Democracy in Egypt
Not if the Muslim Brotherhood Can Help It
ICC Note:
“The sad truth is that while Mubarak can’t be called a “friend” of the Copts, he at least tried to reign in his and their common enemy: the Muslim Brotherhood,” the Christian Post reports.
By Chuck Colson
2/10/2011 Egypt (Christian Post) – In a recent column, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times proclaimed that “today we are all Egyptians!” Well, hyperbole aside, it’s easy to be inspired, even carried away by the images coming from Cairo. And images are all most Americans have to go by.
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As we have learned the hard way in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, deposing a dictatorship is a lot easier than creating a democracy. Places that have no tradition or experience of democratic rule often wind up replacing one kind of despotism for another. Or, the brutal order of tyranny is replaced with the tyranny of chaos and disorder.
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Democracy is about more than elections: as Yale law professor Amy Chua described in her book World on Fire, elections in many countries are a preface for oppression. The majority, finally getting a chance at running things, decides that the first order of business is to persecute and deprive a despised minority.
In Egypt, that despised minority are Coptic Christians. For the Copts, whose ancestors debated the Trinity long before ours even heard of Christ, discrimination and harassment are the best they can reasonably expect from the Muslim majority.
The sad truth is that while Mubarak can’t be called a “friend” of the Copts, he at least tried to reign in his and their common enemy: the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is the original and still most influential Islamist group in the world. Its progeny include al-Qaeda and Hamas.
While the Brotherhood has participated in the electoral process, it’s with an eye to creating an Islamic republic at the center of the Arab world. To call the Brotherhood a force for democracy is insane-and dangerous.
In its vision of a society where the Qur’an is the “sole reference point” for the ordering of family and social life, there is no room for the Copts. The Brotherhood has been implicated in the burning of churches, seminaries and Copt-owned businesses, as well as the murder of Coptic Christians.
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