Christmas is coming in 5 days; no, I didn’t get it wrong, I know we usually celebrate Christmas before the New Year, but to the Coptic Christian community in Egypt, it falls on Jan 7 according to the ancient Egyptian civil year calculation, which is similar to the older Julian Calender, as opposed to the Gregorian Calender we have adopted today.
I’m ignorance of Orthodox Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on a different date, until Marianna, a volunteer at the St. Sergius Church in Cairo, enlightened me. My sister and I had gone to the Old Cairo area (also known as Coptic Cairo to tourists) last week, where many ancient churches and monasteries located within a walled area, with narrow cobble stone paths and old buildings erected from rocks.
The Coptic is a term originally derived from the Greek designation for native Egyptian population in Roman Egypt (as distinct from Greeks, Romans, Jews, etc.). After the Muslim conquest of Egypt, it became restricted to those Egyptians adhering to the Christian religion. Today, the Coptics formed 10% of Egypt population, they are the largest religious minority in the country.
Marianna had approached my sister and I, as we were sitting in the dimly-lit, semi-underground St. Sergius Church on Christmas Day (as we have always thought it should be), but there was no special mass on that occasion. “May I give you a free guided tour of the church?” Marianna offered, and she showed us the crypt, where it was believed that Joseph, Maria, and baby Jesus (known as the Holy Family) had once taken shelter while escaping from the “massacre of the first born” ordered by King Herod of Judea.
Marianna then moved on to explain that the Coptics observed 43 days of fasting culminating to Jan 7, when they finally celebrate Christmas, but she doubted that this year there would be a big celebration, as the past year had been difficult, and the people were not in festive mood. I had heard the same line from Samu, another Coptic, who said: “This is a sad, sad, year for Egypt. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate, I won’t have a Christmas this year.”
What Samu meant is more than just the many lives lost during last year’s revolution, which reportedly caused more than 2,000 deaths and many more injured (apparently, some blinded by rubber bullets during protests); but he also mourned those killed in the suicide bombing attack on a church in Alexandria on the New Year’s eve a year ago.
I learned from local media report that some Copts have organized a protest last week, against a church sending invitation to the military officials and Islamists from vairous political factions to join this year’s Christmas Eve’s mass, the protestors claimed that those invited were among the ones who had inflicted pain, insult, and deaths to the Coptic community. But the Church stick to its invitation, a move to promote peaceful co-existence and co-operation.
Walking around Old Cairo, one could sense that for centuries, people of different faiths have lived side by side here; within the vicintnity, not only some of the oldest churches stand, but there’s also the oldest mosque in Cairo – Amr Ibn El-As, and Synagogues, and cemeteries for various communities. There’s also no segregated neighbourhoods for the different communities, and women walking around in scarfs are not necessarily Muslims, and they all speak the common language.
May the harmonious co-existence continue, and it’s still not too late to wish each others, regardless of faith, merry Christmas and a happy new year!
Here and There 
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