Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Religion and Modernity
In his introduction to the first of two parts of The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (the third and last volume of The Popes of Egypt edited by Stephen J. Davis and Gawdat Gabra), "The Coptic Papacy under Ottoman Rule (1517-1798)," Magdi Guirguis makes an important point: a history of the Coptic papacy is very far from being a history of the Copts. While educated urban communities might indeed have been tied in some way to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, matters have long been entirely different where the more rural areas are concerned. The number of churches and monasteries has diminished steadily since the 13th century. The result, Guirguis writes, is that, as late as the 1980s, "in most villages, if you asked a Copt to recite the Lord's Prayer, he would start reciting the first chapter of the Qur,an, just as Muslims do, believing it to be part of his own faith tradition. The majority of these people were not baptized and had never seen a priest in their life." The more recent patriarchs made occasional efforts to remedy the situation, but their success was limited.
Although the history of the patriarchs and the Coptic elite since the Arab conquest of Egypt is easier to reconstruct than that of a semiliterate population in the countryside, the obstacles still remain considerable. A majority of historians of the medieval and early modern periods have relied on the traditional, and often hagiographical, histories of the patriarchs, which are remarkably economical with their information. Magdi Guirguis is one of the very few scholars who has actually tackled the archives of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate and of the Dar al-Watha'iq al-Qawmiyya in Cairo and has consequently produced a series of excellent studies in which he breaks entirely new ground.
From the Middle Ages to the present day the Church of Alexandria has been characterised by a fluctuation of authority between, on the one hand, the Coptic notables or arakhina, rich and educated individuals often serving the Muslim government as scribes and bureaucrats, and, on the other hand, the patriarchs and the clergy. In the late Mamluk and early Ottoman...