Comparative Literature 2013 Mahmood 265 84

Saba MahMood

Azazeel and the Politics of historical Fiction in Egypt

a yEar aFtEr its publication, the novel Azazeel was awarded the prestigious International Prize for arabic Fiction (modeled after the Man booker Prize)

and quickly became a best-seller in the Middle East.1 Azazeel is a work of historical fiction set in the period (319–431 ad) crucial to the consolidation of both early Christianity and the Coptic orthodox Church indigenous to Egypt. the author, youssef Zeidan, director of the Egyptian Manuscript Center and Museum (an affiliate of the bibliotheca alexandria), was known at the time more for his com-pilations of ancient manuscripts and academic commentaries on Greek, Coptic, and early Islamic texts than for his fiction. (his earlier novel, Zil al-Af’a, was largely regarded by critics as a minor and overly encumbered work.) Following the award, Azazeel won wide acclaim in literary circles, appeared in multiple arabic editions, and was translated into fourteen languages, including Greek, Italian, hebrew, and Portuguese. these literary honors notwithstanding, leading personalities in the Coptic orthodox Church accused Zeidan of “defaming the Christian religion” (izdira al-din al-masihi) — a crime in Egyptian law — and fomenting sectarian strife between Muslims and Copts. although Coptic lawyers associated with the church failed to have the novel banned, they did succeed in preventing the production of a film based on it.

Critics of the Coptic Church immediately drew parallels between its reaction to Azazeel and ayatollah Khomeini’s condemnation of rushdie’s Satanic Verses, argu-ing that both were the product of a form of religious fundamentalism hostile to freedom of expression. Egypt is of course not new to this kind of controversy, but the objects of censure have tended to be Muslim authors (such as Naguib Mah-fouz and haider haider) accused of affronting Muslim beliefs. the fact that in this case a Muslim author widely respected for his efforts at preserving ancient manuscripts (including Coptic ones) was writing about early Christian debates made for a different kind of accusation fed by flames of sectarian strife, which has reached its apex in Egypt in recent years. Many clerics and lay Copts found it

the author wishes to thank Charles hirschkind and Michael allan for their comments on this essay, and the Luce Foundation for providing support for research on this project.

1 Established in 2008, the first “arabic booker” had gone to another Egyptian, baha tahir, for his novel Wahat al-Ghroub. the fact that the second award was also given to an Egyptian raised many eyebrows in literary circles.

Comparative Literature 65:3 doI 10.1215/00104124-2325095 © 2013 by University of oregon

Comparative Literature

Published by Duke University Press

CoMParatIVE LItEratUrE / 266

2 It is difficult to do justice to the complexity of this debate without collapsing important ele-ments internal to the miaphysite and diaphysite positions. but in general one can say that the Chal-cedonian creed (the diaphysite position) subscribes to a dual nature of Christ — human and divine — conjoined in one hypostatic union. the miaphysite view, on the other hand, holds that Christ had only one nature in which his humanity and divinity were united. oriental orthodox Christianity (the non-Chalcedonians) is comprised of the Coptic orthodox, the Syrian orthodox, the armenian apostolic, the Ethiopian orthodox, and the Indian orthodox churches.

unacceptable that a Muslim author would take the liberty of commenting upon sensitive issues internal to the history of the church when a Coptic author would never be granted the freedom to do the same with regard to Islamic doctrine and history. In their view Zeidan’s novel was yet another sign of the discursive violence visited by a bellicose Muslim majority on the religious beliefs of a minority that has little control over the conditions of its national subjection.

While this sectarian context was no doubt important to the reception of the novel, there were also other issues at play. of particular consequence is the period Azazeel covers (319–415 ad) — a period that precedes the arrival of arabs and Islam in Egypt by over two hundred years and is foundational to the identity of the Coptic orthodox Church. told from the point of view of an Egyptian monk who bears witness to the struggles of the early church, Azazeel is a text steeped in the Christological controversy — over the divine and human natures of Christ and their relation to God — that eventually split the Egyptian church from Western Chris-tendom at the Council of Chalcedon (451 ad). the Egyptian church, along with what came to be known as oriental orthodox Christianity, adopted the miaphy-site position against the Chalcedonian creed embraced by the Catholic and East-ern orthodox churches (and later the Protestants),2 a position for which the Cop-tic orthodox Church endured over two hundred years of persecution at the hands of the byzantium rulers, who sought to exert theological and political control over the alexandrian See. Subsequently, Catholic and Protestant missionaries and brit-ish and French colonialists continued to regard Copts as obscurantist heretics who needed to be converted to a more enlightened form of Christianity. Insomuch as Azazeel not only ventriloquizes the early Christological debate but also takes a par-tisan position on many of the disputes, it is not surprising that it provoked the ire of the Coptic Church and its lay followers.

Much of the debate that unfolded over the novel seemed to center upon the cor-rect interpretation of ecumenical events and theological arguments. however, underlying this dispute were also opposing conceptions of religion and divinity that could not easily be resolved through fact-checking. Azazeel embodies a humanist sensibility that skillfully elides questions of Christ’s humanity with the claim that religion itself is a human invention, a view radically at odds with the church’s belief that it is humans who are a creation of the divine. Nested within these contrastive conceptions of religion and god are claims about what it means to represent the divine and, by extension, the reading practices one brings to lit-erature and history and the place of critique in such endeavors.

In what follows I hope to elucidate the multiple stakes and historical antago-nisms that the novel galvanized, the vehemence of which caught the author as much as its readership by surprise. Instead of reaching for the familiar trope of “religious intransigence” as an explanation for the church’s reaction, I would like to invite readers to consider how literary works mobilize and engage deeper



AZAZeeL & thE PoLItICS oF hIStorICaL FICtIoN / 267

3 Copts believe that the apostle Mark brought Christianity to Egypt as early as 42 ad. by the early third century, Christianity had taken root in Egypt, and the Church of alexandria was regarded as one of the four apostolic Sees, for a long time second in importance only to rome.

4 Notably, this occurs after Iblis has been forgiven for enticing adam to taste the fruit of knowledge. (See Sura 2:30–34 and 38:71–75 from the Quran).

questions that are never simply about fiction and historical truth; they also elicit certain reading practices that assume ways of apprehending the world that have a far more contested genealogy than first meets the eye.

Pagan and Christian Itineraries

Azazeel is set in the period during which Christianity came to consolidate itself against, on the one hand, the political ambitions of the roman Empire and, on the other, a cacophony of beliefs and practices (including Jewish, Gnostic, and pagan) that the ascendant church tried to eradicate, reform, and/or subsume. the novel’s narrative unfolds in the voice of hypa, an Egyptian monk who trav-els from aswan (an ancient frontier town in southern Egypt) to various monas-teries in akhmim, alexandria, Jerusalem, Sinai, and — eventually — halab and antioch. Versed in multiple languages central to early Christianity — Greek, Cop-tic, Syriac — hypa is a Copt, that is, one of the indigenous inhabitants of Egypt who predated arabs by centuries and embraced Christianity at the time of the apostles, abandoning their pagan gods and mythologies for the truth of the newly ascendant religion.3 at a time when alexandria and antioch competed for importance against rome (and eventually Constantinople), this was a multi-centered world, and the pulls on an energetic and intelligent man like hypa were many. Azazeel is presented as a compilation of his scrolls — originally penned in Syriac on papyrus and with arabic commentary in the margins — that survived through the years until they were discovered by archeologists and later rendered in arabic for its present audi-ence, with an introduction written by the translator. the plot of the novel vacillates between the drama of Christological schisms that threatened to tear Christianity apart and hypa’s own struggles between carnal desire and ascetic monasticism.

the title Azazeel intimates the kind of contention and conflict, both personal and theological, at the heart of the novel. a figure in early Jewish demonology, azazeel (often spelled azazel or azazil in English) is found in various pseudepi-graphic texts based on the old testament (such as Apocalypse of Abraham and Book of enoch I) and appears in later Jewish and Christian demonological lore in vari-ous forms. Scholars suggest that azazeel belongs to two different and competing mythologies of evil: the fall of adam and Eve and the revolt of angels in the ante-diluvian period (see Caldwell and orlov). they also suggest he was a precursor to Satan in all three monotheistic traditions. In Islam these two trajectories of evil are preserved in the figure of Iblis, who is cast out of heaven for his refusal to obey God’s command to prostrate himself in front of adam.4 While the Quran makes no mention of azazeel, early Sufis — such as Mansur al-hallaj (d. 922 ad) — ren-der him akin to Iblis, emphasizing not so much his ability to incite evil as his argu-mentative and persuasive abilities to engage the prophets, including Moses and Muhammed (see Sells 273–77). In the novel, when hypa asks azazeel what he would like to be called, he responds: “they’re all the same to me — Iblis, Satan,




5 all citations to the novel are from the English translation of Azazeel by Jonathan Wright.

ahriman, azazeel, beelzebub, beelzaboul” (291). When hypa then asks for the common meaning of his many names, azazeel responds, “the antithesis.”5

In the novel, azazeel appears as a voice and presence close to hypa’s heart, sometimes even his conscience, rather than a presence from without: “yes, hypa, the azazeel who comes to you from within yourself” (36); “I am you, hypa, and I am them . . . . I am the will, the willer, and the willed” (292). at times enticing hypa to pursue his desires and at others questioning him when he wants to recoil from theological and existential ambiguities, “azazeel,” hypa acknowledges, “has strong arguments and he usually wins me over. or is it that I have emboldened him by tugging him towards myself, as he claims, with my constant hesitation and my chronic worrying?” (37). In the words of Kamal Ghobrial, a Coptic writer and critic: “the novel tells us that Satan (azazeel) is not a metaphysical entity outside of us, who hatches conspiracies for us day and night, but he is inside of us, the impediment within, [an aspect of] our human disposition from whom it is neces-sary we do not recoil but confront with courage.”

azazeel is a constant companion to hypa as he travels far and wide in his search for existential and divine truths in a world located at the cusp of an ascendant Chris-tianity. hypa carries with him the memory of witnessing the death of his pagan father when his mother converts to Christianity and conspires with fellow religion-ists to have her husband killed. after this horrifying event, he leaves home for train-ing at a monastery in akhmim (a center of Pharonic, Greek, and — later — Christian learning). a young man with many skills, hypa teaches himself the craft of herbs and medicines and comes to love manuscripts (pagan, classical, hellenic, and Chris-tian), which he collects clandestinely, absorbing their wisdom even as he strives to become a consummate monk. over the course of his journey he indulges in tumul-tuous affairs with two women, each time turning away to persist in his quest for god.

It is in alexandria that hypa encounters the two historical figures at the center of the Christological debate of the period: Patriarch Cyril of alexandria (c. 376–444 ad) and his nemesis Nestorius (c. 386–451 ad), the archbishop of Constan-tinople, whom Cyril succeeded in anathematizing at the Council of Ephesus (431 ad). through hypa’s eyes, we come to see Cyril (known to Christianity as the “Pillar of Faith” and “Father of the Church”) as a cruel and ambitious clergyman who mercilessly persecutes Jews and pagans, key among them the beautiful Greek philosopher and mathematician hypatia, from whom hypa takes his name and whose murder by a Christian mob at Cyril’s behest hypa describes in horrific detail. hypa also admires “the heretic” Nestorius and his intellectual predecessor arius (anathematized at the first Council of Nicea in 325 ad). In the novel, he shares with various characters criticisms of Cyril’s position on Christ, the divine Word, and the Logos, echoing instead the views of arius and Nestorius, both of whom are portrayed as victims of Cyril’s ambition.

Heresy and Hermeneutics

Shortly after Azazeel’s publication, a Coptic priest, abdul Masih basit, published The Novel Azazeel: Is It Ignorant of History or Does It Falsify History?, a scathing attack on




6 basit also issued a number of accusations against Zeidan in the media (calling him a terrorist, an inciter to religious hatred, and atheist) all of which Zeidan denied. Eventually Zeidan brought a libel suit against basit, which he won in 2011.

7 bishoy is the secretary of the church’s highest religious body, the holy Synod of the Coptic orthodox Church, and the Metropolitan bishop of damietta (an important diocese in Egypt).

8 among those who engage in this activity on television and in print is the well-known al-azhar scholar dr. Zaghloul al-Naggar. bishop bishoy has challenged his views in a number of publications and television appearances. against the Muslim invective, there is now an equally vituperative Cop-tic program hosted by Father Zakariyya and aimed at Islamic doctrine and beliefs.

the novel that was part of a series on Christian apologetics.6 this was followed by a four-hundred-page book, Response to the Accusations in Youssef Zeidan’s Azazeel (2009), authored by bishop bishoy, one of the most senior and well-respected fig-ures in the Coptic orthodox Church.7 While not strictly a publication of the church, bishoy’s book is nonetheless representative of the views of the clerical hier-archy, and in recent years bishoy has taken on a number of Muslim preachers for casting doubt upon and attacking Christian beliefs. In the opening pages of his book bishoy charges that Azazeel is the “worst book ever known to Christian-ity” (13). he compares it to The Da Vinci Code (which the church had successfully petitioned the Egyptian authorities to ban in 2006), a novel that, he argues, also deploys historical events and debates in the church to assault Christian beliefs.

While most of bishoy’s charges are similar to those of basit, his is a more schol-arly endeavor replete with citations to historical works dealing with the period and written in both arabic and English. What seems to have angered him most is the novel’s depiction of archbishop Cyril as a brutal and savvy demagogue and its portrayal of hypa’s sympathy for Nestorian views on the nature of Christ. bishoy’s response includes several chapters that present an alternative account of the ecu-menical councils at Nicea and Ephesus, and he launches a sophisticated defense of Cyril’s Christological position against that of the arian-Nestorian heresy. amidst the intense communal polarization that characterizes Egypt today, it is rare to encounter such a serious and sustained — albeit accusatory — exposition of a liter-ary work that focuses on a somewhat obscure period in Christian history.

Excerpts from bishoy’s copious response circulated in various forms in the Egyptian, and especially Coptic, media. despite its complexity, Azazeel quickly became for many Copts synonymous with the attacks they have come increasingly to anticipate from a Muslim majority bent upon excoriating Christian doctrine and practice. Many believed that Azazeel was simply a literary version of sermons delivered by fanatical Muslim preachers who attack the truth of the bible and the divinity of Christ in the Egyptian media.8 (Muslims believe that, like Muhammed, Christ was a human prophet, not the son of God). It is this perspective that bishop bishoy foregrounds in his response to Azazeel: “What would be the reaction if a person wrote a story that was similar in its falsification and deception (what dr. Zeidan calls ‘literary creation’) but in regards to Islam? Will any Muslim, enthusi-astic about his religion, accept such a violation of his beliefs, distortion of Islamic history, the casting of doubt on its traditions and postulates, the insulting of its highly respected leading personalities?” (14).

For other Copts, however, the clerical reaction to the novel was in fact based on a fundamental confusion between literature and demagoguery, a confusion that instrumentally served the interests of a church that often suppresses and censors




opposing and unorthodox views. For example, in the Egyptian daily al-Badeel Karima Kamal, a well-known Coptic journalist often critical of the church, writesthe outcry around youssef Zeidan’s novel Azazeel requires that we pause and ask: Is it within the rights of the church to be angry and for the Copts to feel hurt? . . . the answer to this question in the absolute (al-mutlaq) is one thing and the answer in light of what is going on in Egyptian society, its religious polarization and bigotry, is another . . . .If we talk in isolation from what is going on in Egypt then it’s unimaginable that we would limit writing about Christianity to Christians and about Islam to Muslims . . . .[In] the current sectarian climate in Egypt, [however] the response we find on the lips of a number of Copts to my question above comes in the form of [two successive] question[s]: “What would happen if an Egyptian Christian were to take up a period in Islamic history as a topic of his novel, the protest would be unending!” . . . . [Followed by:] “Is it the right of a religious major-ity to deal with its minority always with the rule of force (hukm al-quwwa)?!”

Kamal responds to these questions with her own challenge:Is it possible for us [Copts] to stand in the name of freedom of thought and expression, far from what is happening in the society in reality[?] . . . do we adopt the logic of place, stage, and time or do we adopt the virtual logic rooted in the desire to overcome these conditions? this is a struggle between . . . the inclination to hold up freedom of thought and creativity and the victory of sectari-anism and bigotry . . . .Would it be worse if the minority view would win over the despotism of the majority, a minority that wins through reason and a majority steeped in bigotry? (my translation)

Kamal’s call to these higher principles was widely echoed by a number of lib-eral voices — Muslims and Copts alike. It clearly cast the debate as a battle between a logic that stands up for freedom of expression and the illogic of intol-erance and sectarianism. For Kamal, enlightened Copts should not succumb to the lower impulses of Muslim extremism but must rise above it even as they acknowledge that no Egyptian Christian would be spared if he were to write a literary work similar to Azazeel about Islam in the current climate. Kamal and bishoy thus seem to agree that Copts operate in a climate of bigotry but differ in their responses.

While this way of casting the debate as a confrontation between religious tol-erance and bigotry was widely accepted, it also foreclosed a set of questions that are far more complex and fraught than such a diagnosis allows. these questions include: Why does a partisan account of the fifth-century Nestorian-Cyril contro-versy and the killing of hypatia stir such passion among the Copts today? What are the reading practices that underlie these radically opposed receptions of the novel? does the location of the author of a literary work matter and, if so, for whom and under what conditions? What are the humanist claims that defenders of the novel deployed in order to cast critics of the novel as retrograde? Given our own prejudice for a humanist literary aesthetic, how do we as critics place ourselves in relation to such a contentious debate? In what follows, I try to take up these issues and their consequence for thinking about literary works such as Azazeel.

Hypatia and Religious Violence

youssef Zeidan’s portrayal in Azazeel of hypatia and her murder accords with a long tradition of Western literary and popular writings that depict hypatia’s youthful beauty and intellect as heroically opposed to forces of religious dogma-tism personified in the figure of archbishop Cyril. Zeidan sets the stage for hypa-tia’s murder with a sermon delivered by Cyril at the Caesarium (once a temple built by Cleopatra VII, now a church):




9 Cyrus and his followers purged alexandria of its Jewish population against the orders of orestes, the Greek prefect of alexandria. the “house of idols” is a reference to the temple of Sera-peum, dedicated to the hybrid hellenic-Egyptian god Serapis and destroyed in 391 ad by bishop theophilus, Cyril’s predecessor. Chapter 3 of bishoy’s response to Azazeel is dedicated to challeng-ing this portrait of theophilus.

Children of God, friends of living Jesus. this city of yours is the city of the almighty Lord. Mark the apostle settled here, on its soil lived fathers of the church, the blood of martyrs flowed here and in it the foundations of our faith were built. We have purged it of the Jews, who have been expelled. God helped us to expel them and cleanse our city of them, but the remnants of the filthy pagans are still raising strife in the land. they spread iniquity and heresy around us, and intrude insolently on the secrets of the church . . . .they want to rebuild the great house of idols which was brought down on top of them years ago.9 they want to revive their abandoned schools, which used to instill darkness in the minds of men . . . . So, children of the Lord, free your land from the defilement of the pagans, cut out the tongues of those who speak evil, throw them and their wickedness into the sea and wash away the mortal sins. Follow the words of the Saviour . . . when he said: “think not that I am come to send peace on earth, I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (122–23)

hypa, who is among the sermon’s audience, then describes how Cyril’s followers, who have rushed out of the church to attack pagans, encounter hypatia riding in her chariot, pull her down, drag her through the streets, scrape her skin off her flesh, and finally set her on fire. horrified by the brutality of his Christian brethren, and prodded by azazeel, hypa decides to record the events he has just witnessed in this “city of almighty God, the capital of salt and cruelty” (123–29).

Zeidan’s/hypa’s rendering of hypatia’s murder is neither unique nor novel. Its factual contours roughly follow Socrates Scholasticus’s account in his Historia eccle-siastica, which was written shortly after hypatia’s death in 415 ad and embellished over the years by Protestants and Enlightenment scholars who used hypatia’s mur-der to launch a broader critique of clerical excess and religious violence. Indeed, hypatia enjoyed a legendary status among such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal critics of ecclesiastical authority as Voltaire, John toland, Charles Leconte de Lisle, and Edward Gibbon. In the twentieth century, she has been championed by bertrand russell and Carl Sagan. the title of the deist John toland’s book on hypatia is representative: Hypatia or the History of a most beautiful, most virtuous, most learned and in every way accomplished lady, who was torn to pieces by the clergy of Alexandria to gratify the pride, emulation and cruelty of the archbishop com-monly but undeservedly titled St Cyril (1720). More recently, feminists have embraced hypatia as a pagan prophetess whom the church sacrificed at the altar of patriar-chal monotheism. In these accounts, hypatia’s murder is emblematic of the end of the age of philosophical wisdom and, in Martin bernal’s words, “the beginning of the Christian dark ages” (dzielska 26).

Consider, for example, Edward Gibbon’s account in his magisterial The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire :hypatia, the daughter of theon the mathematician, was initiated in her father’s studies; her learned comments have elucidated the geometry of apollonius and diophantus; and she publicly taught, both at athens and alexandria, the philosophy of Plato and aristotle. In the bloom of beauty, and in the maturity of wisdom, the modest maid refused her lovers and instructed her disciples; the persons most illustrious for their rank or merit were impatient to visit the female philosopher; and Cyril beheld with a jealous eye the gorgeous train of horses and slaves who crowded the door of her acad-emy. a rumour was speared among the Christians that the daughter of theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect [orestes] and the archbishop [Cyril]; and that obstacle was speed-ily removed. on a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader and a




troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames. the just progress of inquiry and punishment was stopped by seasonable gifts; but the murder of hypatia has imprinted an indelible stain on the character and religion of Cyril of alexandria. (33)

however, as Maria dzielska has recently demonstrated, Gibbon’s account, like the others noted above, makes cavalier use of earlier chroniclers in order to drive its point home. hypatia was in fact sixty, rather than a “modest maid” (Gibbon) of twenty-four, and she was not doctrinally opposed to Christianity: “Unlike her con-temporary fellow philosophers, she was not an active, devoted pagan. She did not cultivate Neoplatonic theurgic philosophy, visit temples, or resist their conversion into Christian churches. Indeed, she sympathized with Christianity and protected her Christian students” (dzielska 105; see, also, Wessel 53–54). dzielska also chal-lenges the popular consensus that hypatia’s death marked the end of alexan-drian science and philosophy: “the alexandrian school achieved its greatest suc-cess at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries,” long after hypatia’s death (105).

In dzielska’s view, it was not hypatia’s paganism that bothered Cyril, but her popularity with the alexandrian elites and the political/intellectual weight she carried with them — particularly with orestes, the prefect of alexandria, with whom Cyril was locked in battle (104; see, also, Wessel 50). Nevertheless, “Cyril must be held to account for a great deal, even if we assume that the murder was contrived and executed by the parabolans [the patriarch’s helpers], without his knowledge. For there is no doubt that he was a chief instigator of the campaign of defamation against hypatia, fomenting prejudice and animosity against the woman philosopher, rousing fear about the consequences of her alleged black-magic spells on the prefect [orestes], the faithful of the Christian community and the whole city” (97; see, also, Wessel 46).

there is a crucial part of the puzzle that most scholars working on hypatia’s murder overlook, however — one that commands particular weight in the memory of Coptic Christianity. over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Western Christianity began to construct itself in civilizational terms that had more in common with the late hellenic world than the lands where Jesus and his early followers roamed, it also distanced itself from the history of what came to be called “non-Latinate Christianity” (see Masuzawa, esp. chapter 6). hypatia’s mur-der came to symbolize the degenerate character of a specifically “Eastern Christi-anity” and not of Christianity as such. While Western scholars have explored how Enlightenment Christianity came to distance itself from its Judeo-Semitic origins, little attention has been paid to how it also cast the history of oriental Christianity as outside of its self-image. the antipathy with which European Christians came to regard their fellow brethren from the “East” is clearly evident in the 1875 novel Hypatia, which depicts some of the same events as Azazeel. Its author, Charles King-sley (1819–75), was a well-known priest in the Church of England, as well as a popu-lar novelist, an early supporter of darwin’s Origin of the Species, and a critic of John henry Newman. his profile is exemplary of other nineteenth-century Protestants who drew a resolute line between the superiority of Western Christianity and the depravity of the orient. In the epilogue to his novel, Kingsley writes:the Egyptian and Syrian Churches . . . were destined to labour not for themselves, but for us. the signs of disease and decrepitude were already but too manifest in them . . . .[t]he races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, over-civilized, exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh




10 bishoy relies on the ecclesiastical historian John of Nikiu to substantiate his claim: Nikiu describes hypatia as someone who “beguiled many people through [her] satanic wiles” and “started an active ‘athiezation’ of Christian believers” (dzielska 91).

blood had come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent, incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they afforded material out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not citizens of the kingdom of God . . . .[t]he ever downward career of Eastern Christi-anity went on unchecked for two more miserable centuries, side by side with the upward develop-ment of the Western Church. (xiv)

In Kingsley’s novel, Cyril and his followers embody the dogmatic Egyptian-Syrian mindset most evident in their intemperate devotion to Egyptian monasti-cism. because they once served a useful purpose, “our duty,” Kingsley argues, is “not to sneer at them” but to appreciate what they were able to preserve for the Western Church: “a precious heirloom . . . a metaphysic at once Christian and scientific” that was brought to its fullest potential after it was purged of these old “theoretic mon-sters” and an “effete Greek philosophy [built] upon Egyptian symbolism” (xv). Like Zeidan, Kingsley claims that his novel “closely follows authentic history” (xv), although his orientalist condescension of course finds no resonance in Azazeel.

It should come as no surprise, then, that bishop bishoy accuses Zeidan of bor-rowing heavily from Kinglsey’s Hypatia: “If historians like . . . Gibbon were eager to use the death of hypatia for discourse against Christianity, then there were others [like Kingsley] who were eager to use this murder for their sectarian [i.e. Protes-tant] interests” (80). bishoy also links these earlier writings with those of such con-temporary authors as Carl Sagan, who use hypatia’s murder as evidence of Christi-anity’s inherent violence and irrationality (82). bishoy claims instead that Cyril had nothing to do with hypatia’s muder (the parabolans may have) and asserts that, contrary to popular opinion, she was not a sage but a sorceress who died because of her unpopularity.10 Far more importantly, bishoy turns the tables on Zeidan and asserts emphatically that it was not the Christians who persecuted the pagans but the reverse, a situation that is never mentioned in the novel (Watani).

bishoy is not entirely wrong in pointing to the violence early Christians suffered at the hands of pagans under roman rule. but even more central to this sense of persecution is the particular history of Coptic suffering — first at the hands of the roman emperor diocletian in 284 ad (which marks the start of the Coptic calen-dar with the “Era of the Martyrs”), and later, following the Coptic refusal to accept the Chalcedonian creed (451 ad), under byzantium rulers (the Melkites) for a period of over 200 years. as a result of this long history, a critical part of the iden-tity of the Coptic Church is the valiant resistance that Coptic monks and priests mounted against the imperial governments of rome and Constantinople. by the time Muslim-arabs arrived in 642 ad, the Copts were exhausted by the Melkite persecution and, according to many historians, welcomed the new rulers. this idea, however, is unacceptable to present-day Copts given the sectarian climate that permeates Egypt, a climate in which Copts have come to be treated (this time by Muslims) as second-class citizens and subject to forms of discrimination at odds with the postcolonial nationalist promise of civil and political equality. bishoy’s text often paints a rather homogenous picture of violence against the Copts from the third century to the present.

there is however a new element in this tortured history of European relations with Copts that imparts a fresh charge to the current Christian-Muslim standoff.




11 this agreement was further sealed in 1991 when bishops from the Greek orthodox, armenian, Ethiopian, Syrian, roman Catholic, and Indian Christian denominations gathered at the Monas-tery of Saint bishoy in Wadi Natroun to remove mutual anathemas and to affirm that the Christo-logical mystery could be “expressed in different words and in different traditions though adhering to the same fundamental faith” (Kamil 200).

the Coptic Pope Shenouda III (d. 2012), known for his political savvy in regard to his community’s survival in a Muslim majority country, convinced Pope Paul VI to put the old denominational animosities aside, and they announced in 1973 their agreement on the “meaning of the Christological formula of Saint Cyril of alexandria, the famous ‘one nature of the incarnate Word’” (Meinardus 125).11 In Pope Shenouda’s words, the past schism was merely a matter of “semantics and terminology” that was secondary to the faith that unites the denominations. this was a momentous event in that it not only brought peace between two con-flicted branches of Christianity, one politically ascendant and the other weak, but also laid to rest a century-old conflict over proselytization between Coptic Christians and Western Christendom.

It is this unified Christian identity that bishoy implicitly invokes when he claims that, insomuch as Cyril’s Christology is the essence of Christian doctrine, Zeidan has defamed Christianity tout court by giving voice to Cyril’s critics (Nestorius and arius). bishoy, not surprisingly, makes little of the byzantium persecution. In his attempt to portray Christianity as a unified tradition, the history of interne-cine Christian warfare must be erased in order to secure a global Christian iden-tity against its current persecutors, the Muslims. Furthermore, because the cur-rent sectarian context in Egypt inevitably produces a politics of identity, the fact that Azazeel ’s author is a Muslim can only be read as an act of aggression against a beleaguered minority. Viewed from this perspective, historical schisms and debates internal to the church are always deployed by the Muslim majority to cast doubt on the truth of Christianity and the divinity of Christ. Even though Azazeel makes no mention of Islam or arabs and is in fact concerned with a period in which neither were known to the inhabitants of Egypt, its Coptic audience suspect that its portrayal of the brutality of Christian fathers might discursively level the violence done to them by the Muslim majority. thus, when a reporter asks bishoy whether he is angry because Zeidan is a Muslim or because Azazeel violates Chris-tian beliefs, bishoy answers emphatically: “the two together. I will not accept for any Muslim to explicate Christianity!” (al-Musawwir).

History and Literature

this partisan stance on who has the right to comment on Christian history served as a pivotal point for youssef Zeidan’s counter-response to bishop bishoy and the Coptic Church. Published in the leading Egyptian newspaper al-Masry al-Youm over the course of seven weeks, the title suggests the tenor of Zeidan’s response: “the Lies in the hallucinations of the bishop.” after stating his public record on combating religious sectarianism in Egypt, Zeidan stresses two issues: the historical veracity of the events on which Azazeel is based and his right as a novelist to render them in a manner commensurate with protocols of literary production. Zeidan’s conception of Azazeel as a chronicle of historical events




12 the term Zeidan uses is matran (archbishop). Since bishoy is also referred to as anba (bishop), I have retained the latter in my translations in order to be consistent.

13 Zeidan faults the bishop for making use of ecclesiastical historians (such as Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus), calling them “men of religion” and thereby impugning their credibility when compared to the impartiality of a real historian. In this polemical response, he overlooks the fact that Socrates Scholasticus is one of the primary sources of information on that period for a number of modern historians (such as Gibbon, Wessel, dzielska).

comes to the fore in the striking statement he makes in the beginning of his response to bishoy: “Azazeel is based on actual historical events that are impossi-ble to deny. there is not one historical error in it no matter how the bishop tries to cast doubt on it” (Zeidan, “doktor”). as to the charge that he has meddled in affairs internal to Christianity, he responds:how is it that the bishop12 thinks that the events the novel presents are matters internal to the church? Is the history of Egypt in the fifth century an internal issue? Is the murder of hypatia which cast a shadow on human history for five centuries an internal issue? Is the church schism that shook the world and caused people misery to the ends of the earth, leading to the killing of 20,000 Copts . . . at the hands of a Christian ruler an internal issue? Is search for reality [truth] an internal issue? Is an internal issue ever only an internal issue? (“doktor”)

a key to the rhetorical structure of this argument is Zeidan’s claim that as a human (insan) he represents all of humanity: “the novelist (mu’allif ) is in the end a human being who writes about other human beings” (“doktor”), an argu-ment he clarifies in an interview on al-Jazeera : “[Azazeel] celebrates insan . . . . What is this charge about being a Christian or Muslim? I believe in all religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism . . . .” (Liqa’ al-youm). Zeidan’s professional identity as the director of the Center of Manuscripts was central not only to the defense he mounted against the church’s attack on the novel but also to the public per-sona he projects as a valiant custodian of knowledge at a moment when popular interest in it has declined and it is mired in confusion and myths that obfuscate reality. as a purveyor of historical knowledge, he can thus claim to be better equipped than “men of religion” to reflect on the symbolic meaning of past events for humankind.13 at the height of the controversy, Mona Shazli, who enjoys rock star status on Egyptian satellite television, interviewed Zeidan on her intellectu-ally inclined talk show ‘Ashara Masa’n. the show focuses on Zeidan’s historical contributions (rather than Azazeel ), and he holds forth on a variety of topics ranging from the obscure to the popular. When asked why he loves history, he responds: “It is not possible for us to think about what is happening today . . . without seeing how it all began.” When Shazali asks, “how so?” Zeidan responds: “Let me give you an example: when you debate people these days they often say, ‘so what is the point in the end?’ this is wrong! We must understand what is the origin/beginning of a problem.” Shazli then interjects, “you mean you want to tug at the beginning of a string and see where it leads,” and he replies: “No! [I mean] without knowing how the root of a narrative/account got started we can-not get anywhere” (‘Ashara Masa’n). In another interview televised on al-Jazeera, Zeidan emphasizes a similar theme: “the history I am talking about [in Azazeel] is not ancient history but informs the present . . . . I want to [in fact] claim that we will not understand what is happening in our countries today unless we look at aspects of our history that are lost to memory but which we need to examine without bias or sensitivity (hassasiya)” (Liqa’ al-youm). In this view, historical




knowledge is crucial for elucidating the present and for showing us a way out of its morass rather than contributing to it.

Zeidan is not alone in claiming historical accuracy. over two-thirds of bishoy’s response to Azazeel is a refutation of the historical facts he claims Zeidan misrep-resents, among them events surrounding the ecumenical councils, statements by various clerical figures, and of course the true nature of theological disputes. Copiously footnoted with scholarly and ecclesiastical works, it is a document whose complexity has been lost in the shrill debate in the media. Indeed, the degree to which the issue of historical veracity is crucial to both sides of the debate is at once striking and emblematic of a secular conception of truth in which history, with its protocols of evidence and proof, enjoys a privileged status. Given the force of this epistemological framework, it is not surprising that modern Christians came to ground the truth of the bible (or Christ) not simply in the narrative of redemp-tion or eschatology but in the positivity of biblical events that unfolded within the arc of time (secular, empty, homogenous) like any other event worthy of parallel claims on human action (see Frei and Shugar).

does this mean that the fundamental disagreement between bishoy and Zeidan turns upon their interpretation of historical events? yes and no. yes, because both subscribe to a conception of history that is necessary to their claim on truth. No, because there are two incommensurable understandings of litera-ture and religion at the center of a dispute that is not so much about history as it is about these concepts. Zeidan accuses bishoy of confusing fiction with history even as he himself interweaves both:[one of] the methodological mistakes . . . bishop bishoy makes is that he thinks Azazeel is a historical document or formal report of real events or an actual biography of a monk. Even though, to state it most simply, as noted on the cover, it is a novel . . . a novel. but because he is unaccustomed to reading fiction, he is deluded by the artistic illusion mentioned in the beginning of Azazeel [told in the voice of the translator of hypa’s scrolls from Syriac to arabic] and believes it is a book to which he can respond with another book! he would have learned had he inquired that a number of both famous and non-famous literary works and poetry make recourse to such illusions insomuch as they are a technique of contemporary fictional narrative . . . .[t]he nature of literary discourse of Azazeel escapes the bishop: at the end, Azazeel makes man victorious over loathsome violence that religion uses as a means. It also escapes [the bishop] that the characters [in a novel] are diverse and their posi-tions and thoughts conflict; that when we put words on the tongues of a literary character this does not mean that these necessarily reflect the views of the author. (“doktor”)

this is a familiar claim that almost all secular responses to religious critiques of literary works rehearse, replete with the cosmopolitan condescension at play here. Consider, for example, Salman rushdie at the height of the Satanic Verses contro-versy: “[the writer of] fiction uses facts as a starting-place and then spirals away to explore its own concerns, which are only tangentially historical. Not to see this, to treat fiction as if it were fact, is to make a serious mistake of categories” (qtd. in asad 283). this is what defenders of Zeidan also alleged: that bishoy had made a category mistake between literature and demagoguery, that “men of religion” unschooled in the former could not decipher the difference. yet it seems to me that the claims of history and fiction are more complexly intertwined than the trope of literature, with its own protocols of appreciation and critique, allows. a work of historical fiction recalls a host of images and events that are meant to trigger in its audience various kinds of recognition. Given where one might be located within the social continuum, this recognition evokes different




responses — appreciation, anger, or apathy, among them — in which one’s relation to the history invoked is fundamental. In other words, a work of historical fiction does not place past events indifferently on a blank canvas but works to induce rec-ognition among its readers, and its success is measured in part by how well it can do so. among those who recognized themselves in the narrative of Azazeel are monks, clerics, and those for whom Azazeel voices a critique of the institutional and doctrinal hegemony of the church. What I want to emphasize here is that the reactions of both groups are legitimate reactions to the novel, despite what Zeidan and his supporters want to claim. Insomuch as both parties recognize themselves within the historical stock of images, events, and arguments that the novel mobi-lizes, both reactions squarely belong to the field of literature and its reception. We might appreciate one reaction more than the other, but it will not do to cast one as a category mistake.

Finally, it is important to recall here almost half a century of scholarly work on the normative impulse internal to the narrative structure of the novel aimed at reconstructing and reorienting the sensibilities of the reader. the edificatory effect of the novel is a crucial element in this normative project in that literature seeks to shape and define its audience’s affective dispositions rather than simply express them. Viewed from this perspective, Azazeel does not simply provide an alternative reading of historical debates within Christianity; it also urges its read-ers to inhabit this history differently, to appreciate it with a different kind of devo-tion than that of the clerics. bishoy’s remark that “even a literary work must respect creed/belief” is perhaps best understood as a recognition of the transformative project that Azazeel aims to effect through literary means among its audience. In what follows, I want to give a sense of the kind of sensibility that the novel seeks to create in relation to the Christological debate the church found so offen-sive. I will call this a “humanist sensibility” as shorthand for a perspective that is more inclined to appreciate the poesis of “spirituality” rather than the doctrinal demands of religion.

The Human in the Divine

among the opinions that Zeidan’s characters mouth that were offensive to bishoy is the belief — articulated at various points by archbishop Nestorius (“the heretic”), hypa, and azazeel — that Christ was more human than divine. While this claim resonates with certain positions in the Christological debate, in Aza-zeel it slips quickly and effortlessly into the claim that religion itself is a human creation. this is a subtle elision, one that fits naturally with the secular ethos of the novel and its literary audience but one whose truth cannot be assumed if we are to grasp fully the stakes of this debate.

the idea that Christ was a man distinct from the divine Word/Logos has a long history in Christianity. although both origen of alexandria (d. 253/254) and Paul of Samosata (d. 275) held this belief, it is most famously associated with arius (d. 336 ad), an alexandrian presbyter who was anathematized at the Council of Nicea in 325 ad, when the Nicene Creed was agreed upon as the doctrinal basis of Christianity. arius proposed that the Word was autonomous and independent from the essence of God, who was eternal. he also argued that, just as the divine




14 In arius’s well-known formulation, “If the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten has a beginning of existence; and from this it is evident, that there was when the Son was not” (qtd. in Chidester 46).

15 Some historians have argued that, ultimately, Nestorius’s views are similar to those propounded by Protestants, who nevertheless continue to regard him as a heretic. others, however, note that the fact that Nestorius believed that Christ was the bearer of the Word but not the Word incarnate makes his view heretical to all of Christianity. this latter view seems to have prevailed even among those who disagreed with the equation Cyril drew between Nestorius and arius at the Council of Ephesus.

Word was distinct from God’s essence and beyond human comprehension, so too was the divine Father distinct from the human Son, his wholeness uncontainable by the human form.14 the fact that Jesus hungered, thirsted, and suffered on the cross was proof to arius that he was unlike God, whereas alexandrian Christology claimed that it was not the divine Logos that suffered on the cross but Jesus’ flesh. although the Nicene Creed was meant to seal the fate of this heretical view, it resurfaced almost a hundred years later in the Christology of Nestorius, the arch-bishop of Constantinople, who was anathematized at the Council of Ephesus (415 ad) at Cyril’s behest.

historians of this period point out that Nestorius’s beliefs were in key ways quite distinct from arius, whom he, like Cyril, regarded as a heretic (Wessel 220). Unlike arius, who believed that the human essence of Christ was subordi-nate to the divine Word/Logos, Nestorius advocated that Christ had two natures, human and divine, loosely joined through a single prosopon. If to our ears this view sounds similar to current understandings of the human and divine natures of Christ joined in one person, then we are not entirely wrong.15 Cyril, however, was able to convince the Council of Ephesus that Nestorius was no different than arius (his actions and words notwithstanding) and that Cyril himself was the equivalent of the athanasius who had saved Christianity from the arian her-esy at the First Council of Nicea: When Cyril compared Nestorius to the heretic arius, he opened a doorway through which the audience saw that Nestorius had made Jesus into a common man. Cyril also implied that he himself was the new athanasius, the next defender of Nicene orthodoxy . . . .these vivid comparisons, which brought together the qualities of two persons living at widely separated times into a single point in the present, also belonged to the category of types, both biblical and sophistic. by repre-senting events in terms of actions to be imitated, paradigms to be followed, types had strong moral implications. to label one person with the epithet of another implied, especially in the context of the biblical text, that the second person embodied all the significant moral qualities, or deficien-cies, of the first. (Wessel 188–89)

Cyril also called Nestorius a Jew and in so doing “invoked the entire Christian corpus of anti-Jewish teachings” and their diminution of Christ’s divinity (Wes-sel 216–17).

In an ironic twist, Zeidan likewise collapses the differences between arian and Nestorian views — but for reasons quite different from Cyril’s. In Azazeel, the con-tinuity between arius and Nestorius is consistently thematized. at his first meeting with hypa, Nestorius registers his agreement with arius: “I find . . . the events of [arius’s] life as merely an attempt to purge our religion from the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians about their gods . . . . arius wanted our religion to worship one God alone. but he sang a song which was unfamiliar in his time, recognizing the mystery of God’s manifestation in Christ but not admitting Christ’s divinity, recog-nizing Jesus the son of Mary, a gift to mankind, but not recognizing any divinity




16 although bishoy denounces Zeidan for failing to understand important differences between arian and Nestorian views — differences he expounds upon at length (184–94) — he fails to com-ment on the fact that it was Cyril who first equated arius and Nestorius in order to secure the lat-ter’s anathematization. on the differences between the arian and Nestorian views that Cyril ignored, see Wessel (132–33).

other than the one God” (39). he explains to hypa that “the Messiah . . . was born of man, and humans do not give birth to gods. how can we say that the Virgin gave birth to a god and how can we worship a child a few months old . . . ? the Messiah is a divine miracle, a man through whom God appeared to us. God became incarnate in him to make of him a harbinger of salvation and sign of the new age of mankind” (33). Later, he preaches that “Jesus is human, and his incar-nation is a compromise between the Eternal Logos and Christ the human. Mary is the mother of Jesus the human being, and should not be called the mother of God. It is not right that she be called theotokos” (201–02). When hypa meets Nestorius again at the end of the novel and on the eve of the Council of Ephesus, Nestorius continues to hold firm in his views: Jesus is not God, he tells hypa, but his manifestation, “like a hole through which we have been able to see the light of God, or like a signet ring on which a divine message appeared. the fact that the sun shines through the hole does not make the hole a sun, just as the appearance of the message on the signet ring does not make the ring a message. hypa, these people have gone quite mad, and have made God one of three [the Father, the Son, and the holy Ghost]” (203).16

how are we to understand Zeidan’s elision of arian and Nestorian views? Is it a historical error as bishoy charges or is there something else at play here? I want to suggest that the answer to this question lies in how the Christological debate func-tions to secure Zeidan’s claim that religion is a human creation. the humanity of Jesus that Zeidan ventriloquizes through Nestorius (and by extension arius) secures for him the figure of “insan” (man/human) embattled by the dogmas and duplicities of religious authorities who want to contain human creativity, imagi-nation, and freedom. It is no accident that hypa’s struggle to be an ascetic monk is fraught with the calling of the flesh, a calling that he both appreciates and resents, battling its force while acknowledging the succor it provides for his soul. the carnal qualities of Jesus that the novel’s Nestorius emphasizes — his bowel movements, his thirst, hunger, and, ultimately, his suffering — are akin to the car-nal pulls on hypa, humanizing Christ in the same way that they humanize hypa. Note that while this is a carnality familiar to humanists of Zeidan’s persuasion, it is not one that concerned Nestorius, arius, or Cyril in the Christological disputes; the issue for them was which aspect of Christ suffered on the cross: the Word or the flesh? the answer to this question had enormous soteriological consequences for how the body of Christ was supposed to mediate man’s salvation from origi-nal sin.

What I want to draw attention to is how differently the term “humanity” is freighted in the Christological debate than in the version found in Azazeel. For alexandrians like Cyril, to hold that Christ’s human nature was separate from his divinity was to jeopardize the conception and practice of the Eucharist as partak-ing in the divine flesh and blood of Christ. It was this ingestion of divinity that would deliver and redeem Christians against eternal death. For Nestorians (and the antiochene school more generally), the fact that Christ’s divinity and humanity




17 Zeidan repeats this view in an interview in the daily al-Mussawir, which bishoy quotes in his response to Azazeel (16).

18 the labor of the literary critic, it should be noted, often consists in analyzing the meaning-making practices that endow gods and revered objects with sacrality.

were distinct allowed for a different path to salvation, one that involved the emula-tion of Jesus as the ethical exemplar rather than through the ingestion of his per-son (as in the ritual of the Eucharist). two different models of human redemption were therefore at stake in this debate about the humanity of Christ, but for both sides the fundamental concern was with the Word and its proper relationship to human salvation. In other words, the humanity of Christ in the Christological debate shared little with the modern celebration of human agency as the creative force in the world. rather, the concern with the humanity of Christ was nested in the preordained drama of eschatology, the Last Judgment, and salvation.

In Azazeel, the assumed humanity of Christ easily slides into the claim that god and religion are human creations, a testament to the creative powers of man’s indefatigable imagination. For example, when azazeel asks hypa, “did God cre-ate man, or was it the other way round?” and hypa answers, “What do you mean?” azazeel tells him that “in every age man creates a god to his liking, and his god is always his visions, his impossible dreams and his wishes” (290). In a number of interviews and lectures, Zeidan amplifies this position: “the sacred does not exist by itself. It is people’s beliefs that endow it with sacrality, which is why what is sacred in one place is not in another. If the sacred existed in itself then all of humanity would accept it so everywhere” (Liqa’ al-youm).17

this secular conception of religion as a human feat resonates with a long tradi-tion of humanist writing on religion, among them Ludwig Feuerbach’s The essence of Christianity, in which he famously argues that god is a projection of the most distinctive human qualities — reason, Will, Love — fueled by the human desire for infinitude faced against his own mortality: “the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective — i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. all the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature” (14).

It is precisely because humans create their gods that these gods embody anthro-pologically specific concepts of humanity drawn from a particular place and time. this view is extant throughout Azazeel in conversations staged between bishops, monks, and priests. For example, at one point, bishop theodore of Mopsuestia (a historical figure in the antiochene school) draws parallels between the doctrine of the holy trinity and Plotinus’s philosophical trinity: while the former, he argues, is no doubt superior, its resonance with the latter testifies to the eternal nature of such questions (23). Later in the novel, Nestorius reminds hypa of the similarities between pagan and Christian trinities: “your ancestors also believed in a holy trinity, made up of Isis, her son horus and her husband osiris, by whom she conceived without intercourse” (39). Each period thus endows god with its own cultural meaning and form, making the universal truth of religion sensible to a people in a particular time and place. Such a formulation leaves room for the truth of religion/god to stand (it is not nonsensical) while rooting its significance in human imagination and meaning-making capacities.18




this secular-humanist conception of religion offends bishoy (as it would Mus-lims of a similar sensibility) because it fundamentally reverses the epistemological basis of religion: it is not god that creates us but we create him. Quoting Zeidan’s remarks about the sacred in his response to Azazeel, a deeply offended bishoy can only “leave the reader with these words without any comment” (16). bishoy assumes here that the Egyptian readership — Muslim and Christian alike — will find such an enunciation patently absurd. We can perhaps at this point begin to get a sense of the different meanings of the term “humanity” in Christological debates and in Azazeel: in the former, the humanity of Jesus is a medium for God’s Word, whereas, in the latter, the humanity of Jesus is a symbol of humanity’s capac-ity to create truth and meaning. Insomuch as truth and meaning are products of human labor, this view wrests power from god and locates it in man.

It is precisely this sense of humanity that appeals to liberal Coptic readers of the novel. For critics like Kamal Ghobrial, to foreground the human in this way is not only to celebrate human creativity but also to humanize ecclesiastical power: “I do not believe that what bothered [the bishops] about the novel was its historical veracity [of ecumenical events] but its exhortation to question, to doubt what they present to us as absolute reality. What bothers them is that someone checks what they say and write, and in doing so brings them down from the sky . . . to the earth where the rest of us stand, takes off their godly attire to don human clothing” (Ghobrial). It seems that in this argument the Christianity of Ghobrial and the Muslimness of Zeidan are leveled. What emerges is the universal figure of the author-critic shorn of his creedal accouterments and moorings. Indeed, one might say that, in Ghobrial, Azazeel has found its ideal audience.

this conception of religion popular among secular intellectuals in Egypt today is contested not only by religiously devout Copts but also by orthodox Muslims. Its ability to offend therefore crosses the sectarian Muslim-Christian divide. Indeed, it was not long ago that orthodox Muslims excoriated the Muslim scholar Nasr hamid abu Zayd for arguing that the Quran was a human rather than divine cre-ation. the issue in this instance was not the divinity of Christ but that of the Quran, and, not unlike Coptic critics of Zeidan, critics of abu Zayd charged that he had made instrumental use of medieval mu’tazila debates about the nature of the divine Word to propound a humanist conception of religion (see hirschkind). abu Zayd was legally charged with the “crime” of apostasy, and he fled to Europe, where he was welcomed for valiantly defending a humanist interpretation of the Quran and religion more generally. Judging from the reception of Azazeel, the ability of this humanist conception of divinity to offend Egyptian sensibilities — Muslim and Christian alike — has not lost its potency. For secularists like Ghobrial, these sensibilities are an impediment to dismantling forms of religious power that are in essence this-worldly. For him, as for Feuerbach, to humanize religion is not simply to show the lie to religion but to take a necessary step in its liberation.

Conclusion

Azazeel will not be the last piece of historical fiction that elicits the anger of a religious community. When such conflicts erupt, it is common to read them as a clash between religious intransigence and the right to freedom of speech. Indeed,




19 For a parallel exploration of what might have offended pious Muslims with the publication of danish cartoons depicting Mohammed, see my 2010 essay “religious reason and Secular affect.”

the polemics that accompany such controversies often facilitate this diagnosis and only re-entrench the divide. yet for scholars who want to think analytically about the deeper issues that are at stake in such controversies, it is crucial that we move beyond this way of casting the debate. otherwise, we simply reinscribe our own secular judgments and prejudices and gain little understanding of what may in fact be involved. this essay is an attempt to think beyond the shrill polem-ics surrounding the publication of Azazeel in order to explore what might be at stake for both the novel’s author and those who found it offensive, particularly members of the Coptic Church.19 to undertake such a task is neither to support the attempts by the church to censor the novel nor to take at face value Zeidan’s high-minded defense of freedom of expression and literary imagination. rather, it is to take a first step toward understanding what kinds of incommensurable assumptions — epistemological, political, hermeneutical — undergirded the stand-off. this requires that we parochialize our shared secular epistemology to take seriously another way of thinking about history, religion, literature, and what it means to be human in the world.

as this essay makes clear, the reaction to Azazeel is enmeshed in multiple histo-ries: of religious sectarianism in Egypt; of Western European judgments about the religious backwardness of the East; of Christological debates and their relation-ship to Coptic ecclesiastical identity; and, finally, of a humanist and secular con-ception of god and religion. as I have suggested, the reaction (both positive and negative) to Azazeel is not reducible to any one of these histories, but is a product of overlapping antagonisms that came to the fore following the novel’s publica-tion. In this sense, the success of Azazeel lies precisely in tapping into the varied sensibilities, embedded in distinct histories, of the novel’s readers.

the most immediate context of Azazeel’s reception is the Christian-Muslim strife that characterizes contemporary Egypt. thus Zeidan’s Muslim identity became a flash point for the Coptic Church and laymen to protest the inequality of relations between the majority and the minority. this sense was further exacerbated by the novel’s re-enactment of the murder of hypatia as a martyr of secular truth and freedom — a key trope that has long been central in European Enlightenment and Protestant critiques of ecclesiastical authority in general, and Egyptian Christian-ity in particular. the Coptic Church and its theologians thus saw in Azazeel old demons in new clothes. Furthermore, within a contemporary context in which the old civilizational battle between Eastern and Western Christianity has been recast as one between Islam and Christianity, Azazeel’s ventriloquization of an Enlighten-ment critique of religious violence could only be read in sectarian terms. Para-doxically, however, in order to register their protest against what the Copts per-ceive to be a Muslim denigration of their faith, they had to underplay centuries of inter-Christian violence that had been crucial to their historical identity as mar-tyrs for Christ.

the fourth-century Christological debate provides another grid of intelligibil-ity for Azazeel, one that has been of enormous consequence to the identity of the Coptic Church. as I have noted, because the Coptic Church had suffered over 200 years of persecution for breaking with the Chalcedonian concensus, Coptic




theologians could not be indifferent to Zeidan’s reconstruction of this early debate, particularly its prejudice in favor of a heretical view against which the church has defined itself for centuries. there is a paradox here as well. In the twentieth cen-tury, the Coptic Church has reconciled with the Chalcedonian churches by con-ceding the legitimacy of the doctrine of hypostasis against which it had fought for so long. While this may be a necessary step for the Copts to secure a place for themselves in the global identity of Christianity today, it also suggests that this rap-prochement is undoing the doctrinal specificity of the Coptic Church, an undoing that emanates not from the threat of a Muslim majority but from dynamics inter-nal to modern Christianity.

the Christological debate in the novel, however, performs another kind of labor at odds with the substance of fourth-century doctrinal struggles. In the hands of Zeidan, it turns into a device to amplify a humanist conception of religion and divinity that may have offended the church but has also made Azazeel a literary success among the secular readers of “third World literature” both nationally and internationally. Such a humanist conception of religion is so naturalized in the reading public of global literature that, when challenged, literary critics often respond with little more than derision at the backwardness of orthodox Christians and Muslims alike (see allan). yet religious critics of Azazeel (and other such nov-els) force themselves upon us with their anger, and all too often we respond by restating with increasing condescension the self-sufficiency of literature, its free-dom from fact, history, and particularity — none of which we declare the religionist seems capable of understanding. In such moments of certitude, it may behoove us to pause and consider the extent to which literature — particularly historical fiction — is parasitical upon fact and history, that — its claim to self-sufficiency notwithstanding — the images, figures, and narratives it mobilizes engender forms of recognition among audiences who might not share its secular sensibilities but who are nonetheless part of the world that literature touches and draws upon. In short, to cast religious critics of secular fiction as alien to the world of literature may be our category mistake. by acknowledging this we can perhaps take a first step toward apprehending the implicated genealogies that have produced the current standoff between the religious and the secular.

University of California at Berkeley

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Documents

Comparative Literature 2013 Mahmood 265 84