I Was Sent to Report on Persecuted Christians in Egypt. The Story Reported Me.
My name is Karim. I am a journalist. I have been a journalist for 20 years.
And I will be a journalist until I stop breathing. Because it is not what I do.
It is what I am. I believe in the specific power of a well-reported story to do something that no argument and no speech and no legislation can quite do.
To make a person real to another person who would otherwise never know they existed.
To build the bridge of the imagination between one human life and another. I have believed this since I was 22 years old and I believe it still.
And I think the faith I found 6 years ago did not change that belief.
It deepened it. It gave it a foundation I did not know it needed. I want to tell you how I became a Christian.
It is a story about my job. It is a story about the specific occupational hazard of spending enough time with people whose faith is real enough to cost them something.
Real enough to be tested by the worst the world can offer and to hold.
That kind of faith is contagious in ways that a journalist who is paying careful professional attention is particularly vulnerable to.
I was paying careful professional attention and I was not immune. Let me tell you where it started.
Cairo is a city of 20 million people and approximately 20 million opinions about everything expressed simultaneously and at high volume.
I love it. I have always loved it. The noise and the density and the specific energy of a city that has been continuously inhabited since before most of the world’s great civilizations existed that has been conquered and reconquered and has absorbed everything and remained somehow itself.
Cairo is not intimidated by history because Cairo is older than most of history. I grew up in the Schubra district, a neighborhood in northern Cairo that has the distinction of being one of the most religiously mixed areas of the city with Muslim and Coptic Christian families living in close proximity in the specific way that Cairo neighborhoods sometimes achieve, which is to say not without tension, but with a kind of practiced coexistence that has lasted for generations.
I grew up with Coptic neighbors. I went to school with Coptic children. I knew from childhood that Christians existed and that they were Egyptians and that they prayed differently and celebrated different holidays.
I did not know much more than that. They were neighbors. We were polite. The depth of their tradition was not something I had occasion to encounter.
I studied journalism at Cairo University. I was good at it. The combination of curiosity and stubbornness and willingness to ask uncomfortable questions that journalism requires was a combination I had been born with rather than acquired.
I joined a newspaper after graduation and spent the next 15 years working my way from junior reporter to senior investigative journalist covering the beats that matter most in a country like Egypt, politics, corruption, human rights, the space between what the government says is happening and what is actually happening.
I covered the Arab Spring in 2011. I covered the Muslim Brotherhood’s period in government and its violent end.
I covered the crackdowns that followed, the arrests, the disappearances, the rewriting of the political landscape.
I covered things that put me in danger more than once. And I navigated that danger with the specific recklessness of a journalist who believes that the story is worth more than his safety, which is a belief I still hold, but which I hold now with more understanding of what it costs.
In 2019, my editor called me into her office and told me about a series of attacks on Coptic churches and communities in upper Egypt, the part of the country south of Cairo, where the Nile narrows and the heat intensifies, and the religious tensions of Egypt are sometimes most acutely expressed.
There had been attacks, burning of property, violence against individuals, displacement of families from villages they had lived in for generations.
There had been coverage, fragmented, incomplete, missing the human texture of what was actually happening.
She wanted someone to go down, spend time, and tell the story properly. She wanted me.
I said, “Yes, it was my job. It was the right story to tell.” I packed a bag and I drove south.
I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I want to tell you about the cops of upper Egypt because I think they deserve to be described carefully and specifically rather than as a general category of persecuted people.
The Coptic Christian community is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. The Coptic Church traces its origins to the Apostle Mark who is said to have brought Christianity to Egypt in the first century which means the Egyptian Christian tradition predates Islam in Egypt by six centuries.
The cops of upper Egypt in particular are people who have maintained their faith through 14 centuries of being a religious minority in their own country through Arab conquest, through Ottoman rule, through various periods of relative tolerance and relative persecution, through the specific tensions of modern Egyptian society.
They have survived everything. They are still there. The community I was sent to cover had experienced a specific recent violence.
I will not describe the details of the attacks because the details are not the point of this testimony and because some of the people involved are still in vulnerable situations.
What I will tell you is that families had lost homes, that a church had been burned and that several members of the community had been injured in ways that would be permanent.
I arrived expecting to find, and I say this with full honesty about my own assumptions.
I arrived expecting to find grief and anger and demands for justice and accusations and the specific explosive quality of a community that has been wronged and wants the world to know it.
This is what I had found in every other community I had ever covered in the aftermath of violence.
Grief, anger, demands. This is the human response to being hurt. This is what the human response looks like.
What I found instead, and I want to be precise about the word instead, because it is not that the grief and anger were absent, they were present, but they were not the dominant quality.
What I found instead was something I did not have a category for, something I had not encountered before in 20 years of journalism, something that the more time I spent with it, the more completely it demolished the frameworks I had arrived with.
I found forgiveness, real, specific, costly, personal forgiveness, not as a theological abstraction, not as something people said because it was the right thing to say, but as a practice that was actually happening in real relationships between real people in real time.
Let me give you one specific example because I think the specific example is more powerful than the general statement.
There was a priest in the community. I will call him Father Marcos, though that is not his name.
He was a man in his late 50s, a Coptic priest who had served this community for more than 30 years.
He had been born in this area, had grown up in this church, had watched the church burn from a distance because he had been away when it happened.
He had returned to find the structure in ruins, and several of his parishioners in the hospital.
By the time I arrived several weeks later, the immediate crisis had passed. The community was living in the aftermath, the specific, grinding, unglamorous aftermath of displaced families, damaged property, ongoing uncertainty about safety, and the question of what comes next.
I interviewed Father Marcos over the course of several days. He was not a dramatic person.
He was a quiet man, precise and warm in the way that priests often become after decades of sitting with people in the worst moments of their lives.
He answered my questions with full honesty and without any obvious agenda. He told me about the attack, the damage, the community situation.
He told me about the specific families who had been most affected. And then near the end of one of our conversations, he told me about a visit he had made the previous week.
He had gone to the home of one of the men who had participated in the burning of his church, not to confront him, not to demand accountability.
He had gone to bring food. The family was poor, and the man’s involvement in the attack had brought consequences on his household, and Father Marcos had heard that they were struggling, so he had brought food.
I stared at him. I had been a journalist for 20 years and I had developed a reasonably good ability to detect when I was being told something that was true and when I was being told something that a person wanted to be true or wanted me to think was true.
Father Marcos was telling me something that was simply true. He had gone to bring food to the family of the man who had burned his church.
I asked him why. Not aggressively. I was not trying to catch him in anything.
I genuinely wanted to understand. He said in the specific way that Coptic priests sometimes speak with the weight of a tradition that is very old behind every word.
Because Jesus told us to. Because he said, “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you.
Pray for those who persecute you. I have read those words many times. I have preached them many times.
I have reached the age where I believe I should do what I have preached.”
I wrote it in my notebook. I wrote it and I sat with it for the rest of the day.
And that night in the small room I was renting in the nearest town, I could not sleep.
Not because of what Father Marcos had said or not only because of what he had said, because of the question that his action had raised that his words alone could not have raised.
The question was, what makes a person do that? Not as an exceptional act of individual moral heroism.
Father Marcos did not strike me as a person who was performing heroism or who thought of himself as exceptional.
He struck me as a person who was doing what the framework he lived inside required of him.
What made the framework? What was the source of a framework that when applied to the worst the world could do to you produced?
Go bring food. I had been a journalist long enough to know that this was the real story.
Not the attacks, not the violence, not the politics. This what Father Marcos had done was the real story.
And I needed to understand it. I had been assigned to spend 4 to 6 weeks in upper Egypt.
I stayed for 8 months. My editor was patient. She was a person who understood that the real story is often not the story you were sent to cover.
And that when a journalist finds the real story, you give them the time to tell it properly.
I called her after the first month and told her that what was happening was larger than I had initially understood and that I needed more time.
She said, “Take what you need.” I spent 8 months attending church services, sharing meals, sitting in homes, walking the streets of these communities, talking to people in the specific way that journalism requires.
Not just interviewing them but being with them long enough that they stop performing for you and simply live in front of you.
This is the gift that time gives to journalism. The first two weeks of reporting you get the story people want to tell.
After 2 months you start getting the story that is actually there. After 8 months you are part of something.
I want to tell you about several things I witnessed over those 8 months that did the work that Father Marcos’s story had begun.
I witnessed a community that prayed with a specificity and a regularity that I had not encountered in Muslim practice, which tends toward the structured and the formal, beautiful in its own way, but different in texture from what I was seeing.
The cops prayed with the intimacy of people who expected to be heard. The prayers were not performances of piety.
They were conversations, specific, personal, urgent conversations with a God who was present in the room.
I had never seen prayer that looked like this. I sat in the back of a small church during a prayer service one evening and I watched 40 people talking to someone who was not visible and who they were clearly completely not performing for.
And I thought they know something. These people know something that I do not know.
I witnessed grief that did not become bitterness. This is not a small thing. I want you to understand how unusual this is.
I had covered violence and its aftermath many times. The human response to violence that is not resisted or avenged tends to become either trauma that shuts a person down or bitterness that corrods them from the inside.
These communities had experienced real violence. Some of them had experienced it repeatedly over generations.
And they were not shut down and they were not corroded. They were, and I kept returning to this word in my notes, alive.
More alive in some ways than people whose circumstances were far more comfortable. I witnessed what happened when the man who had burned Father Marcos’s church came to a church service.
This happened. It was extraordinary. It was not staged. It was not something anyone had organized.
The man came. He sat in the back. He had been, I learned later, one of Father Marcos’s food recipients.
And Father Marcos, when he saw him, stopped the service briefly, quietly, and walked to the back of the church and took the man’s hand and said in front of everyone, “You are welcome here.
You are always welcome here.” I was in that church. I saw that happen. I wrote it in my notebook with hands that were not entirely steady.
Something was happening to me. Not the journalism. The journalism was going fine. Something else.
Something that the journalism was both producing and not quite capturing. I was witnessing something real.
And I could not account for it within the frameworks I had brought with me.
And the journalist’s instinct, the instinct that says, “If you cannot account for something, go deeper, look harder, read more.”
That instinct was pulling me toward a question that was no longer professional. I began reading.
This is what I always do when a story goes deeper than my existing knowledge.
I read. I read Coptic history which is extraordinarily rich and which I was embarrassed to have known so little about.
I read the history of the early church in Egypt, the desert fathers, the great theologians of Alexandria, Athanasius and Sirill, and the extraordinary intellectual tradition that Egypt contributed to Christianity in the first four centuries.
I read it as a journalist reads, looking for the story, looking for the human texture, looking for what is underneath the official version.
And then I began reading the Gospels again as a journalist, looking for the source, looking for the original document, looking for the person who had produced this thing that I was watching in upper Egypt, this specific, costly, demanding, beautiful practice of forgiveness that I could not account for.
I read the Gospels the way I read any primary source, closely, critically, with attention to what the text says and what it does not say, with awareness of the context and the purposes of the document.
And what I found, as scholars and seekers from many different backgrounds have found before me, as you have heard in other testimonies on this channel, what I found was a portrait of a person that did not read like a constructed founding mythology.
What struck me as a journalist, specifically as a journalist, using my professional tools on this document, was the texture of the eyewitness testimony.
I had interviewed hundreds of witnesses over 20 years of reporting. I knew what eyewitness testimony looked like, its specificity, its inconsistencies, its inclusion of details that are inconvenient, its failure to edit itself into coherence.
The gospels have this texture. They have the specific messiness of real testimony. The disciples who don’t understand, the women who are frightened, the different accounts of the resurrection that agree on the central fact and disagree on the peripheral details, which is exactly what you get when you take testimony from multiple witnesses about the same event.
I published an analysis of the sermon on the mount as a primary historical document in my newspaper.
The first time I had written about Christian texts in my 20-year career, it was received with curiosity by some colleagues and irritation by others.
My editor read it and called me and said, “Karim, are you becoming religious?” I said, “I am becoming confused in a way that might be related to religion.”
She laughed and told me to keep going, but the professional reading was not the whole of what was happening.
The professional reading was the surface. Underneath the professional reading, something was happening to me that was not professional at all.
I was spending eight months watching people who had been hurt choose consistently over and over to love instead of to hate.
And the watching was doing something to me. The way that proximity to a person’s courage eventually makes you examine your own courage.
The way that witnessing a practice that is costly and specific eventually makes you ask whether you believe in the thing behind the practice.
I believed in good journalism. I believed in the power of a well-reported story to make a person real to another person.
I believed in the importance of bearing witness to what is actually happening regardless of whether it is comfortable.
But I had never had a faith, a framework for existence that was larger than my professional commitments and that made demands on me that went beyond the demands of good journalism.