The Brookings Institute [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings_Institute] is undertaking research into a select group of projects that have been created to bridge the U.S./West-Islamic world divide. Dr. Hady Amr, director, Brookings Doha Center, wrote “My colleagues and I at Brookings have identified your project as one of the most important and influential in the field.” CIDT is, of course, pleased to participate in this research and is pleased with this positive evaluation of our work.
In this issue we would like to ask your attention for Watani’s article on the danger of Christian students isolating themselves in small groups in Egyptian universities [art 26]. It is good that the author, Ishāq Ibrāhīm, raised this issue. It is, however, not only Christian students who do this. One finds the number of Christians isolating themselves from their Muslim environment growing which is increasing the risk of tensions between Muslims and Christians. Many Egyptian Christians refuse to admit this tendency and if asked about it say that they of course know many Muslims but if one then continues to ask for deep friendships the numbers become very small. Isolation makes it possible that rumors – Egyptian society is full of this as we have seen in many previous reports in AWR – about people of another faith are believed and thus leading to conflicts.
The Program for Civilization Studies and Dialogue of Cultures (PCSDC) at Cairo University organized a few days ago an excellent discussion about Father Dr. Christiaan van Nispen’s book “Muslims and Christians, brothers before God,” in French with a question mark but in the Arabic translation without a question mark. The book was recently published in Arabic and received an excellent reception. Both Muslim and Christian scholars provided excellent contributions to the discussion about this book and we hope this may stimulate a development that goes into an opposite direction from that described by Ishāq Ibrāhīm. We later hope to present you with a review of this discussion for Arab-West Report.
Books such as that of Father van Nispen are excellent, but we also need to realize that the book was well received by Muslim and Christian intellectuals. Much effort will need to be made to make it known to middle and lower class Egyptians. Most of these Egyptians will probably never get to read the book and thus more efforts are needed to break the strong isolationist tendencies among many Egyptian Christians.
It was nice having a group of Dutch Christian tourists visiting us on March 6, people who had read the article about our work in the Nederlands Daglad [AWR, 2006, week 32, art. 3] and who were in Egypt following the footsteps of Moses (Tanis, eastern Delta associated with the Biblical land of Goshen, St. Catherines – Sinai) and who wanted to know more about our work. Their Egyptian travel agent was, however, unable to provide them with a bus that evening and thus they asked me to pick them up from their hotel and take them to our office by metro. That caused a small consternation with both the travel agent and Egyptian security who had not wanted them to leave their hotel without a bus. Nevertheless, their group leader decided to take his group to our office and do so by metro (using taxis with people not knowing Cairo would have risked some people never reaching our office). Security sent two plain clothes officers with them. That was fine but less pleasurable was the way they found it necessary to stop Egyptians from entering the metro at the door where the group stood. This hardly helps Egyptians feel that security is there for them. It also did not do well for the image of Egyptian security with the group. One cannot say that these officers were particular rude, but connecting security with a more public friendly attitude would have certainly created a better image with both the public and foreign visitors. An attitude like this also reminds one of other situations whereby security was less kind with the general public. One cannot expect them to be nice in tense situations, but there are also situations where a friendlier attitude would be helpful.
