The avowed aim of Pope Francis' 27-hour visit to Egypt was to promote dialogue. Arriving on Friday afternoon from the Vatican Francis dedicated his first day in Egypt to meetings with President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, the grand imam of Al-Azhar and the patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church. At each of these stops, and during other meetings with public figures, Catholic seminarians and preachers, young Catholics and the wider Christian community that attended a mass held on Saturday afternoon and ecumenical prayers conducted with Pope Tawdros II at the St Peter and St Paul Church on Friday evening, Francis spoke of the need to accept and help the other in the pursuit of peaceful coexistence. His message of unconditional love and tolerance certainly reverberated with many members of the public who took to Twitter to echo a presidential statement to the effect that Francis' visit had “brought joy and blessings to the people of Egypt”.
TALKING WITH THE PRESIDENT: According to an Egyptian source who was on hand during Francis' meeting with President Al-Sisi, “the chemistry between the president and Pope Francis was remarkable; it was something that many noticed and the president himself said that he was delighted by his encounter with the pope”. The pictures that have been published of the president's meeting with the head of the Roman Catholic Church do suggest a sense of genuine courtesy. Egyptian official sources discard as “unfair interpretation” the focus on a statement Pope Francis made during his speech at a luncheon hosted by the president about the condemnation that awaits those who promise to carry the beacon of freedom but pursue the road of tyranny. They also play down the attention Pope Francis gave during his talks with Al-Sisi to the case of Guilio Regeni, the Italian student found brutally murdered in Egypt over a year ago and whose family accuses security forces in Egypt of having a hand in their son's death, and Francis' reference to the village of Kom Al-Loufy where Coptic Christians were physically and verbally attacked by Muslim villagers as they performed their Good Friday prayers. A group of Coptic activists had taken to social media to press Pope Francis to pray for the Copts of Kom Al-Loufi and bring up the matter in his talks with Al-Sisi. The official line is that the pope expressed his sympathy “with those who find it difficult to pray” and his “confidence that the president is doing his utmost” to secure freedom of faith, “something that the president had underlined his total commitment to anyway”. According to Coptic researcher Suleiman Shafik, “there is no doubt that what Pope Francis heard from President Al-Sisi about commitment to Christian rights in Egypt was reassuring.” According to Amr Ezzat, the religion liberties and human rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), “whatever you say about it, the meeting was an act of recognition of Al-Sisi as a president who wishes to promote Islamic tolerance in a way that no other Arab Muslim country is up to, and to support dialogue between Islam and Christianity, a subject that is the focus of a great deal of international attention these days.”
AT AL-AZHAR: Calls for a dialogue of religions, says Ezzat, are almost as abstract as the similarly fashionable call to modernise religious discourse. “We have seen considerable lip service paid to both topics, There have been endless meetings at the national and international levels between priests and sheikhs and meeting after meeting dedicated to modernising religious discourse but what has been achieved in concrete terms — I am afraid not much,” says Ezzat. There are established channels for dialogue between Al-Azhar and the Vatican though they were suspended for five years by Al-Azhar in retaliation for what the Grand Imam Ahmed Al-Tayeb and Al-Azhar's Higher Committee of Ulama believed to be hostile statements about Islam made by Francis' predecessor Pope Benedict. Upon becoming pope, Francis acted to defuse the tensions and last year Al-Tayeb visited the Vatican at Francis' invitation. The visit of Pope Francis to the office of the grand imam and their joint participation in the concluding session of the international peace conference at Al-Azhar, where both religious leaders made statements followed by a very cordial embrace to the wide applause of an inter-faith audience, underlined the commitment to further pursue dialogue. According to Mahmoud Mehanna, a member of the Higher Council of Ulama, the Francis- Tayeb encounter sends “a clear message, especially to those who have launched an unfair attack on Al-Azhar and the grand imam” that “this great scholar and remarkable figure is fully aware of his mission to promote peace, the true spiritual call of Islam despite the vicious attack of secularists seeking to marginalise the role of religion and the misguided call of the extremist groups whose perception of Islam is completely confused.” If anything was particularly remarkable about the visit of Pope Francis, Mehanna argues, it was his clear appreciation of the role and status of the grand imam and of the influence of Al-Azhar. In recent months Al-Tayeb has come under attack from pro-regime media figures for failing to live up to Al-Sisi's ambitious calls to modernise Islamic discourse. Following the Palm Sunday church bombings some media figures demanded the imam step down in acknowledgement of his failure to stop the “discourse of hate and incitement” which they claim is embedded in Al-Azhar's religious curricula. A source close to the office of the grand imam acknowledged that much depends on how the grand imam fares in the inter-Al-Azhar battle with radicals who took exception to the hospitality Al-Tayeb demonstrated towards Pope Francis, as well as on influential Salafi and other radical currents. “The assumed link between the modernisation of Islamic discourse and the equally vague call for dialogue between religions” which was stressed “not just in the local media but internationally tends to exaggerate the influence that Al-Azhar and its imam have over Muslims in today's world,” he said before warning that “there may be no concrete measures taken beyond the niceties that were exchanged” during the papal visit. Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher on minority rights at the EIPR, argues the statement that the grand imam made during the concluding session of the international peace conference “might have exempted Islam from accusations of violence but clearly failed to offer a vision of action for the future”. Ezzat is not at all sure that Pope Francis' meeting with Al-Tayeb will end discussions in some quarters of the executive about the latter's removal and replacement. “Clearly the visit gave Al-Tayeb a new lease but the length of that lease is not really clear, nor is it predictable,” he says.
INTER-FAITH DIALOGUE: The relationship between the Vatican and the Coptic Orthodox Church to which the vast majority of Egypt's Christians belong is similarly unclear. The meeting between Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros on Friday afternoon was said by sources close to the office of the Coptic patriarch to have been tense. The two patriarchs have established a cordial relationship despite the deep theological differences between their two churches and were expected to sign an agreement mutually recognising each church's baptism. The two men, though, emerged from their meeting with grim faces. A source close to the office of Pope Tawadros said that during their meeting Pope Francis had agreed that the document would stipulate an “intention to work towards the mutual recognition of baptism”. But, as Shafik notes, a statement issued by the Coptic Orthodox Church “following the departure of Pope Francis qualified the document as an announcement of cordial relations between the two churches”. Shafik says the Coptic patriarch has faced opposition from within the church on the matter “because of the theological differences between the Catholic Church of Rome and the Coptic Orthodox Church and also as a result of the history of animosity and at times even of mutual rejection between the two churches”. He argues that “the relationship between the Vatican and the Coptic Orthodox Church is much more complex than between Al-Azhar and the Vatican” and “the good intentions of Pope Francis and Pope Tawadros cannot dilute the complexity of this relationship.” According to Shaifk, Tawadros' predecessor Pope Shenouda, “had in the early 1970s shown openness to the mutual recognition of baptism but then reversed course following pressure from the Synod”. Pope Tawadros faces the same pressure, as well as “opposition on the part of some Coptic youth groups to any agreement between the Coptic Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches”. Mina Assad, a Coptic writer and professor of theology says it is difficult to determine the nature of the controversial document on joint baptism. “We have seen statements and counter-statements and we have heard arguments in favour and against the so-called agreement but we have to actually see the text of the agreement before we can discuss it,” says Asaad. The debate over the baptism issue comes against a backdrop of other headaches that Pope Tawdros is facing — not least the issue of divorce which is being pushed by secular Coptic currents and the political debate being spearheaded by youth groups who argue that the association between the Coptic Church and the political regime is too close. “I think it is a tough moment. Pope Francis' visit may have exposed issues but they were already there. It's going to be a very taxing time for Pope Tawadros,” says Rami Kamil of the Maspero Youth Foundation. It is, Kamil added, time for the church to decide whether it wishes to continue with “its controversial political choices or to give priority to theological questions that really need to be addressed”.
A CATHOLIC MOMENT: Egypt's small number of Catholics had perhaps the most to rejoice over the papal visit which drew attention to a church which, though numerically small, remains influential. “Following the political change prompted by 30 June [2013], when several European and Latin countries were hesitating about what position they should take towards the new regime, delegations from Egypt's Catholic churches helped rectify the country's image,” says Shafik. According to Father Hani Bakhoum of the Coptic Catholic Church, the papal visit served as a reminder “of the educational, cultural and social role that Catholic schools, centres and charities have been playing in Egypt for decades”. “This historic papal visit made clear that even as a minority the Catholics of Egypt, with their history of service in society and links that attach our churches to the most influential cultural and religious institutions, we can help with the call for dialogue that Pope Francis put across,” says Bakhoum.
