{"id":6989,"date":"2011-05-16T18:58:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T14:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=6989"},"modified":"2011-05-16T19:01:04","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T15:01:04","slug":"muslim-coptic-relations-five-books-that-spell-it-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/muslim-coptic-relations-five-books-that-spell-it-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Muslim-Coptic Relations: Five Books that Spell it Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Discussions of Muslim-Coptic relations have been riding the post-25 January swing of hope, denial and despair. In one moment, Muslims and Christians are \u201cone hand.\u201d In the next, nothing has changed. An eye-blink later, we\u2019re headed for armed sectarian doom.<\/p>\n

Literature, meanwhile, offers a broader, longer view. The five books below take us from a time when Copts were the majority in Egypt through the good and ugly of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour<\/em>, trans. Nancy Roberts<\/p>\n

Bakr\u2019s acclaimed The Man from Bashmour<\/em> is set in ninth century Egypt – four centuries after Youssef Ziedan\u2019s controversial Azazel. <\/em>The action takes place during a peasant revolt sparked by an exorbitant land tax and provides a deeply detailed look at early Coptic communities. The book gives life to the medieval-era relationships between Copts and Muslims, and, as translator Nancy Roberts notes in her introduction, helps “to clarify the profound commonalities shared by Muslims and Copts.”<\/p>\n

Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club<\/em><\/p>\n

Fast-forward 1,100 years, Ghali\u2019s classic novel sketches the landscape as it stood in the 1950s, in the first years of Gamal Abdel Nasser\u2019s presidency. The book\u2019s narrator, Ram, comes from a wealthy Coptic family, but the Egyptians he describes are a mix of Copts, Muslims, Catholics and Jews. Ram socializes with all these characters, and his mockery of the “kyria lysoon” <\/em>is one of the few times we see his religious identity emerge. However, the landscape is changing: Ram\u2019s Jewish-Egyptian lover, Edna, is struck in the face with a whip by a soldier and disfigured. Other Jews have already fled. Beer in the Snooker Club <\/em>shows an Egypt on the precipice of great stagnation and great change.<\/p>\n

Bahaa Taher’s Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery<\/em>, trans. Barbara Romaine<\/p>\n

Set in an Egyptian village in the 1960s, Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery <\/em>is one of the most optimistic portraits of Coptic-Muslim relations. Taher\u2019s novel, graced by the author\u2019s clear and compelling prose, tells the story of a young Muslim man who kills in self-defense. The widow of the victim demands vengeance, and the killer is given refuge in a Coptic monastery. Taher told Egypt Today, <\/em>about the book\u2019s reception in the West, \u201cKhalti Safeyya<\/em> said that things are not that bad [between Copts and Muslims], and this is something they do not want to hear. The BBC interviewed me about it, and the anchor kept interjecting, \u2018Surely things are not really as you describe them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s St. Theresa<\/em>, trans. Chip Rossetti<\/p>\n

Abdelmeguid\u2019s St. Theresa<\/em> is set in Cairo and Alexandria in the years that follow the 1967 naksa<\/em>, or Arab-Israeli War. The novella\u2019s Coptic, Muslim, secular and Jewish characters are all looking for rebirth and renewal in a changing political landscape. But throughout, the book\u2019s characters are unable to turn their lives toward positive change.<\/p>\n

They are also unable to fully connect with one another. One of the most striking moments comes in St. Theresa<\/em>\u2019s final pages, when the connection between Budur and Sawsan, a Copt and a Muslim, is lost. \u201cShe tries to get close to her but fails. When she spots her, she is glad, but is astonished to see her swelling stomach. Their eyes meet, and everything that had come between them melts away amid the throngs. Budur lowers her eyes. Sawsan tries to stretch her hands out to her, but the flood of humanity is too fast for her, and she is lost in the crush.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khaled al-Berry’s Life is More Beautiful than Paradise<\/em>, trans. Humphrey Davies<\/p>\n

The fifth book takes us to Assiut in the late 1980s. Here, we find the most chilling portrait of Coptic-Muslim relations. Assiut was, in the 1980s, a flash-point of sectarian tensions, and Berry\u2019s recollections – of his time in the Islamist group Jama\u2019a al-Islamiya – offer both a compelling portrait of adolescence and a view of how sectarian conflict begins. The memoir describes Berry\u2019s involvement in both organized and spontaneous violence.<\/p>\n

Berry and his young friends say:\u00a0\u201cWe were now equipped to assert our moral authority, and we didn\u2019t let an opportunity escape us. It came to our ears that on the Prophet\u2019s birthday a Christian student had made a drawing of a store selling the special candy made for that day and labeled it The Worm-eaten Candy Store. Some of the brothers waited for him as he left the school and beat him up, telling him not to try making fun of Muslims again.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet, even though the intolerance runs deep, Berry shows us that change is possible. After all, he did it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. LYNX-QUALEY: The pendulum between hope, denial and despair seems to be swinging ever quicker in Egypt. Literature however offers a longer view. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":6992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,5],"tags":[253,3643,2064,378,320,18300,4215,6284,427,6346,3131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6989"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}