Iran and Egypt, secular culture v Asateer al-Awaleen in religious garb!

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jan 27, 2018 at 10:53

Gato you wrote

>The existence of secular poetry in Egyptian language would have helped its survival in Muslim milieu since secular literature can be shared and admired by people of different confessions,

May be. But religious stories and poetry can be as powerful and inspiring as secular stories and poetry

In late antique Egypt Egyptians loved the stories of Homer in his "The Iliad and The Odyssey" which are not unlike the stories of the Old and New Testament Very inspiring and very entertaining This really means that not just secular literature but also religious literature was loved and appreciated and the "Copts" translated the Bible very early to their own Egyptian language in both the Sahidic as well as the Bohairc dialects so every Egyptian would be able to understand these texts

http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=193

It is very interesting to read comments in a papyrus by a Syrian visitor to Alexandria in late antiquity where he describes the scene at an Egyptian temple with the wonderful smell of incense and music and hymns all very inspiring for the Egyptian masses and not unlike today's Coptic Church!

The point is Egyptians had a wonderful source of literature written in their own language with heroes and villains and that is the Bible what else can you ask for

So the lack of secular writings in "Coptic" may not account for much

There is a "Legal Archive" of an Egyptian (Coptic) family in the early 7th century with something to do with inheritance and real estate and it spans a period of about 40 years well beyond the time of the Arab invasion in 642CE with the family travelling from their home in Upper Egypt to as far as Fustat/Masr in-order to settle the matter in a court of law And they were witnesses to the Persian invasion of Egypt then the return of the Greeks to Egypt followed by the Arab invasion They were truly aliens in their own homeland This is indeed what happened and this is truly still the tragedy of the Copts in Egypt now

Compare this with the Persians that followed the "if you cannot beat them then join them" and the end result is Persians created Islam and through the Abbasids were in control of not just the sacred but also the profane (politics) in the emerging Islam and for a long time

> but definitely Christian literature written by Egyptian monks hardly had any appeal on Muslims.

Again let us say Mathematical books would be of interest only to those that study mathematics and therefore would have limited appeal to the masses. Right?

As a matter of fact most Muslims have no clue about what is in their books and because most Muslims cannot read these books in their primary language Arabic and therefore are off limits to them! Yes they can use translations but we all know that translations are really about what the translator believed that the text is saying So there is nothing wrong with religious writings by the fathers of the Coptic church had limited appeal

Oh Asateer al-Awaleen? It means the Stories of the Ancients! The Meccan pagans were making fun of Muhammad that he was recycling the stories of the ancients (eg: The story of Dhul Qarnain and ahl al-Kahf) and that he was not providing them with any new stories that they did not know! Still these plagiarized stories in the Qur'an are loved by the Muslim masses! Any guesses why?

I do believe that if the people of Egypt would have done what the Persians have done "if you cannot beat them then join them" they would have been speaking their own Egyptian language albeit with loan words from Arabic and they would have shaped Islam (not unlike Iran) in their own image!

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