Talk:Coptic history

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Reconciling the dating of Egypt's demographic transition with the source cited for it.
I have made an edit to the section on the "Arab-Muslim Conquest of Egypt." Previously, this section made the following claim:


 * The Arab Muslim conquest of Egypt took place in 639. Copts were massacred during the conquest of the Rashidun caliphate. Despite the political upheaval, Egypt remained a mainly Christian land until the end of the 12th century.

The statement has a reference attached to it, which points to the following relatively recent, peer-reviewed scholarly source:


 * O'Sullivan, Shaun (2006). "Coptic Conversion and the Islamization of Egypt" (PDF). Mamluk Studies Review: 65–79.

So far so good. But I read through the paper referenced and I cannot find any support in the paper for the claim that "Egypt remained a mainly Christian land until the end of the 12th century." On the contrary, the author, Shaun O'Sullivan, considers a range of possible dates:


 * Chronological and demographic questions interested Wiet and his followers: when did the Copts become a minority in Egypt and the Muslims a majority, and what were the main stages in this process? To begin, they assumed that Coptic conversion to Islam was the main cause of demographic change in Egypt: Egyptian Muslims are thus mostly of Coptic ethnic origin. Next, they supposed that the Copts had converted in two waves—the first in the ninth century and the second in the fourteenth.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 65.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 65.

They survey the literature on this question and discuss one major scholarly contribution (Tamer el-Leithy's dissertation on Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo) which argues in favor of a relatively late date (Mamluk era, perhaps as late as the 14th century) for the transition from a Christian majority to a Muslim majority. But further down in the paper, O'Sullivan explicitly argues in favor of a much earlier date for the transition. They cite a Mamluk-period history by al-Maqrizi as evidence for an early date of transition, in the early 9th century:


 * On balance, then, it seems that the interpretations of Wiet and Fattal were correct. Al-Maqrizi states that the Muslims became a majority in Egypt during the ninth century, following the last Coptic revolt of 831. This is an extremely valuablepiece of information as regards when Islamization occurred.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 70.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 70.

O'Sullivan considers possible alternate readings of the pasages in Al-Maqrizi that are cited, but rejects those alternate readings in favor of reading it as a straightforward claim about the Muslim population beginning to outnumber the Christian population (69ff). O'Sullivan explicitly concludes toward the end of the paper that this is the correct date for the demographic transition from a Christian to a Muslim majority. (Unlike other scholars who favor an early date, O'Sullivan attributes the transition not to large-scale conversions, which he agrees in placing at a late date, but to the effects of depopulation in Christian communities, and immigration by people who were already Muslim.)


 * Islamization in Egypt was achieved within three centuries — on the one hand by the shrinking of Coptic numbers; and on the other, by the introduction of a Muslim element that was small at first but grew quickly, both in absolute terms and relative to the declining native population. Coptic conversion had a significant part in the growth of this Muslim element, but it was not the primary factor.
 * The Islamization of Egypt was thus achieved by the ninth century, but the early Mamluk period may be seen as a long-delayed conclusion to it, since it gave rise to the last and most important in an intermittent series of Coptic conversion-waves.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 78.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 78.
 * O'Sullivan (2006), p. 78.

As far as I can tell -- after reading the paper straight through, and after making repeated attempts to find any reference to this dating using the search -- O'Sullivan's paper does not at any point provide evidence either for or against the claim that the transition should be dated to "the end of the 12th century." All of the estimates mentioned in the paper -- at least as far as I can find -- are either centuries earlier than that dating, or centuries later. The statement that "Egypt remained a mainly Christian land until the end of the 12th century" may be true, for all I know (it's within the range of dates that scholars have considered), but that statement cannot possibly be supported by reference to Shaun O'Sullivan's paper.

The O'Sullivan paper is very interesting and lucidly written, and besides the author's own conclusions, it also includes a very useful literature survey of earlier and contemporary attempts to address the questions of when and how Egypt transitioned from a Christian majority. All of these sources agree that it was centuries after the conquest, but if O'Sullivan's literature review is representative, there seem to be a very wide range of dates advocated by different scholars. Given that O'Sullivan provides evidence that many historians favor a later date for conversion, it seems reasonable to state this in terms of a range of possible dates based on the differing views surveyed in the O'Sullivan paper. So for the time being I have rewritten the sentence to the following:


 * The Arab Muslim conquest of Egypt took place in 639. Copts were massacred during the conquest of the Rashidun caliphate. Despite the political upheaval, historians estimate that the majority of the Egyptian population remained Christian until somewhere between the 9th century and the middle of the 14th century.

I don't especially like leaving the question with such a wide-open, huge range of possible answers -- the statement now says that the transition happened some time or another within a range of over 500 years, which is not very clear or precise. But it may be that the best available evidence leaves the answer to the question question imprecise and debatable. In any case, that seems to be the most accurate NPOV gloss on what the O'Sullivan paper says about the consensus of scholars in history. If there is a good case to more precisely place the date of transition at "the end of the 12th century," or to any other specific period which is significantly later than O'Sullivan's own conclusion (which is that the transition had been achieved in or around the 830s), then that date will have to be supported by another, different scholarly source beside the one that the footnote reference currently cites.

Radgeek (talk) 20:55, 12 August 2020 (UTC)