The year 1952 serves as an important dividing line in modern Coptic historiography, demarcating the end of Coptic communal politics during Egypt’s liberal era (1923–52) and the new set of power relations that defined Coptic history under the republic. The predominant view presented by scholars of the Coptic community is that the Free Officers’ coup initiated the collapse of political pluralism on both the communal and national levels, replacing it with the “dual-authoritarian” leadership created by the partnership between President Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1956–70) and Coptic Pope Kyrillos VI (r. 1959–71). Mariz Tadros defines this dynamic most assertively, claiming that “in 1952 an entente was forged between the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Egyptian government that provided the church with concessions in return for its political allegiance to the regime.”Footnote 1
Central to such narratives are arguments of targeted state suppression of lay leaders associated with the Coptic Communal Council, an elected administrative body with jurisdiction in communal affairs. Since the 1920s, the Communal Council had spearheaded the democratization of Coptic communal politics, in line with the parliamentary ideals that defined Egypt’s liberal era, and often at odds with the clerical hierarchy.Footnote 2 Championing a language of representative politics, the Communal Council challenged church authority in communal leadership and in the process fostered a pluralistic Coptic communal sphere in which both the laity and the clergy competed over who would best be suited to lead the community toward reform. In mainstream narratives of the Coptic 1950s, the trajectory of the lay elites and the Communal Council was one of decline at the hands of a church-state alliance, with land redistribution eroding the class of Coptic elites who made up the lay leadership, and a series of decrees under the early republic stripping the council of its prerogatives. Given this apparent rupture, the year 1952 and beyond frequently serve as an epilogue to liberal era Coptic historiography: a future-looking commentary on an already completed story.Footnote 3
Although historical hindsight certainly confirms the decline of the laity in favor of the clergy over the course of the Nasser era, a closer look at the early years of the republic provides a more complicated picture than that offered by the frequently employed shorthand of “post-1952 Egypt.” Most immediately evident, defining “post-1952” by the pope-president alliance obscures the fact that Nasser was not president until 1956, nor was Kyrillos pope until 1959. Moreover, the circumstances of Kyrillos’s ascension—coming in third in the first round of papal elections and then selected by drawing lots in the runoff—complicates any arguments for clear genealogy between 1952 and 1959. These seven years before such a partnership was even possible were more often than not defined by ambiguity as the regime consolidated power. Importantly, as Omar Foda’s study of the nationalization of the beer industry in Egypt shows, the trajectory of authoritarianism in Egypt was often a messy and ad hoc process, defined not by inevitability, but by day-to-day uncertainty and changes that elicited both optimism and anxiety.Footnote 4 Additionally, several scholars of Egyptian history have noted that the late liberal era and early republic were defined by important continuities, such as continued enthusiasm for the liberal order on the eve of the revolution, the struggle of old-regime figures after the coup, and the persistence of old-regime elites in the new political order.Footnote 5 Finally, narratives of the decline of the laity in the early republic suffer from the common shortcomings of decline theses more broadly: not that decline actually happened, but that the historical actors involved experienced decline as a tangible and inevitable process.
I offer a Coptic perspective for the historiographical reconsideration of rupture and continuity surrounding the early republic. I argue that post-1952 developments in the Coptic sphere were not an epilogue to the community’s liberal era experience, but instead constituted a continuation of the Coptic struggle for reform of the previous decades. I complicate communal narratives of lay decline by relying on a uniquely epilogic set of sources: press memorials for prominent Coptic laymen who died in the early Nasser era. Like the epilogues of books, memorials in the Coptic press were not mere conclusions remembering the lives of the deceased, but were a genre using the commemoration of death to extract further commentary from the ostensibly finished story of an individual’s life. This dynamic granted memorials a distinct storytelling form, allowing them to serve as platforms for expressing Coptic political values.
Memorials reveal the continued activity of the laity in the name of the liberal-democratic values that defined their struggles during the previous decades. Rather than expressing inevitable decline, these memorials voiced the hope of those invested in the lay reform movement for the post-1952 order as they sought out and even celebrated their ties to the Free Officers regime. Employing the memory of the deceased as a platform for continued struggle, memorials offer a unique source for exploring continuity in the face of apparent rupture, overcoming the power of outcomes to obscure the complex contestations that preceded them. Beyond challenging conventions in historical periodization, I argue that these memorials served as a mechanism for lay Copts to lay claim to a sense of belonging in a period of political uncertainty, aligning the future of communal affairs with a broader Egyptian revolutionary nationalist project.
I focus on the memorials of four men, all major institutional players in mid-20th-century Coptic affairs, who died and received the most significant memorial coverage between 1956 and 1958: Minister of Supply Gindy Abdel Malak (d. 1956); Misr newspaper co-owner Edward al-Manqabadi (d. 1956); former Communal Council wakīl Ibrahim Fahmi al-Minyawi (d. 1957); and the leftist intellectual Salama Musa (d. 1958).Footnote 6 Two doctors, a judge, and a journalist, these four men exemplified the professional and educational profile of the generation of Copts who shaped the era of lay-led representative politics. All but Abdel Malak had been educated abroad. Additionally, all four were of provincial origin and ultimately became involved in communal politics after relocating to Cairo. Finally, all four were men. Although Coptic death media in this period was not an exclusively male space, it did reflect the broader gender hierarchies within the community in that the only deceased who were prominent enough to receive significant memorial coverage were men.
These men all died in a critical two-year juncture in both communal and national power dynamics. Within the Coptic community, this period was defined by the ambiguous status of church leadership following the kidnapping, deposition, and death of Pope Yusab II (r. 1946–56) between 1954 and 1956. Elected as a reformist and a symbol of lay-clerical cooperation in 1946, by the 1950s Yusab was popularly associated with corruption amid accusations that members of his entourage were engaging in simony, leading to his brief abduction by Coptic youth in 1954, his removal from authority in 1955, and the subsequent unsteady exercise of leadership in the hands of a triumvirate of bishops in the patriarchal council and then the acting patriarch between Yusab’s death in 1956 and the election of Kyrillos VI in 1959.
Nationally, their deaths accompanied the consolidation of power by Nasser and the Egyptian nationalist and pan-Arab enthusiasm that prevailed on a popular level in Egypt between the 1956 Suez Crisis and the creation of the United Arab Republic in 1958.Footnote 7 This period likewise saw the rise of Nasser as the embodiment of the populist mood initiated by the 1952 coup.Footnote 8 As a time of revolution, the 1950s were more broadly a decade of making claims to history and grappling with questions of historical continuity and rupture, with death commemoration a key site of contestation.Footnote 9
At odds with narratives emphasizing a laity-hostile pope-president alliance, this was a period in which patriarchal authority was tenuous and lay enthusiasm for the president was high. These two years were likewise significant as the product of an accident of history—1956 to 1958 saw the highest concentration of prominent laymen to die and receive press commemoration in the early republic. As I flag in the biographical introductions to the four men, their lives and activities between 1952 and their deaths attest to the realities of lay influence in the politics of that period. At the same time, I am less interested in the fact or fiction of their lives. Rather, I approach these sources by looking at how their authors used narratives about the deceased to promote a specific communal agenda and to engage with their readers’ expectations.Footnote 10
I focus on the death coverage featured in the Coptic newspaper Misr. Misr was a core periodical of the vibrant Coptic press that came to maturity as a communal public sphere in the early 20th century. Coptic periodicals distinguished themselves as distinctly communal organs by featuring an overwhelmingly Coptic writing and editorial staff, focusing on communal issues, and explicitly indicating a Coptic readership, whether by addressing articles to Copts or by using the first-person plural when writing on communal issues to signal communion between readers and writers.Footnote 11 By the mid-1950s, Misr was the only Coptic periodical publishing daily, with most periodicals publishing monthly.Footnote 12 Although it did not have a monopoly on Coptic death media, Misr was the only Coptic periodical with the publishing infrastructure to print in the immediate aftermath an individual’s death.Footnote 13 This frequency aided Misr’s ability to engage with the unique elements that defined public memorialization of the dead. Misr additionally serves as an important source for its editorial line. More than any other Coptic periodical, Misr had for decades functioned as the paper of record for the lay reform movement, offering the space for lay writers and contributors to weigh in on the promises and shortcomings of lay involvement in communal affairs. By the 1950s, Misr was invested in the populist fervor that 1952 initiated, issuing calls for revolutionary purging in Coptic institutions as early as the summer of 1952.Footnote 14 Even before press censorship and the centrality of Nasser to Egyptian politics, Misr was devoted to the revolutionary and populist ethos of the 1950s.
Death Media in the Coptic Sphere
The field of death studies has shown that dying transforms the individual’s capacity for political claims-making by allowing others to speak on their behalf and by fixing them as ostensibly static symbols.Footnote 15 Death, in other words, transforms individuals from subjects of politics to the objects of political discourse. With its distinct relationship to time and intimate emotions, death translated into public media holds a unique political valence in its capacity to connect the past and the future and to provide space for individuals to negotiate their place in a broader collective.Footnote 16
I use “memorial” to refer to a style of death writing that blended eulogy, biography, and commentary on the life of the deceased. Distinct from the straightforward genre of Egyptian press obituaries, which were frequently limited to biographical sketches, condolences, and lists of relations, memorials more resembled the prose styles of feature writing than straightforward reporting.Footnote 17 Consisting of editorials and opinions, transcripts of spoken funeral speeches, and in one case, a ventriloquized deathbed interview, memorials were penned by a range of figures in the community, including staff writers, those close to the deceased, clergy, and prominent communal figures.
Although fluid in form, memorials at the same time had rules. Most significantly, they were bound by the Egyptian effendi value of respectful mourning of the dead.Footnote 18 The dictates of respectful mourning place obligations and restrictions on individuals to navigate between insufficient and excessive grief and to grieve according to appropriate social conventions lest they face public sanction.Footnote 19 This dynamic was well attested in the Egyptian press, with a notorious example occurring when a prominent lay Copt was publicly criticized in 1945 for dressing inappropriately for a papal funeral.Footnote 20 In the public forum of the press, respectability necessitated, in the words of Durham and Klaits, “concealments and disclosures” that “ideally make possible. . . a certain form of civility.”Footnote 21 This dynamic, I contend, is essential for reading memorials as platforms for political commentary, dictating what was said and unsaid in their pages, tempering their capacity for hyperbole, and conditioning how authors contended with the disappointing aspects of the deceased.
In line with Bridget Fowler’s suggestion that public death writing aims to harmonize with audiences’ “horizon of relevance,” I argue that the terms on which memorial writers chose to memorialize their subjects were indicative of what they believed their readership would consider respectful commemoration of the dead.Footnote 22 In this dialogue between writer and reader priorities, a collection of values defining Coptic communal politics comes into focus: a commitment to reform (iṣlāḥ), used just as often to refer to an abstract sense of progress as to specific communal functions; communal leadership in a representative capacity; ties to the revolutionary regime; and a willingness to challenge church authority. I argue that this configuration of values, voiced in the laudatory and respectful space of memorial writing, signals the extent to which Coptic writers of the 1950s saw the early Nasser era not as a rupture, but as a new stage in a continuing struggle for a reform-guided and pluralistic communal sphere.
Also within the Coptic readership’s horizon of relevance were the community’s traditions of the religious narratives of hagiography and martyrology. Alongside reporting on communal affairs, the Coptic press of the 1950s was replete with stories of saints and martyrs in Coptic history, affirming the legibility of saint writing conventions for the communal public. Although diverging from the idealized embellishments of hagiographies and the visceral descriptions of violent death often featured in martyrologies, Coptic memorials shared with these genres the narrative function of imparting a lesson from the life of the deceased through the hagiographical emphasis of exemplarity.Footnote 23 The elites in Coptic memorials were models to be followed and the agents of struggles that were to be continued.
Gindy Abdel Malak’s Descent to the People
Gindy Abdel Malak was born in the village of Miliij in Menoufiyya in 1888. After obtaining a degree in law in 1907, he pursued a legal career as both a practitioner and instructor, eventually rising to the vice presidency of the Court of Cassation.Footnote 24 During this time, he was an active member of the Communal Council, allying with reformist currents in the 1930s and 1940s and supporting lay-allied bishops in papal elections. Abdel Malak’s most prominent role in communal affairs came through his position in Nasser’s cabinet from 1954 to 1956. Abdel Malak assumed the office of minister of supply on 18 April 1954, in the aftermath of the “March crisis” between Nasser and President Mohamed Naguib that resulted in Nasser’s consolidation of power over the government and the purging of Naguib’s allies.Footnote 25 Although his official portfolio was supply, Abdel Malak was better known in his role as the unofficial “Coptic minister,” a status that, according to an observer from the British Embassy, meant that “he bears governmental responsibility for Coptic affairs.”Footnote 26
During his tenure as a minister, Abdel Malak used his elevated status to advocate for council-driven reform projects, voicing his support for shared lay-clerical administration of awqāf (endowment) revenues, a position he claimed represented the will of the people.Footnote 27 The most important role he played as minister came in the downfall of Pope Yusab between 1954 and 1955. Throughout this process, Abdel Malak acted as a state liaison to both the bishops and Communal Council members who moved to divest Yusab of his responsibilities and himself pressured the patriarch to form an advisory council. When the government eventually agreed to formally relieve Yusab of his authority, Abdel Malak made the official announcement of the decision.Footnote 28
Abdel Malak’s tenure as a minister is significant not only for the institutionalization of an unofficial Coptic minister in Nasser’s cabinets, but because Abdel Malak, as an active figure in the liberal era judiciary and as a member of the lay elite of the council, represented both the national and communal old guard. Although conventional narratives hold that Nasser actively sought to dismember the political power of these elites, Abdel Malak was a layman who reached the height of his influence as a Nasser appointee. Even though Nasserist policies may have facilitated the disintegration of these Coptic elites in the 1960s, in 1956 a figure like Abdel Malak could have Nasser personally attend his funeral.Footnote 29
These revolutionary credentials and ties to the state were prominent in Abdel Malak’s memorials. Misr’s initial editorial memorial portrayed Abdel Malak as a key partner in the revolution and praised him for bringing his commitment to communal affairs to the revolutionary government.Footnote 30 More romantically, the lawyer Riyad al-Gamal described Abdel Malak as “a hero among the heroes of the Egyptian revolution and a powerful aid among the soldiers of raʾis Gamal.”Footnote 31 Several memorials emphasized a personal relationship between Abdel Malak and Nasser, indicating that Abdel Malak was handpicked by Nasser due to his reputation, in anticipation of the role he would play in both communal and national affairs.Footnote 32 Frequently, authors used Abdel Malak as a symbol to link the revolutionary movement with the struggle for Coptic reform, drawing parallels between purging in the church and the state.Footnote 33 Memorials of Abdel Malak referred to reform as a primary goal of the revolution, with one memorial referring to the Free Officers’ coup as “the reformist revolution.”Footnote 34
The laudatory power of “reform” in the medium of memorials is well-attested in the coverage of Abdel Malak’s death. Writers portrayed reform as the guiding principle or doctrine of Abdel Malak in nearly every memorial article, with the late minister hailed as an exemplary model of a reformist.Footnote 35 Among the specific reforms that authors linked to Abdel Malak were awqāf administration, personal status law, and the governing dynamics of religious leadership. Language on reform often assumed a martial tone, with Abdel Malak referred to as a “soldier” in the name of reform, itself variously described as a “struggle,” “campaign,” or “battle.”Footnote 36 The journalist Fahmy Ishaq vividly wrote of Abdel Malak as “carrying the banner of struggle” in the intertwined Coptic and national efforts.Footnote 37 Importantly, writers portrayed Abdel Malak’s commitment to reform as not merely rooted in his own will, but as a response to popular demand of the Copts.Footnote 38
Abdel Malak’s most distinct links to reform were detailed through his institutional involvements. These included his years in the Communal Council, his membership in the Independent Coptic Committee established by the regime in 1953 to study Coptic affairs, and his final role as minister of supply. Several of Abdel Malak’s former colleagues in the council were the authors of his memorials, in which they remembered him as a pivotal character in the body’s history.Footnote 39 In a speech given at a memorial celebration nearly two months after Abdel Malak’s death, Communal Council wakīl Iskander Hanna Damian framed the deceased’s institutional career in a genealogy of liberal politics. According to Damian, the council served to represent “the power and the will of the people.” However, this current was obstructed by those in the community wishing to hold on to their old ways, inspiring a generation of men like Abdel Malak and Damian himself to struggle in the name of the people’s progress. Although Abdel Malak had retired from the council in 1950, Damian saw it as natural that he continued to take part in communal affairs as a government minister.Footnote 40 Damian’s speech reflected a common memorial theme, in which the revolution of 1952 did not mark a rupture, but a new stage in a struggle reaching back to the council’s foundation, linked by Abdel Malak’s decades of service.
Memorialists presented Abdel Malak not merely as a participant in the reform movement, but as a leader. Commonly, memorials pointed to his impartiality, fairness, and justice, stemming from his career in the judiciary.Footnote 41 Based on memorials, the most important example he set in leadership was his collective approach to decision-making. Iskander Damian and the journalist Yuwakim Ghubrial both noted the importance that Abdel Malak placed on consultation in his leadership and decision-making.Footnote 42 This did not merely entail engaging with fellow leaders and elites, but paying careful attention to popular demands. Misr columnist Kamil Abdel Sayyid related that in times of conflict between the people and the clergy, Abdel Malak “descended to the popular ranks of the people,” to be acquainted with their demands and to lead accordingly.Footnote 43 Using similar language, a Misr editorial exhorted the community’s leaders to follow Abdel Malak’s example and “descend to the people” in order to transform the Copts’ demands for reform into a popular awakening. This, according to the article, would fulfill Abdel Malak’s legacy: “The people weep for Gindy Abdel Malak because they saw in him the characteristics they desired in a leader. . . and because the reform that he sought to achieve in the end was strongly representing the view of the people.”Footnote 44 In this way, Abdel Malak embodied the democratic ideal of representative institutions among Copts, with his leadership envisioned as a conduit for popular sentiment. At the same time, as the language of “descent” indicates, this relationship was rooted in a clear hierarchy between the people and the leadership.
Death was not only an occasion to celebrate what the deceased stood for, but also to attack what he stood against.Footnote 45 Writers juxtaposed Abdel Malak, as an embodiment of reform, against a cast of antagonists that included corruption, reactionism, and chaos.Footnote 46 On the occasion of Abdel Malak’s forty-day memorial, deacon ʿAyad ʿAyad described the minister’s primary mission as halting corruption and chaos, exterminating them “roots and branches.”Footnote 47 In a notable article, the writer Yusuf Kamil compared Abdel Malak to the prophet Joshua, as a messenger of reform. Kamil referred to the seventh chapter of the book of Joshua, indicating that Abdel Malak’s death was a warning sign for those who would not abandon corruption.Footnote 48 Although the enemies of reform were frequently abstractions like corruption, when their authors cited specific agents, those agents were invariably the clergy. As such, Abdel Malak’s role in the ousting of Yusab was remembered as one of his most important acts in service of reform.Footnote 49
In fact, Abdel Malak’s role in the downfall of Yusab was not so clear-cut. Specifically, Misr editor Talaʿat Yunan’s open criticism of the minister’s initial stance in the affair exemplifies the redemptive utility of memorials. According to Yunan, in Abdel Malak’s early days as a minister, his approach to communal representation was based on respect for the occupant of the papal seat, and he endeavored to support the patriarch. Yunan bluntly recalled his strong disagreement, in which he claimed that he had expressed to Abdel Malak his view that a weak patriarch does not elevate the papal seat. Nonetheless, Abdel Malak continued to seek ways to support the patriarch even as public opinion mounted against him, advocating for the banishment of his circle and the appointment of an advisory council. After these steps failed, Yunan narrated, Abdel Malak came to realize that Pope Yusab must be stopped, “not because of his mistakes, but because he was “no longer reformable.”Footnote 50 With this realization came an about-face in Abdel Malak’s approach to Yusab, leading to the rectification of his error by representing the people in their frustrations with the religious leadership.Footnote 51 Yunan’s narrative is striking not only for his invocation of the incapability of reform as a justification for drastic action, but also for his emphasis on the relationship between the individual and his office. Just as significantly, it illustrates the power of a redemptive narrative as a means of reconciling criticism with respect for the dead when delivering a political stance.
Edward al-Manqabadi: The Unknown Soldier
Two weeks after the death of Abdel Malak, Basili al-Tukhi, secretary-general of the Great Coptic Benevolent Society in Tanta, mournfully wrote, “Gindy died, and our wound had not even healed when it was renewed with today’s loss.”Footnote 52 The new wound that he wrote of was the death of Edward al-Manqabadi, co-owner of Misr, on 11 February 1956. Edward was the son of Tadros Shenouda al-Manqabadi (d. 1932), founder of Misr and an active proponent of Coptic heritage revival.Footnote 53 According to one memorial, Edward had hoped to follow his father’s footsteps in journalism but was persuaded to pursue a career in medicine, leading to his studies in London.Footnote 54 Nonetheless, Edward began to take a heightened role in the management and direction of Misr in 1930, a date that Rami Siddiq cites for its shift to being a distinctly communal paper.Footnote 55
The bulk of al-Manqabadi’s memorials feature elements common to the genre. Like Abdel Malak, al-Manqabadi was “a leader in the battle of struggle against corruption,” often explicitly located in the patriarchate or religious leadership.Footnote 56 Al-Manqabdi’s revolutionary and nationalist credentials were more directly tied to 1919 than to 1952, with the priest Arthanius Zaki remembering al-Manqabadi as among the youth who took to the streets in the demonstrations against the British.Footnote 57 Closer to the context of his death, one memorial remembered al-Manqabadi as among the first to call for “the blessed revolution of liberation” of 1952 to extend to the Coptic sphere.Footnote 58 As for biblical allusions, Fahmi Ishaq compared al-Manqabadi to Moses, quoting Hebrews 11:24-26 to highlight the virtues of al-Manqabadi’s preference for spiritual rather than material rewards.Footnote 59
Of the four Copts featured in this article, Edward al-Manqabadi had the lowest public profile. His memorialists, aware of this status, spun it into a virtue. Memorials described al-Manqabadi as a figure who worked behind the scenes, eschewing fame and hero worship.Footnote 60 Yuwakim Ghubrial described al-Manqabadi’s communal contributions “as a man denying his self” translating his low profile to the language of the saintly quality of ascetism.Footnote 61 Multiple articles described al-Manqabadi as an “unknown soldier” for his outsized but behind-the-scenes role in the reform effort.Footnote 62
Al-Manqabadi’s primary institutional affiliation and role in Coptic reform was as the co-owner of Misr. According to an article in the paper for his forty-day remembrance, al-Manqabadi believed that journalism was “a mirror of public opinion” and as such saw the press as essential to expressing the community’s struggle for its rights.Footnote 63 A consistent theme in al-Manqabadi’s memorials was the set of principles he fought for in Misr’s reporting. Writers praised al-Manqabadi for his vision of Misr as an activist periodical. Beyond basic principles of writing in truth and denouncing corruption, this meant using Misr as a tool to pressure communal elements toward reform.Footnote 64 In line with the spirit of the times, Kamil Abdel Sayyid pointed to al-Manqabadi’s leadership in guiding Misr’s coverage of corruption in the patriarchate in the 1950s.Footnote 65
Holding fast to his commitment to the power of an activist press and “guiding the policy of the newspaper Misr as the patron of the reform movement that completed the halting of the patriarch” earned al-Manqabadi a place of pride in Yusab’s downfall.Footnote 66 Yuwakim Ghubrial, lauding his contributions in the press despite not being a journalist by vocation, painted al-Manqabadi and Gandhi as analogous figures, as professionals who cultivated periodicals in the name of national progress.Footnote 67 Although al-Manqabadi himself may have been less visible as a communal actor, in death he held an outsized voice due to his curation of an important expressive platform for communal reform.
Writers remembered that a key element of al-Manqabadi’s vision for the press was the importance of the independence of journalism. Al-Manqabadi’s leadership was cited as essential to maintaining Misr’s independence, as he preferred to serve “the public interest” rather than to be beholden to a particular institution or the clergy.Footnote 68 A handful of memorials recount instances in which unnamed actors within the community tried to pressure al-Manqabadi to sell Misr or otherwise buy favorable coverage. According to one memorial, al-Manqabadi justified his refusal to sell on the grounds that Misr “was endowed to the Coptic people as one of their institutions.”Footnote 69 In the mid-1950s, the status of the press was a sensitive matter. Since taking power, the revolutionary regime had consolidated control over the press, establishing new government mouthpieces and subjecting existing periodicals to nationalization, censorship, and closure.Footnote 70 Writers in Misr were likely concerned about this trend, but at the same time conscious that expressing such a concern required a delicate approach. Nefarious private elements within the community served as a useful proxy for stressing the importance of press freedom without directly criticizing the state.
The pinnacle of al-Manqabadi’s contributions to Misr’s history was his generative role in the paper’s 1955 poll on the Communal Council. Disagreements over election regulations had led to concerns in the community that the council’s elections would not run as scheduled. Accordingly, some Copts began to call for the government to appoint a caretaker council to oversee elections. A similar action taken five years previously, at the behest of Pope Yusab, had been condemned by council supporters on the grounds that appointments deprived the council of its representative function.Footnote 71 Al-Manqabadi proposed a poll in Misr as a pragmatic means of attaching popular support to the practical need for an appointed council.Footnote 72 The poll, released by Misr in January 1955, indicated overwhelming support for an appointed council.Footnote 73 Although the poll itself had no binding power, it apparently influenced the state in its decision to appoint a temporary council in June 1955 to oversee elections.Footnote 74 Yuwakim Ghubrial described the referendum as al-Manqabadi’s brainchild in his memorial, specifically pointing to the deceased’s efforts to forge a link between Coptic popular will and government action.Footnote 75 As a final legacy, the poll served as a radical extension of al-Manqabadi’s vision of an activist press, fused with the ideal of popular representation in the community. Al-Manqabadi reshaped Misr as an institution of communal representation in and of itself, serving as a voice for the Copts and at the same time as a defender of the laity and their claims to popular representation.
Ibrahim al-Minyawi, As We Knew Him
Ibrahim al-Minyawi’s professional and communal trajectory followed a similar path to that of Edward al-Manqabadi. Al-Minyawi was a doctor by vocation and earned some prestige as the first Egyptian to earn a fellowship to study at the Royal College of Surgeons in London.Footnote 76 Likewise, al-Minyawi’s engagement with communal affairs began in earnest in the 1930s with his entrance to the Communal Council in 1933. From the 1940s until the mid-1950s, al-Minyawi was as at the forefront of council politics, frequently serving as its wakīl and establishing himself as a kingmaker in papal elections and an agenda-setter for Coptic reform efforts. In the postrevolutionary order, he was appointed to the 1953 Independent Coptic Committee and was among the committee of fifty experts selected by the regime to draft a new constitution in 1953, a position he used to continue to advocate for Coptic rights.Footnote 77
Although al-Minyawi had been a lay hero in the earlier decades of lay politics, his reputation in the community suffered a major blow in the last year of his life when he came out in support of the return of Yusab to the patriarchate in 1956. So toxic was his association with Yusab that even a respected figure like al-Minyawi faced vitriolic attacks in the Coptic press. One of the most vocal attacks came from Kamil Abdel Sayyid in an article titled “al-Minyawi As I Knew Him.” Abdel Sayyid spent the bulk of the article calling al-Minyawi’s legacy into question, painting him as a power-hungry and manipulative figure who illegitimately manufactured Yusab’s election, because, as a layman, he lacked the spiritual background necessary to lead and therefore needed a weak-minded pope as an ally.Footnote 78 Misr published Abdel Sayyid’s article on the eve of the 1956 Communal Council elections in which al-Minyawi was a candidate. The paper’s coverage generally portrayed the election as a competition between two blocs: the anti-Yusab reform bloc and the al-Minyawi bloc. Al-Minyawi’s bloc failed to win any seats in the election and his long tenure in the council came to an end.Footnote 79
Although he remained active in Coptic affairs, al-Minyawi was unable to revive his stature in the community in the last year of his life. He had more luck in national politics. Following his election to the Egyptian National Assembly in July 1957, al-Minyawi was set to preside over the body’s inaugural session. Ultimately this would not come to fruition, as al-Minyawi died on 14 July 1957, in the interval between the assembly’s election and first session.
The posthumous revival of al-Minyawi’s reputation speaks to the redemptive power of death through the medium of memorials. Following his death, al-Minyawi reemerged in the press as “the best of leaders,” a pioneer, and “exemplary in nationalism, masculinity, and brilliance.”Footnote 80 In a speech at his funeral, Bishop Yuannis of Giza praised al-Minyawi for “his exemplary spirit in his service to the Coptic people.”Footnote 81 In an explicit callback to Kamil Abdel Sayyid’s article the previous summer, a memorial titled “Dr. al-Minyawi, As We Knew Him,” described al-Minyawi as “a pioneer of reform in our Coptic domain,” who was beloved by the Coptic community.Footnote 82 In the same issue of Misr, Abdel Sayyid himself published a glowing memorial of al-Minyawi, highlighting in particular his role as the wakīl of the Communal Council.Footnote 83
The reappraisal of al-Minyawi after his death, however, did not mean that writers had forgotten his stance on Pope Yusab. Indeed, most memorials explicitly mentioned their staunch disagreement with al-Minyawi during the 1956 council elections. Rather than forgetting, respectfully remembering al-Minyawi meant dislodging him personally from the outcome of the election. Revising Misr’s initial treatment of the election as a defeat of al-Minyawi’s bloc, Abdel Sayyid portrayed the election as a personal repudiation of Pope Yusab rather than of al-Minyawi.Footnote 84 In one memorial, the author used al-Minyawi’s defeat to signal his qualities as a leader, claiming that he had graciously conceded his loss in the election, and noting that although the outcome did not align with his views he supported it, as it was rooted in the interest of the people.Footnote 85 In some cases, authors even extended quiet respect for al-Minyawi’s controversial stance on Pope Yusab, linking it to his belief in mercy or claiming that, however misguided, his view was ultimately based on what he saw as best for the community.Footnote 86
Efforts to redeem the memory of al-Minyawi commonly focused on his long legacy of communal activities prior to 1956. These narratives portrayed the 1956 elections as a singular lapse in judgement, overshadowed by an illustrious career dedicated to Coptic reform. Kamil Abdel Sayyid wrote at length about how al-Minyawi as wakīl of the Communal Council had reformed the financial structure of the institution, stabilizing its funds and investing in the patriarchate and Coptic educational institutions.Footnote 87 One forty-day memorial article recalled one of al-Minyawi’s last, ultimately unsuccessful efforts to defend the council’s jurisdiction over Coptic personal status law in the face of the state abolition of communal courts in 1955.Footnote 88 Notably, the article did not mention the state’s role in the dissolution of the courts, instead opting for the passive voice. As for Edward al-Manqabadi’s defense of the free press, criticism of the more unfavorable policies of the regime necessitated toeing a delicate line.
Just as often as memorials emphasized al-Minyawi’s legacy, they also constructed a redemptive arc by highlighting his activities subsequent to the electoral loss of 1956. Across memorials, al-Minyawi reemerged as an exemplary leader in the last year of his life as a conciliator and peacemaker between different Coptic factions. Examples detailed in al-Minyawi’s memorials were his support and encouragement of the council that he failed to be elected to, his work to bridge the gap between the Communal Council and the Holy Synod on papal electoral regulations, and his continued advocacy for national unity through his ties to state officials.Footnote 89 Noting that he fought to make peace without a formal position in the community, the author of al-Minyawi’s initial memorial in Misr wrote, “He worked toward unity as a soldier, just as he had worked toward it yesterday as a leader.”Footnote 90 Such evaluations were linked to a broader portrayal of al-Minyawi’s attitude toward conflicts and his distinction between personal differences and differences of belief, compelling him to work with his opponents.Footnote 91 Misr columnist ʿAyad Bishoy similarly wrote in his memorial for al-Minyawi that “possibly his most important characteristic was welcoming his critics, no matter how harsh their criticism.”Footnote 92 Despite his own contributions to communal discord and apparent betrayal to reform efforts, al-Minyawi could still serve as a model for Coptic leadership by continuing to struggle for the community in support of the same institutional channels in which he had failed.
The language of al-Minyawi’s memorials is striking when considering that they were written only a year after he was the subject of frequent attacks in the communal press. In a powerful testament to change in the narrative of his life, the authors of multiple memorials expressed regret that the events of 1956 had caused a rift between themselves and al-Minyawi that was unrepaired before his death.Footnote 93 Whether rehabilitating al-Minyawi’s reputation by focusing on his pre-1956 legacy or allowing al-Minyawi redemption through his post-1956 activities, these memorials highlight not only the redemptive power of death in memorials, but also the importance that continuity played in conveying this redemption. Al-Minyawi’s decades-long legacy of communal activity was a respectful way to remember him precisely because the ideals he struggled for were still relevant in the mid-1950s.
The Eternal Salama Musa
Salama Musa was born in 1887 to a Coptic family of modest property whose forbears had migrated from Asyut to the Delta in the early 19th century. After inheriting a significant portion of his father’s estate, Musa embarked on a formative trip to Europe in 1907, eventually settling in London to study law.Footnote 94 Influenced by his involvement in leftist, scientific, and secularist organizations, Musa returned to Egypt on the eve of World War I and began his long career as an outspoken journalist and activist.Footnote 95 Musa’s iconoclastic views led to clashes with the authorities of liberal era Egypt, with Yoav Di-Capua describing him as “a perennial prisoner” due to his frequent arrests.Footnote 96
Over the course of his intellectual career, Musa’s views stand out for their eclecticism. Today, Salama Musa is most often remembered for his role as a radical and innovative pioneer in fields such as socialism, evolutionary theory, pharaonic nationalism, feminism, and secularism. He is less-remembered for his brief but vocal support of Nazism, the anti-Black prejudice in his nationalism, his interest in eugenics, and his at times authoritarian inclinations toward popular representation.Footnote 97 A peculiar turn in Musa’s career came in the mid-1940s, when he became an outspoken voice in Coptic affairs, serving as an editor of Misr and writing a daily front page column from 1946 to 1948 before fading from the scene in the 1950s. Once noted for his antipathy toward religion, Musa publicly called for a strong, politically savvy Coptic patriarch to engage with the Egyptian state and advocated for the election of Yusab in 1946.Footnote 98 Musa’s status as a communally engaged ustādh kabīr (distinguished personality) made him a welcome ally to reformist factions, especially given his support for the election of Yusab.Footnote 99
As Musa’s complex intellectual trajectory indicates, the matter of his legacy at death would be complex. As Egger notes, although Musa had once been at the vanguard of leftist thought, the rapid growth of radical ideologies in the later years of his life rendered him decidedly behind the times.Footnote 100 Musa’s diminished national stature was reflected in the pages of al-Ahram, in which his death only received a brief announcement in the obituaries alongside a handful of individual condolences.Footnote 101 Misr was more eager to celebrate Musa’s legacy. The paper’s biographical obituary of Musa informed readers that his three primary influences had been Freud, Darwin, and Marx, and, in line with the mood of the 1950s, the obituary’s author noted that Musa was among the first to employ socialism as a vehicle for opposing the British occupation.Footnote 102 In Misr’s editorial memorial for Musa, Talaʿat Yunan lauded Musa for “preceding the other thinkers of his generation by at least a century,” particularly noting his early advocacy for the industrial development of Egypt and the economic liberation of women. Yunan reminded readers that Misr had been a primary field for Musa to engage in “his great intellectual struggle.”Footnote 103 In a period in which his once-radical ideas were coming to public fruition in the national sphere, Musa provided Copts with an important claim to their genealogy.
It is in memorial coverage of Musa’s views on communal affairs that his penchant for radicalism shone once again. An article by the journalist Ibrahim Abdel Sayyid, tellingly titled “Salama Musa Speaks About Coptic Affairs Before His Passing,” warrants particular attention, both for its content and its unique approach to death writing. The framing of the article reads like a deathbed confession. According to the author, just before dying, Musa had spoken with Misr’s editor in chief on the status of Copts and church affairs. Following this meeting, Ibrahim Abdel Sayyid wrote, “We hoped that he would depart from [the hospital] and begin anew his glorious Coptic struggle after having left that field several years ago.” Unfortunately, however, Musa passed away before he could resume his efforts. The interview then would be Musa’s final statement on communal affairs. Abdel Sayyid tantalizingly informed readers, “the great philosopher made confessions. . . and expressed views never before published.”Footnote 104
Musa’s “confessions” represented a notable extension of views common to the laity in their engagement with communal politics. Weighing in on the ideal candidate for the Coptic papacy following Yusab’s death, Musa offered a radical suggestion, stating that a layman would be most suitable as the next patriarch. However, “under the pressure of the reactionism that controlled the church,” he recognized the need for pragmatism and conceded that an enlightened bishop would suffice. Specifically, Musa called for the nomination of Mikhail, the young bishop of Asyut. Mikhail was a bishop of similar mold to the late Pope Yusab: educated and governing a prominent Upper Egyptian diocese, with a reputation for the strong personality needed to push for reform. Although Yusab himself may have fallen from grace in the community, Musa still believed in the model of competent clergy that he represented. As for the monastic candidates under consideration for the papacy at the time, Musa was blunt in dismissing their suitability, claiming that their ascetism rendered them unprepared for life in the 20th century.Footnote 105
Monks were not the only clerics subjected to Musa’s criticism. Lamenting the lack of intellectual curiosity in the church, Musa described the library of the patriarchate as a “tomb for books.” Similarly, he spoke of the unrefined character of Coptic priests, which he felt detracted from their capacity to work for the community. Echoing the common theme of a divide between “the people and the clerics,” Musa defined the former by their “civilization” and the latter by their “reactionism” and linked this difference to communal decline. To this end, Musa attacked the clergy, claiming that the practical manifestation of the holiness that clerics were meant to exhibit was in “beneficial and fruitful projects” for the community. However, he followed, “I regret to say that the cleric is behind the destruction and failure of every useful project, as he is inclined to destroy, rather than to build.”Footnote 106
Ibrahim Abdel Sayyid’s article is unique among the memorials in that the bulk of the text is presented ostensibly as direct or indirect quotes from Musa himself. Although Musa was provided a larger voice in death than his fellow deceased, it is crucial to recognize that Abdel Sayyid was still responsible for curating Musa’s words and packaging them in the medium of the memorial. The framing of end-of-life confessions offered Musa his own quiet redemption after his absence from communal affairs. It is unsurprising that Musa’s views were previously unpublished, as they were unorthodox in their extremes. However, the blurred lines between Musa’s words and Abdel Sayyid’s pen offered the opportunity to express radical and at times antagonistic views regarding communal authority, ultimately shielded by the respect due to Musa in death.
Although these “confessions” may have been his last words on communal affairs, they did not mark the end of his legacy. In an impassioned letter to Misr following Musa’s death, community member Fawzi al-Bahjuri rejected the idea that he had died. Instead, according to al-Bahjuri, the stature of such a great man ensured that he would never die. Even though he departed in body, the author claimed that Musa would remain victorious as a “professor of generations of writers and a reference for millions of students.”Footnote 107 This sentiment was expressed in other memorials for Musa, with one article citing the “eternal” influence of his writings and another claiming that “although Salama Musa has departed from this world in body, he will never die in his unending influence and ideas.”Footnote 108
This trope of eternal legacy was not reserved for Salama Musa, but appeared in the memorials of the other men reviewed in this article. Yusuf Kamil, for example, wrote regarding Edward al-Manqabadi that although some may think that his death marked the end of his mission and the collapse of his struggle, “We will join together. . . to carry the banner that fell from him in the field.”Footnote 109 In the context of revolutionary Egypt, such ideas resonated with the speech of Nasser following an assassination attempt on his life in 1954, in which he famously declared, “If Gamal Abdel Nasser dies, then each of you will be Gamal Abdel Nasser.”Footnote 110 From Nasser to al-Manqabadi to Musa, these invocations of life after death were both celebrations of the influence of the dead (or nearly dead) and reminders to those still living of their responsibility to preserve their legacies. Such invocations put the saintly quality of exemplarity to work in service of a radical expression of continuity. As long as those who remembered the dead continued their struggle, death itself need not constitute a rupture.
Conclusion
Although these four men died in a period of significant change in Egyptian politics, their memorials reflect a remarkable degree of continuity with the values that defined the previous three decades. As expressed in the memorials of these figures and their activities before and after the revolution, the atmosphere that 1952 ushered in did not mark a rupture leading to an inevitable decline, as an epilogue to the liberal era, but was a new stage in the struggle of the previous decades. Although retrospectively the “dual-authoritarian” narrative of the Coptic 1950s offers a convenient lens for understanding the centralization of clerical authority under Nasser, the writers in the Coptic press of the 1950s indicated a perhaps ironic optimism that the powerful state could serve as a key ally in securing their pluralistic, meritocratic, and accountable vision for the communal sphere.
However, just as the eventual outcome of decline was not inevitable, the laity’s hopes for Egypt after 1952 did not preclude anxiety. Alongside optimism, the memorials of the period expressed quiet uncertainties about the future. In a forty-day memorial of Ibrahim al-Minyawi, the author noted the former wakīl’s fear that the abolition of communal courts might mean the end of the council itself, a concern that proved prophetic when the council experienced gradual decline in the 1960s.Footnote 111 Similarly, although Salama Musa offered a radical argument for lay authority in the community, his concession to the election of bishops and his commentary on the need to reform the clergy may be quiet signals of the church-dominated direction that he foresaw for the community.Footnote 112 More than anything else, the emotional language of grieving for the dead characterized by overflowing tears and anguish signaled simultaneously mourning for the dead and anxieties over a future without them. As Barbara Carter has argued, the decline of Coptic representation in Egyptian politics in the 1930s and 1940s was tied in part to the death of a generation of Coptic politicians.Footnote 113 Coptic writers in the mid-1950s were likely aware of this dynamic, and their writing reflects a consciousness that they too had lost a generation of leadership.Footnote 114 Although 1952 did not mark the end of the laity’s struggle, its future would be all the more difficult with the absence of yesterday’s heroes.
It was this uncertainty amid political change that gave the claims laid in Coptic memorials their urgency. Framing the lives of deceased Coptic laymen in the vocabulary of republican Egypt was a means to signal the belonging of the laity and their values in the context of the revolutionary politics of the 1950s. Laden with a language of loyalty, revolutionary reform, and popular struggle against corruption, the public mourning of death carried an emphatic assertion of the laity’s place in Egypt’s future.
Acknowledgments
Elements of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association and the American Academy of Religion, and as well at the Arabic Pasts Workshop at Aga Khan University and the Impossible Archives Conference at the American University in Cairo. For their comments on previous drafts of the article, I thank in particular Chris Cooper-Davies, Cyma Farah, John-Paul Ghobrial, Peter Gran, Joseph Leidy, Fergus Nicoll, Orçun Okan, Paul Sedra, Heather Sharkey, Robert Vitalis, Deanna Womack, and the anonymous reviewers. This article draws on research carried out as part of the project Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East, which is based at the University of Oxford under the direction of John-Paul Ghobrial and supported by funding from a European Research Council Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 101001717).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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