In earlier entries, you read about how the Mamluks, slaves raised to fight, became a ruling class with a complete bureaucracy as well as attempts to normalize into a hereditary monarchy. The Kipchak Turk Mamluks had their “Mafia” structure in power from about 1250 to 1382. In 1382, a competing Mamluk network took over, probably the finalization of a process that had been going on for a while. These new Mamluks were Circassians who, like the Kipchak Turks, favored their own ethnic group in spite of the official doctrine that Mamluks had no ethnicity.
There’s another storyline that’s important to notice; if we focus only on the rulers, we miss many other stories. At the start of the Mamluk period, Egyptian Muslims were probably still a minority, though a large one. Between the initial Muslim conquest and the end of Mamluk rule in 1517, about 900 years passed. That’s longer than Americans can easily imagine. At the beginning, and for maybe two centuries, the daily language of Egypt was what we now call Coptic, but it was really just the language of the Pharaohs (all languages change over time). During Greek rule, the Greek alphabet and some symbols derived from hieroglyphics were used to write the Coptic language. However, by the time the Mamluks fell to Ottoman conquest (spoiler, sorry!), Christians had become the minority. The Mamluk period oversaw the key flip in majority/minority roles.
The Muslim conquerors had never set out to convert their new subjects, since they were mainly interested in tribute being paid fully and on time. The tribute rate was set much lower—in fact it was a mere tax—for Muslims. In some periods, life was made easy for the majority Christians and minority Jews. But they were always subject to rules that could be suddenly made much more restrictive, and in certain periods, that’s what happened. One of the basic rules was that houses of worship needed approval from the secular governor to be built or repaired. In restrictive times the Muslim rulers just refused, and the churches and synagogues fell apart. There were constant pressures like this to just suddenly see the light of Mohammed’s truth and join the ruling religion. In very restrictive times, the pressure became more than some could bear and there were waves of conversion.
The Mamluk period was one of the more difficult times. Apparently, there was a Muslim jurist named Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who left many books and precedents. He was so important that he was known as the Elder of Islam, the Sheikh al-Islam. He was educated in Damascus in the most traditional (i.e. least friendly to modernizing) Sunni schools, the Hanbali. He made his first mark at age 30 when he led a party that insisted on the execution of a Christian man who had “insulted Mohammed.” His Hanbali school was anti-wine, anti-music, and pro-jihad. Islam has always had this strain present in its culture; in our time it’s the Wahhabis, in that time it was the Hanbalis. They are all Salafis, followers of the Salaf (first 3 generations of Muslim believers).
Ibn Taymiyya and the Salafis interpreted the Mongol invasions as punishment from Allah for being too soft on unbelievers. Ibn Taymiyya ruled that Muslim governors had no obligation to give building/repair permits to any Christians or Jews, and if their houses of worship ceased to be, so much the better. He was controversial; other schools of Islam sometimes had him imprisoned or put on trial. But he left a strong influence, as we might say today, he shifted the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Whenever life could be made more difficult for Christians and Jews, that’s what should be done. Obviously.
Coptic monasteries and churches continued to function, but they were smaller and had less funds. They could copy books to keep old manuscripts from dying out, but the effort to write theology and history in Coptic stopped. Coptic clergy did not have good relationships with Mamluk rulers, who were mostly first-generation converts and eager to win the approval of the Salafis. In 1354, the rulers seized a huge amount of land endowment from the Church, following three days of riots against Christians.
During the Burji period (1382-1517), Egypt was struck by many calamities, starting with the plague that kept returning (as in Europe). The effects of the plague peaked around the time the Burjis came to power; in Europe, there were peasant uprisings as finally the plague began to cause labor shortages in the countryside to bring in the harvest. Egypt must have seen similar developments. The people in the countryside were more likely to be Coptic farmers. Over the century of Burji Mamluk rule, the Copts not only became a minority as all but the most stalwart believers converted to Islam, they also became the scapegoat for all woes. Riots targeted Coptic churches in cities and towns.
There was a wave of martyrdom. Unlike in the Roman period, when Christians were directly persecuted, the Burji era martyrs were usually converts to Islam who were stricken by conscience and chose to go back. Now they were not just Copts, they were Muslim apostates. Some chose to do this in a very public way, making the announcement in public knowing that they would swiftly be executed. Others did it privately or retreated to monasteries where they were less likely to be hunted down.
By the close of the Burji Mamluk rule, Egypt was the land of mosques and Arabic language that we know today. Its local variant of Arabic was loaded with Old Egyptian words that persisted as borrowings. Its remaining churches were the largest ones in the big cities, where bishops sat, and the smallest ones in the farm villages where they had little to lose. The in-between layer disappeared.
with thanks to chapter by Maged S. A. Mikhail in The Coptic Christian Heritage, ed. Lois M. Farag.