Talking to the Copts – An Irishman’s Diary about a Dublin soup run with a guest from Egypt

I made my annual visit to the accountant recently – a mission that involved taking the Luas Green Line out into darkest south Dublin. And after the usual business, and the banter about Ulster football (the accountant is a Tyrone GAA enthusiast, while I’m from Monaghan, so the issue of Tiernan McCann’s hair came up again), he offered me a lift back into town.

That was if I didn’t mind a couple of short stops on the way, he added.

So I told him I had a gym session at six, but that there was otherwise no rush.

And I took the lift.

Devout

Now I’ve gathered over the years that Tyrone football is not my accountant’s only religion – that, in fact, he’s also a devout Christian (the two things are not as mutually exclusive as you might think). He doesn’t flaunt this. On the contrary, it tends to come up only in relation to certain charitable endeavours of his, including a weekly soup run for the homeless.

Sandwiches

And sure enough, the first stop was at his house, where his wife was making the ham sandwiches he’d distribute later, and where he had to collect a few other things, including blankets that other people donate.

It’s always impressive to see such philanthropy in action. But as well as being impressed, I was also pressed (into service, that is), however briefly. By the time we left the house, I was carrying a large Thermos flask and a duvet.

As we continued into town, I plied my driver with questions about the people he met on the streets, and he talked about other services the organisation he was working with provided. “We have a hostel called the Morning Star,” he said at one point. And that’s when I remembered that the “we” in his case was the Legion of Mary.

Nearer the city centre, he made his second stop, which was to pick up another member of the crew.

This man turned out to be Egyptian – a member of a religious community there, on a year’s retreat in Ireland.

So I did the classic Irish thing of asking him what part of Egypt he was from, as if it was Cavan or Tipperary we were talking about. And when he said it was the upper Nile, I had to admit lamely that, no, I didn’t know anyone from that parish.

Identity

But it was in any case quickly obvious that his geographical origins were of much less importance to him than his communal identity. As he told me proudly, he was a member of the Coptic faith – Egypt’s Christian minority.

Not only was he a Copt, he was a Coptic Catholic, a minority within the minority. There are only about 200,000 of them, he said (compared with maybe 10 million Orthodox Copts – themselves barely a tenth of the population in an overwhelmingly Muslim country).

The Egyptian man didn’t have much English, but what he did have he used very forcefully, so that when he was talking I felt I had to look directly at him, even though he was in the back seat.

Tattoo

There was a fierce intensity to his words, and in his eyes, especially when he suddenly thrust his arm across the seat to show me a tattoo on the inside of his wrist. It was a small Coptic cross, not much more than a centimetre in diameter, but indelible.

When Muslims came to Egypt in the seventh century, he explained, “they first destroyed our churches”. So then the Copts put crosses on their homes and made churches there, “but they destroyed our homes too”. So finally – he tapped his wrist, his eyes burning – “we put the crosses here”.

Persecution

Most Copts now have the wrist tattoo, for better or worse. And although it invites persecution, it can sometimes also be a guarantor of safety.

In some churches, they won’t admit people without the tattoos, to minimise risk of terror attacks.

When the man asked me if I’d ever been to Egypt, I said no, but that it was near the top of my to-do list (this was before the latest events there, since when, alas, it has fallen a few places).

Then, as we parked in the city centre and got out, he asked if I was “in the Legion”. So I said no again. But I helped with the duvets as far as Trinity College, where the two men were meeting others. Then I left them there to perform their good works among the Dublin homeless. And feeling a bit guilty, I went off to spend an hour doing lunges, press-ups, and forward squats.