Are we all beheaded Copts?

The
beheading of 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians by ISIS on February 15 has triggered widespread
international official condemnation. Human Rights Watch has condemned
this atrocity as a war crime. However, the language is sufficiently opaque  as to leave room for missing the point of
who these civilians were and why they were targeted: “Egyptians
– particularly those of Coptic faith and truck drivers carrying goods back and
forth from Egypt – have been targeted for abduction or killing in Libya around
a dozen times since late 2013”. Invoking Copts and truck drivers (even
if non-Copt) implicitly suggests that they are both vulnerable to abduction and
killing. Is this framing informed by an absence of knowledge of what is
happening in Libya, or strategic – intended to underplay the explicit targeting of civilians on religious
grounds? 

An
audit of the incidents of kidnappings that were announced in the Egyptian press
since 2013, most of which were confirmed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
gives an unambiguous picture of what is going on.

Compiled by Akram HabibLibya
has for many decades been a country which has received hundreds of thousands of
Egyptian migrants in search of livelihoods. While not all Egyptian residents in
Libya are low income earners, it is likely that the majority are. Certainly,
the twenty one beheaded Egyptian Christians fit that category. They came from a
remote village in Minya, one of the Upper Egyptian Governorates with a low
human development profile and high levels of poverty. Many Egyptians, Copts
included, have often held low paid menial jobs in Libya, whether as day
labourers or street vendors, with their poverty increasing their vulnerability.
However, even when they are not in economically vulnerable situations (such as
the doctor and his family who were murdered, see table above), they have still
been targeted.

From the table above it is clear that of the 1,125 cases of kidnapping, only the
Christian have been killed (though there may be more who were taken hostages,
the whereabouts of which are unknown, undocumented in the media). This
comparison of the predicament of captured Egyptians suggests that there is a
pre-meditated plan of eliminating those who happen to be Copts on the basis  of religion. The selective killing of the
Copts, and the release of the others can 
only be explained by the will of the assailants. The BBC for example,
reports that eyewitness
accounts in one incident of kidnapping involved the armed group which
dashed into a house full of Egyptian workers and asked whether there were any
Christians among them, seized them, and left the rest.

In
view of the long history of Egyptian Christian migrant labour to Libya, why are
they being targeted now? Writer Salwa El Zoghby provides an astute analysis of
the main drivers of the religiously-mediated targeting.  She suggests that these attacks have taken
place predominantly in the centre and east of Libya which are areas
characterized by the near absence of state authorities,  prevailing chaos, absence of rule of law and
widespread circulation of weapons. It is in these areas that Islamist militias
have established strongholds, and found the conditions that have empowered them
to target Christians on ideological grounds. She also points that these
Islamist jihadi groups have been responsive to the announcement by Ansar Al Sharia
( Libya) in February 2014 of an economic reward for anyone who clears Benghazi
of any Christian presence. There is also a performative dimension to how ISIS
has captured the beheading of the Copts on video, in line with its other
videoed assassinations in Iraq and Syria. By beheading Egyptian Christians, as
opposed to their Muslim counterparts, ISIS assumes (wrongly) that it is not
alienating Muslims and is only enforcing their message of zero-tolerance policy
towards those whom it believes to be infidels.

Certainly all of Libya has suffered as a consequence of the
disintegration of any functional state, the country now being the centre of
geopolitical power struggles between different contenders: the US, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, Italy – and the list goes on.

There is also a vendetta between the Egyptian leadership and
the Islamist movements which has its roots in the overthrow of President Morsi
through a popular uprising that was followed by military intervention. There
are a number of concentric circles which are underpinned by complex historical
and contextual power dynamics that have spill over effects on socio-political
relations on the ground.

However, to reduce the transparent targeting of Copts on
religious grounds to an unfortunate fallout of a messy and chaotic situation is
to deny the diffusion of an ideologically driven political project which is
intended to clear the middle east of its religious minorities, and liquidate
religious pluralism. Christians, being the largest religious minority in the
middle east, become an obvious target, though not the only ones. There are
strong resonances in the modalities of religious cleansing deployed by varied
Islamist militant groups and ISIS in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The kidnappings,
imposition of ransoms, the ultimatums of conversion to Islam or death in Syria
and Iraq, have amounted to religious and ethnic cleansing according to the UN.
A recently released UN
report produced by the UN body responsible for reviewing Iraq's record for
the first time since 1998, denounced "the systematic killing of children
belonging to religious and ethnic minorities by the so-called ISIL, including
several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings,
crucifixions of children and burying children alive".

So
where does this leave us? In speaking with some progressive academics, social
justice advocates, human rights activists, I have sometimes noted a certain
reluctance to recognize this phenomenon as ideologically driven, or to analyse
the particular modalities of violence identified above as associated with
religious targeting of non-Muslim groups in the Arab world. This is not due to
lack of evidence (UN, Amnesty International and others have released reports,
UN officials have already spoken of a genocide in Iraq), but to the
invisibility of the nature of these outrages in our debates. I do not claim to
understand why, but here are some propositions.

First,
many proponents of post-colonialism have repeatedly reminded us that colonial
powers have used the “religious minority card” in order to divide and rule.
Moreover, in some instances the entanglement of missionary movements with the
imperial powers’ political agendas, and their privileged position in society,
has left a rather infamous legacy of Muslim-non-Muslim relations. However, this
history has left a number of unfortunate imprints on contemporary discourses
around religious minority matters in Muslim majority contexts in the middle
east. The first is that it generates the false assumption that the middle
eastern Christians are all remnants of the missionary movement, rather than
ancient denominations founded in the first four centuries AD. like the Copts,
predating missionaries by millennia. Second, it ignores
the very ancient non-Abrahamic religions whose ancestry goes back thousands of
years and who are also at risk of extinction (the Zorastrians and Yazidis being
cases in point). Could this past generate a reluctance to raise issues of
religious diversity in case they smack of support of neo-colonialism? 

Second,
many progressive western activists and thinkers are rightly conscious of their
positionality – namely how they are perceived in the Arab world. There is a
fear among some that appearing to be defending religious pluralism in the
middle east would be equated with the American hegemonic project, often
perceived to be strongly aligned with right wing Christian lobby groups.
However, it is precisely the role of the US in aligning, supporting and
nurturing militant groups in Libya, Iraq and Syria as a catalyst for the
current existential threat to religious diversity in the region that we need to
bring to the forefront. There is no longer a “western us” versus the “Muslim
rest” – the entanglements of the US in deals and manoeuvrings with Islamist
militants, not least in Libya, Syria and Iraq cannot be overlooked.

Finally,
our dread of  Islamophobia at a time
when right-wing political parties with racist overtones are on the rise in
Europe, should not allow us to be cowed into the avoidance of anything to do
with the  “Islamic zone” in the name of
political correctness. This reluctance to differentiate between the followers
of the faith, and those who mobilize violently in the name of religion, may be
a basis for exercising self censorship. It is what Bassam Tibi has termed
Islamophilia: refraining from criticizing political Islamist groups so as not
to offend. One classic example of this is raised by Professor Elizabeth
Prodromou, who argues that there is a reluctance to talk about the contemporary
political project of the instatement of an Islamic Caliphate. She argues
that skeptics from the middle east have been
concerned understandably that the subject of ISIS formation of a new Islamic
Caliphate “is freighted with neo-Orientalist attitudes and neo-imperialist
designs, and critics in the US scholar-practitioner community have worried
justifiably about the neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideological posturing
and policy blowback embedded in the topic. However, considered skepticism and
principled criticism need not foreclose historically-informed analysis and
prudent policy planning”.

We need the courage to reflect, discuss and debate how we
can carve a space that would allow us to engage with religious pluralism issues
in the middle east head on, without equivocation, and without falling into the
traps of easy stereotypes and reductionistic explanations.

This article was first published in February 2015 with the title: Are we all beheaded copts?: Outrage in Libya