“Spreading hatred against non-Muslims has reached an unendurable level in Egypt”, said Mounir Megahed in his capacity as head of Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination (EARD). The danger, he explained, was that incidents of sectarian violence were not carried out by terrorist groups or extremist parties but were in the major part planned and executed by ordinary people regularly bombarded with fanatic thought.
Last Friday and Saturday EARD held its first national conference at the headquarters of the leftist Tagammu party in Cairo. The first to be held against religious discrimination, it raised the slogan “Egypt for all Egyptians”. Egyptian researchers, writers, intellectuals, politicians, and rights activists from home and abroad gathered to discuss the issue and figure out solutions for the sectarian problem that has increasingly plagued Egypt during the last few years.
Among the attendants were Mahmoud Abaza, Nabil Abdel-Fatah, Naguib Gabrail, Emad Gad, Adel Guindy, Mamdouh Nakhla, Hisham Qasem, Mohamed al-Sayed Said, and Youssef Sidhom.
Bleak threat
The two-day conference aimed to define religious discrimination, delineate its symptoms, and warn of its bleak threat to the homeland. It sought to persuade the decision makers and people representatives in this country to purge the Constitution and laws of articles that lead to discrimination. It also called for consolidating the unity of the Egyptian community through a wide front of NGO effort and promoting popular support for citizenship concepts. Discrimination as a daily life phenomenon and the increasing incidence of sectarian violence were high on the conference’s agenda, as well as discrimination in the public domain such as sports—a field from which Copts are conspicuously absent. The raising of religious slogans during games and the categorisation of players according to their religiosity has become a day to day reality.
Religious discrimination in school curricula and especially the spread of extreme religious thought in schools and the media, and the scarcity of Coptic appointment to top posts were significant conference issues. The call for the conference stressed the role of political parties and movements in fighting discrimination and promoting equality and citizenship concepts regardless of religious belief. Positive discrimination was proposed as a viable tool to help solve the problem in the short term.
Victims of religious discrimination were on hand to deliver first hand testimony of their experiences.
Blocked
The conference was initially planned at the Downtown premises of the Journalists Syndicate. However, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) current in the syndicate succeeded in blocking the event, and the organisers had to take an on-the-spot decision to hold the conference elsewhere; Tagammu party promptly agreed to host the event.
The MB had attempted to apply pressure on the syndicate to refrain from hosting the conference. A memorandum signed by MB members Gamal Abdel-Rehim who is also a board member of the syndicate, Mohamed Abdel-Qodous and others was presented to the syndicate board demanding that the syndicate refrain from hosting the conference on grounds that it defended Baha’i faith, which was counter to Islam. But the syndicate board of directors gave the conference the green light, acknowledging its significant role in serving the community.
On Friday morning, however, the conference organisers and participants who headed to the syndicate building found their access denied by a band of men carrying clubs and occupying the entrance and lobby, headed by Mr Abdel-Rehim. Banners of “Oh Islam!” and “No to Israel, no to expatriate Copts, no to Baha’is in the Journalists Syndicate” were hung on the entrance. The syndicate head Makram Mohamed Ahmed arrived and tried to resolve the problem with the MB but was unsuccessful. Directly after Friday prayers the organisers moved the event to Tagammu and, as Watani International went to press, the conference was ongoing. Mr Ahmed joined the conference in an obvious movement of support, and in protest against the syndicate board in which “I only hold one vote,” he said.