By Dr. Nabil Aziz Abdel Malek –
Unfortunately, this problem is not limited to Coptic girls being lured or coerced into conversion. It is bigger and interconnected with other issues, but its root lies in the discriminatory practices stemming from the position of Copts under Islamic Sharia. They are considered “Ahl al-Dhimma” or “People of the Book,” which in modern terms means “subjects” of the Islamic state, not “citizens,” and not members of the “Islamic Ummah.”
On this basis, these are legal (Sharia-based) concepts that cannot be ignored within such a “theocratic state,” since they are integral to the Islamic creed and also form the ideology of the state. Thus, the non-Muslim’s place falls outside the legal framework of the state—even if some constitutional texts mention citizenship—because those provisions clash with Islamic legal principles.
Therefore, regardless of contemporary discourse about human rights and minority rights, the “Islamic state,” in Islamic political thought, does not recognize equality before the law when non-Muslims are among the population of a country ruled by Muslims. They are considered merely subjects, visitors, or treaty-bound foreigners (like foreign workers).
Islamization Practices
As for Islamization processes, whether by deception or consent, in the past four decades they have turned into a systematic phenomenon. Islamic associations, backed by official institutions, organize them within a few days under the protection of security agencies. Once someone has become a Muslim, legally (that is, according to Sharia), leaving Islam is impossible. A convert risks being killed by extremists, while anyone who leaves Islam for another religion or to atheism is arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, and ostracized from society, unable to find work.
Thus, a Christian born to Christian parents suffers discrimination for life, while a Muslim who converts to Christianity faces persecution and discrimination of the harshest kind.
Escalation of Coptic Protests
In recent years, the rising number of forced disappearances of Coptic girls and their conversion to Islam has spread terror and grief among families and the entire Coptic community. It was natural for Copts to raise their voices on social media, expressing their anger, pain, and fear for their own lives amid other crimes occurring without security protection, with negligence—or even complicity—by some extremist elements within security agencies.
Historical Roots
Objectively speaking, the issue is now bigger and more dangerous than kidnappings, deception, or freedom of belief. Historically, Copts have suffered under the Islamic state from blatant discrimination in all sectors. Only occasionally—when necessary—were exceptions made, such as granting a high office or allowing the construction of a church. Even when a Copt was appointed minister, it was as often a “minister without portfolio.”
Some equality was achieved only after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, starting with Mohamed Ali’s reign, until the “Free Officers” coup in 1952. Since then, the situation worsened—especially under Sadat.
The danger today is even greater because the world in the 21st century has become a small global village, of diverse religions, ethnicities, and races. After two world wars came the establishment of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, followed by international treaties granting peoples and minorities political, economic, social, and cultural rights. Developed countries adopted them in their constitutions, and later many Third World states—including Arab and Islamic states—accepted them, but with reservations. They saw many freedoms and rights as contradictory to Islamic doctrines.
As a result, these states neither accept nor respect equality, justice, and rights for non-Muslims, nor even for Muslims and women.
Rise of Islamist Terrorism
From the early 1990s onward, the world witnessed the rise of terrorism cloaked in Islamic texts. This fueled Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, describing a conflict between the West, and the East and Islam. Although some Muslim intellectuals denied it, the rise of countless Islamist terrorist groups only confirmed the reality of this clash. Academic studies multiplied, analyzing causes and outcomes. Civil wars and social upheavals swept the Middle East, regimes collapsed in Africa, and Egypt itself endured waves of terrorism, embodied in power struggles between authoritarian regimes with Islamic legal cover, and radical Islamist groups.
Conclusion: A Global and National Struggle
This struggle is, in reality, a global conflict between secularism—based on democracy and cultural pluralism—and the Islamic state, which rejects democracy and pluralism in all cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic forms. All countries that resisted progress and global human development were destroyed.
The picture is now crystal clear in Egypt. The struggle continues between a crippled “semi-civil state” and political Islam entrenched within.
Here, the ugly face of discrimination against the Coptic Christian community resurfaces, hostile to the modern world and its humanitarian principles. Egypt today stands at a crossroads—and not only for the Copts. Change is inevitable, and the time is now—for Egypt, with its civilizational roots and its tolerant people. Without it, there can be no Egypt.
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Translated from: https://www.facebook.com/nabilaziz.abdelmalek
Nabil Abdel Malek is president of the Canadian-Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
