Writing in the Huffington Post, Georgetown Professor John Esposito and co-author Sheila B. Lalwani, address the issue of hostility toward Christians in Muslim majority countries. In a piece titled “Christians Under Seige: The Challenge of Religious Pluralism in the Muslim World,” Esposito and Lalwani are forced to confront an undeniable reality: Christians living in Muslim-majority countries are not safe and do not enjoy human rights.
Such an admission is probably difficult to make for both Esposito and Lalwani, both scholars at at the Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University (which Esposito heads). The center has been described by Martin Kramer as a Saudi effort to “change the subject” away from an honest discussion about the religious roots of Islamist terrorism. The Investigative Project reportsthat Esposito has a history of minimizing Islamic extremism, has praised Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi and has described Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Sami Al-Arian as “one of the most impressive people I have met under fire.” Esposito has also warned against seeing “Islam and Islamic activism through the prism of ayatollahs and Iran, of Bin Laden, and the Afghan Arabs.”
Clearly, in light of recent attacks against Christians in the Middle East, Espsito’s narrative is in need of revision.
The Piece
Esposito and Lalwani wrote their article, published in the Huffington Post on Jan. 27, 2011 in response to the New Year’s Day attack on Coptic Christians in Egypt. Here is the context they provide:
While Esposito and Lalwani do a reasonable job of describing the problems that Coptic Christians currently face in Egypt, their asssertion that Muslim-Coptic relations in Egypt have historically “generally been good” ignores how Coptic Christians have, in the words of Mordechai Nissan, become “veritable aliens in their own land” as a result of Muslim-imposed restrictions on their life. In his text Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression (McFarland, 1991), Nisan writes:
The Islamic conquest of Egypt from 640 to 641 inaugurated the decline of Christianity in the Nile Valley. There were one hundred bishoprics in the year 600, but only seventy by 700; in the year 1300 only forty remained. While some Copts joined the Arab governmental apparatus as accountants and translators, others engaged in revolt to secure Christian self-expression. Overtime, the burden of dhimmi taxation compelled thousands to accept Islam. The surge to revolt, like the insurrections from 725 to 773, persisted intermittently until 830 at least, but to no avail. Copts were dragged off to Baghdad as slaves. By the tenth century, the spoken Coptic language had all but died, replaced by Arabic. The caprice of changing rulers would arbitrarily affect the Copts’ condition. It is said that Saladin, supsecting Copt collusion with the crusaders, punished them sternly. The overall Chrsitian population, formerly some 90 percent of Egypt, dwindled incessantly to some 10 percent.
The extreme fragility of Copt existence was rooted in the superiority of Muslims exercised through the dhimma doctrine. Islamic supremacy often degenerated into brutal repression. A Maghrebian visitor to Cairo in 1301 witnessed the degradation of the Christians: None could ride a horse or hold public office; churches were closed; and Christians had to wear a distinguishable colored turban different from that of the Muslims. Violence against Copts and their ecclesiastical establsimnent was a central theme in the sectarian relationship. Muslim mobs, based on the rule of Islam, ransacked Copt neighborhoods and massacred their inhabitants, as in Cairo in 1343.
The situation led continually to mass conversions from the Cross to the Crescent. Islam legal opinion developed a harsh attitude toward churches, as both Ibn Taimiyya in the fourteenth century and Shaykh Ahmad al-Damanhuri in the eighteenth century condoned the construction of churches. Sixty churches were destroyed in 1321. With the Copt religion victimized, the Copt language fading, and the Copt community straining under heavy jizya and kharaj tribute, Copt history was burned with minority-status bitterness under Islam for more than a thousand years. (Page 119)
Despite downplaying the tragic history of Coptic-Muslim relations, Esposito and Lalwani do, howver, describe the recent acts of violence against Copts with appropriate alarm:
Interestingly enough, the authors do not mention the attack that killed several dozen Christians in Baghdad on Halloween 2010. Most people intent on addressing the mistreatment of Christians under Muslim rule would at least mention this attack to lend weight to their assertion that Christians in Muslim-majority societies are not safe. Why not mention it along with the many other acts of violence against Christians they describe in their piece?
In describing the Egyptian response to the New Year’s Day attack on Coptic Christians, Esposito and Lalwani report that
Egyptian outrage over the attack was profound and indeed Egyptian Muslims did show up to serve as human shields during Christmas Eve services. What the authors fail to report is that Coptic Christians had been subject to a persistent campaign of defamation, incitement and acts of violence by Muslim extremists in the months before the attack, which was left unchallenged by religious and political leaders in Egypt. Writing in the Huffington Post, Kathryn Cameron Porter provides some detail:
Back in November, Al Qaeda in Iraq issued a statement threatening the Copts of Egypt after Al Qaeda’s massacre of a central Baghdad church. In response, the Egyptian government renounced such threats and vowed to protect Copts from Al Qaeda. Apparently that vow did not protect the Copts from their own government, from their fellow Egyptians, or from any external threats.
Egyptian state security forces were quick to act against their own citizens when Coptic Christians in Giza, Cairo, attempted to finish the construction of a church on November 24, 2010. On that day, the Copts, defending themselves with bricks and stones, were met with tear gas, “rubber” bullets, and possibly live ammunition. Two Copts were killed, dozens were injured and at least 156 arrested at the hands of state “security” forces.
So where was Egyptian state security on New Year’s Eve?
The Egyptian government has freely allowed country-wide protests over the last 4 months against the Copts, with protesters shouting false accusations and attacks against Pope Shenouda, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church. These protests involved rock throwing, barricading roads leading to churches, and unsubstantiated accusations that churches and monasteries were storing weapons and kidnapping Muslim women to force their conversion. There were little if any security forces or policemen at these events.
Attackers of Coptic Christians in Egypt attack them with impunity. The shooter of six Copts and one Muslim guard on January 7, 2010 following the Christmas service at a Coptic Orthodox Church in Naga Hammadi was sentenced yesterday after a yearlong delay of the trial. No one has been punished for the burning down of 20 Christian homes and shops in the Qena Province of Egypt by an angry Muslim mob this past November.
Further undermining confidence in Ahmed Al-Tayeb’s to the rights of Christians is his condemnation of Pope Benedict XVI for calling for the protection of Coptic rights in Egypt. In response to a modulated statement from the Pope, Al-Tayeb accused the Pontiff of meddling in Egypt’s internal affairs. (Interestingly enough, this went unreported in Esposito and Lalwani’s piece as well.)
False Equivalence
In one section of their article, Esposito and Lalwani offer a false equivalence between Muslim extremists and their Christian and Jewish counterparts. They write:
Majorities of Muslims and Christians embrace religious diversity. However, a significant minority of hard-line conservative, fundamentalist, and militant Muslims -- like their counterparts in Christianity and Judaism -- are not pluralistic, but rather strongly exclusivist in their attitudes toward other faiths and even fellow believers with whom they disagree. As recent events in Egypt and Pakistan illustrated, these myopic religious worldviews can turn ugly.
Yes, on an abstract or theoretical level, Christians and Jews, do represent a threat to civil society and international peace, but on an empirical level, there is simply no comparison between Muslim extremists and their counterparts in Judaism and Christianity.
The authors also fail to provide any specific data to demonstrate that majorities of Muslim embrace religious diverity. In fact, a recent survey of public opinion conducted by the Pew Research Center reports that “Majorities of Muslims in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and Nigeria say they would favor [of making] the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion the law in their country.” The Pew survey indicates:
In sum, the problem of Muslim rejection of pluralistm is bigger than Esposito and Lalwani are able to acknowledge and does not merely represent a threat to the fabric of Muslim societies. As the Pew data indicates, in some countries at least, it is part of the fabric itself.
