To understand the significance of this question—and because pre-Islamic Egypt’s profoundly Christian nature is often forgotten—a brief primer is in order:

Before Islam invaded it, Egypt was home to some of Christendom’s earliest theological giants and church fathers, including Clement of Alexandria (b. 150), Origen the Great (b. 184), Anthony the Great, father of monasticism (b. 251), and Athanasius of Alexandria (b. 297), the chief defender of the Nicene Creed, which is still professed by all major Christian denominations. The Catechetical School of Alexandria was the most important ecclesiastical and learning center of ancient Christendom.

Writing around the year 400, and further indicative of how thoroughly Christian pre-Islamic Egypt was, John Cassian, a European, observed that “the traveler from Alexandria in the north to Luxor in the south would have in his ears along the whole journey, the sounds of prayers and hymns of the monks, scattered in the desert, from the monasteries and from the caves, from monks, hermits, and anchorites.”

Some Europeans, such as the British historian and archaeologist Stanley Lane-Poole (d. 1931), even claim that Coptic missionaries were first to bring the Gospel to distant regions of Europe, including Switzerland, Britain, and especially Ireland.  Most recently, both the oldest parchment to contain words from the Gospel (dating to the first century) and the oldest image of Christ were discovered in separate regions of Egypt.

Accordingly, something very dramatic, very cataclysmic—namely, violent persecution, as made clear by page after page of A Sword Over the Nile, which chronicles fourteen centuries of Islamic rule—was responsible for transforming Christian Egypt into Muslim Egypt.

Should anyone consider the Coptic sources of being biased against Islam, it is worth noting that Muslim sources often confirm them.  For instance, in Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) authoritative history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving Coptic women and children—often with the compliance if not outright cooperation of the authorities.  The only escape then—as sometimes today—was for Christians to convert to Islam.

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