How does one even attempt to capture who Maged Atiya was?
The scientist with a successful academic and practical career?
The businessman who built a flourishing company?
The intellectual, who bridged the gap between Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox, whose knowledge was as wide and deep as humanly possible, and beyond?
The twitter persona who became a resource to anyone interested in Egypt and a mentor to many?
The author who wrote like a poet?
None of these fully capture who Maged was.
Many words have been written about Maged already.
He has been described as brilliant, a man with an extraordinary mind, a caring soul, a unique voice, a gifted observer of Egypt, the most humane individual I have ever met, a cultured thinker, a vital voice of reason, one of the most thoughtful individuals in our civilization’s predicament, or as Hisham Melhem put it “he was my northern star”
People who had never met him and who only knew him though his blog and tweets, were overstruck with sadness at his passing describing how they felt they had lost someone so dear. As a friend wrote “he had more influence on me than many people I come across daily.”
All of them true, none of them sufficient, not even close.
I came to know Maged in 2012. He had been following me on twitter for some time before in replying to one of his tweets I said “I think Salama (sorry don’t know real name) is talking about ….” The next day I received a message from him “real name is Maged Atiya, I keep my online identity a bit confidential in deference to family. Aziz Atiya (Coptic Encyclopedia) was my uncle.” “Oh my God, we are relatives” I replied. The random encounter was on its way to become much more.
A few months later, I invited him to join a group we had on facebook where we discussed Egyptian politics. The qualities people mentioned about him were self-evident.
His encyclopedic knowledge. How does one describe that? There was no topic on which Maged was not extremely well read. We were once discussing successful revolutions and I mentioned the Meiji restoration in Japan. No surprise, he had read a few books on the subject. The Mehdi revolt in Sudan? A dozen books as well as a personal family story escaping that carnage.
But it was not abstract knowledge that Maged had. In describing another person, Maged wrote to me “it is rare to meet someone with passion matched by knowledge.” That was Maged. He was passionate about the subjects he spoke of, but never delusional. Enthusiastic but never naïve.
But his passion and knowledge were matched by another rare quality, his willingness to change his views. As a friend from our group remarked “I learned from him how to carry on a decent conversation, and how not to be afraid to lose an argument.” As Maged had once written me “I like anyone who can change their mind, since I do that often anyway.”
But it was something else that struck me the most about him. We were all younger than him, foolish, confident in our wisdom. Exchanges were sometimes rough, but Maged always tolerated our foolishness. The same quality was evident on twitter. A wise voice, a tolerant spirit. He would be was attacked on twitter for something he had written, sometimes viciously. He never responded in kind. He never allowed himself to succumb to hate and always stayed above the bigotry he confronted.
I often thought of what word would describe that attribute of Maged. Kindness! Generosity! Toleration! None of them were enough. Naturally it was Maged himself who provided the answer, as he often did. We were sitting in the Met’s café discussing subjects as far apart as heaven and Egypt and the topic of a recent fight within American conservatism came up. Maged said that what the fight lacked was charity towards the other. Our discussion would later become the topic of one of his last posts on his blog “Criticizing with Charity”. That was the word. Maged was not only charitable towards others, he overflowed with it. In an earlier message, he had suggested the approach to writing about someone we both disagreed with, he wrote “try to imagine what limitations placed on him were, what his priorities were. It will help with being balanced.” Mind you this was about someone who had hurt Maged a lot throughout his life.
Maged and I became friends. It was a meeting of minds as he described it. He became my first reader and I his. Every article I ever published, he read it first, providing comments, criticism, and encouragement.
After Maged’s death, Steven Cook wrote on twitter that Maged was a patient teacher. It’s a great description. In his essay on liberal education, Leo Strauss had written that “liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for vulgarity, they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in thing beautiful.” Talking with Maged was a liberation from vulgarity and an experience in things beautiful. It was education, even when you were not aware that you were being taught. A slow process of enlightenment and illumination.
But there is one aspect of Maged, that deserves some elaboration. Following the events of the Arab Spring, Egypt, and the Copts, the sorrows of a country, the plight of a people, became the subject of most of Maged’s writings. This was hardly preordained. Both had given him pain in the past.
His uncle, Aziz, had left the country, bitter at the discrimination he had faced because of his religion, his father as Maged recounted in his last article, faced similar discrimination. The Copts and their Church had been no different.
Aziz had practically invented Coptology as a subject, but he had become estranged by the bitter fights that the church had went through in the 60’s and 70’s. In one of our early exchanges he recounted a nasty episode from the early 80’s where Aziz had been viciously attacked by some Coptic activists. It had been painful for Aziz and for Maged as well. “I stayed away from the Coptic scene until recently,” he wrote to me.
What had driven him back to writing about the country and the people? In his practical and matter of fact telling, it was the plight of the Copts that forced him back. That plight occupied his mind daily. In 2014 he even wrote me “I am so worried that I am thinking of selling my company, retiring and working full time on the Copts issues. It is a pretty crazy idea.”
I had different thoughts.
When my book on Copts came out in 2013, Maged wrote the first review on his blog. This was the first paragraph:
“The Egyptian writer and intellectual Salama Moussa wrote toward the end of his life “I returned to the Coptic Orthodox Church with affection, finding in her our tormented and broken history“. It is an odd statement from a man who was a confirmed atheist, a believer in scientific progress, a frequent castigator of superstition in all religions, and one who espoused the “National” project of the intra-war years which sought to downplay religious identity in favor of a larger Egyptian identity. But we need not see this statement as an expression of regret, nor a conversion, nor even a tragic thought, but rather as a succinct definition of the existential realities of Copts in Egypt, of the inevitability of ending up a Copt even if a larger and more universal identity is sought and seemingly achieved.”
I have thought a lot about those words. They were obviously true about Salama Moussa, but I thought they were true of someone else as well, that it was no coincidence that Maged chose the name Salama Moussa as his alias. I thought Maged was describing himself.
I finally mustered the courage to make the suggestion writing to him about Aziz and himself “I understand this from his writings, though I got the impression that when you wrote the review of my book, and started with Salama Moussa, you were writing also of Aziz, and maybe yourself.” “Yes, that is true, on both counts, he replied.” Years before he had told me of Aziz’s last words to him “el qibti dayman qibti” The Copt is always a Copt.
It is in that role that many came to know him, as a saga of the Copts, their voice and their backbone. The man who counseled many and guided the multiple. He supported numerous Coptic organizations both financially and with his advice, he nurtured a new generation of Copts who looked up to him. Many young Copts have already written about the impact he had on them. He was as Sara Salama described him “a counselor, a friend, and a powerful tribute to the community.
Maged was, however, not naïve in his passion for his people. He knew their ills well. He once wrote to me “As always Sam, remember. Copts will kick those who genuinely help them in the groin.” On another occasion “Ignorance has always been the real enemy of Copts.” As Leon Wieseltier once said “a true measure of a man is his ability to speak truth to his tribe.” And Maged did just that.
What guided Maged? What kept his going? His love for his people? Sure. His sorrow for their plight? Also true. But something else was there. Recounting one of the last times he met the late Bishop Samuel, whom he deeply loved, he told me of Samuel’s words, spoken on Aziz’s front porch in Salt Lake City “Our lives are short and in the hand of God. But we should live them so some worthy man can write about them as history, not in anger, but as guidance for others.”
And so Maged lived. And so his light shone.
Maged has left us with a vacuum that can never be filled. But as painful as his death leaves us, I am today counting my blessings.
The blessing of the first encounter, of strangers’ worlds and ages apart meeting. The blessing of the ways of strangers becoming the way of friendship and much more. The blessing of a mentor, of a father gained. The blessing of a week we spent in New York last summer, knowing it would probably be our last, walking the streets of New York, visiting its museums and endlessly talking. And the final blessing. The blessing of visiting him in his last day with us, holding his hand, and saying goodbye.
As I was holding his hand, singing to him the ancient cry of our people Kyrilaison. Lord Have Mercy, he told me “Sam, keep saying the truth. And then in his low voice “ma3a el salama” Goodbye.
It is befitting that just as I was leaving, he spoke to Monica and me saying “Why do Copts always have to suffer.”
That is his legacy. This is our burden to carry.
This Eulogy was delivered by Samuel Tadros on Saturday, March 7th, 2020 and was printed with permission.
Samuel Tadros is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and a Professional Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. Tadros is the author of Mother Land Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity (Hoover 2013) and Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt (Hoover 2014).