JUNE 06 Newsletter

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Coptic Identity and Views in the Diaspora
Dr. Saba Demian

The disparity between the official count by the government of the number of Copts in Egypt and that of the records of the Coptic Church authorities highlights the problem. It is said that there are not enough of us, the Copts, to make a significant minority, that is, we do not count, ergo, have negligible political existence and thus may be dealt with according to the whim of the moment.

The number of Copts in the Diaspora is not in question; mostly immigrants to the ‘West’ which includes a majority in North America, substantial numbers in Australia and Western Europe. Trickles of Coptic immigration started from Egypt in the early sixties, and the main cause of it has been the dim prospects of young Copts due to a pervasive institutionalized discrimination against them.

The generation of Copts who immigrated is as Egyptian in origin, belief, and commitment as the Sphinx. Though they may now be carrying two passports, their allegiance to the homeland has never wavered. They are not turncoats, neither are they blind, nor blinded by false propaganda or assertions by the current or previous Egyptian governments, which never ceased to speak in laudatory terms of a solid national unity between Muslims and Copts despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

The blunt truth is that Diaspora Copts see the incontrovertible facts of discrimination and even persecution of their families and friends who have stayed behind, either due to circumstances or in the belief that their families’ future will be brighter in Egypt. The benefits of emigration, however, come at a very high cost, both socially and psychologically. Those of us who paid this exorbitant price I have dubbed ‘The Losing Generation’. We lost contact with our families, our friends who stayed behind, and indeed with our entire homeland.

We in the Diaspora are losing our children, who naturally experience a strong pull to identify with the countries where we now live, and find it difficult to sympathize with our religious faith and tradition—hence despite our material success, our lives are colored by a deep sadness.

The motto of the weekly publication Watany is the famous line of poetry by the late poet laureate of Egypt, Ahmad Shawky, which translates as follows:

My country—if I am distracted from its service in pursuit of my immortality, my being will wrench me back to its service.

I will not go into the litany of grievances and the myriad of legitimate gripes and complaints of the Copts. These have been aired and documented ad nau

seum, and have been disingenuously denied by the authorities. I will, however, raise a few historical points. At no time has any Coptic pontiff or ecclesiastical authority sought aid from outsiders to succor against their persecutors. As far back as the late nineteenth century, when the British took control of Egypt, the then British Ambassador approached the Patriarch of Alexandria to offer the “protection” of Her Majesty’s government to the Copts from their Muslim countrymen, to which the Pope simply responded “And who is protecting Her Majesty’s government?”

Never in the entire history of civilization have a people lost the use and knowledge of their native language, as did the Copts in Egypt within five centuries of the conquest of their country by the Arab Muslim army. Under the systematic pressures of the Arabization and Islamization that ensued, the Coptic language went into decline and by the eighteenth century had virtually become dead. Now, it is used only in the liturgical observances of the Orthodox Coptic churches, although lately a small Coptic minority has begun an effort to encourage lay Copts to learn it themselves. But unfortunately, this laudable enterprise is largely futile, as it is akin to attempting to resurrect a person from the dead.

Legend has it that during the Middle Ages, Copts’ tongues were cut off if they persisted in speaking their language. To preserve it from total extinction, the Copts maintained the phonetics but adopted Greek characters with the addition of seven consonants in order to maintain the full integrity of the language. Linguists are not particularly surprised by this extinction of the Coptic language, citing other languages that died such as Latin. But Latin, in contrast to the Coptic language, is not the language of a particular nation with a unique culture, but rather the infrastructure underpinning romance languages. Its death as a spoken language, therefore, constitutes no loss to any particular people. Hence the loss of spoken Coptic is a severe blow to our spiritual identity, almost like a loss of one’s soul. It took hundreds of years to stamp out the Coptic language, but the Arab-Islamic conquest of Egypt finally succeeded in doing so.

In the last three to four decades, we the Copts in the Diaspora have seen the plight of the Copts in Egypt go from bad to worse. Judging from the goings on these days, what with the mounting pressure by extremists such as the Muslim Brothers whose tentacles reach well within the institutions of government and beyond to Palestine in the form of the Hamas movement, the prospects for the Copts, in light of the Brothers’ stated agenda, is clear and it is grim.

The government, of course, is not powerless to stem the rising tide of intolerance that has brought sectarian tensions to the breaking point, but the usual public handshakes and embraces between the Pope and the Sheikh of Al-Azhar are not the solution. I abjure the Egyptian authorities to ask the Muslim clerics and scholars to resolve whatever ambiguities there are in the Holy Qur’an and Hadith, with the aim of diffusing hostility toward any non-Muslim faith. The ulama should also combat the derogatory label mushrikin or “polytheists” that some extremists use to label Copts. How can it be that the Copts are polytheists when the two most important prayers of the Coptic Orthodox Faith are the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostolic Creed? We begin the first by saying “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, ONE GOD” and the latter begins with the affirmation “Truly we believe in ONE GOD.”