A prayer for the Copts

Among the many heartening images coming from Egypt’s winter revolution in Tahrir Square was a photograph of a Muslim and a Copt holding up, respectively, a Koran and a crucifix. While the President of Iran, with motives that were all too plain, nervously hailed what had happened in Egypt as an ‘Islamic revolution’, many of the demonstrators vehemently contradicted him: ‘No — it is our democratic, secular revolution.’ Even spokesmen for the Muslim Brotherhood insisted that it had been a revolution made ‘by men and women, Muslims and Christians’.

Does this mean that the ancient Coptic community of Egypt — possibly 15 per cent of the population — has nothing to be afraid of? We might remember that the ancient Christian communities in Iraq are being persecuted virtually to extinction, thanks to the war unleashed by those fervent Christians, Blair and Bush, whereas they previously had enjoyed the protection of the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. The other country in the Middle East with the best record of protecting its Christian minorities — indeed, where they flourish — is the equally secular Baathist regime in Syria.

The Copts are intensely proud of their identity. In Aswan, Coptic children in a church — even in the street — were eager to show me the cross tattooed on their wrists. In a country where the hijab is almost universal, Coptic women go about unveiled. But Copts insist on their Egyptian patriotism. The Copts split from the larger Christian church in the fifth century because their emphasis on the divinity, rather than the humanity, of Christ was deemed heretical. Sick of persecution by the Greek emperors, they supported the Muslim-Arab invasion of Egypt.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

In much of the Middle East, the ancient Christian communities are subject to a creeping defamation of them as somehow foreign — even though Jesus Christ, unlike Mohammed, was a native of Palestine, knew Jerusalem intimately, and had lived in Egypt.