Communication

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ARTICLES

To the Editors:
I wish to register a protest concerning the review by Ralph M. Coury of S. S. Hasan, Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic Equality (AHR, April 2005, 591). This review, contrary to AHR guidelines, tells us little about the book itself but much about the reviewer's blatant political prejudices.
I object particularly to Coury's accusation—which is nowhere made in Ms. Hasan's own valuable and honest book—that Israel aims "to exploit Coptic and other forms of Middle Eastern minority identities for [its] own purposes." A reader of the review alone would not know that the author was herself banned from Egypt because of government intolerance of her advocacy of peace with Israel (Christians versus Muslims, xi).
The review is replete with anti-Israeli innuendo while sidestepping the major subject of militant Islamist persecution of Coptic Christians. When Coury refers crudely to "an alliance of the American Zionist lobby and the Christian right," he is guilty of stereotyping and caricaturing pro-Zionist opinion and involvement in this country—much of which is solidly liberal and democratic. I am proud to be in that camp.
David E. Narrett University of Texas, Arlington

Ralph M. Coury responds:
American/Zionist efforts to exploit Middle Eastern minority identities have had a long history, from Zionist attempts to ally with Lebanese Maronites in the 1920s to the operation of Israeli agents in Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria today.
Oded Yinon, a former official of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, summarized the strategy in a report to the World Zionist Organization in 1982: Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq could be broken up into religious, ethnic, and regional enclaves. Iraq, in particular, "rich in oil," "the greatest threat to Israel," and "internally torn," was "guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets."
Yinon's report reflects a wider pattern of thought that helps us to understand the recent occupation of Iraq. In 1996, the American neoconservatives Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith drafted "A Clean Break: Defense of the Realm [Israel]" for Prime Minister Netanyahu. They advocated removal of Saddam Hussein, a "roll back" of Syria, renunciation of Oslo, and replacement of Arafat. These and other prominent architects of the Iraqi occupation aim to reorganize Arab societies on religious, tribal, and clan foundations wherever possible, to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict on Sharon's terms, to shift power to Israel, Turkey, and an Iraq under permanent American control, and to accord ethnic and religious minorities rights as self-contained entities in order to weaken the Arab states and stifle pan-Arabism.
Egypt has not been neglected in this strategy. "The vision of a Christian Coptic state in Upper Egypt," Yinon noted, " ... seems inevitable in the long run." To be sure, Egypt is not likely to be destroyed, but it is clear that serious deconstructive pressures are being applied. I cannot here document the story of how Israel and various American allies (eminent neoconservatives and liberals, the Zionist lobby, Christian rightists, and expatriate Copts) have played the Coptic card through such devices as the Congressional International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. I will simply refer to two telling pieces of evidence that provide deliciously blatant manifestations of hypocrisy and double standards.
In 2001, Elliott Abrams, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, led a fact-finding delegation to Egypt and Saudi Arabia but refused to accompany other delegates to Israel inasmuch as he believed that no Israeli problems warranted attention. The Commission issued no report about Israel and the occupied territories because of the "complexity of the situation" and "differences of opinion." When Abrams was later appointed National Security Advisor for the Near East and North Africa, the Weekly Standard hailed the event as a move that neatly "cocks a snook at the pro-Palestinian wimps at the State Department."
Another example is provided by the international conference "Egyptian Copts: A Minority under Siege," which expatriate Coptic associations sponsored in Zurich in 2004. The keynote speaker was none other than Daniel Pipes, whose "Campus Watch" website monitors professors who "dislike" their country and its allies (i.e., American and Israeli policies). Pipes asserted that Christianity was disappearing from the Middle East (because of Muslim persecution) and from Europe (because of Muslim immigration and high birth rates). The "great cultures: Italian, French, English and others, will likely be replaced by a new transnational Muslim identity." No concerns were expressed for the Church of the Nativity.
In spite of all of this, most Egyptian Copts are not taken in. "Egyptians, Muslims and Copts alike, will never bow before the Zionist and Western designs to bend our will, alter our national priorities, and usurp our autonomous resolve," Pope Shenouda III declared in response to Daily Telegraph misrepresentations of Coptic/Muslim relations in 1997.
David Narrett is "proud" to be a liberal pro-Zionist. There are indeed differences between liberal and right-wing Zionists, but this should not obscure fundamental commonalities. Zionism has been a form of settler-colonialism that has necessitated the support of an imperial power (Britain, then the United States) and counterrevolutionary strategies. Israel's alliances with apartheid South Africa, with France against Algeria, and with France and Britain against Egypt, as well as its policies of divide and rule, existed long before the ascendancy of the Likud. Such alliances and policies were effected by many who were also proud to call themselves liberals, and by some who even called themselves socialists and Marxists.
Ralph M. Coury Fairfield University

REVIEWS

To the Editors:
In her review of Julie Taylor's Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony of Lucera (AHR, October 2004, 1295–1296), Sally McKee wrote, "when tensions between the Christians and Muslims in Sicily in the first decades of the thirteenth century disrupted life on Frederick II's island, the emperor did what the Christian rulers of Iberia had done in the eleventh century: he removed the Muslims from his kingdom." Although before 1085 Christian reconquering rulers sometimes did expel local Muslims, for example, Fernando I of Leon-Castile after reconquering Coimbra in 1064, this policy was not in fact always pursued by Christian Iberian rulers in the eleventh century. Most notably, Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile permitted the substantial Muslim community of Toledo to remain there after its reconquest in 1085. For documentation, please refer to Joseph F. O'Callaghan, "Mudejars of Castile and Portugal," in Muslims under Latin Rule, ed. James M. Powell (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 13–19, especially note 7. Given the current international climate, I feel that it is very important that the historical record of medieval Christian rulers' treatment of their Muslim subjects not be unduly misrepresented.
Alice Whealey

Sally McKee does not wish to respond.
The Editors

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