal of all British forces from the country and ruled Egypt from 1956 until 1970. Though he rid Egypt of all foreign control, the title of his biography is not
The First Egyptian
but
The Last Arab
. The author was referring to the fact that Nasser saw himself as an Arab, not an Egyptian: he wanted the Arabic-speaking peoples, living in disparate countries stretching from Marrakesh to Baghdad, to unite, rise up against their colonial overlords, and form one nation.

Nasser was not so much interested in Egypt as such. Indeed, for more than a decade the name “Egypt” vanished from the map, as Nasser changed the country’s name to the United Arab Republic and sought to unify it with Syria. He also redistributed Egypt’s land, crushing the old feudal order. This affected both Muslim and Coptic landowners, but since the Coptic lay elite had done well under the monarchy, it hit them particularly hard: one estimate suggests that the Copts lost 75 percent of their wealth and property. The upper-class Coptic laymen who were impoverished by this measure had often been the community’s political leaders, and so the community was not only poorer but also less influential. The eighteen-member Revolutionary Command Council, which administered Egypt after the Revolution, did not include a single Christian. Nonetheless, while Nasser lived, violence against Copts was almost unheard of. That was in part thanks to his fearsome security services, which repressed Islamist movements ruthlessly, and to his own considerable popularity. Nasser never expressed any religious prejudice—Arab nationalism could have room for Christians as well as Muslims (and indeed, some of its early proponents were Syrian Christians). Nasser had a close relationship with the Coptic Pope, and made gestures toward the Copts such as attending the inauguration of their new cathedral in Cairo.