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The Islamization of Egypt occurred after the seventh-century Muslim conquest, in which the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate seized control of Egypt from the Christian dominated Byzantine Empire. Egypt and other conquered territories in the Middle East gradually underwent a large-scale conversion from Christianity to Islam , motivated in part by a ...
Christian influences in Islam can be traced back to Eastern Christianity, which surrounded the origins of Islam. [1] Islam, emerging in the context of the Middle East that was largely Christian, was first seen as a Christological heresy known as the "heresy of the Ishmaelites", described as such in Concerning Heresy by Saint John of Damascus, a Syriac scholar.
The vast majority of Egyptian Christians are Copts who belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, an Oriental Orthodox Church. [2] [3] As of 2019, Copts in Egypt make up approximately 10 percent of the nation's population, [4] with an estimated population of 9.5 million (figure cited in the Wall Street Journal, 2017) [5] or 10 million (figure cited in the Associated Press, 2019). [6]
Christianity in the 8th century was much affected by the rise of Islam in the Middle East. By the late 8th century, the Muslim empire had conquered all of Persia and parts of the Eastern Roman territory including Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Suddenly parts of the Christian world were under Muslim rule.
The book consists of two parts, an analysis, which aims to paint a broad picture of the conversion of the Near East to Islam, and an appendix containing selected primary sources. The book focuses only upon the Christian communities in Iran, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Libya and the Maghreb. [4]
Under the vizier al-Aziz, there was a large amount of toleration conceded to the other sects of Islam, and to other communities, but the belief that the Christians of Egypt were in league with the Byzantine emperor, and even burned a fleet which was being built for the Byzantine war, led to some persecution.
The Copts' Egyptian Christian identity was thus formulated. It was then with the spread of Arabic beyond the big cities that the Egyptian Church became known as "Coptic" and that native Egyptian Christians became known as "Copts", a semantic shift that occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries. [82]
Eusebius [57] credits Mark the Evangelist as the bringer of Christianity to Egypt, and manuscript evidence shows that the faith was firmly established there by the middle of the 2nd century. Although the Greek-speaking community of Alexandria dominated the Egyptian church, speakers of native Coptic and many bilingual Christians were the majority.