From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest by Maged S. A. Mikhail (review)

Maged Mikhail’s From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt examines the transformations in Egyptian society, religion, and politics occasioned by the Arab-Muslim conquests of the seventh century. It is an ambitious undertaking. In twelve chapters spanning the seventh to the tenth centuries, the book seeks to examine an extensive range of historiographically significant subjects. These include relations between the conquerors and indigenous Christian elites; religious conversion; linguistic change; Muslim rulers’ reforms to the Byzantine administrative system; law and justice in the cities and countryside; the settlement and evolution of Egypt’s Muslim population; relations with the churches of Nubia, Ethiopia, and Syria; the reconstitution of ecclesiastical authority under Muslim rule; and the practical and discursive construction of Coptic, Melkite, and local Muslim religious identities.

In many respects, the book succeeds in accomplishing its ambitious goals. Its greatest strength is its full use of the exceptionally wide range of textual sources Egypt has to offer—narrative texts in both Coptic and Arabic, as well as Greek, Arabic, and Coptic documentary papyri—in the service of its broad historical vision. The source material and historiographical debates related to Egypt are extensive enough that the subject of any of the book’s chapters could be a monograph of its own. Mikhail’s signal contribution is to bring such a diverse array of material together to offer both compelling and coherent syntheses of his chosen topics and a number of new arguments of his own. Chapter 9’s discussion of the Coptic Church’s relations with Nubia and Ethiopia is noteworthy; Mikhail ably makes the case that those relations fundamentally structured the Coptic hierarchy’s political position vis-à-vis the Muslim rulers back in Egypt. Although other provinces of the early Islamic caliphate have received treatments comparable in their breadth (Michael Morony’s seminal Iraq after the Muslim Conquest [Princeton, 1984] comes to mind), Egypt was surely in need of one. Mikhail has made an important contribution in this regard.

From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt will be most readily accessible to specialists in late antiquity and early Islam. On the whole, its chapters tend to dive straight into historiographical debates; students or nonspecialists might want to read a more general history before engaging with Mikhail’s arguments.

Certain limitations arise in the book’s approach to the formation of communal religious identities. Mikhail frequently and laudably objects to primordialist narratives of Egyptian history (although which contemporary scholars actually hold such views is not always clear), and tends to emphasize the constructedness of religious identities. Despite this framework, however, the book uses the terms Coptic and Melkite interchangeably with anti-Chalcedonian and pro-Chalcedonian throughout. This becomes problematic at times. For example, Mikhail justly argues that Coptic religious elites began to portray Byzantine rule as exclusively persecutory only in the ninth century and that doing so was an effort to define the Church’s place in both the Egyptian past and the Islamic order (p. 36). It would have been useful, however, to consider whether indigenizing discourses like this played some role in producing the very idea of Coptic Christianity as a discrete religious tradition and in transforming anti-Chalcedonian Egyptians into Copts as an ethno-religious category. In this respect, the book’s terminological conventions sometimes obscure the cultural transformations it otherwise documents so well.

These limitations are not an indictment of the book’s overall quality. It is a very impressive success to provide both broad syntheses and detailed examinations of a topic so vital to the history of the Middle East and Christianity. From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt is a welcome contribution to the historiography of the early Islamic world, Coptic Christianity, and late-antique and medieval Egypt.