Good question

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Apr 22, 2008 at 21:08

Jennifer wrote

1. Why did the majority of the people in the Middle East convert to Islam?"

That one's got me thinking. Off the top of my head, I would say that Roman and Persian Empiricism had something to do with it - the "little people" were tired of Empiracle Rule, so they traded it for a religion that would later rule them.

Don't laugh - it's just a guess!

Oh no, very good point. But not true. If you examine the Islamic historical tradition then this is the answer that you will get, but this is far from the truth

But the islamic historical tradition has serious flaws; It is late and it is tendentious and it is very much full of topoi and schemata. I urge you to read Noth's great work Quellenkritische or "The early Arabic historical tradition. A source critical study" and you will realize that what you are reading is not reading real history but qissas or stories that have no meaning and will get you no where.

The islamic historical tradition tells us that the "Copts" were happy that the arabs invaded Egypt and that the arabs defeated their enemy and that is the Greeks, and that a Copt surrendered Egypt to the Arabs and they give him the name of al-Muqawqas. But if this is really true then why did the Arabs not leave Egypt after defeating the Greeks?

And a case in point is Tabari's history of the Arab invasion of Egypt where he seems to have no clue about the geography of the country and at the end you realize that what he is telling us is not real history

In the case of Egypt where we have lots of extant literary sources we know that Hellenism was a phenomenon of the cities and it did not affect the lives of the ordinary Egyptian that lived in the Egyptian cora (country side) as Egyptians continued to speak their language (Egyptian), practice their brand of Christianity and live their lives. But if any Egyptian opted for the great culture of Hellenism all he/she had to do was to move to Alexandria or the capital cities of the Nomes (the districts of Egypt including Oxyrhynchus). The conflict between the Egyptian Church (later to be known as Coptic) and the Melkite (root MLK) or imperial Church was a conflcit of ideas that never affected the lives of ordinary Egyptians prior to the arab invasion of Egypt.

Then the Arabs never left and Egyptains had many uprisings and the most famous was in 735CE but the brutal Arabs were able to suppress it and it was the end of Christian Egypt as more Copts converted to isalm in-order to avoid persecution

So who was really al-muqaqas? He was Cyrus the man in charge of the Melkite Chruch between 631CE and 642Ce and he is the one who surrendered Egypt to the Arabs.

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