The Missionary Era · 1854-1906 · Egypt
The Coptic Revival — Cyril IV and After
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About This Movement
The Coptic Orthodox Church entered the nineteenth century poor, largely untaught, and reduced in the eyes of most outsiders to a survival. And then in 1854 a young patriarch took office and spent seven years changing that. Cyril IV founded schools, including one for girls at a time when that was nearly unheard of in Egypt, brought in a printing press, built a library, and set about educating clergy who had mostly learned the liturgy by ear. He died suddenly in 1861, not yet fifty, in circumstances still argued about. What he started did not stop. An elected lay communal council from 1874, a Coptic press and newspapers from the 1870s, and the schools that would eventually produce the twentieth-century Sunday School movement out of which the modern Coptic renaissance came.
Sources
- Cyril IV's reform record: the Patriarchal school (1855, incl. provision for girls' education), the imported printing press, the patriarchate's records of his reforms (1854-61) and contested death (primary) — Notably documents the provision made for girls' education.
- The community's continuation record: majlis milli (communal council, 1874) records; Coptic periodicals (al-Watan, 1877-); the Sunday School movement's roots (primary) — The lay-clerical reform contest, in the community's own minutes. The Sunday School movement's fuller flowering came in the twentieth century.
- Missionary observers: CMS and American Presbyterian records describing (and proselytizing among) the Copts (primary) — Written by an outside, competing pen: missionary observers with their own proselytizing agenda, whose descriptions are still useful as data - and the revival is partly legible as a response to them.
- Magdi Guirguis & Nelly van Doorn-Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy (AUC Press, 2011), with Otto Meinardus, Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity (AUC Press, 1999) (secondary) — The current standard covering Cyril IV directly, and the standard survey.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, ch. 21 'Coptic Christianity in modern Egypt' (O'Mahony) (reference)