Arabization and Islamization of Egypt

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), Mar 20, 2007 at 18:24

Hi , Dhimmi no more,

Thanks a lot for your detailed explanation .

> I'm sorry, but again my time is so limited, so i will be as brief as I can as there are indeed many similarities between the Arab invasion of let us say Egypt, and the Turkish invasion of the Byzantine empire. Again I'm trying to make something simple when it is not.

I know your predicament all too well. Simplifying complicated things may be misleading , if not simply wrong , sometimes.

> Just to go back one step: Anthropologists have the following model in the case of what happens when the barbarian invade the land of the civilized? The answer is the barbarian becomes the civilized (and this is one possible outcome of the invasion of Europe at present by Muslims or the melting pot theory) as the barbarian will adopt the language and the the religion of the civilized.

This model is based on some chosen processes in European history. The Romans were hellenized , the Norse Frenchified , the Slavs that occupied Greece in 7-8th c. couldn't stand the influence of superior Greek culture. Of course , there is some implicit optimism in it which doesn't make this theory universally applicable alas.

> However, it is very clear that the outcome of the Arab as well as the Turkish invasion of let us say Egypt in the first instance and the Byzantine empire in the second instance was very different. There was religious as well as linguistic/cultural shift.

In other words, superior civilizations retrogressed and reverted to barbarism under the impact of lower culture imposed and upheld by force by the new primitive masters.

> In the case of Egypt, Hellenism was very different from Arabism: Hellenism was a phenomenon of the cities and the Greeks expected whoever wanted to be hellenized to move to Alexnadria or the capitals of the Nomes (districts of Egypt) and this very much could explain why the Egyptian/Coptic language (Coptic has 20% Greek loan words and compare this wiht 20% of Farsi are loan words from Arabic and for this see below) did not die during 1000 years of Greek presence in Egypt and even in the city of Alexandria the district of Rakoti (the Egyptian name of Alexandria) was populated by Egyptians and the spoken language there was Egyptian.

I presume this ethnic vivacity of the Egyptian element is visible in mummification which continued successfully until the Arab conquest.

> Arabism on the other hand, was very different: The arabs came to your front door demanding to get their Jizya and be landed gentry without any regard for learning or culture.

> The Copts in effect were running the country and collecting the taxes and the only way to communicate with the Arabs was to speak Arabic.

> I also suspect that Egypt was in the process of a cultural shift for reasons we still do not understand and the Arab invasion was only a catalyst and adoption of the Arabic language (see Whorf Sapir) was only a manifestation of such shift and I believe that this must be the only explanation of why did the arabs that invade Egypt not adopt Coptic/Egyptian as their language as expected from the above model and it also explains why did the Copts adopt Arabic as their language and abondoned their language Coptic/Egyptian (see Becker).

Probably the reason was in part mundane. The illiterate uncouth Arabs were good at plundering cities, at cutting throats of and terrorizing the infidels but – to put it mildly – rather untalented , incapable and clumsy as far as learning foreign languages was concerned. Their prophet spoke not a single foreign language. Why should they do ? What is more , he showed that only Arabic – Allah's language – was superior to all other languages as it was in this language that Allah wrote his „masterpiece".

> And no it is not ture that the importation of Arabs into Egypt was of any significance in actual fact it was very limited (see gastom Weit). And do you know why? Because it has been estimated that 200,000 Arabs invaded the Middle east strarting in 633CE and this would have been a drop in the bucket as the population of the middle East at the time was estimated to be aroun d 30M.

> So we can safely say that the linguistic shift from Coptic to Arabic was an internal Egyptian shift.

Could you amplify a little this term „lingustic shift" ? Does it mean the Copts voluntarily abandoned Coptic to embrace Arabic due to the particular internal circumstances ? It's known that e.g. they helped the Arabs to conquer the Greek fortress of Pelusium that blocked the road to the Delta. But I wonder how do such particular pro-Arab actions are connected to the „cultural shift" you are referring to ?

> One real problem with the above is that if you examine what really happened in Iran (the only other nation state in the Middle East like Egypt)

I wouldn't agree with this , dear Dhimmi . There was a world of difference between the two. Iran was an independent superpower with vivid memories of the past glories of the invincible kings of kings. These memories lived in the subjugated nation even though the Persian state religion Zoroastrism was gradually exterminated by the Moslems. After the downfall of the Sassanid empire the Persians still dated their history under the Arab yoke in years passed since the death of Yezdigert III (651) , the last Sassanid king of kings.

Now look at Egypt. The last memories of independent Egypt lay behind c. 1200 years – if you take the 26th dynasty as the last genuinely Egyptian dynasty. Egypt had always been just a dependent province or a kingdom ruled by non-Egyptians (Assyrians, Persians , Greeks , Romans). Politically the Egyptians had no ambitions and living traditions. They were passive. Their religion was Christianity although they have preserved many pre-Christian rites and manners. Their passivity under the new regime was not surprising. The other thing known from the Byzantine history is that the Arab conquest was accompanied by flight of Greek land-owners who formed a large group of emigres in Constantinople. So naturally enough the Greek influence was weakened in Egypt and in this relative vacuum the Arab influence was gradually gaining momentum.

> a different picture emerges as following the arab invasion we find the following variables:

> 1. Farsi is still the national language albeit with 20% Arabic words

> 2. Arabic just vanished except in Mosques with hardly anyone knowing arabic anymore.

> 3. But the real difference from Egypt is that Iran had a very significant secular literature and the propagation of such literature might be the reason for the survival of Farsi and I do think that the engine that got this moving was no other than Firdawsi's Shahnemah (Hafiz and Omar al-Khayyam for sure helped).

This difference in literature I think just reflects a basic difference between Egypt and Iran. The Persians wanted to restore their political independence even as Moslems. The Egyptians were too passive and historically handicapped – so to speak – to dream of independence they never had and to restaure the glories they had log forgotten.

> Now Islamization was a very separate process and the turth we have no evidence that there was indeed islam as we know it now in 632CE when Muhammad died.

I wanted also address this problem. If you state this , how do you account e.g. for ar-ridda that erupted all over Arabia the moment „the seal of the prophets" was dead ? The evidence is of course flawy and deficient but at least consistent. If you reject the tradional (biased 100% to be sure , but not totally improbable) accounts, many serious problems arise which are avoided by finding at least some core of the traditional accounts as historically acceptable. In other words Moslems invented a lot in their history but negating all of their early history is exaggerated - in my view - and produces many serious problems instead of solving any.

> The evidence points to the fact that islam was in process of still of being formed, and for reason we still do not fully understand, it was being formed in the Middle East and not in Arabia and it did not become fully fledged until the 3rd century of Islam

Every religion like a volcano has its „hot" phase where all is in flux and its „cold" phase when petrification of ideas sets in. In the "hot" phase all seems possible , the end of times is at hand , religious fever makes the believers forget reality. What great eschatological expectations were cherished by all the Moslem world as the 100th anniversary of hijra was approaching ! ...Few think rationally and coldly at the "hot"phase of religion. Some reflection starts as time does its job and shows the futility of the immediate advent of the promised paradises. Before it was time for wonder-doers.Now it's time for more cautious theologians to systematize and manipulate what is most important for the given political purposes he is pursuing.

> (the word Islam does not appear in th Islamic literary sources until the building of al-Masjid al-Aqsa in jerusalem and the word Muslims (Muslimeen) does not appear in the literary sources until 767CE or some 150 years after the death of Muhammad.

One minute. You have to remember that the Arab Beduins that participated in the conquests were just as ummi as their prophet. It took them one-two centuries to learn how to read and write and even more to read others' writings. They never learned to truly appreciate them. It's symptomatic that most correspondence in early caliphate was conducted in Greek. Out of this practical necessity it was the oral tradition and stories that emerged as the prevalent historical evidence of what had happened . These oral traditions formed the early Muslim historiography. It's of course clear that much –if not all- of this oral tradition was unreliable and biased depending on the story-teller and the circumstances when the same story was told and retold. But nonetheless this oral tradition referred to some real events the authors of them had participated in.

One important reservation must also be made . Most early sources (e.g. Sayf ibn Omar al-Asadi at-Tamani –fl. c.750 and his „Great Book of the conquests and the apostasy" and others ) have not been preserved. It's hard to judge after what has been re-written by at-Tabari and others about how exactly these early works might have reflected the early years of Islam and its triumph in the Near East. But that they existed is also true , isn't it ?

> The Arabs had no reason to see non Muslims converting to islam or to what was to become islam as this would have meant that the arabs will not be collecting the jizya tax and this is why we see the concept of mawali or if you want to convert to islam you must become an Arab first (see Q14:4) and you have to be sponsored by an Arab Wali or master.

I have just read A.I. Kolesnikov's study „The Arab conquest of Persia" (Moscow 1982) where the author quoting different sources mentions that the invading Arabs (The invasion commenced soon after ar-ridda was quenched in blood in 633 ) first tried to make the Persians convert to Islam and only then fought them. They were ruthless towards those that converted and then apostasized as these cases were very frequent. It was no other than the Salman al-Faris – the illiterate prophet's literate advisor - that used to persuade the Persians to embrace Islam in these first years. It looked like a systematic effort, even if the conversation between Rustem and Zukhra on the virtues of Islam before the battle of Quadisya mst probably never took place. So there must have already existed what is termed „Islam" with a lot of attributes and peculiarities that we know from later "petrified" Islam.

Anyway , the Arabs were particularly ruthless and cruel towards Christian Arabs living in Mesopotamia. It was known that the Christian Arabs – with the exception of recently Christianized nomadic Arabs from the fringe of the desert – fought staunchly on the Sassanid side. Yezdigerd III's body abandoned in a ditch in Merv was buried by a group of Christians under their bishop Elias.

> And this is why we have two separate things going on:

> 1. Arabization first.

> 2. And then islamization.

> Now why did the majority of Egyptians convert to islam? We stll do not know. Wasserman tells us how it happened but he does not explain the why! i think that it would be too simplistic to attribute it to the jizya or the the fact that the Qur'am is such a great book I still think this is an area of great research.

At least what is known is that no mass conversion occurred and it took a few centuries to make Egypt a Moslem country, didn't it ?

> I suspect that the conversion of the majority of Egyptians to islam was part of this cultural/linguistic shift that was taking place and we still do not really undrestand as we would have expected the invading arabs to be part of the Coptics and to become Christians but this is not what really happened.

> No simple answers.

As usual. ;)

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