Though an Egyptian court only recently ruled to remove the legal authority of monks living at the world’s oldest Christian monastery and give the state extensive control over the property, Cairo’s efforts to strip the monastery of its autonomy have actually been underway for the past decade, according to Coptic Christian and research analyst Mariam Wahba.
“I grew up in Egypt’s Coptic Christian community; once a year my church would pile us into a bus for our annual pilgrimage to the [St. Catherine’s Monastery],” Wahba wrote in an Aug. 17 Free Press article. “But the standing of this holy place is now at grave risk.”
The struggle sparked a meeting in June between the Greek and Egyptian foreign ministers to secure the monastery’s rights, and its resolution bears crucial implications not only for the monastery, its Greek Orthodox monks, and the historic manuscripts they protect, but also for US-Egypt policy and minority religious institutions across Egypt, according to Wahba.
“The outcome of this fight will signal whether Egypt still makes room for religion that is outside state control,” Wahba wrote. “Over the last decade, Cairo has steadily chipped away at St. Catherine’s autonomy — a microcosm of Egypt’s broader campaign against the country’s estimated 10 to 15 million Christians in the majority Sunni Muslim nation.”
Wahba, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained that Egyptian authorities canceled a project to digitize the monastery’s manuscript collection. In 2024, they denied visiting scholars entry to the monastery library without explanation.
Additionally, for years, “researchers have been able to study its manuscripts with approval from the monks,” Wahba explained. “The government, however, seized control over academic access to the site in 2023, revoking the monastery’s long-standing authority to oversee the research.”
The government-run system has not approved a research request since, according to Wahba.
Though Badr Abelatty, Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs, insisted that the ruling does not infringe on the monastery’s religious freedom, “that’s hardly the point,” Wahba wrote.
“The state does not need to evict monks or fully ban prayer to undermine Christians’ religious freedom,” Wahba wrote. “By nationalizing the site and cutting it off from the global research and religious communities that have long sustained it, the government is effectively severing the monastery from its identity and function. The stakes here go well beyond a specific holy site.”
“St. Catherine’s is a bellwether for a broader trend in Egypt — one in which the state gradually subsumes non-Sunni religious institutions,” she continued. “If the government can absorb a monastery with this much history, international standing, and religious significance, then no independent religious institution is safe.”
Wahba emphasized that though Christianity is technically a legally protected religion, Cairo has for years allowed “a culture of impunity” to grow as Christians suffer attacks and perpetrators are not held accountable; further, there is an epidemic of kidnappings of Coptic women and girls that Egyptian officials routinely ignore, according to Wahba.
She also pointed to a February 2025 report of State Restrictions on Religious Freedom in Egypt published by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“Egypt continues to impose systematic and ongoing obstacles to freedom of religion or belief on religious minority communities,” the report states.”
Elaborating on the risk that the outcome of the monastery’s struggle bears for the US, Wahba noted that partnerships between American scholars and institutions working with the monastery “are now in limbo.”
“According to Egyptian law, if the monastery is no longer a recognized legal entity, it cannot contract or partner with foreign institutions,” she explained. “Centuries of intellectual and religious heritage are at risk of being lost.”
Positing about factors that could pressure Egypt to reverse course, Wahba noted that the US provides Egypt $1.4 billion in military aid annually, a portion of which is contingent on Egypt advancing human rights. It is also based on an agreement that stipulates that the US government will assess whether Egypt is protecting religious freedom and minority groups.
“These obligations are not symbolic, but codified law meant to reflect U.S. values in foreign assistance,” Wahba wrote. “Quietly nationalizing one of Christianity’s most sacred sites without consequence calls into question how seriously both Cairo and Washington take those conditions.”
Wahba also wrote that many Christian so-called commentators and pundits have spoken out against discrimination of Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank, but “most of them remain utterly silent on these brazen attacks on Christianity taking place in Egypt and across the Arab Middle East.”
“Religious freedom does not vanish overnight,” she concluded. “It erodes gradually until sacred spaces become footnotes to state power. That is the danger at St. Catherine’s. If the United States is serious about protecting religious pluralism and preserving Christian cultural heritage, then now is a moment to act. Not to mourn what is lost, but to defend what remains.”
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