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Copts and the Security State
Violence, Coercion, and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt
By Laure Guirguis STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Laure Guirguis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0080-5
CHAPTER 1
INSTITUTIONALIZED VIOLENCE AND THE IDENTITY STATE
HASSAN AND MARCUS
Egyptian cinema showed the representation of civil war for the first time in 2007. This unnamed, troubling thing, this projected phobia that haunted people's spirits and sometimes appeared under the mask of a proper noun ("Lebanon," "Iraq," ...), became an image. The last scene in Hassan and Marcus shows two massive armies, face-to-face. Weapons fire; heavy, spinning, batons hit skulls; the wounded collapse, stunned; and flames invade the screen. Yet tenuous hope remains, perhaps, for the nation-state to be saved. In the heart of the battlefield, their faces charred by fire, six characters advance hand in hand: two fathers in the center, then their wives, then the son of Marcus and the daughter of Hassan, who have fallen in love. Having both been threatened by their radical co-religionists, Hassan and Marcus had unwittingly used the same subterfuge by temporarily adopting the religious identity of the other. Not realizing the sectarian front that separated them, the two families became friends. Finally, they preserved these bonds to meet the challenge posed by the love between their children.
The debates in the Egyptian press were both animated and bitter. Some praised the intention of denouncing sectarianism and pointing out its dangers; others pointed to a lack of realism in the exact parallels drawn between the two parties, implying the presence of two forces of equal strength and with an equitable distribution of wrongdoing. But the dynamics of denial shaped all discussion about the film: although recognizing the existence of the trauma, or of the problem, discussions about its representation still denied the very dynamic that nourished it. Such is the nature of denial.
Indeed, the allusion to the 1954 film Hassan, Marcus, and Cohen, adapted from the stage, escaped no one, and no one — or almost no one — failed to underscore the fact that Cohen, the Jew, was missing. What would become of Marcus, the Christian? Do we Egyptians wish that Marcus, too, would take the path of exodus? The reference to this imagined past offered the audience a chance to once again embroider a work that never ceases to unravel and that, just like Penelope, keeps hope alive to one day attain the "nation." Hassan, Marcus, and Cohen conjured nostalgia for a golden era; the film's creators described the cheerful ties and friendship that united members of diverse religions under the Egyptian sun. Lamenting the "sectarian" incident — real or onscreen — they idealized the past period and then concluded that the current unfortunate state of affairs was only a passing phase. Yet denial transcends the personal sphere and pervades most narratives related to the "Coptic issue" in general and "sectarian violence" in particular. Salah Jahin presented a humorous riff on this denial in a cartoon published in al-Ahram on June 22, 1981, at the end of a decade punctuated by violence: "They [unity, harmony, secularity] are my children and I know they are kind, but you, whose child are you?" asks Mother Egypt, astonished, to an unlikely offspring, a hirsute and enraged monster named fitna ta'ifiyya (sectarian strife).
That Salah Jahin dared to count secularity ('ilmaniyya) among the three children of Mother Egypt was the motivation for the criticism and insults that the artist suffered at the time of the cartoon's publication — the height of irony given the collective dynamic of denial. Denial determines the modalities of apprehension and interrogation; it bedevils the most sophisticated analyses of what is deemed fitna ta'ifiyya; it accompanies an acute awareness of all the "givens" of the problem. Denial, by definition, only exists in full knowledge of the facts.
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In this chapter I analyze the security, discursive, and legal dispositifs of minoritization, relying on three case studies: the treatment of violence, the production of a consensual discourse on the relations between Muslims and Christians, and religious conversions. Taking "power in its forms and its most regional and local institutions, especially where this power, overstepping the rules of law that organize and delimit it, extends beyond these rules," I highlight the principal feature of Egypt's authoritarian situation: the margin of informality that allows for the arbitrary and establishes a reign of fear.
PRODUCING FITNA TA'IFIYYA
From the 1970s, attacks on Christians became a recurrent feature of Egyptian society. Physical violence represents only one particular form of violence, merely determined by political power relations and government policies. Generally, three periods of violence can be distinguished, throughout which the motives — or pretexts — for outbreaks of hostility have been generically similar. Regime policies and the police agencies have played a crucial role in determining the forms, the duration, the extent, and the intensity, as well as the agents of violence, from the 1972 attacks in Khanka in the Nile Delta region to the military repression that bloodied the Maspero Bridge in the center of Cairo in October 2011.
A Christian association, Friends of the Holy Book (Asdiqa' al-Kitab al-Muqaddas), had legally carried out activities in the village of Khanka since 1946. In 1970 it had constructed new buildings on recently acquired plots of land (one from a Copt and the other from a Muslim) and used one as a place of worship without having first obtained the necessary church-building license. This roused the anger of the Muslim neighborhood. The building was burned down on November 6, 1972. Pope Shenuda III appealed to martyrdom and sacrifice; the church ran bus and taxi services to send its clergy. The morning of November 12, hundreds of Cairene priests descended on the site to celebrate Sunday Mass. Having been ordered to warn the clergy that they would not be able to get all the way to Khanka, State Security cordoned off the road to prevent them from reaching their destination. No incidents occurred during Mass, but several Muslim neighbors retaliated that same evening after gathering in the mosque. They formed a procession that police only partially dispersed, headed toward the Arab Socialist Union (al-ittihad al-ishtaraki al-'arabi) building, burning, destroying, and looting Copts' houses and stores along the way. A government committee headed by Gamal al-'Utayfi was charged with conducting an inquiry into the causes of the incident. The committee determined that the principal motivations for the outbreak of violence and, afterward, the Copts' anger and mobilization were disputes over sacred places: religious symbols, women's bodies, land, and, particularly, places of worship.
Since the Assiut conference in 1911, suggested by the British and organized by Christian lay elites, Copts have discussed the idea of unifying legislation on Christian and Muslim places of worship. The actual regulations are one of the rare cases where religious discrimination has a legal basis. The regulations are partially derived from theHatti Humayuni, enacted in 1856 during the Tanzimat reforms, which conditions the building and restoration of Christian places of worship upon the issuance of a sovereign authority. Only Egyptian presidents have the power to grant building permits to Christian denominations. Certainly, subordination to the goodwill of a ruler represents a violation of the principle of equality. De facto, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954–70) authorized Cyril VI (1959–70) to erect twenty-five churches, and together the president and pope laid the cornerstone of Saint Mark's Cathedral in 'Abasiyya, the current seat of the Patriarchate in Cairo; Sadat (1970–81) allowed Shenuda III the right to construct fifty more. But the 1934 Izabi ministerial decree had enumerated ten conditions (notably the respect of a minimum one hundred–yard distance between any church and the closest mosque, as well as the prior procurement of the assent of neighboring Muslim populations) that, on a local scale, have seriously interfered with the construction of churches even after authorization has been granted. Shenuda III did not fail to mention these obstacles each time that Sadat boasted of having doubled the number of authorizations of his predecessor.
Mubarak (1981–2011) issued two decrees (in 1998 and 1999) with the objective of simplifying procedures for church restoration. In 2005 he put forward one more (291/2005). The text of the law delegated the power to authorize the expansion and renovation of churches to the twenty-six provincial governors, stipulating that the governors must review all requests no later than thirty days after their date of submission and that any rejections should be explained. It also mentioned that maintenance work may be undertaken with a simple written notification to the local authorities. Several years after the enactment of the decree, Egyptian church representatives noted that local authorities continued to pose obstacles to construction, whether by demanding the presentation of documents impossible to procure (for example, a presidential decree authorizing the existence of a church built during the monarchy), by classifying simple maintenance work under the rubric of "expansion/reconstruction" and so arguing that a written notice would not suffice, or by State Security's obstruction of church-building despite the presence of all prior necessary documents. Finally, if a mosque were to be erected between the date of authorization and the start of work, the neighborhood would no longer consider the authorization valid. Church construction, renovation, and expansion, therefore, have been highly dependent on personal relationships between the clergy and the local authorities. Weary of the toil required to overcome these obstacles, Christians sometimes use private locations or those of associations to worship and carry out necessary activities without permits. These unauthorized initiatives regularly provoke Muslim neighbors' anger and represent one of the primary pretexts for attacks against Copts and churches. To date, the People's Assembly (majlis al-sha'b) has not examined any of the proposals for a unified law applicable to all houses of worship. In one of these proposals Muhammad al-Juwayli, then president of the Suggestions and Complaints Committee in the People's Assembly, suggested a single regulation: to be governed by law 176 of 1976 pursuant to civil construction. The unified regulation would apply to construction work, maintenance, and repair of all Muslim, Jewish, and Christian houses of worship. The law's author aimed to free the construction of houses of worship from "the political and security influence to which it is currently subjected" and to put an end to the power "that governors and State Security officers exercise in this domain, their irresponsible actions in refusing, without explanation, to grant the permits required to undertake work, and their hindrance of [permits'] proper implementation." Al-Juwayli presented the draft to the People's Assembly in May 2005, hoping that it would be reviewed before the end of the parliamentary session. In a second draft, commissioned by the National Council for Human Rights (NCHR) — an organization formed by the regime — the editors placed the issuance of permits back under the control of local authorities and the State Security services. Yusif Sidhum was critical of this second draft, which would "preserve political and police dominance." He asked: "Has the role of the NCHR been hijacked, so that instead of protecting human rights it protects those of the authorities?"
Christian and Muslim associations' renewed activity constituted a defining feature of the era after the shock of the Arab defeat in 1967. And the authors of the 'Utayfi report noted the impact of da'wa (call, or preaching, typically reserved for Islam) and of tabshir (proselytizing, typically reserved for Christianity) on the exacerbation of tensions between the two religious groups. They also counted the conversion (two years earlier) of two young boys in Alexandria among the incidents that had heightened emotions before the eruption of hostility in Khanka.
Throughout the first period of violence (1972–97), which was marked by the growth in power of Islamist organizations (al-jama'at al-islamiyya) and the critical peak in 1981, the Egyptian state showed a general complacency with regard to radical groups, followed by increasingly repressive measures undertaken to combat them. Just after the 1967 defeat to Israel, leftist and Islamist activism in Egypt reorganized. Having reached the presidency in 1970, Sadat removed 'Ali Sabri's (his adversary in government) pro-Soviet faction, triggering the "corrective revolution" (al-thawra al-taslihiyya, May 1971). He then encouraged the rise of Islamist movements on university campuses as a countercurrent to the influence of Nasserist and leftwing organizing; from 1970 to 1972 the latter had been more and more urgently demanding the warrior's revenge Sadat had promised. The strategy of rapprochement with the religious right and the concomitant adoption of Islamic rhetoric ensured the success of Sadat's primary objectives: to make peace with Israel and, correspondingly, to promote economic policies of openness (infitah), breaking down the Nasserist outlook and the figure of Nasser. The Islamization of political rhetoric, beginning with the implementation of Nasser's socialist politics and renewed with the activity of Islamist movements at Sadat's instigation, had repercussions at all levels of society. Although violence was frequently grafted onto local quarrels over land or interfaith romances, the jama'at exacerbated these existing tensions and launched attacks against churches, Copts, and their property. This was particularly the case in Upper Egypt, Alexandria, and in numerous informal areas in the outskirts of Cairo. The tensions weighed on the daily activities of students, both Muslim and Christian, particularly at universities in Assiut, Minya, and Alexandria. Islamist militants kept a watchful eye, sometimes using force, so that everybody would respect the laws they deemed mandatory according to shari'a; they pressured women to cover their heads, forbade celebrating Christian holidays, and imposed the payment of jizya on a Coptic youth rooted in the church and the evocation of martyrdom for Christ.
In June 1981 the Zawaya al-Hamra episode marked the climax of this first phase of violence. A dispute between a Christian and a Muslim over land in the peripheral Cairo neighborhood of Zawaya al-Hamra, where a church was supposed to be built, gave way to a battle that was carried out over the course of three long days. At Zawaya al-Hamra, and to a lesser degree at Khanka, the security forces' behavior favored the spread, prolongation, and intensification of violence. Coptic activists, among others, denounced State Security's sluggishness in curbing the violence and the agency's complicity with the assailants. The accusation was justified in the case of the Zawaya al-Hamra events. Although they surrounded the combat zones, security forces did not intervene during the first days, allowing a good number of members from the more radical Jama'a al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad to come from other districts and lend arms and other assistance to the Zawaya residents. After the battle of Zawaya al-Hamra and Sadat's assassination by Khalid al-Islambuli (who rose in the wake of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, where his brother was a member), Mubarak's policies integrated those Islamists judged to be "moderate" into public life, though the initiative was controlled and punctuated by phases of repression. The regime also started promoting an official version of Islam, all the while extirpating radical groups. In the 1980s and early 1990s the police carried out extrajudicial repression and killing, whose intensity varied depending on the different orientations of the various governors and ministers of the interior. Faced with the ever more rapid reconstitution of radical cells and attacks on tourists, State Security hardened its tone and brought militants before military courts (al-mahakim al-'askariyya). The repression transformed into a veritable war, epitomized by the siege of Imbaba in 1992 and the battles in Assiut against the Jama'ain the early 1990s. The war seemed to have been won in 1997 when the Jama'a declared its renunciation of violence, with the exception of a last deadly jolt, in Luxor, carried out by a dissident faction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Copts and the Security State by Laure Guirguis. Copyright © 2013 Laure Guirguis. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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