WATANI International
12 July 2009
Throughout the past four years it has become an annual ritual for me to write, at the close of every parliamentary round, deploring the failure of Parliament to pass a unified law for building places of worship. This is the fifth year in a row that the political administration refrains from placing the bill on Parliament’s agenda.
It is not that the time is not ripe for the bill to be debated; the bill has been intentionally sidelined. Nor is it that Parliament was pressed for time to discuss and debate the bill; Parliament has proved itself perfectly capable of passing “last minute laws” which are hastily discussed and passed just before the round closes. The recent anti-monopoly law was passed just as the last parliamentary round closed.
I find myself in need of reiterating what I wrote last year. Once the curtain is drawn over the parliamentary round we are deluged with reports, studies, and interviews with lawmakers on the uncanny achievements and huge number of new laws passed by Parliament. Conspicuously absent, however, is any mention of the bills that never found their way to Parliament’s agenda, neither why nor for how long has the government been sidelining them on the legislative map. To say nothing of Parliament’s absent role in reminding the government of the bills that have been queuing for a place on its agenda.
And lest the constant official disregard of the bill leads to its erosion from our collective recollection, I find it necessary to remind of its history. I say this in the aftermath of a comment on the bill by MP Mohamed Amer, deputy to the secretary-general of the Human Rights Committee in Parliament, who said that it was not possible to utilise any parliamentary means to activate a bill that was as yet a non-resolved notion. The remark genuinely upset me; I did not know who to blame: the MP supposedly concerned with human rights issues and who should consequently be concerned with the bill in question, or the parliamentary and government officials who have glaringly succeeded in obscuring the bill, so much so that it should be branded a “non-resolved notion”?
The bill did not spring out of nowhere. The dire need for it emerged from the flagrant legislative and procedural gaps between the building of mosques on one side and churches on the other. The purchase of land, its allocation for a mosque or a church, the erection, as well as future expansion, restoration or renovation are all fully facilitated for mosques and direly complicated for churches. The glaring inequality regularly breeds incidents of violence, especially within the context of the appalling fanaticism that has increasingly swept through the Egyptian scene during the last three decades. Extremist anti-Christian fatwas have served to build up antagonism towards Christians and their churches, encouraging Christian haters to take the law in their own hands by viciously attacking Christians and torching and looting their property once they have the temerity to hold prayers in any ‘unlicensed’ building. The official response is to term the horrifying violence mere “sectarian incidents” and to compel the Christians to undergo “reconciliation” with the attackers, as though sedating both victim and assailant. So the official and security apparatuses are either negligent or outright collaborative with the aggressors.
In 2004 MP Mohamed Guweili proposed a bill for a unified law for building places of worship, that would make the licensing of both churches and mosques the business of the building authorities. So far the licensing of churches is in the hands of the security authorities, while mosques require no licensing whatsoever. The bill was approved by the Proposals and Complaints Committee in Parliament and referred to the Building Committee, and there it lies to this day.
Following the bloody attack against the Copts in the village of Bemha, Ayyat, in 2007 on the pretext that the Copts were about to convert a building they owned into a church, three MPs again proposed a unified law for building places of worship. Its destiny was the same as that of MP Guweili’s. And despite a third bill proposed during the same year by the National Council for Human Rights, which was also laid to rest beside the previous two bills, the government is doing nothing towards placing the issue on its legislative agenda.
For Egypt the ailment persists, while everyone appears content to merely look on.
