Happy Coptic Christmas

Despite the biblical references to the Holy Family's journey to Egypt: Take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt [Matt: 2:13], and Out of Egypt have I called my son [Matt: 2:15], outside of the Coptic communities around the world, the early years of Jesus are not as widely known as the Nativity, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Is it not time to stage a three-act play in Coptic churches that combines the Nativity with the Flight into Egypt? It should be borne in mind that, apart from Copts in Egypt and the Middle East as a whole, there are more than 500,000 in the United Sates, 100,000 or in Canada, 300,000- odd in Australia, and more than a million residing in Europe, Latin America, Africa and New Zealand.

If the children of Coptic doctors and academics, engineers and businessmen -- and I should mention that Copts in the diaspora have built impressive Coptic Orthodox churches and the bulk are regular church-goers -- took part in or attended such a play, I wager that soon enough the schools that they attended would come to know about the three-act "Christmas Story", and perhaps it would then be enacted in churches of other denominations. What a boost to tourism that would be!

THE COPTS AND CITIZENSHIP: This approach to the Coptic question is based on the premise that the Copts are, first and foremost, citizens and members of the Egyptian national community. The Copts are not a separate group or closed entity. Nor are they sociologically or politically homogenous. They are spread across the social scale, include labourers, peasants and craftsmen, practitioners of the liberal professions and businessmen. They are bound only by their affiliation to Egypt and their religious affiliation, with regard to both of which their interests, attitudes and opinions will vary. Citizenship is thus the prime governing factor for all Egyptians, regardless of the differences between them. Citizenship, here, can be defined as people's daily collective exercise and pursuit of their social, economic, cultural and political rights on the basis of equality, without discrimination of any sort. It also involves inclusion in the electoral processes that determine how public resources and national wealth are shared.

Four decades of religious tension have precipitated many problems. Their combined result has been to demote citizenship in favour of religious affiliation. Egyptian society has been re-categorised on a religious basis, and public and political spaces have become an almost entirely religious sphere. We should not, however, allow these protracted tensions to divert us from our approach to the Coptic question based on the definition of citizenship outlined above. We need to look at current trends as the product of socio-economic causes and as a deviation from the concrete achievements Egyptians have made together, proceeding from the notion that existing tensions oblige us to consider the Coptic question in a context that includes the problems of the Egyptian people as a whole. It is, after all, impossible to speak of the citizenship of one class of people without conditions of citizenship first being established for the people as a whole.