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A.C.N - Aid to the Church in Need Italian Office |
Religious Freedom in
the Majority Islamic Countries |
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Egypt Population:
62,110,000
Although Article 3 of the Egyptian Constitution of 1923 proclaims the equality of all Egyptians before the law, without distinction as to race, language or religion, the reality is very different. The trend towards islamisation of the Egyptian legal system culminated in 1971 when, by decision of the Supreme Constitutional Tribunal, approval was given to a law stating that "Islam is the State religion and any law contrary to Islam is contrary to the Constitution". The latter, despite the changes made in 1980, formally guarantees freedom of conscience, and proselytism is not legally prosecuted; however, an article of the Penal Code which prosecutes actions susceptible of endangering national unity or social peace, is used against those Muslims who desire to convert to the Christian religion. There is direct evidence of various arrests of this type in 1995, and one in 1996. On January 4 1998, Muhammad Sallam, an Egyptian Christian who had converted and already previously been detained for ten months in 1990, together with two other converts, was arrested at Cairo airport and taken to an unknown destination (MEC, January 7 1998 and ACN Info report, February 1998). The lack, or complete absence, of respect for the right to religious freedom undoubtedly also hits at the Islamist militants, as was recorded by the reports of Amnesty International in 1998 which cite the case of 34 presumed members of the Muslim Brotherhood, arrested in August 1997 on charges of belonging to an illegal religious organisation and then released one month later. But, again according to this international organisation, this phenomenon may in fact involve thousands of cases, including the lawyers involved in the defence of those detained. Among the victims of this intolerance were also dozens of young rock music fans, who were held in detention for a month and accused of following Satanic cults. Numerous laws and provisions arising from this ruling contravene the principle of equality between Christians and Muslims under the law (inheritance, marriage, etc.). Thus the law prevents a Christian being nominated as tutor to a Muslim child, while in legal disputes it is common for greater value to be attached to the testimony of a Muslim than to that of a Christian. It is forbidden to abandon the Muslim religion, but the same principle does not hold in the case of conversions from Christianity to Islam. Discrimination of the same order also applies to educational legislation; for example a Christian cannot teach literary subjects, while the courses of history, philosophy and literature are imbued with anti-Christian attitudes and the Christian students are obliged to swallow all this. In the field of press and publishing, Order 518 of February 24 1970 specifies that religious books and publications about Christianity must be subject to censorship, while at the same time it is laid down that the distribution and circulation of Islamic publications should be favoured in the schools and universities. Persecutions against the clergy and the Church The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Shenouda III, was arrested in 1981 and placed under detention in a "supervised residence" until 1985. It is estimated that since then almost a quarter of the Coptic episcopate have been subjected to restrictions on their personal liberty. The reason for this arrest was the determination of Patriarch Shenouda to denounce the acts of violence against the Copts. After a long series of violent attacks and assassinations, on June 17 1981 an entire quarter of Cairo, Zawya el-Hamra, where Christians and Muslims have lived alongside one another for years, was attacked and set on fire by Islamic extremists. Although the number of deaths has never been precisely stated, its is safe to assume that no less than 20 people were killed and over a hundred injured. Children were thrown out of windows before the eyes of their horrified parents, churches were set on fire and shops and homes were looted. And these groups of Islamic fanatics continued to rampage undisturbed for two whole days without the police daring to intervene. The reaction of then-President Sadat to all this violence was the deposition on September 5 of Patriarch Shenouda and the effective "house arrest" to which he was subjected. Approximately one month later, on October 6, President Sadat himself was to die under the bullets of an Islamic terrorist group. Numerous cases are documented of outrages and insults which have taken place, even in the public streets, against Christian religious, as also of assaults on their churches and places of worship. In February 1987 in the town of Sohag, in upper Egypt, following a fire which began accidentally in the local mosque, two Christian churches - one Coptic Orthodox and one Protestant - were set on fire and seriously damaged by groups of Islamic extremists who were convinced that the Christians were responsible for the fire in their mosque. Other cases of violent attacks against Christians have been reported from the town of Beni-Souef, some 75 miles south of Cairo. The periodical Idea Spektrum of January 12 1995 reported a news item according to which, in the Egyptian town of Giza, three Coptic Orthodox priests were arrested on suspicion of instigating religious conversions. They were accused of having falsified the identity documents of a former Muslim woman convert by registering her under a different religious denomination. The woman had been baptised in the Church of St Dimyane. On December 19, the Protestant pastor W. Gayyid was acquitted of the charge of having carried out religious conversions. According to the periodical quoted, out of 55 million Egyptians, 85% are Muslims and 14% Christians. Middle East International announced on March 7 1997 that on February 12 of the same year, a Coptic church in Upper Egypt near the village of Fikriya (Minya region) had been attacked by armed men. The attack took place during the weekly meeting of young people in the church and resulted in nine deaths. On March 13, nine Copts and four Muslims were massacred by an Islamist terror group in Ezbet Daoud; the attack also left another 25 injured. Coptic sources have described numerous cases of instigation to violence by leading groups in the mosques (in Kafr Denyan these incitements led to violent attacks) and acts of extortion and threats against Christians. In September 1997, a few days after the announcement of a Marian apparition close to the Church of Shartana el Hagar, hundreds of Islamic militants invaded the village, shouting anti-Christian slogans, threatening and robbing the property of the Christians. (Cf. also CWR 11/1997; ACN Info 2/1998). The German news agency KNA of February 14 1997 reported that in the Egyptian town of Abu Qurquas Muslim militants had killed nine Coptic Christians and gravely wounded another five. A sixth man died later from the injuries he had received. When the police reported what had happened in the capital, armed men broke in three days later in the evening into a church 130 miles south of Cairo; they surrounded the village and shot at the people with machine guns. They probably belonged to the militant group Jamaa islamiya. From 1992 onwards around 1,170 people have been killed by these fundamentalists, among them numerous Christians. The leaders of the Islamic extremist movements continue to urge the Muslims of Egypt to discriminate against their Christian fellow countrymen. In April 1997, the supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood declared that when Egypt became an Islamic state "the Christians will no longer be allowed to serve in the army because in the event of a conflict with a Christian country they might change allegiance and become agents of the enemy". The German weekly Der Spiegel of April 14 1997 reported that the militant Islamic confraternity had begun its campaign against the 10 million Coptic Christians. Their leader, Mustafa Mashur has urged the removal of the Copts from all state agencies and from the armed forces, and the exclusion of Christian ministers from the government. The KNA-OKI news reports of September 30 1997 note that the cry "God is great" has, in the Nile basin, become a war-cry against tourists and against the Egyptian Christians. Four Copts, who were also Egyptian citizens, were murdered in the province of Minya by an armed Islamic group. The victims, who belonged to the minority four million Christians in Egypt (though the Copts speak of nine million), were ordinary peasants like their Muslim neighbours, and at the moment of the killing they were sitting in front their houses in the village of Kafr Rumanthe, about 120 miles south of Cairo. The police are convinced that this was the work of Muslim extremist group Jamaa islamiya. The objective of these extremists in recent years has been to try to dry up the resources from tourism in order to weaken the government and plunge the country into chaos. In this way it would be easier to establish an Islamic state. However, the pressure from the government and the strong protective measures taken for foreigners have resulted in a decrease in these terrorist attacks. Since 1992 there have been over a thousand civilian victims, including the fundamentalists themselves and members of the police forces. But is this a holy war against the Christians? The situation is not clear, just as it is unclear exactly how many Christians there really are in the country; the figure varies from two to nine million, depending on the source. The fact is that all missionary activity is forbidden, and in the towns 90% of the inhabitants are Muslims and extremism is a daily threat. In an interview given in October 1997, the Coptic Catholic Bishop of Minya, Monsignor Antonios Naguib, has stated that in the last five years the Islamic extremists have caused the deaths of some eleven hundred people, of whom 220 were Christians from Central and Upper Egypt (DC, October 5 1997). According to a Coptic priest in Cairo, reported by the Vatican news agency Fides, the recent outbreaks of violence by the fundamentalists are due to the fact that fundamentalism is rooted in the Egyptian educational system. Indeed there are very frequent cases of students belonging to religious minorities being flagrantly discriminated against and mistreated. It has happened, for instance, that the chaddar (Muslim veil) has been imposed on Christian girls in elementary schools and that the Catholic schools have had to endure heavy interference by the authorities. It is no co-incidence that, following the massacre in Luxor on November 17 1997, the Minister of Education, Husein Kamel Bahaedin, announced that he had moved 1,600 teachers from teaching in state schools to administrative jobs. The policy of the government, according to Father Boulos Garas, national director of the pontifical missionary society in Egypt, is to ignore the presence of the Catholic Church because the Catholics are considered as semi-foreigners. In the official view, the Christians of Egypt are in fact the Coptic Orthodox; the Catholics have to put up with a situation that makes them a minority within a minority. Strong social and economic pressure is likewise brought to bear on Christians, to the extent that many abandon their Christian faith merely in order to be able to live in better conditions. But despite this the Christians are for the most part respected; the inter-religious dialogue has known good moments, and above all the population at large does not show hostility towards the Christians. (cf. Fides, February 1998). Idea Spektrum of February 19 1998 reports that the Middle East Council of Churches has made an appeal to Egyptian Christians not to leave the country, arguing that emigration is not a response to discrimination. Every year around ten thousand Christians leave to settle in Canada or Australia, whereas according to the council they are an integral part of society in the Arab world. And yet, in 26 Egyptian provinces there is not even a single Coptic Christian governor. Of the 127 Egyptian embassies abroad, not one is represented by a Christian Coptic ambassador. And just ten of the 3,600 state bodies have a president belonging to this religion. The Middle East Council of Churches states that the need is not for external protection but for a deepening of the dialogue in relation to this discrimination. But according to this declaration of the Council, which represents 27 churches and 14 million Christians in the region, the situation of the Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants nonetheless remains a critical one, as it does also in the other 22 countries of the Arab League, within whose populations there are 10 per cent of Christians. Different interpretations and versions emerge from the Ecumenical News International (ENI) News Service of March 26 1998, according to which the leader of a delegation of American pastors, Calvin Butts III (President of the Council of Churches, New York City), who visited Egypt in March has stated that the news of mass persecutions of Christians in a majority Muslim country have been exaggerated. According to the World Churches Handbook which estimates the number of Egyptians at 61 millions - there are 8.7 million Christians living in the country. The largest Church is the Coptic Orthodox Church, with eight million adherents. There have been isolated episodes of violence but generally relations are excellent, thanks also to the support of the government. Many Church leaders in the Middle East fear that the intervention of foreign governments, in particular of the United States, for a better treatment of the Christians could create misunderstandings and resentment towards the very people they are seeking to defend. The number of murders of Christians does not exceed the number of those among the population generally; the aim of the terrorists is to destabilise the government and not to kill the Christians. As to the forced conversions to Islam and the murder of Muslims who have converted to Christianity, the Egyptian Christian leaders have stated that this is a comparatively rare occurrence. It is true that there are grave difficulties in the building or restoration of churches but, for example, there is no discrimination against Christians working with the government. The richest person in the country is an Egyptian Christian. But at the same time as this, representatives of the American Coptic Union organised a press conference to declare that attacks against Christians are by no means isolated incidents, but regular occurrences. The government, in their view, does not provide sufficient protection and, indeed, even acts in collaboration with the terrorists. According to a report by the Catholic News Service of April 3 1998, the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, Amre Moussa, has rejected the label of "terrorism" applied to Islam, asserting that this type of violence exists also in Christian and Jewish countries in just the same way. He has spoken of a committee for Christian-Muslim dialogue that should be established in May, and looks forward to a reasoned and tolerant understanding between the two religions. According to this minister there are groups which hide behind religion in order to commit acts of terrorism. The International Herald Tribune of April 14 1998 announced a proposed United States law for the reduction of persecutions against religious minorities; it has unleashed real anger in Egypt. The proposal speaks of economic sanctions against countries judged guilty of religious discrimination, but it is opposed by the Egyptian Copts who represent the largest Christian minority in the Arab world. In fact the proposal seems to lend weight to the demands of those who wish to prevent American economic aid to Egypt, a country which has been a pillar of collaboration with the United States ever since the time of the Camp David agreements. This comes at a moment when the Arab world is already viewing with suspicion an American policy that applies two different standards of justice, one against the Arabs and Muslims and the other which overlooks the violations committed by the Israelis against the rights of the Palestinians. But discrimination does exist in Egypt, as for example the obstacles placed in the way of the construction or restoration of churches, or the educational syllabus of the secondary schools which conceals the history of the Coptic influence prior to the arrival of Islam. The Copts are for the most part excluded from political life, from government positions and from important academic posts, with rare exceptions. Human Rights Without Frontiers of August 8 1998 speaks of an "escalation in the persecutions against Christians", noting that on July 27 1998, without any advance warning, the Egyptian security forces carried out the enforced closure of a Coptic church in Maadi, near Cairo. A group of soldiers, led by senior officials, stormed the church and sealed up all of the entrances, including the windows. A spokesman for the security forces declared that this forcible action had become necessary because the church did not have the necessary permission. The church had been built four years previously on land owned by the Coptic Church within the diocese of Maadi. The community had been using the church for Sunday worship, although they had not yet received official permission to do so. The reality is that such permissions can take up to 10 years to arrive, but until now it has been usual to allow their use for Sunday worship. A few weeks before this incident three Coptic Christians were murdered - probably by Islamic militants - in a town 200 miles south of Cairo. According to the publication Human Rights Without Frontiers of October 21 1998, three Coptic Orthodox religious - a bishop and two priests - were charged by an Egyptian judge with having interfered in the police investigations concerning the murder the previous August of two Christians in a village in central / northern Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox Bishop Wissa of Baliana was summoned by the Public Prosecutor of the Sohag state and accused, together with two other priests of his diocese, of having infringed five articles of the Egyptian penal code. The two priests are Father Antonious Fouad Hannam and Father Shenouda. At the beginning of September, Bishop Wissa had contacted Egyptian groups for the defence of human rights with a document in which it was alleged that at least 1,000 Christians of the village of El-Kosheh (which is 80 per cent Christian) had been arrested, interrogated using oppressive methods and tortured by the police authorities who were investigating the double murder. But even though these abuses were reported to the local police authority by the bishop, the arrests continued for several weeks afterwards. The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), having verified the facts, stated that the number of Christians who were detained for months during the inquiries was 1,200. According to EOHR the police "started from the assumption that the assailant was a Christian". The news of the charges was confirmed by the minister responsible for the Department of Human Rights of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, ambassador Nayla Gabr, who confirmed to Compass that the bishop and the two priests had been accused of "withholding information relevant to the inquiries" and of having "interfered with witnesses in order to make them change their statements". Following the revelation of these abuses, the police claimed to have identified the killer, a Christian who is the cousin of one of the victims. The Prosecutor of Dar al-Salaam apparently formally charged this suspect on September 22. But two witnesses in the investigation, both of them Christians, contacted the prosecutor on October 7 to declare that their testimonies had been extorted from them by torture and were thus false; it appears that they have now been arrested for giving false witness, two days before the summons against the bishop and his priests. Other charges against members of the Coptic Orthodox Church allege attacks on national unity and social peace, the use of religion to incite revolution, and using religious meetings to incite criticism of the Government’s actions. In a letter to the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, Lord David Alton, a member of the House of Lords, accuses the Egyptian government of "attempts at intimidation of the Christian clergy" through charges under the penal system, instead of punishing "the police officials responsible for these grave abuses against human rights". The names of the police and officials involved in this case have been provided by the Coptic lawyer, Morris Sadek, in a list which also includes the names of the governor of Sohag, Mohammed Abdul Aziz Bakar, and of the chief of police in Sohag, Khalil Makhlouf, who are both accused of being "directly responsible" for the abuses against the Christians of Kosheh. "If the best that the Egyptian authorities can do is to arraign these priests with criminal charges," writes Lord Alton in his letter, "it is a clear indication that the Egyptian government is itself implicated in the persecution of Christians in its country". After interrogation by the prosecutor, the bishop and his two priests were released, pending trial, without a fixed date, on payment of bail of 100 Egyptian pounds each. However, the persecutions of Coptic Christians seem to be taking on the more classical forms of Christian martyrdom, to judge by the letter of Christina Lamb, published in the Daily Telegraph on October 25 1998, in which she speaks of rapes followed by crucifixion carried out by the Egyptian security forces. During the invasion of the Coptic village of El-Kosheh, near Luxor, a number of young adolescent girls are alleged to have been raped, and children as young as three-months-old beaten savagely with sticks inside the police stations in front of their mothers. The news, which has spread abroad despite the terror which prevents people from speaking about it, has reached as far as the United States Congress, where 29 representatives have signed an appeal to President Mubarak calling on him to put an end to these tortures. The crucifixions are alleged to have been carried out on groups of 50 people, literally nailed to crosses or handcuffed to doors with their legs tied to one another, and then beaten and tortured using electric shocks on their genitals by the police, who accused them of being "infidels". Romani Boctor, an 11-year-old boy, was suspended by an electric cable from the ceiling and tortured in this position. A statement has also been made about this episode by an Italian parliamentarian, Marco Zacchera, a member of the Foreign Committee of the lower house, who wrote to President Mubarak on November 10, 1998 calling on him to intervene "to guarantee that Egyptians be allowed to live their own Faith in freedom, and to ensure on the part of the state governors, the police forces and the local authorities a fair and balanced attitude which would reconcile the economic social and political development of Egypt with the recognition of religious freedom". Deputy Zacchera has also addressed a question to Foreign Minister Dini, calling on the Italian government "to bring this problem to the attention of all our diplomatic authorities". |
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