Muslim, Christian or Human Being?

by Alaa El Aswany

Dear Reader,

Do you consider yourself primarily a Muslim, a Christian or a human being? Is your primary allegiance to your religion, or does being part of humanity take precedence over any other allegiance? How you answer this question will define your view of the world and how you treat others. If you see yourself as human before any other consideration, then you will certainly respect the rights of others regardless of their religion. A proper understanding of religion necessarily makes you more attached to humankind, because religion in essence means defending human values: justice, freedom and equality. But if you think your religious affiliation takes precedence over being a part of humankind, you have started down a dangerous path that will generally end in bigotry and violence. Religion by nature is not a point of view but an exclusive belief that does not assume the truth of other religions. It starts when someone believes that his or her religion is the sole truth and that people who follow other religions are misguided because their religions are false or corrupted or were not revealed in the first place. This contempt for other religions is bound to make you belittle those who follow them. If people whose religion differs from yours believe in delusions and hocus-pocus. while you alone believe in the true religion, then you and these misguided people can never enjoy the same human rights. This way of thinking will gradually lead you to dehumanize people whose religions are different. You will think about people of other religions as a group, not as individuals. If you’re a Muslim, you won’t see your Christian neighbour as a human being with an independent existence and with his own way of behaving. You will see him as one Copt among many and think that Copts in general have certain distinctive traits and ways of behaving. You will have taken another step towards hatred. You will say things such as "These Copts are horrible and bigoted. I don’t like them." You might reach a stage where you find people of other religions disgusting because in your opinion, apart from being unbelievers, they are also unclean. They don’t wash in the same way as you and, if you go close to one of them, you might notice a distinctive smell, perhaps because of the incense they use or the food they eat. When you reach this stage, dear reader, you are unfortunately a bigoted religious extremist and very likely to commit crimes against others because you have misunderstood religion in a way that has led you to hate and despise others. Time for a question: how did Egyptians use to express their piety? In fact Egyptians are among the most pious people in the world but because of their cultural heritage they always used to understand religion the right way. Egypt always respected all religions and was always a safe haven open to all, welcoming immigrants of every creed and ethnicity: Armenians, Italians, Greeks, Jews and Baha’is. Egypt’s civilization also allowed for absolute personal freedom. In a civilized Egypt it is you who decides your lifestyle. If you want to go and pray, you can do so. If you want to go and sin, you can do that. You are completely free but you alone are also fully responsible for your actions  before God and the law. In 1899 the great imam Mohamed Abdouh presented an Egyptian version of Islam and freed Egyptians once and for all from bigotry and mumbo-jumbo. Despite the British occupation Egypt flourished to become a pioneer in almost every field. This tolerant Egyptian concept of Islam endured in Egypt until the October war broke out in 1973 and, thanks to the sacrifices of the Egyptian and Syrian peoples, the price of oil rose several times, giving the oil states in the Gulf unprecedented economic power. And because the Saudi regime depends for its stability on its alliance with Wahhabi sheikhs, millions of dollars were spent to propagate the Wahhabi concept of Islam throughout the world. On top of that, the economic crisis in Egypt forced millions of Egyptians to emigrate to work in Saudi Arabia, and they came back with Wahhabi ideas completely alien to Egyptian society. The Wahhabi concept of Islam, quite unlike the Egyptian concept, is dogmatic and bigoted, hostile to democracy and unfair to women. Wahhabism generally reduces religion to rituals and practice, taking an interest in the form of religion at the expense of the substance. In the land of Wahhabism Egyptian men learn that, if their wives show their hair in the street, members of the Society for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (the organization responsible for imposing morality by force) will immediately step in. At the same time Egyptians living in Saudi Arabia realize that the law cannot be enforced against Americans, Europeans, princes and other powerful people, but is applied rigorously only against Egyptians and other oppressed nationalities.  Egyptians  in Saudi Arabia are taught that missing prayers is a major sin, but at the same time it’s quite another matter for a Saudi employer to abuse Egyptians, deprive them of their financial dues and have them thrown in jail if they claim their rights. Under Wahhabi thinking, that would have nothing to do with religion. Over the decades Wahhabi ideas have spread in Egypt and the most dangerous seed they have sown in Egyptian society is hatred and contempt for Copts. In an article in issue no. 4327 of the magazine Rose al-Yousef, Professor Essam Abdel Gawad cites statements about Copts by fundamentalist Wahhabi sheikhs. Sheikh Said Abdel Azim, for example, says, "There can be no affection or friendship with Christians. One should not associate with them or congratulate them on their holy days, because on their holy days they are infidels more than ever." Abu Islam says, "Christians should come to their senses, because everything they believe in is inconsistent with reality and reason." Sheikh Yassir al-Burhami says, "Muslims must not let Christians take part in their religious celebrations because they are polytheists." Sheikh Ahmed Farid says, "Muslims must not send condolences to Copts when someone dies or wish them anything related to the afterlife, because Hell is the Christian’s only fate in the afterlife." In any respectable country statements such as these, repeated day after day in the sermons the Wahhabi sheikhs preach in mosques or on satellite channels, would be considered criminal incitement to hatred and to violence against people solely on the basis that they have a different religion. But unfortunately the Wahhabi sheikhs poison the minds of Egyptians and fill their hearts with hatred and bigotry with legal and moral impunity. What should we expect from people who think in such a way? What happened a few days ago in the village of Marinab near Edfu in Aswan province now makes sense, and was even to be expected. The Copts of the village have been praying in St George’s church there since 1940 but the old walls are falling down and those responsible have obtained the official permits need to rebuild the walls. So far, so good. Then a problem arose. A group of Wahhabi salafists appeared and objected to repairing the church, but instead of the authorities enforcing the law and protecting the church, the police and the army held an informal council at which the salafists dictated their conditions for allowing the repairs to go ahead, stipulating that the church should have  no loudspeakers, no domes and no crosses. How can you have a church without the cross, which is the symbol of Christian belief? The answer is that the salafists wanted it that way, police and army officials agreed and the man in charge of the church was forced to agree so that he could repair his church. The strange thing is that even when the church accepted these conditions, it did not save the church from the salafists. On the next Friday the Wahhabi preacher at the mosque incited the congregation against the church and, as soon as prayers were over, the extremists set off, surrounded the church, set fire to it and completely destroyed it. It took them hours to commit their crime and in the meantime  the army and police did not intervene to protect a house of God. The governor of Aswan, one of the remnants of the Mubarak regime, resorted to the old method of denying responsibility, saying that there wasn’t a church in the village in the first place (in other words, that everything that happened was no more and no less than a figment of  the imagination of  a few Copts). Criminal attacks on churches  have  taken place in surprising and suspicious numbers in Egypt since the revolution: what happened in Edfu  has also happened in Fayoum, Ismailia, Embaba, Ain Shams and Atfih. This raises several questions.

    Firstly, The military council is performing the functions of both the head of state and  parliament during the transitional period, so it has sole responsibility for running the country, so why do military policemen treat demonstrators so brutally - hitting them, torturing them and degrading them, while at the same time just watching on when the salafists set fire to churches and tombs, cut off  the ear of a Christian man and blocked the train line to the south for ten days, as they did in Qena? Why does the iron fist of the military police turn into a kid glove when they are dealing with the salafists?  Why do army and police representatives sit and negotiate with the salafists and submit to their conditions, as if the salafists represent a foreign state that is stronger than Egypt? What legal status do the salafists have that gives them the right to inspect churches and set conditions for building them, to  veto them, knock them down and even set fire to them if they want? Do the salafists enjoy a certain political standing with the military council, or do the incidents of lawlessness and sectarian violence serve some political interest of the military council’s by justifying the council staying in power on the pretext of maintaining law and order and protecting the Copts from attack by extremists?

    Secondly, since the 19th century the Egyptian people have struggled for decades  and  thousands of them have given their lives for two objectives: independence and a constitution - to end the British occupation and create the democratic civic state that was the hope of all Egypt’s leaders, from Saad Zaghloul to Gamal Abdel Nasser. These leaders were not secularists hostile to Islam as the Wahhabis claim; but they were civilized and cultured enough to understand that a civic state that treats citizens as equals regardless of their religion is the only way to progress. Any attempt to change the civil structure of the state would bring real disaster to Egypt. If the salafists cannot tolerate the existence of a church when they are just individuals, what would they do to us, Muslims and Copts, if they came to power in  Egypt? Islam, if understood properly, makes us more human, more tolerant and more respectful of the beliefs of others, whereas despising Copts and attacking churches are heinous crimes that have nothing to do with any religion.                                                  

    Democracy is the solution.

email address: dralaa57@yahoo.com