Egyptian Activists: Our Religion Is None Of Your Business

Since Egypt’s revolution began, tensions among Egypt’s Muslims and Christians have only increased. Earlier this month, it once again turned deadly. Tit-for-tat killings left three Muslims and at least six Christians dead.

That and other religious violence is prompting a public debate about religious identity in Egypt. One group of young Egyptians wants to remove religious labels from national ID cards.

‘Where The Trouble Starts’

Aalam Wassef, one of those advocates, will gladly tell you he’s a video artist, a musician and a publisher. When it comes to his religion, though, he says it’s none of your business.

That’s the motto of his new campaign, too. Wassef, along with two other Egyptians, is calling on others to cover up their religion on their national ID card and start identifying as human first. They’re spreading the word on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One of their videos plays images of a particularly bloody day for Christians last year, when the military — in power at the time — drove over Christian protesters, and state television called on “honorable” Muslims to come out and defend the troops from the Christians. Twenty-seven people were dead by the end of that day.

The lyrics sung to these images are just as chilling: “The racist republic of Egypt, the sectarian republic of Egypt. It’s ingrained on your ID, and this is where the trouble starts.”

“Egypt has a long history of sectarian violence and sectarian issues, which have always been covered up with this narrative of national unity,” Wassef says. “And so it’s a big lie, actually, because there’s a lot of embedded discrimination in the society.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM NPR 

Five Egyptians killed in clashes between Christians, Muslims

By Ulf Laessing and Omar Fahmy, Reuters

Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in the latest sectarian violence in the most populous Arab state.

Christian-Muslim confrontations have increased in Muslim-majority Egypt since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hardline Islamists repressed under his rule.
Four Christians and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started shooting at each other in Khusus outside the Egyptian capital, the sources said.

State news agency MENA put the death toll at four.

The violence broke out late on Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute, the security sources said. No more details were immediately available.

FULL ARTICLE FROM NBC NEWS

In Egypt the Amateurs are in Charge

NEWS ABOUT EGYPT FROM THE REGION

By Rami G. Khouri

The tumultuous road to a stable democratic system of government in Egypt is passing through one of its most decisive stages these days, with most of the main political actors revealing their amateurism more than anything else. This is a hard but necessary learning process, as the main protagonists refuse to accept that hard-line and absolutist positions are inappropriate during this delicate transition.

For all the heartening talk about their shared commitment to democratic pluralism, the dominant Muslim Brotherhood and most of the other leading Egyptian political groups are demonstrating the problems arising from a fast transition from autocracy to democracy, without a transition period in which people and organizations learn how to function in a democratic system. Personality has much to do with this.

The Muslim Brotherhood leaders who have spent much of the last 25 years in and out of jail were catapulted into the presidency without any previous experience in managing national politics. President Mohammad Mursi is revealing his inability to act as the president of all Egyptians and the shepherd of a historic constitutional transition in which basic governance institutions are being built. Unlike Nelson Mandela who spent decades in jail and then showed his compassion, flexibility and statesmanship when he became president of South Africa, Mursi seems focused on pushing through his agenda (presumably also the Brotherhood’s) and is unable at this stage to act as the magnanimous leader of all Egyptians.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE DAILY STAR (LEBANON)

Egypt’s Military Cements Its Powers as Voting Ends

CAIRO — The Muslim Brotherhood early Monday projected its candidate, an Islamist, as the winner of Egypt’s first competitive presidential election, hours after the ruling military council issued an interim constitution granting itself broad power over the future government, all but eliminating the president’s authority in an apparent effort to guard against just such a victory.

The military’s new charter is the latest in a series of swift steps that the generals have taken to tighten their grasp on power just at the moment when they had promised to hand over to elected civilians the authority that they assumed on the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year. Their charter gives them control of all laws and the national budget, immunity from any oversight, and the power to veto a declaration of war.

After dissolving the Brotherhood-led Parliament elected four months ago, and locking out its lawmakers, the generals on Sunday night also seized control of the process of writing a permanent constitution. State news media reported that the generals had picked a 100-member panel to draft it.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Egyptian Christians: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The first round of the Egyptian presidential election resulted in a runoff between Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsy, who won 25 percent of the votes (about 5.8 million), and Ahmed Shafiq — a former prime minister and symbol of the Hosni Mubarak regime — who won 24 percent (about 5.5 million votes). The question now is how Egyptian Coptic Christians will vote in the upcoming runoff between these two candidates.

There are almost 8.5 million Copts in Egypt who represent about 10 percent of the population and constitute the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Observers often cite how Copts are concerned that the Brotherhood might turn Egypt into an Islamic state. Nevertheless, the alternative, Shafiq, is generally not welcomed by many Egyptians who consider him part of the previous regime. With this in mind, there is still a question of whether the Brotherhood will be willing to take political or legal steps that may alleviate Copts’ concerns about the movement’s conservatism and encourage Christians to vote for the Brotherhood’s candidate.

Answering this question requires an examination of the way Copts have historically been treated in Egypt, a country that has a majority Muslim population. It is also necessary to explain the general principles that regulate the status of religious minorities in Islam. While these are complex issues that fall beyond the context of this article, a brief reading of Islamic history reveals that religious minorities can coexist peacefully in an Islamic country.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE EGYPT INDEPENDENT 

Democratic Muslims? Why not?

The advent of democracy in the Arab Middle East has prompted heated debates over the role of Islam in government, and over the rights of women and non-Muslim minorities, especially in Egypt, the largest Arab nation that also has the largest Christian community in the region.

The issues are fraught with misunderstandings, primarily because of the antagonism between the West and Islam. Cultural stereotypes distort the debate with improper or deliberately misleading language.

Islam, the faith, is not government.

Some governments may call themselves Islamic — as in Saudi Arabia and Iran. But many Muslims routinely question the Islamic credentials of those two governments. This tells us the obvious: There is no one, monolithic Islam. There’s great diversity of thought and interpretation among Muslims, as in people of any faith.

In Muslim democracies — or, more precisely, Muslim-majority nations that are democratic or becoming so — a government may be led by a political party that calls itself Islamic. Or it does not but others do, because it is “rooted” in Islam or “political Islam.” Or its leaders and/or rank-and-file are pious Muslims.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE STAR (CANADA)

In Egypt, Dynamic Pragmatist Becomes Top Islamist Candidate

By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles TimesMay 5, 2012, 8:53 p.m.

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — The stage along the sea was a politically crafted advertisement for Egypt’s diversity: An unveiled woman chatted with a bearded Islamist and a retired soccer star shared the spotlight with a young hero from last year’s revolution.

A roar erupted from a crowd, mostly students, when a white-haired man in a linen blazer raised his arms. As fireworks flashed in the night sky, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh called for national unity to end military rule and unrest that have soured the euphoria since Hosni Mubarak was forced from power.

“The time when Egyptian blood was shed without a price is over,” said the doctor and former political prisoner, opening his presidential campaign last week in this fabled and flaking city. “The time when Egypt’s dignity was humiliated is over. The time when Egypt’s fortune was stolen to be given to a certain group of people is over.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE LA TIMES 

Will Muslim-Christian relations improve with a new president in Egypt?

The religious freedom for Christians in Egypt (Copts) and other religious minorities hangs in the balance as Egyptian voters prepare to select a new president on the weekend of May 23-24.

This is the first open presidential elections in a generation. If voters favor a hard-line Islamist as president, existing religious freedoms are at greater risk. At least one moderate candidate favors less state involvement in religion.

Right now, the two major contenders for the presidency are Amr Moussa, belonging to the old guard around former President Mubarak, and Abdel-Moneim Abol Fotoh, an Islamist with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Until mid-2011, Moussa was Secretary-General of the Arab League and is widely recognized as an establishment figure. His hard-line criticism of Israel has proven to be popular in Egypt.

Abol Fotoh, a political moderate, quit the Muslim Brotherhood in 2011 after decades of involvement in order to run for president. In the late 1990s, Abol Fotoh spent five years in prison for his political activism.

In the past week, popular resentment in Egypt exploded when the Election Commission disqualified 10 candidates, including three well-known and controversial figures: Khairat al-Shater (Freedom Justice Party, Muslim Brotherhood); Omar Suleiman (former vice president and spy chief under Mubarak); and, Hazem Abu-Ismail (an ultra-conservative Salafist). This week, Shater alleged that the commission’s move was an attempt the rig the election.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CHRISTIANITY TODAY

The Islamist Dilemma

‘Islamist’ is one of those words journalists hate to use but can’t live without.

Recently, there’s been discussion within media organisations about whether to keep using the term, with some arguing it’s come to describe such a wide variety of groups, views and individuals that it really doesn’t mean much anymore. I agree. In fact I think we should dump the word ‘liberal’ too.

But as a Cairo-based correspondent heading towards the presidential elections, I must admit it left me stumped.

One of the more unfortunate side effects of the Egyptian revolution has been the increasing polarisation of the country.

Today, in post-Mubarak Egypt, you are either an Islamist or not.

The term has been overused (not just in Egypt but in the wider Middle East and Africa) yet we can’t do without it because that is what everything seems to boil down to these days.

Whether we are talking about presidential candidates, political parties or the members of the assembly writing the new constitution.

The sad thing is not only that it inserts a relatively new, sectarian dimension into our political lingo that will slowly creep its way into societal lingo … but also that it deflects us from discussing what really matters – issues, agendas, stances.

Rabab El Mahdy, a professor at Cairo’s American University, in a recent article described the process of selecting members to write the constitution: “The majority party presented a list clarifying the percentage of ‘Islamists’ and ‘non-Islamists’ and mentioning the names of Christians as if this were a sectarian battle … And everyone forgets that conducting the battle this way will not bestow a better constitution upon us but rather will entrench a sectarian nation and military rule.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA 

The Muslim Brotherhood is NOT the Taliban

A year on from Egypt’s revolution, a historic change of guard is taking place. The Muslims are coming. As Islamists step confidently into the political arena, anxiety is growing into hysteria. Two weeks ago, Rick Perry, a presidential hopeful at the time, told a cheering Republican crowd that Turkey, a member of Nato, was being ruled by “Islamic terrorists”. Earlier, Newt Gingrich had declared that the winners of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood, were “a mortal enemy of our civilisation”.

From this perspective, a rising crypto-fascist tide of jihad is washing over the Middle East. At best, this Manichaean world-view turns shades of green (the traditional colour of Islam) into black and white – at worst, it misunderstands the way in which squeezing out elected and non-violent Islamists can spur on those who really are our mortal enemies.

It’s important to put the Islamists’ victories into context. For a start, hardline ultra-orthodox Salafists have lagged far behind the Brotherhood. In Egypt, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party took nearly 47 per cent of seats against the Salafists’ 25 per cent. There’s little chance that the blocs will band together, because the Brotherhood is already terrified of scaring away Egypt’s liberals and provoking a backlash. It doesn’t want to suffer the fate of Algeria’s Islamists in the Nineties, who won an election that ushered in civil war.

This is why the Brotherhood is happy to stay away from foreign policy – why rock the boat on Israel, when there are safer votes to be won on the economy? When Cairo was hit by major protests in 2002 (against Israel) and 2003 (against the Iraq war), the Brotherhood stayed warily on the sidelines; it was also far behind the curve on last year’s revolution.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE LONDON TELEGRAPH