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AS the presidential elections in Egypt wound up and President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the leading candidate, a section of the Egyptian population watched in trepidation.
Egypt’s Coptic Christians, an ancient minority and a sizeable 10 per cent of the electorate, have in recent years struggled to express their religious identity. One law from the 19th century made it impossible for them to build or even repair churches, requiring a presidential petition for even the most nondescript place of worship. Other forms of discrimination, social and cultural, persisted as well.
Post-Mubarak Egypt did not offer much hope either. Last October, the Egyptian city of Alexandria saw Coptic churches being burned, prompting hundreds of rioters to take to the streets. A New Year bombing in 2011 killed more than 20 Copts.
A report produced by Coptic rights activists and presented before the Helsinki Commission in July this year alleged an ongoing escalation of violence against Coptic Christians, with girls from the community often drugged, kidnapped and then sexually assaulted. In one case, the report notes, the abductor threatened onlookers from interfering as the kidnapped girl was ‘an enemy of Islam’.
Given this picture, it is unsurprising that many among the Egyptian Coptic community have chosen to leave Egypt, seeing little in the country’s march towards an Islamist government that would respect their rights or ensure protection for their community.
With few concrete answers or plans regarding the position of Coptic Christians in a post-Mubarak Egypt, and the possibility of persecution becoming ever more real, the ranks of those trickling into the Coptic diaspora in the United States and Europe increased.
It is this legacy that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the 55-year-old Coptic Christian held responsible for the pejorative film Innocence of Muslims, carried with him to Los Angeles.
The film, aesthetically crude and obnoxiously derogatory, has been responsible for some deaths and scores of protests across the Muslim world. According to reports released after he was questioned by the FBI, Nakoula — who had been involved with right-wing Christian organisations in southern California — spearheaded the film’s production.
While authorities could not yet disclose how he had obtained financing for the film and what sort of assistance he received in promoting its distribution on the Internet, it seems clear from the facts surrounding the release that the dissemination of the film in the Muslim world was intentional.
Nakoula’s case highlights how issues with local dimensions of a particular political context — in this case post-Mubarak Egypt — can be transported to a new legal jurisdiction, making its laws and liberties unwitting accomplices for vengeance.
In this case, a Coptic Christian carrying the burden of exclusion and discrimination from a post-Mubarak Egypt ridden with political tumult and uncertainty found in America two tools for his use.
The first were the liberal legal protections available to free speech in a US where even the most noxious utterances, including in recent years protests at funerals of slain US soldiers or castigations of Jesus Christ, enjoy legal protections. The second is an American political context heated by a decade of war in Muslim countries and a profusion of extremist rightwing Christian groups eager to fund anything that demonises Muslims and keeps the war machines churning.
It is on the backs of these legal and political realities of contemporary America that Nakoula transported his cause from Egypt to the United States, launching it from there to the rest of the world. The dry tinder of a Muslim world rent with bloody wars, the evils of imperialism and terrorism and the political and economic uncertainty of a world beset with crises was easily lit.
Mobs in countries where the young and the unemployed sleep and wake to hopelessness emerged, wronged and incensed, on the streets, burning American flags.
Everyone was convinced that the film was not the act of one man, but an expression of the disrespect of the entire West. The film, as in the case of previous films, cartoons and desecrations, became the flashpoint of something larger and civilisational involving everyone Muslim against everyone who was not.
The mechanics of the conflagration are familiar to Pakistanis, witness in recent weeks to the case of the young girl accused of blasphemy and the exodus of Christian and Hindu minorities to wherever they can find succour or respite.
Like Egypt, Pakistan also faces populism where the identity of those who deviate even bare inches from the norm of being Sunni and Muslim is contested. It is not hard, then, to consider that some who can never in Egypt or Pakistan be a majority would take their wounds elsewhere, try to whet hatreds once they themselves have escaped or been banished. The Somali-born author Ayaan Hirsi Ali did just that, as did others; now it seems it is Nakoula’s turn.
The First Amendment of the constitution of the United States provides protections to all speech except when it directly incites violent actions. As the fires burn in streets around the Muslim world, and clerics provide more fuel to wronged hearts in their congregations with accounts of crude disrespect, the silent public in the Muslim world must consider not the freedoms of the American constitution but its own silence.
The future, fuelled by the right-leaning youth of Pakistan, or the new president in Egypt, may well be an Islamist one; but this reality must also grapple with the question of whether those who are not Muslim, in Islamist Pakistan or Islamist Egypt, can still belong. Further, they can unleash a new and bloody geography of revenge on what they left behind.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
