Amr was anxious to conciliate and gain the affection of the new subjects he had added to the caliph’s empire, and during his short stay in Alexandria received them with kindness and personally heard and attended to their demands. It is commonly believed that in this period the Alexandrian Library was dismantled; but, as we have already seen, the books had been destroyed by the zeal of contending Christians. The story that attributes the destruction of this world-famous institution to the Arabian conquerors is so much a part of history, and has been so generally accepted as correct, that the traditional version should be given here.
Among the inhabitants of Alexandria whom Amr had so well received, says the monkish chronicler, was one John the Grammarian, a learned Greek, disciple of the Jacobite sect, who had been imprisoned by its persecutors. Since his disgrace, he had given himself up entirely to study, and was one of the most assiduous readers in the famous library. With the change of masters he believed the rich treasure would be speedily dispersed, and he wished to obtain a portion of it himself. So, profiting by the special kindness Amr had shown him, and the pleasure he appeared to take in his conversation, he ventured to ask for the gift of several of the philosophic books whose removal would put an end to his learned researches.
At first Amr granted this request without hesitation, but in his gratitude John the Grammarian expatiated so unwisely on the extreme rarity of the manuscripts and their inestimable value, that Amr, on reflection, feared he had overstepped his power in granting the learned man’s request. “I will refer the matter to the caliph,” he said, and thereupon wrote immediately to Omar and asked the caliph for his commands concerning the disposition of the whole of the precious contents of the library.
The caliph’s answer came quickly. “If,” he wrote, “the books contain only what is in the book of God (the Koran), it is enough for us, and these books are useless. If they contain anything contrary to the holy book, they are pernicious. In any case, burn them.”
Amr wished to organise his new government, and, having left a sufficient garrison in Alexandria, he gave orders to the rest of his army to leave the camp in the town and to occupy the interior of Egypt. “Where shall we pitch our new camp?” the soldiers asked each other, and the answer came from all parts, “Round the general’s tent.” The army, in fact, did camp on the banks of the Nile, in the vicinity of the modern Cairo, where Amr had ordered his tent to be left; and round this tent, which had become the centre of reunion, the soldiers built temporary huts which were soon changed into solid, permanent habitations. Spacious houses were built for the leaders, and palaces for the generals, and this collection of buildings soon became an important military town, with strongly marked Muhammedan characteristics. It was called Fostât (tent) in memory of the event, otherwise unimportant, which was the origin of its creation. Amr determined to make his new town the capital of Egypt; whilst still preserving the name of Fostât, he added that of Misr,—a title always borne by the capital of Egypt, and which Memphis had hitherto preserved in spite of the rivalry of Alexandria.
Fostât was then surrounded by fortifications, and Amr took up his residence there, forming various establishments and giving himself up entirely to the organisation of the vast province whose government the caliph had entrusted to him. The personal tax, which was the only one, had been determined in a fixed manner by the treaty of submission he had concluded with the Kopts; and an unimportant ground rent on landed property was added in favour of the holy towns of Mecca and Medina, as well as to defray some expenses of local administration.
Egypt was entirely divided into provincial districts, all of which had their own governor and administrators taken from among the Kopts themselves. The lands which had belonged to the imperial government of Constantinople, and those of the Greeks who had abandoned Egypt or been killed in the war against the Mussulmans, were either declared to be the property of the new government or given out again as fiefs or rewards to the chief officers of the army. All these lands were leased to the Koptic farmers, and the respective rights of the new proprietors or tenant farmers and of the peasant proprietors were determined by decisive and invariable rules. Thus the agricultural population enjoyed under the Mussulmans a security and ease which replaced the tyrannical annoyances and arbitrary exactions of the Christian agents of the treasury of Constantinople; for, in fact, little by little, there had disappeared under these Greek agents the sound principles of the old administration that had been established by the wise kings of ancient Egypt, and which the Ptolemies had scrupulously preserved, as did also the first governors under the Cæsars.
After all these improvements in the internal administration, the governor turned his attention to the question of justice, which until that moment had been subject to the decision of financial agents, or of the soldiers of the Greek government. Amr now created permanent and regular tribunals composed of honourable, independent, and enlightened men, who enjoyed public respect and esteem. To Amr dates back the first of those divans, chosen from the élite of the population, as sureties of the fairness of the cadis, which received appeals from first judgments to confirm them, or, in the case of wrongful decisions, to alter them. The decrees of the Arab judges had force only for those Mussulmans who formed a part of the occupying army. Whenever a Koptic inhabitant was a party in an action, the Koptic authorities had the right to intervene, and the parties were judged by their equals in race and religion.