The Egyptian government rushed to blame the attack in Alexandria on foreigners. However, only last November there were ferocious clashes between Copts and security forces over the ban on building a church in the governorship of Giza. What responsibilities does the Egyptian government have in encouraging the tension between Copts and Muslims?

I do not believe the Egyptian government is directly responsible for encouraging tension between Copts and Muslims. National unity, that can only be founded on harmony between religious majorities and minorities, is a guarantee for the very survival of the regime. It could instead be true that the security services underestimated the signs and clues (and I do not believe they intentionally ignored them) that could have led them to prevent the attack in Alexandria. The Copts’ perception that the government is prejudiced against them is probably a distorted perspective caused by feelings of frustration, isolation, and one might say persecution that Christians in Egypt experience with regards to the Muslim majority.

Does the New Year’s Eve attack threaten or paradoxically strengthen the stability of the Egyptian government?

It does both. On the one hand it can be perceived as a threat, since it risks sparking a religious civil war that could escape the control exercised by police and security forces. On the other hand, it could provide an opportunity for increasing public coercion measures that are one of the greatest obstacles on Egypt’s path to full democracy. I wish to emphasise that, in my opinion, the objective of the organisers of the attack in Alexandria, be they Egyptians or “foreigners,” was the destabilization of the Egyptian regime by fuelling ancient conflicts imbued with religion that could eventually turn into a civil war. The tones used by the Coptic community have been understandably raised and tense. However, I hope that the leaders of the Coptic Church will not fall into the trap prepared by these terrorists, be they affiliated to the elusive al-Qa’ida or members of radical endogenous schools of thought.

The flag used during the 1919 Egyptian revolution against British domination bore an Islamic Crescent Moon next to a Christian cross. What were relations between these two communities like? What factors have influenced the evolution of these relations?

Firstly, from a social and behavioural perspective of customs and habits, there are not substantial differences between Christians and Muslims. Values and traditions are part of a single Egyptian identity shared by the faithful of the various religious denominations. This leads one to believe that the current clashes between Christians and Muslims are surreptitious and the result more of political-economic issues or perceptive ones rather than religious in origin. Access to resources, career opportunities and success, the symbolic war between churches and mosques, the desire to state alleged cultural superiority one against the other, are all elements that spark conflicts that are at a later stage attributed to religious motivations. In 1919, the revolution was carried out by the liberal Wafd (“delegation”) party, which was a basically secular and interdenominational movement. The Wafd’s objective was to free Egypt of British colonial control and to achieve this Copts and Muslims joined forces. The paths of these two communities separated in the Seventies of the 20th Century, when Muslim extremism on one hand and Copt extremism on the other (during the Seventies Pope Shenuda III stimulated Coptic revenge activism that also resulted in very strong positions taken against Islam) and inevitably came into conflict. Of course, one can identify strictly religious motivations in these clashes, but the Coptic assertions were, and remain, mainly motivated by the persuasion that they suffer economic and political discriminaiton.

Speaking instead of Iraq, leaving aside attacks against Christians in recent months, does the new political-institutional organisation of the country protect or put at greater risk religious minorities?

I think that the extremely fragile and unstable Iraqi political situation is no guarantee for religious minorities. Not because governments are per se insensitive to the problems of minorities (one should bear in mind the attitude of Kurds to Kurds), but because they are not able to fully maintain security in the country. In such a context, those extremist fringes that, for example, fight Christians considering them unbelievers, (there are also Sunnis who fight against Shiites and Shiites who fight Sunnis on the basis of reciprocal accusations of unbelief), are able to take advantage of the Iraqi state’s structural weakness to put into practice their plans.

If one excludes the Lebanon, the other states in the Near East are founded on the basis of a secular national identity rather than on a denominational basis. Today instead, in countries such as Egypt and Iraq, denominational divisions seem to be emerging… If such a consideration is correct, can you provide us with elements to better understand this evolution?

It may seem a simplification, but I am sure that all this has roots in the defeat of secular and pan-Arab ideals, founded on nationalism and socialism, on which Middle Eastern states were founded at the time of decolonization (especially during the Fifties and the Sixties). The symbol of this evolution was Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956-1970). Nasser personified in both theory and practice the ideals of nationalism, socialism, pan-Arabism, a secular management of power, albeit within an ethical framework that referred to Islam, on which the independence and the route to modernity of a significant number of Arab and Middle Eastern states was based. When Nasserism was heavily defeated, even annihilated, during the Six Day War (June 1967), won by Israel over the Arabs, the devolution of secularism, nationalism and pan-Arabism opened the way for a return of Islamic forces. Social and economic factors, as well as intellectual ones and ideals, resulted in a radicalization of some Islamic schools of thought, to then reach the point of armed conflict by fringes that are, however, minorities in Islam. This led to an escalation in denominational divisions within countries (such as Iraq to a certain extent but above all Egypt) in which there was a significant Christian minority. Current regimes in Arab countries, albeit officially secular in most cases, have not been immune from a return to Islam that permeated society first and then the institutions.

Faced with the emigration of many Christians from the Middle East following the violence, millions of new believers, many of them Catholics, come from Asia and Africa often to work in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia. What effect has this presence had, or what effect will it have, on the social and political equilibrium in the region?

I believe that this will be effectively a negligible inflow. On one hand, immigrants in search above all of jobs and economic wellbeing, do not benefit in any way from emphasising their personal beliefs. On the other hand, they remain a minority in a region in which, as previously mentioned, there is a spreading of an Islamic consciousness that shows no sign of diminishing in the near future.

Translated by Francesca Simmons