Copts and the Security State: Violence, Coercion, and Sectarianism in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

The past decade's intersection of popular uprising, renewed authoritarianism, destabilization, and hardened sectarianism in the Middle East form the backdrop for Laure Guirguis's analysis of Copts (Egyptian Christians) and the Egyptian state. At stake is the status of the region's largest Christian population. Copts number somewhere around 8 million and form a minority approaching 10 percent of the Egyptian population (though these numbers are controversial). They are an indigenous population that dates to the early years of the first century, when the Christian gospel reached Egypt. By the fourth century, the majority of Egyptians had become Christians. In the fifth century, Egyptian Christians broke with the Roman church in a theological disagreement over the nature of Jesus Christ. They were therefore familiar with foreign rule under the Byzantine Christians even before the Arab conquest in the seventh century. In the years since that time, increasing numbers of Egyptians came to embrace Islam and speak Arabic, while the population of Christians dwindled. By the twentieth century Copts had become a small religious minority among the millions of Egyptian Muslims. According to Guirguis, over the last several decades their status has been subject to the vicissitudes of authoritarian interest and intrigue, increasingly defined by sectarianism.Over the past several years, Guirguis has filled several postdoctoral positions, most recently at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University. Her work in this volume represents over a decade of research into the topic. The book is comprehensive and extensive, speaking to historic and contemporary realities, though it suffers some deficiencies in its scholarship, prose, and conceptual organization.Based on the research presented in this book, Guirguis is quite possibly the best-informed commentator on Coptic affairs writing in English. She comments widely on numerous events and topics that help to define the Copts' relations with the Egyptian state. Her overall argument is that sectarian divisions and flashpoints in Egyptian politics are manipulated and used by the state in an effort to maintain its power. She notes that “sectarianism has endured to the extent that the modern state has consolidated it, while profoundly modifying it. In other words the state is the principal agent enforcing sectarianism” (8). The tensions between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority therefore arise as a device, a Foucaultian dispositif that justifies repression, distracts from the real problems of the Egyptian state, and serves the interests of multiple authoritarian parties. What is more, where those tensions turn into violence, “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” (17). Sectarianism thus serves the interests of the state, but it also helps to reinforce the authority of the traditional Coptic Orthodox Church, led by its patriarch, or “pope.”The argument proceeds through several thematic chapters. They begin with the state's “subtle” use of power and violence to reinforce an identitarian logic. A second theme is the use of national and Coptic symbolic configurations that help to deepen the “ethnicization of the definition of community” (11). Next, Guirguis goes on to analyze the communal use of identity, both in the hands of the patriarchate of the Coptic Orthodox Church and in the intracommunal politics of Copts themselves. Finally, she assesses the ways in which identity discourse strengthens sectarianism under the aegis of the authoritarian regime.Thematic organization of the book helps to underscore the timelessness of sectarianism in Egypt. However, it contributes to an awkward narrative structure. The author moves back and forth through history, here referring to recent events like the 2011 revolution, and there turning to the communal dynamics of the 1950s, the 1910s, or the early years of Shenouda III's patriarchate in the 1970s. Events and developments that are used as evidence of the perfidy of the Egyptian state in perpetuating the sectarian discourse are thereby decontextualized. It would be difficult for the average layperson, untutored in the history of Egyptian politics or the history of church politics throughout this period, to follow. No doubt Guirguis is unconcerned with chronology, focused instead on the way in which the state has continually followed the sectarian logic throughout the last century. However, even if this is the case, context does matter and ignoring that fact only contributes to a certain confusion over the process by which sectarianism has become enmeshed in Egyptian politics.The thematic organization of the book leads Guirguis to focus on issues and their management over the decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For example, she describes how ongoing controversies over conversion become a battleground for the various narratives of sectarianism used by the state, the Islamists, and the Copts themselves. They provide opportunities for the state to cater to Islamist complaints about foreign interference and at the same time extend government largesse to Christians and Christian institutions who demand protection from the Islamists.Egyptian government-issued identity cards include a citizen's religious affiliation from birth. While the constitution notionally allows conversion, in practice only conversion from Christianity to Islam is permitted when it comes to changes to one's identity card. Guirguis demonstrates how this gap between law and practice is evidence of what she calls the “margin of informality” employed by authoritarian governments (10). Hence “the rejection of conversion happens in daily practices and is merely legitimized by reference to Islamic teachings, whether as social actors conceive of them or as they believe others conceive of them” (32).The high-profile case of Wafaʾ Qustantin, the wife of a Coptic Orthodox priest, who was reported to have converted to Islam in 2004, becomes a touchtone for Guirguis's exploration of the politics of conversion. The Coptic Orthodox Church, concerned to preserve its authority in multiple domains including management of its hierarchy, marriage status, and conversion, publicly denounced the conversion as a fraud. Eventually the church took custody of the woman in question, ostensibly to protect her from the efforts of Islamists to politicize the controversy. Guirguis notes that the case highlights the peculiar difficulties of women who seek to flee “the multiple signs of Christian inferiority in collective spaces” (53). She also points out the propaganda value of apparent forced conversions in the global conflict between would-be champions of Christianity and Islam. She notes that “the figure of the young woman converted by force constitutes one of the last avatars in a war between Christians and Muslims that has played out on different fronts” (54). Christians protest that female converts are kidnapped by the Islamists: the Islamists respond by profiling the same women living contentedly in their new lives (57). Meanwhile, the Coptic Orthodox Church sees such conversions as a direct challenge to its communal authority, especially when church authorities are not consulted to ensure the veracity of the conversion. The late Pope Shenouda III put his own authority on the line over the Qustantin case, demanding that the state return the woman to the church. In the end, President Hosni Mubarak himself intervened to ensure that the church would remain her custodian. This example notwithstanding, the state can use its own authority to threaten, blackmail, or compel vulnerable converts from Christianity to Islam.This authority of the patriarchate of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and its codependent relationship with the state, also forms an important part of Guirguis's analysis. The authority of the Coptic Orthodox Church came under significant challenge in the first half of the twentieth century. Lay elites demanded influence in the regulation of church affairs, culminating in a dramatic assault on the Egyptian papacy in 1954. A self-appointed group of lay activists calling themselves the umma al-qubtiya (Coptic nation) detained then-patriarch Yusab II and demanded his resignation. A year later he was officially deposed by the church hierarchy. Since that time, Coptic patriarchs have sought to restore the temporal and spiritual authority of the church. As such, their efforts mesh with those of the state to strengthen the sectarian loyalties of Egyptians. Guirguis sees the efforts of the church hierarchy to reinforce their authority through this lens.Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt from 1954 to 1970, played along with the restoration of the church's authority. According to Guirguis, he thereby “allowed the rising clerical elites to transform the ecclesiastical space into a communitarian one” (69). Nasser developed a relationship of mutual respect with Pope Kyrillos VI, who in turn sought to reinvigorate the Coptic Church and Coptic identity from the inside. Kyrillos's successor, Shenouda III, defended the power of the clergy while conforming it to his own image. Guirguis argues that Shenouda “was not a grand theologian but rather a remarkable administrator and one of the most skillful players on the Egyptian political scene” (72). Under his leadership, the Coptic Orthodox Church championed Christian dissent against President Anwar al-Sadat's efforts to enshrine the Islamic Shariʿa in the constitution as the source of Egyptian law. But after Sadat's assassination, Shenouda sought to restore the relationship between the church and the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. He successfully created a stable arrangement whereby the state respected the internal legitimacy of the church as the sole representative of Christian interests, while the church agreed to stand by the regime.Guirguis makes a strong argument that this relationship is a durable part of the politics of sectarianism in Egypt. She takes issue with Mariz Tadros and others, who have pointed to rising tensions between the church and the state in the early 2000s. Tadros focuses on the state's unwillingness or inability to protect Copts from violence, as well as flashpoints such as the aforementioned case of Wafa' Qustantin.1 Guirguis, conversely, holds that “the alliance between the regime and the pope in the 2000s and the support that the latter granted the [ruling National Democratic Party] during elections have not been fundamentally questioned” (87). What is more, throughout the 2011 revolution and beyond, “the structural reasons for the church's bond to the regime … have remained unchanged” (96).The resilience of the Coptic Orthodox Church's interest in maintaining a special relationship with the state relies on numerous foundations, according to Guirguis. This would include the clergy's interest in cultivating the religious revival among the faithful and its desire for protection from Islamist radicals. The state conversely desires to continually manipulate sectarianism to justify its own use of repression and violence, and tends to exploit the Islamists' use of the Coptic “Other” as a propaganda tool. One finds little reason to dispute this assertion, though it would be salutary for Guirguis to mention, at least in passing, the numerous other scholars who have described this institutional relationship between the state and the church. She neglects to mention that both Fiona McCallum and I have written substantively about the stability of the institutional partnership in several journal articles and books. This points to a weakness to which I will return: Guirguis only selectively engages with scholarship on Coptic affairs written in English.Toward the end of her work, Guirguis turns her attention to the triangulation of the “Coptic question” in the relationship between the regime, the Islamist opposition, and the Copts themselves. The management of relations with the Copts was perpetually used as a device in the hands of the ruling party and the Muslim Brotherhood, “an empty signifier that is used by both sides to different ends,” she notes (117). Both sides would use token Coptic candidates to demonstrate their supposed support for their Christian compatriots. At the same time, the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood would each use anti-Christian slogans, or introduce the Copts as a “foil” in their efforts to demonstrate which one was the better defender of Islam in a hostile secularized world (133).Amid the politics of the 2011 Revolution that unseated Hosni Mubarak and his National Democratic Party government, each of the players continued to manipulate the Copts and the rhetoric of national unity to their own ends. The Muslim Brotherhood, through the Freedom and Justice Party apparatus, maintained an ambiguous policy with regard to the status of Copts. They courted Coptic friendship while continuing to pursue a violent line against compromise or respect for Coptic rights (139–43). One might add that remnants of the ancien regime cultivated Coptic support through fear of the Islamists' intentions. Today, the government of Abdul Fattah al-Sisi presents itself as the only trustworthy ally of Coptic interests, casting the opposition as violent fanatics. The pattern persists even as the stakes in the conflict between the regime and the opposition have risen.In the Arab Spring, Coptic laypeople flirted with political movements, freed from the authority of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Guirguis argues that “the majority of Christians and other Egyptians that came into the streets on January 25 or the following days were not affiliated with any opposition party, advocacy group, or any other dissenting body … the new vitality of dissent in the national arena swept through the ranks of Christians and was stimulated by the diaspora activism” (155). Global networks and the new era in Egypt made Christians ambivalent about their own place in the sectarian matrix. But the actions of the Islamists in government and the reversal of their prospects for power have driven Copts back into the hands of the Church and the regime. As a sort of postscript, Guirguis dismisses the role of civil society organizations organized by Christians, noting that they “did little to contribute to the waves of social mobilization that played a pivotal role in the January 25 revolution” (181). One would presume that under renewed authoritarianism, they would have even less influence.Here Guirguis apparently presumes that the Church and lay organizations exist necessarily in a state of opposition to one another. In fact, the expansion of Coptic civil society has taken place in tandem with the assertive role of the Church in recent decades, as Peter Makari has demonstrated and as I have indicated in my own work. Numerous bishops and clergy in the Coptic Orthodox Church have engaged in authorized and unauthorized expansion of the civil initiatives associated with the church. Guirguis makes passing reference to a few of these individuals and their work. They include the late Matta al-Miskin, whose influence on monasticism continues to make waves within the church hierarchy; Bishop Thomas of Qusiya, whose diocesan projects, retreat center, and international reputation have been an ongoing concern; or most notably Abuna Samʿan, whose work among the zabellin in Moqattam is legendary, and which has given rise to a massive number of developmental initiatives among poor Copts in the area. The truth is that the Church and Christian civil society vie for support among the same parishioners, making it difficult for them to engage in a zero-sum conflict over the support of average Copts.This blind spot speaks more generally to the way in which Guirguis misses some of the distinguishing marks of pluralism under the authoritarian system of sectarianism. Her insistence on drawing the wider influence of cultural influences and Foucaultian disposifs obscures some of the internal dynamics that exist even under authoritarian repression. Christianity's survival and revival over the past several decades exists sui generis, even if it helps to reinforce the sectarian rhetoric employed and manipulated by the state, the Islamists, the Church, or the global lobby for religious freedom. The Copts' mere existence helps to present a way forward beyond authoritarianism or revolution: monasteries preserve the Christian heritage in spite of secular challenges; churches provide for the poor and downtrodden under successive regimes; and global movements and media channel the trajectory of Coptic demands.Indeed, Guirguis's reliance on Foucault somewhat naturally often descends into self-referential jargon. In one passage the prose begins to sound a little like the character of the Architect in The Matrix Reloaded: to wit, “the revolutionary dynamic at its apogee turned into its opposite and triggered the counterrevolutionary dynamic” (172). Likewise, “the power of hegemonic logics of sense relies on their capacity to integrate contrarian and critical leanings” (180). It takes some time for the reader to fully comprehend such turns of phrase.Some extra effort in editing would have helped also to improve the author's erudition in English. Awkward phraseology, incorrect word choice, and poor grammatical choices, such as shifts in tense, make the book less readable. At times it seems as though Guirguis is translating from French, and indeed she pays considerable attention to French sources. There is nothing wrong with bringing French scholarship to the attention of English readers. But as I have noted above, Guirguis appears unaware of much of the scholarly debate taking place in English, which helps to explain some of her inability fully to explain the church-state nexus and the role of civil society.Further editing might also have caught several references to evidence that are not fully introduced or explained. On page 56, she refers to videos that have not been otherwise described. On page 107, an amorphous “they” remains undefined. On page 113, Abuna Samʿan is referenced but only later described, and MARED (Egyptians against Religious Discrimination) is referenced a few times before it is defined on page 158.Beyond these issues and the somewhat awkward decision to eschew a chronological narrative, Copts and the Security State reveals something important about Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt: their very definition is used to maintain the stultifying status quo. Christian Egyptians are not inherently alienated by the Egyptian state, or even by its Muslim majority. Rather, the idea that they are pitted in some age-old feud is a trope used to defend the security state, a state that transcends any one political faction or movement. In Guirguis's words, “the nation-state constantly defines itself based on a foundational fracture—‘the unity of the two elements of the nation’—and in the name of security it ceaselessly recreates an internal enemy” (179). Fictions such as this foundational fracture perpetuate dark trajectories. While I suggest that the discovery of a pluralist narrative could rewrite this fiction, it is by no means clear that Egyptians form an interested public.