In the last decades, physical and moral violence targeting Christians in Muslim-majority countries has increased against a backdrop of rising Islamization and entrenched authoritarianism. The tragedy of the Pakistani Christian Asia Bibi that captured media attention for a while is symptomatic of a general exclusionary undercurrent latent with religious bigotry and hatred of minorities. The subfield of Middle East studies should have been more sensitive to the tragedy of Christians in the region considering the scale of their suffering. But such is not the case because scholars generally avoid shedding light on practices victimizing Christians in the name of Islam for reasons that go beyond the limit of this review to explain. Hence, the importance of Laure Guirguis’s book on the Coptic community: With empathy and objectivity, Guirguis analyzes the plight of Egypt’s Christians using a wealth of Arabic resources and the testimonies of activists, intellectuals, and public figures, in addition to tracts distributed in Coptic circles. Copts and the Security State is well researched and deserves to be read.
The actors contributing to the othering and humiliation of Egypt’s Christians operate in both the political and societal realms, and Guirguis does a fine job covering both spheres. She shows that successive Egyptian regimes exploited fears of political Islam in order to cultivate Coptic loyalty, though Egypt’s Christians suffer like their fellow citizens from the predatory practices of the powers-that-be in Cairo. The sectarianism of the Muslim Brothers has been historically unmitigated, and their antipathy toward the Copts largely undisguised—notwithstanding occasional rhetoric suggesting otherwise. The 2011 uprising could have triggered a rapprochement between Egypt’s Christians and Muslims like the 1919 revolution against British rule in Egypt did. But the Muslim Brothers did everything they possibly could to sectarianize politics after former president Hosni Mubarak was ousted—including transforming a constitutional referendum in March 2011 into a vote for or against Islam, and using anti-Christian slogans and tactics to rally voters to their cause in some districts during the 2012 parliamentary elections.
Guirguis investigates these dynamics analytically; and though centered on contemporary politics, her book offers several useful flashbacks that set the present in its historical context. Beyond the political realm, she also studies societal dynamics pertaining to such issues as romantic affairs across religious lines, conversions, or the construction of new churches, all of which unfold in an uneven playing field always skewed against Copts. For instance, it is easy for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman, but a Christian man must convert to Islam in order to marry a Muslim. Similarly, conversions from Christianity to Islam face no bureaucratic hurdles, but the opposite is not true.
Some anecdotes in the book reveal the depth of anti-Christian discrimination in Egypt. For example, in 2008 the president of the Doctor’s Syndicate, Hamdi al-Sayyid, declared that he would “prohibit transplants between Muslims and Christians” (p, 59), allegedly to prevent wealthy Christian buyers from purchasing poor Muslims’ organs in black market sales—thus giving credibility to the stereotype of the rich “Christian” preying on the poor “Muslim,” never mind the thousands of Coptic scavengers who make a living from collecting and selling garbage (p. 59). That same year, rumors circulated in Egypt that Christians were selling pork contaminated with swine flu in a meat mixture available for Muslims to buy and eat. Surrounded with hostility, and facing intermittent episodes of outright violent persecution, many Copts have come to believe that there is an ongoing process of Arabization-Islamization of Egypt that will never stop until their complete annihilation. For their part, many Muslims are convinced that Christian proselytism is determined to destroy Islamic religion and culture; even secularization is sometimes equated with Christianization as long as both projects lead to de-Islamization in one way or another. A whole discursive system is thus constructed as a product of the tug of war between Christians and Muslims. Guirguis studies such dynamics in a particularly insightful part of the book (Chapter 2, “Purity As an Embodiment of Security?”).
The book also covers the politics of two actors directly concerned with the ongoing discrimination against Christians in Egypt: the Coptic Church and Coptic immigrants whose numbers have been growing for decades. Under the energetic and domineering leadership of Pope Shenuda III, the Coptic Church expanded its authority from the ecclesiastical to the secular spheres of life, instituted a network of social services catering to the least fortunate members of the community, and became—in the person of its head, the pope—the main political representative of its flock. In essence, Shenuda delivered the Coptic vote for the ruling party under former President Mubarak; what he hoped to get in return was influence over government decisions affecting Copts. Shenuda did certainly garner some political weight, but his alliance with the Mubarak regime was always unequal considering the asymmetry of force unfavorable to the Coptic side.
Contra the attitude of the Church “at home,” activist Coptic immigrants became convinced that the Egyptian state would never be serious about the Coptic question and lobbied foreign governments, especially the United States, to intervene in favor of the beleaguered Christians. Guirguis analyzes the strategies of both Coptic actors and their tense relations with one another: The Church found it prudent to distance itself from activists abroad, whereas the latter accused priests of cowardice and questioned the wisdom of their attitudes vis-à-vis power, which they considered meek. Thus, the book offers an overview of the internal dynamics and rivalries operating within the Coptic Church and community, in addition to analyzing Coptic politics and Christian–Muslim relations in Egypt at large.
Having laid out different aspects of the Coptic plight in Egypt, the book does not venture into thinking through possible solutions or strategies for action. Should Christians in Egypt keep betting on an eventual secularization of society that would eventually save them from the inferior status that has been theirs historically? And if so, what are the realistic chances of such a strategy in a society still deeply structured by Islam? Should they, by contrast, adopt a more confrontational approach and maybe lobby for a quota guaranteeing their representation in the system? Their Lebanese brethren do have a quota of their own in Lebanon’s institutions, but they once formed 50% of Lebanese society and still represent around 35% of it today. The Copts do not have the same demographic weight and never enjoyed the preponderance that the Christians in Lebanon once had.
If there is a solution for the Coptic question in Egypt, it is not clear what it is or could be. And so perhaps the silence of Laure Guirguis on this particular matter should not be held against the book. In the end, Copts and the Security State is a must-read for anyone interested in Egypt, the Copts, and the long-suffering Middle Eastern Christians.
