A little window into a different world, from Attwater’s
Eastern Catholic Worship (1945):
“The religion of Islam (“Mohammedanism”) began to displace Christianity in Egypt at the Arab invasion thirteen hundred years ago. Today there are less than a million native Christians, of whom no more than 50,000 are Catholics.” (p. 74, “The Alexandrian Rite, 1: The Liturgy of the Copts”, introduction)
Coptic Orthodox are today estimated at at least five million (government figure), more commonly 8-12 million (non-governmental estimates; for example the CIA factbook for Egypt puts Copts at 9%, which would be about 7.4 million), and they certainly did not increase 6 million+ in a pro-Christian environment in modern Egypt.
So I think you are despairing a bit prematurely, OP. Muslims have always wanted to take over the world, and have made great gains in that area while never actually being successful. Ultimately, Islam will prove to be just like communism, in so far as its ability to provide a utopia is concerned. Eventually, people will get tired of waiting and the diehards will become an increasingly marginalized minority (which doesn’t mean Islam will stop being a threat to the world, only that probably the kind of people linked in the video will be seen in much the same light as the Stalin-fetishists among some on the political left in today’s Russia). The question of whether or not any of us will be alive to see that day is something else (I doubt it; I doubt it will even happen in our children’s children’s lifetimes), and there is also of course the related question of what shape the native Middle Eastern churches will be in even in the near future…but let’s not all rush to play Carnac the Magnificent just yet. I bet if you had asked the tiny number of Copts in Egypt in 1945* if they felt that they were in a tight spot, they probably would’ve said yes, but God has provided for them through hardships and tragedies that Christians in the West can’t even begin to imagine.
So don’t anybody despair, please. Despair and immigration are destroying Christian communities worldwide.
- according to the closest estimate at hand, Egypt had a population of ~18,460,000 in 1945, so if the relative percentage of Copts had actually not increased but just stayed steady and appeared to increase due to the overall massive increase in the population as a whole, then we would have expected to see about 1.6 million Copts in 1945, as that is 9% of 18,460,000 (1,661,400 to be exact); the fact that Attwater reports that they are less than a million shows that they have increased as an absolute percentage since that time, and this is despite some very, very nasty treatment at the hands of the Muslim majority and increasingly Islamified political structure, e.g., the rewriting of the constitution in the early 1980s to insert ‘Islamic principles’ as the primary source of legislation, where that hadn’t been explicitly the case beforehand.
