Fearful Egyptian Christians Look for Safe Haven in Muslim Regime

Sunday’s violence at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo is part of a general collapse of security in Egypt, and evidence that the ruling Muslim Brotherhood is unable to manage the country, said Alfred Raouf, a Christian computer engineer and founding member of Al Dostour, an Egyptian opposition party based on secular principles.

“All this sectarian tension is the product of the (former Presidents) Sadat and Mubarak … who allowed the Islamists to preach hate” of Christians and other non-Muslims, Raouf said. The tension, he said, affects all of Egyptians, Muslim and Christian.

“I don’t think Christians are suffering more than Muslims,” he said.

Measured in applications to leave Egypt, the distress is being felt by all Egyptians, according to a European diplomat based in Cairo. Speaking on condition of anonymity, she said it was “most likely” a desire for security and economic well-being that had led to an increased demand at her embassy for visas she said were being sought by “Christians as well as Muslims.” 

She declined to say how many requests her embassy had received recently, or how they could be religiously broken down, but she insisted it was “too easy” to assume Christians were leaving due to religious persecution, suggesting they, as their Muslim compatriots, were seeking “better security and economic opportunities” in other countries, including hers.

There are no official figures for how many Christians have left Egypt since the revolution, though estimates range as high as in the tens of thousands.

“When there is no clarity, rumors abound,” said Ibrahim Isaac Sedrak, Patriarch of Egypt’s estimated 250,000 Coptic Catholics. “There are those saying hundreds of thousands, others saying thousands, but there are people leaving, this we know—and not only Christians, Muslims are leaving as well.”

He and other Christian leaders, including Pope Tawadros, have publicly called on their communities “not to be afraid,” and to “pray for stability and peace in the homeland.” But some have also admitted that convincing their communities to stay is becoming harder to do.

“I don’t have what is needed to convince them not to travel abroad,” Sedrak said. “All I can do is to tell them we are here in our country, (and) we have a message. Yes, we have difficulties here, but there are difficulties outside too.”

Salah, a 35-year-old father of four, said it was hard to imagine a life more difficult than the one he already knows in Manshiyat Naser, the impoverished slum on the outskirts of Cairo where he lives among thousands of others of the city’s Christian garbage collectors.

Providing only his first name, Salah said Muslim thugs attacked the area in March 2011, after Christians there had protested the burning down of a church in another Cairo neighborhood a few days before. 

He recounted that military forces on hand had watched as the thugs looted and torched Christian homes in the violence.

“Houses burned, and families were destroyed and nine Christians were killed and I don’t know how many were wounded,” Salah said of the event, which local and international human rights groups documented at the time.

Afraid ever since, he has stopped collecting garbage outside the neighborhood, and tries to live off what he can make selling locally the coat hangers he produces from scrap plastic. He also gets occasional help with food from a church in the neighborhood.

Salah said one of his relatives has applied “20 times” for permanent resident status in the United States. He said he dreams of leaving too, but doesn’t think he’d be able. He is illiterate, he said, and raising his four young children alone, after his wife died giving birth three years ago.

“Many (Christians) want to leave,” Salah said, “but their possibilities are limited.”