The Copts in Egyptian Politics (RLE Egypt

B.L. Carter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135086749
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios regionales

This book explores the political relationship between the Muslim majority and Coptic minority in Egypt between 1918 and 1952. Many Egyptians hoped to see the collaboration of the 1919 revolution spur the creation of both a new collective Egyptian identity and a state without religious bias. Traditional ways of governing, however, were not so easily cast aside.

Some Egyptians held tenaciously to the traditional arrangements which had both guaranteed Muslim primacy and served relatively well to protect the Copts and afford them some autonomy. Differences within the Coptic community over the wisdom of trusting the genuineness and durability of Muslim support for equality were accentuated by a protracted struggle between reforming laymen and conservative clergy for control of the community. The unwillingness of all parties to compromise hampered the ability of the community both to determine and to defend its interests.

The Copts met with modest success in their attempt to become full Egyptian citizens. Their influence in the Wafd, the pre-eminent political party, was very strong prior to and in the early years of the constitutional monarchy, and their formal representation was generally adequate and, in some parliaments, better than adequate. However, this very success produced a backlash which caused many Copts to believe, by the 1940s, that the experiment had failed: political activity has become fraught with risk for them. At the close of the monarchy, equality and shared power seemed motions as distant as in the disheartening years before the 1919 revolution.

Chapter One

COMMUNAL ORGANISATION

A. THE CHURCH

By this century, the church was a crumbling fortress, less and less able to protect those who sheltered within its walls. It had lost many of its administrative functions, and both corruption and incompetence had opened it to the depredations of laymen and outside predators. The church, however, remained an important element in the lives of many Copts; for centuries it had been the one institution which had represented the community and served as its refuge. Even those who had lost some or all of their faith were slow to cut their communal bonds. This lingering sense of ethnic identity, as much imposed by Muslims as deliberately retained by Copts, helped the church preserve some independence of action, a remarkable feat given how little agreement there was as to who should hold the balance of power within the community.

The unity of the orthodox church was broken first by missionaries. Some Copts left the fold for these newer Christian sects, while others were stirred, from the mid-nineteenth century, to demand reform in their own church. The latter had two goals: the correction of abuses such as simony, and the acquisition of a voice in church affairs. Both, the reformers felt, had an important bearing on the community's well-being and future. They saw the church as backward, corrupt and lazy; an ancient and malfunctioning organisation in need of a push into the twentieth century. They wanted to limit clerical responsibility in those affairs of the community which were not strictly religious or theological. This was not simply because they had come to accept a European division between spiritual and temporal matters, but because the clergy, in their view, had failed to attend to the practical side. For example, the Muslim chairman of the Chamber's Judiciary Committee noted in 1927 that the ecclesiastical committee charged with establishing Coptic schools had failed in its appointed task.¹ The reformers wished to build not only schools but also hospitals, orphanages and seminaries. They hoped to educate better the clergy and the community and to improve the organisation of charity.

Most of those supporting reform were drawn from the educated middle class and the landed gentry. They had been exposed to Western thinking and a few had even abandoned Egyptian in favour of European culture. Their aim seemed to be to redesign the church as some kind of Western parliamentary system with all decisions and offices subject to the will of the people.² This is an odd model to choose for a church whose very survival says something about the aptness of its ways, and it may partly demonstrate the influence of American Presbyterian missionaries whose own church functioned along reasonably democratic lines.

The clergy, of course, had once controlled practically all areas of life in the community: religion, justice, charity and education among them. Their role was not only being increasingly questioned but had also been substantially diminished. They understandably felt threatened by the better-educated and often more articulate laymen.³ They were not, whatever the reformers liked to believe, all corrupt, unthinking and reactionary. The clergy were, of course, interested in protecting their personal power, but many also hoped, by maintaining the church's ancient arrangements to preserve the community's cohesion and religious character, for therein lay safety. They had powerful friends both in the Palace,⁴ and among the lay élite. The latter, drawn in past times from high officialdom, probably had traditionally allied itself with the higher clergy to the benefit of both, and sometimes, no doubt almost incidentally, to that of the community as well. Both were helped by the fact that the great mass of Copts, although often the victims of clerical waste and corruption, had a tendency, born of long habit, to follow the lead of their clergy rather than the latter's new rival. Not all the clergy, however, opposed the reform movement. Those who supported it were admittedly few, but their influence was disproportionately great because they fragmented the clerical monolith.⁵

The rigidity of both the clergy and the reformers embittered the conflict and made a solution all but impossible; ultimately it harmed a system which both were trying to preserve, however different their means. In this fight for power, no one was accountable for the community's well-being. Various outsiders were sometimes drawn into the conflict to help settle it. The government, the Palace and the British all had important roles to play, only the last were consistently in favour of reform.⁶ They were also the most reluctant to intervene.

1. The Majlis al-Milli's Struggle for Power

In 1874, the government bowed to popular pressure and established a popularly-elected Coptic Lay Council (Majlis al-Milli) with the right to participate in church affairs. Clerical opposition, however, was constant, and the Council functioned only sporadically. A new Majlis was elected in 1883, and a new law gave it significant power, the exercise of which was still successfully blocked by the clergy. Two later laws, dated 1908 and 1912, emasculated the Council,⁷ but by doing so enabled it to meet regularly.

Reformers always played an important role in the Council and came to dominate its deliberations. The Majlis was the chief mechanism by which they sought to gain control of the community. Because Council elections were held only in Cairo and the Council sat in that city, Cairenes played a disproportionate role in the Council's life. That body would probably have been more conservative and more genuinely representative had voting been by diocese. Some Council members were in fact bound by the horizon of the community, but many had wider interests and were involved, for example, in national politics as well. An advantage was seen in electing politicians and high officials to the Majlis; they could then represent the Council to their party and the government.⁸ The additional public exposure brought by Council membership was probably useful to many Coptic politicians, particularly those representing Cairene constituencies with many Coptic inhabitants.

At the heart of the dispute between the clergy and key members of the Council was the control of monastic endowment ( waqf ) revenues. Five thousand feddans had been endowed for the particular use of the seven surviving monasteries, which were charged with the responsibility for only about one hundred monks and an income in 1926 of £E300,000.⁹ The Abbots disposed of huge sums as they saw fit, while rumours of waste and wrong-doing abounded. For example, in 1919–20 Dair al-Muharraq earned £E1.5 million in cotton sales, a sum which seemingly disappeared.¹⁰ Monastic incomes were only rarely spent on the welfare of their intended beneficiaries, the monks, let alone on the entire Coptic community. The monks lived in dire poverty and received little, if any, education; only the poorest of the poor and those avoiding conscription saw monastic life as a refuge of any sort.

These large revenues, then, were the key to the success of lay reform plans. The Council, with the backing of many Copts, wished to establish a system of accountability by supervising incomes and expenditures. Some Copts despaired of this solution and advocated more extreme solutions such as the dissolution of all monasteries or supervision of monastic endowments by the Ministry of (Muslim) Endowments.¹¹

By 1926, the reform movement had gathered such speed that its opponents could only interrupt and no longer break its momentum. The two Coptic newspapers, various Coptic societies, the national and local diocesan lay councils, the latter of which functioned primarily as personal status courts, were all demanding reform. Understandably, they focused on changing the Majlis charter to give the Council control of the endowments and the reformers more power in its deliberations.

Suryal Jirjis Suryal opened the campaign in the Senate in June 1926 by pointing to the many petitions of complaint against clerical mismanagement that the Senate had received. He then moved for a return to the Majlis law of 1883 and the abolution of the 1908 and 1912 laws.¹² He asked for a Council membership of twenty-four, who would be chosen by an electorate of all adult male Copts. Bishop Lukas, a Senator appointed to represent the church, argued that the Council already had enough authority; the ecclesiastics, by virtue of their position, wer entitled to exercise the greater share of power. His argument was not persuasive, and the draft law was passed to the Committee for Suggestions and Petitions in July. Suryal had, however, failed in his attempt to skip this particular step in the process. He had requested that the bill be submitted directly to the Judiciary Committee, which would have hastened the passage of the bill through the Senate. The Bishop and his supporters argued successfully against this and were able to persuade their colleagues that the circumstances were not so extraordinary as to demand the circumvention of normal Senate procedures. Theirs was obviously a delaying tactic.¹³

Only two members of the high clergy supported the reform, the Metropolitan of Asyut, and the Bishop of Manafalut and Abu Tij.¹⁴ The rest opposed any reduction in clerical privilege, and none more so than Yuannis, the Metropolitan of Alexandria. In August the Patriarch submitted a petition, apparently written by Yuannis, to the Senate objecting to Suryal's plans and presenting the case for ecclesiastical supervision of monastic endowments.

The Coptic press printed pages and pages of letters and telegrams supporting Suryal and was unrestrained in its criticism of the clergy. One article in Misr , a daily Coptic paper, accused the clergy of being so busy selling feddans that they served Mammon and not God.¹⁵ Other newspapers, including al-Muqattam ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Abbreviations
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. COMMUNAL ORGANISATION
• 2. THE BRITISH, THE COPTS AND THE NATIONALIST MOVEMENT
• 3. THE LIMITS OF THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY AND EGYPT'S NATIONAL IDENTITY
• 4. REPRESENTATIVE INSTITUTIONS
• 5. THE COPTS AND PARTY POLITICS
• 6. THE COPTS AND THE STATE
• 7. ETHNICITY AND RELIGION IN THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX