You are on the ball Hawk.... was just reading something about that a few days ago.
Controversy swirls around Egypt's early Islamic history
By Andrew Hammond CAIRO
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.
Reuters
metimes.com |
