ICC Note:
Among Coptic Christians in Egypt and America, there are mixed feelings of fear and excitement about Egypt’s future following the revolution.
By Pamela Constable
9/19/2011 Egypt (Washington Post) – With a new doctoral degree from Harvard and a stint at the World Bank behind her, Iris Boutros was mulling job offers in the international development field a few months ago.
But last week, she boarded a jet and headed instead into the maelstrom of post-revolutionary Egypt. She is jobless but determined to make a difference in her parents’ homeland, which shaped her identity as a Coptic Christian.
“I felt for the first time in my life that I had a chance to affect change,” Boutros said, sipping wine in an Adams Morgan cafe one evening shortly before leaving for Egypt. It would be her first visit to the country. “Many of our elders are afraid, and even some of my friends say I am insane to go back, but what’s the point of having all these fancy degrees if I don’t use them to help my own country?”
Boutros, 36, is on the far edge of an uneasy change that is sweeping the Washington region’s Copts as a swirl of horrific and hopeful events shakes their homeland. Over the past 30 years, the area’s Copts — a proud but insular group of about 3,000 Orthodox Christian immigrants from Egypt — have worked hard, educating their children, building quiet, mostly suburban lives, and establishing a solid niche in government and professional work.
Close-knit and church-centered, they have clung to an ancient faith and bewailed the suffering of family and friends back in Egypt, where Copts have long been a harassed minority in a nation that is 95 percent Muslim. At the same time, the community has faced new fears of persecution in the United States, from Islamic extremist groups and from suspicious Americans who might mistake them for Muslims.
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Now, however, the growing tumult in Egypt has made it impossible for many to remain aloof. Outraged by the Egyptian church bombing that killed 23 worshipers on New Year’s Eve, and galvanized by the generally peaceful pro-democracy rebellion that erupted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the community has found itself plunged into heated debates over where Egypt is headed, whether to join the fledgling local protest movement and how much the United States should intervene.
Some in the Coptic community, particularly the younger generation, envision a bright future for their ancestral homeland with the chance, at last, for true freedom.
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As more local Copts become engaged in the political and religious power struggles unleashed by the Arab Spring, they have been drawn into controversy at home. Many fear Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt are poised to dominate the revolution and coming elections, exposing Copts to more persecution.
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