During last month’s Coptic Christmas mass, Egyptian Muslims offered their bodies, and lives, as “shields” to protect the threatened Christian community. The action caused many to wonder if it was a sign of improving relations between the two groups.
Unfortunately, Cornelis Hulsman, reporting from Cairo for Christianity Today, thinks there’s too much else going on to put those tensions aside in the long term:
Last August, another woman, Kamelia Shehata, also married to a priest, allegedly wanted to convert to Islam to obtain a divorce. She too disappeared. Following the disappearance,local media highlighted a claim of Orthodox Bishop Bishoy, made in an interview, that Muslims are “guests” in Egypt. (There is a popular Christian belief that only Christians belong in Egypt.)
But Egyptian government officials have repeatedly expressed in private their frustrations that the Orthodox Church has become “a state within a state” that flouts the law.
The construction of mosques and churches is another persistent sore spot. In Nag Hammadi, Father Isidorus explains that most of his monastery was built up over the past 30 years by constructing new buildings around 19th-century-era buildings. Many Christians do this to get around highly restrictive state limits on stand-alone new buildings.
But near the entrance of the monastery stands a mosque with a minaret that is taller than the tower of the church. In el-Tur, Sinai, a mosque has been built to rival in size the new church, which had been larger than the area’s existing mosques. In Aswan, a cathedral dominates the skyline of the city, where only a few hundred Christians remain. This kind of rivalry among Egypt’s Christians and Muslims causes both the state and the church to look weak
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February 11th, 2011 | 5:42 pm
The claim is not that only Christians belong in Egypt; it is that Christians are the natives, like Native Americans in the US.
February 12th, 2011 | 12:45 am
What about the Christians in Israel?
February 12th, 2011 | 6:35 am
Some years ago, I went to a nearby pub for lunch with some Coptic medical students who had been attending the weekly Coptic liturgy at St Andrew’s, Holborn, in London. The congregation seems mainly composed of staff at the London teaching hospitals.
I showed them an article in one of the Sunday papers, the usual stuff about how Islam was a religion of peace, tolerance &c. They crowded round eagerly to read it and, then, one of them asked me, in puzzled tones,
“This is the famous British sense of humour, yes?”
February 13th, 2011 | 8:53 am
“The claim is not that only Christians belong in Egypt; it is that Christians are the natives, like Native Americans in the US.”
Not all Christians, just the Copts, who are the indigenous Egyptian population–the ones related to the Pharoahs, hieroglyphs, pyramids and all that. The Eastern Orthodox Christians are for the most part descendants of the Greek population that settled in the lower Nile (Alexandria and environs) in the Hellenistic era.
The population of Egypt was predominantly Coptic and Greek down to the 13th-14th centuries, when the Mameluk rulers of Egypt, uncertain of the loyalty of the local Christians, tossed them off the land and replaced them with Arab fellahin from what is now Yemen (this has been proven by genetic testing).
February 13th, 2011 | 8:58 am
“What about the Christians in Israel?”
What about them? Like Muslims in Israel, they enjoy political and legal equality and are generally left alone. Unfortunately, in the occupied territories, the indigenous Christians are caught between a rock and a hard place, uncertain of their status under any final settlement. Their hierarchs, largely living in Muslim-ruled countries (mainly Syria) cannot be seen as pro-Israel, and sometimes they go too far in the other direction, and become actively pro-Palestinian, incurring the ire of the Israeli authorities. In the long term, this attempt to be seen as “good Arabs” will avail them as much as Jewish attempts to be “good Germans”.
Let the record show that I am a Melkite Greek Catholic, and know a bit about Middle Eastern Christians.
February 14th, 2011 | 3:33 am
Stuart Koehl
You are right, but this must be seen in the context of a rather dated belief, stemming from the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule (and correspondingTurkish revolt against Arab influence) that, in the Middle East, nationality could provide a bond transcending confesional differences, as it had done in Europe.
February 14th, 2011 | 6:09 pm
[...] FIRST THINGS: What Happens to Egypt’s Christians After Mubarak? [...]
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