The "Coptic issue" periodically finds its way onto the national agenda, and usually it happens in a dramatic manner. It’s become an issue of public debate in recent months because of a murder investigation that resulted in the arrest, and mistreatment by police, of hundreds of citizens. Another such occasion was a conference on minority communities in the Middle East that the Cairo-based Ibn Khaldoun Center in collaboration with the Minority Rights Group based in London intended to hold in Cairo in 1994. Egypt’s Coptic community was on the agenda. This was at the height of the war between extremist Islamist groups and the state, a war which caught Coptic communities, in Upper Egypt especially, in the crossfire. An outcry was raised in the press, and the conference venue was moved to Cyprus. What some people -- including Pope Shenouda, in official statements -- objected to was the use of the term "minority" to describe Egypt’s Coptic citizens. But the hullabaloo also belied a historical sensitivity to foreign interference in the balance between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, interference exercised by colonial authorities in Egypt and other Arab countries in the past, and that, according to the logic of the conference’s critics, continues today in the technical jargon of social scientists.
Dr. Saadeddin Ibrahim is the director of the Ibn Khaldoun Center.
Q: Are the Copts a minority?
Technically, the term minority means any group that is smaller in number than other groups living in the same community. So it’s a question of size. But then what makes a minority is not just size but also the primordial variables that set it apart from the people around it, like religion, sex, language, race, national origin. Any of these variables is ascriptive -- in social science jargon that means it’s inherited. Because of these differences others look at you as different and treat you as different. When this treatment is discriminatory, then we can say the minority is also subject to discrimination and prejudice. Then the minority-majority relation becomes a problem.
Now, in the Arab world, and in Egypt, the subject is a taboo; nobody talks about it. Either it’s a problem that members of the minority talk about hush-hush among themselves, or it can get to the point where they protest, complain and use violence, like the Kurds of Iraq, the Southern Sudanese, like the Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Lebanon. So the range is not just religion. We [at the Ibn Khaldoun Center] calculated in our research that minority conflicts [in Arab countries] have claimed ten times as many casualties as all our wars with the state of Israel. We lost something like 200,000 in all the wars, but the number of casualties in these ethnic minority civil strives is in the neighborhood of two million, and that’s a conservative estimate -- protracted civil strife has claimed a million Sudanese and around 200,000 Kurds, for example. So we should tackle our decision-makers on these issues and find ways of dealing with them instead of waiting for them to explode.
Q: Is the Egyptian government’s fear of the religious sentiments of a Muslim majority the real reason for the grievances of Copts, or are religious complications simply an excuse for inaction?
I think it’s the first. They have an exaggerated, ungrounded fear of the reaction among Islamic militants. We say this is nonsense, because the militants do not need an excuse to do what they are doing. Besides if you allow them to set the agenda, it’s bad news. The problem should be tackled rationally. But all governments have a tendency to want to maintain the status quo, and there are probably elements in the government who harbor prejudicial feeling to Copts, and they are the ones who frighten other decision-makers from addressing the legitimate grievances of Copts, using Islamic militancy as an excuse. [The militants] have assaulted Copts, and used them as a volleyball to embarrass the government, like they did with tourists. The government should not succumb to that.
Q: What rights are we talking about -- would you favor a quota system for Copts in official positions of state, as Coptic lawyer Maurice Sadek advocates?
This argument has been made several times in the last 100 years, and to their credit it was the majority of Copts who rejected it. So Maurice Sadek is the voice of a minority. It’s not an illegitimate point of view, but I have my doubts that it represents the sentiments of the majority of Copts. Rather what is needed is genuine democracy. If you ask most Coptic figures what was the golden age for them, they will point to the Liberal Age 1922-52. That’s the time when Egypt had a multi-party system, a pluralistic democracy, and when Copts could run for office in a constituency with no single Copt and win. The Wafd Party used to nominate Copts in areas with little or no Christians. In this Liberal Age we had prime ministers who were Copts, including the grandfather of [former UN Secretary-General Boutros] Boutros Ghali. We had foreign ministers, defense ministers. Nobody raised a question about it.
Q: What approach should Copts take to lobby the issue -- making a noise, as they do in North America?
No, no -- I think everything helps, but I don’t think the style of Copts abroad is a style the government appreciates. Having said that, they do make the government listen. But there are other ways, and one is to do what we have been doing, which is to put the issue on the agenda. And here, the government is doing something. The government in Egypt does not like to look as if it is yielding to pressure. This is in the character of the Egyptian bureaucracy in general. There is that ethos that the government knows what is best for the Egyptian people, unlike Western democracies where people can lobby and if representatives are interested, they can attend to it. That’s not the case here yet.
We’ve signs in 1998 that are encouraging and for which the government deserves credit. These include the return of Coptic endowments, land seized long ago. Islamic endowments were [seized] too, but [Muslims] have a ministry [for maintaining their endowments]. In 1998 thousands of acres of land were returned to the Coptic Church. Another encouraging sign was the easing of [restrictions on] building and repairing Coptic churches, which used to require a presidential decree, while a mosque does not. Now it is the jurisdiction of the governors. It is locally administered now. We’re also encouraged by the Minister of Education’s willingness to purify school books of any subtle or not-so-subtle disparaging remarks against Copts and Christians. And we have been encouraging him to develop curriculum material to familiarize the majority of Muslim students in schools with the Copts, in religion, as people, as a subculture of Egyptian national culture.
Q: Do you think there is a negative perception of Copts in society at large that might take years to go away?
No. There is [a negative perception] among some, especially among the younger generation, unfortunately. People of my generation who came on the tail end of the Liberal Age were never exposed to any anti-Christian literature of messages. Therefore, there were no alien feelings towards Copts, even if we didn’t know much about them and their beliefs. Relations were very amicable, except for periods of national strife, when there is a tendency to scapegoat, and the Copts have been among the scapegoats. After 1967, with the rise of Islamic movements, there was a tendency to spread literature and messages against the Copts by the hardliners and bigots of the Islamic movement.
But we’re still living in "the post-1967 age" when secular Arab nationalism is perceived to have failed, and we still have a belligerent Jewish state next door -- so couldn’t it take a long time for these attitudes to change?
I believe that within 5-10 years you could change the country around. Every Muslim knows a Copt, and at worst has ambivalent feelings, but not outright negative feelings. These [negative feelings] are only [found] among those influenced by the venomous literature of some -- not all -- Islamic movements. We conducted a three-question survey in 1996. One: what do you know about Copts? Two: what would you like to know about Copts? Three: what do you suggest we do about the Coptic issue? The amount of ignorance and stereotypes was amazing. These were just average human beings, and to their credit they wanted to know a lot. They were very curious. The gut feeling of most people is that these are our partners.
The fallout from the arrest of hundreds of citizens during the murder investigation in Al Kosheh last summer has been that the government denies there is any Coptic problem and accuses foreign powers of interfering.
The Kosheh incident has nothing to do with sectarian strife. There are other reasons. It was a normal killing, of Copts killing Copts. Now, the clumsiness of the government was to not issue a statement about the facts. The clumsiness and arrogance of the government is to tell the Coptic bishop to say that nothing had happened. Then the EOHR [Egyptian Organization for Human Rights] made a report, and sent it to the government to answer as usual, but they ignored it. Then two months after the incident, the world began to know about it. The cover-up was reality-denial, unnecessary. Then they used the EOHR as a scapegoat, and fabricated a cheque from the British embassy -- outright lying, extortion, very cheap. And then more clumsiness when they arrested the Secretary General of the EOHR, within two or three days of the entire world celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Egyptians are fair-minded and tolerant. But we get a terrible reputation because of mishandling and mismanagement of problems that all societies have.
