Yes, I’m aware that I still owe you all a completion to the Jerusalem story – however current events are catching up with me, so I feel the need to make use of my experience abroad to shed some light for you all.
On New Year’s Day, a car bomb exploded in front of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, killing at least 21. Later, riots erupted as Coptic Christians clashed with Muslims in the streets near the church as well as security forces summoned to the scene. You can read more in depth here, at the NYTimes and Al-Jazeera English.
I just wanted to comment on my experience with Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. The news articles aren’t lying when they talk about tensions between the two groups, to be sure. Coptic Christians are represented in government, and are under at least some peer pressure to convert to Islam – at least, you’re probably not going to see a whole lot in the way of Islam to Christianity conversions. things are particularly strained in Alexandria, due to the large Coptic population and the heavy presence of the Muslim Brotherhood – bringing extremists from both groups into contact on a regular basis. And as a minority group, when things do flare up, Christians wind up relying more on the government for protection.
However, this does not mean that Christians and Muslims brawl in the street on a regular basis. The idea of any conflict between the two groups is abhorrent to the mainstream population on both sides. When we asked a Protestant Presbyterian Egyptian which came first, being Christian or Egyptian, the booming reply was “Al-deen lillah wa alwatan lilgamee3!”, or, “Religion is for God, and the Nation is for All!”. To most people we posed the question to, the thought of disliking somebody of the opposite religion merely because of that religion was unthinkable. To be sure, the two have their theological squabbles, as I ran into on numerous occasions, but certainly nothing to the point of breeding contempt. Bringing up Jews gets a bit more complicated because of the connection to Israel and the low-level anti-Semitism that’s pretty prevalent, but even then I heard a few Egyptians lament the gradual disappearance of the nation’s Jewish population as a great loss for the social fabric of Egypt.
When the news broke, the reaction across the Facebook pages of my Egyptian friends was one of shock and tragedy. حداد, meaning “mourning” was found in many statuses, and profile pictures reflected the deep connections within the society across religious boundaries. A few examples:
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- “They will not drive us apart.”
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- “Mourning”
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- “Remember where we came from.”
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- “I am an Egyptian against terrorism.”
I’m not sure what to leave you all with. I don’t know enough to speculate about who was truly behind the attack, or criticize the government’s response, or predict the eventual outcome of this event. Just know that the occasional story that pops up in the news is the tiniest slice of life in the Middle East.
So is the Muslim Brotherhood anti-Christian? The NYT print article-dunno if that’s the one online-said the org. condemned this bombing. The NYT article also suggests , to me anyways, that the official govt policy isn’t as hard-line as one might believe..
Not as hard-line as what? The government is flooding the region with riot police. Mubarak’s pragmatic enough to keep the country running, but he doesn’t seem to have many tools other than oppression, and coming pretty late, too. On the topic of the Brotherhood, I don’t think the more mainstream elements would openly advocate violence against Islam, and the movement itself isn’t necessarily anti-Christian – still, advocating a government on Islamic principles doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for Christians outside of a minor protected community with somewhat curtailed rights, which doesn’t exactly ease tensions.
Well, I was thinking along the lines of Egypt being officially secular, and the President’s comments indicated to me he doesn’t like the violence. He makes some kind of attempt to stop the violence, though it seems to be weak for a number of reasons.
In comparision, certain parties in Iraq will just let the Christians and the followers of John the Baptist essentially go extinct .
Though is it possible Mubarak just doesn’t like it cause it threatens his power?
If I were to venture a guess, I’d say it has something to do with the percentages each population represents. Coptic Christians still make up about 10% of the population – even if they’re subject to second class treatment in some respects, they still wield a significant amount of power in the country, and full-on sectarian warfare has the potential to erupt into some pretty disruptive fighting, which Mubarak certainly doesn’t want – he prefers a nice, quiet country to run. In contrast, the Christians in Iraq represent a far smaller part of the population – still present, but far more easily marginalized, and much more isolated than Egypt’s Christians. As a result, some parties in Iraq probably don’t see any reason to care about what happens to them.
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