Since the nationalisation of educational in Egypt by the Arab nationalist Nasserist regime in 1955, and the end of the Coptic autonomous educational system that had been established in the 1850s by our great Pope Cyril IV, our children and youth have been fed by Arab and Islamic literature. Not only the young, but those of us of middle and old age have been exposed to a bombardment of this foreign literature ta degree that amounted to brainwashing and with the intention to assimilate us into a foreign culture.
Whether it is old or new Arabic and Islamic literature it is foreign to our taste, values and culture. And I don’t mean just the pre-Islamic literature, including al-Jahili poetry, and the Koran but also literature produced by modern poets and novelists, such as Ahmad Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, Muhammad Hussain Haikal, Yousif al-Siba’ai, Taha Hussain and even Naguib Mahfouz who is the best of the lot from our point of view. These are not only foreign culturally to us, we Copts, but of little value.
We must feed the brains of our people with high literature that reflects our values and literature. And when we talk about that we talk about a literature that reflects our Christian values which form the core of our culture. We need to read literature such as the Russian’s – the great literature by great souls and great writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov. This is the type of literature that we should use to shape our character. This is the literature that is closest to us.
But all that is impossible without gaining control of the education of our children of use: we must have independence on what we select to teach our children. And for this to happen, we must have national cultural autonomy.