Ignorance is…

Bliss. Or at least that’s what they tell me. And maybe that’s the case in certain scenarios, but not all of them. Take growing up, for example. How do you know what you are going to be if you don’t know where you came from? Ignoring your roots, or simply not knowing them at all, affects the foundation that you build your life upon—because there simply is no foundation without roots.

In the two years of working with the high school youth group at my church and four years attending the “Primetime” College Friday Night meetings, I have probably heard every Arab joke there is. From extremely late arrivals to any and all events—“there is no discrimination on what we are late for, we're just late for everything,” they say—to the typical arrogant egos of Arab males to gossiping mouths of Arab women. Of course, these examples are only jokes and not meant to include every single person of Arab descent. What saddens me, however, is that the youth group as well as the majority of college students at our church includes us in the ethnic category of “Arab.”

We are Copts. We are Egyptian. We are North African. I will even go so far as to call us Middle Eastern, even though that is a term invented in the 1950’s and we have been around much, much longer than that—but one thing we are not is Arab.

Depending on who you talk to, depends on the criteria used to decipher an Arab from a non-Arab. Many people use the criteria of language. If the country’s national language speaks Arabic, then you must be an Arab. If we apply that logic to other countries, then that means Americans are really English, right? Or that Mexicans are Spanish? Of course we all know better than that. People of America speak English, but they are Americans. Mexicans speak Spanish, but God help you if you call them Spanish to their face. Englishmen are from England and the Spanish are from Spain and although they share the connection of language to those in different countries, it does not change the ethnicity of the people.

Furthermore, the languages of these once colonized countries have become a colloquial, bastardized version of their origin. The English would use words like “lift, petro, and mobile,” where as Americans would say “elevator, gas, and cell phone,” respectively. The Arabic spoken in Egypt is no exception to that rule. Egyptian Arabic, although the most widely understood dialect of all the Arabic-speaking countries, have developed miles of differences to that of the more formal Modern Standard Arabic.

When I met Gregory Orfalea, author of The Arab Americans: A History, two years ago at a teacher’s workshop in Georgetown University, I asked him about his criteria. We exchanged the typical Arabic greetings and pleasantries as he prepared his answer—immediately recognizing my Egyptian Arabic. He insinuated that it was all relative, but he agreed with the majority of the world to decipher Arab ethnicity by language—with a few exceptions. He asked if I was Coptic Orthodox and I showed him my cross tattoo on my wrist—a significant identification of a Coptic Christian. “If we looked at it in the genealogical sense,” he said, “then of course the Coptic people are not Arab because they have no origins in the Arabian Peninsula.”

Let’s take a deeper look at the principle of genealogy. At one point, shortly after the ascension of Christ, Coptic Orthodoxy was the majority religion of Egypt. The national language was Coptic, not Arabic. Also, the ethnicity of the Egyptian people were called Copts; hence the reason why Copts are considered an ethno-religious group. Then in 641AD, the Copts encountered the Arab-Muslim Invasion. They were given three options: convert, pay the Jizya—a special tax to stay Christian, or death. Many could not afford the tax, so they either converted to Islam or died for their faith. In addition, the Arabs also enforced their language by banning the use of the Coptic language in public. Although Coptic is one of the major languages spoken in the liturgy, very few people can have a conversation in that tongue.

For those who still consider Egyptians to be Arabs, let me ask this question: is it possible for a nation to invade and conquer their own people? Of course not; there is nothing to conquer when it already belongs to that nation.

I am not suggesting that Copts are above the Arabs. After all, we are late everywhere we go—to the extent that if we are fifteen minutes late by American standards, we’re at least a half hour early by Egyptian standards. Most Egyptian men are sweet but abundantly arrogant, and many of the women love to spread the juicy gossip. I simply want to untangle this misunderstanding that many of our Coptic youth seem to possess. Maybe then, they will take more pride in being something so exotic that the average person in America has yet to understand.