Controversy
swirls around Egypt’s early Islamic history By Andrew Hammond
CAIRO
HISTORICAL
CHANGES: A VIEW OF THE FOUNTAIN IN THE CENTRAL OF THE COURT
YARD OF
THE 1,100-YEAR-OLD AHMAD IBN TULUN MOSQUE IN CAIRO, DURING RESTORATION WORKS TO
THE ORIGINAL AND LARGEST MOSQUE IN EGYPT.
New
research has challenged official Islamic histories by showing it may have taken
several centuries after the Arab conquests of the Middle East before Egypt
became predominantly Arabic speaking and Muslim.
THE LAST
PART OF THIS STORY WAS CENSORED FROM THIS WEEK’S PRINTED EDITION
Scholars
told an unusual conference in Cairo on the early Islamic history of the largest
Arab state that Egypt spent some three centuries as a tri-lingual,
multi-cultural country using Arabic, Greek and indigenous Coptic.
The
conference broke new ground in a region where questioning official accounts of
early Islam has become a controversial and dangerous activity in the last
decade. Many Muslims feel that questioning their religion is an extension of
Western political domination in Islamic countries.
The
gathering, last month, suggested it was only after the Fatimid caliphate was
set up in Cairo in A.D. 969 – more than three centuries after the 641 Arab
conquest of Egypt - that the country’s present Arab, Muslim identity took
decisive hold.
“The
early Islamic period is perhaps the most multi-cultural, multi-lingual and
multi-religious time period in Egyptian history,” said scholar Nicole Hansen of
Chicago University.
Since
the 1970s, a small group of Western scholars has been investigating the origins
of the Muslim holy book, the Koran, the text’s meaning and how Islam was formed
in the aftermath of the Arab conquests.
Islamic
tradition, until recently accepted by most Western scholars, says Islam emerged
as a fully formed religion out of Arabia during the Arab conquests. But new
thinking says the monotheistic milieu of Iraq, the Levant and Egypt helped
shape the religion once the region was united under Arab rule.
Muslim
groups in the West have reacted angrily to the work, while most scholars in
Arab countries remain unaware of it.
Challenging
religious orthodoxy has proved dangerous in the past.
An
Egyptian academic who argued for an allegorical reading of the Koran was forcibly
divorced from his wife in 1996 on the grounds that his theories proved he was
no longer a Muslim, so could not remain married to his Muslim wife.
Egypt’s
Nobel Laureate author Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed by zealots in 1995 because of
a novel which the religious establishment had slammed as blasphemous.
Authorities
here have since prosecuted a number of people for forming groups which held
unorthodox views on central Islamic tenets concerning prayer, pilgrimage and
fasting.
The idea
that Egypt’s Arab-Muslim identity was still in the balance three centuries
after the Arab conquests, while not in the same category of controversy, is
entirely absent from official discourse in Egypt, now the biggest country in
the region, with almost 70 million people.
But a
trilingual tax demand issued to a Christian monk by the Arab authorities in the
8th century A.D., or the second century of the Muslim calendar,
shows the ancient Pharaonic tongue of Coptic coexisted with Greek and Arabic
for a long time.
Coptic
is the term used to denote the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language
after Christianity became the country’s religion from A.D. 312.
Greek
had existed alongside the ancient language and culture of the Egyptians since
the 332 B.C. conquest by Alexander the Great.
“The
fact that this document is written in these three languages is in itself
interesting,” said Sarah Clackson, a scholar of Greek and Coptic at Cambridge
University in England.
Arabic,
which Egypt’s new rulers made the language of administration, eventually ended
centuries of linguistic schizophrenia. Greek disappeared and Coptic slowly
receded, though one family claims to still speak the language today.
Frank
Trombley of the University of Wales suggested Egypt’s early Islamic rulers
refrained from contributing to annual Arab attacks on Christian Byzantium, in
modern-day Turkey, because a majority non-Arab, non-Muslim population could not
be trusted. “Coptic sailors defected after the A.D. 717 siege of Constantinople. The caliphs relied on Christian
crews, so they stopped operations after this,” he told the conference.
Analysts
said such research could be viewed as unsettling even today, as Egypt seeks to
maintain a sense of national unity and patriotism despite outbreaks of
sectarian strife. Although Muslims and Coptic Christians live side-by-side, the
communities rarely inter-marry and their cultures remain distinct.
“There
is a reluctance to talk about these issues,” said prominent Coptic lawyer
Mamdouh Nakhla. “We were a majority until the Fatimid caliphs, for three
centuries,” he added.
Many
Copts today – who form less than 10 percent of Egypt’s population - claim to
be the true descendants of Pharaonic Egypt. Modern research suggests, however,
that many if not most of Egypt’s Muslims descend from one-time Coptic converts.
Despite
the wrench in the country’s identity witnessed in the early Islamic centuries,
researchers see remarkable signs of continuity throughout Egypt’s 5,000-year
history. In one example, Hansen showed that Pharaonic concepts that male
impotence was caused by magic, which “bound” the man’s ability carried on in
Islamic Egypt. Today, impotent men are referred to in Egyptian and other Arabic
dialects as “marbout”, or “tied”. Coptic legal texts show a large smattering of
Arabic terms after the conquest of Egypt, said Sebastian Richter of Leipzig
University. Egypt’s Arabic dialect is full of Coptic words, and classicAl
Arabic also has words of Coptic origin.