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Paul Sedra is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University and Middle East editor of the Wiley-Blackwell journal, History Compass. A specialist in modern Egyptian history and Christian-Muslim relations, Sedra has taught at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto, and received his doctorate from New York University in January 2006. His most recent book, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, is published by I.B. Tauris.
The Christmas visit of Egypt’s interim president Adly Mansour to the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo occasioned much commentary in the Egyptian press about a new era in church-state relations. Indeed, newspaper headlines heralded the visit as the first undertaken by an Egyptian president to a Coptic patriarch to offer congratulations on a Coptic holiday. The interim president’s magnanimity in making the visit was set in stark contrast to the parsimonious attitude of Hosni Mubarak, who would typically leave such obligatory greetings to a lesser figure in the Egyptian government.
When Mohamed Morsi assumed the mantle of first democratically-elected, civilian president of Egypt, he both resigned from the Freedom and Justice Party‑‑the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood‑‑and declared himself “president of all Egyptians.” Now, only ten months later, the country’s Coptic Christians are undoubtedly sneering at the insincerity of Morsi’s initial gestures toward magnanimity.
