EGYPT:
ONE CIVILIZATION OF HARMONIOUS CULTURES
Egypt is the cradle of human civilization: a fact hardly contested
among authoritative historians. But Egypt also enjoys a local geo
political position, connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe through the
Mediterranean Sea. On its land, migrations of people, traditions,
philosophies and religious beliefs succeeded each other for
thousands of years. Evidence of this succession is still visible in
the accumulation of monuments and sites attesting to a uniquely
comprehensive cultural heritage. Indeed, one of the phenomena which
shaped Egypt’s distinctive identity, and explains its pervasive
influence on the then known world, was a dynamism that accommodated
and re-formulated these successive cultures into one homogenous and
harmonious Egyptian canvas. Egypt is one civilization woven of many
strands, threaded by successive and intertwining eras; the Pharaonic,
the Graeco-Roman, the Coptic Christian, and the Islamic eras.
Because the Egyptian people are the essential product of this
“harmony in diversity”, “otherness” has become an integral component
of their awareness, a basic constituent of their national and
cultural identity. This characterictic has yielded one important
result: Egypt was, and still is, the land of refuge in the widest
sense of tile word, a place of tolerence and dialogue for peoples,
races, cultures and religions.
On this land of Egypt, the first voice proclaiming the Oneness of
God rang our in the 14th century B.C. through Akhenaron’s
monotheistic creed. Moses and Jesus lived in this same land. Later,
Islam entered without conflict.
Before long, the world will be celebrating the birth of Christ,
together with the birth of the twenty first century, the third
millennium A.D. While sharing with the rest of mankind the
celebration of this momentous milestone in the world’s history,
Egypt will have its splendid occasion to celebrate the dawning of
the seventh millennium of the country’s recorded history.
Some people in the outside world may not be aware of the special
significance all Egyptians attribute to the fact that the Holy
Family, when Christ was an infant, found haven in Egypt for nearly
four years after their flight out of fear from the persecution of
King Herod. Egypt’s re-paving of the route the Holy Family followed
is part of a comprehensive policy to revive, and give prominence to,
all the religious landmarks which constitute the spiritual heritage
of the one Egyptian civilization. With an eye Of history, and
Egypt’s role in it, a nation-wide project is under way, under the
leadership of President Mubarak, to restore and preserve this
heritage. The aim is to generate a renaissance, in a temporal
context, connecting the past with the present, providing, thereby,
an impetus for the future.
To highlight but a few noteworthy examples of the many initiatives
in this regard, I would refer only to the restoration work carried
our on the Sphinx and now completed after ten years; the salvaging
of Egyptian monuments of Graeco-Roman period off the shores of
Alexandria; repairing the Hanging Church in Old Cairo, one of the
oldest landmarks in Christendom in the orient, and the work of
conservation carried out on the one-thousand year-old Al Azbar
Mosque as well as on all the other awe-inspiring edifices of Islamic
Cairo in the heart of the capital.
His Holiness Pope Shenouda Ill, guardian and defender of the
national traditions of the Coptic Church, personally approved the
text of the present book, mapping the route the Holy Family followed
on its flight into Egypt, from Al-Farma in the north east of Sinai
to Al-Muharraq Monastery in the southern Nile Valley. When the
ground work of this vast project is completed by the beginning of
the third millennium, many of the believers in the One God, we all
worship, and lovers of our civilization, will come to us. But the
supreme objective of the present book, and of the project when
completed, is enshrined in the two-fold message addressed to all
Egyptians and the world at large simultaneously: that our country
was, and will remain, a safe haven of co-existence and peace; and
that the unity of the Egyptian people, both Moslems and Copts, is
the backbone of the entity of the Nation-State of Egypt.
