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.
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.
Christian monasteries flourish in today’s Egypt, partly as a result of Christians’ retreat into their own community. The Deir Abu Fana, dating back to the fourth century and shown here in 2012, is expanding rapidly. Photo by the author
My friends at the hotel put me in touch with a local driver to take me to the villages and monasteries in the countryside. The next morning, as I waited for him, I walked through the park again. Across the river I could see an ox pulling a plow in the fields. The city’s gentle nighttime revelry had left a trail of litter in the park, and a pickup truck came to collect it. A veiled girl—from a nearby village, I guessed—threw bags of garbage onto the truck and then pulled herself up after them. Her feet on the bags, she sang and laughed as the truck drove away.
When the driver arrived he was pleased to hear that we would be going to see some of the local Coptic monasteries. He was a Copt himself, and his name was George. (Although St. Mark is claimed as the founder of the Coptic Church, children are more commonly named after St. George—and the image of him plunging a lance into a dragon is a popular one in churches and homes, just as once ancient Egyptians us
ed to depict the god Horus driving his spear into a hippopotamus.) “Tourists are never interested in Coptic sites,” he complained. “They only ever want to see things from ancient Egypt. I tell them about our churches and they never want to visit them.” And yet the monasteries are in certain ways modern-day versions of the ancient temples. In the early years of Christianity, monasticism was solitary: men went into a remote place, often in the desert, to pray. It was in Egypt in around ad 320 that St. Pachomius founded the first community of Christian monks. He intended it for those who could not manage the rigors of living alone. But the monasteries took a familiar pattern: a community of pious men, living in a walled enclosure and farming nearby fields, worshiping in chapels within the enclosure to which pilgrims came as visitors—it was the system by which Egyptian temples had always operated. Many early monasteries had points of resemblance to the temples in the way that their high walls sloped inward and in the carvings on their entrances.
George showed me pictures of local monasteries. One particular picture caught my eye. Glass cases, labeled to show that they contained the bodies of Christian martyrs who died under Diocletian, contained partly mummified corpses. These, with teeth flashing through black flesh twisted in pain, were reverently dressed in silver tinsel and wedding costumes as a symbol of the eternal happiness their sacrifice had won them. At first I found the pictures shocking, even grotesque. But they were, I realized, the expression of a profound and uncompromising faith. The Copts’ belief in martyrdom has helped them endure difficult times. George and I drove past fields with piles of reaped wheat and others where the sugar cane stood tall. George pointed to the sugar cane. “That’s where the gunmen used to hide,” he said, “back when the troubles happened here. I had a friend who was a policeman, and that was how he was shot.” Between 1992 and 1998 a militant Islamist group called al-Gama’a al-Islamiya operated in Minya and other towns in southern Egypt, attacking both the security forces and local Christian civilians. Now, in 2011, the Gama’a had formed a political party and made an effort to show that it had changed: it persuaded five Copts to join, called for a free market economy, and won one of Minya’s sixteen parliamentary seats.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 26