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  • Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt
  • Christian Cannuyer
Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt. By Febe Armanios. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xvi, 254. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-199-74484-8.)

This book explores the religious beliefs as identifying parameters of the Coptic Christian community in Ottoman Egypt (1516–1798), mostly through using unexploited church archives. It is a new research field, since the history of the Copts during this intermediary period—although a pivotal one in the shaping of modern Egypt—has scarcely been studied. In the decades following the Ottoman conquest, a sense of misfortune triggered an outpouring of religious piety among all Egyptians, Muslims as well as Christians. The author tries to examine how the Copts coped with this trend, exploring the ways in which they used religion to define their identity.

Due to the fragmentary nature of sources, the book can only be a string of “snapshots” of Coptic religious life under Ottoman rule. The first chapter provides a general look on how the conquest affected the management of the community, and mainly how the lay elite (the archons), as a result of their links with the new rulers and of their growing wealth, supplanted the clerical leadership, even the previously almost absolute authority of the Patriarch. The second chapter investigates the popularity of the martyr Salib (d. 1512), who perished for publicly defaming the Prophet of Islam. Significantly, the martyrdom—a text of dynamic “communal remembrance” from the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods—carefully avoids anti-Islamic controversy. The popularity of a more ancient martyr is scrutinized in the third chapter: St. Dimyana, whose cult as a beneficent miracle-worker was centered on springtime festivities in the Nile Delta and reveals complex conceptions of the female ascetic ideal. Chapter 4 focuses on the modalities of the annual Coptic pilgrimage from Cairo to Jerusalem through the lens of eighteenth-century sources. This devout practice was connected to an antique Christian tradition but also exposed commonalities with the annual Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca. It emphasized how lay and clerical elites collaborated to ensure a Coptic presence in the Holy City. The last and fifth chapter analyzes some sermons produced by Coptic higher clergymen (especially Patriarch Yu’annis XVIII [1769–96] and Bishop Yusab [r. 1791–1826]), who were reacting against the aggressions of the “heretical” Catholic missionary enterprises. The Coptic hierarchy responded by scorning all the heterodox practices, which were proliferating as a consequence of intermarriage, socialization, or outright conversion.

Throughout the book, Febe Armanios shows how popular religion was the glue that held Coptic believers together. She challenges some scholars such as Bernard Heyberger and Molly Greene who tend to view religion as a minor marker of identity among Ottoman dhimmis and the Christians as essentially sharing the religious mentality of their Muslim neighbors. On the contrary, [End Page 617] says the author, religion served as a conduit for articulating those irreducible characteristics that shaped the distinct identity of the Copts. Thus, her work improves our understanding of the Ottoman period. However, a greater acknowledgment would have been welcome of the pacific coexistence between the different religious communities and its effect on Egyptian society, at a time when conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Europe caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. Very interestingly, Armanios also demonstrates that the resurgence of the patriarch’s authority in the second part of the nineteenth century and the resultant opposition of the lay elite reflected well-established trends from the eighteenth century. In this way, the author’s remarkable study contributes to clarify the complexity of Muslim-Christian relations and of the internal dynamics of the Coptic community not only in the Ottoman period but also in contemporary Egypt.

Christian Cannuyer
Faculty of Theology
Catholic University of Lille
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