Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity

by Samuel Tadros

Defender of the faith, hero of Christianity, banished, assaulted, cursed, forced into hiding, but never relenting, the rock on which Arianism was crushed. His life can be summoned in a conversation with a friend who warned him that everyone was against him, the bishops, priests and the emperor himself. “The whole world is against you, Athanasius,” the friend said, to which Athanasius replied: “Athanasius Contra Mundum,” I am against the world.

These conditions include promising not to build new churches or monasteries nor renew old ones that are damaged; promising not to manifest their religion publically, display crosses, or ring loud bells; acting with respect to Muslims by rising from

their seats when a Muslim wishes to sit; clipping the fronts of their heads; pledging not to imitate Muslims in their dress; agreeing not to mount on saddles, take Muslims as servants or build houses overtopping Muslim houses.

Copts were forced to wear hazel-colored clothes with special marks on them, forbidden to ride horses and ordered to use saddles made of wood when mounting other animals, required to hide crosses in marches and funerals, and ordered to put statues and marks of dogs or monkeys on the front of their homes.

First, in stating that sciences were Islamic,5 an argument was being made that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Islam or Muslims. True, they had fallen through a dark age, but they had been great once before. They were, in fact, the founders of science. Secondly, science was thus understood as a set of technical devices. No comprehension is evident of modernity as a clear break in the history of man.

Abbas,

He disliked foreigners, especially the French, and is recorded as having attempted to banish all Copts from Egypt to the Sudan, only to be stopped by the intervention of the sheikh of Al Azhar.

Egyptian liberalism would emerge not from an independent bourgeoisie but from civil servants, men whose lives were tied to the state and whose conceptions were inherently shaped by that.

Mohamed Ali arrested Coptic civil servants and levied sums of money on them. Guirguis El Gohary was the leading Coptic civil servant and Mohamed Ali extorted his money from him. Mohamed Ali elevated Moalem Ghali to prominence only to order him killed in 1822 to be succeeded by his son Moalem Basilious. Similarly in 1817, Mohamed Ali re-imposed the dress codes on Copts barring them from wearing white turbans, in the last instance of dress codes being imposed in Egypt.

He also encouraged conversion to Islam by granting those who converted financial rewards, though no force was used.

His most important intervention for Copts came after the martyrdom of Sidhom Bishay in Damietta. Sidhom had been accused of insulting Islam and after a hasty trial was found guilty and ordered flogged. After the flogging, the mob took him and beat him through the city streets. He died five days later from his wounds. The foreign consuls in Damietta raised the issue to Moahmed Ali who ordered a reinvestigation. The investigation implicated the governor and judge in the death. Mohamed Ali ordered both removed from their positions and banished. He furthermore allowed Copts for the first time to raise crosses in their funerals.

Unlike other minorities, Copts never accepted foreign protection.

The seeds that Habib Guirguis had planted would grow into a movement that would attempt to revive Coptic Orthodoxy to counter the influence of the missionaries and stop their encroachment on what they viewed as theirs: Copts. Reform inspired by the Protestant missionaries and setting them as a model for a more modern church and community vs. revival as a reaction and counter to the Protestant missionaries became the identities of the two roads.