Copts and the Arab Spring

Muslims of Egypt are called Egyptians, uniting them with the Copts, but recent violence threatens their unity.

Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat once said, “There are more Christians in my country than there are Jews in Israel”. He was referring to Copts, an ancient Christian community that, according to tradition, was introduced to Egypt by Saint Mark in 42 AD. Copts comprise nearly 10 per cent of Egypt’s 80 million people. Today, the Copts feel threatened by the Arab Spring.

The Copts joined with the Muslims in Tahrir Square to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, but the unity forged in that popular uprising has not lasted. A peaceful march protesting the destruction of a church in Upper Egypt was broken up by the police and army troops in central Cairo. Twenty-seven people were killed, some of them run over by military vehicles and more than 300 people were injured.

Copts have long faced discrimination, but today, with the tide of political Islam on the rise, they fear that religious bias and violence against them may increase. Copts are increasingly showing up at Western embassies enquiring about emigration opportunities.

In truth, Christians have been leaving the Middle East for decades. Not long ago in Israel, Bethlehem was nearly 100 per cent Christian. Today, it is 30 per cent — many Christians having fled to North and South America.

The name of Egypt is supposed to have come from Egyptian hieroglyphic Ha(t)-ka-ptah, ‘temple of the soul of Ptah the god’. When the Greeks landed there, they found the word difficult to pronounce, so they coined a variant: ‘Aigyptos’.

The Arabs who invaded Egypt, like the Greeks, had problems pronouncing the term, ‘Aigypti’, which means ‘Egyptian citizen’. (In Greek, ‘gypt’ is pronounced as ‘gupt’.) They changed the word to ‘Copti’ which they pronounced as ‘Qibti’. Of course, at that time, Egypt was a Christian nation, so the term became limited to actual Egyptian Christians as the country became more and more Muslim. In Urdu, the word for Copt has come from Arabic, and we pronounce it ‘Qibti’. The Qibti of Egypt were among the first non-Muslims to accept Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as the true Prophet of God.

The Qibtis of Egypt were Monophysites who believed in the ‘one nature’ of Christ. In October 451 AD, Pope Leo and Byzantine Emperor Marcian, convened the Council of Chalcedon on the eastern bank of the Bosphorus, in present-day Istanbul, to settle a dispute over the meaning of Christ between the eastern and western church. To the western church (based in Rome and Constantinople), the Chalcedonian definition of faith held that Christ existed ‘in two natures’— that he was both divine and human.

The Qibtis belonged to the Eastern Church and did not agree. As a result, they were ousted from Christianity as ‘Monophysites’ (from the Greek words for ‘single’ and ‘nature’). Their belief in Christ was closer to the Judaic and Islamic tradition. That could be one reason why they accepted Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) as the true Prophet of God.

There are ironies in the Egyptian situation today. The Copts are the original people, their name derived from the name of the country. Muslims of Egypt are called Egyptians but the word unites them with Copts whether they like it or not.

The other name for Egypt is ‘Misr’, which means ‘coast’ and is often applied to Cairo, too. Pakistanis are often shocked to find that Egyptian Arabs pronounce it as ‘Masr’, too. So when an al Qaeda terrorist is captured as al Masri, we tend not to connect him to Egypt. It is tragic that intolerance has crept into the movement that began against dictatorship and had Copts in its ranks.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2012.