More Copts would help
but difficult to do that with a POD post-1900...Maybe the Muslim Brotherhood takes over Egypt and creates a religion-based state, and the Copts decide that this doesn't bode well for their safety and freedom(can't imagine why!), and start agitating for independence?
But I still think external geopolitical forces would play a major role. What would the various big-power players(eg. USA, USSR/Russia) think of Cairo Vs. The Copts? And would anyone be willing to intervene(economically if not militarily) on one side or another?
But I still think external geopolitical forces would play a major role. What would the various big-power players(eg. USA, USSR/Russia) think of Cairo Vs. The Copts? And would anyone be willing to intervene(economically if not militarily) on one side or another?
It is not clear to me how Coptic separatism could even work, given the lack of substantial Coptic-majority territories that could cohere into a viable Coptic state and the identification of Copts as Egyptians.
Just thinking about the requirements of the POD, I think that you would need an Egypt that not only ended up getting fully colonized—no mere protectorate—but ended up seeing a national identity evolve on sectarian lines. It would be impossible, perhaps, for any Christians to be seen as Egyptian. A departing imperial power might well try to resettle the Copts, concentrating them in a particular convenient area perhaps. The Sinai? Alexandria?
Sectarian/ethnic. The Copts are not Arabs, which made some difficulty in the United Arab Republic, even though Nasser was secularist.
Sinai plus the west bank of the Suez Canal? The latter is actually a populated region with three large cities, and is separated from the Nile valley and delta by desert.
What is an Arab, really? Someone from Arabia? Someone who identifies as an Arab? Someone who speaks Arab as their mother tongue?
Copts are Arabs, Islam isn’t a requirement to be an Arab. Copts supported both the monarchy and Nasser due to their secularism.
No. But descent from the migrants out of Arabia is.
The Copts are descended from the pre-Arab-conquest inhabitants of Egypt.
There has been some interbreeding, of course - but very few Moslems ever marry into non-Moslem families, especially in a Moslem-controlled country. Apostasy is a capital offense for Moslems.
Language not descent is used to determine who is Arab.
Same goes for the Muslim population.
So Ireland is almost entirely populated by English people?
The Moslem population is descended partly from the Arab conquerors and partly from Coptic natives who were assimilated by the Arabs, by converting to Islam and intermarrying.
The Copt population is descended almost exclusively from Coptic natives who remained Christian and did not intermarry. They do not identify as Arabs. I was told this by a Copt.
Different "ethnic groups" use different ways to define ingroup and outgroup. Language might define it for one group while another it is religion or something like past economic status.
and ? They still assimilated.
I've heard the opposite from a few Copts I know. Groups can have different opinions regarding identity.
Do the Copts see themselves this way? As importantly, do non-Copts see Copts this way?
That is imaginable. The big problem with that is that it does not seem as if there ever was a Coptic preponderance there.
So are the Muslims of Egypt. Egyptian Muslims are overwhelmingly descended from converts, particularly from the local Coptic Christianity; Egypt was hardly repopulated.
With regards to the Irish, one point in their favour is the fact that their ancestral language seems to be spoken and used to an extent that is not true for a Copt that is close to extinct.
(Note, please, that I do not think that should be the only metric.)
The passage of time is also key. If it is clear that the Irish constitute an ethnic group, it is much less clear for the Cornish, much more assimilated than the Irish. The Cornish language dropped out of use as a community language for nearly two centuries before its late 19th century revival.
Is this debate something like the debate among Maronites over whether or not they, or perhaps the wider Lebanese population, can be considered Arabs?
The answer to that question, and to like questions posed to like groups, is that it honestly depends on the circumstances, including the question of what the people in question prefer. In much of the Arab world, including Egypt, there were Arab and local national identities that were authentically multireligious; in Egypt, the main divide seems not to have been drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims, but rather between natives and immigrants.
Could this have changed? Certainly. I can imagine scenarios in which Egypt might have had a different colonial history, a rather worse one, in which the main dividing line came to be drawn between Muslims and non-Muslims. In that scenario, I can imagine one imperial power or another trying to engage in some demographic reengineering, creating a new concentration of Copts in an area that would be a dependable client state.
(It is also the case that I can imagine an Egypt that evolve rather better, one that did not end up under any kind of colonial control and that became a secure country where European and other immigrants could find a secure place.)
A lot of people have ancestors from Arabia. The question then would be how large percentage of your ancestry would have to be from Arabia to count as an Arab. My impression is that people consider themselves Arab if they speak Arab and self-identify as Arab. Probably Muslims outside Arabia proper in general have more ancestry from the Arab peninsula than non-Muslims in the same areas (like the Copts and Maronites), although even among the latter some identify as Arab, and many of the Muslims probably have most of their ancestry from other regions than Arabia.
Deleted member 169412
The Copts aren't a majority anywhere in Egypt so it's hard to see how a single part of Egypt could become a Coptic nation-state without population transfers and other Bad Things (tm).