Egypt: how a Christian country became a Muslim one

Egypt was conquered in 642 and did not become majority Muslim until the fourteenth century. Seven hundred years separate the conquest from the conversion, and that gap is the most useful fact in this entire subject, because it rules out the two stories people tell.

It was not conversion at sword-point: if it had been, Egypt would have been Muslim by 650. And it was not a free market in ideas: if it had been, seven centuries of a Christian majority would not have collapsed in a single century once the fiscal screws turned.

What happened in between is documented in the tax records.

The conquest, 639 to 642

Amr ibn al-As entered Egypt in 639 with a small force, took the fortress of Babylon in 641 after a siege, and received the surrender of Alexandria in 642. Byzantine rule ended. The Coptic Church, which had been in schism with Constantinople since Chalcedon in 451 and had been persecuted for it, initially had reason to prefer the new rulers to the old.

The terms were the standard terms: submission, tribute, and the legal status of the protected non-Muslim. Copts kept their churches and their liturgy and paid the jizya for the privilege.

The seven centuries

For the first four hundred years the arrangement was, from the state’s point of view, working as intended. Non-Muslims were the tax base. Governors actively discouraged conversion at points, because a convert stopped paying.

Then the pressure changed. Al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph, ordered the destruction of churches and synagogues across Egypt and Palestine from 1004, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. Under the Mamluks, from the thirteenth century, jizya enforcement hardened, church construction was blocked, Copts were periodically purged from the administration, and waves of forced conversion followed outbreaks of mob violence.

The fourteenth century is when it broke. Historians of the period identify it as the decisive sociological transformation, the one window in which Copts converted en masse. A study in the Journal of Economic History worked directly from the tax and conversion records and found the mechanism: the jizya was a regressive tax on a religion, poorer Copts converted first because the tax fell hardest on them, and what survived was a smaller, wealthier Coptic community and a Muslim majority. The socioeconomic gap between the two groups in Egypt today is a fossil of that selection.

That is what “gradual conversion” means when someone says it kindly. It means a tax applied to a religion for seven hundred years until the religion could not pay it.

The language died too

Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in Greek letters, descended in an unbroken line from the language of the pharaohs. Arabic replaced it in administration immediately after the conquest, and it drained out of ordinary speech between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, with the decline accelerating after the fourteenth.

It survives as a liturgical language. The last community of native speakers is gone. Four thousand years of continuous spoken Egyptian ended, and it ended as an administrative consequence.

The remnant, and what still happens to it

Copts are roughly a tenth of Egypt’s population, the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and the pressure has not stopped:

Alexandria, 1 January 2011: a bombing outside the Church of the Two Saints killed 23.
Maspero, October 2011: army vehicles drove into a Coptic protest in Cairo, killing 28.
August 2013: dozens of churches, schools and homes burned across Egypt in a single week after the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government.
Palm Sunday, 9 April 2017: coordinated bombings at churches in Tanta and Alexandria killed around 45 worshippers. Islamic State claimed both.
Minya, May 2017: gunmen stopped a bus of pilgrims heading to a monastery and killed 28, including children.

Church construction remains restricted by law, and the restriction descends directly from the medieval rule against building or repairing houses of worship without permission.

Why this page exists on a Jewish site

Because the same seven hundred years happened to Egypt’s Jews, and their ending was faster. Egyptian Jewry, continuous since antiquity and rebuilt around Cairo’s Ben Ezra synagogue and its genizah, numbered around 80,000 in the 1940s. After 1948, 1956 and 1967 there are a few dozen left.

And because the argument used against Israel is that a religious minority cannot claim a homeland in a region where it is outnumbered. Egypt is the answer. It was outnumbered by design, over centuries, by a tax.