Why Do Coptic Christians Keep Getting Attacked in Egypt? - The Atlantic
H.A. HELLYER
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/1857/11/the-latest-attack-on-coptic-christians-in-light-of-egypt/528330/?preview=qiyvhH6Zxjj1CBpx_5a8zaxtlIg
Sectarian incitement and anti-Christian populism are not limited to the ISIS cohorts and cells in Egypt. ISIS may take the sectarianism to an ultimate conclusion, but before ISIS ever existed in Egypt, a vile sectarianism had already infected far too much of the pro-Islamist universe. It has spread by playing to the baser, more populist sentiments among the pro-Islamist camp.
As Taylor Luck noted earlier this month in the Christian Science Monitor, Muslim antipathy toward Christians has been simmering for a long time, and has occasionally erupted into mob violence:
One of the largest waves of anti-Christian violence was after the 2013 military ouster of Islamist President Mohammad Morsi … and the army’s bloody crackdown against a sit-in by Muslim Brotherhood supporters in which nearly 1,000 Islamists were killed. Brotherhood officials singled out Copts, and particularly Coptic Pope Tawadros, for being complicit in the General Sisi-led military coup, and Christians were the target of angry supporters.
In August 2013, Human Rights Watch reported that mob violence led by Brotherhood supporters damaged 42 churches and dozens of schools and businesses owned by Copts across Egypt, killing several and trapping Christians in their homes.
Islamist circles and some Muslims across Egypt, meanwhile, use rhetoric deriding Christians as a “favored class” that is “hoarding wealth” and benefits from the regime, fault-lines that ISIS is looking to exploit.
We shouldn’t group all of the Islamist camp, whether in Egypt or otherwise, together with ISIS; that would be inaccurate. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that ISIS thrives on sectarian background music that has long been provided by other parts of the Islamist universe, and not only by ISIS’s own media apparatus.
One of many ironies is that if nothing else, Friday’s appalling attack shows, yet again, how unorthodox groups like ISIS really are when it comes to Islam. In one of the many condemnations issued by Muslim religious figures and released today, one particular saying of the Prophet Muhammad’s, recorded in the hadith literature, stood out to me: “Whoever harms a person of the covenant [a non-Muslim in a Muslim territory], I am his adversary; and I will be his adversary on the Day of Judgement.” How much clearer can that be? And yet, those who seek violence will find hermeneutic ways to ignore this direct warning.
