By Uzay Bulut –
The European Parliament recently approved a financial assistance package for Egypt worth €4 billion, despite the country’s ongoing persecution of the Christian population.
Following a recent appeals court ruling in Cairo, the Egyptian government will seize the historic Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine and evict its community of monks to convert the site into a state-run tourist attraction. The decision is the latest chapter of a land claim case first filed in 2012.
The Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine, situated among the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, is the world’s oldest continuously active monastery. The monastery is located where the Hebrew Bible records that Moses saw the burning bush and received the Ten Commandments.
According to the Library of Congress,
The Orthodox Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai was constructed by the Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, in the late sixth century AD over the relics of the martyred saint and the place of the biblical burning bush as identified by St. Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor, Constantine.
It is home to reputedly the oldest continuously run library in existence today. Its holdings of religious and secular manuscripts are legendary and allegedly second only in number to the collection held by the Vatican.
Archbishop Damianos of Sinai, Pharan, and Raitho, Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai spoke to the National Herald about the recent developments at the monastery. These events have reached the brink of eviction as a result of an Egyptian court ruling that considers the Abbot and the entire Sinai Brotherhood as ‘squatters,’ disregarding their continuous presence over fifteen centuries. Currently, 18 to 20 monks reside at the monastery.
Archbishop Damianos stated:
For over ten years now, we have been in and out of court, because our right of ownership over this barren land—which we always considered ours, handed down to us by sanctified individuals—is being denied.
The authorities, particularly the Antiquities Service, tell us that yes, you may use them, but they belong to us. … Now they say we have no right to manage them.
I am 91 years old today and I have lived in the Monastery since the age of 27—you can imagine the pain in my heart.
When asked what will happen now that the court has issued an eviction order, the Archbishop said:
It is judicial manipulation. Back in 1980, the government declared that in areas without a land registry, property owners should file declarations. The Monastery was among the first to submit such declarations …Twenty years later, the Egyptian state tells us it’s too much, or this or that excuse—and in the end, we were given nothing. Now they tell us: ‘You have no right to be here; you are newcomers,’ when we have lived in Sinai since the sixth century.
We got caught up in unrest, during the period of fanatic Muslim uprisings, and they began to see us as invaders, as if we had recently purchased these lands, as many others have done illegally.
Archbishop Damianos also stated, “The authorities accuse us of usucapion (adverse possession) and are even demanding payment for it. At this moment, there is no lawyer in Egypt who speaks Greek or is Greek to defend us.”
On May 29th, Greek MEP Emmanouil Fragkos submitted a motion for a resolution that would link the macroeconomic support to Egypt with the protection of the centuries-old and venerable status of the Greek Monastery of St Catherine.
Another Greek MEP, Nikolas Farantouris, also took action at the European Parliament to help stop the seizure of the monastery. He said:
No four billion euros to Egypt without respect for Mount Sinai. … I call on my colleagues not to vote in favor of new funding as long as the ownership status of Mount Sinai remains unresolved.
Yet, on June 18, the European Parliament approved a provisional agreement reached with the Council on a macro-financial assistance (MFA) package for Egypt worth €4 billion.
Lindsay Rodriguez, the Director of Development and Advocacy of the organization Coptic Solidarity, told europeanconservative.com:
The El-Sisi government’s narrative of improving religious freedom, compared to the year of Morsi’s rule, is proven vacuous. Take, for example, the legal proceedings against St. Catherine’s Monastery. These were initiated under Morsi’s short (one year) rule, but have continued since 2013, and turned into outright harassment under El-Sisi’s purview.
El-Sisi has given a convoluted message by making a verbal agreement to Greek authorities all while anticipating the court ruling (keeping in mind that judiciary in Egypt is far from ‘independent’), which contravenes the monastery’s historical ownership and its protected status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. To have any credibility, the Egyptian government should immediately end all legal proceedings against St. Catherine’s Monastery and return to the status quo ante. Anything less demonstrates a premeditated, vicious plan to overtake the monastery, in part or whole, when the world’s attention fades.
The seizure of the monastery is part of a broader pattern of Christian persecution in Egypt. It stands in clear contrast to how mosques are dealt with, as the building of new churches is restricted in the country. According to the organization Open Doors, which monitors Christian persecution on a global scale,
In Egypt, Christians of all backgrounds face difficulties when trying to find (new) places for holding worship. Communal hostility and mob violence, in particular, continue to cause difficulties.
The security services also actively detain and intimidate Christian converts from Islam in order to make them stay silent about their conversion, while the state makes it impossible for them to obtain any official recognition of their conversion.
Church leaders are particularly vulnerable to rights violations, in part as they are often easily identifiable as Christians. Whilst uncommon, the killing of clergy does occur; for instance, in April 2022 when an Orthodox priest in Alexandria was stabbed to death.
In Egypt, Islamic oppression operates in a variety of ways. Islamic culture sustains a view in Egyptian society whereby Christians are regarded as second-class citizens. This view causes the discrimination of Christians in the political realm and in their dealing with the state.
Sharia law is “the principle source of legislation,” according to the Constitution. Article 7 designates the al-Azhar University, the most prominent educational institution within the Sunni Islamic world, to have “main authority for religious sciences, and Islamic affairs.” The university’s head has repeatedly stated that the death sentence is the only possible punishment for anyone leaving Islam.
Open Doors concludes that Egypt is not fulfilling its international obligations by regularly violating or failing to protect the rights of Christians.
Today, Egypt is a predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking country. But it is the Coptic Christians who are the indigenous people of Egypt, not Arab Muslims. Copts identify as the remaining descendants of the civilization of the ancient Egyptians, with Pharaonic origins, according to their genetics as well as the evolution of their language and traditions.
Egyptian Greeks have also existed in the country from the Hellenistic period until today. The Greek presence has continued in Egypt from the rule of Alexander the Great (332–323 BC), to the Greek Ptolemaic Empire (323–30 BC) and later to the Roman and Byzantine rule until today. In the aftermath of the Egyptian coup d’état of 1952, however, most were forced to leave.
Egypt was part of the Roman and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empires from 30 BC to 642 AD. Saint Mark the Evangelist, who wrote the earliest of the four New Testament Gospels, was the founder and first bishop of the Church of Alexandria in Egypt. This occurred before the Church of Rome was established.
The process of the Islamization and arabization of Egypt started when Muslim arabs invaded Byzantine Egypt in 641 and conquered the province. They massacred many Christians, forcibly converting many to Islam, and turning the rest into dhimmis, second-class citizens who paid high jizya taxes to remain Christian.
Academic researcher Mark Basta explains:
Throughout the different dynasties, Arab leadership treated the Coptic population with various amounts of discrimination that started from radical increases in taxes and up to full-scale massacres.
From 1517 to 1914, Egypt was under Ottoman Turkish occupation. The Minority Rights Group notes:
The Copts were persecuted by their Muslim rulers, in turn Arab, Circassian and Ottoman. Churches were destroyed, books burnt, and elders imprisoned. By the time the British had taken Egypt in 1882, Copts had been reduced to one-tenth of the population, mainly as a result of centuries of conversion to Islam.
Arab Muslims governed Christians and Jews according to the rules of Islamic Sharia. According to Islamic law, they were viewed as dhimmi, i.e., non-Muslims granted a special status in return for paying a heavy poll tax. They had to wear different colors and clothes from Muslims, could not build new places of worship or repair old ones without permission, or construct them in such a way as to overshadow those of Muslims. With the Arabization of governmental positions, Coptic clerks sought to study Arabic and teach it to their children, given the tradition of inheriting jobs. There was a gradual change to the use of Arabic, with the Coptic language being abandoned except as a liturgical language, and many Copts converted to Islam.
Centuries after the Islamic takeover of Egypt, the Christian persecution remains ongoing.
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