The Turks in Egypt

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 14, 2007 at 08:00

Hi Ianus,

I very much agree with your response to the following quote by Plato

Plato wrote:

>as you have pointed out the Arabs hated the Turks

And in the case of Egypt this is indeed very correct. The funny thing here is the Turks were seen by Egyptians as Europeans that did not speak the language or have the same customs as the locals. There was also stories more urban legends than reality about Turkish women abducting Egyptian men and forcing them to have sex with them and men having orgies and being drunk in the middle of the day. Egyptians felt that Turks did not bring anything to Egypt that Egyptians did not already have neither a new religion or language. The Arabs brought Arabism and Islamism.

When the majority of Egyptians converted to Arabism (i'm very convinced that we can very much speak about the process of Arabism then Islamism and these two steps are very separate and it seems to be the only explanation for why Egyptians stopped speaking Coptic and opted for Arabic by both Muslims and Christians ) then to islam.

I also happen to believe that a more subtle and profound reason is that in 642CE and afterwords Egyptians were already in the process of a cultural shift and that the Arab invasion was nothing but the catalyst and not the cause of such shift (see C. Becker) nothing more and nothing less.

But when the Turks occupied Egypt there was no such process and this is why the cultural legacy of the Turks in Egypt is marginal at best, and Turks that moved to Egypt converted to Egyptianism.

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