Excerpted from A Lonely Minority by W.H. Worrell

[Editor’s Note: The Copts are not actually Christians; the are monophysites. But this is an intriguing glimpse into the lives of people who know how to survive.]

By way of introduction, it may be well to state that the Copts are the native Christians of Egypt, and the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians...a people with the longest of recorded histories...preserved by secession and oppression. ...When the respected Washington Post correspondent, John Lancaster, reported on Egypt’s “Endangered Christians” in 1997, the Egyptian ambassador to the United States, Ahmed Maher el Sayed, stated the government’s unchanging public and official position: “Christians in Egypt have always enjoyed equal rights and privileges along with their Muslim brethren and have occupied key posts in parliament, the government and many international organizations. Back came the response by “an Egyptian Christian who grew up in Egypt and is very familiar with the current situation.” The particulars of his 1997 indictment are echoed by other members of the Coptic diaspora and confirmed by independent observers.


  • Not a single Christian appointed to the judicial system for ten years.

  • Presidential decrees required before Christians can build or repair their churches.

  • Egypt’s governing party (controlled by President Hosni Mubarak) did not nominate any Christians in the parliamentary elections. Mubarak subsequently appointed ten Christians to the parliament.

  • Christians are excluded from the police academy and any military school.

  • Christians must list their religion on ID cards and all job applications.


...The main outlet for community zeal has been the Coptic organizations which have proliferated since the turn of the century. Most numerous in Cairo, these exclusively Coptic organizations teach the young, shelter orphans, care for the sick, the poor and the handicapped, help pay marriage expenses, provide social and recreational outlets, and bury the dead. In effect, they maintain a closed circle of Coptic activities, enabling the individual to fulfill his personal needs within the community. It is a doubly reinforced circle, reinforced from within by the Copts and from without by Moslem rejection.

...The stated purposes listed by the Coptic organizations center on three dominant themes: education, assistance for the weak and needy, and support of religious commitments. The laity, in maintaining these organizations, is not only making the implicit statement that the church is unwilling or unable to meet community needs. More than that, the laity has included the care and feeding of the Coptic religion in its responsibilities, reaffirming the church’s secondary position.

...The attachment of Copts to their Egyptian homeland is dramatized in the small-scale diaspora of the young, the educated and the qualified who have begun to leave Egypt. They leave with reluctance, talking not of greener pastures elsewhere but of closed doors at home. Feeling deprived of the traditional Coptic right to market their skills at a reasonably high price, they turn to the last resort of departure and dispersion. Yet the trappings of the Coptic identity are not suited to long journeys. Its symbols and ceremonies need the church and clergy which are left behind, while departure breaks the closed circle of community life. Copts, already Westernized, become invisible in a Western country. In another Middle East country, they blend into the mosaic of Arab Christian minorities. If the Copt continues to attend church abroad, he will go to a Greek Orthodox church or an Eastern Catholic church. Sometimes, he chooses a Protestant church. It’s a matter of personal predilection. The Copt travels lightly, bringing mainly his skills and flexibility in the marketplace. What was useful to the Ottoman Empire, the British occupation and the Farouk regime is still marketable in Beirut, London and Chicago.

Time and resistance will eventually erase nostalgia for Egypt, but one link is bound to survive during the lifetime of the dispersed family commitment. This locates the answer to the centuries of Coptic survival, for the family unit is the solid foundation on which the unsteady structures of church and community have stood. In the final analysis, the minority has survived because each family in each Coptic home has sustained the group’s identity and has dug its roots into the Nile Valley. In this dependence on the family, the Coptic minority does not differ from other durable minorities, whether the Jews with their miracle of survival over the centuries, the longsuffering Armenians, or the ethnic groups remaining intact inside the so-called American melting pot.

A brilliant Coptic engineer now becoming a successful organization man in New York City still writes his mother daily, and when he mentions his lingering uncertainty about deserting Egypt, he says with more meaning than he intends: “After all, Egypt is my mother.” Enclosed within the home in which he was reared was the response to the challenge of survival. Each generation of each family handed identity to the next, a relay race pursued over the centuries and summed up in the ultimate simplicity of an individual Copt’s statement on his identity: “I was born a Copt. That’s why I’m a Copt.”

In the beginning of life, as one Coptic father stated, “Children are baptized on the faith of their fathers and mothers who are held responsible before God for bringing up children in the Coptic faith.” Godparents, normally chosen from the family, reinforce the commitment. The child is named after a grandparent, a favorite saint or a favorite relative, depending on the desire of the parents, though some families decide by burning three candles, each representing a different name. The candle that burns longest - symbolizing a long life - names the child.

With his parents, brothers and sisters as the nucleus, each Coptic child becomes increasingly entangled in relationships on both sides of the family that reach beyond uncles and aunts to distant cousins. By the time he grows up, he can run across a marriage announcement in the newspaper and trace the girl’s relationship to him on his mother’s side by the marriage of a great-aunt to a lawyer from Assyut. In lines that are clear and unmistakable, the individual Copt knows the details of his extended family relationships, each demanding varying degrees of loyalty and responsibility.

While the Coptic family resembles the traditional European family in many ways, it differs sharply from the Moslem family which is constantly imperiled by divorces that complicate the child’s position. The Moslems have a saying that reflects (and exaggerates) the insecurity of a wife: “When a woman prepares a meal for her husband, she is not sure she will be his wife long enough to share it.” Many Moslem children grow up with substitute parents who are often uncles and aunts, sometimes servants. Though the Moslem woman is moving out of her traditional position of inferiority, Coptic women have always been more emancipated and the mother has been in a special position. The Coptic husband, unlike the Moslem, is likely to joke about being henpecked. The Coptic father, particularly in middle class families, centers his life around the home, which is less disturbed by the centrifugal pull of divorce, the coffee house and a male vanity culture that tends to keep the Moslem father in exclusively male company.
The Coptic child receives very early the message from his father that he must do well in school for the sake of his parents, his family and, also, for himself. He learns to honor the ritual of family gatherings on Sunday as he is thrown into close contact with his cousins of the same age. Holy days, weddings, birthdays and anniversaries become occasions for mandatory family gatherings. There is little opportunity to go beyond the family circle and less beyond the circle of Copts. The dramatic highlights of the child’s life become his first Communion and his Confirmation.

Except to establish a family of their own or attend a university, Coptic sons and daughters ordinarily never leave home. Even when a son returns from Oxford, the Sorbonne or N.Y.U. and begins a successful professional career, he remains with his parents until he marries. Bachelor apartments are practically unheard of. Until about thirty years ago, the son brought his wife into his father’s household, though the modern fashion is to set up separate households while still honoring all family obligations. Eventually, the son takes his aged parents into his household, completing the life cycle of intimate relationship between child and parent. At death, the parents are interred in the family’s special burial grounds, a symbolic area where the solidarity of the family is reaffirmed and homage paid regularly to the dead.

In love and marriage, cousins or children of known and respected families are preferred. Until recent years, first-cousin marriages were common, thereby keeping a tight rein on property and protecting the family from outsiders. Reluctantly, Coptic families have accepted foreigners married by sons away at school, though the resistance to such marriages is supported by the fact that many of the dispersed Copts have married non-Copts.

Since parental approval is still regarded as mandatory, prospective wives and husbands are screened by the family, though in many cases this is unnecessary because cousins or close family friends are involved. Coptic mothers often act as go-betweens in matching couples. If the prospective mate is from the father’s side of the family, his opinion is paramount, vice versa if the mate is from the mother’s side, though generally speaking mother negotiates and father decides. In conservative families, boy and girl meet and court in the presence of the family. Dating alone is still not common. Even when the family is not around, couples go out in groups. Engagements occur after both families agree, and once this is settled, the engagements are not prolonged beyond six to twelve months. Parents want to reduce the risk of complications in a long engagement, for the match does not pretend to be merely a matter between two individuals. It involves both families.

The betrothal, formalized by a priest with the standard supporting cast of chanters with incense and cymbals, takes place in the home before family and friends and is regarded as “half a wedding.” Technically, the betrothal is part of the actual wedding ceremony and needs church approval to be dissolved. The marriage ceremony omits the betrothal formula if it already has been pronounced and proceeds to anoint, crown and join in wedlock. Normally, wedding ceremonies are performed in church, though in rural areas they often take place in the home. The couple are supposed to partake of two other sacraments as well as matrimony: confession and Communion.

At one summer wedding witnessed in the fashionable Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, the ceremony inside the church was counterpointed outdoors by a composite view of middle class family life. In the social and recreation area adjoining the church, children played games and pleaded for soda pop, teenagers played basketball, nubile young ladies sat under watchful eyes at tables where parents chatted with friends. In the same Heliopolis, renowned in the ancient world for its temple to the Sun god Ra, Coptic fathers in short-sleeved nylon shirts and mothers in Pharaonic print dresses testified to the saga of Coptic continuity, though the scene was as exotic as a Little League father-and-son outing.

At the church, the congregation, arriving desultorily and late, took their places, looking about, nodding to friends, then became vaguely attentive to the proceedings. (Sometimes it seems that the Coptic church clashes its cymbals and breaks into outbursts of chanting in order to catch the attention of its congregation.) At the altar, the giggling bride turned repeatedly to whisper to her bridesmaids and to her flower girls; the groom, wearing white ceremonial vestments over his formal suit of clothes, patiently endured the chanting, the cymbals, the incense. At one point, pieces of candy wrapped in cellophane were distributed; at another point during the ceremony, gigantic wreaths of red, pink and white flowers were brought in. The clothes worn by the congregation ranged from the traditional all-black ensembles of older ladies accompanied by husbands in white suits to stout ladies in brocade dresses, servant girls in faded cottons and little girls dressed in ruffles. According to church teaching, the ceremony conferred on the couple the grace to live together in mutual love and purity. Adultery, that eternal threat to the family, is regarded as the most reprehensible sin by the Copts. (If a son kills his father, it is said that the victim is not his father, thereby linking the murder to adultery.)

At marriage, the bride and groom transfer the gold bands which they exchanged at their betrothal from the right to the left hand. The husband strains his resources to give his bride a diamond ring; she symbolizes their new intimacy with a gift of bedroom slippers, pajamas and a dressing gown. The bride’s family, which pays for her trousseau, furnishes the bedroom in their new home, often the living and dining rooms as well. Since the bride retains any inherited wealth for her own use and great stress is placed on the male provider, Coptic men don’t marry until they are well-established. Usually, this means that they marry between 30 and 40, though nowadays many young men are able to marry in their late twenties. Young ladies are expected to marry before they reach the age of 25.

With marriage, the crucial dividing line is drawn between Copts and Moslems. All the pressures of parental loyalty, family conditioning, and social ostracism work against intermarriage as do the fundamental differences between Coptic and Moslem marriages. Though the Moslems seldom marry more than one wife and the government is attempting to restrict divorce, the Moslem emphasis on easy divorce and the right to marry more than one woman makes the Coptic and Moslem views of marriage incompatible. This fortifies the dividing line, for minorities that intermarry freely with majorities soon disappear.

Each new marriage partnership then takes up its primary function of raising a family and transmitting Coptic values and attitudes. The cycle of Coptic replenishment moves forward; the indelible label is imposed on each child. In their intimate involvement with their parents, the children are swept into a larger involvement with the community of Copts. Just as they may leave the church and remain in the community, Copts leaving Egypt and the community still remain loyal to their families. This is the bond that still is evident in meeting dispersed Copts at a university campus in Beirut, a restaurant in Rome, an apartment in Brooklyn. In some cases, the complaints about lack of opportunity in Egypt are transferred to the next generation. Copts say that they never would have left “if we felt our children had a future in Egypt.” Their departure was a practical transaction. In exchange for the almost certain loss of Coptic identity by sons and grandsons who would grow up with dim consciousness that they are Copts and eventually disappear by intermarriage into the new environment, the dispersed Copts have purchased a future outside Egypt. Even in that irretrievable final step, it can be said that they are acting on behalf of the family by meeting what they regard as a responsibility to the next generation.

A minority can be sentenced to death by the majority or it can commit suicide as an identifiable group by assimilating. By fleeing or being expelled, it can escape either fate, but at a high price. In the forseeable future, the Copts face none of these possibilities; neither Moslem majority nor Coptic minority shows signs of resorting to such extreme solutions of Egypt’s enduring minority problem. After each of these possibilities is disposed of quickly in summary fashion, a fundamental conflict remains between the minority’s goal of a pluralistic society and the majority’s policy of domination.

...The Copts, for their part, demonstrate resistance to assimilation with the renewed vigor of church and community, the solidity of family life, the implacable opposition to intermarriage. Proud of their self-images as the “true Egyptians” and the “original Christians,” the Copts are reinforcing their label rather than surrendering to what they consider the inferior Moslem way of life. While more Copts might quit Egypt if there were a place to go, this would hardly affect the bulk of the minority. Moreover, since Egypt won’t permit departing Copts to take their personal wealth with them, a practical handicap is added to psychological reluctance.

Determined both to remain in Egypt and to retain their identity, the Copts have had the same goal and the same complaint throughout this century. In the early 1900’s, Kyriakos Mikhail, a Coptic journalist sent to London to arouse the sympathy of British public opinion, set down the unchanging goal: “We have asked for justice and equality with Egyptians and for full participation in the fruits which have resulted from the new regime.” And the unchanging complaint: “The Copt has already lost much of his former position in Egypt; he is daily in danger of losing the little that remains.” Both statements still apply as the Copts set their sights on harmonious coexistence between the many and the strong (the Moslems) and the weak and the skilled (the Copts). They seek a pluralistic society where cultural, religious and social diversity thrives but does not penalize the minority, yet unlike the typical beleaguered minority, the Copts are not trying to overcome feelings of inferiority or lower social status. Their deprivation is relative, their touchstone of dissatisfaction the immediate past.