What the Taming of Christian Spaces Reveals about Egypt’s Security Complex

For fifteen days every August, Egypt's Coptic Christian community celebrates one of its most popular religious festivals, the mulid[1] of the Virgin Mary. During this festival, thousands of Coptic pilgrims including families, church groups, and religious organizations travel to the Virgin Mary Monastery in the Dronka Mountains of Asyut for spiritual blessings and celebratory activities. The excitement and energy of the festival usually begins at the bottom of the mountain with vendors offering entertainment, refreshments, tattoo stations, and religious gifts for purchase. As pilgrims scale the mountain, they are met with opportunities for spiritual engagement through sermons, religious music, and prayer at shrines.

According to tradition, the monastery marks the farthest south the Holy Family is said to have sojourned in Egypt while fleeing persecution—a theme that reverberates with Copts today.

Terror attacks and sectarian violence against Christians in Egypt has increased in recent years with over five hundred incidents reported since 2013 by Eshhad.[2] At the end of 2016 and into 2017, some of these attacks received greater international attention such as the ISIS bombing of St. Mark's Coptic Cathedral in Cairo, the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Church, in December 2016 and the Palm Sunday suicide bombings in Tanta and Alexandria in April 2017.[3]  Since then, the mulid of the Virgin Mary has come under greater securitization and surveillance. Researcher Mina Ibrahim observed how the feast in 2017 was noticeably different from previous years of “unstructured and unsupervised activity”[4] as new security protocols restricted the scope of activities permitted at the monastery.[5]

Efforts to domesticate the Virgin Mary mulid extend beyond securing Christian spaces and represent a microcosm of broader state policies in Egypt. The dependence on securitization demonstrates not only how the state manages the Coptic question, but also how it responds to threats to its authority.  As we will discover, the growing monopoly of the security regime under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi actually jeopardizes long-term solutions to stability in Egypt and makes the country less safe for Copts.

Marian Devotions and Metal Detectors

This year’s mulid required inspection at least three security checkpoints before entry into the monastery’s religious complex.[6] While the security screening included a customary process of placing belongings through a baggage scanner and walking through a metal detector, it also included more informal mechanisms of assessing potential threats. For instance, security personnel profiled visitors on physical indicators of their religious affiliation—from asking parishioners to show their Coptic cross tattoos to detaining young women in hijabs for further screening.

When I arrived at the monastery grounds at 3 am on a Sunday morning, a security official at the first checkpoint told me that reviewing my ID was not necessary because I was a woman (presumably, a non-Muslim-looking woman). Meanwhile, my Egyptian travel companion was detained for several hours at the checkpoints on account of the “Muslim” designation on his Egyptian identification card. He was initially prohibited from entering the complex in spite of his press credentials and assignment to cover the festival for his media outlet.

These expressions of suspicion also reflect a collective fear within the Coptic clerical establishment to religious outsiders. Although Pope Tawadros II frequently evokes the history of religious co-existence in Egypt[7], growing isolation and protection of Christian spaces have become more exclusive of their Muslim neighbors. Whereas previous mulid celebrations were open to Muslim and Christians alike, the celebration of the Virgin Mary as one of the few spaces inclusive of both communities of faith has come under greater scrutiny from both the Patriarchate and the state.[8]

Securing the Sacred

This expanding securitization of the mulid exposes a fundamental contradiction in the current Egyptian security regime. Following the church attack in 2016 and on the heels of additional violence against Copts during 2017, President Sisi imposed a nationwide state of emergency as part of its counter-terrorism strategy to protect Christians.[9] The state’s solution to ensure Coptic safety since has been to increase military and security presence at churches and respond to terror attacks with swift demonstrations of force.[10] Although security consultation occurs between the Patriarchate and security forces, Egyptian Christians rarely hold positions in the security sector.[11]

The oversized role of the military and security apparatus in Egypt means that exclusion from these sectors creates a dilemma for Copts who are not decision-makers in policies that directly affect their safety. According to Michael Hanna, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, this scenario inculcates “paternalistic and patronizing attitudes in which the state is tasked with dealing with and protecting a marginalized minority community that sits separate and apart from political and coercive power.”[12] The absence of Coptic participation only serves to marginalize their standing as equal citizens and neglects their shared interest in an effective security policy.

In addition to the exclusion of Copts from state security roles, there is little indication that securitization has mitigated the violence and may have even contributed to prejudices against Christians. Some Egyptians and outside observers point to Coptic support for Sisi in exchange for protection as a factor in the state-led crackdown on civil liberties in Egypt.[13] They point to the lack of accountability and transparency in the state’s retaliatory attacks on targets suspected of carrying out terror attacks on Copts and consider this strategy as a way the state justifies its expansion of unchecked executive power.

Militant groups responsible for targeting Copts also use the state’s protectorate role as rationale for their violence against Egypt’s Christian minority. In the aftermath of an attack against Christian pilgrims in Minya, the Los Angeles Times pointed to how the Islamic State “repeatedly vowed to go after Egypt’s Christians as punishment for their support of President Abdel Fattah Sisi.”[14] While these arguments have been rightfully critiqued by writers as victim-blaming[15] and justifying violence against Copts, the prevalence of this narrative demonstrates how state reliance on the security apparatus worsens the situation for Christians.

According to Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) researcher Ishak Ibrahim, the state’s default to securitize over other methods of mitigating violence has additional consequences for the Coptic community. In 2017, EIPR published a report on legislation passed by the Egyptian House of Representatives on church construction where Ibrahim notes that “the task of regulating church construction” was relegated “almost exclusively to the security apparatus.”[16] Security forces are now not only responsible for protecting houses of worship, but are also charged with assessing social risk for church construction, renovation, and regulation. In other words, security officials are charged with extensive authority over a host of issues that determines Coptic communal safety, a dynamic the report decries as “a recipe for the reproduction of sectarian violence.”[17]

Before early evening mass at the Virgin Mary monastery on 18 August, an altercation occurred between volunteer security and mulid visitors over the photography of Christian women working an ice cream station. A group of young Coptic men scrutinized photographs taken by a professional photographer of scenes depicting young women, albeit without showing their faces, serving ice cream to parishioners. Although no official rule prohibits the photography of women at the monastery, the reaction of mulid volunteers demonstrates how even the Coptic laity internalize mistrust and suspicion inherent within the logic of securitization.

This is a particularly stark divergence from the environment of the Virgin Mary celebrations prior to 2017. A Mada Masr photo essay published in 2016 recounts the experiences of seven photographers from both Christian and Muslim backgrounds at the monastery during the festival. According to Egyptian photographer Ahmed Gaber, his perspective of the mulid was shaped by the co-existence and participation of both faith communities, noting: “I have not seen Christians in Muslim mulids, but here there were Muslims, and people were very welcoming to photographers.”[18] Indeed, one of the most significant shifts since 2017 is the barring of Muslims from celebrating with their Christian co-nationals in Asyut. The introduction of a new security regime at the mulid contributes to the creation of new sectarian geographies.

The safety of Coptic persons and property cannot be guaranteed through exclusive reliance on the security state, in part because the social consequences of securitization worsen the conditions that lead to Christian insecurity. While protecting houses of worship and religious events are an important part of a long-term solution, a sustainable strategy demands changes in education, employment practices, and respect for personal status laws that have long been neglected. Addressing the pervasive social, economic, and political discrimination against Copts in Egypt requires strategies that metal detectors, armored vehicles, and guns cannot solve.