Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  To most Westerners, Arabic is the language of Islam. But I found that Arabic-speaking Egypt had more Christians in its churches on Sundays than England. I joined them: each week I took a taxi or rode the Metro, smooth and clinically clean and Japanese-built, up to the slightly shabby, unremarkable suburb of Shubra. To escape expat life, there was no better place. It was almost Egypt’s center of gravity, its definition of middle class with its small shops and one famous restaurant and paved streets. There was grit, there was noise, there was still the sour tang of polluted air—but these things did not seem to trouble my Egyptian friends as much as they did me. In Egypt villages are not places where the well-off choose to live, and the better kind of apartment (so my friends told me) was the kind on the noisy main street, not the quiet dirt roads behind. When one friend visited me in London she complained of the quiet, which had prevented her from sleeping.

  No tourists went to Shubra, or do today. They are wrong, however, if they think it has nothing to offer them. It has at least one thing they will not find anywhere else in the Middle East: a station named after a European saint. Boarding the Metro in central Cairo, I would pass through stations named after Egyptian presidents—Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak; I would go through one named after the pharaoh Ramses; and then I would arrive at a station named Sainte Thérèse.

  How did St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower, come to be on the Cairo map? The answer can be found just off the main street of Shubra, in a very remarkable church. The church is named after St. Thérèse because it was founded by French Carmelites, and it is remarkable because the portico of the church is covered from top to bottom in votive plaques, in English and French, Hebrew and Arabic, left by Jews, Muslims, and Christians in testimony to miracles performed by the saint. The church still attracts some Muslim visitors who come to light candles at the back, and even when an Islamic militant came to vandalize the church many years ago, he attacked the cross but left the saint’s pictures alone.

  One day I walked into the small, asphalt-paved forecourt of the church and met what would be, for a year, my own community in Egypt. There was huge Atef, who looked like a bouncer but wanted to be a monk; there was Maggie, who was studiously training to be an architect; there was Samih, a self-confident engineer. I noticed among the congregation signs of its pharaonic past, names such as Rameses and Nefertiti. A man called Wael, who had ambitions to be a model, claimed that his features were exactly those of the pharaohs. Regally presiding over everyone was Father Paul, a priest from a Coptic Catholic family. (In the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church set up a Uniate church in Egypt, whose Coptic members could keep their own traditions while accepting the bishop of Rome’s authority. This Uniate church has today more than 160,000 members.) He was a study for me in Egyptian courtesy. This was pretty much at the opposite end of the scale from the understated and distant courtesy of the English; I found myself navigating exaggerated compliments, half-meant invitations, and gargantuan hospitality. One particular exchange that the priest had with a flower merchant summed it up for me. After a lengthy negotiation over price, the flower seller declared: “Of course, I would like you to have them for free.” Nimbler at this than I would ever have been, the priest had an equally insincere compliment ready in reply: “You know, I only came here for the pleasure of seeing you.”

  Endlessly generous in showing me around Cairo, the priest was more elusive when I tried to return his hospitality. On the one occasion that he came to my flat, he drank a single glass of water, and when I tried to persuade him to stay longer, he declared, “No: I have honored you enough.” My Coptic friends’ kindness to me, though, never dried up. The church was more than a church. The members of the congregation took holidays together, chatted to each other for hours in the forecourt, and met frequently during the week. They taught me Egyptian dancing and once invited me to join them on charitable visits to Cairo’s poor: people living in makeshift shacks on the rooftops of tall apartment buildings. My new friends also regularly reproached me for the laxness of British Christianity. No wonder. A devout Copt should pray seven times a day, avoid drinking alcohol, and never smoke cigarettes. Copts fast not only during Lent but also during Advent and at other times of the year—210 days of the year in total. Though they are bound to give up meat and dairy products during these times (and fish during Lent), some go even further by eating only fruit, or the stewed beans that Egyptians call fuul. Some do not eat anything at all between midnight and sunset each day of Lent. This is more demanding than the Muslim fast of Ramadan. I was tempted to repeat a judgment made by Herodotus, who twenty-five centuries ago was an awestruck visitor to one of Egypt’s great temples, which at one point became so wealthy from donations that they owned a third of the country’s fertile land: “The Egyptians are religious to excess, more than any other country in the world.” (In recent opinion polls, Egyptians have agreed with Herodotus: they believe themselves to be the most religious people in the world.)

  I thought this not only about the Copts, but also when I heard the loudspeaker-enhanced sermons of local mosques on Fridays. Every taxi driver seemed to play the Koran on his cassette player, sometimes pointing out, like a connoisseur, the quality of the particular reciter. At a concert of Sufi music the lead singer, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, elicited rapturous applause, and some of his hearers went into a state of trance. This pervasiveness of religion meant that religious differences, too, were obvious. Several times when I was walking through Cairo’s streets, people came up to me and asked which soccer team I supported. A few times they would ask instead—much in the same spirit, it seemed—if I was Muslim or Christian. My Arabic teacher told me that people asked her the same question, though not directly. They would ask her for her name, and then her father’s name. (As a liberal Muslim, she evaded their questions on principle, feeling that people should have a right to keep their religion private.) Copts had their own way of asking the same question. One time at the local supermarket the cashier surreptitiously exposed his wrist to me, showing the tattoo of a cross.

  Those differences expressed themselves violently from time to time while I lived in Egypt. The embassy forbade me to visit parts of the south of Egypt, and especially the city of Minya, because of Islamist terror groups that were attacking the security forces and local Christians there. In September 1997, when I was in Alexandria with friends from St. Thérèse, I saw on the television that German tourists had been gunned down in Tahrir Square. It was my first encounter with terrorism. “Don’t be alarmed, Gerard. It is fate,” said Samih. “We must all die on our appointed day.” I was not comforted. Two months later, sixty-two people were killed in a massacre at Luxor, carried out by terrorists armed with guns and knives. A five-year-old child was among the victims. A note praising Islam was found afterward in the disemboweled body of one of the victims.

  Yet interspersed with these terrible events were occasional reminders of a more humane form of coexistence. Take, for example, the attack in Tahrir Square, which so alarmed me when I saw it on the news at Alexandria. The men who carried it out escaped afterward, or so I read, to a neighboring district called Bulaq Abu’l Alaa. The people of the district shielded the killers. It happened that I knew this place. It was one of my favorite areas to walk in, where welders’ magnesium flares garishly lit up once-elegant colonial-style buildings and the dust and dirt of neglected roads between them. Yet the priest in this area, a huge man in a huge Italianate church, told me the Muslims there were his brothers; he had no trouble from them, he said. Copts came and went to the church without ever being harassed. As I walked back out of the neighborhood, I passed through a street market selling clothes. Here were people of all kinds: men in turbans, men in suits, in jeans, in coveralls; women wearing veils, women without veils, and one woman, too poor perhaps to afford a veil, who had fitted a cardboard box around her head to protect her from the sun; and a girl with long plaited hair teaching her little brother how to make the sign of the cross.r />
  I left Egypt in 1998 and went back only rarely and briefly. Then in 2011 I saw that Tahrir Square was in the news again. The Egyptian people had gathered there to topple a president. Christians and fundamentalist Muslims stood shoulder to shoulder. Paid thugs attacked the demonstrators. President Hosni Mubarak resigned. An army council took over. There were outbreaks of fighting between Christians and Muslims. Some churches were attacked. Several Christians were killed. I had planned to go to Egypt anyway, for this book, and the trip seemed more relevant than ever.

  —————

  As the plane landed at Cairo in March 2011, I looked out at a well-remembered city. I could see the mansions of the rich, in the serene northern suburb of Heliopolis; I could see where the poorest of Cairo’s poor, the Nile River dwellers who have no homes except their little uncovered skiffs, are rocked each evening by the backwash of luxury cruise boats. The road from the airport took me past a huge grand military barracks with murals showing the victories of Egypt’s pharaonic armies; turning into a giant overpass, it sped me over the grimy edifices of the state, its ministries, and the principal train station. It passed by the domes of the Coptic cathedral, and next to it a mosque—in solidarity? Or competition?

  My hotel, on an island in the Nile called Zamalek, was a shabby but cozy relic of Cairo’s elegant past. A retired architect had installed himself eccentrically on a faded chair in the lobby and appeared to be dictating various letters, usually of complaint, to an obliging member of the staff. Outside the hotel, a group of young women in hejabs were painting a mural representing people power. As I walked along the street I noted the signs on the shops and walls. One advertised in English the Libyan currency at its new low rate as Western and Arab allies threatened war: “Libian dinar buy 2 sell 3.65.” Another said in Arabic: “In the name of God: there are many honorable policemen. Let us celebrate our police.” A third, on the door of a shop, was starker, with just one word in bright letters: “Viagra.”

  The island of Zamalek appeared on the Nile just over a century ago, a composite of the silt that used to be washed down the river year by year, and which gave the Nile Valley its fertility. (After the Nile was dammed in 1970, the silt stopped flowing. For that matter, the “rising of the waters”—the annual ebb and flood of the river—ended, too.) Zamalek attracted the upper classes, who built on it palaces and parks that now have become frail and faded. I rode a taxi across the bridge to the older parts of Cairo, which are on the eastern bank of the Nile. As we crossed the Nile, the taxi driver proudly pointed out the burned-out shell of the former ruling party’s headquarters, squatting on the river’s edge. A presenter on the radio declared: “Corruption in society—we can talk freely about this now!”

  My goal was a modest pink-stuccoed building stuck between a multilayer concrete overpass and the expanse of Tahrir Square. Into this museum every day thousands of people would come to see 165,000 statues, figurines, sarcophagi, and mummies. Tourism in 2009 provided employment for up to 12 percent of the Egyptian workforce, but the Egyptian Museum has always been more than a moneymaker. It is a monument to Egyptian identity. On its front wall is another symbol—a long list of the dynasties that had ruled Egypt, as if to say to Egyptians: You have always been ruled by kings. In revolutionary Egypt in 2011 it was the one place where autocrats—though of the dead and mummified kind—were still in vogue.

  Instead of elaborate traps and curses to ward off intruders, the mummies had a guardian in the form of Tariq el-Awadi, the museum’s director. I found him in his office in the museum basement. His desk was surrounded by a collection of ornate gilded clocks, each showing a different time. I had come to ask him about history. “Egyptians are divorced from their past,” Awadi said. “They are made to feel that they have nothing in common with it.” The school curriculum, he explained, divided history into eras: pharaonic, Coptic, Islamic. It was the Islamic era that received most attention. But Awadi thought that learning more about previous eras could help Egyptians become more united as a people. A Muslim himself, he felt that the country’s ancient past was a heritage that both Christians and Muslims shared: “Our country is a cohesive society, although it has more than one religion; customs, language, even certain religious traditions are the same for all Egyptians, and different from the Arabs.” But for many decades, Egyptians had been told that they were Arabs. And so, as Awadi said, “Egyptians are asking, ‘Who am I? Am I Arab or Egyptian?’”

  After I saw Awadi I walked through the halls of the museum, looking at toys and models of ships and ushabti (funerary) figurines that might have been made yesterday, so perfectly were they preserved. It gave me a strange feeling—as though the veil of time had somehow grown thin, and the mummified pharaohs might really step through it and come alive in the modern day. Certainly the Egyptians had expected that their bodies might come alive again, something that most other ancient peoples did not foresee. For example, when Gilgamesh the king in the Iraqi epic descends beneath the earth to search for his dead friend Enkidu, he meets shades, not people of flesh. “Enkidu,” as he says, “has turned to clay!”

  The people of the Nile Valley, however, were surrounded by a sand that was a hundred times drier than the Iraqi desert—so dry that even pieces of paper buried in it for two thousand years have been discovered with writing on them still legible. Ancient Egyptians buried their dead in this sand, and even without the process that was later devised of removing the body’s organs and stuffing the corpse with natrun salt to preserve it, the corpses were often naturally mummified by the sand’s dryness and heat. Dug up years later, they would still have been recognizable. It was possible to imagine the soul (the ka) reentering them and bringing them back to life. An Egyptian inscription from the twenty-fourth century bc declares, “Let them who are in their graves, arise; let them undo their bandages. Shake off the sand from thy face” (here appearing to address the dead themselves), “raise thyself up on thy left side, support thyself on thy right side.”

  If the pharaohs really did come back to life today, rising from their gilt sarcophagi, they would find their country changed beyond recognition. Only in the countryside might they see familiar sights: families washing themselves and their pots and pans in the Nile, green palm trees and heaps of threshed wheat punctuating the fields, water buffalo wandering beside streams. Otherwise they would be amazed at the choking fumes and teeming apartment buildings of Cairo, now one of the world’s biggest cities; at the population of Egypt, more than twenty times now than in antiquity; at the fact that the nation, once the breadbasket of the Roman empire, now imports 40 percent of its food. And they would discover that their religion of animal-headed deities, which once held so powerful a grip on Egyptian society, was gone.

  Or not quite gone, as it turned out. I had an appointment in a hotel by Tahrir Square with a couple who called themselves Osirites—modern-day Egyptian worshipers of the old Egyptian god Osiris. The husband, Hamdi (not his real name), looked just like the statue of an ancient Egyptian scribe, thickset and jovial. Bottles of Saqqara beer, named after the oldest pyramids, were brought to our table. Past the chintz sofas and glazed windows the river Nile flowed by, brown and ageless. According to Egyptian myth, Osiris, the god of the underworld, had floated down the river in a coffin after being tricked by his wicked brother, Seth. His sister, Isis, rescued him, but Seth found him again and chopped him into pieces. Isis found all the pieces except her brother’s penis, which she rebuilt for him out of gold. Then she magically revived him. He became the god of resurrection—and was thought to control the ebb and flood of the Nile, themselves symbols of death and rebirth.

  Osiris, Isis, and Seth—and other Egyptian gods such as Amun—were just one single deity, the Osirite couple told me. It was wrong, they added, to speak of the ancient Egyptians as polytheists or kuffar, as some Muslims did. They had given the world most of its contemporary religious ideas, including the word amen.

  “When others say ‘Amen,’
I say ‘Amun’!” declared Hamdi.

  “We invented the Sabbath,” his wife added. “And the psalms of David: they were written by the pharaoh Akhenaten. Look at the hymns he wrote to Aten, and you’ll see they are the same as the psalms.”

  She told me about a modern Egyptian festival that could be traced to an ancient one. Two thousand years ago it was referred to as “Osiris coming to the moon”; now it is called Shamm al-Nessim, but it is still celebrated at the spring equinox. “There is a special holiness to the day. It is the only day when everything stops.” There was no other festival in modern Egypt celebrated by both Christians and Muslims. “People eat green things, and fish and lettuce, and sit on the grass, and paint the eggs they eat.” (There is an Egyptian specialty that they eat on Shamm al-Nessim: fiseekh, a kind of preserved fish that academics say dates back millennia. I tasted it once and found it shockingly pungent. But some Egyptians love it.) This old Egyptian feast was the origin of Easter, she insisted.