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Marcus Simaika’s eighty-year life from 1864 to 1944 spanned the careers of half a dozen or more Egyptian rulers, British proconsuls, Egyptian nationalist leaders, visiting western heads of state, and French directors of Egyptian antiquities—from Khedive Isma‘il to King Farouk, Lord Cromer to Lord Killearn, Ahmad Urabi to Saad Zaghlul, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt to Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III, and from Auguste Mariette to Etienne Drioton. Simaika’s memoirs—a veritable who’s who of the Egyptian scene for more than fifty years—recount his personal interactions with many of these leaders and comments on nearly all of them. Had Patriarch Cyril V not reigned for an astonishing fifty-two years (1874–1927), Simaika might have interacted with half a dozen Coptic popes as well. Simaika also parleyed with the most powerful Coptic politicians of his day, from Prime Minister Boutros Ghali to the influential Wafdist Makram Ebeid and Tewfik Doss, a confidant of King Fuad.

When Simaika was born in 1864, Egypt had yet to see the British occupation, the Suez Canal, the Aswan Dam, the Mixed Courts, a parliament, the Paris-on-the-Nile district of Cairo, al-Ahram newspaper, the national library, a state university, Thomas Cook’s tourist steamers, Baedeker guidebooks, or railways south of Cairo. Mariette’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Bulaq was only a year old, and Egypt’s Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Coptic antiquities still languished in neglect. Copts could not yet attend state schools, lacked a seminary to train their clergy, and had no community council (Majlis al-Milli) to give laymen a voice in administering Coptic religious endowments (waqf), schools, and personal-status law. Across the Atlantic, the Civil War had not quite yet sealed the fate of slavery in the United States, and in the wealthy Cairo household where Simaika grew up, female African slaves still did the housework.

If many of the familiar features of modern Egypt were still missing when Simaika was born, changes over the century before 1864 had nevertheless been far reaching. The Mamluk military households that had effectively wrested Egypt from Ottoman control in the later eighteenth century succumbed to the successive blows of Napoleon’s French invasion in 1798 and Muhammad Ali’s (r. 1805–48) consolidation of power. Muhammad Ali paid for his new European-style army of peasant conscripts by recentralizing tax collection and establishing a state monopoly on cotton as a cash crop for export to Europe. New textile mills, arms factories, professional schools, a printing press, and a translation bureau primarily served his army at first. Muhammad Ali’s rebellion against the Ottoman sultan collapsed at the end of the 1830s, when European intervention forced him to relinquish his Arabian and Syrian conquests, retreat to Egypt and Sudan, and drastically reduce the size of his army.

After a lull, the pace of change picked up under Muhammad Ali’s son Said (r. 1854–63) and grandson Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79). Born thirteen months after the accession of Isma‘il, Simaika grew up amid a whirl of new reforms and increasingly threatening European colonial penetration. A French company completed the Suez Canal, and Egypt built up extensive railway, telegraph, and postal systems. State schools (separate from the religious schools capped by al-Azhar) expanded rapidly, Cairo acquired a Paris-inspired new district, and a tripartite court system (Mixed, National, and Sharia courts) was organized. Egypt acquired its first parliamentary body, a national library, an antiquities service, the Egyptian Museum, a geographical society, and an opera house. Bankruptcy cost Isma‘il his throne in 1879, and in 1882—the year Simaika turned eighteen—the British defeated Ahmad Urabi’s proto-nationalist revolt and occupied the country.

Some sixty years later, Marcus Simaika dictated the unpublished memoirs on which—another sixty years after that—his grandson Dr. Samir Simaika, with co-author Nevine Henein, would base their fascinating biography. They have also drawn insightfully on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive. This book, based on Marcus Simaika’s “Reminiscences,” deepens our understanding of at least four important themes of modern Egyptian history: the founding of the Coptic Museum and the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian–British interactions during the colonial (1882–1922) and semi-colonial (1922–52) ages, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.

Marcus Simaika is now remembered almost exclusively for the first of these themes—his great achievements in Coptic archaeology, especially the founding of Cairo’s Coptic Museum.

Egypt’s other three main historical museums—the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities (mainly pharaonic), the Museum of Arab (now Islamic) Art, and the Greco-Roman Museum—all had European rather than Egyptian founding directors. The Coptic Museum came into being just in time to form a critical link between the Islamic era and Egypt’s Greco-Roman and pharaonic pasts at the very time when modern Egyptians were reemphasizing their pharaonic past as an inspiration for their modern struggle for revival and national independence.

Simaika was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. His claim as “father of Coptic archaeology” lies instead in his achievement as a visionary administrator who used his status as a notable to pursue relentlessly his dream of preserving endangered monuments, founding a Coptic museum, rescuing decaying monastic and church libraries, and promoting love of the Coptic heritage among his fellow Copts and Muslim compatriots, and in the world at large.

Simaika and Henein recount in illuminating detail how Marcus Simaika won the cooperation of the Coptic patriarch, British authorities, and the international historic preservation movement in pursuit of his goals. The authors also bring out Marcus Simaika’s leading role on the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Art (“the Comité”) and in organizing and preserving the libraries of Coptic churches and monasteries. As chairman of the Comité’s “technical section” for a decade, Simaika—a Copt—presided over the permanent body that executed the Comité’s works, the great majority of which were on Islamic monuments.

In addition to these achievements in the field of Coptic heritage, Simaika and Henein bring back into public view Marcus Simaika’s largely forgotten activities in the fields of British–Egyptian relations, relations between Coptic laymen and the clergy, and interactions between Copts and their Muslim compatriots. In the fall of 1882, the dust of battle from Urabi’s defeat at Tell al-Kebir had hardly settled before eighteen-year-old Simaika’s knowledge of English, enterprise, and connections found him work as translator to Viscountess Strangford, a British volunteer who organized care for wounded soldiers. He soon moved on to a government career in the railways department, where British influence was already strong. As Simaika carefully negotiated his way through Egypt’s difficult colonial age, he was both deeply patriotic and eager to cooperate with Britons, from Lord Cromer on down, in causes that he believed would benefit his country.

The third and fourth themes illuminated by Simaika’s and Henein’s biography—relations between Coptic laymen and the clergy and the interactions of Coptic and Muslim Egyptians—are often intertwined. Over the long rhythm of the last three centuries, power and influence within the Coptic community have twice swung toward lay notables as spokesmen for Copts in worldly affairs and have twice swung back to the current status, in which the pope speaks as the preeminent leader of his community. Marcus’s family background, education, and talents brought him to the fore as a precocious young notable just in time to ride the wave, which lasted from the late nineteenth century into the 1950s, of powerful lay challenges to clerical monopoly of Coptic communal leadership.

In the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the power of the Coptic pope both within his flock and in representing it vis-à-vis the Islamic state was strong. According to theory, Christians as ahl al-dhimma (people of the contract) were non-Muslim monotheists—protected, but banned from military service and subject to such disabilities as a jizya (head tax). The sultan and Ottoman provincial authorities in Cairo counted on the patriarch to manage the internal affairs of his flock and guarantee the collection of the jizya. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, lay Coptic notables (arakhina, s. arkhon) working as scribes, tax collectors, and financial managers gradually marginalized the patriarchs in managing communal affairs and as go-betweens with the Islamic state. This trend ran loosely in tandem with the decline of central Ottoman control over the Mamluks and other military factions. Lay notables overshadowed the popes as patrons of church renovations, manuscript copying, and icon painting, and even in determining papal successions. Coptic sources dubbed notable Mu‘allim Ibrahim al-Guhari (d. 1795) “the sultan of the Copts.”

The collapse of the Mamluk households and successive blows from the French and Muhammad Ali undercut the Coptic financial officials who had prospered in the service of the Mamluks. Muhammad Ali preferred Armenians or Catholics to Orthodox Copts in high posts, and with the fortunes of Coptic lay notables in decline, the pendulum of power within the community swung back toward Pope Peter VII during his long reign (1809–52). Peter’s successor Cyril IV (1854–61) turned this regained papal power in a different direction, earning the epithet “the Father of Reform.” Inspired by Muhammad Ali’s new state schools and printing office and by a short-lived Coptic seminary run by Anglican missionaries in the 1840s, Cyril founded the Patriarchal School (which Simaika would attend), a second boys’ school in Haret al-Saqqayin, and a school for girls. He also imported a printing press. These new Coptic schools, joined by American Presbyterian missionary schools from the 1850s and by the state schools opened to Copts in 1867, turned out a cadre of well-educated Coptic officials and professional men who joined Coptic large landowners in challenging the popes’ leadership of the community in worldly affairs. Simaika and his peers doubted the competence, honesty, and ability of many of the traditional upper clergy, most of whom had only elementary educations and lacked administrative experience outside monastery walls until well into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, reforms paralleling those of the Tanzimat in Istanbul had begun, transforming Copts from dhimmis (protected but inferior subjects in an Islamic state) into theoretically equal citizens of an emerging Egyptian nation. Muhammad Ali relaxed restrictions on building churches, ringing church bells, and wearing crosses in public, and for the first time conferred the rank of ‘bey’ on a Copt. Said abolished the jizya in 1855 and began conscripting Copts into the army. In 1866, two years after Simaika’s birth, Isma‘il included Copts in his appointments to Egypt’s first quasi-parliamentary body. In 1882, Copts joined in a national assembly that endorsed the Urabi revolt against Khedive Tewfik and his European backers.

In 1874, the year Simaika turned ten, incoming Patriarch Cyril V agreed to the founding of a communal council (Majlis al-Milli) of laymen to join the clergy in administering Coptic waqf, schools, and personal-status law. Correctly fearing that this would dilute his own authority, Cyril soon backtracked on cooperating with the council. For the next seventy years, until Nasser stripped the Majlis al-Milli of most of its functions, popes often clashed with the council and suspended it for lengthy periods, only to be pressured eventually into reconvening it. Simaika was only twenty-eight in 1892 when he joined the government, Boutros Ghali (the first Copt to be made a pasha), and the other members of the Majlis al-Milli in exiling Cyril V to a desert monastery. When the pope turned the tables and emerged triumphant, his enmity kept Simaika from obtaining a seat on the Comité in 1896. A decade later, however, Simaika’s reconciliation with Cyril cleared the way for a burst of high-profile appointments—seats on the Comité and national legislative council, and even the vice presidency of the Majlis al-Milli. The patriarch’s consent to the founding of the Coptic Museum soon followed.

From the vantage of these distinguished posts, Simaika watched with dismay the crisis in Coptic–Muslim relations surrounding the assassination of Boutros Ghali—the first Copt to become prime minister—by a Muslim member of the Watani Party, the ensuing Coptic Congress in Asyut in 1911, and the answering Egyptian Congress convened in Heliopolis. Simaika claimed that the Coptic Congress had grown out of the resentment of the Asyut Coptic notable Akhnoukh Fanous that his Oxford-educated son had not received a government appointment comparable to that of his fellow Oxford graduate Muhammad Mahmud. He also blamed the flare-up of Coptic–Muslim tensions on policy failures of both Lord Cromer and his successor, Sir Eldon Gorst.

Firm grounding on Marcus Simaika’s memoirs is a great strength of this book. It will in turn stimulate further research, archival and otherwise, on many still inadequately understood topics. The causes and consequences of the Coptic Congress of 1911 is one such theme. Others include what happened to Coptic antiquities in the decade between the Coptic monuments being brought under the Comité’s jurisdiction in 1896 and Simaika’s accession to a seat on the Comité, the choice of the Fatimid Mosque of al-Aqmar as inspiration in designing the façade of the Coptic Museum, and the politics surrounding the nationalization of the Coptic Museum in 1931. Another intriguing question is the absence of the Coptic Archaeological Society (founded under another name in 1934) from Marcus Simaika’s memoirs, even though he had a seat on its board and his son Youssef Marcus Simaika served as its treasurer and secretary. What part did the exhibits, resources, and activities of the Coptic Museum play in the great revival stimulated by the Sunday School movement from the 1920s on? The politics of the Majlis al-Milli from its inception to the Nasser era also still await adequate historical examination.

On a personal note, in the fall of 1987 my daughter Alysa mentioned a friend in her class at the British International School in Zamalek, Marianne Simaika. I was doing research on the history of Egyptian museums and archaeology and wondered if Marianne might be related to Marcus Simaika. When my wife Barbara and I met Marianne’s parents, Dr. Samir and Yolande Simaika, we learned not only that he was the grandson of Marcus but also that he had inherited his grandfather’s unpublished memoirs. Samir generously lent me these, which proved to be a rich source for Egyptian history on which I have drawn in several publications. Nearly thirty years on, I was delighted to learn that the American University in Cairo Press was considering for publication a biography of Marcus Simaika by Dr. Samir Simaika and Nevine Henein which was based on these remarkable memoirs. Their fine work will appeal both to general readers with an interest in Egypt, Copts, archaeology, and historic preservation and to a range of specialists who will find it a valuable stepping stone to further research.