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Not Welcomed as Liberators

Walter Russell Mead repeats a common misconception about Coptic history: Egypt’s Copts welcomed Islamic forces as liberators in the 7th century AD; the Orthodox Church considered the Copts to be a heretical sect and under the Byzantine emperors the Copts faced persecution. The second part of this sentence is true. The first part is untrue. […]

Walter Russell Mead repeats a common misconception about Coptic history:

Egypt’s Copts welcomed Islamic forces as liberators in the 7th century AD; the Orthodox Church considered the Copts to be a heretical sect and under the Byzantine emperors the Copts faced persecution.

The second part of this sentence is true. The first part is untrue. It is one of the strange legacies of the Islamic conquests that Byzantine propaganda about the disloyalty of heterodox Christians is so readily accepted by many modern people. The evidence most commonly cited to prove non-Chalcedonian disaffection comes from the works of polemicists engaged in post-conquest theological disputes. Modern discussions of non-Chalcedonian loyalties often take for granted that heterodox Christians must have been eager to embrace the rule of non-Christians, which overlooks that non-Chalcedonians understood the Roman Empire to be their empire. Non-Chalcedonian objections to their Chalcedonian rulers concerned their theology. They blamed the imperial, Chalcedonian church for bringing disaster upon their empire, because they shared the assumptions of their time that theological error and sin invited judgment and punishment. They no more “welcomed” the Islamic conquests than they had “welcomed” the Sasanian occupation earlier in the century. Once their lands were conquered and the possibility of rejoining the empire receded, non-Chalcedonian communities accommodated themselves to their new rulers, but this wasn’t because they regarded the invasions as liberation.

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