There has been a succession of conferences on Christians in the Middle East for a while now. The increase in the number of conferences is nothing more than conclusive evidence of the state of concern that takes hold of this fundamental part of Arab society, whose existence dates back to the pre-Islamic era. The threats that endanger this group’s existence are numerous. Some threats have been around for a long time, such as the group’s demographic decline that has resulted from structural reasons. Some of these include a lack of political freedoms and decreased growth — due to either political crises and successive wars, or economic policies that limited the chances of success and narrowed job possibilities, such as the waves of economic nationalization that were common in the 1950s and 1960s. Other threats are newer, and have been imposed by the harbingers of the Arab uprisings and accompanied rise of Islamist movements.
Truth be told, the emergence of Islamist movements is not a reassuring factor for non-Islamic groups in particular and other subgroups within Arab society. These groups look forward to modernity that denotes the priority of the rights of individuals over any other values guaranteed by a democratic civil state, although they are committed to the principles, rituals and rites of Islam. In Egypt, developments that accompanied the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power and their attempt to monopolize power — by running parliamentary elections alone, refusing to ally and bridge with the rest of the groups in Egyptian society or limiting the draft of the constitution to a group that is loyal to it and absolutely conform to its ideology — have not been reassuring to Christians and have undoubtedly weakened their enthusiasm for the Arab Spring. They had previously been at the forefront of these uprisings, given the potential that existed for a shift toward modernity and firmly establishing the right to participation and self-determination.
