To many fanatics in our country, Christians are seen as the secret ingredient in every conspiracy being cooked against Islam.
We weren’t always like this. In the 1940s, before the military coup of Nasser, Egypt was one of the most diverse nations in the region, a true melting pot of religions and ethnicities, but something happened along the line. Was it the huge infusion of Saudi money into Egypt? Or maybe it was when military authorities thought it easier to use religion to mass-control people with shitty lives? What’s better than looking forward to a second life with a heaven full of booze and women, both of which you can’t get in your current life? Or maybe it is the very nature of military rule: they hate diversity and they don’t know how to deal with it, so the best thing is to make everyone as homogeneous as the uniforms in their training camps.
The truth is, we pretend to be tolerant until we are really not.
Life was not that fair for Christians even before the Islamists acquired majority rule in the parliament. Under Mubarak they had their own share of inequality, which included official unequal representation in the government and not being able to build their own churches without going through a convoluted mess of bureaucratic red tape.
It was normal for Christians to hear hateful speeches against them during Friday prayer sermons blasted through the microphones from mosques near their homes. The Wahhabi sheikhs indoctrinated generations with myths about Christians, ranging from what they put in their food to how they fornicate. Discrimination against Christians is a common practice across the Arab and Islamic worlds, and to some extent is not necessarily a religious thing. It is more of an authority thing. You see, the more open and inclusive a society is, the more free and expressive their citizens. An authoritarian regime, whether military or religious, doesn’t want diversity. Having masses of people who think the same, talk the same, and hate the same is much easier for maintaining control.
So when Muslims worry about Trump becoming president and how he will deal with Muslims, they are just worried they will be treated the same way they treat non-Muslims in their countries. Like shit.
Again, like Muslims in America, Egyptian Christians are told from a very young age to keep to themselves. Even their grand priests have that mind-set of avoiding anything that might piss off the government. But after the revolution many people changed, and many of the Christian youth became more involved in politics and protests.
In October 2011, Christians took to the streets on their own, which is stupid if you are a Christian living in Egypt. They were out to demand more equality and better political reform. It was a huge, peaceful march, the first of its kind in Egypt.
It was also the last.
After their long march the Christians stopped and assembled around the state television building. In the Arab world television buildings are even more secure than the presidential palace. This dates to a long tradition in which Arab coups could simply take control of the television and radio stations, announcing the new leader as president, and people could go on with their merry lives.
On that day twenty-six Christians were killed by the army’s soldiers and tanks.
The tragedy was not limited to the huge death toll. Another tragedy was in how the media covered it. “Copts were attacking military units,” said the anchor on the state-run television news. “We implore the honorable citizens to protect its army against the vile attack.”
But this was actually a turning point in the course of the revolution, both because the death toll at this march was the largest number of civilians to die in one day since the beginning of the revolution and because the killing took place in front of the cameras and at the hands of the ruling authorities. Unfortunately, from here on out, death turned into a daily statistic. A week after this incident I was interviewed by a reporter who asked me what I thought about what had happened. I told him that an entire revolution had erupted because one kid was tortured to death in a police station. One death. Now death had become very easy to swallow. What was a couple more? When the military turned people into discarded commodities, there was no telling how high the death toll could climb.
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER THIS INCIDENT, SEVENTY-FOUR FOOTBALL fans were killed during a riot at a football game. This appeared to be premeditated murder, chaos initiated by unknown thugs while the fans were caged in and left to die.
There were many speculations about how and why it happened. One theory was that the fans of this club (Al Ahly, the biggest club in Egypt and Africa) were the most vocal against authority. They chanted against police in their matches and had an active part in the demonstrations against the police and army.
The true explanation still remains a mystery, but the way the police managed the crisis, the fact that “shady” known criminals were allowed into the stadium, and how the fans were trapped there and left to die hardly made it appear like a “normal” sports riot. Nothing was adding up.
I didn’t comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy until the next day when I looked outside the window of my office. Right across from our building stood one of the biggest mosques in Cairo with more than three thousand people standing outside it. These were the friends and family of some of the deceased waiting for the bodies to come out after the funeral prayers.
I found myself going downstairs and walking toward the crowd. As I was in the middle of it, deafening silence overcame me. This felt like a scene from a black-and-white avant-garde French movie where everything was in slow motion. One kid raised his head and recognized me, then another and another. No one rushed to ask me for a photo or a selfie as per usual. One man silently walked toward me and put his hand on my shoulder. “We need you to avenge us,” he said somberly. “You are the only one that speaks in our voice.”
I had no idea what to do. I was a satirist, for crying out loud, and now I was called upon for help? What had I gotten myself into?
The sad thing was, this was not the last horrific incident that made satire and laughter inappropriate. For the next couple of years, I was repeatedly called insensitive and rude for trying to make people laugh while there was blood in the streets.
When we broadcast the following week, people were still in mourning and none of the media outlets rose to the occasion. I decided to change my attire. Instead of wearing a suit I wore a black T-shirt that was designed for the victims of the football game massacre. We aired the episode in black-and-white and featured a video by the minister of defense at that time, who instead of accepting responsibility went out and insinuated that there were evil agents against the “Egyptian people.” The same way Trump insinuated that the “Second Amendment people” could consider assassinating Hillary Clinton, the minister of defense asked the “honorable Egyptians” to go after activists and “traitors living amongst us.” I mocked his comments and even used a logo that said “Lying Soldiers,” which became popular after all the atrocities committed by the army. By using this logo I was basically putting the blame on the military, who were hiding behind an interim government. They were the ones running the show. They were the ones who killed the Christians directly, they were the ones who killed the football fans, and they took on the people in Tahrir Square indirectly through the police.
This episode stirred huge controversy. My mom called me screaming, “How dare you call them liars!”
“Mom, I didn’t say that,” I replied.
“I am not stupid, you used the logo,” she answered.
“Well, I—”
“The army is the only standing institution in this country. We would be lost without it. Show some respect.”
She’d already had a fight with me because I had indirectly attacked the army a few weeks earlier when they crushed the Christians under their tanks. My mom believed the army’s story that the soldiers were defending themselves against those “Christian criminals.” To my mom and her generation, the army could do no wrong.
And that was the core of the problem. The army was indeed much more sacred than religion, and was not allowed to be slandered in any way. Islam might have entered Egypt fifteen hundred years ago, but for seven thousand years before that Egypt was owned by an army.