Egypt’s Soft Sectarian War, Nostalgia for Old Regimes…….
“Egypt’s Copts, representing about 10% of the country’s 80 million people, feel increasingly alienated and marginalized as the country becomes more Islamized. This feeling of alienation will increase now after yesterday’s Christmas Eve murders. An analyst with al-Ahram Center said that this Islamization has been going on for about thirty years now………….This tends to make them withdraw from public and political life, to seek isolation behind their Church walls, which tends to make them easy targets for extremist views espoused by some Coptic émigrés in the West…….Their have been more clashes in recent years, mainly cause by the refusal of the authorities to allow Copts to build new churches or to expand exiting churches…… some clashes were caused by romantic entanglements of young people from opposite religions…….....”
What a coincidence: this has been going on for “nearly thirty years”, the number of years Hosni Mubarak has been in power, ruling under a convenient ‘emergency law’. The same number of years he has been allowing Egypt to be pushed toward the Saudi model of Salafi extremism (whoever heard of the niqab or burqa'a in Cairo thirty years ago? Or of legalized part-time marriages, mesayyar travel marriages, tourist marriages, marriages of men in their sixties to girls aged 13-14 years).
It is that other growing sectarian confrontation that can escalate; and it will as long as the regime allows Egypt to keep on moving toward an intolerant Islamic state. There was no communal strife under King Farouk, or Nasser, or Sadat, mainly because they held on to Egypt’s millennia-old history of tolerance.
No wonder some Arab media report growing nostalgia in Egypt for older days, decades ago, even for the old monarchy that nobody remembers.
Cheers
mhg
Mon Email
Very interesting. I am currently studying Arabic at my university and plan to study abroad in Egypt sometime in the next two years. An insightful look into a fascinating country.
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