الكنائس القبطية القديمة في مصر الجزء الثاني

by Alfred J. Butler, الفريد .ج بتلر, إبراهيم سلامة إبراهيم (ترجمة)

This two-volume work is the result of a seven-month field work in Egypt, during which Alfred Butler was a private tutor to Prince Tawfik from 1880 to 1881. Butler visited most of the old churches and monasteries in and around Cairo and traveled to the Wadi al-Natrun, the monasteries of the Red Sea and a number of churches in Upper Egypt. His descriptions are invaluable and sometimes are the only record of what we know about a certain object or church"It is an important document for its time and an early and influential example of unprejudiced scholarly interest for the culture of the Coptic Church." - Karel Innem�e, Leiden University Introduction to this reprint Alfred Joshua Butler was born at Loughborough, Leicestershire in 1850. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford, and then was elected fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. After being assistant master at Winchester from 1874 to 1879, was private tutor to Prince Tawfik in 1880-81. He has kept an interest for Egypt till the end of his life. He also wrote The Arab Conquest of Egypt (1902), and Court Life in Egypt (London, 1887), partly based on his own experiences. Together with B.T.A. Evetts he published The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some neighbouring Countries attributed to Abu Salih, the Armenian (1895, Gorgias Press reprint 2001).

Genres: Coptic Language

312 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 2001

About the author

Alfred Joshua Butler (1850-1936) was English historian who was educated at Oxford, becoming a fellow of Brasenose College in 1877 and receiving his doctorate in 1902. He wrote a number of works on Egypt that spanned from the Coptic era to the medieval period, including his Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt (Oxford, 1884) and the acclaimed The Arab Conquest of Egypt (Oxford, 1902).

Alfred J. Butler was a self-confessed “friend of the Copts”. On them he wrote in 1911, “ … having known the Copts for upwards of thirty years, I have the highest opinion of their capacity and their character.”
When the Coptic Congress in 1911 raised some demands to the British authority to end the injustices the Copts suffered from under British rule he sided with the Copts against Sir Eldon Gorst, the British Consul-General in Egypt (1907-1911), whose policy was “(to) exalt the Mohammedan and to tread down the Christian, to license the majority and to curb the minority.”Addressing the policy makers who thought that the Copt could not be given a position of command and authority in a country with Muslim majority, he said, with the knowledge of the character of the Copts he possessed, “I for one should have no fear that a Coptic Mudir or Mamur would fail in tact or in justice, in kindness or in courage.”

But Butler’s main achievement for the Copts was in the field of scientific study. He was one of the great English gentlemen who through meticulous and hard research have done great services to the Copts. The Coptic nationalists are grateful for him for all his important work in Coptology; but particularly in correcting the story of the Arab occupation of Egypt, and in refuting the unfounded claims that the Egyptians (the Copts) welcomed and assisted the Arabs at the conquest; that the Arabs treated the Egyptians well at the invasion; and that the Arabs were received by the Egyptians as liberators – all are baseless lies and propagandist claims that some of the Muslims of Egypt kept repeating. The Arab Conquest of Egypt remains the main reference for the events that preceded, accompanied and shortly followed the Arab conquest of Egypt. No one can understand Coptic history without reading Butler’s books. It is interesting to mention here that Butler benefited a lot in his study from The Chronicle of John of Nikiu,the Coptic historian who was contemporaneous to the Arab occupation in 640 AD, and gave us a more accurate record of the conquest’s events, and their chronology, than the Arab and Byzantine historians.