Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  The journey took us along country roads where there was little other traffic. A man on a donkey, pulling a cart full of alfalfa, passed us; next came a wedding party in a bus, lively music pumping out from a stereo. “They are coming from the monastery,” said George, referring to the Abu Fana monastery, our first destination. “They went to get a baraka from the monks before the wedding.” Baraka means “blessing” in Arabic, and was a word I found myself using often during this visit to Minya. When we drew up to the monastery I found that it was also a baraka simply to meet a priest or monk: “I came to see you, to take a baraka from you,” the young men would say when they came to greet the monks in their trailing black robes and tight-fitting black caps ornamented with gold crosses. There were plenty of young men visiting the monastery. Some were more respectful than others. One of them, when he thought he was unobserved, went to sit in the abbot’s throne in the monastery’s chapel—he was drawn to it by the carving of a lion on its arms, which was the symbol of St. Mark the Evangelist.

  The monastery, fronted by a high wall and gate, sits on the very edge of the Nile Valley, where the valley meets the desert. Some think there may have been an old temple on the site; the nearby town of Hor was likely named after the god Horus. An Egyptian named Abu Fana came to this place in the fourth century ad, giving away all his money on the way there. Known for his asceticism (one of his miracles, according to tradition, is to have gone without food for thirty-seven days), he raised the dead and read minds, and spent eighteen years on a pillar. By the Middle Ages the monastery had fallen into neglect. Only two monks were there, according to al-Maqrizi, an Arab scholar of the fifteenth century.

  Now there are more than two dozen monks, many of them young, a product of the Coptic Church’s renaissance. One of them, who was looking after the monastery shop—which sold crucifixes and religious posters—told me he had been a medical student before entering the monastery. He gave me a baraka in the form of a loaf of bread elaborately carved with holes in the pattern of sacred symbols and Coptic writing (Egyptians in pharaonic times, as we can see from tomb paintings, sometimes decorated loaves by perforating them with holes). The life of a Coptic monk consists of praying for hours communally—including every day at 3:00 a.m.—praying alone, and sometimes engaging in tough manual labor.

  This bread, inscribed with Coptic letters, is given by monks as a blessing to visitors. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings show that the custom of decorating bread in this way goes back many thousands of years. Photo by the author

  George introduced me to the abbot, and we sat together in a hot, rather dusty room packed with sofas. They served me tea and an endless supply of saccharine soft drinks. Later we walked out into the sunlight. “There, in that tower, is where the monks used to hide if bandits came into the monastery,” the abbot told me. Similar problems persist. A monk came up to us and, on an order from the abbot, he reluctantly lifted his sleeve: his upper arm was shriveled where the bone had been broken. A few years before, he had been captured by a Bedouin group who lived nearby. Though the kidnapping was related to a land dispute—the monastery wanted to build on land the Bedouin used for grazing—it turned sectarian. His captors had told him, the monk said, to spit on the cross. When he refused, they broke his arm. “When we found him, he had been starved of food and water and could not move,” the abbot said. This particular monk was a talented artist who had painted many of the monastery’s murals. It had taken him months to relearn how to paint.

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  Back in Minya that evening, I moved out of my hotel and into a boat on the Nile, which turned out to be run by a Coptic Protestant group in the city. (As well as those Copts who joined the Catholic Uniate Church, there were others who joined various Protestant denominations during the past 150 years, and many villages around Minya had Protestant and Catholic churches as well as Coptic Orthodox ones.) The water lapped all night against its side, inches from my head. A year after my visit, the houseboat would be burned by a mob of Islamists protesting the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi, and in the boat next to it, two men, a Christian and a Muslim, would be burned alive—while other Muslims formed human chains to protect Christian churches in the city. The rampage would infamously be punished with 529 death sentences, given not for the burning of churches so much as for the killing of a policeman in the course of the riots.

  I had persuaded a Coptic priest to show me around his parish the next day. Father Yoannis lived in a top-floor apartment in a simple building just down the road from his church, in a village called Qufada, several miles from Minya. George drove me to see him. We all sat in his kitchen, and I nibbled at a piece of slightly stale and very sweet cream cake that the priest had bought to mark the occasion. I discovered that his father and grandfather had been priests before him. He had a natural gift for reaching out to others, and a distinctively Egyptian way with flattery. He asked George where he was from, and when George replied Minya, the priest said what turned out to be his standard compliment: “Minya? The people from that place are the best people.”

  Of forty thousand inhabitants in Qufada, more than 90 percent were Muslim. The mayor (umda is the Egyptian word), however, was Christian. His family had once owned the village’s land, until Nasser’s government confiscated and redistributed most of it. Although now much poorer, the family was still respected. “Back in 1940,” the priest said, “soldiers came from the government to tell the umda that he had to punish the local people because they had failed to pay their taxes. But instead of punishing them, he paid their taxes himself.” The villagers never forgot the incident and had been happy for the family to keep the title of umda—even though the family was Christian and mostly lived elsewhere.

  “Hardly any of them live here now,” the priest told us as he drove us around the town in his car. “The old house is almost empty. The present umda is a dentist in the city, and it is his sister who lives in the house. The younger generation are selling off their land. Our problem as a community,” he added, honking his horn at someone he recognized, “is that we leave the villages and don’t come back. Muslims go away for work but they keep their houses in the village. Christians go to the cities for higher education and stay there. I end up seeing my old parishioners around once a year, at weddings in Cairo.”

  The umda’s white-walled old house stood in a small unpaved courtyard set back from the main street. Father Yoannis’s church was next to it, and I found a seat in the back of the nave while Father Yoannis gave a talk to the local Christian children. They sat attentively, girls separate from boys, while he told them about the monks at one of Egypt’s oldest monasteries, who were so holy that they could fly. And he instructed the children on how to behave themselves in church. “You should know that this is a holy place,” he said. “When you come in here, the angels are watching you. So behave with respect!”

  The village had never seen sectarian violence, and one of the reasons became clear to me when Father Yoannis took me to see his friend Sheikh Hassan, who occupied the position of Muslim registrar of marriages—a position of religious and social authority. The priest pulled into the driveway of a large and well-appointed house and parked his battered car next to an expensive sedan. The owner’s wife came out and greeted the priest warmly, then ushered us into a small conservatory-like room. The registrar was a powerful figure in the village: out of respect, he was called a sheikh. Unlike the umda, he was very much present in the village’s daily life. He liked Father Yoannis and had helped him in various ways, most recently protecting the church from a gang of criminals who—taking advantage of the collapse of law and order that ensued when the Mubarak government fell—had come to plunder it.

  The good relationship between the Christian priest and the Muslim official was crucial to keeping peace in the village. With the impoverishment of the Christian upper classes by Nasser’s land reforms, and then their departure for the cities, the Coptic Church was the only i
nstitution that could mediate on behalf of their community in a country where strength and power matter more than legal rights and justice. And, seeing Father Yoannis’s good humor, simplicity of life, and connection with his people, I found it easy to understand why people would trust him. But the more that people invested in religious institutions to represent them, the less they would invest their time and money in other institutions—political parties, trade unions, or secular social groups—that were shared between people of different faiths. The police, meanwhile, preferred not to intervene in disputes, even violent ones, if it meant making themselves unpopular. So if the religious leaders could broker peace between Muslims and Christians, religious strife could be avoided. Otherwise, the communities had almost nothing that would stop an incident from escalating into bloodshed.

  “We in the Sa’eed are a fiery people,” said George afterward as we set off again in Father Yoannis’s little car. “People are friendly one minute and then they may be violent the next. It just takes a small thing to make the difference.” Father Yoannis gave an example from a nearby village a year or so before. A local Christian couple had married their daughter to an acceptable Coptic husband, but without their knowing it she fell in love with a Muslim man and had an affair with him. Both took drugs. When the parents were away, the daughter used their house for trysts. One evening, the parents came back unexpectedly and found their daughter in bed with her lover, both in a stupor. The mother did not hesitate: she strangled them.

  She spent that night in the kitchen, chopping up the body of the dead man and stuffing it into a plastic bag. She told her husband to dump it somewhere in the desert. He chose a bad spot, dropping it in an area that turned out to be an archaeological site. The lights of his car were noticed and guards came to investigate. He escaped, but the bag was found and its ghastly contents uncovered.

  The guilty parents knew it wouldn’t be long before they would be identified. The dead man’s family was looking for him, and their own daughter had disappeared; people would soon understand what had transpired. So they fled. The dead man’s family took revenge in the old way. Seven people from the guilty family were murdered before the blood feud was considered settled. And then, said the priest, the guilty couple returned. “And at the wake for one of the people who had died, the mother of the murdered Muslim man turned up. She said to the couple, ‘If you had only told us what you had done, we would have thanked you for killing him. We would have killed him ourselves, if we had known.’” But the insult of leaving his corpse unburied had to be avenged.

  Love and death have a long association in Egypt. Near Minya I saw the tomb of Isidora, daughter of a pagan priest under the Ptolemies, who died when she swam across the Nile for a clandestine nighttime meeting with her lover, whom her father had forbidden her to see. The tomb became a pilgrimage site for young lovers. They face even greater obstacles today: love affairs between Christians and Muslims are frequent causes of violence between the two communities. Egyptians are not often left free to choose whom they marry, and under both Islam and Egyptian law marriage is not an equal relationship. Islam does not allow a Christian man to marry a Muslim woman, and in Egyptian law the children of a couple take their father’s faith, not their mother’s. So Christian women who marry Muslim men will be unable to bring up their children as Christian. Most of those who marry Muslims are ostracized by their families; many convert to Islam. A Coptic bishop estimated in 2007 that between five thousand and ten thousand Copts convert to Islam every year, and Coptic priests have separately commented that the large majority of these converts are girls under the age of twenty-five. The fear of losing their daughters to Muslim suitors is yet another reason for Copts to build social networks that do not cross the religious divide.

  Coptic priests remain significant figures in their communities. By the law of their church, they all must marry. Some of the children here are from priests’ families. Photo by the author

  Other conversions have happened because of the Coptic Church’s almost total rejection of divorce: Pope Shenouda tightened the rules until only adultery could be a basis for ending a marriage. Copts who want to leave their husbands or wives for any other reason must first leave the church. Some join another Christian denomination; others become Muslims. Some of this last group try afterward to return to the Coptic Church, but by doing so they risk sparking conflict, for an apostate from Islam must, according to the shari’a, be put to death. In such disputes, religion becomes a way for husbands or wives to rally a wider community to their side. Abeer Fakhry, for example, a Coptic woman living in Minya, fell in love with a Muslim man and left her husband for him in 2011. She was traced by her family and detained by the Coptic Church, which tried to persuade her to return to her husband. It was rumored that she had already converted to Islam, however (a rumor she subsequently confirmed), and so her detention provoked riots and church burnings by Muslim fundamentalists and a gunfight that caused twelve deaths. In Atfih, a suburb of Cairo, a love affair between a Coptic man and a Muslim girl sparked riots in which, again, a church was burned.

  External factors could spark conflict, too. A few months earlier, Father Yoannis said, a television station run from Cyprus by a Coptic priest called Zakaria Butros had become famous for its attacks on Islam. At the peak of its infamy in Egypt, Coptic priests had experienced exceptional hostility from local Muslims. A group of Muslim women, for instance, had spat at Yoannis. “People who broadcast hate against Islam, insults to the Koran and who burn Korans,” he said, “this all has very serious, bitter consequences for us.”

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  I asked Father Yoannis whether Copts ever lived in entirely Coptic villages. It was unusual, he replied, because so few Christians in Egypt practice agriculture. Two villages that he knew of were entirely Coptic, though, and he agreed to take us to one of them, Deir al-Jarnoos. George was a little doubtful. The people in Deir al-Jarnoos, he said, were “toughs.” “Nobody gives them any trouble,” he said. “In fact, all the villages round about are scared of them. When they gather as a group and come out of their village, everybody else runs away.” Father Yoannis knew how to handle them, though. As he drove us in, he rolled down the window and called out endearments to every man, woman, and child he could see: “How are you, honey? How beautiful you look!” He had an effusive style—and perhaps wanted to make sure that people would look at him and see his clerical dress and the cross hanging from the rearview mirror. Cars carrying strangers were not a common sight in this place.

  The state had no presence inside the town. In this, Deir al-Jarnoos was a Christian equivalent of militantly Muslim towns of southern Egypt that the police never dare to enter. And just as those towns (and sometimes suburbs of Cairo) can enforce their own rules without much regard for Cairo, so Deir al-Jarnoos was building a huge church that dwarfed the humble houses that crowded around it. On the roof of the church, men in gray jelabas were constructing domes and towers to make it stand even higher on the horizon. We climbed up to meet them, and Father Yoannis asked them where they were from. Asyut, they said, referring to a city another hour or so south. “Ah, Asyut,” he said. “The best people are from Asyut.” We climbed back down and inspected the old stone church next door. A villager pulled the wooden lid off a well just inside the church door and lowered a metal cup by a rope into the water below. He invited me to drink. It was a holy well, he said; when Jesus was brought to Egypt as a baby, his family had drunk from it. He hoisted the cup up and I sipped the cool water.

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  The following day George came with me when I went to see a whole group of Coptic priests, courtesy of Father Yoannis—who also came. We met in a village not far from Minya, in a house attached to the village church. A black-bearded man named Father Mousa was our host, and a friend of his called Younus sat with us, too. Younus remarked, “The older generation treat Christians like brothers. Most of my friends are Muslims. They come to our festiva
ls, they pray in the church. There is a priest here who exorcises demons; he is very popular with Muslims as well as Christians. But then the Salafis come from the universities. It’s the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood who mistreat Christians. They tell Muslims not to greet Christians in the street. And the new generation, those between eighteen and twenty-seven years old, they are a bad generation. They have had very bad teachers. It started with Sadat.” There was a new tradition, he added, according to which Muslim boys would hit Christians on the last day of a school term. “The teachers don’t seem to encourage it,” Younus said, “so far as we can see. Soldiers used to go to the school to stop it, but they couldn’t be everywhere. And after the government fell, there were no rules at all. No fear of soldiers, no fear of guards, no fear of God.”