a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan.’ It seems to me excessively naïve to believe that the abounas would be reluctant to use a strategy that was first employed by their master.” Wahid finally unearthed and pitied the true psychological motivations that push people to commit such idiocies. “In the epileptic convulsions of those who frequent Mit Damsis, we can sadly observe how the elderly and the outcast are willing to humiliate themselves just to attract the attention of others. It is this same supplication for attention that I had once experienced when I was working in my pharmacy, and an elderly woman showed me of her age-worn flesh more than she should while taking a vitamin injection. I can still remember how she observed my face, trying to capture and exaggerate the least expression of lust.”
In another chapter that he suggestively titled ‘The Tainted Legacy of Gnosticism in the Coptic Church’ Wahid quickly traced the Coptic history, from the day when Anianus repaired the sandal of St. Mark till the reign of the present pope, boldly trespassing on Iris El Masry’s area of expertise. Wahid recounts a peculiar story about a book that he once discovered on a Coptic shelf. “The Orthodox Church! That was its name. I was very excited when I first skimmed through it but I was calmed down, and saddened, when I realized that the book was translated and was thus written by no Copt. I noticed how the Coptic translator truncated a chapter that dealt with the ecumenical councils, eliminating any mention of the council of Chalcedon and the councils that followed it [the Coptic Church, being part of oriental orthodoxy, accepts only the first three councils]. I honestly wonder how Copts reason. From the way they glorify St. Athanasius and claim that the conclusions of Nicaea I were guided by God I wonder how they reject the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon. Why did God support the orthodox Athanasius in 325 and the saint-murderer Cyril in 431 yet let the pious Dioscorus down in 451?” Wahid also covered the brutal murdering of Hypatia and dedicated to her an ineloquent though incredibly moving poem.
In another part of the chapter, Wahid recalled how a Coptic poster printed to celebrate the journey of the holy family to Egypt had once fallen into his hands. “The abomination depicted a cracked Pharaonic column and tablet, both standing feebly, about to crumble at any moment. St. George’s Church of Sporting emerged from behind, clothed in a most spectacular light, like a victorious rising sun. The picture of the holy family constituted the background. The phrase ‘Behold, the LORD… shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence…In that day there will be an altar to the LORD in the heart of Egypt. (Isaiah 19)’ was written in the lower left corner. The message is clear: Isaiah was prophesizing the coming of the holy family to Egypt. This would eventually lead to the collapse of paganism and founding ‘an altar to the Lord’ which turns out to be nothing other than our beloved Church of Sporting! The motif is as old as the hills: we read Zoroastrian texts demonizing Alexander the Great, Arabic sources claiming that the sacred fire of Ahura Mazda was extinguished when Mohammed was born, Mandaean legends making a villain out of Moses and a Jewish Tanakh ranting about the ‘Whore’ of Babylon. Here, the author of this perpetuation has deliberately hijacked a wholly unrelated and unfulfilled Hebrew prophecy and recycled it to serve his goals… It is interesting how he mutilated the first verse, omitting any mention of the ‘swift cloud’ upon which the Lord will ride when he comes to Egypt. It should come to us as no surprise, seeing that the ‘Lord’ had actually arrived on the back of a one drowsy ass!”
In the remaining part of the chapter, Wahid went on to illustrate with contempt how the Coptic Church ended up accepting the foulest aspects of Gnosticism while rejecting the highest. (hence the name of the chapter.) “because those abounas are willing to assert the despicable nature of the flesh and find great interest in the tales of angels and miracles while at the same time maintaining the moral superiority of the Old Testament deity and discouraging mystical insight or spiritual independence.” Wahid tells us about ‘Al Sowah Al Mujahideen’ [The struggling tourists] and how he first learned about them. “When I was six my mother took me, in one of her infinite attempts to raise me as a good orthodox, to the Monastery of Marimina [St. Menas] at Marriot Desert. The monks were very excited that day; the tools of the altar have changed their positions and a monk claimed that he had overheard numerous voices chanting hymns at three o’clock in the morning. There was only one rational explanation: Al Sowah Al Mujahideen had paid a nocturnal visit to the monastery. Al Sowah Al Mujahideen are a group of devout Christians who have ventured to the desert, led celibate lives, renounced every earthly possession and seldom ate or drank. They thus were just Sowah: tourists who no longer belonged to this world and were only partially governed by its laws. Their bodies, tamed by their spirits, were extremely fragile and thin; they could walk on water and ‘be carried away by the wind’ for long distances in a few seconds. They could work great miracles and often met at late hours in old, abandoned churches where they held masses and glorified the Lord with their unearthly voices…. I wonder if Madame Blavatsky had ever heard about Al Sowah before she started believing in the Tibetan Masters!”
Wahid also criticized the church for burdening people with guilt in order to control them in what he called “a maneuver worthy of clandestine cults alone”, a maneuver that evidently took its toll on his own conscience as a young believer. In an unrelated paragraph, for instance, we find Wahid writing about a dream that he had as a teenager, shortly after discovering the ‘forbidden ritual of the hand’: “Our blessed virgin stood before me, with weary, half-dead eyes, eyes of a woman who had just witnessed the crucifixion of her own son. She was covered with sweat and mud as she wrestled to push a brick-loaded carrel. ‘Your sins have grown beyond measure, Wahid.’ She wearily exclaimed at a guilt-ridden me.”
Wahid’s book could have become a sensation for the Egyptian Islamists who easily identify with anything anti-Coptic, were it not for its sharp-edged attack on Islamism. Writing in the seventies, an era when the Islamists, no longer prosecuted under the Nasser regime, were experiencing an unholy upheaval, Wahid was keen on pointing out the impeding horrors that Egypt would have to face in case the Islamists took control. Wahid made it clear that he was writing a book that would “challenge Copt fanatics but please no Islamist.” In the penultimate chapter Wahid claimed that the sole merit of the Coptic Church was its ardent resistance to Islamization for fourteen centuries. Yet he expressed his concern that the Coptic Church had actually absorbed Islamic values in the process. He pointed out with irony, which spoke of grief more than of pleasure, how cowardly Pope Shenouda the Third was when he discussed the doctrine of the Trinity, trying to ‘water down’ the interpretation of the trinity against the Islamic accusations of shirk [polytheism]. He concluded the chapter with a quote from the aforementioned pope where he illustrated the Trinity by means of the sun, its rays and heat. He then showed how this same allegory had been used by the abominable Sabellius to propagate his nontrinitarian heresy as attested by Saint Epiphanius of Salamis in his Medicine Chest, also known as The Panarion (6).
I believe that the last paragraph of the chapter summarizes Wahid’s position much better than any attempt from my side. “… for every action there is a reaction; even Tertullian, who thought that Athens had nothing to do with Jerusalem, still had a faint spark of light in his writings; his words still caught the fragrance of Hellenism. Now the church faces no Neo-Platonists, Stoics or Gnostics. The foe is new: one who neither cares about reason nor mystical experiences. The church is no longer faced by the important questions; the priests are not asked whether meaningful myths are spiritually superior to historical events or whether personal experience is more authoritative than scripture. The orthodox now deal with a like-minded foe and the debates are about the historicity of events. The disputes concern the actuality of the crucifixion, not its spiritual meaning. The absence of a third party has fooled both the orthodox and the Muslims into believing that disproving one religion will instantaneously justify the other.”
&n
bsp; In the last chapter Wahid expressed his deep desire to see Copts develop a secular concept of ethnic identity. This chapter clearly differs in style and attitude from the other chapters; the language is obscure and the words are ambiguous. I have a certain feeling that Wahid was trying to draw parallels between his hoped for Al Haweya Al Kebteya [The Coptic Identity] and a certain movement that had transformed another religious identity into a national one.
This extraordinary book haunted me, I tried to slip away from it but it somehow chased me in my solitude and in my dreams (I was tempted to believe that I had run into the latest incarnation of that sinister Argentine coin that almost drove Borges mad (7).) Finally, I concluded that my encounter with the book was not accidental, and admitted that I had the moral obligation of bringing the forgotten life of Abdul Masseih into light. This task turned out to be exceedingly difficult and soon I realized that I had to rely on the only two available sources of information in my quest: the autobiographical paragraphs