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Let my people go.

Article Excerpt
CHRISTIANS VERSUS MUSLIMS IN MODERN EGYPT: THE CENTURY-LONG STRUGGLE FOR COPTIC EQUALITY By S. S. HASAN Oxford University Press 320 pp. $49.95.

SANA HASAN, an Egyptian scholar best known for her Enemy in the Promised Land, has written another important book in Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt--a book in which she honestly confronts the sorry condition of Christians in Egypt, where the "problems faced by the Christian minority are for many ... a taboo subject." Hasan courageously describes the discrimination and harm often visited upon one of Christianity's oldest communions--the Coptic Church. Courage is certainly required in a world in which Islamic leaders frequently suggest that the victims of Muslim violence are themselves to blame for it. Among other things, Hasan's book is a welcome taboo-breaker.

The book has other merits as well. Though Hasan focuses on the past century in the life of the Copts, she capably fills in much Coptic history, which is too little known in the West. The Copts trace their traditions back to St. Mark the Evangelist and count among their luminaries such figures as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril of Alexandria. The tragic isolation of the Copts began in 451, when a majority of Egyptian bishops, led by Patriarch Dioscoros of Alexandria, refused to accept the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon, which decreed that in the person of Christ there are two natures, one human and the other divine. Dioscoros and his supporters...