Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (35 page)

For one other community, Nasser’s advent marked the beginning of the end. In 1956, after Israel joined with Britain and France in a secret conspiracy to destabilize Egypt and seize the Suez Canal, Nasser stripped many Jewish Egyptians of their citizenship. He went on to expel thousands from the country, and nationalize—that is, confiscate—their businesses. Judaism was the oldest religion in the country: there had been Jews in Egypt since at least the seventh century
BC
. “We had Jewish neighbors when I was a child,” a Christian Egyptian doctor named Amin Makram Ebeid told me in his flat overlooking the Nile. “A Mr. Shoheit and his family. He told my father that he had found a husband for my sister. And then a few months later he disappeared. All of them disappeared. We suspected what had happened”—they were deported—“but none of us had the courage to ask, because then we would be implicated ourselves as Christians.” The doctor sighed. “How can someone’s belief within four walls affect his acceptance by the society?” He had hung a painting of a man in a Jewish prayer shawl in a spot where it would be the first thing a visitor would see, in the hope that it would shock people out of their prejudices. There is still one synagogue in Cairo, but only ten Jews remain in the whole country.

After Nasser’s death the Copts faced a new challenge. Church burnings had been rare before Nasser and unheard of during his time in power. When Anwar Sadat became president in 1970, this changed. Sadat styled himself the “pious president” and, to outflank his left-wing critics, allied himself to the Islamists. Extremist gangs were allowed wide license to operate in Egypt’s universities, where they attacked Sadat’s leftist critics and also enforced their own version of shari’a law on campuses. In 1972, an arson attack on a Coptic church marked the start of a new era of sectarian violence.

Meanwhile, the government’s approach to education was undergoing a wider change. Youssef Sidhom, editor of the Coptic newspaper
Watani
(“My Country”), recalled that period when he spoke to me in his office in downtown Cairo. “After the Islamization of Egypt in the late 1970s, Christian history was taken off the syllabus. There was pressure from those who had taken over education. Coptic history was stolen.” In the new textbooks only 4 of 240 pages were given to Egypt’s Christian past. The Koran replaced secular poetry in Arabic language classes, marginalizing the cultural heritage that Christians and Muslims had had in common. The state television networks allotted Islamic religious programs thirty hours a week but Christian programs only one time slot a year (at Christmas). In a thoughtful article for the Egyptian newspaper
al-Ahram
in May 2013, education expert Kamal Mougheeth recollected that in the 1980s, one of his schoolbooks declared that the Bible was fabricated. His Christian schoolmates were forced to memorize verses from the Koran.

George Ishak, a veteran opponent of the Egyptian military government, also pinpointed to me Sadat’s time as the pivotal moment. A man in his sixties, he became famous ten years ago for his outspoken protests against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak. I met him in an artists’ café called Groppi’s. He was clearly popular with the clientele: while we talked, we were interrupted every two minutes by someone coming up and shaking his hand, or by his getting up and greeting someone at another table.

“Sectarianism in Egypt started with Sadat,” Ishak said, in between these encounters. “When Sadat said, ‘I am a Muslim and this is a Muslim state,’ it frightened people beyond the literal meaning of the words. Whether it was good fortune or bad, it happened that the head of the Coptic Church at the time, a man called Shenouda”—he meant Patriarch Shenouda III, the man who consecrated St. Mark’s Church—“was charismatic. He drew people into the church, and all their life came to be lived within the church.” I nodded. I had seen the aftereffects of this at the church in Shubra, which had been so much more than just a place to pray. Shenouda had reformed the Coptic Church, giving power to a new generation of educated and dynamic clergy; he and his contemporaries had inspired a surge in monastic vocations.

“Then the tension began. Priests demonstrated when they were forbidden to build churches.” An old Egyptian law required Copts to receive a permit before building a new church, or even restoring an existing one. Sadat’s government was slow to grant these permits, causing great frustration among Copts. In 1981, a dispute over a plan to build a Coptic church led to bloody clashes in a poor and overcrowded suburb of Cairo: seventeen people were killed in the worst incident yet of Coptic-Muslim violence. Patriarch Shenouda III led a nonviolent protest over what he saw as government failure to protect the Copts; Islamists accused Shenouda of seeking a Coptic state, said that only an Islamic state would stop Coptic aggression, and called for a complete ban on new churches. Sadat responded by putting both Shenouda and a number of Muslim clerics under house arrest. Later that year, however, Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists angered by his peace deal with Israel. (The man who fired the fatal shots cried as he did so, “I have killed Pharaoh!”) Hosni Mubarak replaced Sadat and ostensibly built a much better relationship with the Coptic Church, granting permits for church building and making Coptic Christmas into a public holiday. But Ishak saw things differently. “Mubarak found,” Ishak went on, “that he could use this issue to distract attention. The security forces made tactical alliances with the Salafis.” The Salafis were just as Islamist as the Brotherhood but stayed away from politics.

The security forces grew hugely in the face of the terrorist threat. Between 1974 and 2004, as attacks on Copts and on the police themselves increased, the Egyptian police force grew from 150,000 to 1.7 million men. Yet the Copts remained unequal. There are no Coptic university presidents or heads of public companies. One Egyptian banker, a Muslim, told me that the attitude toward the Copts was one “that you might have toward a younger brother—a half brother, really. Someone you know is there, but you’d really rather he wasn’t.” Nor did Mubarak’s government completely protect the Copts. In January 2000, for example, sixteen Christians were killed in the village of al-Kosheh. The longest sentence handed down for the killings was two years, though one man was given an additional ten-year sentence for possessing an unlicensed firearm.

Yet the Coptic Church never confronted Mubarak in the way that it had briefly confronted Sadat. Nor did it call for democracy in Egypt, or sanction participation of Copts in the Tahrir Square demonstrations in 2011. It apparently felt that the alternative to Mubarak—the Muslim Brotherhood—would be worse. The Brotherhood did little to calm Coptic fears when it called in the 1990s for Copts to be shut out of senior positions in the army or in 2007 for the Egyptian constitution to specify that only a Muslim could be president. In 2006 the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, Mehdi Akef, was quoted as saying, “At-tuz fi Masr,” meaning roughly “To hell with Egypt”—apparently because, as an Islamist, he rejected the nation-state in favor of the restoration of an Islamic caliphate.

For some Copts the answer was emigration, made easier for them by their relatively high levels of education and a favorable attitude from Western governments. Between 1993 and 1997, 76 percent of requests from Egyptians for permanent emigration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were made by Copts. Others retreated further into the church, investing their energy in making it into a more effective and all-encompassing community. I met a Copt who had been wounded in a protest against church burning, during which Copts had thrown stones and the security forces opened fire. “As long as you feel threatened by the others,” he said, still nursing his leg, “your identity will be strong.” Nor is it only Christians who have come to prefer religious institutions over secular ones. Gallup reported in 2013 that 92 percent of all Egyptians, Muslim or Christian, had confidence in their religious institutions. No other institution came close. Put simply, Patriarch Shenouda and his Muslim equivalents have, owing to their acumen and dedication, acquired a great deal of influence. Some hard-line clerics have used this for ill. The overall result is that Muslims and Christians have had less and less to unite them.

All of this I learned in Cairo. But I knew that if I wanted to understand Egypt, and particularly to understand Christians in Egypt and how they related to their Muslim neighbors, then I would have to go to the place where most of Egypt’s Copts originated: south of Cairo, where the Nile Valley winds through hundreds of miles of unremitting desert. The people of this area (which is called the Sa’eed, or Upper Egypt—the same name that it had in ancient times) were slower to convert to Islam, and as late as the 1920s, 80 percent of Egypt’s Christians lived in the Sa’eed.

Although great numbers of Copts have since migrated northward—one scholar suggested to me that more than half of the Copts now live in Cairo and other northern cities—the Sa’eed is still their heartland. At least a quarter of the inhabitants of Minya city, for instance, 140 miles south of Cairo, are Copts—the largest proportion of Copts of any city in Egypt. The wider governorate is poor, with over 80 percent unemployment; more than a third of the governorate’s population is illiterate (though the figures are better in the city). The governorate is also where the greatest number of clashes have taken place between Christians and Muslims—perhaps as much as 65 percent of Egypt’s sectarian violence has happened there. I decided that to understand the Copts—their history, their beliefs, their future—I needed to get a better sense of the place. I did this in 2012, as Egypt’s first democratic election moved into its second round. Soon after my visit, Egyptians would choose between the two remaining candidates: Ahmad Shafiq, a Jesuit-educated Muslim who had served under President Mubarak, and Mohammed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. (Minya was one of the most pro-Morsi areas in Egypt, giving him 64 percent of the vote, with 36 percent going to Shafiq.)

Cairo’s main train station—called Ramses because a statue of the pharaoh once sat there—was first built in the 1850s, when Ismail commissioned the first railway in Africa to take cotton from Cairo up to Alexandria for export by sea. It was also the place where in 1923 Egyptian feminist Huda al-Shaarawi, returning from a conference in Europe, removed her veil in sight of the astonished crowd who had come to greet her—a step that inspired later generations of Arab feminists. I hurried through Moorish arches and past walls with faience tiles to buy my ticket. There was a special platform for the Sa’eed, I found, and a scattering of people waiting there to board the train. In a small bookstore on the platform was a display of books, several of which advertised with lurid pictures their subject matter: the tricks used by practitioners of black magic and how to combat them. I remembered the Salafi boys who thought they had found spell-casting equipment in the burned church’s basement.

Soon the train began trundling slowly south, through Cairo’s suburbs of cheap brick apartment buildings. At a tree-lined station in one of Cairo’s poorest suburbs, boys came onto the train to sell scented tissues and cheap candy. About half an hour into the journey the train track was joined by a narrow, clogged-up canal running parallel to it. Eventually we left the city and headed into the Nile Valley’s green fields, stopping frequently at one small town after another. Always the canal ran alongside the railway. I saw people wash dishes in it, and their clothes. In the evening, we reached Minya. As I emerged onto the platform an elderly porter grabbed hold of my bag and, despite my protests, held on to it grimly and carried it over the railway bridge.

There was one major hotel in the city, a huge concrete building called the Akhenaten, and I checked in there for the night. My room had fittings that had been elegant once—the 1970s, I reckoned. No tourists were staying there. The only people in the lobby were its staff, smoking cigarettes. I talked to them for a while, and they explained to me how superior the people of Minya were to those elsewhere. “You can’t trust people in Cairo, and they’re not as friendly as us,” said one of them to me. “And if you go further south from here, to Assyut, the people there are too hot-headed. But here in Minya, the people are in between the two. They’re just right.”

I found as I walked about the town that Minya was indeed friendlier than Cairo and, in its own quiet way, beautiful, facing as it did the Nile and low sandy cliffs beyond. A small riverside park was full of families, with some people playing football, others smoking the
shisha
water-pipe. On a boat moored by the riverside a wedding party was in full swing, bride and groom dancing to the sound of a popular Egyptian song. The city’s squares were full of people enjoying the evening breeze, men and women sitting together. Most of the women were unveiled, an almost certain sign—in this conservative city—that they were Christians. (In Cairo there are Muslim women who go unveiled; I never saw one in Minya.) This being a Sunday evening, I guessed that these couples had probably just come out of the churches and Christian community centers on the nearby streets. When I went to a roadside stall to get a glass of orange juice, a nun was on line ahead of me, ordering crushed sugar cane.