By Hyun Jeong Ha
Assistant Professor of Sociology
The Lebanese film Where do we go now (2011) begins with a procession of dozens of women to a cemetery in a secluded village. The women in black slowly march as a group, each one beating their chest with their hands out of deep sorrow at losing their loved ones. Upon arrival at the cemetery they separate. The Muslim women on the right mourn as they kiss tombstones and the Christians on the left kiss the crosses laid on the graves. The sectarian clashes that killed mostly male villagers is now history, but their grief still remains.
The faces of the village women overlapped with Egyptian Christians grieving the deaths of Christian worshippers caught in a suicide bombing at the Botroseya church (St. Peter and St. Paul’s churches) in December 2016. The film featured clashes between the villagers, while in reality, Christians were attacked by armed militants. This pre-planned attack has become a more frequent type of sectarian violence in recent Egypt with ISIS’s gaining of international prominence in 2014. This bombing was particularly surprising to many Cairenes because attacks on church buildings were something they believed to only take place in other parts of the country – places like Upper Egypt or the city of Alexandria where more radicalized militants or Islamists are based. As one of my interview participants, who lost her old church friend from the aforementioned bombing, said, this event made Christians living in the center of the country more concerned about their safety. Continue reading “Egyptian Christians under Sisi: Where Do They Go Now?*”