In January, I signed up to take an evening course at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences on the theme of Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt. Located in an historic building near the famed citadel of Salaḥ al-Dīn (d.1183), CILAS offers a variety of interesting courses in the humanities, including history, philosophy, and cultural anthropology, among others. I took the course not only because it relates to my field of study, but also to meet others in Cairo who are interested in some of these questions. I am glad I decided to take this course for several reasons, but certainly one of them is that I was able to meet Sara ʿAllām Shaltout who is teaching the course.

Sara 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. 

(Our class at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences.)

Sara kindly agreed to sit for an interview about her research on the 2016 Church Construction law and church-building conflicts and controversies in Minya. The interview touches on Sara’s upbringing as a child from a Muslim family who attended a Christian school in Asyūṭ, her interest in the Christian community in Egypt, her work as a journalist covering Christian affairs, conflicts over churches in Minya, and the impact of the 2016 Church Construction Law on the building and legalization of churches in Egypt. In the interview, Sara explains that although the 2016 law is not perfect, it has significantly improved the situation for Egyptian churches and she estimates that some 5,000 churches have been given legal status since the law was passed.

Part of our work at Dialogue Across Borders is to highlight people who see beyond the boundaries of their own community to look sympathetically at those who come from a different background. Along those lines, I was very much struck by this comment from the interview about Sara's time as a student: “I was doing kind of journalism in my school, and I felt interested and encouraged to write about Christians. I felt deeply that I belong to them, and they belong to me in a way or another, and that I could understand them.” 

An excerpt of our interview can be found here.

Matthew Anderson

Director - Center for Arab-West Understanding

Executive Editor - Dialogue Across Borders (Brill)

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March 26, 2025