Commentary by Joel Veldkamp
A version of this article originally appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper.
On January 7, as Christians across Egypt gathered to celebrate Christmas on the Orthodox Calendar, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi appeared at the Nativity of Christ Cathedral to present his holiday greetings to the worshippers there. This colossal cathedral, the largest church in the Middle East, was built by the Egyptian government and inaugurated in 2019.
Four days earlier, on January 3, the government sentenced a Christian man named Augustinos Samaan to five years’ hard labor, for the crime of defending the Christian faith in debates with Muslims online.
The two cases exemplify the paradox of Egypt’s Christians (often called “Copts”). Even when they are publicly celebrated by their country’s authoritarian ruler, they remain, at best, a protected minority, one that must take care not to offend the majority.
An ancient Christian presence
Egypt is home to roughly twelve million Christians, or 10% of the population. That figure is hotly disputed – official government censuses tend to put Christians at 5% of the population, while Christian leaders insist that the government deliberately undercounts them, and claim that their numbers are closer to 15%.
No matter the case, Egypt’s Christians are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle East, a region where safe places for Christians are quickly disappearing.
The Copts also have a great cultural influence on Egyptian society and, indeed, the whole Middle East region. Egyptian Christians are prominently represented in business, scholarship, and the arts. Arabic-speaking Christians across the world tune in to religious programs broadcast from Egypt by satellite.
Around 90% of Christians in Egypt belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, an ancient church that claims St. Mark the gospel writer as its founder. The remaining 10% belong to the Coptic Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, or a number of smaller Protestant churches.
The Copts rightly claim a deep connection to their homeland. These are not immigrants or recent converts to Christianity. Egypt was a Christian-majority country from the 3rd century until long into the Middle Ages. The very word “Copt” used to simply mean “an Egyptian.” And while modern genetic studies show that nearly all Egyptians are related to the inhabitants of the ancient kingdoms of Egypt, this is more true for Copts than for their Muslim neighbors.
A legal system based on Islamic supremacy
To the outside world, Sisi eagerly portrays himself as the protector of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Yet the Copts continue to suffer from legal inequalities, social discrimination, and often violence.
The cathedral is a case in point: Sisi built it in Egypt’s new administrative capital, which is located in the desert 45 kilometers west of Cairo – very difficult for ordinary people to reach. Meanwhile, under Egyptian law, building new churches, or even repairing old ones, is exceedingly difficult, and requires getting specific permission from the governor.
Indeed, Egypt’s entire legal system is tilted towards Islam. Egypt’s constitution makes Islam the religion of the state, and names the principles of Islamic sharia law as the principal source of legislation. Accordingly, Muslim men are allowed to marry Christian women in Egypt, but Christian men are not allowed to marry Muslim women. All children of mixed marriages are automatically counted as Muslim. The religion of each person is registered with the state, and marked on each person’s ID card. Converting from Islam to Christianity is nearly impossible, but converting from Christianity to Islam is frighteningly easy.
This Kafkaesque legal matrix incentivizes a particular form of gender-based violence – the abduction and forced conversion of Chrisian women and girls. Alarmingly frequently, Egyptian Christian women will disappear and reappear a few weeks later, having been converted to Islam and married to a Muslim man under duress. Once a Christian woman has been officially converted to Islam, there is almost no legal way back to her family and community. Thus, their kidnappers enjoy near-impunity.
When Christian communities are attacked by Muslim mobs after disputes over church construction or cross-faith romantic relationships, Christians – especially in rural regions – cannot expect justice or police protection. Instead, the local authorities typically arrange a “reconciliation session” between the Christian and Muslim communities. These sessions usually end with the Christian community apologizing for whatever offense (real or imagined) triggered the burning of their homes, paying a fine to the Muslims, and moving away from their village.
For all of Sisi’s performative demonstrations of support for Christians, the bedrock legal and social reality in Egypt is Islamic supremacy.
Protection – but what kind?
Nevertheless, there is some truth to Sisi’s claim that he protects Christians. Radical groups in Egypt have long made it clear that they see Christians as enemies of Islam, against whom jihad should be waged. Between 2011 and 2018, extremists murdered hundreds of Christians in a series of church bombings.
In the last eight years, this kind of spectacular violence has become rare. Sisi, a former military general who came to power after overthrowing Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013, sees Islamic extremists as a threat to his rule as well, and he has ruthlessly crushed them.
But Sisi’s regime does not protect Christians as equal citizens. Islam remains the religion of the state. The protection that Christians enjoy is conditional – as long as they stay in line, Egypt’s rulers will keep violence against them to a minimum.
The first major church bombing in 21st century Egypt took place on January 1, 2011. On that day, a suicide bomber blew himself up during a New Year’s service at a church in Alexandria, killing 23. As the scholar Mariz Tadros demonstrates in her 2013 book Copts at the Crossroads, there is strong evidence that the attack was orchestrated by Egypt’s security services. A few months earlier, Egypt’s church leaders had openly criticized the government for its handling of the disappearance of a priest’s wife. In the Alexandria cathedral bombing, the government sent a message to the church: keep quiet, or you will suffer.
Christians, Jews, and dhimmitude in Egypt
This relationship has a name: dhimmitude. When Muslim rulers conquered Egypt and the rest of the Middle East in the 7th century, they promised the Christians and Jews living in those countries their protection – but on the condition that Christians and Jews assume the role of dhimmis (meaning, people who adhere to the dhimma, or the “pact”).
Under the terms of the dhimma, Christians and Jews had to accept a position of subservience to Muslims – to pay extra taxes, to accept the supremacy of sharia law, and to always support the Muslim ruler. The community would be held collectively responsible for violations.
This system of co-existence was tolerant for its time, especially when compared to how Jews and Muslims were persecuted in medieval Europe. But although the dhimmi status is no longer codified in Egyptian law, dhimmitude, the relationship between Muslims and Christians created by the dhimmi system, has persisted into the modern era, with grievous effects.
The term dhimmitude was coined by the scholar Bat Ye’or, a Jewish Egyptian woman. When she was a child, there were 75,000 Jews living in Egypt. Today there are around 10. Bat Ye’or’s family, along with the rest of Egypt’s Jewish population, was forced to flee Egypt after Israel invaded Egypt in 1956. Because the Jewish state attacked Egypt, the entire Jewish population was punished.
Similarly, the massacres of Egyptian Christians in recent decades, whether by the state or by Muslim extremists waging war against the state, have been justified by accusations that the Christians are stepping out of line – criticizing the government, preventing Muslims from evangelizing Christians, building churches, and other perceived infractions.
Westerners accustomed to the liberal human rights tradition may be surprised that the same president who builds an enormous new cathedral also puts Christians in jail for arguing against Muslim apologetics and fails to stop Christian women from being forcibly converted to Islam. But for Sisi and Egypt’s Muslim rulers, there is no contradiction. In the government’s mindset, Christians are not equal citizens, but dhimmis – protected but subservient.
Coptic Christians have lived in Egypt for nearly two thousand years, and they aren’t going away. But whether Egypt can transition to a society where all people are truly equal, regardless of religion, is another question.
Photo: The Cavern Church of Saint Sergius and Bacchus in Coptic Cairo. CSI, 2018.
