With deep nationalist pride, she listed the many and widespread religious customs and ideas that had originated in ancient Egypt: the customs of pilgrimage and prayer, fasting, the concept of the Messiah, Christmas trees and the name of Christmas, the lighting of candles in churches, and more. “The Egyptian flag is fourteen thousand years old,” said Hamdi. “Red, white, and black have always represented national pride. And the eagle at its center is the sign of Horus.” I could see that this couple, too, were looking for an identity that would be the property of all Egyptians. While I found it hard to imagine that there would be many people joining them in the cult of Osiris, their final declaration was boldly given: “The Egyptian religion is returning!” A year later, when the Muslim Brotherhood were running Egypt, I met this couple again, but they spoke differently and more cautiously. They were interested in the culture of ancient Egypt, they said, not the religion.
Still, they were right that the ancient Egyptians had an influence on later religions. Not only did the Egyptians pioneer belief in the resurrection of the body, but the pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun, was the first known monotheist in history. He abolished all gods except his beloved Aten, the sun god, and built epicene statues symbolizing the union of masculine and feminine. A hymn to Aten survives, written perhaps by the pharaoh himself: “The earth brightens when thou arisest in the eastern horizon and shine forth as Aten in the daytime. . . . How manifold are thy works! They are hidden from the sight of men, O sole God, like unto whom there is no other!” Jews, who lived in Egypt, share some of their customs with the pharaohs: the avoidance of pork and catfish was practiced by both Jews and Egyptians, as was male circumcision. Compared with the number of ancient traditions I found alive and well in Iraq, though, I noted few in Egypt. The country had no community like the Mandaeans or the Zoroastrians that kept pre-Christian traditions continuously into the modern era. And Egypt’s folk customs, though many and colorful, are mostly medieval. I found only three that date back to pharaonic times.
One is the custom by which the Egyptians mark death. At the medieval cemetery of Cairo, a collection of miniature mansions is assembled in silent array along straight, empty dirt roads near the al-Azhar mosque. Although these mansions are actually lived in for much of the year by squatters, they are built above graves and exist for a particularly Egyptian custom: forty days after a relative’s death, and on the death’s every anniversary, many Egyptian families gather at these little mansions to eat a meal there. In the same way, their ancestors came to eat by the graves of their loved ones, offering food to their spirits. A doctor I met told me how in the south of Egypt, the ancient custom of hiring mourners for funerals continued, and, that for a week after a death, the bereaved family would shelter and feed visitors. The same doctor had once come across mourners who improvised chants while he was carrying out a surgical operation. They stood, dressed predominantly in black mourning costume, around the operating table and improvised a dirge for the occasion, since they refused to accept that the patient might survive. “Oh, you poor woman whose flesh was cut while you were still alive!”
Another, less attractive custom definitely dates back to pharaonic times. The Egyptians “practice circumcision for the purpose of cleanliness,” wrote Herodotus, and a papyrus from the second century bc shows that it was performed on girls as well as boys. It still is. A UN-backed survey in 2008 shockingly found that over 90 percent of Egyptian women surveyed had undergone the procedure—though it is uncommon among better-educated Egyptians. Also known as female genital mutilation, it involves slicing off the clitoris and sometimes also the labia with a knife. It was banned by the Mubarak government in 2007 after a girl died during the surgery. Although its origin is not Islamic (it is practiced by some Christians as well as Muslims) this ugliest of all ancient Egyptian customs has survived better than any other, and—unlike those other customs—attracts support and not hostility from Muslim fundamentalists.
Yet another sign of ancient Egypt stares most visitors in the face at some point or other. Hanging from many car mirrors in Cairo is the blue-colored “Hand of Fatima,” which today is believed to ward off the evil eye, the envy people attract through their good fortune. The “Hand of Horus” in ancient times, often made of blue lapis lazuli, served the same purpose. In the nineteenth century, Egyptians went to all kinds of lengths to avoid the evil eye—dressing up boys as girls, staining the faces of beautiful girls to conceal their looks, and giving themselves unpleasant-sounding names such as “Ugly” or “The Little Bird” or “The Donkey.”
Very few Egyptians read any deeper significance into these customs, any more than most English people think of the god Tiu when they touch wood for luck. Both Christian and Muslim religious hierarchies, however, want their followers to abandon these traditions. In particular, Salafi Islam condemns them. In 2012 a Muslim fundamentalist politician, Murgan al-Gohary, called for the Sphinx and pyramids to be destroyed. Salafi groups in Egypt boycott the Shamm al-Nessim celebration and have called for it to be suppressed. Pharaoh, too, remains a dirty word for Islamists. When in 2011 the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to promote a new constitution on which there was to be a yes-or-no vote, it devised the slogan “Vote no, get pharaoh!”
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Egypt’s original religion was weakened by centuries of foreign rule over Egypt—by Persians, Greeks, and Romans—starting in the fourth century bc. Even Cleopatra was of Greek and Persian descent, though her family tried to adopt Egyptian customs (one of the less savory of these being the tradition that pharaohs married their sisters; Cleopatra was descended from several generations of incestuous marriages). The native Egyptians came to be given their own special label, to distinguish them from the Greek settlers who owned most of the land and ran the administration. They were called Aiguptioi—from which the words “Egypt” and “Copt” are both derived. By the third century ad a Christian preacher could claim that the old religion was dominated by Greeks, and that Christianity was the religion of the Copts.
Roman rule, introduced after Cleopatra’s death, did not displace the Greeks, but it did lead to the abolition of the role of the pharaoh—which in turn undermined the temples, which had depended on financial support from the pharaohs and had played a significant role in keeping the old culture alive. In the second century ad, we see an example of traditions dying out in the report of a guild of hieroglyph carvers at the city of Oxyrhynchus: they numbered only five, the guild reported, and had no apprentices to carry on the profession.
The temples survived several centuries of Roman rule, though their power was reduced. But in the fourth century the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and made strenuous efforts to suppress the old religion. Many Egyptians enthusiastically joined in, attacking pagan philosophers and obliterating the gods’ faces on murals in their temples so that their magical power would be annulled. In the narrow confines of Egypt’s Nile Valley there is no record of any non-Christian community surviving at the time of the Muslim conquest. Even the ancient Egyptian language was flooded with new words brought by Christianity: a Greek word for “soul,” psyche, replaced the ka of the pharaohs.
Some customs survived, as I learned in St. Mark’s Church, because they were thought worthy of inclusion in new Christian rites. Early Christian clergy of Egypt were in many recorded cases either temple priests who had become Christian or children of temple priests. A hymn such as “Pek Ethronos,” which I heard at St. Mark’s in Kensington, would have been very familiar to them. It just needed some amendments so that it would be addressed to Jesus Christ. Cymbals, too, had been used in the worship of the old gods. For a time, they were banned by the Christian church, but it later relented; they are still used in Coptic rites today.
Coptic, Armenian, and Syrian churches, on one hand, and Byzantines and Europeans, on the other, disagreed with each other at the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon about the nature of Christ. Putting the difference crudely, the Copts felt th
at the council was not firm enough in taking a stand against those who wanted to distinguish between Jesus as man and Jesus as God. The Copts were emphatic that Jesus had only one nature, and they still refer to themselves as Miaphysites (mia physis meaning “one nature” in Greek). The upshot was that the Coptic patriarch rejected the council; although Egypt was then part of the Byzantine Empire, the patriarch and not the emperor was the true ruler of Egypt. Relations between the Copts and Byzantium suffered. The dispute reflected other tensions as well—perhaps among them the long-standing dislike that the Copts had for foreign rule. Certainly the religious divide deepened that dislike, and Copts did little to resist when the Muslim Arabs invaded Egypt in the seventh century. Relations soured somewhat when the new Muslim government imposed heavy taxes on the non-Muslim population; rebellions followed. Still, most Egyptians remained Christian until the tenth century, and Coptic was still a common language until the thirteenth century, when Arabic was gradually enforced. In the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions, anti-Christian riots became more frequent, and the authorities imposed laws to curb the Copts’ influence and status. When the German monk Johann Vansleb explored Egypt in 1672, he reported that the Copts were “so fearful from continued tyrannies that at the least noise they trembled like leaves.”
Admiration for the pharaohs is a recent phenomenon among both Copts and Muslims. In the Koran, the pharaoh who famously refused to allow Moses and the Jews to leave Egypt features prominently. He is described as “one of the corrupters,” having set himself up as a god, exalted himself, and despised the poor. Unlike the “Sabians” in Harran, therefore, the pharaohs were always clearly defined as idolaters and their religious sites were regarded with suspicion. One early Muslim ruler reputedly wanted to demolish the pyramids. According to the medieval historian al-Maqrizi, a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic did manage to smash the Sphinx’s nose, apparently enraged by the fact that local peasants were making offerings to it as a god (a rare reference to the possibility that, covertly, the old gods were still worshiped). Nor would the average person living in Egypt necessarily have seen “Egyptian” as an identity. William Browne, a British visitor to Cairo in the eighteenth century, reported that the local merchants referred to themselves simply as Arabs. The term Copts, originally used to describe indigenous Egyptians, was by this stage applied exclusively to Christians.
During the nineteenth century, however, this attitude began to change. The catalyst was a series of discoveries, initially by Western archaeologists, that revealed the skill and artistic achievements of the ancient Egyptians. Archaeologists uncovered the temple of Abu Simbel, guarded by sixty-five-foot-high statues of Pharaoh Rameses II, in 1813. In 1817 they found the tomb of Seti in the Valley of the Kings, complete with painters’ brushes still on its floor beneath bright blue and golden pictures showing the progress of the pharaoh’s soul in the afterlife. In Europe and America, these and other discoveries contributed to “Egyptomania”—an enthusiasm for imitating ancient Egyptian architecture.
This coincided with cultural and political shifts within Egypt itself. In the nineteenth century Egypt and Sudan, though officially provinces of the empire of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, were actually governed as a separate entity by the Mohammad Ali dynasty—named after its founder, a successful Albanian adventurer who established his power base by inviting his rivals to a banquet and then slaughtering them all as they went home. Despite this bloody beginning, the dynasty was a force for reform and modernization in Egypt.
Ismail, the dynasty’s third member, who ruled from 1863 to 1879, was particularly ambitious. He curbed the slave trade, built Africa’s biggest railway, and began the digging of the Suez Canal. He also opened the first Egyptian Museum, a predecessor of the one that sits in Tahrir Square, in 1863. It was designed in a pharaonic style. To reassure devout Muslims who hesitated to emulate the polytheistic pharaohs, a religious scholar named Tahtawi offered reassurance that the pharaohs were really “Sabians” who worshiped one god in different forms. In 1864 a pupil of Tahtawi’s named Abu’l Suud wrote a history of ancient Egypt calling on its modern-day people to imitate their ancestors “in working together as true Egyptians and true patriots, for the renaissance of Egypt.” From 1867 onward, the pyramids appeared on Egyptian stamps.
This was not just a romantic movement of nostalgia for the past. It had relevance to Egypt’s status in the world. The glories of Egypt’s history enabled Ismail to look European rulers in the face. They also constituted a basis for seeing Egypt not as a province of the Ottoman Empire but as the independent country that Ismail wanted it to be. This emphasis on Egypt’s separate identity influenced Ismail’s attitude toward religion as well. Ismail reproved a Muslim minister who spoke of a government employee contemptuously as “this Coptic official”; he turned to the author and retorted, “All are Egyptians alike.” This assertion of equality between Christians and Muslims (as well as of a unifying national identity) was significant: only in 1855 had Christians been released from the special jizya tax imposed on them as non-Muslims. But Ismail granted land for Coptic schools; included Copts in a sort of proto-parliament he created, called the Advisory Council of Representatives; and appointed one Copt as chief of the government’s official press and another as head of the finance administration. At the end of his reign he appointed an Armenian Christian, Nubar Pasha, as his prime minister. The country’s Jews also benefited from the new atmosphere of religious openness: Ismail encouraged the Jewish Egyptian playwright Yacoub Sanoo’a by praising him as “Egypt’s Molière.” Religious emancipation, the celebration of Egypt’s ancient heritage, and the project of building an Egyptian state went hand in hand.
No wonder, then, that educated Copts embraced ancient Egypt, even though the Christian Bible is scarcely kinder about it than the Koran. They created a Rameses social club and a journal named Pharaoh. There were even efforts to revive Coptic as an everyday language. Vansleb had written in the 1670s that he had “had the satisfaction of seeing the man with whom the Coptic language wholly shall die out.” Now, at the start of the twentieth century, a Coptic antiquarian named Claudius Labib insisted that his children speak the language at home. A Coptic Museum opened in 1908 to celebrate the Egyptian cultural achievements of the post-pharaonic age.
By 1919 Copts were at least as well off as their Muslim countrymen: they owned 20 percent of the country’s agricultural land, according to a British estimate, which also assessed that this was well above their proportion of the population. The prime minister that year, Youssef Wahba, was a Copt (the third Christian to serve in that position). But by this time the political context had changed from Ismail’s day. The government was dominated behind the scenes by Britain—which had become Egypt’s biggest creditor, and then effectively its administrator, when Ismail’s ambitious spending plans had sunk his country into debt. As well as featuring in the government, the Copts were also active alongside Muslims in the burgeoning movement for Egyptian independence from British control: demonstrators gathered in Tahrir Square in 1919 under the banner of a conjoined crescent and cross. When the Egyptian nationalist Wafd Party, led by a visionary leader called Saad Zaghloul, put together a delegation of seven Egyptian representatives to go to the British ambassador and demand independence, Zaghloul was careful to include a Copt. A Christian priest even preached from the pulpit of the country’s premier mosque, al-Azhar, in 1919, for the first time in history. “If the British stay in Egypt under the pretense of protecting Copts,” the priest, Father Sargious, declared, “let all Copts die and Muslims live free.”
In Cairo during my visit in 2011 there were reminders of that time. Near Tahrir Square, opposite an antique bookstore whose outer wall was blotched with bloodstains, a man wearing a shirt that said “Guns don’t kill. Governments do” was selling T-shirts marked with a crescent and cross. I saw that symbol painted on walls across the city. By evoking the spirit of 1919, the people who painted it
were stressing national unity in the face of those who wanted to foment differences between Christians and Muslims.
This crescent and cross symbol, which I photographed in 2011, was in the strongly Muslim area of Cairo around the al-Azhar mosque. It symbolized the desire of Christians and Muslims to overcome their differences and work together for freedom. Photo by the author
Not all of the Egyptian politicians who called for independence in the 1920s and 1930s, though, were as open-minded as Zaghloul. In 1928, a group of laborers at the British military camp in the port city of Ismailiyya visited Hassan al-Banna, a well-educated opponent of secularism, and told him: “We see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are not more than mere hirelings belonging to the foreigners.” They took an oath to be soldiers for Islam, but al-Banna chose for the group a more innocuous title: the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the first demands that the Brotherhood made of the Egyptian government was that it ban alcohol and crack down on prostitution, which had become rife during World War I, when foreign soldiers were stationed in Egypt. The Brotherhood called for the British to withdraw from Egypt. But it also had larger ambitions: to unify all Muslim lands under a caliph who would impose strict Islamic law.
Coptic politician William Makram Ebeid tried to find common ground with the Brotherhood and was the only politician to protest when the Egyptian government dissolved the movement in 1948. He was also the only politician to attend Hassan al-Banna’s funeral after the latter’s killing by government agents the year after. In return, the Brotherhood claimed to have no quarrel with Copts. In practice, however, the new Islamist movements wanted to undermine their secular rivals. Attacking the Copts, who often played a part in the country’s secular parties, helped them in this mission. In the 1940s, Islamist rhetoric led to church burnings, beatings of priests, and attacks on Coptic ceremonies. In the meantime, al-Banna’s emphasis on the struggle against Christian foreigners inevitably colored the Brotherhood’s discourse about Christianity in general. The Brotherhood did not share Ismail’s enthusiasm for Egypt as a country in which all citizens would be equal. Instead, al-Banna was proud of Egypt principally because of its historical role in defending Islam against the Crusaders, which was not a vision of history that offered much real dignity to the Copts. The movement offered Copts a position of peaceful inferiority, not the equality offered by some secular nationalists.
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