1One day in the winter of 1908 Murqus Simaika, vice president of the Coptic Community Council (Al-Majlis al-Milli, hereafter Majlis Milli), called on Patriarch Kyrillus V and found him watching as a silversmith weighed out old silver gospel covers and church vessels to be melted down for reworking. They bore 14th and 15th century inscriptions in Coptic and Arabic. Simaika offered to raise the L.E. 180 market value of the bullion if these objects would be saved in a storeroom as a start toward a museum. The Patriarch agreed, and the Coptic Museum was born.1

2This transvaluation of worn-out cult objects worth no more than their weight in silver into priceless antiquities reflects a major shift in the way the Copts viewed their past and defined their present identity. In the West, similar transvaluations accompanied the development of classical archeology, Egyptology, and — later and differently — Islamic art and archeology. Diverted from Western imperial to Egyptian nationalist purposes, these disciplines later took root in Egypt as well.2

3This conference has inspired me to examine the relationship between archeology and social reform, with the Coptic community as a case study. Among the Copts at least, the pioneers of modern archeology, far from escaping into a dead past irrelevant to the present, were both products of social reform and major promoters of it. As in 18th-century France and 19th-century Greece, anticlerical laymen pushed social reform and a revaluation of the ancient past against the opposition of much of the clergy.

4This paper concentrates on two leaders in both archeology and social reform: Murqus Simaika (1864-1944), founder of the Coptic Museum, and Mirrît Boutros- Ghali (1908-), founder of the Coptic Archeological Society. Simaika is treated at greater length because his unpublished memoirs were newly available and because his life spans nearly the entire century under study and illustrates the relevant themes well. Other sources include interviews3 and the Bulletins, of the Comite de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art arabe and the Coptic Archeological Society. Although well-known to historians of art and architecture, the Bulletins have not been exploited as sources for the cultural, social, and political history of modern Egypt.

Coptic Communal Reform and Simaika’s Education to 18824

5The first wave of Coptic social reform began in 1854, ten years before Simaika’s birth, under the leadership of Patriarch Kyrillus IV (1854-1861). From then on until 1952, a new wave of reform crested about once a decade, but with laymen leading the way and most of the clergy resisting. Coptic reform had its own internal dynamic but was also tied into the wider rhythms of Egyptian national and even Ottoman reform.

6Amba Kyrillus IV, who assumed office the same year as Sa’id (1854-1863), is known as Abu al-Islah, "the Father of Reform". A humble Upper Egyptian fellah and a monk at Saint Anthony’s Monastery, he may have had contact with the theological seminary, an Anglican missionary run in Cairo in the 1840s.5 The reforms of Muhammad Ali (1805-1848) and his successors, however, influenced him more. Ali lifted dress restrictions on minorities, and Sa'id abolished the poll tax (jizya) they paid and drafted them into the army. In Istanbul, the Hatt-i Humayun of 1856 affirmed the equality of all subjects. In Egypt, too, the state increasingly dealt directly with Christians and Jews as individuals, moving away from the millet structure which left the patriarch or grand rabbi in charge of his flock.

7Muhammad Ali’s new army, higher schools, study missions to Europe, translation bureau, printing press, and official journal bypassed the Copts, so Amba Kyrillus introduced his own reforms. He imported a printing press from England (not used until after his death), came down hard on priestly corruption and ignorance, opened new schools, and reached out ecumenically to the Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and perhaps the Anglicans. It was widely believed that Sa’id, fearing that foreign interference would follow, had the patriarch poisoned.

8Amba Kyrillus IV’s greatest achievement was founding the Patriarchal School (Madrasat Al-Aqbat Al-Kubra). Sa’id refused his plea to admit Copts to state schools and to allow them to join the Muslim Egyptians who were now moving up into the officer corps. Hitherto Coptic formal education ended with the elementary kuttab, where students learned to read and write Coptic and Arabic from the Bible and to do simple mathematics; the Copts had no al-Azhar. Simaika had to walk only two hundred meters down Darb al-Wassa Street (Ezbekieh) from his grandfather’s house to the Patriarchal School, next to St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Patriarchate. This school shaped a whole generation of the Coptic lay elite before missionary and state schools made education widely available to Copts. Simaika boasted that his alma mater produced three Coptic prime ministers.6 Other alumni of interest here include Qalini Fahmi, Mikha’il Sharubim, Mikha’il Abd al-Sayyid, and Claudius Labib.

9Simaika’s grandfather’s house was in a heavily Coptic quarter, but the quarter gates now hung unused, and Copts felt secure settling throughout Cairo. Most Copts were unlettered Upper Egyptian peasants, but Simaika’s family belonged to an urban elite that had done well serving state and church. His mother’s father was secretary to Ibrahim Pasha in the 1830s in Damascus, where she was born. His father’s family had donated manuscripts and other treasures to al-Mu‘allaqa Church.7 The Patriarchal School was free and open to all religions, but many students came from privileged Coptic families like his own. Simaika studied Arabic, Coptic, and Greek. He does not mention Turkish, which was becoming less important as the ruling class became Arabized. State inspectors picked two of his brothers for transfer to the state law school and eventual government careers. Muslim families often sent one son to al-Azhar, and Simaika’s father tried to save him for the church by forbidding him to attend the English class of Mikha’il Abd al-Sayyid, editor of the Coptic paper al-Watan. Simaika refused to eat until his father gave in. The boy learned English, transferred to the Ecole des Frères chrétiens to study French, and dropped all thought of a church career.8

10Patriarchs Demetrius II (1862-1870), Kyrillus V (in office 1874-1927), and Amba Yua’nis XIX (1928-1942) reacted sharply against the foreign influences Amba Kyrillus IV and Simaika found so stimulating. Amba Demetrius attacked the United Presbyterians’ "American Mission", whose first contingent arrived to "occupy"9 Egypt (the military metaphor is theirs) in 1854. Khedive Isma’il (1863-79) backed the Patriarch against these disturbers of the peace, who denounced the Coptic Church as heretical, corrupt, and ignorant. Diplomatic protection, however, enabled the Mission to consolidate its headquarters at Asyut and build schools and churches throughout Egypt. Isma’il countered by giving the Coptic Church 1 500 feddans to develop its schools10 and by opening the state schools to non-Muslims in 1867. Catholic missionaries, who had long been on the scene, were less inclined to attack the Coptic Church head-on. Catholic and Protestant (Evangelical) Copts eventually split off from the main Church.

11Simaika sang in the choir at the confirmation of Amba Kyrillus V, who at first gave in to lay demands for a Clerical College and a lay Majlis Milli to help run Coptic affairs. Boutros-Ghali, a rising young notable, drafted the necessary law, and in 1874 became vice president of the Majlis Milli under the patriarch.11 Such lay communal councils were in the air. The Ottomans set up Armenian, Greek Orthodox, and Jewish councils in the 1860s and a constitution and parliament in 1876. Isma’il established a Chamber of Delegates in 1866 which included Copts. Amba Kyrillus soon shut down the Majlis Milli and Clerical College, just as Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) did away with the Ottoman parliament and constitution.

12For over seventy years, lay reformers would battle the Patriarch and upper clergy, who clung to their traditional authority over the community. The reformers wanted the Majlis Milli to administer church and monastery waqfs, Coptic schools, and personal status laws on divorce and inheritance. Patriarchs and bishops, plucked directly from their desert monasteries, were revered for their piety and ascetic withdrawal but lacked education and worldly experience. Most monks came from simple and provincial Upper Egyptian families. "It is a shameful confession," wrote Simaika, "but we must acknowledge that very few of the existing bishops belong to respectable families."12 Protestant themes echo in Simaika’s denunciation of the clergy as lazy and corrupt refugees from the real world of work who neglected religious duties, sold justice, and enriched relatives with church funds.13 The big landowners and professionals who dominated the Majlis Milli were becoming increasingly educated and prosperous and demanded an increased say in Coptic affairs. In 1891 seven of twelve Majlis Milli members were beys and one — Boutros- Ghali — was a pasha.14 But the Patriarchal party were well-entrenched, had a mass following, and held their own in one round of disputes after another up to 1952.

13The stalemate from 1919 to 1952 in national politics between the Wafd and authoritarian palace governments was similar. There were also parallels with al-Azhar, which by 1900 drew most of its students from poor or provincial families.15 The ulama resisted reform of al-Azhar, the Sharia courts, and awqaf administration for fear of losing power and status. Reformist shaykhs like Muhammad Abduh were as exceptional as reformist Coptic bishops, and both drew their support from secular elites. Reformers might call in the state to tip the balance, but the price in lost communal autonomy could be high.

Early Coptic Interest in Coptic Studies and Egyptology

14Bonaparte’s expedition and Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphics laid the foundations for Egyptology in the West. In 1858 Mariette rooted the discipline in Egypt when Sa’id authorized him to found an Antiquities Service and Egyptian Museum. Foreigners dominated these two institutions until the 1920s, when partial independence enabled Egyptians to enter Egyptological careers. Unlike hieroglyphics, Coptic was the scriptural language of the Coptic Church and needed no European decipherer. Nevertheless Simaika emphasized that Europeans initiated the revival of Coptic studies in the 19th century. A. Kirchner, a French Jesuit, pioneered the study of Coptic in Europe in the 17th century, and Westerners began spiriting neglected manuscripts away from Coptic monasteries. Coptic was part of Biblical and patristic studies; Champollion showed that it was also the gateway to hieroglyphics. Mariette first came to Egypt in 1850 to buy Coptic and other manuscripts for the Louvre. But uncovering the Saqqara Serapeum confirmed him as an Egyptologist, and he never looked back.16

15The Patriarchal School and the Clerical College provided places Coptic could be studied above the kuttab level. Simaika’s class used a copy of H. Tattam’s Coptic- Arabic New Testament which the author had donated by way of return for manuscripts he had taken from Wadi al-Natrun. Simaika’s teacher Barsum al-Rahib, wrote the first modern Coptic grammar in Arabic. Egyptologist/Coptologist Claudius Labib (1868-1918), four years younger than Simaika, also got his start at the Patriarchal School. Unlike 19th century Western Protestants who saw archeology as a means of "proving the Bible", the Coptic clergy did not share Labib’s Egyptological interests. The hellenized pharaonic first name of a younger student, Sesostris Sidarus, suggests his parents had classical or Egyptological interests.17

16Reform and archeology could work at cross purposes, however. Like the early Christians who defaced or plastered over pharaonic temples, Protestant missionaries denounced the icons in Coptic churches. Amba Kyrillus IV made a bonfire of old icons and forbid new ones when he rebuilt St. Mark’s. In 1869 in Asyut, Coptic youths close to the American missionaries read of Gideon’s overturning the altar of Baal and destroyed the icons of a Coptic church. They had to make restitution, but Simaika observed that before long "picture worship almost entirely ceased."18

Coptic Reform under The British Occupation

17Eighteen-year-old Simaika’s English served him well when the British occupied Egypt. He found work as secretary to an English lady who ran a volunteer hospital for wounded officers, then in 1883 began his career in the State Railways. His choice was not unusual; 48% of Railway and Telegraph officials in 1911 were Copts.19

18The British occupation precipitated another Coptic reform attempt. The support of the Anglican’s Association for the Furtherance of Christianity in Egypt was hardly an asset; a lead speaker at an early meeting had railed against "the soul- destroying heresy of the Copts."20 Amba Kyrillus refused to preside over the Majlis Milli, which was disbanded once more in 1884.

19Boutros-Ghali, now a pasha and undersecretary of justice, again played a key role. He had attended the Prince Fadil school (on whose estate Ghali’s father worked), Kyrillus IV’s school in Harat al-Saqqa’in, and the state’s School of Languages. At home in Turkish, Arabic, French, English, and Italian, he mediated between the state and the Copts, the British and the Egyptians. Ghali bought up royal estates at Inshas, Sharqiyya, and served in the cabinet from 1893 until his assassination in 1910.21

20In 1890 a Tawfiq Society (not named for the Khedive) began the fourth reform attempt. Simaika was elected to the Majlis Milli, but Amba Kyrillus again refused to recognize the body. Baring, Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi, and Boutros-Ghali agreed to exile him to a monastery in Wadi al-Natrun. A backlash developed, Riad Pasha replaced Fahmi as prime minister, and Kyrillus’ triumphal return was seen as a blow to British prestige. It was rumored that an Anglican priest consulting manuscripts at the patriarchate — Cromer, Ghali, and Simaika had helped arrange things — was the agent of a projected Anglican takeover of the Coptic Church. The Patriarch replaced the Majlis Milli with a docile four-man committee, and "no one dared speak of Reform."22 As a sop to the opposition, however, several schools were founded and the Clerical College reopened, but with a weak staff.

21In 1895 the reformers acquired a newspaper to counter the pro-patriarchal al-Watan, which Mikha’il Abd Al-Sayyid had run since 1877. Boutros-Ghali persuaded Tadrus Shanuda Al-Manqabadi — of the Tawfiq Society and the late Majlis Milli — to edit Misr, which was both reformist and pro-English. After 1900 the Patriarch and the new owner of al-Watan came round to supporting the British occupation.23

22The aborted Coptic reform of the 1890s had parallels at Al-Azhar, where Abbas II, after an initial interest in reform, put in a conservative Shaykh Al-Azhar. Muhammad Abduh eventually despaired of reform and resigned from the Azhar council. The long struggle of the state to wrest control of Muslim awqaf from the ulema also resembles the Majlis Millis’ contest with the Patriarch over waqf.24

Simaika and the Coptic Awakening to Archeology

23Mariette’s successor Maspero (1881-1886, 1899-1914) set a room aside in the Egyptian Museum for Coptic antiquities and during his second term, the first scientific excavation of Coptic sites began.25 Somers Clarke, however, described a bleaker picture between Maspero’s two terms:

24"The mental attitude of the Egyptologist towards any study of Egyptian Archaeology, excepting along his own lines, was at that time as unscientific as it was discouraging. The Director-General of Antiquities could speak only with disdain of "les méchants Coptes". He was guilty of cruelty and absolutely needless barbarities at Medinat Habu. One of the courts of this ponderous and impressive building had, at a remote period, been turned into a church. Monolithic columns had been erected and an apse constructed for the reception of the altar. This page of history did not please the gentleman who was director-general at that time, so out the evidences must come. At no little trouble and cost the monoliths were dragged away. And not only so, but no plans, drawings, or notes were published. We must now, to find out how the Christian community had tried to rearrange the court to suit its own uses, refer to a plan in the Description de l’Egypte."26

25"Day by day," wrote A.J. Butler in his Ancient Churches of Egypt in 1884, Christian antiquities "are perishing, unknown to western travellers, and little regarded by the Copts themselves; and nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done since to rescue them from oblivion, or to save them from destruction."27

26Simaika had his work cut out for him. As a boy he loved visiting the Egyptian Museum, Giza, Saqqara, and Cairo’s mosques and churches. Before the dust of the British invasion settled, he was escorting his employer, the Viscountess Strangford, around the sights. He learned about his country’s antiquities from Murray’s Handbook of Egypt and later Baedeker. "Although painful to my patriotic feelings", he wrote, "I must confess that we are indebted to Europeans and especially to the French, for the discovery, the scientific study and the restoration of these monuments."28

27In 1890 Simaika visited Butler, who had thanked Simaika’s brother for assistance with his Ancient Churches, in Oxford.29 Butler introduced Simaika to Somers Clarke, an architect who restored English cathedrals and later retired to Egypt and wrote Christian Antiquities in the Nile Valley (1912). Simaika warned that notables were replacing ancient churches with "tasteless buildings" in modern Greek style decked out in Italian marble. The patriarch and Boutros-Ghali did not care. Clarke dashed off a letter to the Times, and the spring of 1891 found Simaika showing Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer) Cairo’s churches and pressing him to entrust their preservation to the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l’Art arabe (hereafter "the Comité").30 Long after, Simaika dedicated his guide to the Coptic Museum to Butler’s and thanked him for the inspiration to bring the Comité in and for founding the museum.31

28Khedive Tawfiq had founded the Comité in 1881 under pressure from European enthusiasts of Arab (i.e. Islamic) art. In 1894 the Comité proposed taking over the care of Coptic churches and monasteries, and two years later it offered to spend L.E. 2.000 of state money on them if the church would contribute as well. Grudgingly, the Patriarch gave way. Minister of Public Works Husayn Fakhri, the dominant Europeans, and two Armenians then joined to pass a Comité resolution to add two Copts. An all-Muslim opposition faction voted "no", saying one was enough. One European’s proposal to change the name to the Comité de conservation des monuments des arts arabes et coptes went too far and was voted down.32

29The Patriarch’s only consolation, wrote Simaika, was keeping him off the Comité. Simaika blasted one of the appointees, Nakhla Al-Barati, for demolishing a tower of the Roman fortress of Babylon to make a grander entrance for the Mu’allaqa Church and for jumbling screens and icons of various eras together in the Church of St. George. Simaika often joined Somers Clarke, an honorary Comité member, and architect Max Herz to recommend Comité repairs on Coptic monuments.33

30Simaika came to realize that he faced a stark choice. He could keep pushing for communal reform or he could repair his relationship with the Patriarch in hopes of a seat on the Comite and permission to build a Coptic Museum. In 1893, he had been one of only two Majlis Milli hardliners who refused to sign Boutros-Ghali’s petition to recall the Patriarch from desert exile.34 Now he changed his mind. He put reform on the back burner and began working on the Patriarch. In 1905, Simaika got his seat on the Comité, and three years later he got his museum.

31Other laymen of Simaika’s generation also awoke to the Coptic past. Misr editor Tadrus Shanuda founded a Society for the Preservation of Coptic History in Asyut in the 1880s and translated Butcher’s History of the Church in Egypt to Arabic. Mikhail Sharubim wrote a four-volume Arabic History of Ancient and Modern Egypt which started with the Egyptians’ descent from Noah but soon moved onto more solid historical ground with the First Dynasty and marched steadily forward. Claudius Labib learned Coptic at the Patriarchal School and hieroglyphics while working in the Antiquities Service. Maspero’s successors after 1886 discouraged aspiring Egyptian Egyptologists, and Labib left in 1892 to teach. As professor of Coptic at the Clerical College, he published Coptic and Arabic religious books for the Patriarch, began a Coptic dictionary, and published a magazine in Coptic and Arabic (Ayn Shams, 1900). He even gave his six children pharaonic names and insisted that they speak Coptic at home.35

Coptic Reform, Communal Tension, and Egyptian Nationalism, 1905-1910

32Coptic communal reform and the founding of the Coptic Museum usually pass unnoticed in accounts of Egypt’s crowded years from 1905 to 1910. Boutros-Ghali became the first Coptic prime minister in 1908, the year after Cromer retired. Nationalists attacked him as a procooperating with the British, but he was hardly alone. Misr, al-Watan, and Asyut landowner Akhnukh Fanus defended the occupation, and the Patriarch hung portraits of Edward VII and George V in his reception hall.36 Fanus, a graduate of the Syrian Protestant College and a Protestant himself, used his Coptic Reform Society and the Party of Independent Egyptians, which grew out of it, to press for official concessions to the Copts. Other Copts made wiser choices. Wisa Wasif and Murqus Hanna joined Mustafa Kamil’s Watani Party, and Fakhri Abd al-Nur and Sinut Hanna joined Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid’s Umma Party. Lutfi al-Sayyid and Kamil both insisted that Muslims and Copts were a single nation. After Kamil’s death in 1908, Watanist-Coptic relations deteriorated, and Boutros-Ghali’s assassin was a Watanist. The Coptic Congress which Fanus and others organized in Asyut shortly after the killing year further aggravated Muslim- Coptic relations.37

33Meanwhile, the Coptic community had undergone another wave of reform. Disturbed by the mismanagement by the patriarch’s four-man committee, al-Watan and Misr joined in calling for a new Majlis Milli in 1905. The Majlis Milli was restored, and Simaika re-elected. He now put much of the blame for the 1892-93 clash on the patriarch:

34Unfortunately, instead of showing some consideration for the wishes of the Patriarch by avoiding the controverted points and devoting ourselves to other much- needed reforms, we pursued a rather violent policy. A serious struggle ensued between the Council, supported by the mass of the people, and the Patriarch, who had on his side the bishops, most of the clergy and a certain section of the Community.38

35"Occasionally the Patriarch can," remarked an English writer, "by the gentle and tactful persuasion of such a man as Marcus Simaika Pasha, be wooed a little into the way of reform."39 But many years later his memoirs vented long-suppressed complaints about Kyrillus V: the Patriarch tolerated rampant clerical corruption, channelled church money to his relatives, tried alchemy to obtain gold to build new churches, and had Simaika dig for buried treasure under the altar of an Old Cairo church.40

36Ghali’s murder led the Copts to close ranks, and Lord Kitchener, working through Qalini Fahmi, arranged a compromise in 1912 whereby four appointed clerics sat with eight elected laymen on the Majlis Milli. World War I and the 1919 revolution further postponed Coptic communal reform.41

37By 1900 Simaika had established himself as a main liaison between the Patriarch and occupation authorities and visiting clergymen. As early as 1886 Simaika had gotten Baring and educational adviser Douglas Dunlop to allow an English instructor to teach after hours in the Patriarchal School. Scarcely an Englishman who visited Egypt and wrote on the Copts failed to thank Simaika for his help. Simaika persuaded Cromer to subsidize Coptic schools inspected by the state, and he had educational adviser Douglas Dunlop replace one of Kyrillus’ favorites as head of the Clerical College with a French-educated reformer.42

38Simaika moved from communal to national politics as an appointed member of the Legislative Council (1906-13) and the Legislative Assembly (1914). The other Copts in the Assembly were Qalini Fahmi, future Wafdists Sinut Hanna and Kamil Sidqi. Around the time of World War I, Simaika became a pasha.43

The Coptic Museum and Coptic Identification with Antiquity

39It was no accident that it was a layman who redefined discarded church relics as valuable antiquities and founded the Coptic Museum. The Patriarch and most of the clergy had yet to benefit from educational reform. They derived their legitimacy from personal piety and their apostolic succession from St. Mark. Preserving and displaying ancient objects other than holy relics did not interest them. "I wish I could say," an Englishman commented when the Coptic Museum was already six years old, "that the Patriarch himself had anything like a proper appreciation of the treasures still left to his sadly depleted church."44

40In contrast, the newly educated, vocal, and prosperous laity increasingly felt the need to reach back past the living "medieval" church tradition and imagine a glorious ancient past. Pious Copts and Muslims alike had usually shunned identification with the idolatrous past, but now the continuity of Egypt’s history was re­established. That the Copts were "modern sons of the pharaohs"45 was a commonplace understanding among European writers, with archeologists like Maspero, Flinders Petrie, and A. Sayce lending their scholarly support. Petrie and Sayce even pushed the idea to the dangerous extreme of declaring that only Copts had the ability to lead modem Egypt forward.46 Did not the word "Copt" itself derive from the word "Egypt"? Had Champollion shown that Coptic was merely the latest form of the ancient Egyptian language? Among the Coptic laity at least, enthusiasm for Egyptology and for Coptology often went hand in hand, and both easily flowed over into territorial Egyptian nationalism. To laymen like Simaika, the dichotomy between Christianity and paganism was no longer a chasm.

41The Egyptians were among the first nations to adopt Christianity, which offered great similarities to their old religion. The Redeemer Christ recalled the old legend of the good and generous Osiris who had also died as a victim of evil, and who rose again to enter Eternal Life. The Holy Trinity and the judgement of the dead are similarly familiar to ancient Egyptian religious traditions.

42One step more bound Copts and Muslims together as a nation. Most Egyptian Muslims descended from Copts, Simaika said, and "all enlightened Muslims" — he cited Qasim Amin — agreed. All Egyptians are Copts, he later declared. Though some were Muslim and others Christian, all were descended from the ancient Egyptians.47

43Like Tahtawi eighty years earlier, Coptic writer Salama Musa discovered his presumed pharaonic roots while in Europe. Embarrassed by questions on ancient Egypt he could not answer, he returned home and rushed off on a tour of Upper Egypt. Family lore has it that Makram Ubayd became interested in Egyptology while in France. With Muslims like Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid -and pioneer Egyptologist Ahmad Kamal also promoting identification with the pharaohs, the stage was set for the political, artistic, and literary movement of pharaonism after World War I.48

44The titles Copts chose for their journals illustrate their growing interest in antiquity. The Syrian Christian Taqla brothers preempted "The Pyramids" (Al- Ahram, 1876), but the titles Al-Watan (1877) and Misr both suggest emerging territorial patriotism. Other Coptic journal titles were specifically pharaonic: Ra’msis (Rameses, 1893), Fir’awn (Pharaoh, 1900), Claudius Labib’s Ayn Shams (1900) and Al-Athar al-Misriyya (Egyptian Antiquities, 1909), and another Ra’msis (1911).49

45Pharaonism had no attraction for Amba Kyrillus V. Neither did Coptic antiquities, but he authorized the Coptic Museum in return for Simaika’s helping him control the more vociferous reformers of the Majlis Milli. Without his consent there would have been no museum, since its land and much of its collection was waqf.

46The Coptic Museum was the last link in an unbroken chain of Egyptian history from the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Museums to the Museum of Arab Art. The other three were state museums, and it was Europeans who took the initiative in founding them. But an Egyptian founded the Coptic Museum, which belonged to the Church, not the state. The idea went back at least to 1897, when Comité architect Max Herz suggested that the carved capitals and other neglected Coptic relics he saw when inspecting churches be collected, with the Patriarch’s permission, as a nucleus for a museum: "Arab Art has its museum; Coptic art is still waiting its own."50 It is unclear whether this collection materialized before 1908.

47The Museum could not have found a more historic setting: next to the Mu’allaqa Church in Old Cairo (Fustat), with the church of St. Sergius — the Holy Family’s place of refuge in Egypt — and other churches nearby. Armed with the patriarch’s mandate, Simaika scoured churches, monasteries, and ruins "from Rosetta to Khartoum",51 paying the Church a nominal price for objects he selected. No funds came from the Church itself. Lay notables, an occasional clergymen, future Sultan Husayn Kamil, cabinet ministers and British advisers, and Simaika’s fellow Legislative Council members contributed. The state also chipped in an annual subsidy of L.E. 200, which was raised to L.E. 300 in 1918, L.E. 1 000 in 1925, and L.E. 1 500 in 1930.52

48The modest museum soon became a locus of Coptic pride and a symbol of the solicitousness of Egypt’s Muslim rulers for their Coptic subjects. In 1910 ex-president Theodore Roosevelt condemned the killing of Boutros-Ghali, berated the nationalists, and praised the British in a speech at the Egyptian University. Coptic notables thanked him by inviting him to the Museum. Qalini Fahmi revealed his attitude toward antiquities by suggesting presenting the most precious manuscript to Roosevelt, but Simaika immediately quashed the idea. In 1923 King Fuad stopped by with King Victor Emmanuel III and his queen in tow.53

Simaika and Coptic Communal Reform, 1919-1944

49The national uprising of 1919 brought Coptic communal reform into firm alignment with the quest for national independence for the first time. Influential Copts — Boutros-Ghali’s son Wasif, Marqus Hanna, Wisa Wasif, and Makram ‘Ubayd — joined Sa‘ad Zaghlul and the Wafd and transformed themselves from communal into national politicians. Secular nationalism offered a way out from clerical domination and the cramped world of communal politics. They bent so far in the national direction that Simaika complained about Coptic deputies, senators, and ministers "who never opened their mouths when bills of vital importance to the Coptic community... are discussed..."54 Wafdist Copts denounced proportional representation for minorities as the 1923 constitution was being drafted, and during the free elections of the 1920s and 1930s which produced Wafdist majorities, the Copts fared quite well without proportional guarantees.

50With the 1919 uprising, Misr dropped its support for the occupation, added Muslims to its staff, and became a national Wafdist paper. The Wafd won a base in the elected Majlis Milli, where its clash with the church hierarchy loosely paralleled its contest in parliament with the absolutist palace. As a rule, Wafdist governments favored Coptic (and Muslim) communal reform, and pro-palace governments did not.

51Simaika, the Patriarch, and Al-Watan were not among the Copts who came out for the Wafd in 1919. Two months before the uprising in March, Simaika confided to the British that he preferred the British to the Muslim yoke, and that he had no faith in Muslim justice.55 Ambassador Miles Lampson later offered unfair but not uninformed notes on Simaika: "Often in past arbiter between Coptic reformers with whom his sympathies lay, and the reactionary patriarchate." "After a brief disappearance under the waves of the Independence movement, he emerged to try and form a Moderate party, to oppose the chauvinism of Zaghlul." "He ratted from the Coptic reforming party in December 1927 and favoured the reactionary cause in the matter of succession to the Patriarchal Throne, probably with the good of his beloved museum in view. His was a notable defection." Simaika thus supported the king’s candidate, who became Patriarch Yu’anis XIX in 1928. "His Beatitude stands for all that is reactionary and corrupt in the Coptic Church."56 In 1942, he also backed the conservative candidate (the future Yusab II) over the winning reform candidate (Makarius III, 1942-1944).57

52Simaika once called on Zaghlul to thank him for a favor to the Copts, but he was no Wafdist. His brother Wasif Simaika served in the 1920s cabinets of Tharwat and Adii Yakan, Liberal Constitutionalist who seceded from the original Wafd. Simaika also had ties to Isma’il Sidqi, whom he saw at "old boys" reunions of the Frères school.58 Sidqi’s authoritarian palace government named another brother, Abdallah Simaika, to the Senate in 1931, where his colleagues included anti- Wafdists such as Faris Nimr, Qalini Fahmi, and Yu’anis XIX. Thus Simaika after 1919 continued to rely on personal ties to reactionary patriarchs while cultivating new contacts with the palace and its anti-Wafdist allies. Qalini Fahmi and Tawfiq Doss were King Fu’ad’s favorite Coptic political fixers.59

53As vice president of the Majlis Milli, Simaika was harsher on that body than on the Patriarch. He complained that members viewed their service as a form of corvée, often failing to produce a quorum. Women in divorce and alimony cases might come great distances for a hearing at its meetings yet have to be put off. He instead recommended professional judges under joint church-ministry of justice supervision. He also criticized the Majlis Milli for mismanaging those church waqf lands which it did control.60

54From 1926 to 1928 an unusual Liberal Constitutionalist-Wafdist coalition made the most serious pre-1952 attempt to reform Coptic and Muslim communal institutions. The government wrested the appointment of the Shaykh al-Azhar from the king and put in a reformer, Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi. There was animated discussion of reforming or abolishing ahli (private) waqf, although no legislation resulted. Parliament also reaffirmed the right — hitherto resisted by the Patriarch — of the Majlis Milli, elected by universal male suffrage, to oversee church and monastery waqfs, personal status law, and schools. Parties and newspapers across the spectrum, Muslims and Copts, the palace, the British, and Anglican authorities all backed the Majlis Milli law. Only the leaderless upper clergy — Kyrillus was on his deathbed at 103 — objected.61

55The reformers‘ celebration was short-lived. King Fu’ad lured the Liberal Constitutionalists into an illegal palace government in 1928 and aligned himself with conservative Muslim and Coptic religious leaders. He replaced al-Maraghi at al-Azhar and overrode the Majlis Milli to force the election of Patriarch Yu’anis XIX (1928-42). Later, Isma’il Sidqi’s palace government named Yu’anis to the Senate despite the protests of the Majlis Milli and Misr.62 Later pre-1952 attempts to continue communal court and waqf reform bogged down, and the Majlis Milli- Patriarch stalemate continued.

The Coptic Museum: From Communal to National Institution

56The main political issue at the Coptic Museum in the interwar period was whether the state should take over the institution. King Fuad used lavish cultural patronage in his bid to build a strong monarchy in the political space England vacated in 1922. He seized every occasion he could to sponsor museums, international congresses, publications projects, and cultural and charitable societies.63 The Coptic Museum would be one more display of Egypt’s cultural progress under his enlightened patronage. From the Coptic side, the three parties concerned — Simaika, the Patriarch, and the Majlis Milli — had to weigh the costs and benefits of nationalization. Keeping the Museum under the Church would be more in line with the old millet way of thinking; nationalizing it would fit in with the belief that the state should treat Copts as individual citizens like everyone else.

57Fu’ad’s opening bid came with a royal visit to the Museum in 1920. He donated L.E. 500 and invited his entourage to chip in. This raised over L.E. 2 000, a magnificent sum for a museum whose total income from all sources in the past ten years was only L.E. 3.680. That it took eleven years to close the deal may have been due to the stubborn Amba Kyrillus, who had outmaneuvered even Lord Cromer. Kyrillus’ death and the election of Amba Yu'anis' set the scene for the takeover. Yu’anis owed his post to King Fu’ad, and Simaika had abandoned the reform party and backed the king’s choice for Patriarch. Fu’ad grew impatient with further delay. In 1930, while showing King Albert I of Belgium through the Museum, Fu'ad snapped at Simaika: "The State is above individuals, so why do you not hand over the Museum as I asked you to do?" 64

58Simaika knew how to deal. In 1928 he lobbied parliament for L.E. 40.000 to fund the Comite’s repairs on the mosque of Ibn Tulun, then deftly slipped in a request for L.E. 4.000 to replace the collapsed roof of the St. Barbara Church. Minister of Finance Muhammad Mahmud balked, so Simaika invited Minister of Communication Makram Ubayd, who normally took little interest in either antiquities or Coptic affairs, to tour the Coptic Museum. Ubayd, did so and offered a L.E. 10 donation. Simaika declined, asking instead that Ubayd use his influence to get the L.E. 4 000 approved. He did, and the Comite executed the repairs.65

59On one occasion Simaika had not hesitated to join his Muslim colleagues on the Comité in opposition to his European friends. In 1925 he defended a Muslim employee of the Museum of Arab Art who had been dismissed for covering up in a scandal involving the curator, Ali Bahgat. The Europeans suggested that the official might not only have covered up but also have had a share in shady deals for profit. Simaika rejected the suggestion outright: the man had suffered enough, and he was an excellent employee and "one of the rare Egyptians who love archeology."66 Simaika had no trouble holding his own as the only Copt on the Comité for much of the interwar period, even succeeding a European as chair of the key executive board which carried out the Comité’s repairs.67 During this period Simaika and his assistant Yassa Abd al-Masih, a Clerical College graduate, got the patriarch’s backing in conserving monastery manuscripts. They designated a room in each monastery the library, put the "most enlightened" monk in charge, shelved the manuscripts, and published the catalogues.68

60In 1931, the Department of Antiquities finally took over the Coptic Museum. The king got his cultural trophy. Amba Yu’anis got a commitment that church waqf rights would be honored and the right to name four Museum officials. Simaika was confirmed as curator, got funds for a new wing, and later worked out the transfer of Coptic materials from the Egyptian Museum. If Simaika, King Fu’ad, the Patriarch, and Prime Minister Isma’il Sidqi were pleased, the Majlis Milli was not. Demanding a say in Museum appointments, it had the Museum locked and its records transferred out of reach. Prime Minister Sidqi was not one for half-measures. He sent a truckload of soldiers, changed the locks, and reinstalled Simaika. Sidqi’s visit to the

61Museum in January 1932 symbolized the completed transfer. Simaika liked the new arrangement, although opening the new wing was delayed until after his death. A bust of him was unveiled on the occasion. King Fu’ad would have savored the occasion in person for the applause; King Faruq sent a substitute.69

62Despite the reformism of his youth and his private grumbling about unenlightened Patriarchs, Simaika had chosen the Comité and the Coptic Museum over social reform when the chips were down. Like Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Simaika had backed secularizing reforms which would not threaten the social class from which he had sprung.70 A leading Coptic notable and a pasha, he grew more conservative as he aged, but the political spectrum was also moving left. Social reform and archeology, in Simaika’s case at least, had parted company.

Mirrît Boutros-Ghali and Social Reform

63In the year that Simaika turned seventy, 1934, twenty-six-year-old Mirrît Ghali and his friends took up the cause of Coptic archeology. Ghali was the moving spirit behind the Société des Amis de l’art copte, soon to become the Société d’archéologie copte. For Ghali as for Simaika, Coptic archeology and social reform — past glory and the change essential to modern revival — were implicitly linked: "It is a good omen that the beginning of the reign of our noble king has coincided with the dawn of our national independence, after centuries of expectancy. The reign of Farouk I is the connecting link between the greatness of Ancient Egypt and the hopes we entertain for Modern Egypt."71

64But Ghali’s idea of social reform was not Simaika’s. Simaika’s agenda of the 1890s, and that of the Majlis Milli notables until the 1950s, was secularist, anticlerical, and confined to Copts — to transfer the oversight of waqfs, schools, and personal status law from the clergy to the elected laymen of the Majlis Milli. Liberalism, secularism, and efficiency were at issue, not the social distribution of wealth. With landlords and wealthy professionals dominating the Majlis Milli as they did the parliament, any hint of redistributing wealth was cut short.

65A landowner with industrial investments and scion of a famous family, Ghali was no radical. His great uncle was the assassinated prime minister, his father Najib a pasha and cabinet minister, his uncle Wasif Boutros-Ghali — who wrote French poetry — the Wafd’s perennial foreign minister through 1937, and the current secretary-general of the United Nations is his cousin. Mirrît Ghali was born in 1908, took a French law degree, married a Swiss woman, became a bey, and twice sat in parliament. He joined all the right clubs: Gezira Sporting, Muhammad Ali, Royal Automobile, Royal Hunting, and Royal Fencing.

66Yet he was an aristocrat with a conscience, or at least a political realist. Coming of age during the Great Depression, his circle were the youthful, reform-minded minority wing of the upper class. Unlike Simaika, his vision of social reform went beyond the Copts to the nation and included some redistribution of wealth.

67In 1938 Ghali laid out his ideas in Policy for Tomorrow, dedicating it to his friend Ibrahim Bayumi Madkur. The book became the starting point for the lecture and publication program of the National Renaissance Society (Jama’at al-Nahda al- Qawmiyya) from 1944 to 1949. Ghali, Madkur, and a dozen others, Muslim and Copt, belonged. They had ties to Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, Bahi al-Din Barakat, Sa’dist politicians, and — though they did not join his Egyptian Front — Ali Mahir.72

68Ghali urged swift action to defuse the mounting socio-economic crisis which he believed threatened the existing order. "Some dozens of families" lived in luxury while most were mired in poverty.73 Education, agriculture, health, industry, and housing all needed urgent attention. Once the national question was resolved by the 1936 Treaty with Britain, the Wafd had missed the chance for a frontal attack on social and economic problems. In 1944 Ghali’s wife Gertrude saw rural misery first­hand as a volunteer combating a malaria epidemic in Upper Egypt.74 Her companions were mostly wives of aristocratic, anti-Wafd politicians; the Wafd government was trying to keep the epidemic hushed up.

69By 1947 Ghali believed that workers, junior officials, and the younger generation of all classes considered some redistribution of national wealth imperative. A progressive income tax could assist inheritance in breaking up landed estates over 100 feddans, an appropriate maximum holding. Three feddans seemed the minimum holding necessary to support a peasant family. Tax exemptions to encourage land reclamation should have a twenty year limit, and ahli waqfs should be abolished. Ghali knew that in 1944 a senator had lost his seat merely for proposing a cap on future land acquisitions except by inheritance, but he hoped that the danger of an upheaval might bring parliament round. Scathing as his indictment of current misgovernment was, Ghali retained a 19th-century liberal’s skepticism about government intervention in the economy and trusted mainly in Egyptian and foreign private enterprise.

70Ghali had helped put land reform on the national agenda, and from July to September 1952 it seemed he might have a chance to act on his ideas. He became minister of municipal and rural affairs in al-Hilali’s cabinet of July 22, 1952, only to have the Free Officers sweep in the next day. The officers did call Ghali to consult on land reform, but his proposals — too radical a short while ago — were now too conservative. Nasser turned instead to Rashad al-Barrawi, an economics professor at Alexandria, who worked out the September land reform decree limiting agricultural holdings to 200 feddans. On September 6 Ghali made it into the cabinet (at Rural Affairs) along with Ibrahim Madkur. But Prime Minister Ali Mahir had shown his hand by suggesting a 500 feddan-limit. The Free Officers forced him out on September 7 to make way for the ministry of General Najib.75

71Ghali and his class were squeezed out of public life. Years later he wrote that the debate about a pharaonic versus an Arab or Islamic identity for Egypt was artificial; no part of the national heritage should be denied. He also judged the attempt to unify all Arabs in a single state as no more sensible than trying to unite all speakers of English, French, or Spanish.76

72Coptic communal politics, meanwhile, remained stalemated until the late 1950s. The first reformist patriarch in ninety years, Amba Makarius III (1944-1946) managed to alienate both clergy and the Majlis Milli and did not live long in office. Amba Yusab II (1946-1955, d. 1956) was so corrupt that the clergy, Majlis Milli, and the government agreed to depose of him. In any case, the Free Officers broke the mold that had defined the Patriarch-Majlis Milli struggle for so long. They abolished ahli waqfs, tightened state control of private schools, and brought personal status justice and khayri waqfs under state control. Land reform and the nationalization of big businesses undercut the upper class, and the Majlis Milli and the parliament they had dominated disappeared for a time.

73In addition to his Coptic interests, Ghali was fully engaged in national issues. But as national politics took on a more Islamic tone in the 1930s, many Copts reemphasized their communal identity. In the 1940s, Salama Musa, once noted for his socialism and secularism, returned Misr to its origins as a Coptic communal paper.77 Habib Jirjis’ Sunday School movement fostered an educational and spiritual revival among clergy and laity alike. The monasteries were transformed by the entry of secondary school and university graduates and some who had had worldly careers. All ten candidates to succeed Amba Yusab were from the Sunday School movement.78

The Coptic Archeological Society 1934-1952

74The Society’s original name, "Les Amis des Eglises et de l’art coptes", reveals it as a Coptic variation on the Société des amis de l’art founded in 1924, with Prince Yusuf Kamil as president. A later president, Muhammad Mahmud Khalil, formed the collection of European paintings now housed in the national museum bearing his name. In 1947 the Friends of Art’s board, on which Ghali later served, included six pashas, six beys, and six Europeans. Families who had made their fortunes a generation or two back could now afford some cultural polish. Some sons of famous fathers became artists themselves: Wasif Ghali with his French poetry, architect Ramsis Wisa Wasif (the son of the Wafdist chair of the Chamber of Deputies), and painter Mahmud Muhammad Said (a prime minister’s son).79

75The ninety-odd Egyptian and Europeans who founded the Friends of Coptic Churches and Art included big landowners, professionals, and a few professional scholars. There were a dozen pashas, a score of beys, two amirs, and a handful of European nobility. There were five Muslims and over fifty Copts. Professional scholars who joined then or later included Egyptologists H. Junker, Salim Hasan, Sami Gabra, E. Drioton, Pierre Jouguet, Islamic art historians K. Creswell and Zaki M. Hasan, and modern historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal. Mirrît Ghali guided the society for over fifty years, and other members of his family were major donors.80

76Ghali honored Simaika with a board post, and his son Yusuf Simaika, a pasha and an irrigation engineer, long served as treasurer. Ghali’s mother, an Armenian from Istanbul, donated funds to frame icons for the Coptic Museum, and his father also gave to the Museum. Ghali’s addition to the Comité in the early 1940s gave Copts a second seat there alongside that of Simaika and his successors at the Museum.81

77Secretary general from 1936 until his death in 1957, Charles Bachatly persuaded the Society to change its name to "Société d’Archéologie Copte", defined research and publication as its main purpose, established a bulletin and a monograph series, and started a library. He organized a pioneering Exhibition of Coptic Arts, and directed the Society’s excavations at the Monastery of Phoebammon.82

78The 1950s brought hard times to many cultural institutions which survived the old regime, including the Coptic Archeological Society. It had no royal largesse to lose, but many European members emigrated, Egyptian donors fell on hard times, and the publications program suffered. A core of Egyptian members saw the Society through; ten of the fourteen men on the board in 1959 were twenty-year veterans.83 The Society made considerable contributions to Coptic studies over the years, but it remained a society of amateurs, unlike the Egyptian Geographical Society, for example. In the West, Coptology trailed Egyptology and Islamic art and archeology in emerging as a full-time specialty, a trend that was even more marked in Egypt.

79Coptic studies received some attention at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University as an adjunct to Egyptology, and Copts showed a real affinity for Egyptology. Georgy Subhi (1884-1964), a Coptic professor at the Faculty of Medicine, dissected many mummies with Elliott Smith and taught Coptic and demotic as adjuncts to hieroglyphics. The Department of Antiquities opened up to Egyptians after 1922, and the Egyptian University graduated its first class in Egyptology in 1928. The first three graduating classes were over half Copt, as were over 40% of the Egyptologists graduated from 1928 to 1950. The opening of an Islamic archeology section in the early 1930s drew off many Muslims, whereas Copts stayed with Egyptology.84

80Two early Egyptology graduates followed Simaika as heads of the Coptic Museum, Togo Mina (1944-1949) and Pahor Labib (1951-1965). Togo was named for the admiral who won the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, while "Pahor" was the pharaonic name Claudius Labib gave his son. The protracted arrangements for editing and translating the Nag’ Hammadi Coptic codices — discovered by a fellah in 1945 — were central concern during Mina’s and Labib’s tenure as directors. Mina’s arrival marked a turn toward professionalism, for he had done advanced studies in Europe and worked ten years as Simaika’s assistant. With a single exception, all later directors of the Coptic Museum have been Cairo University graduates in Egyptology. Their professionalism has usually been more Egyptological than specifically Coptic.85

81Two other Coptic Egyptologists stood out among the first three graduating classes, Labib Habachi and Girgis Mattha. Mattha followed Subhi in teaching Coptic and demotic at the University. Aziz Atiya (1898-1988), ten years older, came to Coptic studies by a different route. Graduating from the Egyptian University’s History Department, he went on to Europe for graduate work in medieval history, and taught at Alexandria University. He founded the Institute of Coptic Studies under the Patriarchate in 1954 just before emigrating to the United States, where he founded the University of Utah’s Middle East Center and edited the Coptic Encyclopedia.86

Conclusion

82Murqus Simaika and Mirrît Boutros-Ghali personify two stages of Coptic archeology, each related to a certain type of social reform and phase of the Copts’ revaluation of their past. Simaika’s early emphasis on Coptic archeology expressed the quest of a new class of educated and prosperous laymen for a version of the past which could legitimize their attempt to take over communal leadership from the pious but poorly-educated and inexperienced clergy. Tracing their pedigree back through nineteen centuries as a Copts and thence to the ancient Egyptians rooted them in a glorious past. They believed that they could recapture past greatness only if the landed, professional, and bureaucratic lay elites acted through the Majlis Milli to take over the administration of church and monastery waqfs, schools, and personal status law, confining the clergy to strictly spiritual leadership. American and British Protestants stimulated this vision of reform. Lord Cromer favored it passively but would not force the issue. The patriarchs and most of the upper clergy during this period showed little interest in the Coptic Museum and resisted reforms that would undercut their power. Forced to choose between social reform and winning the Patriarch’s support for the Coptic Museum, Simaika chose the Museum. King Fu’ad’s nationalization of the Museum in 1931 fits in with the Copts’ absorption into national life, but this came at the hands of an autocratic king and an old-fashioned patriarch, not of the Wafd and the elected Majlis Milli. This reflects the limits of democratization and secularization.

83Mirrît Boutros-Ghali’s Coptic Archeological Society shows that Simaika’s vision of a proud Coptic (and behind that, pharaonic) past had taken root among the lay notables of the community by the 1930s. Most favored the secularizing agenda of the Majlis Milli and thought of Copts as fellow members with Muslims of the Egyptian nation. The circles from which the Archeological Society drew its members were socio-economic conservatives, but Ghali represented a reformist minority who favored land reform and other changes to stave off a social upheaval. The old regime blocked even modest reform proposals in the 1940s, but Ghali and his Renaissance Society helped set the agenda for the Nasser regime.

84Ghali’s ideas proved too conservative for the Free Officers, however, and he and his class were forced out of public life. Like many cultural institutions from the old regime, the Coptic Archeological Society suffered from the departure of Europeans and the financial and political woes of its wealthy Egyptian members. Nasser undercut the old upper classes which had dominated the Majlis Milli and parliament, while transferring most of the Majlis' functions to the state. Identification with the Coptic and pharaonic past percolated down to the middle classes, however, and the Sunday School movement revived interest in the Coptic language, history, and communal identity among laymen and clergy alike. Archeology, history, social reform, and communal and national identity among the Copts would continue to be, as they had been for Simaika and Ghali, interlocking pieces of the same puzzle.