Islamist poll triumphs worry Christians

A year of revolutionary movements sparked by demands for democracy across the Arab world is giving way to governments led by Islamists, which are frightening beleaguered Christian communities.

The impact on people’s lives is apparent whether they are dealing with immediate crises or the consequences of longer term political change. Most Christians in Egypt are opting for quiet Christmas celebrations this year, to avoid provoking newly invigorated Islamists. The violence in Syria has prompted religious leaders to cancel public Christmas commemorations.

“Christmas is the 10th or 11th concern for people,” said Michel, a Syrian Christian and native of the besieged western city of Homs. “The first concern is to come back home alive. The second is to get heating oil. And the third is LPG for cooking ... Christmas? Everybody forgot about Christmas.”

In Egypt, Coptic Christians, who make up 10 per cent of the population and wholeheartedly took part in the February revolution, balk at the result, with political parties linked to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the puritanical Salafist movement winning nearly two-thirds of the popular vote in elections.

Syrian Christians’ initial scepticism about the uprising has only hardened as it has taken on an increasingly sectarian dimension, with a mostly Sunni opposition movement infused with an increasingly Islamist identity confronting a secular regime dominated by the Shia Allawite sect, which has generally protected Christians and other minorities.

Christian doubts about the Arab uprising were voiced by the head of Lebanon’s Maronite community, Patriarch Bishara Boutros al-Rai, who stunned some of his supporters in October by praising the autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad as “open-minded” and urging parishioners to give him more time to implement reforms. Democracy advocates in the Arab world were surprised. But Christians throughout the region understood.

“I was, at the beginning, a very big supporter of all the things happening in Syria. We all wanted to change this corrupted regime,” said Michel. “But we started to see a lot of things that we did not want to see,” he said, asking that his last name be withheld because of fears that publication would endanger his family. “We saw the rise of radicals in Syria. We thought we don’t have all these religious differences in Syria but apparently we do.”

Christian communities in the Arab world are generally small but influential, with strong ties to the west and generally higher than average levels of education and wealth.

Even before this year’s events there were signs that Arab Christians were retreating from public life. Sizeable Christian communities in the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Iraq have shrunk because of wars and a lack of opportunities.

Many had hoped that the Arab uprising would mark Christians’ re-emergence. Instead, the revolutions appear to have cowed Christians after unexpectedly strong performances of avowedly Islamist political parties in the Egyptian and Tunisian elections.

The newly dominant Islamists have gone to pains to insist that the rights of Christians and others would be protected under any future government. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood included some token Christian members in its political party. The newly elected Tunisian president, Moncef Marzouki, a secular leftist in a coalition headed by moderate Islamists, met leaders of his country’s Christian and Jewish communities last week, urging Jews who had emigrated to return.

But none of this has calmed suspicions about the Islamists’ agenda.

In Egypt, many Copts feel betrayed by the Islamists’ political manoeuvring. Immediately after the February ousting of Hosni Mubarak as president, several polls put the Brotherhood’s support at about a third of the electorate. The group’s leaders said they would not contest more than 50 per cent of seats and would not field a presidential candidate. Salafist groups originally expressed no interest in taking part in politics.

Instead, driven by competition between each other and possibly encouraged by foreign patrons, they took to electoral politics with fervour, trouncing the mostly secular young activists that led the revolution in a way that appears cynical and motivated by a lust for power. They won two-thirds of the vote. Their rise has poured salt on the wounds of Egyptian Christians who have yet to recover from a 2011 New Year’s mass bombing of a church in Alexandria, attempts by Islamists to destroy churches and a lethal clash between Coptic protesters and the army in October.

“There’s always been some kind of persecution toward us. It’s been more these days because of the rise of the Islamists,” said Christine Massis, a student of art and mass communications at the American University in Cairo. “I know a lot of people who are leaving the country because they are not in favour of what’s happening, because they’re scared. I won’t tell you I haven’t thought about leaving.”