The “Christians among Muslims in Medieval Egypt” (CaMMEgy) projects aimed at studying the adaptation processes of a minority in the making – the Coptic Christians – during the Medieval period in Egypt (7th – 13th centuries) under an innovative angle. It indeed focused on the analysis of discourse strategies set up by members of the Coptic community in order to claim and reinforce a favourable position in a social and territorial context that was gradually reorganized by Muslim rulers. Indeed, after the Arab conquest of Egypt (642 AD), the Copts started to be transformed into a minority: first socially – in political and confessional terms –, after the establishment of a new Islamic rule and government (7th century), and later numerically, after a great number of individual or collective conversions to Islam had occurred.
From this perspective, the overall objective was to make an integrated and comparative analysis of data extracted from two corpuses – largely understudied so far – in order to highlight and understand these discourse strategies, from the 7th century onwards. These corpuses are Arabic historiographical sources, i.e. mainly the History of the Patriarch of Alexandria (HPA, 11th century) and the History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt (HCME, 13th century), and the so-called papyrological sources.
The analysis combined tools and methods from various disciplines, such as history, textual criticism, (socio-)linguistics (language level choice) and literary analysis.
As for its societal importance, the CaMMEgy project is considered a crucial step towards a much-needed holistic and diachronic understanding of the larger Christian-Muslim relationship(s), usually studied from a unique perspective, either Christian or Muslim.
