A Sword Over the Nile: A Brief History of the Copts Under Islamic Rule , livre ebook

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246 pages

English

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"With Egypt's Copts targeted as part of a bloody and systematic campaign of genocide against the ancient churches of the Middle East, Adel Guindy has produced a timely and authoritative account of their story. It deserves to be widely read."
* -- Professor Lord Alton, Professor of Citizenship at Liverpool John Moores University

Sujets

Histoire

Egipto

Egypt

History of the Middle East

Ancient Egypt

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Date de parution	29 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781645365099
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Adel Guindy
A Sword Over the Nile
Austin Macauley Publishers
2020-06-30
Adel Guindy Copyright Information© Foreword Introduction Who Are the Copts? A Peaceful or Forceful Conquest? Rapacious Umayyads The Abbasids Squelch the Resistance The Turkish Walis: More Sorrows The Fatimids and the Adventures of Al-Ḥakem bi-Amr Allah The Decay and Demise of the Fatimid State The Wars of Ṣalaḥ Al-Deen Against the Kuffar The Copts in the Ayyubid Mill Harassed from All Directions The Slaves’ State and Its Dark Days An Ottoman Paradise Bonaparte Knocks at the Door Mohammed Ali’s Attempts to Exit the Dark Tunnel Fake Liberals, Real Fascists Dhimmis in the Republican Umma -State Overview and Analysis: The Copts Under Arab Islamic Rule Conclusion: Triumph of ‘Islamocracy’© Afterword Appendices 1. The Impact of the ‘Forgotten of History’ on Civilization 1. Doctrinal Differentiation of Christianity 2. Monasticism and the Western Civilization 3. Philosophy 4. Science 5. Music, Art, and Architecture 6. Textiles and Crafts 7. A Fourth Century ‘Red Cross’ 2. Who Was ‘Al-Muqawqis’? 3. The Historical Responsibility of the Copts Pope Dioscorus (444–454) Pope Benyamin (623–662) Pope Yousab I (830–849) Pope Ghobrial II (1131–1145) 4. Distinctive Identity and Provinciality 5. Pseudo-Apocalyptic Writings as ‘Political Resistance’ 6. Patriarchs of the Coptic Church 7. Glossary Bibliography Core Reference Primary References Other References Sites Accessed: Notes
Copyright Information©

Adel Guindy (2020)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The opinions expressed in our published work are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of Austin Macauley Publishers or its editors. Neither Austin Macauley Publishers nor its authors guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information published herein and neither Austin Macauley Publishers nor its authors shall be responsible for any errors, omissions, or claims contained in this publication.
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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Guindy, Adel
A Sword Over the Nile
ISBN 9781643787602 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643787619 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645365099 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902962
www.austinmacauley .com/us
First Published (2020)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 28 th Floor
New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1 (646) 5125767

To the ordinary and unsung Copts,
in their towns and villages,
for their quiet perseverance
and heroic steadfastness
over the centuries.
A testimony to resilience.
To Congressman (ret.) Frank Wolf
and Lord David Alton (U.K.),
for their remarkable efforts
to promote global religious freedom.
Foreword
February 2015 was the first time many in the West heard of the Copts, Egypt’s indigenous, Christian inhabitants. Then, the Islamic State published what subsequently went viral—a gory video of their jihadi members savagely carving off the heads of 20 Copts and one Ghanaian by the shores of Libya because they refused to renounce Christ for Islam.
Little known, however, is that, well before the Islamic State targeted and unwittingly “popularized” the Copts, countless other Muslims in modern Egypt—individuals, mobs, sheikhs, organizations (the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafi Front), and even governmental authorities—had persecuted or at the very least discriminated against the nation’s Christian minority.
Such oppression is often seen and presented in the West as an aberration. After all, have Muslims and Christians not lived in peace for centuries in Egypt? Does the fact that Copts comprise at least 10 percent of Egypt’s population not bespeak of tolerance—a Muslim willingness to live and let live for 14 centuries? Indeed, was it not the Copts themselves who initially called on the Arabs to enter and ‘liberate’ Egypt from the Byzantine yoke in the seventh century?
All these observations that invariably arise in response to the “Coptic question” suggest that current discord is rooted to temporal matters—poverty, ignorance, tribalism—anything and everything other than religion.
The problem, however, is that these observations are built atop a faulty first premise—and, as always, false first premises always lead to false conclusions. Put differently, they are built atop a pseudohistory that has long dominated the West’s understanding of Islam’s history vis-à-vis non-Muslims in general, the Copts, for our purposes, in particular. A corrective is needed.
Enter the current book in your hands. I first read an earlier version of A Sword Over the Nile in Arabic and found its contents so useful as to urge its author, Adel Guindy, to translate it into English. Not only did he comply—to the benefit and subsequent edification of English-language readers—but he greatly enlarged the original work, tying it to the current era and supplying several useful appendices.
A Sword traces the history of the Coptic people under Islam, from the seventh century on to the present era. Most of it is a chronological translation of lengthy selections of the compendious History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church and other Coptic primary sources, some translated here for the first time. Although the History of the Patriarchs was first rendered into English in the early twentieth century, most editions are out of print; existing copies tend to be exorbitantly priced. But Mr. Guindy has not only provided an accessible and fresh translation; he has spared the reader the agony of culling through the History of the Patriarchs ’ many volumes—as might be imagined, hundreds of its pages make for dry and irrelevant reading — to find the most applicable selections for inclusion.
As such, A Sword’s merits are many. Unlike the well-known and dominant Muslim historiographical tradition, which is largely hagiographical—that is, meant to put a “saintly” veneer on Muslim conduct vis-à-vis non-Muslim subjects—the Coptic sources used for this book tend to more accuracy. For example, whereas the oldest Muslim history of the Arab invasion and subsequent conquest of Egypt was written two centuries after the facts (by Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam, d. 870), the Coptic sources relied on in this book are contemporaneous with the events they record. That alone suggests that their narrative is more authoritative. Moreover, by relying heavily on Coptic sources, this book offers the added benefit of presenting the story of Egyptian Christianity under Islam through the eyes of the vanquished, not the victors, the latter hitherto being the traditional guardians of the “narrative.”
Less academically, the great achievement of A Sword is that it gives the lie to the aforementioned and popular Western view that whatever the Copts are currently suffering has nothing to do with Islam. The next few hundred pages of source document translations make clear that everything modern Egypt’s Copts are currently suffering—including the burning and bombing of their churches, sporadic bouts of violent persecution, the abduction and forced conversion of Coptic girls, and a myriad of other forms of entrenched social discrimination—was suffered by their Coptic ancestors over the course of fourteen centuries. The continuity is staggering; think what the Islamic State has been doing to Christians and others but on a prolonged and sometimes exponential scale (for instance, under the Mamluks). Moreover, the persecutors were not fringe “radicals” but often the very rulers of Egypt, whether Arabs, Fatimids, Kurds, Mamluks, Turks, or Egyptians.
Lest the Coptic chronicles appear too sensational or exaggerated, it is worth observing that Muslim sources sometimes confirm them. For instance, in Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) authoritative history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving Coptic women and children—often with the compliance if not outright cooperation of the authorities. The only escape then—as sometimes today—was for Christians to convert to Islam.
Indeed, after recording one particularly egregious bout of persecution in the eleventh century, when, along with the countless massacres, some 30,000 churches, according to Maqrizi, were destroyed or turned into mosques—a staggering number that further indicates how Christian pre-Islamic Egypt and the Middle East was, a point to be addressed anon—the Muslim historian makes an interesting observation: “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.”
This leads to the all-important question, one that A Sword’s chronological approach clarifies: how and why did Egypt go from being overwhelmingly Christian in the seventh century, to being overwhelmingly Muslim in the twenty-first century? To understand the significance of this question—and because few in the West comprehend pre-Islamic Egypt’s profoundly Christian nature—a brief primer is in order:
Before Islam invaded it, Egypt was home to some of Christendom’s earliest theological giants and church fathers, including Clement of Alexandria (b. 150), Origen the Great (b. 184), Anthony the Great, father of monasticism (b. 251), and Athanasius of Alexandria (b. 297), the chief defender of the Nicene Creed, which is still professed