Copts pave the road ahead
BY MAI SHAMS EL-DIN Cairo: “It saddens me to be asked to protect Coptic rights,” President Mohamed Morsi told a delegation of clergymen in the presidential palace soon after he was elected the country’s first civilian president. But the gesture did little to quell the Coptic community’s fears. After Morsi’s victory over Mubarak’s last prime minister Ahmed Shafik, who arguably garnered most of the Coptic vote, fears of the dominance of the Muslim Brotherhood group to which Morsi belongs are mounting among Egypt’s Copts. To many observers, the Coptic community emerged more as an organized and politicized force than a…
Not my president
BY JOSEPH FAHIM My name is Joseph. I’m a liberal Coptic Christian writer. Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s newly elected president, does not represent me, nor does he represent the 10 million Christians who refused to vote for him, or his party, at this month’s presidential election. Mohamed Morsi is not my president, and he’ll never be. Like millions of Christians, I sat home on the day Morsi’s victory was announced, watching the festivities in Tahrir Square from a distance, overwhelmed with a sense of alienation. How did it go so wrong? How did we allow ourselves to compromise so much? Unlike…
