Working Partnerships
Muslim-Christian unity. A cartoon by Carlos Latuff.
A Christian worship service was held in Tahrir Square today on behalf of the protesters. Just as Christians formed a cordon of their bodies around their praying, vulnerable Muslim colleagues on Friday, so the Muslim Brotherhood had vowed to protect these Christians. The gestures are symbolic rather than practical, but that does not make them unimportant.
Perhaps it makes them more important.
Following today’s service, there was footage on Al-Jazeera (Arabic) of a Muslim Imam in the dress of an Al-Azhar cleric holding arms with a Christian priest in Tahrir square, both saying that they are united to get Mubarak out and change the regime.
Their words echoed that of the Muslim preacher during Friday prayers Feb. 5 said, “This is an Egyptian movement, with Christians and Muslims taking part. It does not have a religious goal. It is spontaneous, and is not driven by party-political aims. Our aims are to get rid of Mubarak and his regime.”
But aren’t Muslims and Christians at each others’ throats in Egypt? Wasn’t there a church bombing just last month? What is going on?
It is difficult to be Christian in Egypt. In rural communities, small scale disputes that begin as squabbles between neighbors may descend into community-wide violence along sectarian lines.
In the city, Christians winding their way through the Byzantine regulations that govern the building of new churches may find that their Muslim neighbors (for whom building a mosque is a much simpler process) have deliberately stolen a jump on them and built a mosque on the site they sought to put their church on.
During the chaos that has occurred since the dissolution of the police, there have been reports of Muslim neighborhood militias standing aside as their Christian neighbors were looted.
There are strong friendships and working partnerships between Christians and Muslims, but also considerable mistrust. Christians have increasingly begun to signal their identities by tattooing crosses or fish on their hands.
For many Christians, however, the root of their problems lies with the Mubarak regime rather than with Islam per se, or even with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Christianity in Egypt is said to have begun with the mission of St. Mark the Evangelist. His relics are buried beneath this cathedral, where his tomb is accessible for pilgrimage.
Over the past several decades the state has created a framework of legal discrimination against Christians. Under Egypt’s constitution, Christians are free to practice their faith but the regime has structurally limited their ability to do so.
Christians in Egypt are consistently under counted in official censuses, limiting their political influence. They are routinely refused permission to build new churches and claim to be treated by state institutions as second class citizens.
While Christians do not blame the state for violence perpetrated against them, they claim that the state is slow to investigate anti-Christian crime, but quick to investigate when a Christian is accused of a crime.
And the state is quite capable of direct persecution, as when the regime slaughtered more than 300,000 pigs as a precaution against “swine flu”, rendering thousands of poor Christians destitute. One Christian told me last summer that he believed the action was a retaliation for Coptic resistance to efforts by government cronies to take over the beautiful rock churches in Moqattam and turn them into tourist destinations.
[The official government web site on H1N1 virus in Egypt claimed that contact with infected swine was the most common way to transmit swine flu, while the US CDC web site claimed it was the least common–only 50 recorded cases since 1958]
Many Christians also say that the regime quietly supports, and sometimes even sponsors sectarian violence in order to produce evidence of the chaos they are supposedly preserving Egypt from. For those in Tahrir Square, their symbols of unity are aspirational signs of what they hope life could be like freed of the heavy hand of the Mubarak regime.
That’s why there have been so many placards showing the conjoined signs of cross and crescent during the uprisings. It’s why there have been joint Muslim-Christian prayers in Tahrir Square.
A Coptic church carved out of the rock of Moqattam mountain, where thousands of Copts were rendered destitute by the destruction of their swine herds.
These signs reflect a historical tradition of Christians and Muslims joining together in political protest that dates back to banners carried by the nationalist Wafd party in 1919 when it led revolution against British colonial.
Similar signs were seen during the anti-Mubarak protests in 2005 and during recent workers’ strikes.
The collapse of the regime will not solve the problems of Egypt’s 8 million or so minority Christians. But many Christians clearly believe a new government would be a breakthrough that would give them an opportunity to redress grievances.
It is surely a significant statement against the Mubarak regime that many of Egypt’s beleaguered Christians would rather work with the Muslim Brotherhood toward change than continue to live under the current government.
Additional Resources:
Dream Teams?
Let’s Compare Dream Teams
A New York Times article describes an Egyptian/White House plan for constitutional reforms. Meanwhile, protesters are circulating their own list of people they’d like to see design constitutional reforms which was forwarded to me by friends. Let’s compare:
The Regime Dream Team
Umar Suleiman, who was appointed Vice President of Egypt on January 29, 2011, was director of the Egyptian national intelligence agency from 1993 until now. He was ranked the Middle East’s most powerful intelligence chief by Foreign Policy magazine and the Daily Telegraph (Britain) dubbed him as “one of the world’s most powerful spy chiefs”. Suleiman’s credibility was undermined for the “Shabab Facebook” by US embassy telegrams released by wikileaks that show his role in supporting US and Israeli policy on the Gaza border.
Lt. Gen. Sami Enan is chief of the Egyptian armed forces. He rose from battalion commander in 1981 to his present rank in 2005.
Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi is the former defense minister and commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces.
The Protester’s Dream Team
Dr. Ahmad Kamal Abul Magd was vice president of the National Council for Human Rights until last February when he was dismissed without explanation. After the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, he was appointed the Arab League’s commissioner responsible for “dialogue between civilizations
Dr. Ahmed Zewail is an Egyptian-American professor of physics at CalTech and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Naguib Sawiris is the owner of the telecommunications company Orascom, which has become one of the leading telecom companies in the world. Forbes Magazine declared him the 374th richest man in the world. Sawiris is a Coptic Christian.
Ambassador Amr Moussa is the Secretary-General of the Arab League. He has been ambassador to the United Nations and India, and was Egyptian Foreign Minister 1991-2001.
Dr. Usama Al-Ghazali Harb is editor-in-chief of the monthly news magazine Al Siyasa Al Dawliya and is one of the founders of the Democratic Front Party.
Dr. Amr Hamzawy is a noted political scientist currently serving as a senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has taught at Cairo University and the Free University of Berlin.
Monir Fakhri Abdel Nour is a leader of the New Wafd Party opposition group and an Egyptian delegate to the Pan-African Parliament.
Mahmoud Saad was a popular Egyptian TV host. He achieved notoriety after the protests began as one of the first national television journalists to resign rather than broadcast propaganda.
Dr. Gawdat El- Malt is a respected economist and president of the Central Auditing Organization, He is also chair of the Working Group on Fight Against Corruption and Money Laundering
On the one hand, a broadly representative group of businessmen, academics, journalists and human rights activists with deep international and national experience to design the new basis for political life in Egypt. On the other hand, the military and the spies.
Political realism–a cultural viewpoint that guides most US foreign policy decision–dictates that members of the regime be included in the reform process. If they control the process, these reforms will likely merely be a transfer of power from one authoritarian regime to another. If Obama administration pushes as hard for inclusion of the protester’s dream team as they do the regime’s, some modest democratic reform might be possible.
Will Islamists Derail Democracy?
In the contemporary world system, events happening in one place affect lives in other places. Egypt concerns American because half the world’s oil passes through the Suez canal, and hence unrest in Egypt affects prices at the pump. Egypt has been a keystone of US foreign policy in the Middle East while Mubarak has been in power, and uncertainty is often scary.
One of my wife’s friends worried in a recent e-mail that even if the Egyptian protestors realize their highest aspirations, achieving a successful democracy in Egypt might be a bad thing for our national interests.
She articulated her concern thus: “It seems that whenever a true democracy has been attempted in Muslim countries, with time, the Islamists (not the same as Muslims) eventually win a majority, and then all the original hopes of a tolerant society are out the window.”
I find this statement, and the fears it engenders, puzzling. I can’t think of any examples that fit the bill.
There are very few democracies in the Islamic World. There are many reasons for this, and the fact that some successful democracies do exist suggests that it is not endemic to Islam. I think the simplest answer is just that there are few democracies in the world period. Only about one-third of the world’s states are functioning democracies.
Out of the 47 Muslim majority nations (defined as having 50% or more Muslim population) I tally as (more-or-less) democracies Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey.
Bangladesh’s government is dominated by two powerful parties at complete odds with one another: a secular leftist party and an Islamist party. The Islamist party, when in power, has not destroyed Bangladesh’s democracy. On the contrary, Bangladesh seems to be getting more democratic. The Islamist party has cooperated with its rival in 2007 to change the constitution to provide greater separation of powers, and again to ban Bangladesh’s two Islamist terrorist organizations.
Since the resignation of the dictator Suharto in 1998, Indonesia—the country with the world’s largest Muslim population—has had a functioning democracy with several overtly Islamist political parties of different stripes. Indonesia was hit hard by both the Tsunami and the global recession, yet there’s been no sign of an Islamic takeover.
Malaysia has a strong constitutional monarchy very closely modeled on the British model.
Morocco also has a constitutional monarchy. The king, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, has far more powers than the king of Malaysia, but the head of state is an elected prime minister and the legislative branch is relatively independent–albeit, only so far as the king lets them be.
Pakistan has bobbled back-and-forth between democracy and military rule since it was established in 1948. It has had continual trouble with Islamist militants in provinces along the Afghan border (and, to a lesser extent, throughout the country), but it has not ever had an election Islamists won, much less seized power.
Turkey is a great counterexample. A secular democracy, its conservative Islamic AK party swept into power in 2002 and has held on to power in subsequent elections. It promotes social conservative laws and free market economics much like the Republican party in the US, but it has never tried to overturn the secular constitution or overturn Turkey’s tolerant democratic society.
The only thing that I can imagine is that people making statements like this one are looking at Iran and imagining that if Islamists get hold of a government this is what it must look like.
But Iran doesn’t fit the statement either. Iran was never really a democracy because it is committed to the principle of the Velayat-e Faqih, or “rule of the chief jurisprudent.” This political principle, which mandates a hierarchy of clerical decision-making, is rejected by almost all other Islamist political thinkers, both Shi’ite and Sunni.
If the protesters achieve their highest ambitions–an interim government is formed and the Constitution is revised, and free and fair elections are held—I think it unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win a solid majority so that it could form a government without allying with other parties.
The Muslim Brotherhood is highly conservative and well-organized, but there is no reason to think they would take over Egypt. Most Egyptians I’ve talked to respect them highly for their moral conservativism, but they wouldn’t want to actually live under them.
But even if they did win an election, there is no reason—based on the evidence of other Muslim majority democracies—to think they would somehow undermine democracy or tolerance and impose some more radical version of shari’a.
In fact, the evidence all seems to indicate exactly the opposite.
Rising Up in Egypt
Speaking at a brown bag luncheon at Miami University
On Monday, Jan. 30, the International Studies program hosted a brown bag lunch talk at which I was asked to offer some context to the events in Egypt since Jan. 25. Since then, as weather permits, I’ve been speaking to classes, news media and others about Egypt and how and why the uprising occurred.
Key questions have included “What are Egyptians protesting about?“, “Why is this happening now?“, “What will happen next?“, “Did you know this was going to happen?“, “Did this happen because of social media?”, “What will this mean for the U.S.?”
So I took advantage of yesterday’s snow day to post answers to some of these questions. Since my answers are drawn from my anthropological background, and my experience in Egypt, I’ve added a section to my “Connected in Cairo” web site. I’ll continue to post as often as time permits as we watch the events in Egypt unfold, and pray for the best outcome for the Egyptian people.
Shameless Self-Promotion?
This is me in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, Cairo, summer 2010.
In fact I hope that this is not shameless self promotion but it’s never clear.
My publisher strongly recommended that I start a blog or web page. First it was a letter from the promotion and marketing department, then some questions by my editor about how the current uprising related to issues in my book.
It struck home particularly because of a column I published recently in Anthropology News advocating blogs, web pages and other social media for those linguistic anthropologists who want to get seen by the media. The essay was subsequently published to the Society for Linguistic Anthropology blog.
In the face of all this sudden emphasis on the importance of social media, I decided it was high time to give it a try and see what happens.
I appreciate your joining me.
CONNECTED in CAIRO 