Sara ʿAllām Shaltout worked as the Christian affairs editor for the newspaper al-Yawm al-Sābiʿ from 2015-2020, a position usually reserved for Egyptian Christians. The fact that she was entrusted with this position as a Muslim is a testament to her independent thought and objective journalism. In 2022, she completed an M.A. thesis at the American University in Cairo on church-building controversies in the Egyptian governorate of Minya. After completing a second M.A. at the University of Edinburgh, she is now pursuing doctoral studies in Christian-Muslim relations at St. Andrews University in Scotland. In recent years, Sara also published an influential book on the murder of Coptic Orthodox Bishop Epiphanius, Maqtal al-Anbā Epiphānīūs (Dār al-ʿAyn Publishing, 2020).
This interview was conducted with Dr. Matthew Anderson, executive editor for Dialogue Across Borders, on March 11, 2025.
Exceprt:
MA: In your M.A. thesis, you did case studies of three different churches in Minya, which is a challenging governorate for Christian-Muslim relations. You could have chosen another province, where maybe you wouldn’t have had the same conflicts over churches. Would other provinces have given you different case studies?
SS: Yes, Minya is unique because it has the largest Christian community in the Middle East comprised of almost two million people. It is not like Asyūṭ, my hometown. Christians in Minya are quite different from Christians in Asyūṭ where they are better established politically and economically. This kind of empowerment reflects on the way in which they live their everyday life. They have an easier time building churches. On the other hand, Christians in Minya are mostly poor, and when you have both poverty and minority status, you have more pressure and suffering,. This is why I chose Minya. What is very interesting about Minya is that it not only has the biggest Christian community but also has the largest number of denominations other than Coptic Orthodox. There are a lot of smaller Protestant churches.
MA: In terms of comparison with Asyūṭ, you would say that the conditions of Christians in Asyūṭ is quite different, and that in Asyūṭ if they want to build churches they will have an easier time of it?
SS: Yes. It doesn’t mean that they won’t go through the bureaucratic hurdles which can be tedious. They will, but they can do it. In the electoral assembly that we have in Asyūṭ, one representative has to be Christian, which is not the case in Minya, which also has a more significant history of Islamists working and living there. This was before the 2014 Constitution which provided Christians with a quota in the Egyptian parliament.
MA: You picked three churches in Minya for your thesis. Can you walk me through what happened to the three churches that you worked on?
SS: The first was a church in the urban center of the city of Minya which was burned and looted after the violent clearing of the Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawīyya protest in Nasr City, Cairo, on August 14th, 2013. There had been a smaller protest in the city center of Minya in support of Morsī. During the period after the Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawīyya incident, Islamists and their allies attacked dozens of churches and Christian buildings all over Egypt. At least in part, they punished the Christians for what happened to Morsī and the Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawīyya protest. I decided to work on this issue and study the dynamics in the city, which led to the church being a victim of political struggle between the Egyptian state and the Islamists. The Egyptian government later played a role in rebuilding this particular church in Minya.
MA: The first one in the city was actually a large Coptic church? I ask because when we hear that a church was burned, we often imagine a major Coptic church, when in fact in many cases it is a smaller, temporary tent structure or something similar.
SS: Yes, it was a large church built in the eighties or the nineties. They burned it to the ground and stole everything they could steal.
MA: I understand that you weren’t there when they burned it. Did you look at the pictures?
SS: I was there one week after they burned it. It is kind of a custom in the Coptic Church that when they have a struggle over a building, they have a mass, so had a mass over this church that was burned.
MA: What about the other two churches you studied?
The second church was a metal tent structure, and it was kind of marginalized at the edge of a village that was far from the city. This church was the result of many efforts for number of years. It had been attacked and burnt down several times before. Finally, there was enough social approval for the church to be granted a license, although it is concerning that this was delayed for so long by Muslim opposition.
The third case study was in a village where there are no churches, and people wanted to build a church because they used to pray in personal homes every weekend. To my knowledge, they still have not been successful. So, these are three different case studies – one of them was a massive established church in the city, which was a victim of political violence; the second one was a humble metal church structure; and the third one was a church that has not yet been built.
