Christians Face Murky Future After Egypt Polls

By MATT BRADLEY
13/12/2011

SOHAG, Egypt—When Victor Anis goes to the polls Wednesday to vote in the second round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, he plans to cast his ballot for the Egyptian Bloc, a list of liberal politicians who represent the strongest answer to the rise of hardline Islamists.

“What’s happening now is turning voting into religion,” said Mr. Anis, 60 years old. Egypt’s religious ideologies and organizations, he complains, all appear to be using the ballot box to orchestrate a kind of power grab.

All of them, that is, except the institution that represents his own faith, the Coptic Orthodox Church. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood and the more conservative Salafi parties organized and rallied their followers to win more than 60% of the combined vote in the first round of polling last month, the Coptic Church has remained silent.

Despite carrying the allegiance of an estimated 10% or more of Egypt’s 80 million population, the reluctance of the Church to embrace political engagement leaves one of Egypt’s strongest—and one of its only—liberal-minded religious institutions behind in a race that will help define Egypt’s first post-revolutionary parliament and, ultimately, the drafting of a new constitution.

Official church discourse and many among the lay faithful contend that the church’s absence from direct politics is consistent with the spirit of its political convictions: that a liberal democratic system should have a separation between church and state.

But the clerical leadership’s current position is also an extension of its quiescent posture toward successive autocratic regimes, analysts say.

As the power of political Islam in Egyptian society has grown over the past several decades, church leaders had sought protection from the autocratic secular state in exchange for political dormancy that was often expressed as official church support for the ousted regime.

But since the fall of the Mubarak regime in February, the ensuing public security vacuum has allowed acts of violence against Christians to grow, leaving the church politically and socially isolated.

While it is reluctant to hide behind members of the former regime and the still-powerful ruling military, it fears that mass political mobilization of the kind used by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi politicians could spark a sectarian backlash.

Instead, the church has chosen a soft middle ground—encouraging voter turnout without openly identifying individual candidates or parties. The church sparked an outcry among conservative Muslim voters last month when it tentatively tried to distribute a list of favored candidates and parties during the first round of elections.

“What the church contributes to is indirectly spreading the word to please go to the ballot boxes,” said Youssuf Sidhoum, the editor of a Coptic Christian newspaper, Al Watani. “But the church cannot openly and bluntly pack Christians in buses, like the Muslim Brotherhood does, and send them to the ballot boxes.”

The Church’s lack of confidence has been clear in their reactions to mounting incidents of sectarian violence. After military police killed some two dozen Coptic Christians during a protest in downtown, victims’ families were outraged when priests politely counseled them not to seek autopsies for fear of implicating the ruling military.

“They are a cowed population in terms of politics. They are afraid and marginalized,” said Michael Hanna, a fellow at the New York-based Century Foundation and a Coptic Christian. “I think the alienation has put some people in the position of not even voting.”

Christian participation in the vote has not been officially recorded. But even in some constituencies in Upper Egypt where the concentration of Coptic Christians could reach an estimated 20%—about twice that of the rest of Egypt—voting in the first round reflected little if any of the church’s clout.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party won between 35 and 40% of the vote in the Upper Egyptian districts of Assiut and Luxor during the first round of voting last month, about equal to their national average. The Salafi Nour Party won between 15 and 20%, a number that is only slightly less than their reported gains nationwide.

Meanwhile, only 120 Coptic candidates will run in a field of thousands , said Mr. Hanna. “You’ll probably be able to count the Copts in parliament on both hands,” he said.

Though many Christians in the Upper Egyptian city of Sohag say they fear the Islamists’ political presence in parliament, particularly the startling showing by hardline Salafis, most support the Church’s lack of a strong political position.

Rather than engage in a quixotic effort to pack the parliament with Christians, the church and its members are more comfortable quietly supporting candidates who tout a nationalist, inclusive political perspective.

“We do not want to make the church to be a bloc and a country within a country because we’re one people,” said Father Kirolos Binyamin, the pastor at Sohag’s main Saint George’s Church. “The church is not in a state of war with the Islamists.”

While such consoling talk seems to resonate with a minority who seek little more than equality, it also leaves the lay Christian public without the strong institutional ballast to confront a political future likely to be dominated by Islamists.

In an electronics appliance shop next to Mr. Anis’s tailoring stall, Tareq Fabrury, 45, said the future for Egyptian Christians looked unpredictably bleak. The church, he said “might not survive what’s coming.”

When asked who would protect Egypt’s Copts, he paused for a moment and looked away.

“International interference?” he guessed. “What can the church do? How can they organize us?”

Source: