I never understood the proximity rules between dead Muslims and Christians. Even if no amount of interfaith dialogue could bring Muslims and Christians together, death can.
As a hyphenated Muslim-American, I couldn’t help but remember and wonder about the one Christian family that lived in my village when I was growing up in Egypt 50 years ago. What became of them? What trace had they left, if any? I decided to make a trip back to Egypt and into that history to find out more about this Christian family and why my village was immune to the rift between faiths.
My village, as I remember it, was a small, unassuming place in the Nile delta. Many people’s lifestyles hadn’t changed much since the time of the pharaohs, and local demographers couldn’t find any dramatic census changes for a long time. Before CNN and Al Jazeera, villagers lived the simple life of a farming community, and their interest in the outside world extended only as far as the edge of their fields.
The men left with their animals for work at dawn and came back at dusk. Their wives stayed home, busy preparing hearty meals and raising kids to work on the farm as soon as they mastered their first step..
People all seemed to consult the same fashion designer, pray at the same mosque, eat the same food and celebrate the same holidays. For generations, villagers kept the gene pool confined to area families. I was interested to know more about the Coptic family who had lived among us.
The Christian family’s peculiar lifestyle was intriguing to me; in fact, it was a breath of fresh air that invigorated the monotonous village life.
“They seemed friendlier than most, and they easily smiled,” said Haj Abdullah, one of the few relatives left with a sharp memory of the Coptic family. Unlike other villagers who farmed, the Christian family was still in the hunting-and-gathering age. “They made their living chasing wild wolves lurking on the outskirts of the village,” continued Haj Abdullah. “The Christian father, Kyriakos, would vanish into the remote fields for days and suddenly resurface with his kill,” he added.
“The Coptic family would drag the dead wolf around in the streets for show and tell, describing the grave danger they had just faced and the heroic adventure they had encountered, which earned them considerable admiration from villagers and a handsome handout of rice, corn or whatever the season offered at the time,” explained my cousin Ezzat.
“I knew Kyriakos, the father; he had a great sense of humor,” Haj Abdullah added. “He was a joker.”
“I never thought of them as Christian or Coptic, just my neighbor,” said my brother Abdel Rafaa.
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This documentary is inspired by the story of Kyriakos, a Coptic Egyptian who lived in my predominantly Muslim village for years. His life—and his extraordinary burial in a Muslim cemetery—broke with tradition, revealing a deeper story of coexistence, identity, and belonging.
Through personal narratives and historical reflections, this film intertwines his journey with my own as a minority Muslim living in the U.S. As I return to my village, revisiting familiar places and voices, a new story emerges—one that speaks to the quiet harmony of a rural Egyptian community of 5,000 people.