By Jared Malsin – The Guardian UK –
As a boy growing up in a country where football is a national passion, Mina Fayek joined a youth programme at a local sports club in the wealthy Cairo neighbourhood of Heliopolis. He started training, but one day he overheard his coach make an offhand remark: no Christians would join the first team, or make it to the championships.
“My parents and I knew this is not going anywhere, and I had to choose another game,” Fayek, 26, a software engineer and blogger, recalled. He tried handball and basketball, two sports seen as more acceptable for Egyptian Christians to play.
Fayek, an affable young man, believes his social status shielded him from the worst forms of persecution inflicted on poorer Egyptian Christians. Instead, he was subject to a more subtle form of discrimination: the sense that the highest echelons of power and status in his country were off limits because of his religion.
During his 13 months of compulsory military service, he trained soldiers and officers in computer skills. As a Coptic Christian, he knew he could never serve in the intelligence branch. No Christians sit on the supreme council of armed forces.
“It pushes you to feel disengaged from your country,” Fayek said. “How could someone maintain his love for his country – and be passionate about building it – while at the same time he can’t be whatever he wants to be, whether a military commander or a police commander.”
Egypt is home to the largest Christian community in the Middle East, with the Copts widely estimated to be about 10% of the population. The exact figure is a matter of dispute, with the government and Coptic church offering varying estimates. In spite of a history of cooperation between the church and the Egyptian state, Copts today say they face both official discrimination and the threat of violent attacks by militants.
Numerous Egyptian Copts participated in the 2011 uprising that removed President Hosni Mubarak from power, and Copts have been targets of violence at key moments in the turbulent years since then. In October 2011, 28 people were killed when the military attacked a crowd of mainly Coptic demonstrators outside the state TV building in Cairo (Maspero).
Sectarian attacks peaked in August 2013 in the wake of state crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood after the removal of the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. Crowds of men attacked at least 42 churches across the country in a massive assault blamed on Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood denied responsibility for the attacks.
Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, the former military chief who led Morsi’s removal, has vowed to fight extremism and launch a new era of religious unity. Many ordinary Copts and the official church are vocal in their support for Sisi. But some Coptic analysts are concerned about both security and the prospects for Copts’ civil rights.
“You’re getting attacked now by extremists and by security, so in addition to the old-time discrimination in state bodies. It’s getting worse,” said Fayek.
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Photo: Relatives of an abducted Coptic Christian weep outside their home in the village of el-Aour, south of Cairo. Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP
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