By David Salter
As we pass the first-year anniversary of the coronation of King Charles III, we present this piece from Happy & Glorious: A Royal Celebration reflecting on the King, and some surprising adventures in Egypt. Click here to read Part 1.
It was 10 years ago, 2013, and I have never seen such a thing before. A man is plodding along the seafront, blowing a warbling trumpet. He is carrying two big bunches of balloons, one at each end of a wooden pole across his shoulder. Is this man crazy, or just trying to sell balloons, or both? Selling balloons seems pretty odd, because it’s already dark. And the streets are almost empty because a night-time curfew is beginning. Yet here he is, walking slowly. He’s either crazy, or extremely motivated.
Menacingly, seven tanks rumble past to enforce the curfew, and the man speeds up a little. He blows his warbling trumpet again. Is he desperate? He’s certainly brave. I am sure this brief glimpse will stay fixed in my memory—the determination and optimism of an honest man trying to feed his family. So this is Egypt, proud land of the Pharaohs, in October 2013. I return to fend off the biting spiders in my dimly-lit hotel room. And to risk drinking more of the tap water, because that’s all there is. A lot lies ahead…
I have begged some time from my family and my (largely irrelevant) “day job” back in England to come to this land, whose history and culture I have loved since I was a boy. My maybe- mad idea is to offer friendship and some help, at a time of massive civil and religious instability, to the resilient and faithful Copts, those ancient Christians who are proud to be in the direct line of language and culture from the people ruled by the Pharaohs.
Why am I here? Good question. I am British, not Egyptian. An ordinary Church of England layman, not Coptic Orthodox, and trained as a scientist, not a diplomat, priest, or journalist. I speak my native Devonshire version of English, and sometimes still passable German from my three years working in Hamburg, but only quite limited Arabic at this point. So why come to Egypt? Basically, because I couldn’t get out of my head the idea of getting involved here. Nearly 40 years ago, having graduated in physics and mathematics, I was absolutely one-hundred-percent convinced that I should retrain in medical subjects. So I did, at London University’s Medical College of the Royal Hospital of St. Bartholomew, founded in 1123—before the University of Oxford! I then went on to complete a research doctorate at Oxford, a master’s in moral philosophy, and an international career in healthcare with a strong interest in anthropology and culture
Now, for the first time in decades, there is that same strength of conviction again. No fire-writing on the wall, or any mystical experience, much as I might have wished for it. Just a relentless motivation to do something, something that would begin a fair exchange, a genuinely two-way partnership, demonstrating and increasing respect on both sides. This would be really stretching across the international divides of language, culture, tradition, and a million possible misunderstandings. And I’m well aware that I’m not specifically trained. Just a man with some relevant experience and a very noisy bee in his bonnet.
When I had persuaded my family to join me on a holiday to Egypt late in 2008, I had absolutely walked on air through the famous Egyptian Museum in central Cairo. I was finally seeing some things—and even Pharaohs—who actually felt like old friends from my years spent reading their histories and peering at their pictures in Egyptology books.
It was unexpectedly emotional. I probably wore a foolish grin throughout, as also when visiting Djoser’s pioneering pyramid at Saqqara, reading hieroglyphs in Ptahhotep’s beautifully-carved tomb nearby, stooping with hair-raised awe down, along and up the ancient corridor to reach the sarcophagus chamber of Khaefre’s pyramid in Giza, and studying painted tombs in the Valley of the Kings. I had, after all, been the first translator of the hieroglyphs on a coffin in our local museum which had been there for 90 years. The owner, Iyhat, a wab or purification priest, would I’m sure have been pleased to have his name and those of his parents recalled at last. But staying with my family in splendid hotels in Cairo and Luxor, though marvellous, can all too readily give the false impression to locals outside that foreigners are amongst the super-rich, which is not usually true in their home countries. And nice hotels shield the foreigners from what some call “the real Egypt.” Not good—mish kwais! Personally, I wanted to see not the pre-interpreted tourist version, but the real Egypt, the more than 7,000 years of known culture beginning with prehistoric paintings in the lonely wadis of the Eastern Desert, and continuing in the faith practices and folk customs of today.
Earlier in 2013, I had watched TV reports of huge public demonstrations and civil unrest developing in Egypt. Mosque sit-ins were being forcibly ended by security forces, and literally hundreds of church buildings were being burned out by Islamic extremists, who either wrongly thought that it was Christians who had attacked the mosques, or believed—correctly but unjustly—that Christians were easier targets for revenge than was the Army. In nationwide chaos, both Muslims and Christians were killed, and a courageous Muslim saved Christian children from an orphanage set on fire by Islamist fanatics.
Trying to describe all this, international media often focussed on burned-out church buildings because they outnumbered the damaged mosques. The burned-out churches of Egypt reminded me of the Minster Church of St. Andrew in my native city of Plymouth (the original one in England), built by Roman Catholics in the fourteenth century and for the past five hundred years housing a congregation of the Church of England, of which my family and I are now part. In the destruction of Plymouth’s whole city centre by the Nazi’s Luftwaffe in 1941, St. Andrew’s was burnt to just a roofless shell. But having also lived in Hamburg in Germany, I was reminded of the massive destruction wrought there too by Allied bombing causing the terrible firestorms of 1943. I knew how, on both sides of that conflict, there had been irreparable loss of life, but places of worship had been lovingly rebuilt, and were once again buildings where prayers were prayed, songs were sung, and eternal life beyond the present world brought back to mind. That restoration had needed not just faith, but hard work and money for the reconstruction.
So maybe we “rich foreigners” could help now in Egypt? After all, much of the Christian faith depends upon what happened in Egypt. There are many more examples besides, but just think of some from within the Bible. Consider the so-called sojourns, some bad, some good—indeed, some absolutely vital. Think of Joseph, who became number two to Pharaoh and saved his entire family from starvation, the family who soon became the tribes of Israel. Think of the “Flight into Egypt,” when the Holy Family, taking refuge from their own country, were helped to save the infant Saviour. And there are the Desert Fathers of the early church, whose wise words and tough lives are still studied and cherished today.
Thus was born my “two-way partnerships” inspiration. Most Christians in England have more money than most Christians in Egypt. But most Christians in Egypt have, it seems to me, a more resilient and lively faith than most Christians in England, who tend to have “cooled off” somewhat due to….what? (Insert your own ideas here!) So maybe a genuinely two-way, and thus fair, exchange could rebalance things and also produce significant synergy, a building up of the Body of Christ in which resources, spiritual and material, are identified and relocated to where they are needed most. I was reminded a bit of liver biochemistry and the physiology lectures in my student days at Bart’s Hospital. Surely this idea was worth trying?
But it would not be comfortable in the way it had been while staying as a tourist in lovely hotels. On my Egyptair flight to Cairo, I was handed the several Egyptian newspapers I had asked for. Good to help learn the language, I thought. Yet I had not expected the front-page pictures of a sweet little 8-year-old Coptic girl, Mariam Ashraf Messia, cruelly and fatally gunned down just the day before by drive-by extremists. She was innocently waiting outside a church in a poor district of Cairo for the bride to arrive for her wedding. Mariam was just a little girl happily wearing her best clothes. She had asked her uncle to take a picture of her wearing them. And this child killing was deliberate. It was simply murder. Mariam was taken from her family and from life not by a stray shot, but by 13 bullets fired straight at her, “into the heart of Egypt,” as the paper put it. I have three daughters myself, my youngest then being only twelve, and my memories of all of them came flooding back.
I was so shocked by the unrestrained blind hate shown against this entirely innocent little girl that quite a few tears came to my eyes. They come back even now, many years later. And poor harmless little Mariam was not the only victim of that attack. Three others were killed immediately—a girl of just 12, like my own daughter, and two adults. Eighteen other Christians were wounded, including Mariam’s mother, father and 3-year-old little brother. Also wounded were three Muslim guests, one of whom died of his wounds later. Did the hate-crazed terrorists know, or care, that these Christians were welcoming Muslim guests? And could those guests justify murder by others claiming to have Islamic faith? I doubt it.
Now all that was in the recent past. When daylight came after the balloon man and the tanks had gone home for a while, I found myself looking out at what the ancient Egyptians called the Great Green, uadj-uer, to me the rather beautifully blue sunlit Mediterranean sea. I was in Alexander’s triumph and Cleopatra’s capital, Alexandria, Iskandria, the greatest centre of learning in the world some two thousand years ago. Alexandria was the source of amazing new science. Here Euclid revolutionised theoretical geometry with the mathematical theorems in his Elements, whose lines, triangles and circles have been grappled with in schoolrooms ever since; Eratosthenes revolutionised practical geometry by measuring the radius of the globe (embarrassing flat Earth believers, but not eliminating them), and Aristarchus put our planet into its proper place orbiting the Sun, eighteen hundred years before Copernicus. Here, Herophilos was the first to conduct anatomical dissections in public and declare the brain to be the seat of intelligence. People used those very intelligences in Alexandria to make this extremely cosmopolitan city a melting pot for philosophical and theological debate between its Greek, Jewish and Egyptian residents. It became the home of, among others, the Church Fathers Clement and Origen, Plotinus and the neo-Pythagoreans, followed by gnostic “Hermetic” philosophers who laboured at what we now call alchemy, leading eventually to scientific chemistry. Seafarers were guided into safe harbour by Alexandria’s innovative and massive stone lighthouse, the Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Now, however, I had very respectfully tiptoed in as well, into this great city which had clearly seen better days. I was here, at the invitation of relatives of friends, to attend another Coptic wedding. But a very modern cloud had appeared on that blue horizon. The church booked for the wedding was mentioned in a terrorist hit-list, just discovered and discussed by local newspapers. Some priests were saying that weddings could, and maybe should, be postponed, thinking of the recent massacre at little Mariam’s church. Indeed, in the bride’s parents’ flat I heard a very worried discussion as part of the pre-wedding family gathering. But Coptic faith and cultural resilience won through, and I attended the wedding, which proved to be joyfully noisy, as did chasing the bride and groom on a mad drive along Alexandria’s seafront, the Corniche, in an open-topped sports car! Happily, the couple have flourished and grown into a healthy family with healthy children, and they are good Facebook friends of mine to this day.
Come back next Thursday to read the next installment of this story.