Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt provides a rigorous yet richly imaginative analysis of Egypt's Coptic community in the early modern period. The Ottoman conquest in 1517 brought to a close an era of intense religious persecution of Egypt's Copts under Mamluk rule. As Armanios explains, the nearly three centuries under Ottoman rule until the arrival of the French in 1798 nonetheless presented distinct challenges to Coptic identity, belief, and practice. Scholarly understanding of this critical transformative era in Coptic history, however, has long been limited by the paucity of primary source material. Armanios admits that, in stark contrast to the Mamluk and modern eras that preceded and followed, discussions of the Copts in Egyptian Muslim sources in the Ottoman era are so scarce that it at times seems that the Coptic community had, in her words, “simply disappeared” (9). In the face of this fundamental challenge, Armanios engages in a series of almost surgically tight readings of several sources that do survive in order to support a variety of arguments concerning critical transformations in Egypt's Coptic community, above all in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
To Armanios, the most consequential development in Ottoman-era Coptic society was the rise of wealthy lay elite leaders called “archons.” Ottoman rule from Istanbul tended to be indirect, with regional authority across Egypt falling mostly into the hands of local Muslim beys and Ottoman military officers, with elite Janissaries increasingly dominating these roles by the eighteenth century. Beys and army officers alike in turn depended heavily in their administrative functions on well-educated Coptic elites. From this privileged group emerged many individuals, termed archons, who played critical roles in shaping and preserving Coptic identity and community throughout the Ottoman period via their patronage and leadership in nearly all matters pertaining to Coptic culture and religious practice.
For the Coptic ecclesiastical hierarchy, by contrast, the Ottoman era tended to be a time of relative eclipse. To be sure, the Coptic Church in the Ottoman era continued to be headed at least in theory by a patriarch whose authority extended over a corps of bishops and priests. Armanios is careful not to dismiss entirely the roles of patriarchs and bishops, and she demonstrates particularly well in a chapter on eighteenth-century Coptic pilgrimages to Jerusalem the frequently interdependent rather than entirely competitive nature of the relationships between lay archons and upper clergy. Yet the Coptic ecclesiastical establishment comes across through most of the book as at least peripheral, and even at best reflexively defensive. The book's final thematic chapter, for instance, explores a series of eighteenth-century sermons by a patriarch and a bishop concerned above all with inoculating the Coptic flock against a fresh wave of conversions among Egyptian Christians reaped by western Roman Catholic missionaries to the region.
Easily the most engaging and exciting portions of the book are chapters 2 and 3, in which Armanios taps a handful of fairly brief but exceptionally rich texts pertaining to the roles of two martyr cults that enjoyed particular popularity among the Ottoman-era Coptic laity at large. The first involved devotion to a Coptic saint named Salib who in 1512 reportedly heroically faced martyrdom in the twilight years of Mamluk rule. According to Armanios, Salib's story was repeatedly told and retold among Copts in what was, judging by the nature of the surviving Ottoman-era Coptic copies of the story, particularly dramatic and colloquial Egyptian Arabic of the era. Armanios demonstrates too that Coptic devotees told Salib's tale in ways that, far from demonizing Muslims in general, included in the story numerous humane and sympathetic Muslim characters. Armanios reads these texts as evidence of the delicate balancing acts by which Egyptian Copts—led by the archons who were so closely tied to the governing elite—successfully worked in the Ottoman era to preserve their community amidst Egypt's overwhelmingly Muslim majority.
The second martyr cult involved mushrooming Coptic devotion through the course of the Ottoman era to an equally heroic saintly young woman named Dimyana. Dimyana was purportedly the daughter of an ancient Roman governor of the Nile Delta region who was said to have suffered martyrdom under Diocletian (although the earliest extant references to her life and death appear to be from a fourteenth-century Arabic language Coptic martyrology). Veneration of Dimyana among Copts skyrocketed in Ottoman era, and her annual festival in an isolated rural area of the eastern delta became especially in the eighteenth century a popular highlight of the Coptic devotional calendar. Through exceptionally close reading of documentary references concerning the Dimyana festival, Armanios develops a series of insightful arguments. For one, the festival itself was made possible only via security accords between Coptic archons who patronized the event and the bedouin groups who inhabited the region east of the festival site, as well as the area's Ottoman provincial military commanders—arrangements that further support the author's portrayal of Coptic-Muslim relations in Ottoman Egypt as negotiated rather than strictly confrontational. Even more significant is the insight the Dimyana festival provides into Coptic women's initiative in religious matters. Armanios contends that the Dimyana festival's broad popularity owed in part to the relatively open space that it provided for women's devotional expression. As was rarely the case in their daily lives elsewhere in Egypt, for instance, Coptic women often went about unveiled at the Dimyana festival, and they appear to have believed that the saint's protection shielded them during the festivities from any unwanted male attention.
On balance, this carefully crafted study reminds us that the sheer volume of sources available on a topic does not by itself determine the quality of the work. Via deep analysis of a limited corpus of available documentary sources, Armanios has succeeded in shedding important new light on a significant but heretofore little understood era in Coptic history.
