Abstract
On a number of religious, historical and geographical reasons, we can consider Egypt as a huge sacred open-air place shared by different religions. Islamic tradition reached Egyptian soil relatively late in relation to the very long history of the land. It therefore found an extremely rich cultural substratum and adapted it naturally to its own religious conceptions. In this chapter I will first of all argue that the primary layer of sharing is constituted by the intangible cultural heritage associated with the various denominations that the Egyptian holy landscape has assumed over the centuries. These designations offer valuable information about the longstanding connection between history and sacred geography in the land of Egypt. I will then address the issue of the Egyptian holy landscape and its natural sacred sites, most notably the Nile and the Sinai. Specific emphasis will be placed on the recognition that the different religions on Egyptian soil have often shared very similar interpretations and rituals, both in a diachronic and synchronic way. Finally, I will present some remarkable examples of shared holy places connected to the ancient Egyptian heritage as to the sacred history of Christianity and Islam.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Nāsak is a term unknown to ancient Islamic sources, the people of Mansak, according to the geographical works of Dīnawarī (d. 896) and Qazwīnī (d. 1283), descend from Meshech (Muski), son of Yafet (1999). This people lived in the same region as the mysterious people of Gog and Magog, and Magog and Meshech are mentioned together in Genesis 10:2, van Donzel, Ott, EI2.
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Patrizi, L. (2021). A Shared Holy Landscape: The Reactualization of Egypt’s Sacred History and Geography in Medieval Islamic Thought. In: Burchardt, M., Giorda, M.C. (eds) Geographies of Encounter. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82525-6_13
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