When Simaika was born in 1864, Egypt had yet to see the British occupation, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam, the Mixed Courts, a parliament, the Paris-on-the-Nile district of Cairo, al-Ahram newspaper, the national library, a state university, Thomas Cook’s tourist steamers, Baedeker guidebooks, or railways south of Cairo. Mariette’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Bulaq was only a year old, and Egypt’s Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Coptic antiquities still languished in neglect. Copts could not yet attend state schools, lacked a seminary to train their clergy, and had no community council (Majlis al-Milli) to give laymen a voice in administering Coptic religious endowments (waqf), schools, and personal-status law. Across the Atlantic, the Civil War had not quite yet sealed the fate of slavery in the United States, and in the wealthy Cairo household where Simaika grew up, female African slaves still did the housework.
If many of the familiar features of modern Egypt were still missing when Simaika was born, changes over the century before 1864 had nevertheless been far reaching. The Mamluk military households that had effectively wrested Egypt from Ottoman control in the later eighteenth century succumbed to the successive blows of Napoleon’s French invasion in 1798 and Muhammad Ali’s (r. 1805–48) consolidation of power. Muhammad Ali paid for his new European-style army of peasant conscripts by recentralizing tax collection and establishing a state monopoly on cotton as a cash crop for export to Europe. New textile mills, arms factories, professional schools, a printing press, and a translation bureau primarily served his army at first. Muhammad Ali’s rebellion against the Ottoman sultan collapsed at the end of the 1830s, when European intervention forced him to relinquish his Arabian and Syrian conquests, retreat to Egypt and Sudan, and drastically reduce the size of his army.
After a lull, the pace of change picked up under Muhammad Ali’s son Said (r. 1854–63) and grandson Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79). Born thirteen months after the accession of Isma‘il, Simaika grew up amid a whirl of new reforms and increasingly threatening European colonial penetration. A French company completed the Suez Canal, and Egypt built up extensive railway, telegraph, and postal systems. State schools (separate from the religious schools capped by al-Azhar) expanded rapidly, Cairo acquired a Paris-inspired new district, and a tripartite court system (Mixed, National, and Sharia courts) was organized. Egypt acquired its first parliamentary body, a national library, an antiquities service, the Egyptian Museum, a geographical society, and an opera house. Bankruptcy cost Isma‘il his throne in 1879, and in 1882—the year Simaika turned eighteen—the British defeated Ahmad Urabi’s proto-nationalist revolt and occupied the country.
Some sixty years later, Marcus Simaika dictated the unpublished memoirs on which—another sixty years after that—his grandson Dr. Samir Simaika, with co-author Nevine Henein, would base their fascinating biography. They have also drawn insightfully on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive. This book, based on Marcus Simaika’s “Reminiscences,” deepens our understanding of at least four important themes of modern Egyptian history: the founding of the Coptic Museum and the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian–British interactions during the colonial (1882–1922) and semi-colonial (1922–52) ages, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.
Marcus Simaika is now remembered almost exclusively for the first of these themes—his great achievements in Coptic archaeology, especially the founding of Cairo’s Coptic Museum.
Egypt’s other three main historical museums—the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (mainly pharaonic), the Museum of Arab (now Islamic) Art, and the Greco-Roman Museum—all had European rather than Egyptian founding directors. The Coptic Museum came into being just in time to form a critical link between the Islamic era and Egypt’s Greco-Roman and pharaonic pasts at the very time when modern Egyptians were reemphasizing their pharaonic past as an inspiration for their modern struggle for revival and national independence.
Simaika was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. His claim as “father of Coptic archaeology” lies instead in his achievement as a visionary administrator who used his status as a notable to pursue relentlessly his dream of preserving endangered monuments, founding a Coptic museum, rescuing decaying monastic and church libraries, and promoting love of the Coptic heritage among his fellow Copts and Muslim compatriots, and in the world at large.
Simaika and Henein recount in illuminating detail how Marcus Simaika won the cooperation of the Coptic patriarch, British authorities, and the international historic preservation movement in pursuit of his goals. The authors also bring out Marcus Simaika’s leading role on the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Art (“the Comité”) and in organizing and preserving the libraries of Coptic churches and monasteries. As chairman of the Comité’s “technical section” for a decade, Simaika—a Copt—presided over the permanent body that executed the Comité’s works, the great majority of which were on Islamic monuments.
In addition to these achievements in the field of Coptic heritage, Simaika and Henein bring back into public view Marcus Simaika’s largely forgotten activities in the fields of British–Egyptian relations, relations between Coptic laymen and the clergy, and interactions between Copts and their Muslim compatriots. In the fall of 1882, the dust of battle from Urabi’s defeat at Tell al-Kebir had hardly settled before eighteen-year-old Simaika’s knowledge of English, enterprise, and connections found him work as translator to Viscountess Strangford, a British volunteer who organized care for wounded soldiers. He soon moved on to a government career in the railways department, where British influence was already strong. As Simaika carefully negotiated his way through Egypt’s difficult colonial age, he was both deeply patriotic and eager to cooperate with Britons, from Lord Cromer on down, in causes that he believed would benefit his country.
The third and fourth themes illuminated by Simaika’s and Henein’s biography—relations between Coptic laymen and the clergy and the interactions of Coptic and Muslim Egyptians—are often intertwined. Over the long rhythm of the last three centuries, power and influence within the Coptic community have twice swung toward lay notables as spokesmen for Copts in worldly affairs and have twice swung back to the current status, in which the pope speaks as the preeminent leader of his community. Marcus’s family background, education, and talents brought him to the fore as a precocious young notable just in time to ride the wave, which lasted from the late nineteenth century into the 1950s, of powerful lay challenges to clerical monopoly of Coptic communal leadership.
In the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the power of the Coptic pope both within his flock and in representing it vis-à-vis the Islamic state was strong. According to theory, Christians as ahl al-dhimma (people of the contract) were non-Muslim monotheists—protected, but banned from military service and subject to such disabilities as a jizya (head tax). The sultan and Ottoman provincial authorities in Cairo counted on the patriarch to manage the internal affairs of his flock and guarantee the collection of the jizya. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, lay Coptic notables (arakhina, s. arkhon) working as scribes, tax collectors, and financial managers gradually marginalized the patriarchs in managing communal affairs and as go-betweens with the Islamic state. This trend ran loosely in tandem with the decline of central Ottoman control over the Mamluks and other military factions. Lay notables overshadowed the popes as patrons of church renovations, manuscript copying, and icon painting, and even in determining papal successions. Coptic sources dubbed notable Mu‘allim Ibrahim al-Guhari (d. 1795) “the sultan of the Copts.”
The collapse of the Mamluk households and successive blows from the French and Muhammad Ali undercut the Coptic financial officials who had prospered in the service of the Mamluks. Muhammad Ali preferred Armenians or Catholics to Orthodox Copts in high posts, and with the fortunes of Coptic lay notables in decline, the pendulum of power within the community swung back toward Pope Peter VII during his long reign (1809–52).