2 - Gendered Naming Practices among Coptic Christians in Sixteenth-Century Cairo: A Preliminary Assessment

Summary

Abstract: Coptic Christians, living in sixteenth-century Ottoman Egypt, were forced to navigate their participation in Cairo's majority Muslim community. Legal documents from property deeds and court registers yield onomastic clusters that suggest gendered naming strategies practiced by Coptic families. Men were more likely to have religious names, while women often had names that they shared with Muslim girls. This window into Muslim-Christian daily coexistence makes visible the complexities of Coptic cultural identity and the ways that Copts chose to enact both their community's distinct identities and their social similarity with their Muslim neighbors. Cairo's shared naming culture for girls would have circulated its messages primarily among the local, social networks of women.

Keywords: Egypt, Ottoman empire, early modern, personal names, identity formation, non-Muslim minority

Personal names illuminate the lives of otherwise anonymous people lost to history and their connections to each other and the broader society. The Coptic community in early modern Egypt provided one example where, in naming their children, parents strategically responded to tumultuous social and political changes. Those changes accompanied Egypt's incorporation into the Ottoman empire beginning in 1517. To the distant multicultural Ottoman state, Coptic Christians, the indigenous pre-Islamic population of Egypt and just one of many minority sectarian groups, were demographically insignificant and largely ignored, as long as they paid their taxes and did not cause any trouble. The community kept the internal autonomy and state protection they had mostly enjoyed under earlier Muslim governments, but with greater stability and security. In the face of these changes, the Coptic community adopted new practices to “integrate themselves with Ottoman officials, Muslim notables, and distinguished Christian leaders.” The group also increasingly placed their trust in the empire's Islamic courts. From the first century of Ottoman rule, court registers and property deeds enacted at these courts recorded Muslim and Christian personal names, including those of women that very seldom appeared in chronicles and church histories. Incidental to research on the social history of religiously mixed districts of Cairo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a gendered “onomastic cluster” has gradually emerged. Based on the present documentation, the present study suggests that, taken collectively, gendered naming practices can be read as forms of networking. In the Coptic case, names as networking faced both outward toward the larger society and inward toward family and neighborhood.