NEWS FEATURE: Coptic Christian Studies Gain Ground in Egypt

c. 2000 Religion News Service CAIRO _ Twice a week, 23-year-old Simon Soliman takes a break from his studies and plays teacher to foreign tourists and fellow Egyptians who flock to Cairo’s elegant, fourth century Hanging Church. Picking his way between ancient relics and 1990s scaffolding, the Ain Shams University student offers visitors a slice […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

CAIRO _ Twice a week, 23-year-old Simon Soliman takes a break from his studies and plays teacher to foreign tourists and fellow Egyptians who flock to Cairo’s elegant, fourth century Hanging Church.

Picking his way between ancient relics and 1990s scaffolding, the Ain Shams University student offers visitors a slice of a pre-Islamic Egypt, when Christianity dominated the country’s culture and religion. The informal lectures are a distillation of an almost 2,000-year-old Coptic heritage, passed on by parish priests and neighborhood elders who reside in a tangle of narrow stone buildings and cobblestone streets known as Old Cairo.


But hardly a date or a fact can be traced to the country’s public school curriculum.”They taught us about the wars and the conquests when the Arabs came here, and so on,”said Soliman, who is Christian.”But they didn’t teach us much about the Copts.” Experts agree that school history classes offer scant mention of Egypt’s once-powerful church, which tradition says was founded by St. Mark the Evangelist and which profoundly influenced the early spread of Christianity. Today, it continues to shape the spiritual life of some 6 million Christian Egyptians, who account for about 10 percent of the country’s population.

What facts that do exist are rolled into accounts of foreign conquests _ about the Roman and Byzantine rulers who persecuted the Christians, and, finally, about the Arabs, who taxed and converted many to Islam when they swept into Egypt in the 7th century.”As far as education and history go, the Copts don’t exist,”said Milad Hanna, a prominent Copt who writes about relations between Egypt’s Christians and Muslims.”There was Pharaonic history, and history stopped with (Queen) Cleopatra. Then it starts again with the invasion of Arabs to Egypt.” But now, Egypt’s Coptic past is up for review.

Prodded by criticism in the press and from public figures like Hanna, the Ministry of Education has appointed a committee of prominent historians to revise school textbooks and to fill in critical gaps. Besides fleshing out Coptic history, the panel is placing more emphasis on Pharaonic history and the country’s problematic modern history as well. The revised primary and secondary school textbooks are expected to be out by next September.

The aim of the new curriculum is not just historical balance, committee members say. It is also to inject a sense of national pride and social unity into disaffected young Egyptians that has been shaken by decades of religious and political strife.

Semantics, they argue, are on their side. The word”Copt”comes from the Arabic word”qubt,”which simply means Egyptian.”In this case, every Egyptian man is a Copt,”said Egyptology professor Ali Radwan, who like most committee members is a Muslim.”We must put this fact in books for young children to realize there is no difference between Islamic and Christian Egyptians. They are all Copts.” Whether that sentiment will translate into only a rosy touchup of Egypt’s past is unclear. But so far, the revisions spearheaded by Education Minister Hussein Kamel el Din have earned widespread praise from academics and members of the Coptic community.”The Minister of Education is a courageous man and he is taking steps to correct the historical imbalances,”said Youseef Sidholm, editor-in-chief of Watani, a weekly Coptic-oriented newspaper, who noted the effort to include more Christian history has been attacked by some Islamist and opposition newspapers.”The government won’t acknowledge this, but they’re trying to change a dangerous situation that’s spread bad beliefs about the Copts.” The school curriculum, like many parts of Egyptian public life, has been cut and colored to suit the leader of the times. Under Egypt’s first president,Gamal Abdul Nasser, references to Egypt’s recently deposed royal family were airbrushed out of history textbooks, in favor of a slant toward the pan-Arab nationalism that dominated the region in the 1950s and ’60s.

When successor Anwar Sadat briefly courted Islamist groups, Muslim history was emphasized in classes, scholars say, and Islamic schools controlled by Egypt’s prestigious Al Azhar University spread across the country.”Our history is like socks,”committee member Milad Hanna said.”It is all sizes and it changes according to the ruler.” A renowned engineer and urban planner, Hanna was imprisoned along with eight Coptic bishops just a month before Sadat’s 1981 assassination by Islamist extremists. The experience affected Hanna so profoundly that he began writing books and articles about the heritage shared by Egypt’s Copts and Muslims.

But at school, separation of the two religions is still emphasized. Christians take Bible lessons, while Muslims study the Koran. And on the streets, Copts and Muslims skirt a subject that still sparks friction and sometimes bloody sectarian flareups in Egypt.”I have lots of Christian friends, but they don’t want to talk about religion; it’s a very personal thing,”said 24-year-old Mohammed Ramadan, a Muslim who confesses to know almost nothing about Egypt’s Coptic past.”Here in Egypt it’s a very difficult matter.” For now, most Copts still learn about their history the old-fashioned way _ at home, and in churches like St. Mary’s, in the affluent Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek.


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Like many Egyptian churches, St. Mary’s offers weekly classes that stretch from kindergarten through high school. Students also go on field trips to monasteries and churches around Egypt to learn first hand about their religious heritage.”There is some history, but we need more,”said Father Joseph, St. Mary’s affable, white-bearded priest who overseas the church classes.”We need university programs that teach the Coptic language, Christian history and so on.” A number of Copts and religious scholars agree.”You have Coptology being taught in Germany, Italy and the United States, but there isn’t anything in Egypt,”said Gawdat Gabra, the former director of the Coptic Museum of Cairo.”We will struggle to have it. This is a moral obligation to keep in touch with the people.”DEA END BRYANT

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