By the fourth century, Egypt was one of the intellectual and spiritual capitals of the Christian world. Alexandria stood alongside Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem as one of the five great patriarchal sees of Christendom. It was in Alexandria that Origen and Clement built the first great Christian catechetical school, that Athanasius fought the Arian heresy and helped write the Nicene Creed, and that the Desert Fathers, Anthony, Pachomius, the monks of Scetis and Wadi Natrun, invented Christian monasticism itself, a movement that would later spread to Ireland, to Gaul, to the whole of Christian Europe.
The native population spoke Coptic, the last living form of the ancient Egyptian language, written in a script adapted from Greek. The word “Copt” itself comes from the Greek Aigyptios, “Egyptian”, filtered through Arabic into Qibṭ. The Copts were not a minority in Egypt. They were Egypt. The word for the people and the word for the Christians of the country were, for centuries, the same word.
The Conquest: 639–642 AD
In December 639, an Arab army of perhaps 4,000 men under Amr ibn al-As crossed the Sinai into Egypt on the orders of the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. This was an invasion of a province that had been Christian for over three centuries, launched seven years after Muhammad’s death, as part of the same wave of conquest that had already torn Syria and the Levant away from Byzantium at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636.
Amr’s forces took Pelusium after a month-long siege, then moved on Babylon Fortress (the core of what is now Old Cairo), which fell after a siege of roughly seven months. Alexandria itself, the jewel of the eastern Mediterranean, capitulated in November 641 under a treaty that saw Byzantine forces withdraw by sea. The Byzantines briefly retook the city in 645 before Amr crushed the counter-attack and secured Egypt for the Caliphate permanently in 646.
Egypt’s Muqawqas, the Byzantine governor who negotiated Alexandria’s surrender, was reviled in later Coptic tradition as a traitor. Within a generation, the new rulers had a name and a legal category for everyone who had not converted: dhimmi, literally “the protected,” but protected on terms decided entirely by the party doing the conquering.
