From Marc Michael’s “Is liberalism killing the copts?” at Al Jazeera:

Imperial liberalism not only reinforced lines of fracture in local social fabrics, but often engineered them, by inventing traditions and mythological pasts, linguistic and ethnic groupings. To this day a majority of Copts subscribe to the “Hamitic Hypothesis”: that Copts are a separate race with a separate language, that they are not Arabs but descendants of the pharaohs, the original Afro-Nilotic people of the land; in biblical terms, the accursed progeny of Ham rather than Sham.