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Contemporary Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Local Dynamics and Foreign Influences

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Contemporary Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Local Dynamics and Foreign Influences CHAPTER THREE CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS IN EGYPT: LOCAL DYNAMICS AND FOREIGN INFLUENCES Grégoire Delhaye Introduction Although they represent less than six percent of the Egyptian population, with some 4.5 million members, Copts are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle-East.1 Ninety-five percent of them belong to the autonomous Coptic Orthodox Church, born of an early schism of Christi- anity in 451 CE at the Council of Chalcedon (Meinardus 1999). Copts are present everywhere in Egypt but are a majority nowhere except for a few villages in the southern governorates of Minia and Sohag. Significantly over represented in the south and in large cities like Cairo and Alexandria, Christians are, on the other hand, few in the Delta region (Denis 2000). While generally well integrated in society, Copts nevertheless face some legal but mostly social forms of prejudice. As one commentator rightly put it, the situation of Copts in Egypt is one of “subtle yet entrenched discrimination” (Khalil 1998). But the extent to which individual Chris- tians are discriminated against varies greatly along geographic, social, and economic lines. Larger towns are usually more welcoming than rural areas, and wealthy Copts are much less likely to experience discrimina- tion, if any at all. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Islamic groups contesting the legitimacy of what they denounced as a secular, ungodly government, orchestrated violent attacks throughout the country, and Copts were among the prime targets. Because of the official discourse emphasizing national unity put forward by the authorities, targeting Copts also served the purpose of indirectly attacking the government. The massacre of foreign tourists at Luxor in 1 These figures are based on the 1996 Egyptian census, the last one for which religious data were made public. Higher numbers are often quoted by Copts and western media but demographers Courbage and Fargues, who have studied the issue, have confirmed the accuracy of the census figures (1998: 181). © Grégoire Delhaye, 2012 | doi:10.1163/9789004216846_005 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Grégoire Delhaye - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:08:46AM via free access 72 grégoire delhaye 1997 marked a turning point in the evolution of Islamist violence. The gruesome killing of foreigners, in a country where numerous people drew their livelihood from tourism, contributed to radical groups losing popular support and Islamist violence subsided (Kepel 2001: 413–443). Violence against Copts did not totally disappear though. At the turn of the millennium, in the southern village of El-Kosheh, an argument between two shopkeepers, a Muslim and a Christian, escalated into a full fledged pogrom. Twenty-one died, twenty of them Copts. In October 2005, a crowd of Muslims attacked a church in Alexandria after an inflammatory sermon at the local mosque. The preacher had mentioned the existence of a Coptic- produced DVD of a play portraying a Christian youth converting to Islam for money before realizing his “mistake” (Roussillon 2006: 153–155). On January 7, 2010 in retaliation for a rape, the drive-by shooting of a Coptic Church in the southern town of Nag Hamadi claimed the lives of seven Coptic worshipers and a Muslim guard. On March 10, 2011, in the Moqatam neighborhood of Cairo, a pitchfork battle between Muslims and Christians protesting the earlier burning of a Church in another province left 13 dead and 140 wounded. Snowballing from seemingly minor events, a dispute, sometimes even mere rumors—such as recently about an affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman—these clashes are examples of a type of sectarian violence that, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, is not political in nature. These events are indeed not fueled by a political project but stem from an underlying tension fueled by negative stereotypes. These events are commonly perceived as the result of the recent (re)islamization of Egyptian society and its impact on a persecuted and powerless Coptic minority. Against this widespread view, I wish to argue that sectarian tensions are in fact the product of parallel, century-old Islamic and Coptic revivals in which both Muslims and Copts are active. As we will see, the recent political upheaval in Egypt makes few changes to a dynamic long in the making. I will then discuss attempts made by different actors in the Egyptian political system to tackle the issue of sectarian relations. Finally, I will analyze the role played by foreign actors in recent policy changes regarding this issue, and weigh in on the possible drawbacks of these foreign influences. Parallel Religious Revivals The current climate of sectarian tension cannot be understood without looking at a broader historical context marked by parallel Coptic and Grégoire Delhaye - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:08:46AM via free access contemporary muslim-christian relations in egypt 73 Islamic revivals. Both were triggered by the colonial encounter, took shape in the late nineteenth century and accelerated after the defeat by Israel in 1967. This shared genealogy explains the homology of both revivals. As Martin points out, even though “the content of [both the Coptic and Muslim] renewal is different [. .]. In both cases we find a rejection of a ‘westernized modernity’, of its ideas and its praxis, while the intention is ad fontes, the return to the authenticity of one’s own sources” (1997). A concrete example of this homology can be found in the strikingly similar structure of the discourses of Coptic and Muslim preachers as noted by Radi (1997). The Islamic Revival Islam Never Really Went Away Vatikiotis (1991) argues that, from its very inception, the Egyptian national movement had a strong Islamic dimension. At the end of the nineteenth century, resistance to European influence in general, and British tutelage in particular, was mostly framed in term of pan-Islamic solidarity and undergirded by allegiance to the Sublime Porte. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, the inability of the Ottoman Empire to “assist its non-Turkish Muslim subjects in their opposition to European rule” became obvious. He refers here to the take over of Morocco by France and Libya by Italy. This, he argues “prompted the idea of territorial [meaning Egyptian] nationalism” (ibid.: 214). This idea imposed itself even more easily given that, since Mohamed Ali’s rule, Egypt was de facto an independently run administrative unit of the empire. Even though a secular national movement in the 1920s and 1930s emerged, “this secularism was not marked by an abandonment of the Islamic faith” (ibid.: 218), and this period was one of ongoing debate regarding the relationship of religion and politics. In fact, the secularists were labeled as such because they were fighting first the influence of King Fouad then King Farouk, who both used religion to boost their own legitimacy and further their political aims (ibid. 1991; see also Aclimandos 2001). It was not, therefore, a reflection of their own lack of religiosity per se but rather their resistance to the use of religion as tool by the ruling monarch. Overall, this period of Egyptian history is often remembered by today’s Egyptian secularists as a golden age, characterized by a unified (meaning non-sectarian) national movement. However, when viewed in a wider historical perspective, non-sectarianism can be seen as more of an Grégoire Delhaye - 9789004216846 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 05:08:46AM via free access 74 grégoire delhaye exception than the rule when it comes to the relationship of religion and in politics in Egypt. Additionally, the success of the secular party Wafd in its struggle to wrest Egypt’s independence from the British did not necessarily mean that the Egyptian masses recognized themselves in its secularism. This partially explains why the Wafd struggled to rule the country once the constitu- tional monarchy was established. Partly due to royal hindrance, the party of Saad Zaghlul alienated many, who went on to join the ranks of other organizations including the Muslim Brotherhood. By the time of the 1952 revolution, the movement funded by Hassan El-Banna was enjoying the largest popular support of any other political organization in Egypt. In fact, without its tacit approval, the revolution/coup of the Free Officers could not have taken place (Aclimandos 2002). But the success, until today, of the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization reflects, rather than explains, the rise of the Islamic idiom in Egyptian society. The Failure of Arab Socialism The Arab socialist nationalism promoted by Gamal Abdel Nasser after 1958 was not particularly religious in nature. During his successor’s presi- dency, however, the Islamic dimension of Egyptian identity was more directly promoted, as Anwar Al Sadat allied himself with Islamist-leaning elites to bolster his power and undermine the still influential Nasserites. El-Khawaga sums up the changing role of Islam as a frame of reference during the post-Nasser period when she writes: “The media’s insistence on the Islamic identity of Egypt grew stronger, first to supplant the symbols of the Egyptian left (1972–1976), then to compensate for Egypt leaving the Arab League following the signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel and then again to take the reislamisation slogan away from the Muslim Brotherhood or the [radical] Islamist groups (1978–1990)” (1993). The failures of the now authoritarian Egyptian State were not limited to the military arena. Sadat’s attempt at liberalizing the Egyptian economy, by reducing subsidies and privatizing government services, led to the country’s failure to provide basic services to vast segments of the population. Sadat also failed dismally at curbing corruption.
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