-OpEd-
CAIRO — Following last Friday's attack on two buses and a microbus in Egypt's Minya governorate, killing at least seven Coptic Christians and injuring 16 others, both domestic and international media have deployed subtle and not-so-subtle examples of "victim-blaming" in their coverage.
Egyptian media highlighted the poor condition of the road on which the attack took place and speculated about lack of security, which had been debated in the months preceding the attack. Member of Parliament and journalist Mostafa Bakry, on his show Haqa'eq wa Asrar (Facts and Secrets) on Sada al-Balad, praised the efforts of the Egyptian military and security forces, saying, "No one says that police presence is lacking — they are everywhere. But this group went on roads away from security checkpoints to reach the monastery. Terrorists came along mountain paths and waited for them."
International media largely situated the attack within a context of Coptic Christians' presumed wholescale support for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's regime. Such narratives not only attempt to posit the attack as an isolated or exceptional incident, but also reduces Copts to homogenous supporters of a regime that provides them with "special protection," and yet perpetuates their continued exclusion, persecution and death.
Mourners after the Nov. 2 attack on a bus with Coptic Christians — Photo: Gehad Hamdy/DPA/ZUMA
On November 2, Islamist gunmen opened fire on a bus leaving the St. Samuel Coptic Orthodox Monastery in Upper Egypt's Minya governorate. The attack is similar to another one that took place in May 2017, when gunmen opened fire on buses transporting Coptic Christians to the same monastery for prayers and pilgrimage, killing 28 people.
A New York Times (NYT) article by Declan Walsh and Mohamed Ezz, written on the same day as the attack, is emblematic of coverage about Egypt's Copts by Western media. The language deployed by such articles suggests that all Coptic Christians support Sisi's regime, and hence are partially responsible for the atrocities committed against them.
Sectarian attitudes also have a long and deep history in the country.
This religious minority, numbering between 8 to 10% of Egypt's total population, are often painted as avid supporters of the regime. Despite government intransigence over discriminatory church-building laws — less than 1 percent of churches and religious buildings submitted for government approval in early 2017 have been accepted — Islamist groups use the erroneous claim that Copts support Sisi and the military regime in return for a degree of protection.
As the authors of the NYT piece highlight, Sisi has consistently said he "has put security concerns at the heart of his autocratic style of rule," which is pure rhetoric. Sectarian attitudes also have a long and deep history in the country and do not need "the Islamic State's campaign to sow sectarian divisions," as the writers state.
Nationalists, Islamists and church reform movements in the 19th century helped to lay the groundwork for an emergent national identity that increasingly drew distinctions between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. Western intervention, in the form of British occupation and later United States imperialism, further entrenched such movements and engendered a more nationalistic, ethnic-based character in the service of nation-building. Categories of "minority" and "majority" peoples emerged further from these attempts to define the modern nation-state and to delimit its boundaries.
As noted scholar and feminist theorist Saba Mahmood has argued, by the turn of the 20th century, the state and its attendant institutions had brought religious life under new forms of regulation, and ultimately exacerbated religious differences. Sectarian identity thus became "sutured" to religion by the state, and thus subjected "to a new grid of intelligibility," so that majoritarian religious prejudices in the state could not be easily separated or named.
After years of exclusion and outright discrimination under former presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat respectively, increased segregation was prevalent in places of worship, social gatherings and decisions about with whom to interact and do business. One's name, as much as the cross tattoo on their wrists, became a marker of difference.
After years of economic stagnation and state securitization under ousted President Hosni Mubarak, the 2011 revolution sparked a short-lived period of hope. This faded with the Muslim Brotherhood's ascendency to power. Such developments have only deepened historical divides in the country, leading to almost constant sectarian attacks by Egypt's Islamic State affiliate and other homegrown militant movements since the 2013 military coup.
The regime's usual response to such attacks? A period of national mourning, platitudes of "we are all Egyptian," and then silence. When individual attackers are named and arrested, justice is short-lived. The state imposes traditional reconciliation with obligated church support, which often leads to little more than a slap on the wrist for the perpetrators.
What Egypt needs today is not a "benevolent" dictator touting the language of protection. We do not need more guns, more walls and more soldiers dying. Egypt needs a government willing to support and elevate those who are destitute, who have less access to resources, and therefore are most likely to support fundamentalist organizations. Education, social welfare, community outreach and a renewed emphasis on infrastructure are vital to developing a language of inclusion.
This is very much a story distinguished by Egyptian history. Yet Egypt is far from unique, and the Middle East is not inherently more dangerous, or more violent, than anywhere else. The killing of 11 Jewish worshipers in a Pittsburgh synagogue on October 27 serves as a stark reminder. TheNew York Times has been all-too-vocal in pronouncing that a gunman opened fire in a house of worship fueled by President Donald Trump's anti-Semitic and xenophobic rhetoric. Yet while denouncing such hateful acts and the vitriol of their own president, US media continues to perpetuate false Egyptian state rhetoric and a centuries-long orientalist vision of the Middle East and its peoples.
Stop blaming the victim. These atrocities do not happen in a vacuum. To say otherwise is to insult the memory of the deceased.
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Note: This article was co-published with Active History.
