Holy Family Today Would Run Away from Egypt, Not Toward It

Crux || By John L. Allen Jr. || 5 July 2015

At the very origins of Christianity lies the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, escaping persecution under an Israelite king. In the crypt of a small Cairo church, one can still find the well from which tradition holds that Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus drew fresh water during their exile.

Sadly, Egypt today has become a place a small number of Christians are running away from, not toward, while most express a grim determination to hold on no matter how bad it gets.

Along with my Crux colleague Inés San Martín, I spent last week in Egypt collecting the stories of these persecuted Christians.

Our hope was to reverse-engineer Stalin’s famous dictum that one death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic. Rather than accumulating facts and figures, we wanted to unearth the individual dramas beneath such data.

For instance, we met Wadie Ramses, a 64-year-old Christian doctor who was kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai region last year and held for 92 days, blindfolded and handcuffed, until his family paid a ransom. Periodically he would be put in a car and driven around listening to verses from the Qu’ran, while his captors beat him with a rubber hose for refusing to accept Islam.

We met Andraous Oweida, a 44-year-old construction worker and father of two who was wounded and almost crushed to death when the Egyptian army plowed their armored personnel carriers into a crowd of Christian protestors four years ago, leaving 22 people dead, including several of Oweida’s friends.

We met Nadi Mohani Makar, 59, once a prosperous merchant in a mid-sized town called Dalga when a mob burst into his home, shot his wife in the leg, set the house ablaze, and dragged him off for a beating. He was held by local police for 15 days, allegedly as a precautionary measure, and then informed that he was no longer welcome in town.

We met Nabil Soliman, a former security guard from Upper Egypt who lost his home, his job and all his property to a mob of Muslim radicals in 2013. He survives today with his wife, children, and grandchildren in a run-down Cairo apartment that’s barely worthy of housing livestock, let alone human beings.

Soliman is one of millions of Egyptians infected with hepatitis C, and because he can’t really afford the complicated bundle of medicines needed to treat it anymore, he may literally be facing a death sentence for the simple fact of being a Christian.

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We met Ayman Samwel, a 33-year-old pharmacist who’s part of the Zabbaleen, Cairo’s legendary underclass of “garbage people” who are almost entirely Christian.

Last week Samwel was rousted from his bed by police at 3:00 am and dragged off to a station house, where he says he was beaten for four hours and subjected to verbal abuse about his faith. As Samwel describes it, it’s part of routine harassment of his community.

We met Saqer Iskander Toos, 35, whose father was killed in August 2014 in another spasm of anti-Christian violence. Muslim friends helped Toos and his brother escape their village, then buried the father since his sons weren’t allowed to return.

In a final humiliation, a mob later dug up the father’s corpse and paraded it through the streets.

I could go on, but the point is that such stories are depressingly easy to find.

Two big-picture points suggest themselves about the situation facing Christians in Egypt, which to greater or lesser degrees is shared across most of the Middle East.

First, Christians are not the only one suffering.

Right now Egypt’s most embattled minority group is arguably the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative Islamic movement whose members are subject to arrest, torture, and extra-judicial execution by security services. Other minorities, such as Egypt’s small Shi’a Muslim population, also experience hardships, as do many women, gays, free-speech activists, and other constituencies.

The day before we left, the country’s top prosecutor, a Muslim, was killed in a car bomb attack, presumably by Islamists upset at the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Second, Christians in Egypt insist their aim is not special privilege but equality as citizens. They see themselves as fully Egyptian, not the “other”, and their suffering as part and parcel of the broader difficulties facing the entire nation under a regime which, to put it charitably, has a checkered history vis-à-vis human rights.

(By “regime,” they don’t mean just the current government of President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. They mean the military, political, and economic complex that’s governed Egypt since the 1952 revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.)

That said, there’s no doubt that Christians are especially at risk in places such as Egypt, where they’re a convenient target anytime someone is mad at the state, the West, or any other perceived enemy.

Christians will take a natural interest in such suffering by fellow religionists. Concerned citizens of any stripe, however, should be able to recognize these abuses not as a confessional matter, but an urgent human rights challenge.

There’s also a clear strategic value at stake: If Christians go down in Egypt, they’ll go down all across the entire region, and with them any realistic hope for pluralism, democracy and stability in the Middle East.

Here’s hoping that realization takes hold in time to do Soliman, Ramses, and the other victims we met this week some good.