Sectarian mongers

By Amr Elshobaki

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Everyone who lives in this country suffers from the usual array of problems: the poverty, the lack of political freedom and the social repression. Copts just as Muslims suffer from those common problems. But the Copts have a harder time of it. They have to cope with discrimination in certain government jobs. They have to deal with diminished religious freedom. And they have to live in a climate of stifling Islamic religiosity, a climate that can get ugly and inconsiderate to say the least.

Muslim and Coptic intellectuals are partly to blame. The Copts are reluctant to criticise their church, even when objective criticism is in order. And the Muslims fail to stop the ignorant and shallow trappings of religiosity. So in the absence of action by the intellectual elite, fanatics take over. When Nasser Seddiq Gadallah, a Copt, died in police custody, this wasn't a sectarian act. It was yet another evidence of wide-spread police brutality in this country. Gadallah's Muslim neighbours felt the same sadness for his tragic death as the Copts.

But someone had to turn the whole thing into a sectarian killing. Someone took the effort of calling Gadallah's widow to tell her that President Bush learned about what happened to her husband. Now there are victims of police brutality in this country everyday. Muslim victims think they are lucky when they can locate a journalist or a parliamentarian to talk to. Now the US president is on it, a sectarian monger claims. This is just great.

We have competence and brutality in this country. We live with corruption all the time. But not all acts of horror are necessarily sectarian. Yet, there are certain individuals who make a point of giving everything a sectarian veneer. Those people don't care for equality or reform. They may live in the West, but they haven't learned the first thing about democracy and human rights. All they care for is fanaticism and bigotry, just as any of the fascist and Nazi groups that inhabit that murky zone on the fringe of Western societies.

This week's Soapbox speaker is an analyst at the

Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.