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An army of 4,000 Arabs led by Amr Ibn Al-Aas was sent by the Caliph Umar, successor to Muhammad, to spread Islamic rule to the west. The Arabs crossed into Egypt from Palestine in December 639 AD, and advanced rapidly into the Nile Delta. The Imperial garrisons, exhausted by constant war with the Persians, retreated into the walled towns, where they successfully held out for a year or more. But the Arabs sent for reinforcements, and in April 641 they captured Alexandria. The Byzantines did assemble a fleet with the aim of recapturing Egypt, and won back Alexandria in 645, but the Muslims retook the city in 646, completing the Arab Muslim conquest of Egypt. Thus ended 975 years of Græco-Roman rule over Egypt. Local resistance by the native Egyptian Copts however, began to materialize shortly thereafter and would last until at least the ninth century. The Arabs imposed a special tax, known as Jizya, on the Egyptians, who were by this time Coptic Christians. They acquired the status of dhimmis, and all native Egyptians were prohibited from joining the army. The Arabs in the seventh century used the term quft to describe the indigenous people of Egypt. Thus, Egyptians became known as Copts, and the non-Chalcedonian Egyptian Church became known as the Coptic Church. The indigenous population of Egypt was gradually and largely Arabized and Islamicized over the following centuries, However, native Egyptian identity and language survived among the Copts, who spoke the Coptic language, a direct descendant of the Demotic Egyptian (which itself was an evolution of Ancient Egyptian) spoken in the Roman era. Since the eighteenth century, Coptic has mostly been limited to liturgical use and today Coptic is extinct as a primary language. Copts still to this day espouse an Egyptian rather than Arab ethnic identity. |
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