WATANI International
14 February 2010
Our reading of the Cairo papers this week takes us to several major issues.
The first was the apparition of the Holy Virgin above the domes of her church in Warraq, Giza, which gave rise to many a story about her in the press. In his daily column in the Cairo daily, State-owned Al-Ahram Anis Mansour quoted a message he had received from the reader Samir Mitry Gayed. Mr Gayed wrote that the Holy Virgin was the only one the Qur’an says that God came to rescue from the Devil. It also says she was the only one whom God provided with food at the hand of His angels. Among all the women on earth, she was uniquely selected for the ‘Great Miracle’: the birth of Jesus, the ‘the Word of God’, according to the Qur’an.
Honour her
“Was anyone ever honoured in the Qur’an as the Holy Virgin was,” Mr Gayed asks.
“Why do not Egyptian Muslims then give her due honour?”
The best way, Mr Gayed says, to honour the Holy Virgin is to keep alive in memory the first-century flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. This may be done by encouraging tourist visits and pilgrimage to the sites in which the Holy Family stayed or stopped. Festivals and seminars may be organised around these places, highlighting their importance, the traditions about them, as well as the character and architecture of the sites and buildings. “Would not this,” Mr Gayed stresses, “introduce a fine image of Islam, and at the same time activate religious tourism for the benefit of our country?”
Mr Mansour replied, “I totally agree with you. We all ought to pay due respect to ‘our Lady’ who was honoured and blessed in the Qur’an.”
Civil versus religious
In the wake of the painful Nag Hammadi Christmas Eve massacre, the weekly, State-owned Rose al-Youssef opened a very well-documented file on the escalating religiosity that has come to dominate all aspects of Egyptian society.
In a story entitled “When the civil State requires a fatwa from religious scholars [to justify its actions]”, Hany Abdullah reported on the confusion of the Egyptian government which claims Egypt is a civil State but runs to religious scholars for fatwas (Islamic religious edicts) to justify political decisions. When the underground steel wall constructed by the Egyptian authorities at the Egypt-Gaza border was widely criticised by Arabists and Palestine supporters in Egypt, the government got the religious scholars to issue a fatwa to approve the construction on grounds that it was in the benefit of Egypt’s security. Other scholars, for their part, issued a fatwa countering the opinion of the first, on the grounds that the wall harmed Palestinian and Muslim interests.
Abdullah concluded by confirming the utterly rational fact that decisions in a civil State should not be based on what is ‘halal’ (righteous) or ‘haram’ (sinful) but on what was in the national interest.
Pharaohs, not worshippers
A title “The team of the Pharaohs, not the worshippers” highlights that the Egyptian national team, which won the Africa Cup of Nations for the third time in succession and brands itself internationally as the “Pharaohs” but locally as the “worshippers”. Whenever a goal is scored the players fall down with their faces to earth to worship; the coach Hassan Shehata recently said players would be rated on “their relationship to God’ and not merely on skill.
Wael Samy, who reported on the issue in Rose al-Youssef file, posed the question of whether God was with the winning team and against the losers. Was He with Algeria when it won the game against Egypt last November? And why did He abandon them this time?
Mr Samy made the point that, out of 400 players registered with football teams in Egypt, only two are Christian. “Is it a question of widespread lack of talent among Copts?” he mocked, “or is it that players are selected according to discriminatory measures?”
American make
The lion’s share of media interest in religious or sectarian issues, however, was—predictably—the Christmas Eve crime in Nag Hammadi. Even though the Cairo press included a huge number of articles which condemned the crime and warned that fanaticism and sectarian violence were set to destroy not only Copts but Egypt in its entirety, not a few assumed an insensitive—if not outright irrational—attitude.
In the weekly, independent al-Youm al-Saabei, the Shiite writer Ahmed Rasem al-Nafees claimed the Nag Hammadi crime was an American make. The CIA and the Mossad, he insisted were behind all the terrorist operations in the region and the crimes against Copts in Egypt.
The claim defies comment.
Agonising insensitivity
A wide majority of the visual media assumed the stance of discounting the Nag Hammadi incident as an individual crime.
The actor Ahmed Adam, who presents on al-Hayat satellite channel “Beni Adam show”, a show which depends on farce, mocked the Nag Hammadi crime and said that Muslims also kill other Muslims. As though this justifies the killing of Copts on Christmas Eve and makes the pain all too natural.
On the satellite channel OnTV, the Islamist writer and theatre critic Safinaz Qazem was hosted by Gaber al-Qarmouti in his talk show “ Manchette (Headline)”. In absolute disrespect of the blood of the seven young men who lost their lives in the shootout, she said the crime could be compared to the man who shot his wife and children then killed himself because he lost his money on the stock exchange. How this compares to a mass shooting by a seasoned criminal at a congregation as it leaves church after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve defies all logic. Worse, it exposes an agonising insensitivity, a total disregard of the pain suffered by the families whose sons were senselessly killed, and an absolute discounting of the suffering of the Coptic community.
Says it all
Finally, back to Rose al-Youssef whose editor-in-chief Karam Gabr printed a letter he received from a Coptic businessman named Nagy Yassa. Mr Yassa wrote that what most pained and angered him was a general attitude by opinion writers to equate the offender with the victim, putting the oppressor in one basket with the oppressed. This is exactly what happens when someone says “the extremists on both sides” or “political Islam and political Christianity”. Equating both sides is an outright falsity. Will anyone volunteer to tell me just what is political Christianity or where are those extremist Christian movements?
“Did you ever hear in Egypt, Mr Gabr,” Mr Yassa wrote, “of a Christian who burned a mosque? Killed or even assaulted a Muslim merely because he was Muslim? Verbally abused a sheikh? Did you ever hear a priest abuse Islam in a sermon? Tell me of just one such incident in the last 100 years.”
I think Mr Yassa’s letter just about says it all.