Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (36 page)

Christian monasteries flourish in today’s Egypt, partly as a result of Christians’ retreat into their own community. The Deir Abu Fana, dating back to the fourth century and shown here in 2012, is expanding rapidly. Photo by the author

My friends at the hotel put me in touch with a local driver to take me to the villages and monasteries in the countryside. The next morning, as I waited for him, I walked through the park again. Across the river I could see an ox pulling a plow in the fields. The city’s gentle nighttime revelry had left a trail of litter in the park, and a pickup truck came to collect it. A veiled girl—from a nearby village, I guessed—threw bags of garbage onto the truck and then pulled herself up after them. Her feet on the bags, she sang and laughed as the truck drove away.

When the driver arrived he was pleased to hear that we would be going to see some of the local Coptic monasteries. He was a Copt himself, and his name was George. (Although St. Mark is claimed as the founder of the Coptic Church, children are more commonly named after St. George—and the image of him plunging a lance into a dragon is a popular one in churches and homes, just as once ancient Egyptians used to depict the god Horus driving his spear into a hippopotamus.) “Tourists are never interested in Coptic sites,” he complained. “They only ever want to see things from ancient Egypt. I tell them about our churches and they never want to visit them.” And yet the monasteries are in certain ways modern-day versions of the ancient temples. In the early years of Christianity, monasticism was solitary: men went into a remote place, often in the desert, to pray. It was in Egypt in around
AD
320 that St. Pachomius founded the first community of Christian monks. He intended it for those who could not manage the rigors of living alone. But the monasteries took a familiar pattern: a community of pious men, living in a walled enclosure and farming nearby fields, worshiping in chapels within the enclosure to which pilgrims came as visitors—it was the system by which Egyptian temples had always operated. Many early monasteries had points of resemblance to the temples in the way that their high walls sloped inward and in the carvings on their entrances.

George showed me pictures of local monasteries. One particular picture caught my eye. Glass cases, labeled to show that they contained the bodies of Christian martyrs who died under Diocletian, contained partly mummified corpses. These, with teeth flashing through black flesh twisted in pain, were reverently dressed in silver tinsel and wedding costumes as a symbol of the eternal happiness their sacrifice had won them. At first I found the pictures shocking, even grotesque. But they were, I realized, the expression of a profound and uncompromising faith. The Copts’ belief in martyrdom has helped them endure difficult times. George and I drove past fields with piles of reaped wheat and others where the sugar cane stood tall. George pointed to the sugar cane. “That’s where the gunmen used to hide,” he said, “back when the troubles happened here. I had a friend who was a policeman, and that was how he was shot.” Between 1992 and 1998 a militant Islamist group called al-Gama’a al-Islamiya operated in Minya and other towns in southern Egypt, attacking both the security forces and local Christian civilians. Now, in 2011, the Gama’a had formed a political party and made an effort to show that it had changed: it persuaded five Copts to join, called for a free market economy, and won one of Minya’s sixteen parliamentary seats.

The journey took us along country roads where there was little other traffic. A man on a donkey, pulling a cart full of alfalfa, passed us; next came a wedding party in a bus, lively music pumping out from a stereo. “They are coming from the monastery,” said George, referring to the Abu Fana monastery, our first destination. “They went to get a
baraka
from the monks before the wedding.”
Baraka
means “blessing” in Arabic, and was a word I found myself using often during this visit to Minya. When we drew up to the monastery I found that it was also a
baraka
simply to meet a priest or monk: “I came to see you, to take a
baraka
from you,” the young men would say when they came to greet the monks in their trailing black robes and tight-fitting black caps ornamented with gold crosses. There were plenty of young men visiting the monastery. Some were more respectful than others. One of them, when he thought he was unobserved, went to sit in the abbot’s throne in the monastery’s chapel—he was drawn to it by the carving of a lion on its arms, which was the symbol of St. Mark the Evangelist.

The monastery, fronted by a high wall and gate, sits on the very edge of the Nile Valley, where the valley meets the desert. Some think there may have been an old temple on the site; the nearby town of Hor was likely named after the god Horus. An Egyptian named Abu Fana came to this place in the fourth century
AD
, giving away all his money on the way there. Known for his asceticism (one of his miracles, according to tradition, is to have gone without food for thirty-seven days), he raised the dead and read minds, and spent eighteen years on a pillar. By the Middle Ages the monastery had fallen into neglect. Only two monks were there, according to al-Maqrizi, an Arab scholar of the fifteenth century.

Now there are more than two dozen monks, many of them young, a product of the Coptic Church’s renaissance. One of them, who was looking after the monastery shop—which sold crucifixes and religious posters—told me he had been a medical student before entering the monastery. He gave me a
baraka
in the form of a loaf of bread elaborately carved with holes in the pattern of sacred symbols and Coptic writing (Egyptians in pharaonic times, as we can see from tomb paintings, sometimes decorated loaves by perforating them with holes). The life of a Coptic monk consists of praying for hours communally—including every day at 3:00 a.m.—praying alone, and sometimes engaging in tough manual labor.

This bread, inscribed with Coptic letters, is given by monks as a blessing to visitors. Ancient Egyptian wall paintings show that the custom of decorating bread in this way goes back many thousands of years. Photo by the author

George introduced me to the abbot, and we sat together in a hot, rather dusty room packed with sofas. They served me tea and an endless supply of saccharine soft drinks. Later we walked out into the sunlight. “There, in that tower, is where the monks used to hide if bandits came into the monastery,” the abbot told me. Similar problems persist. A monk came up to us and, on an order from the abbot, he reluctantly lifted his sleeve: his upper arm was shriveled where the bone had been broken. A few years before, he had been captured by a Bedouin group who lived nearby. Though the kidnapping was related to a land dispute—the monastery wanted to build on land the Bedouin used for grazing—it turned sectarian. His captors had told him, the monk said, to spit on the cross. When he refused, they broke his arm. “When we found him, he had been starved of food and water and could not move,” the abbot said. This particular monk was a talented artist who had painted many of the monastery’s murals. It had taken him months to relearn how to paint.

—————

BACK IN MINYA THAT EVENING
, I moved out of my hotel and into a boat on the Nile, which turned out to be run by a Coptic Protestant group in the city. (As well as those Copts who joined the Catholic Uniate Church, there were others who joined various Protestant denominations during the past 150 years, and many villages around Minya had Protestant and Catholic churches as well as Coptic Orthodox ones.) The water lapped all night against its side, inches from my head. A year after my visit, the houseboat would be burned by a mob of Islamists protesting the overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi, and in the boat next to it, two men, a Christian and a Muslim, would be burned alive—while other Muslims formed human chains to protect Christian churches in the city. The rampage would infamously be punished with 529 death sentences, given not for the burning of churches so much as for the killing of a policeman in the course of the riots.

I had persuaded a Coptic priest to show me around his parish the next day. Father Yoannis lived in a top-floor apartment in a simple building just down the road from his church, in a village called Qufada, several miles from Minya. George drove me to see him. We all sat in his kitchen, and I nibbled at a piece of slightly stale and very sweet cream cake that the priest had bought to mark the occasion. I discovered that his father and grandfather had been priests before him. He had a natural gift for reaching out to others, and a distinctively Egyptian way with flattery. He asked George where he was from, and when George replied Minya, the priest said what turned out to be his standard compliment: “Minya? The people from that place are the
best
people.”

Of forty thousand inhabitants in Qufada, more than 90 percent were Muslim. The mayor (
umda
is the Egyptian word), however, was Christian. His family had once owned the village’s land, until Nasser’s government confiscated and redistributed most of it. Although now much poorer, the family was still respected. “Back in 1940,” the priest said, “soldiers came from the government to tell the
umda
that he had to punish the local people because they had failed to pay their taxes. But instead of punishing them, he paid their taxes himself.” The villagers never forgot the incident and had been happy for the family to keep the title of
umda
—even though the family was Christian and mostly lived elsewhere.

“Hardly any of them live here now,” the priest told us as he drove us around the town in his car. “The old house is almost empty. The present
umda
is a dentist in the city, and it is his sister who lives in the house. The younger generation are selling off their land. Our problem as a community,” he added, honking his horn at someone he recognized, “is that we leave the villages and don’t come back. Muslims go away for work but they keep their houses in the village. Christians go to the cities for higher education and stay there. I end up seeing my old parishioners around once a year, at weddings in Cairo.”

The
umda
’s white-walled old house stood in a small unpaved courtyard set back from the main street. Father Yoannis’s church was next to it, and I found a seat in the back of the nave while Father Yoannis gave a talk to the local Christian children. They sat attentively, girls separate from boys, while he told them about the monks at one of Egypt’s oldest monasteries, who were so holy that they could fly. And he instructed the children on how to behave themselves in church. “You should know that this is a holy place,” he said. “When you come in here, the angels are watching you. So behave with respect!”

The village had never seen sectarian violence, and one of the reasons became clear to me when Father Yoannis took me to see his friend Sheikh Hassan, who occupied the position of Muslim registrar of marriages—a position of religious and social authority. The priest pulled into the driveway of a large and well-appointed house and parked his battered car next to an expensive sedan. The owner’s wife came out and greeted the priest warmly, then ushered us into a small conservatory-like room. The registrar was a powerful figure in the village: out of respect, he was called a sheikh. Unlike the
umda
, he was very much present in the village’s daily life. He liked Father Yoannis and had helped him in various ways, most recently protecting the church from a gang of criminals who—taking advantage of the collapse of law and order that ensued when the Mubarak government fell—had come to plunder it.

The good relationship between the Christian priest and the Muslim official was crucial to keeping peace in the village. With the impoverishment of the Christian upper classes by Nasser’s land reforms, and then their departure for the cities, the Coptic Church was the only institution that could mediate on behalf of their community in a country where strength and power matter more than legal rights and justice. And, seeing Father Yoannis’s good humor, simplicity of life, and connection with his people, I found it easy to understand why people would trust him. But the more that people invested in religious institutions to represent them, the less they would invest their time and money in other institutions—political parties, trade unions, or secular social groups—that were shared between people of different faiths. The police, meanwhile, preferred not to intervene in disputes, even violent ones, if it meant making themselves unpopular. So if the religious leaders could broker peace between Muslims and Christians, religious strife could be avoided. Otherwise, the communities had almost nothing that would stop an incident from escalating into bloodshed.

“We in the Sa’eed are a fiery people,” said George afterward as we set off again in Father Yoannis’s little car. “People are friendly one minute and then they may be violent the next. It just takes a small thing to make the difference.” Father Yoannis gave an example from a nearby village a year or so before. A local Christian couple had married their daughter to an acceptable Coptic husband, but without their knowing it she fell in love with a Muslim man and had an affair with him. Both took drugs. When the parents were away, the daughter used their house for trysts. One evening, the parents came back unexpectedly and found their daughter in bed with her lover, both in a stupor. The mother did not hesitate: she strangled them.