Hassan and Morcos, a film dealing with relations between Egypt's Muslims and Copts, exposes the limits of the rhetoric of Egyptian national unity, writes Mona Anis A meeting was held at the left-wing Tagammu Party headquarters in Cairo yesterday to help foster national unity between the country's Muslims and Copts. This is not the first meeting on this theme to have taken place this year, let alone in previous years, yet it should be clear by now that national unity cannot be fostered by conferences alone. Hassan and Morcos, a film starring Adel Imam and Omar Sharif, opens with a scene of one such "national unity" conference in which Muslim and Coptic clergymen can be seen gathering in a large hall where a banner above the rostrum announces the 51st Conference for National Unity. All the participants are shown taking part in a frenzy of sloganeering about the unity between Muslims and Copts. However, as the two groups walk out, Coptic priests can be seen whispering amongst themselves about the persecution of Copts in Egypt, and in the following shot Muslim clergymen whisper to each other about the threat the Copts pose to Egyptian society. Scripted by Youssef Ma'ti and directed by Rami Imam, Hassan and Morcos has a case of mistaken identity at its core. This most ancient of dramatic devices, often employed to enhance the comic effect, is in this case used both as a comic ploy and as a vehicle for challenging the stereotypes informing many of the religious prejudices rampant in today's Egypt by casting a Copt in the role of a Muslim and vice versa. Hassan is the undercover name given by the police to Adel Imam, who plays the role of a Coptic priest whose life has been threatened by a fanatical Christian group in disagreement with his tolerant views, and who is now hiding under a false Muslim identity. Omar Sharif, on the other hand, plays the role of a devout Muslim, similarly threatened by Muslim fanatics for refusing to join their fundamentalist group, and now living undercover as a Copt called Morcos. The two men and their families are seen hiding in the same building, in which they occupy opposite flats, though they are both ignorant of each other's real identity. A strong friendship develops between them as each believes the other to belong to his faith. As the two families become closer, Hassan's son falls in love with Morcos's daughter, something that is welcomed by both families. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a case of "love's labour's lost", since all the parties are labouring under the misapprehension that they share the same faith -- be it Christian or Muslim -- and that once the circumstances necessitating their adoption of false identities come to an end their children can get married. When the cover of Hassan and Morcos is finally blown, the love affair between a Copt and a Muslim triggers an armed sectarian clash -- similar to a number of real clashes that have recently taken place in Egypt -- between the residents of the neighbourhood. So how does the film advocate national unity? I do not believe that it does, and the fact that it does not is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, Hassan and Morcos must be credited for scratching beneath the surface of the rhetoric of national unity between Muslims and Copts which has been belied by the many recent ugly sectarian incidents. Egyptian cinema has produced numerous films showing Muslims and Copts marching together in demonstration against a common enemy (mostly the British occupation), with the sound of church bells and calls to Muslim prayers in the background. However, like conferences, such scenes are not sufficient in themselves to foster national unity. At best, these are images that hark back to certain moments in the colonial past, when "the two elements of the Egyptian nation," as they were called during the 1920s, were united against the British. A slogan used at the time read: "Religion is God's concern, while the homeland is the concern of all Egyptians." However, like all slogans this one has been reinterpreted -- even contested -- at different historical moments. At the height of the national liberation struggle in Egypt, the slogan was part and parcel of a secular project that called for the separation of the state from religion and that was adopted by many political forces including the Wafd, the party of the majority until 1952. This secular project has long since been contested by religiously-inclined political movements, prime amongst them the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has always argued that "Islam is both religion and state." This is a call that has gained currency over the last three decades, especially after 1980 when the Egyptian constitution was amended to stipulate that Islam was the official religion of the state and that any new legislation must not contradict Islamic Sharia law. Moreover, the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in Egypt has caused the country's substantial Christian minority to feel insecure, giving rise to a wave of counter-fundamentalism among the Copts. As a result, the country has been engulfed in a kind of clash of fundamentalisms for decades. To expect a film like Hassan and Morcos to offer a recipe for resolving this clash would be naive indeed. However, the fact that the film deviates from the standard script of national unity, focusing instead on the mutual distrust between "the two elements of the nation," is perhaps a step in the right direction of acknowledging the magnitude of the problem rather than being taken in by slogans representing an illusory reality.
