The Copts suffer from their state, but so do all Egyptians

East Meredith, NY September 1, 2009

Egypt has the largest and oldest Christian community in the Middle East, the Copts. The status of the Copts affects all Christian communities in the region.

In the Arab world minorities learn to seek justice with a broadminded and a long term perspective. The Christian Copts of Egypt feel marginalized and face a dilemma: keep quiet or challenge the system. Minorities of the region often ponder how to deal with their own specific issues of justice, when the entire political system is broken.

It is easy for emigrants to speak their minds about their home country from their comfortable position abroad.

When Egyptian President Husni Mubarak visited President Obama on August 17, the Voice of the Copts strongly protested with a rally and a press conference in Washington DC. The Voice, a human rights diaspora organization, which enjoys only limited support of the Christians they claim to represent in Egypt, is charging Mubarak with full complicity in alleged oppression of Christians and other minorities. DC protesters demanded “that Mubarak take action to stop Muslim extremist violence against Coptic Christians and others in Egypt”.

“Others” refers to a tiny Bahai Egyptian community which faces severe rejection because many Egyptians do not consider Bahaism a valid religion; this is a sad fact.

The Copts are suffering but they are not oppressed. Are the Copts really suffering for being Christians, or are they momentarily distanced from political representation by a regime that wishes to appear more Muslim than it really is?

There are ten to fifteen million Christians in Egypt, representing 12 to 15% of the population. Today, more than in the past, being a Copt is both a religious affiliation and an adherence to a different way of life.

Prejudice and political marginalization in the Arab world are not easy to explain; the dynamics of injustice are commonly misunderstood by outsiders.

Islam and Christianity have coexisted for fourteen centuries in the Middle East. Often the similarities of the two Abrahamic faiths are overlooked and the differences are exaggerated by narcisstic theologians, manipulative politicians and co-opted clerics. In an increasingly insecure and poorly managed society minorities often faced disproportional pressures.

The Voice of the Copts assumes that President Mubarak is able, but unwilling, to control sectarian tension and isolated acts of violence against individual Christians in remote areas of Egypt. The Voice is asking for the impossible. The suffering of the Christians is largely a consequence of political chaos that all Egyptians live under. The most disadvantaged Egyptians are not the Christians; they are the poor, women and children, and the political dissidents.

Christian citizens of Egypt, together with their Muslim compatriots, might consider joining the political struggle against oppression that victimizes all segments of society.

Overall, the Copts are not doing better or worse than the general population. Some are doing better because they tend to have good education. Most feel politically disadvantaged as minorities; some may feel uncomfortable merely for being Christian.

There are no quotas or strong political parties to guarantee a minimum of representation of Copts in Egypt. There are no ways for stopping disgruntled civil servants from abusing the law against minorities.

Copts have many churches and endowed ecclesiastical facilities throughout the country. Still the legal discrimination of not allowing churches to be built or repaired without super rigorous approval procedures is a painful fact.

The Copts are not being attacked as a community. Conflict arises from time to time around local disputes such as mixed-marriage, sexual norms, economic rivalry and village feuds. Copts are not known to be vindictive or politically active. Their leaders have turned inward.

The government is not threatened by the Christians. The Copts are hard working and loyal citizens. The threat to the government is political Islam. The government is appeasing the Muslim fundamentalist opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, in not making life easier for Copts.

Social distance is also a factor in sectarian tension. Because Copts tend to live in Coptic neighborhoods or villages there develops a social line of separation between them and larger society. When the local community is economically comfortable, communal tension is minimal. When there is widespread poverty and misguided local leadership, inter communal trouble is expected. The role of community leaders - the Christian bishops and the Muslim clerics, the Sheiks - is crucial for prevention of tension. The more open minded religious leaders are the better the inter communal relations.

When Copts cry martyrdom about the inconvenience they face as a minority, the majority Muslim community responds negatively. What the larger society is not saying directly, but may be it should, is that the national priority is changing the overall political system in order to achieve equality for all. The Muslim majority would prefer to see the Copts join the larger political struggle to emancipate Egypt from a milieu of autocracy that suffocates all segments of society.

Any attempt to provocatively broadcast local sectarian tension outside Egypt is counterproductive. The recent Christian community’s appeal to Washington provokes the Muslim majority and makes discrimination – at least partially- a self fulfilling prophecy. In their advocacy the expatriate Coptic organizations are hurting their national image inside Egypt; inadvertently, they are doing a disservice to their community.

Written for Daily Star

Why do Middle East states fear secularism?

East Meredith, New York.

Iran is a country that has gone very far in subjecting governance and societal institutions to the crushing influence of religious leadership, and to the clutches of organized clerical power.

Street demonstrations following the June presidential election shook the Iranian regime. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defended the integrity of the election and accused the opposition of disloyalty to the nation. The insecure Iranian regime monitors dissidence as a matter of routine. Universities are strategic environments for mobilizing the opposition. The country’s “moral” police surveys universities and worries even about the spread of social sciences in classrooms. Political sociology and philosophy are now considered dangerous topics. Social science has become “anti-Islamic” and “unpatriotic” to a regime gradually losing its grip over society

When the state and the church (or the mosque and the synagogue) are in constant search for legitimacy, it is natural for them to form an implicit alliance to maintain their hold on society, and this they tend to do against what they perceive to be a common enemy: secularism.

Secularism promotes the separation of religious institutions from state structures. On a personal level, the religious and the secular need not be in conflict. When devout individuals vote for the separation of the church, mosque, or synagogue from the state, they are behaving secularly, but that does not necessarily diminish their commitment to the religious.

In the Middle East examples abound of the interconnectedness between the state and religious structures. In Egypt, the government has doubtless tried to suppress religious parties by denying them representation in Parliament. Yet this restrictiveness has not been effective. The Muslim Brotherhood is the fastest growing movement in the country. In contrast, secular parties and thinkers have suffered the most from government pressure. There is not a single secular Egyptian party rivaling the Muslim Brotherhood. Both the government and the religious authorities often work hand-in-hand to impose silence on free thinkers.

Repetitive and pervasive religious indoctrination in the media has also inhibited independent thinking in Egypt. On many occasions, the government has taken liberal authors to court to challenge their “loyalty” to Islam. The late Egyptian writer and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz barely escaped an assassination attempt for writing his vivid, essentially secular novels. When in doubt, courts ask the supreme religious authority to give their verdicts on accused secularists.

In discouraging secular manifestations outside its control, the Egyptian state is hardly an exception in the Arab world. In Lebanon, state, church and mosque dynamics illustrate ways in which religion and politics feed into mutual communal insecurity. The political elite sustains a sectarian power-sharing system of governance, in collaboration with the clergy. The Lebanese are often socially secular but politically they are not. Sectarianism is passed on from one generation to another and is reinforced by laws regulating identity formation, voting, and personal-status issues such as birth, adoption, marriage and inheritance.

Secularism is not simply a temperament or a philosophy. It is also something vital for political liberation, while its absence promotes the status quo. A secular education leads to scientific problem-solving and allows people to be comfortable with creative doubt. Whatever questions poor governance, rulers for life, invasive theology, dull-witted education, unfair gender laws, abuse of national resources, and more, is bound to come from people who respect science, human rights and the rule of law, and who do not consider matters solely in a religious framework.

As critics of religious leaders and political rulers, secular reformers also become threats to injustice. Political questioning disarms those who possessively hold on to temporal and ecclesiastical power.

Sometimes, strange alliances form between states and religious powers. For example, Israel, led by a largely secular government, has worked with evangelical Western churches in combating political Islam.

Bu then everywhere in the Middle East regimes have developed odd relationships with religion. There are regimes that have assumed the role of protectors of Islam. There are rulers who claim direct descent from the Prophet. There are governments that position clerics above the law. There are nations ruled by religious minorities who pretend to be secular. There are countries claiming to base their constitution on religion, despite glaring violations of the essence of that religion. And there is a state whose people are chosen by God and whose land is considered holy.

The secret code binding together the state and the senior cleric is political survival. Yet their survival comes at the expense of the rest of society.

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Ghassan Michel Rubeiz is an Arab American commentator. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.