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Coexisting With Islam
| Article
# : |
12756 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1987 |
3,817 Words |
| Author
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Walter Gottesman
Walter Gottesman is a free-lance writer and foreign
correspondent for The New York City Tribune. |
When Pope Shenouda III, patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox church in Egypt, was banished to a desert monastery by the late President Anwar Sadat in September 1981, the millions of Egyptian Christians under his spiritual authority turned not only to the Bible for comfort but to the records of their nearly 2,000-year history as well. Several times over the centuries, many other leaders of the Copts had been sent into internal exile, even to the same desert monastery - at Wadi al-Natrun - to which Pope Shenouda was restricted. Each time the patriarch was eventually able to return to his post, though often only after the passage of many years. For Shenouda III it was forty months before Sadat's successor, President Hosni Mubarak, allowed him to resume his pastoral responsibilities.
The reports in the Western press of Pope Shenouda's plight were, for some readers, their first acquaintance with the existence of one of Christianity's oldest branches, the Egyptian church. The word 'Copt' is from the Arabic Qibt, which in turn is derived from the Greek word Aigyptos, meaning Egypt. Coptic simply means Egyptian. Aigyptos is the Greek form of the ancient Egyptian ptah, which originally referred to the local creator deity of Memphis, an old capital of Egypt, then later came to mean Egypt itself.
The Coptic Church traces its beginning to the evangelical work of Saint Mark in the earliest era of Christianity and reveres the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. The first Christian theological school, which had a profound influence on the development of the Christian doctrine and creed, was founded by Mark in Egypt, at Alexandria, then the most commercially prosperous and learned city in the Mediterranean world. The Egyptian church also gave birth
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