To his fellow human rights activists he’s "crazy Maurice." To the government, he’s a total pain in the neck. To the extremist Coptic groups in North America he’s something of a hero. He hails from the town of Dayrout in Upper Egypt, where fundamentalist violence against the state has been strongest. It’s also an area with a high concentration of Copts in `its population. In Cairo he became a lawyer, and he was involved in the legal campaign to have Pope Shenouda released from his confinement in the monastery of Wadi Natroun in 1985. At that time the rights movement was just beginning, but by 1993 he had emerged on the rights scene looking to use it to push for Coptic rights. Now he runs the Human Rights Center for National Unity, and uses it to push his agenda. He argues for a return to the Law of Religious Freedoms of 1856, which gave Copts the right to 25 percent of positions in the state bureaucracy and 10 percent in the military academies. Just like in Lebanon. "So what?" he snaps.
Maurice Sadek’s strategy is to batter you with statistics so you’re left in no doubt. The government is overwhelmingly dominated by Muslims; of 32 ministers only two are Copts, and they’re "in marginal ministries," he says (though that includes the Minister of the Economy). "In the last 20 years, no defense, interior, justice or foreign minister has been Christian." All 28 governors are Muslims, as are most figures in the media, education and agriculture. Of 700 ambassadors, only three are Christian. There are only six Coptic members of parliament, and all of them had to be nominated by the president. The Qur’an is broadcast 24 hours a day, and 25 percent of television programs are "Islamic" -- the Minister of Information refuses to broadcast Sunday services. The army is Muslim-dominated, and Al Azhar University will only accept Muslims, because it’s a "racist university." All 15 universities in the country have Muslims for principals, and the national press is essentially the same. All of this because "religion is a basic element in the appointment process," he says. "This state is Islamized, and all of it is against the Egyptian constitution, which considers all Egyptians equal in rights and duties."
Welcome to the world of Maurice Sadek, the man who sees a conspiracy to marginalize the role of Egypt’s Copts -- at 15 million, 25 percent of the population, he alleges -- in all spheres of life. It’s not because of the state’s sensitivity to the religious sentiments of the Muslim majority -- Sadek doesn’t buy that argument. He thinks that since Sadat fostered Islamist groups in the 1970s, the ideology of the state itself has become religiously supremacist. "I think that deep inside they don’t want Christians to have any role in the country. It’s a psychological issue at root," he says.
Sadek doesn’t trust the few pro-Copt moves made by the government. The ruling National Democratic Party nominated a Copt in a district of Alexandria in last year’s Shura elections, and had no qualms about engineering his victory. State television decided to broadcast this year’s mass at Coptic Christmas for the first time. Recently, the governor of Assiut in Upper Egypt issued a decree allowing the renovation of 45 churches. As Sadek sees it, even if the government tosses a biscuit to the Copts now and then, it never lets go of the bag. The government’s hands are not tied when it comes to improving the Copts’ situation, he argues. "Nothing is impossible," as he says. He nurtures a view of himself as maverick speaker of truth. "Talking is necessary." And talking he has certainly done a lot of. Since the tragic events in the Sohag town of Kosheh last summer, Sadek has been all over the Arabic satellite and international media, pouring potfuls of salt into the government’s open wound.
Yet, despite its legion of trivial laws connected to national security and the country’s best interests, the government has done nothing to curb Sadek. Muslim Brothers have faced military trial for less. Hafez Abu Saada, the Secretary General of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights (EOHR), spent six days in jail in December for publishing a report on the mistreatment of citizens in Kosheh. Perhaps arresting Sadek would be one blunder too many. But what might finally push the state to make that move is Sadek’s links to the vociferous Coptic groups in North America. Sadek surely knows it, and is curt but clear that he has nothing to do with them. "There is no link between us and the expatriate Copts," he says. But unlike almost everyone else involved in politics in the country, Copt or Muslim, he refuses to condemn them. "They are demanding the same rights as we are," he objects. He also refuses emphatically the government line that bringing the Coptic issue into the open gives foreign powers a stick with which to beat Egypt in foreign policy. "How do foreign forces benefit from the Coptic issue?" he says. "The Coptic issue is about giving rights to Egyptian only. It’s Egyptians who benefit from giving these rights. There is no interest for foreign countries."
A 1994 conference on minorities in the Middle East that the Ibn Khaldoun Center, in collaboration with the London-based Minority Rights Group, hoped to convene in Cairo seems to have been something of a turning point for Sadek. The conference was moved to Cyprus after an uproar in Egypt over the inclusion of Copts on the agenda. He initially went with the flow, and signed a declaration organized by the leftist Tagammu Party calling for the conference to be banned from Cairo. After the fuss died down, he repented, stating at a seminar held at the Ibn Khaldoun Center that he had "made a mistake." He went on: "I should have been in Cyprus addressing these issues. What is a minority or a majority? These terms do not change the fact that I am a Copt with a problem. How I am going to solve it is what is important." Now, relishing the bull in the china shop mantle, he denies his position was ever ambiguous. "I opposed holding the conference outside Egypt," he says.
At any rate, whether Sadek began walking in minefields sooner or later, he hasn’t gained any respect among the civil and human rights crowd. Strange, you might feel -- in a political arena where co-optation by the state is the norm, a fighter should command respect. But he’s operating from within the rights movement -- he set up his National Unity Center in 1994 following the minorities conference fiasco -- to fight blatantly for the rights of only one section of the population, the Copts. "It’s a center for national disunity," jokes one rights activist. What’s more, he’s looking for solutions imposed from above, as if he doesn’t believe that democracy-for-all would be enough to safeguard the rights of Copts. "If the government wants to do something, the people can’t do anything to resist," he says. "If the government wanted to appoint Pope Shenouda as Deputy to the President of the Republic, for example, there would be no resistance from the people." According to his logic, Muslim-Copt relations are governed by the Islamic concept of wilaya -- that a non-Muslim can not be "lord" over a Muslim. But it’s a psychological hurdle he shows no inclination to get over, and one that would disincline any non-Muslim from bothering running for parliament. It doesn’t seem like a position worthy of a rights activist. (See Mounir Fakhry Abdel Nour interview)
Sadek also exaggerates, and it’s a close call whether he knows it and thinks that it furthers his cause, or really believes what he’s saying. That there are only three Christian ambassadors is simply not true. The recent Arab Strategic Report produced by the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies makes a strong case refuting the argument that Copts are distanced from public life. It cites one study that found that the percentage of Copts involved in companies established between 1973 and 1995 was 22.5 percent. Today, Copts own 20 percent of contracting firms, 50 percent of consultancies, 60 percent of Egypt’s pharmacies and 45 percent of private clinics. Copts, then, clearly have a share in the nation’s economic life above that which their numbers would suggest. "Using the numerical size of any social group, and using that as the measure to judge its presence in one sphere or another," the report says, "is an expression of a narrow sectarian mentality which has nothing at all to do with modernization and creating a civil society."
Sadek also thinks that fighting for Coptic rights was one of the main reasons both Rose Al Yousef magazine and Al Destour newspaper incurred the wrath of the government last year. (Al Destour was closed down, and Rose Al Yousef is now firmly under government control.) But any media observer knows that it was the way they dealt with the issue, and not the act of discussing it, that irked the authorities. And in recent media excursions he’s had a tendency to mention Nelson Mandela -- teasing observers abroad to suggest a similarity between himself and the South African rights campaigner -- although there is no comparison at all between the apartheid regime in South Africa and the grievances of Copts. Then again, you never know. He may seriously have convinced himself of all of this. When he talks, he has a tendency to slip into the kind of rhetoric that you might hear from a priest spouting about the vicious blows and calumnies suffered by the believers who know that right is on their side. Images of ecstasy and pain adorn his dingy office in the center of the Cairo district of Shubra. "When I forgive, I forget," intones the slogan beneath one image.
The fact is that almost all figures in public life concerned with the civil rights of Copts, as well as of all other Egyptians, find Sadek’s methods counterproductive. It was Sadek, after all, who, without visiting Kosheh, immediately launched a battery of faxes to all corners of the globe claiming the ugliest forms of persecution, although -- as rights groups have been at pains to point out -- when it comes to police brutality, citizens of all faiths are equal. That’s a line you won’t hear from Maurice Sadek.
