As soon as I arrived at Cairo airport from London, to spend my annual vacation, I received news about sectarian violence in the Khosous district. According to the most circulated news, the incidents broke out when a Copt allegedly painted a swastika on the walls of an Al-Azhar-affiliated institute. On the first day, the clashes claimed the lives of five people, including four Copts, in addition to burning stores, houses, a kindergarten and cars mostly owned by Coptic families.
As soon as I arrived at Cairo airport from London, to spend my annual vacation, I received news about sectarian violence in the Khosous district. According to the most circulated news, the incidents broke out when a Copt allegedly painted a swastika on the walls of an Al-Azhar-affiliated institute. On the first day, the clashes claimed the lives of five people, including four Copts, in addition to burning stores, houses, a kindergarten and cars mostly owned by Coptic families.
Since the revolution, sectarian riots have seemed to be an extension of a long series of sectarian violence and discrimination throughout the history of the modern Egyptian state, whose exclusionary mechanisms became more obvious when the Free Officers came to power and culminated under Mubarak.
Anwar Sadat’s government (1970 – 1981) played an important role in deepening sectarian hatred following the events in Zawya Hamraa neighborhood in Cairo—remembered as one of the first major clashes between Copts and Muslims. Sadat’s notorious speech before the People’s Assembly in September 1981, during which time he announced the dismissal of Pope Shenouda III and forced him into isolation, was heavily applauded.
Since the end of World War II, social science has exerted major efforts in understanding the motives of sectarian and racist hatred. Theories relating sectarianism to psychological disorders have lost their impact, while Social Identity Theory is still widely accepted. In the latter, an individual needs to belong to relatively stable and homogenous social groups to solidify his identity and his relation to the world, from his perceived membership of social groups that define the individual’s social role, expertise and behavior. This collective membership (social identity) only develops in the context of relationships with others. The existence of the different other is essentially conditioned for a social group with which to identify itself. Therefore, social identity emerges by contribution of social variables based on category, class, religion, ethnicity, nationality or other social classifications.
In order to preserve the internal structure of any social group and intensify its individual membership, social classifications organize social groups within a hierarchal structure where the most powerful group dominates all others. For instance, the Jewish identity depends on “God’s chosen people”, the Christian identity is perceived as “You are the light of the world” and the Islamic identity is centered on “The best nation sent to the people.”
Some societies have succeed in absorbing this inherited conflict between these contradicted social identities by substituting the social hierarchal classification with a comprehensive one that recognizes the diversity and uniqueness of the groups within the same society, without favoritism. This ensures co-existence supported by legal and democratic structures necessary to control the repeated identity crises between these groups. However, in different historical circumstances, strained societies adopt an identity discourse that justifies their unachieved materialistic superiority, by blaming minority groups, and defines a majority-minority relationship not only governed by superiority but also fueled by animosity.
In a similar context, the current political Islamic discourse in Egypt depicts the Copts as a continuous threat to the Islamic majority, through a hypothetical economic domination represented by the Sawiris family and its economic and media empire; an urban threat that would demolish the Islamic identity of the country by building new churches, an honor threat to female Muslims who are regularly kidnapped and detained inside churches and above all, a threat of a Coptic conspiracy against the Islamic majority followed by Western intervention to occupy Egypt.
Thus, while it seems that the current regime has succeeded in exploiting the sectarian hate discourse to ensure the loyalty of the majority of citizens by clinging to their threatened Islamic identity and supporting the Islamic political project against the Coptic threat, recent historical lessons reveal that sectarian hate discourse only results in devastation of both the majority and minority.