About the Copts I Write

The assertion that the persecution of Copts is not a government or a regime policy is an absurd statement evoked to conclude discussions over prejudices, injustices, and aggressions against Copts.

As an observer of Copts’ affairs who studied Christianity and its history in Egypt as well as Copts’ status within Egyptian society over the past two centuries, I readily affirm that Coptic persecution is not the regime or the government’s policy. However, this does not repudiate the intensity of the problem nor does it negate a scintilla of its outrageous magnitude.

Though Coptic persecution is not a government policy, Copts have suffered from increasingly unremitting harassments, predicaments, and a suffocating atmosphere since the El-Khanka incidents of 1972.

And, although I believe that the Egyptian government does not have a set policy mandating prejudice against Copts, I can also affirm that it has no policy to combat the prevalent virulent atmosphere of animosity towards Copts, which has permeated large sectors of Egyptian society.

The government may not have been directly involved in any particular disastrous incidents. However, this does not necessarily exonerate the government or negate its responsibility, as it took no action to resolve the problem or alleviate Coptic grievances.

The unremitting upsurge of the religious tide, particularly in 1948, 1967 and 1972, and the simultaneous decline of Egypt’s moderate and tolerant Islamic institution of Al-Azhar, which was substituted by many layers of a brutal Wahhabi Islam reflecting all the harsh nomadic features of the land that produced it, has created a prejudiced and fanatical environment resulting in infinite and indescribable difficulties for Copts in their everyday life.

First: The government lacked vision, as the problem was erroneously perceived on both the political and administrative level, and—contrary to its true proportions—as a minor issue that does not solicit the political administration’s effective attention.

Second: The gustily Wahhabi wind that swept through Egypt, since the beginning of the late president Sadat’s term, did not subsume particular sectors of society but rather all sectors of society, including those whose responsibility was to fight the problem.

Third: The sad deterioration of Egypt’s religious institution in the face of venomous Wahhabi currents and Wahhabi petrodollars, allowed this institution to produce figures in great proximity with Muhammad bin Abdel Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism) who could hardly compare to figures such as Sheikh Mostafa Abdel Razek Pasha, the former minister of Endowments who was a professor of philosophy and a Sorbonne alumna. (Those boorish Wahhabis, such as the barbaric members of the vice squad of the sand dunes and camels kingdom—who are thoroughly incapable of reading one paragraph in a book by Aristotle—can never perceive life nor comprehend ideas in the same way as Al-Azhar professor Sheikh Mostafa Abdel Razek, who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and taught it in the faculty of literature at Egypt’s King Fouad First University over sixty years ago. How can they ever measure up to Sheikh Abdel Razek who used to recite poetry by Lamartine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud?)

Egypt’s contemporary religious institution is currently generating some kind of men who are incessantly spewing venom. One such person wrote a book about Copts a few months back (which Al-Azhar withdrew from the markets). This proves that the religious institution in Egypt is spawning Wahhabi symbols that could never condone full equanimity between Copts and Muslims nor between men and women.

Ten years ago, as I wrote that Copts are the indigenous people of Egypt, I was pummeled by stones from many symbols of Wahhabism (stones thrown by uncouth and illiterate youngsters), although I never said that Egyptian Muslims were not also indigenous people of the land.

Fourth: The special political relations between Egypt and the Arab state financing the proliferation of an interpretation of Islam derived from the writings of [radical Islamic sheiks] Ahmed Bin Hanbal, Bin Taymeya, Bin Qayem El-Jozeyah and Bin Baz, the Saudi mufti who passed away a few years back, prevented the government from attempting to barricade the propagation of Wahhabism in Egypt.

Furthermore, many men in authority could not recognize the detrimental effect Wahhabism had on Egyptians’ moderate nature which produced Egypt’s version of Islam, far from the barbaric Wahhabi version coming from the boorish nomadic desert. Egyptian Islam—which has almost entirely disappeared now—is a cultural entity founded on hundreds of layers of civilizations and cultures dating back to over four thousand years before Islam entered Egypt in 641 AD.

Fifth: Over the past few decades, the Egyptian government has tried to ingratiate itself by sacrificing Copts, and overlooking the harassments they suffer and the grievances they endure, to accommodate the rampant Wahhabi mentality that engulfed our society. Political history tells us that the rulers who cowered in the face of any force ended up turning that force into an undefeatable monster. Throughout history, monsters proved that they understand nothing but force. I am not calling here for the use of arbitrary force but for the use of force within the restrictions of the law.

I have addressed the Copts’ sufferings and grievances amply in my writings. Yet, I never talked about specific incidents such as Al-Kosheh or other such crises where the suppression of Copts spiraled into flagrant aggression on their lives and property. Actually, I am more interested in the disease than in the symptom. All these regretful events are the symptoms of an endemic, generating mindset of intolerance and rejection of Copts as equal partners in this country.

It is the same mindset which ranks women on a much lower status than men.

It was no coincidence that Egypt’s latest elections that did not introduce a single Copt into the parliament also failed to introduce women into the legislative houses.

The problem is not a religious but rather a cultural one. We are facing people who reside out of time, civilization, and progress. They are nothing but human fossils that want to pull us all hundreds of years back into history. Their delusional minds make them believe they will find paradise there. But, we have studied history and we know that the paradise in their dreams was never a reality on earth.

We can see the truth as clearly as we see the sun on a clear summer’s day. Moreover, we are well aware of the cultural and socio-economic factors behind the ailment of those delusional minds dwelling in the past.

Translated by CS. Source: Al Wafd, May 15, 2012