The Copts and the Exit from the Communalist Ghetto

Last update: 2025-01-21 15:08:25

In recent years many books,[1] newspaper articles and reportages have recorded the violence and persecution to which the Copts have been subjected. Generally, it is emphasised that their situation dramatically worsened from the 1970s onwards and even more after the revolution of 2011. It is, in fact, incontestable that the Christians of Egypt have had to deal with an increase in violence ever since the rise to power of Sadat which coincided with a growth in Islamist activism, and that above all over the last three years a critical point has been reached. However, some analyses exaggerate the level of this violence, giving credit to facts in reality based only on rumours, whereas others have not been sufficiently careful to make a distinction between acts of aggression that are motivated by religious discrimination or by a specific hostility towards Christians and those – above all in Upper Egypt – which form a part of the tradition of the tha’r, that is to say retaliatory vendettas generated by a neighbourhood conflict, by the honour of a girl who has been raped (whether this really took place or not), by a grave insult, by an unpaid debt…In not making this distinction, many observers give the impression that the religious questions is of determining importance in all inter-communal violence, whereas often it is only an ingredient, an undeniable ingredient certainly, but always one ingredient amongst others. Lastly, it is often argued that anti-Copt violence increased exponentially after 1970 because of the accommodating policy of the regimes of Sadat and Mubarak towards the Islamists. The notable worsening in inter-communal relations due to the negative direction of the revolutionary movement of 2011, or to the attempt by the Muslim Brothers to take over the country, is supposed to be located in this trajectory. The implosion of an omnipresent security apparatus under Mubarak allowed Islamist groups to organise themselves so as to impose their own law in many rural areas or in numerous poor neighbourhoods of the large cities. In March 2011 an attack by Salafis on the shanty towns on the outskirts of al-Moqattam caused mourning in about ten families. In subsequent months numerous assaults on Copts were registered which culminated in the attack on St. Mark’s Cathedral, the seat of the Patriarchate of Cairo. This was carried out by hooligans, helped by the suspected apathy of the police, on the occasion of the funeral of five young Christians who had been killed in a riot in a working-class district on the outskirts of al-Khusûs.

 

The Attacks of the Post-Morsi Period

 

It is known that after the removal of President Morsi, which took place on 3 July 2013 at the hands of the military in response to calls by the impressive popular movement tamarrud, the Copts, accused by the Islamists of being one of the principal promoters of this movement – when in reality this movement brought together all parts of the population, both Muslims and Christians – became the targets of their rancour. This rancour was exacerbated by the bloody and useless elimination by the military (more than six hundred dead) of pro-Morsi hardcore supporters on 14 August in Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya Square. After this event, there was a wave of attacks on Christians almost throughout the country: almost eighty churches were attacked, about thirty were set on fire, a large number of Copt shops were looted, and there were even lynchings and murders as well. Most Copts said that they were shocked by the selective indignation of the mass media and by Western countries in the face of the certainly excessive brutality of the military. In their eyes, the people to blame for that violent escalation were in fact the Muslim Brothers who, in expanding the limits within which they should have maintained the exercise of their power which had been obtained through the ballot box, wanted to take over the whole of the country. Furthermore, after the removal of Morsi, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, in exhorting people to engage in ‘resistance unto martyrdom’, had entered a logic of violence without concessions, taking on the grave responsibility for the large number of deaths that their policy had caused. Hence the broad support that the Copts gave to the military and the candidacy of Marshall al-Sisi for the presidency of a republic whose Constitution rejects the overly binding references to the Islamic legislation that Morsi and his supporters had introduced through their previous fundamental law.

 

Following the elimination by the military of pro-Morsi hardcore supporters, there was a wave of attacks on Christians practically throughout the country: almost eighty churches attacked, about thirty set on fire, a large number of Copt shops looted, and even lynchings and murders

 

 

 

However, it seems to me that this understanding of events neglects two important parameters which I would like to describe in this article and which I believe are not sufficiently taken into account. First of all one has to contextualise the statement according to which inter-religious violence in Egypt has experienced a notable increase over the last forty years or so. Here a look at the long term is of notable utility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ancient Roots of Discrimination

 

Egypt is probably the country where there appeared for the first time many centuries ago forms of violence produced by religious discrimination. This phenomenon emerged with the reforming Pharaoh Akhenaton in the fourteenth century BC, whatever might have been the nature of his religious ‘revolution’ which has often been defined in a overly hasty way as the first ‘monotheism’. This revolution resulted into a furious persecution of certain traditional cults in order to advantage devotion to Aten in a policy promoted by the monarch. The first example of anti-Semitism also appeared in Egypt when roundabout 410 BC the temple of the Jewish community, which for over a century had lived on the Elephantine Island, was destroyed by an authentic pogrom incited by the priests of the local Egyptian god Khnoum and organised by a number of Persian functionaries. During the third century BC the chronicler Manetho of Sebennytos offered a kind of counter-narrative of the Exodus by spreading libellous tales about the Jews, in particular one which said that the Jews were rebel lepers who had been expelled from Egypt.

The forms of discrimination and brutality of which the Christians of Egypt are the victims are the outcome of a shaky definition of citizenship on the basis of which the former regime had defined the criteria of membership of the ‘nation’ in part by basing them on religion

Over subsequent centuries inter-religious turbulence in ancient Egypt took place with a devastating continuity: the persecution of Egyptian Christians by the Roman authorities (this so marked the consciousness of Egyptian Christians that they still use the Copt era, known as ‘of the martyrs’, which began in the year 284 AD, the year when the Emperor Dioceletian – the initiator of the last persecution – ascended to the throne); the persecution of the pagans by the Christians after the edicts of Theodosius (391/392) which set in motion what in my eyes was the greatest historical catastrophe of Christianity, that is to say its transformation into an obligatory state religion (the scandalous murder roundabout 415 in Alexandria of the neo-Platonist philosopher Ipazia is a painful illustration of this); the anti-Semitic aggressions of Christians themselves led by ‘St.’ Cyril of Alexandria in 411 or 412…And then, starting with the Arab conquest, the sporadic violence of those in power and above all else of Muslim mobs against the Copts. If, overall, coexistence between a dominant Islam and a Christianity which became steadily a minority force (a fact which in my view did not take place before the tenth century) was more or less satisfactory, it is undoubted that there were also periods of tension when the forms of discrimination experienced by Christians became worse and at times crystallised around brutality.

 

The Harsh Mameluke Era

 

The severest epoch was certainly the beginning of the Mameluke era in the fourteenth century. Sociologically this is understandable because that was the moment when Christians really became a minority, going below the threshold of 30% or even 20%, and thus becoming more easily exposed to popular vendettas, above all when the social or economic prosperity of some of them was seen as an intolerable affront to the dignity of the poorest Muslims. 1320 was a year that was truly disastrous for the Copts: everywhere in the country fanatical crowds began to attack Christians in a movement that was so coordinated that one is led to think that planning was involved. Tens of churches and monasteries were destroyed in more than three weeks of upheavals in Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta and Qûs. The Sultan al-Nâsir Muhammad Ibn al-Qala’ûn, who was quite well disposed to Christians and determined to intervene to put an end to the tumults, was forced, in the face of the breadth of the popular movement, to moderate the intervention of the security forces, even though in the end he managed to restore calm and save the Christian community from a fatal destiny and subsequently fostered the reconstruction of the Christian sanctuaries that had been destroyed. In truth, however, the Copts were a target for the whole of the sixteenth century of grave outbursts of violence in which some detect the influence of the ideas of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), one of the maîtres à penser of Islamist thought of our epoch.

Violence of grave intensity was, however, rather rare outside thus difficult century. Generally, the tensions took a very moderate form. We may take as an example an event that took place in the year 1734 which is described by Febe Armanios in his excellent work on the Christians of Egypt during the Ottoman period.[2] Because of the new taxes imposed on Christians a thousand Copts demonstrated in Rumayla Square in Cairo. The famine that raged at the time impeded them from meeting the requests of the tax authorities. This was the most important Christian movement of protest that had ever been seen in Egypt during the Ottoman epoch and soldiers intervened brutally to suppress it. The incident is not without parallels with the suppression of the demonstration of young Copts in Maspero on 9 October 2011. Events took place in a similar way but whereas in 1734 there were only two victims, in 2011 the number was much worse – twenty-seven Copts were killed, most of whom were crushed by the tanks of the military, and there were about 320 gravely wounded. The relatively low cost in terms of human lives of the violence perpetrated against the Copts is often not sufficiently indicated by ‘historians’ who are inclined to dramatise the fate of the Christians of Egypt under the rule of the Ottomans. Febe Armanios reconstructs in a precise way the martyrdom of Christians who during the sixteenth century were murdered or executed, some of whom for reasons which were for that matter understandable (in the case, for example, of public defamations of the person of Mohammed). In total they did not go beyond about ten names. Overall, I would have preferred to have been a Copt roundabout the year 1572 than a Huguenot in Paris at the same time. Egypt did not have a St. Bartholomew’s night and inter-religious violence in this country has never produced the hundreds of thousands of victims that were produced by the wars of religions in Western Europe during the sixteenth century, involving both Protestants and Catholics. This observation, however, should not make us forget that when the Muslims became the dominant majority in Egypt, a tradition of sporadic violence against Christians was established which subsequently alternated with periods of successful coexistence.

Anti-Christian violence has also been a constant in the history of contemporary Egypt, although it have never been a matter of paroxysms. It is true that it witnessed an ascendant parabola during the 1920s with the appearance of the Muslim Brothers and similar groups such as the Shabab of Muhammad or the Young Men’s Muslim Association, with their deleterious activity within Egyptian society. Barbara Carter, in a very well documented book,[3] examines all the grave incidents that took place and in particular the inter-communal clashes of 1946, 1947 and 1952. Already at that time the press condemned the blameworthy passivity of the police and the easy-going approach of those in power who seemed to want to save the Muslim Brothers and absolve them from any responsibility for such violence.

 

The Protector State

 

The second parameter that should not be lost from view when one describes the inter-religious situation of contemporary Egypt is the more than equivocal role played by the state in the relative deterioration of the situations of the Copts. Starting in the 1970s what appears to be new (although it had been prefigured in the past) was the way in which the Egyptian state exploited inter-communal violence – on the one hand to justify the apparatus of coercion that it wanted to conserve, and, on the other, to send ambiguous signals to the Islamist galaxy. The state, in resolutely exhibiting its own Islamic identity and in fact imposing on the Copt community a profile of sub-citizenship that was accepted and profoundly internalised, was the primary agent of inter-confessional or inter-communal discord during the Sadat-Mubarak period. This is what has been demonstrated by Laure Guirguis in a recent work of great value.[4] The author demonstrates ably that the forms of discrimination and brutality of which the Christians of Egypt have been the victims are the outcome of a shaky definition of citizenship on the basis of which the former regime defined the criteria of membership of the ‘nation’ in part by basing them on religion. In having to deal with the growing influence of the Muslim Brothers – which thus in their turn gave a significant responsibility for this development – the Egyptian state under Sadat and Mubarak, but also during the last years of the monarchy and then under Nasser albeit in a less marked and systematic way, never ceased to accentuate this situation, closely connecting the authoritarian and security-based practices of a dominant and predatory clan with rhetoric which based its legitimacy on the communal segmentation of society. To justify the purported role of being a higher moderating and pacifying overall agent, the state was in fact the first actor in inter-confessional discord. To put the point simply: ‘I nurture divisions between communities to demonstrate more effectively that only I am able to guarantee concord through the use of force’!

Moving out of the community ghetto, the mass involvement of the Copts in Egyptian social and political life, and the non-submission of the Church to the policies of the government remain linked to the construction of a state based on la and order equipped with institutions that are not decided by confessional loyalties

It is the state that kept the Copts in a position of being a subordinated minority which was asked to swear total loyalty to established power, acknowledging that it was the only ‘effective’ protector of inter-community peace. The medieval status of the dhimmi no longer exists in legal terms but it has been replaced by a form of subjection and ‘minoritisation’ that is more insidious. The ‘limited pluralism’, which in reality is very exploited, of Egyptian political life since the years of Sadat has accentuated targeting the Copts, in particular in the minds of the Muslim Brothers and in line with the troubled development of their relationship with the regime. At its outset, the 2011 revolution was motivated by a real contestation of the communal system and by a true ideal of equal and non-confessional citizenship. But the strictly mathematical logic of elections that were finally free and fair gave power to a crushing Islamist majority to whom it immediately appeared clear that the ‘citizenship project’ could be reconciled easily with community exceptions and exclusions, even favouring their accentuation.

 

Exiting Communalist Logic

 

After supporting the taking of power by Marshall al-Sisi and the partial return of the old state apparatuses, do the Copts now run the risk of falling back into the political and social inhibitions of a minority that is ‘protected’ by a state that in reality nurtures their segregation? Or have the culture of debate and the aspiration to citizenship that begun with the events of 2011 impressed on the dynamic of their identity an impulse that will allow them to find the strength to move out of this ambiguity, of which other Middle Eastern Christian communities are also the victims, starting with the Christians of Syria? In a Muslim Arab world where the re-composition of ‘Islam’ or post-Islamism is full of uncertainties, moving out of the community ghetto, the mass involvement of the Copts in Egyptian social and political life, and the non-submission of the Church to the policies of the government remain linked to the construction of a state based on law and order equipped with institutions that are not decided by confessional loyalties. This is what is at stake in the changes that are underway within the non-Muslim minorities of the Arab world where Islam, which is disorientated by its own hegemonic dominance, seems to be unable to move out of a communalist logic to assure to everyone civic equality in conformity with the needs of modernity.

Rarely has the construction of social peace been the vocation of generals, just as it is true that starting with the taking of power by al-Sisi those methods of police coercion which we so much liked by the old regime have come to the fore again

The speech that President al-Sisi made to the new Copt Pope, Tawadros II, and to the imam of al-Azhar Ahmed, al-Tayyeb, on the occasion of the swearing in of 8 June of this year went in the right direction. Indeed, the President recognised the important role that the Church has performed since the year 2011 in safeguarding national unity and declared that together with al-Azhar it can offer a valuable contribution to liberating political discourse from the manipulations of recent years. Is it possible that in committing itself to really taking into account the irreversible goals of the revolution of 2011 and the aspiration of a large number of Egyptians to true modern citizenship, the military, which by now holds power, will manage to foster a new socio-political climate in opposition to the exploitation of inter-religious relations by the state which in objective terms has been an accomplice in the translation of such relations into violence? Without excesses of ingenuous hope and with a very prudent optimism, this is what one can hope for the Christians and Muslims of Egypt. As Father Jean-Jacques Pérennès of the Dominican Institute of Eastern Studies of Cairo wrote in an analysis published in La Croix on 23 August 2013: ‘in a few years time, this dramatic episode [of July-August 2013] will be seen as the first stage of the invention by a people with a Muslim majority of a post-Islamist future. If this is confirmed, this would be for Egypt and the whole of the nation very good news that would deserve very much more than some hasty judgements’.

This does not remove the fact the wounds opened up by the brutal suppression of the Islamists at the hands of the military will not close up so very quickly, both in the Copt community which is profoundly marked by the atrocities that this violence generated in reaction, and in Islamist circles which have been crushed, humiliated and inevitably pushed towards a very extreme radicalisation. And we should also not minimise the perplexity generated by the preponderant role played by the military in this change. Rarely has the construction of social peace been the vocation of generals, just as it is true that starting with the taking of power by al-Sisi those methods of police coercion which we so much liked by the old regime have come to the fore again: this has been an implacable repression that has struck at any sign of opposition, whether Islamist or liberal. The Copts, in overly wanting to link their membership of citizenship and their future to a regime which has unclear motivations and strategies, run the risk of becoming lost in a historical impasse.

 

Bibliography

 

 

Christian Cannuyer, ‘Les coptes : renouveau spirituel et repli communautaire’, in Vincent Battisti, François Ireton (eds), L’Égypte au présent. Inventaire d’une société avant révolution (Sindbad/Actes Sud, Paris, 2011), pp. 901-916.

 

Christine Chaillot, Les Coptes d’Égypte, 1970-2011. Discriminations et persécutions (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2013²).

 

Antoine Fleyfel, Géopolitique des chrétiens d’Orient (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2013), pp. 151-180.

 

 

Laure Guirguis, Les coptes d’Égypte. Violences communautaires et transformations politiques (2005-2012) (Karthala, Paris, 2012).

 

Magdi Guirguis, Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy. The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership from the Ottoman Period to the Present (American University, Cairo, 2011).

 

Mark N. Swanson, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt 641-1517 (American University, Cairo, 2010).

 

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