Parameters

The title of this chapter, ‘‘The Reception of Pharaonic Egypt in Islamic Egypt,’’ raises two problems of definition. The first is that of chronology. By historiographic convention, Egypt becomes Islamic in ad 640, when the Arab Muslim commander ‘Amr ibn al-‘jAs seized Alexandria and put an end to Byzantine rule. (In Arabic names, al - means ‘‘the,’’ ibn means ‘‘son of,’’ and Abii ‘‘father of’’; the latter two elements in particular cannot be omitted without causing confusion.) For centuries, however, Arabic-speaking Muslims remained a decided minority: the great majority of Egyptians were Coptic-speaking Christians. (It should also be noted in passing that at the time of the conquests ‘‘Muslim’’ probably did not mean exactly what it does today, since many of the beliefs and practices now considered inseparable from Islam appear to have crystallized at a later date.) As the Arabic sources make clear, the Christians - not only in Egypt but also in Syria and Iraq - had a rich tradition of stories about ancient Egypt. Clearly, then, the term ‘‘Islamic Egypt’’ should not be taken to imply that Muslims were the only people with something to say about Pharaonic history during this period.

If the so-called Islamic period began in ad 640, when did it end? There is no obvious answer. If the mere presence of Muslims suffices as a condition, then Egypt is decidedly still ‘‘Islamic.’’ Historians who require more precision speak instead of ‘‘pre-modern’’ and ‘‘modern’’ eras. In the pre-modern era, Egypt was subject to the caliphs of Medina (632-661), to the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus (661-750), and then to the Abbasid dynasty of (mostly) Baghdad. Al-Ma’mun, the alleged pyramid-breaker, was the seventh Abbasid caliph; he ruled from 813 to 833. Soon after his death, Egypt became virtually independent under a series of dynasties: the Tulunids (868-905), the Ikhshidids (935-968), and most notably the Shiite Fatimids (969-1171), who founded Cairo. The Fatimids were ousted by Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty, which held power until 1250, when Shajarat al-Durr, the first woman to rule Egypt since Cleopatra, was toppled by the Mamluks. The Mamluks, originally slave soldiers from Central Asia, ruled not only Egypt but also Syria and parts of Arabia, and they continued to govern Egypt even after it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1517. In 1798, Napoleon briefly seized control of the country. Nominal Ottoman rule was restored by a viceroy, Muhammad ‘All, whose accession in 1805 marks for some historians the beginning of the modern period. But there is no sense in which Egyptian Muslims stopped being Muslim in 1805 or any other year. Since the nineteenth century, Muslims have frequently been compelled to reflect on their religion in ways that their predecessors were not. But to declare that twentieth - or twenty-first century Egypt is no longer ‘‘Islamic’’ is in effect to decide the outcome of those deliberations on behalf of all Egyptian Muslims, some of whom, at least, would find such a declaration bizarre if not offensive.

At the end of this essay, I will return briefly to the question of when (or if) the so-called Islamic period can be said to have ended. For now, let us turn to the second problem raised by the title: the implication that the Arabic literature of Egypt can be studied on its own. In modern times, it doubtless can. In pre-modern times, however, Arabic literature was a trans-regional phenomenon. In the wake of the conquests, the Arabic language was adopted by members of different ethnic groups, at first as a means of communicating with their new rulers and later as a liturgical language by converts to Islam. Until the tenth century, Muslims everywhere wrote almost exclusively in Arabic, regardless of what their mother tongue may have been. Eventually, many non-Muslims, too, found it easier to write in Arabic than in their traditional Hebrew, Aramaic, Pahlavi, Greek, or Syriac. In modern scholarship, ‘‘Arabic literature’’ covers all of this material: that is, works written in Arabic regardless of the ethnicity or religion of their authors. (It is therefore distinct from ‘‘Islamic literature,’’ which properly refers to writings of a religious nature, not to writings by anyone who happens to be Muslim.)

With so many people contributing to it, it is hardly surprising that Arabic literature should include a great deal of material from other cultural traditions. Particularly important are the scientific, historical, and literary works translated into Arabic from Sanskrit, Middle Persian, Syriac, and Greek during the eighth and ninth centuries. Among the patrons of the so-called translation movement was the caliph al-Ma’mun, who hired Christian experts in Syriac and Greek to put the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, and others into Arabic for him (see further Cooperson 2005). Muslim scholars interested in the history of the ancient world had also recorded the oral traditions of many peoples, including Jews, Greeks, ‘‘Nabateans’’ (meaning, in this case, Christian speakers of Aramaic), Yemenis, Persians, and Copts. All of this material circulated freely wherever Arabic was used: that is, across a region that in the fifteenth century extended from Tabriz to Timbuktu. Thus it is that any survey of the Muslim reception of ancient Egypt must consider all of Arabic literature, not simply the part of it that happens to have been written in Cairo or Fustat. For example, the legend of Surld, the king who built the pyramids, is not an Egyptian story at all but rather an Iraqi one (Fodor 1970; Cook 1983). And two of the most famous Islamic-period writers on Egypt, al-Mas‘udi and ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, were both from Baghdad.