For Ianus and what happens when the barbarians invade the land of the civilized?

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Mar 16, 2007 at 07:41

Hi Ianus,

You are asking many good questions. I do not have the time today but I will try on the week-end to provide you with more information. I will also point out to you the many similarities between the Arab invasion and Arabization/Islamization of Egypt and the Turkish invasion of the Byzantine empire and you will be surprised with how much they have in common.

There is so much myth about the history of Egypt in regard to the Arab invasion in 642CE, and the reason here is the islamic historical tradition in general is very flawed, and as was pointed out by Noth is more topoi and schemata than real history. and if you read Tabari's account of the Arab invasion of Egypt you realize that it is very flawed, and later historians followed Tabari's mistakes and all. And I will just address the following:

1. Number one myth is that Egyptians welcomed the Arabs as they hated the Greeks. This is very much far from the truth as it can get. In the past 30 years those that study the history of Egypt in the late antique period (the period up to the end of the Umayyads in 750CE) and with plenty of literary evidence (papyri in both Coptic and Greek) were able to recostruct a very different picture of Egypt at the end of the late antique period

Hellenism was very different from Arabism. For an Egyptian that lived in Egypt at that time and who wished to be Hellenized, all he had to do was to move to Alexandria (even Alexandria itself had a large Egyptian district called Rakoti, which is the Egyptian name of Alexandria where Egyptians lived and worked in their language Coptic?Egyptian) or to any of the capitals of the Nomes (districts of Egypt). Those Egyptians that did not wish to have anything to do with the Greeks lived their lives speaking their language Coptic/Egyptian. The Greeks did not force neither their language nor their culture on the masses. And this very well explain the reason of why did Coptic/Egyptian survived during the Greco-Roman period.

2. Myth two that the theological split between the Copts and the Greeks is the direct reason for the Arabs being welcomed by the Copts in Egypt and this is also very far from the truth.

Now the theological split between the Melkites (the imperial church) and the Jacobite/Monophysite or Coptic church never affected the lives of the ordinary Egyptian and Egyptians had no dislike for the Greeks.

Now and there is where the mistakes in the Islamic historical tradition: enter the strange character known by the Arabs as: al-Muqawqas he is the one that surrendered Egypt to the Arabs. Muslims never identify him but later sources tell us that he was a Copt. This is very untrue as al-Muqaqas was Cyrus the prefect of Egypt in 642CE and he was a Greek and a Melkite. But nonetheless, Arabs confuse him with Simon the Coptic Abba (also Ava) who stayed in Egypt while Cyrus left Egypt.

Stay tuned for more.

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