The Mubarak government prohibited surveys about the number or demographics of the Christians in Egypt. They were often said to make up roughly 10 to 15 percent of the population. Some followed various small Orthodox, Protestant, or Catholic denominations. The vast majority—more than 90 percent—belonged to the main Coptic Orthodox Church, headed by the pope of Alexandria. It traced its roots to St. Mark the Evangelist, said to be the author of the Gospel of Mark. (The English words “Copt” and “Egypt” come from the same Greek root, Aegyptos.) Some Copts were poor, like the zabaleen—the garbage people—who survive off the refuse of Cairo. Others were among the richest in Egypt, like the brothers Naguib and Nassef Sawiris.
But Mubarak prevented anyone from learning how many, how rich, or how poor Egypt’s Christians were. He took the position that asking questions about differences between the Christian and Muslim populations would create sectarian rivalries or resentments where none had previously existed. Such feelings, he often insisted, were alien to Egypt. If trouble broke out between Muslims and Christians, it could be only the mischief of foreign instigators or the manifestation of some private vendetta.
This was as willfully naïve as maintaining that racism was alien to the former Confederate states, and Mubarak’s denial of the problem had perverse effects. A few months before I arrived in Egypt in 2010, three Muslims had gunned down six churchgoers and a Muslim bystander outside a cathedral after an evening Mass in Nag Hammadi, Qena, in Upper Egypt; prosecutors wrote it off as an isolated act of revenge for the rape of a local Muslim woman by a Coptic assailant. The local bishop complained that police had ignored his pleas for added security, and twenty-nine liberal politicians and activists traveled from Cairo to show solidarity with the local Christian community. But instead of being welcomed, the delegation was arrested. Police accused the visitors from Cairo of turning the killing into a sectarian issue.
On New Year’s Day 2011, a church bombing in Alexandria had killed twenty-three Christians and injured nearly a hundred. The Interior Ministry blamed Palestinian terrorists from Gaza and insisted those killings had nothing to do with Egyptian sectarianism either. No one was ever charged with the crime.
In practice, though, discrimination was an open secret. Every Egyptian’s government-issued identity card bore one of three labels: Muslim, Christian, or Jew. (There were no options for atheists or others.)
Differing family and estate laws had governed Muslims and Christians since the colonial era, in part because Westerners cared to codify only commercial and criminal rules. They left social issues to local religious leaders. Medical schools steered Christians out of certain specialties, like obstetrics, keeping them exclusively Muslim. The highest ranks of the military and intelligence services were closed to Christians, who could work only as lower-ranking civil servants. Most business owners favored their own sect. Christian writers or bloggers were sometimes arrested on charges of insulting Islam. And onerous permitting laws restricted the construction of churches. In November 2010, police said that Christians in a Giza neighborhood had built an unauthorized church disguised as a community center, and when the Christians protested—some allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails—the police killed one and injured several others. I was stunned, because I was still new to Egypt, but no one else was.
Pope Shenouda III, head of the Coptic Church, had once confronted President Sadat, who punished the pontiff for his audacity with house arrest in a monastery. But Shenouda and Mubarak got along fine. The church endorsed Mubarak whenever required, and Mubarak let the pope dictate Christian family law and provided other favors. Soon after I arrived, the pope had briefly withdrawn into seclusion to protest some grievance; Mubarak coaxed him back out by pardoning some jailed Christians. It was their periodic ritual.
Christian minorities in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the rest of the region followed the same logic: better to trust a ruling strongman than the Muslims around them—even if the strongman failed to guarantee equal treatment or, like Mubarak, willfully ignored discrimination.
After the collapse of the police during Mubarak’s last days in power, violence against Christians spiked visibly under the generals. Among other episodes, a feud over an alleged interfaith romance had culminated in a church burning in March in a village in Helwan, just south of Cairo. Christians in Giza had demonstrated against the negligence that allowed the arson, and thirteen people were killed in clashes—eight Christians and five Muslims, according to news reports.
Now, in May, I was on the way to the neighborhood of Imbaba, where a night of street fighting had led to two church burnings. A dozen were killed—six Muslims, six Christians. More than 230 were wounded. Sixty-five were either injured or killed by gunshots. I had no idea why.
My Times colleague Mona el-Naggar and I got out of our Mitsubishi in an Imbaba traffic circle that smelled like cheap plastic and rotting vegetables. The alleys of the neighborhood were too narrow for even a small car, so we hired a three-wheeled tuk-tuk to get us farther into the maze of overcrowded tenements. Imbaba was said to be more than four times as crowded as Manhattan, and here the tallest buildings rose only a few stories. I could scarcely stretch my arms between the walls of the alleys. Men, women, and children leaned out of most windows, which were usually covered by only a scrap of fabric instead of glass. Children in flip-flops bounced through garbage spilling out of overflowing bins. Around a corner, a flock of sheep strolled through the street.
Hard-line Islamist militants had taken over the neighborhood for a period in the early 1990s and forced Christians to pay a religious tax (jizya, as the practice was known in the Middle Ages). Journalists dubbed the district the “Islamic Emirate of Imbaba.” It took twelve thousand riot police with bulldozers to retake control.
Now soldiers were again peering from the turrets of armored personnel carriers stationed every few blocks along the main thoroughfares. No one would talk to us within earshot of anyone else, and taking out a notebook risked attracting a crowd or tangling with a soldier. But one young man, twenty-five-year-old Alaa Ayad, hailed us into a doorway and up several flights to his family’s apartment. We passed a rooster on the stairs. Inside, images of Coptic saints and Pope Shenouda hung on the wall. A television showed a man with a long beard on a Coptic satellite network railing against Islamist extremists. Two of Alaa Ayad’s brothers pulled stools toward the couch to join us, and I could see crosses tattooed on their wrists. Many Copts wore the tattoos: thirteen hundred years of Muslim rule could not erase the faith.
The feud at the center of the violence, like so many others, had started with a woman. Abeer Talaat, also twenty-five, had grown up in a Christian family in Imbaba. She married a Christian in Assiut, a provincial capital two hundred miles south along the Nile, but it did not work out. And the only path out of a bad marriage led through a mosque.
Christian family law effectively prohibited divorce, but a Christian woman could convert to get one. That frequently led to allegations of forced conversion or kidnapping by one sect or another, and then often to violence. The police never seemed to resolve the facts about the episodes, and rumors or fantasies about the cases spread across Egypt and beyond. Islamist militants as far away as Baghdad and Libya had bombed churches or killed Christians in the name of Kamilia Shehata, a Coptic priest’s wife allegedly kidnapped by Christians to prevent her conversion to Islam.
So, for faith or freedom, Abeer Talaat had converted to Islam, filed for divorce, and headed home from Assiut to Imbaba. A Muslim man she met along the way, Yassin Thabet Anwar, somehow got the idea that Abeer would marry him instead of her Christian husband. But she had continued home alone. Then, on Saturday night, May 7, the would-be Muslim groom arrived in Cairo looking for the recently converted woman he hoped would be his bride.
That is when it reached the attention of Hussein Qheder, a hard-line Islamist who had recently returned to Imbaba after fourteen years in prison. “I would be considered an extremist,
” he explained when we caught up with him later and he told us his story of that night.
“You get a phone call that says, ‘Come quick. A big sheikh’s wife has been taken into the church, and he is calling on people to help get his wife out.’”
But who was this supposed sheikh? Why was his wife in a church? The caller could not say, Qheder said, so he stayed out of it. “We cannot bear this kind of talk. This could kill the revolution.”
Alaa Ayad, the Christian sitting with us in his home, had received calls at the same time as the Islamist extremist. Ayad’s callers told him that a mob of hard-line Islamists was heading for the Church of St. Mina, off an unpaved road called Luxor Street. So Ayad rushed to defend the church.
About twenty Muslims showed up at around 6:00 P.M. on May 7. Seeing themselves outnumbered, they called for reinforcements, and by 7:00 P.M., there were about five hundred on each side. The numbers grew into the thousands before the night was over.
A Christian coffee shop owner, Adel Labib, took a gun to the roof of his building, and at about 8:00 he fired the first shot. Did he hit anyone or fire into the air? I could never settle those questions. But Alaa Ayad was sure a Christian was the first to use a gun.
“How can they say we started it when we are defending our church?” Ayad asked. “I am going to defend my church and my house, and if that injures someone, I can’t help it.”
Both sides fought with bricks, clubs, knives, and more gunshots from the rooftops or windows. A Molotov cocktail set fire to St. Mina Church. Part of the mob broke off to burn down the nearby Church of the Virgin Mary. The policemen stationed outside had fled, and the battle continued until nearly dawn. The priest of the Church of the Virgin Mary said that a thirty-eight-year-old guard, Salah Aziz, had burned to death by the altar.
Abeer Talaat, the bride, had gone to the police for protection during the violence. They arrested her on suspicion of bigamy and detained her for three months.
The next day, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces followed the usual playbook and blamed a third party for stirring up trouble. This time it was unnamed Mubarak loyalists—the felool, or remnants. Everyone pointed fingers. Bishops blamed hard-line Islamists. Lay Copts blamed the army and the police, who seldom seemed to arrest anyone for attacking Christians. The metaphor of the boiling-over pot had been wrong from the start, I realized. The police state had not kept a lid on innate sectarian tension. Its discrimination and denials inflamed the hostility.
* * *
• • •
Father Matthias and Father Filopateer were troublemakers. In the decade before the uprisings, Coptic Christians in Egypt had often lamented to one another that columnists in the state-run Al Ahram openly insulted the Bible, or that church burnings and crimes against Copts were going unreported. Even the quasi-official church newspaper had “red lines” precluding criticism of Mubarak, the army, or the police. So in 2004, Matthias, who was forty-five, and Filopateer, thirty-seven, started a newspaper for distribution in churches, to agitate for equal protection.
They named it the Theban Legion, after a legendary battalion of 6,666 Roman soldiers garrisoned at the ancient city of Thebes in the third century. The legend was that all 6,666 had converted to Christianity. When the emperor ordered pagan sacrifices, they refused. They chose mass execution.
The Theban Legion was fearless, even incendiary. One cover depicted Mubarak as a bearded Islamist. After a few months, police started confiscating issues. Some bishops and churches refused to distribute it for fear of retaliation. Pope Shenouda summoned the two priests to a monastery in the desert west of Cairo and told them to stop causing problems. He twice suspended Father Filopateer from the priesthood for his criticism of Mubarak—the first time for a month, and the second for two years—and by 2006, the Theban Legion had folded.
After Mubarak, though, the two priests saw a new chance. In March, some younger Christians had protested the church burnings by demonstrating in the plaza outside the Maspero state broadcasting building, a massive cake of concrete by the Nile near a street named for a French archaeologist, Gaston Maspero. (The Christians picked a smaller space than Tahrir Square so that their numbers would look bigger.) More than three hundred soldiers and a dozen armored personnel carriers were stationed around Maspero, and they started to push the Christians away. So Father Matthias told them to stay and camp out. “I ordered the youth to bring tents and blankets and we slept in the street for nine days,” he later told me.
It was the genesis of the Maspero Youth Union—the first political movement by Coptic laity since before Abdel Nasser, as far as anyone could remember. “It was a shock to Egypt,” Father Matthias said.
To appease the Christians, the generals agreed to rebuild the burned churches and release a jailed priest—a victory. So after the Imbaba riots, Father Matthias, Father Filopateer, and the young Christian organizers camped out again outside Maspero. The church hierarchy equivocated. No other clergy joined in the protests. A brawl outside Maspero injured thirty-three Muslims and twenty-two Christians, according to the Health Ministry, and in the aftermath the police arrested nineteen Christians (and no Muslims). Pope Shenouda won their release the usual way, as a personal favor from the generals. In an apparent exchange, he delivered an admonition carried on the front page of the state newspaper the next day telling the Copts to abandon the sit-in.
The sit-in “negatively affects Egypt’s reputation as well as your own,” the pope said. “The patience of the rulers is starting to end, and you will be the losers if you continue in the protest.” But thousands of Christians defied their pope and rallied again to Maspero. “With our blood, with our souls, we sacrifice for the cross,” they chanted.
* * *
• • •
Smaller iterations of the Coptic demonstrations came and went from Maspero that summer and fall. After more scuffles with the soldiers or Muslim civilians, some of the lay organizers in the Maspero Youth Union wanted to shift to less easily targeted protests, like marches. But then, in October, a mob attacked a church in Aswan, about six hundred miles south of Cairo. The army general serving as governor of the province took the side of the mob and questioned the permit for the church. So on October 5, Father Matthias and Father Filopateer led a march of hundreds of Copts from the heavily Christian neighborhood of Shobra back to Maspero, about an hour’s walk north.
The military police dispersed it with force. An officer beat and kicked Father Matthias. His eyeglasses fell off and shattered. Others were filmed stomping and hammering a prone Christian, then dragging his limp body across the asphalt.
So the two priests called for another march from Shobra that Sunday, October 9. I was coaxing my sons into bed that night when Ben Solomon, a videographer for the Times, sent me an email.
“Are you seeing this news? In front of Maspero?” he wrote. “I think I might go over to shoot some of it.”
“Check that,” Solomon wrote a few moments later. “Twitter says cameramen being beaten. Holding off for now.”
I put down the picture book and hailed a taxi, then made my way by foot for the final stretch across Tahrir Square. The scent of tear gas was everywhere; the security forces seemed to be shooting canisters at random. People were moving around me in herds, some carrying clubs, machetes, or rocks. Flames leaped from burning cars. Sirens and screams filled the air. But the battle lines confused me. Some people were chanting against military rule or for the unity of Muslims and Christians. Others were turning Tahrir Square favorites into sectarian threats: “The people want to bring down the Christians.”
Military police in riot gear marched back and forth along the edge of the square. But a swarm of civilians was marching with them, and they were all chanting together, soldiers and civilians: “Islamic! Islamic!” or at other moments, “Egypt is Islamic.”
Closer to Maspero, officers in riot gear were beating a group of protesters who kept shou
ting “Allahu akbar”—God is Great—the Muslim credo. I was not sure whether men in uniform were beating Muslims, too, or whether Christians were pretending to be Muslims.
A broken cross lay on the ground next to a pool of blood in front of the Maspero building. Ambulances were hauling away bodies on stretchers. A priest in a long beard and clerical robe showed me two bullet casings in the palm of his hand. He was Father Ephraim Magdy, of a church in Shobra, and he said that the soldiers had fired live ammunition.
“They were monsters,” he said. “It’s impossible for them to be Egyptians, let alone members of the army that protected the revolution.”
The march had begun in Shobra at 4:30 P.M., with a larger crowd than expected—thousands, including whole families, led by Father Matthias and Father Filopateer. Young men in plain clothes had tried to throw rocks and bottle bombs at the Christians at two different points along the route, but the march was too large to stop or steer. “We lost control after the first few blocks,” Mina Thabet, one of the organizers from the Maspero Youth Union, recalled.
“The blood of Christians is not cheap,” “Raise your head, you are Christians,” the marchers chanted. They demanded an end to military rule. But they were provocative in other ways, too. Some chants reminded listeners that Egyptians were Christian before the Muslim conquest.
“Egypt is ours,” the marchers repeated.
At about 6:30, the crowd passed under the ramp to the October 6 Bridge and in front of the Ramses Hilton. Soldiers perched on armored personnel carriers fired Kalashnikovs into the air, then into the crowd. The APCs jerked into motion. One crashed into a nearby jeep and crushed it, then hurtled into reverse. Others plowed into the throng.
Thabet gasped as an APC passed within a meter of his leg. Bloody bodies lay under the wheels. Women screamed and cried. Demonstrators fled in every direction.
Into the Hands of the Soldiers: Freedom and Chaos in Egypt and the Middle East Page 11