Copts at the Crossroads: The Challenges of Building Inclusive Democracy in Egypt by Mariz Tadros (review)

The legal and political integration of Coptic Christians in Egypt has been debated for over a century. Coptic rights were either ambiguous or curtailed within Egypt’s various constitutions, from 1923 to 1956, 1971 and 2012. The Copts’ ability to express their political and social concerns within an authoritarian framework and within a society dominated demographically and culturally by Muslims has been quite limited. In Copts at the Crossroads, Mariz Tadros outlines the major difficulties that have faced Egypt’s Christians in the last decade or so, with specific emphasis on the period immediately before and after the January 25 Revolution. The book combines Tadros’s ongoing research and some of her previously-published observations with a multitude of new insights and data. Tadros has gathered important information based on extensive fieldwork, personal interviews, and journalistic accounts. The result is a highly readable, sophisticated, and timely text which will serve as a valuable resource on the Coptic predicament in the early 21^st century.

Tadros begins with an optimistic note, arguing that despite the turmoil and violence that Copts have experienced in recent years, it might be possible to imagine an “inclusive democracy” in Egypt, perhaps akin to what came about in Romania and Bulgaria after the fall of communism (p. 6). As the book unfolds, however, the substantive challenges of achieving this goal seem daunting. In her investigation, Tadros meticulously documents the roots, frequency, and nature of recent sectarian violence, capturing the severity and unpredictability of anti-Coptic aggression. In the last decade or so, she notes, discrimination and persecution of Copts has been taking place not only at the state level, where Copts have been excluded from certain government and military posts, but at a “citizen-on-citizen” level (p. 51). Tadros shows how widespread economic, political, and social crises are often used as a pretext for various groups and individuals to launch anti-Coptic attacks.

Tadros also explores the relationship between Coptic patriarchs and various Egyptian presidents. She notes how, at least until the mid-2000s, Pope Shenouda III (served 1971–2012) had reached an “entente” with Husni Mubarak’s regime, receiving autonomy to oversee the community in exchange for the church’s support and advocacy of the National Democratic Party’s policies. However, rising sectarian incidents, as in the bloody massacre of Coptic parishioners in Nag‘ Hammadi in 2010, would jeopardize this arrangement and create lasting consequences. First, the Coptic religious leadership appeared as weak for failing to prevent or respond to anti-Coptic violence and as increasingly “disconnected” from the grievances of the Coptic masses (p. 90). Second, rising tensions exposed cracks in the application of the rule of law as related to sectarian conflicts. In most cases, perpetrators escaped prosecution and were instead forced to attend government-backed “reconciliation committees,” alongside aggrieved Copts, a process that failed to reap justice or resolution. Even worse, these committees usually applied various forms of “collective punishment” (p. 116): property seizures, hefty financial settlements, exile, and forced relocation became normative retributions against Coptic victims of sectarian violence and likely deterred most Christians from bringing charges against their aggressors.

The Church’s inability to protect Coptic political and legal interests provided an opening for the rise of a new wave of lay leadership. Despite the Church’s objections, Coptic youth and lay activists took to Tahrir on January 25, 2011, sharing in the demands of fellow Egyptians (pp. 129–30). But Tahrir represented a fleeting moment of national and interreligious unity: in 2011 and 2012, under the military-led and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated governments respectively, sectarian incidents doubled and Egypt witnessed a “sudden surge in untriggered assaults” against Copts (p. 140). In the streets and on the airwaves, anti-Christian rhetoric proliferated and became more widely tolerated; as Tadros explains, the “Islamization of public space that had commenced during Anwar Sadat’s era and was latent during that...