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April 2017

BOOKS Comments turned off

Andrew Harrod Reviews Farahnaz Ispahani’s New Insightful Book on Religious Persecution in Her Native Pakistan

By on April 15th, 2017

This was an interesting, important read. It is getting a fair amount of attention on Twitter.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes “Pakistan’s foundational dilemma—Muslim homeland or Islamic state” in her new book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Therein she provides an observant overview of how recurring drives for Islamic theocracy dashed any founding vision of Pakistan as a secular state, to the detriment alike of Pakistan’s Muslim-majority and non-Muslim minorities.

Ispahani begins her historical review with the 1947 partition of Britain’s Indian colony into the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. “Pakistan was carved out of British India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims—a majority enclave designed to protect against minority status in an undivided India” with its Hindu-majority. Given disparate ethnicities and new borders drawn along Hindu/Muslim sectarian lines, “Pakistan was not a territorial nation in the traditional sense. Its leaders had to explain its raison d’être, and most found it convenient to do so in religious terms.”

This faith-based identity appears in Pakistan’s name, the source of Ispahani’s book title. Pakistan arose amidst the 1930s Muslim India independence movement from an acronym encompassing the future country’s regions. Yet Pakistan also means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, a “meaning embraced by Islamist activists since the country’s founding.”

While Pakistan’s population today is only three percent non-Muslim, Ispahani notes that in 1947 Pakistan (then including modern Bangladesh) was almost 23 percent non-Muslim. This previously more pluralistic Pakistani population drew hope from Pakistan’s founding Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Days before Pakistan’s August 14 independence, his famous August 11, 1947, “speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan.”

Several of Jinnah’s fellow Muslim League leaders tried to suppress his speech’s publication, indicating for Ispahani the controversy surrounding Westernized, secular Pakistani leaders like him. “As time went on, Pakistan’s religious parties ferociously attacked Pakistan’s elites for their un-Islamic lifestyle while demanding greater Islamization,” demands often receiving appeasement. “Each round of Islamization was followed by demands for an even greater role for religion in public life.”

Already in 1949, notes Ispahani, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, offered a “vision for Pakistan diametrically-opposed to the secular one Jinnah had offered” in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. “Liaquat, an Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernized landowner not known for personal religiosity,” supported the Objectives Resolution declaring an Islamic state as the objective in the drafting of Pakistan’s constitution. Many believe that he thereby “intended to placate clerics and Islamists only in the most cosmetic sense.” Nonetheless, Pakistan’s 1956 constitution, with the Objectives Resolution as preamble and numerous Islamic references, proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ispahani examines a similar duality in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Pakistan’s 1970 elections. He “spoke of Islam as the personal religion of the majority” on the campaign trail but under his leadership Pakistan’s new “1973 constitution not only retained the Islamic provisions from earlier versions but also added new ones.” A 1974 constitutional amendment then began the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadi sect by declaring them non-Muslim. “Rejecting Bhutto’s hard-cultivated Islamic credentials,” his Islamist opposition in the 1977 elections emphasized his alcohol consumption.

Following the elections, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a coup and had him executed on trumped-up charges. Many associate Pakistan’s Islamization with Zia, Ispahani notes, who “used the phrase ‘soldier of Islam’ to describe himself in his very first speech” in power. Until his death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, this dictator’s “Islamization of the nation was global in its scope and almost obsessive in its thoroughness,” as she documents in detail.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Putting ‘America first’ in the Mideast Ruthie Blum

By on April 15th, 2017

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets last Thursday night — and this Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office?

Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and politicians who have been paying close attention both to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people — most recently with chemical weapons — and to every syllable of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Their argument now goes that Trump’s latest military moves — and shift in attitude toward NATO — are examples of policy “flip-flopping” from the “isolationism” expressed in his inaugural address to a newfound global interventionism. They contend that a president who so drastically and swiftly shifts gears is perfectly capable of performing yet another about-face when the mood arises.

The trouble is that this assertion is both overly simplistic and inaccurate.

In the first place, Trump himself openly acknowledged that though he had said he was not going to intervene in Syria, he “changed his mind” when it was established that Assad was killing babies with sarin gas — after lying about having rid his country of chemical weapons. He has also openly declared war on the Islamic State group. This hardly constitutes a flip-flop. Instead, it indicates flexibility of thought and action on the part of a leader faced with a set of circumstances that warrants both.

The same goes for his statements on NATO, which he originally called “obsolete” and has since deemed necessary. His initial attack on the organization was that its members were not pulling their weight. This spurred them to make at least symbolic gestures, such as slightly increasing their budgets, to persuade him to reconsider. This is no small thing.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Said No to Troops in Syria. His Aides Aren’t So Sure. Eli Lake

By on April 15th, 2017

Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

But as Trump’s young presidency has shown, many of the candidate’s foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It’s not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week’s chemical weapons attack on rebels. It’s not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president’s biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump’s national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster’s critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump’s new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. special operations forces and some conventional forces have been in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama reversed course and ordered a new air campaign against the Islamic State. But so far, the U.S. presence on the ground has been much smaller and quieter than more traditional military campaigns, particularly for Syria. It’s the difference between boots on the ground and slippers on the ground.

Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: “We’re not going into Syria,” he said.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Failure of Open Borders in Germany and Sweden Chancellor Merkel finally admits the obvious connection between refugee flows and increased security concerns. April 14, 2017 Joseph Klein

By on April 14th, 2017

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just woken up to the fact that terrorists have been entering her country under the guise of would-be asylum seekers. “There is no doubt that among the so many people who have sought shelter in our country were also persons who have become the focus of the security authorities,” Chancellor Merkel acknowledged. However, as if to exculpate herself from any responsibility, she added, “we should not forget that our country was already in the sights of Islamic terrorism before the many refugees came to us.” Her latter observation begs the question as to why she was so reckless in opening up Germany’s borders to a veritable flood of refugees, without any careful screening, in the first place.

With the upcoming election in mind as she seeks a fourth term, Chancellor Merkel was most likely trying to appear strong in reacting to the latest in a string of radical Islamic terrorist attacks in her country. Terrorists linked to ISIS are suspected of having detonated three bombs on Tuesday, next to a German soccer team bus in the town of Dortmund, which the chancellor called a “repugnant act.”

In September 2015, Chancellor Merkel boasted of how welcoming Germany was to the self-proclaimed refugees pouring in from the Middle East, Afghanistan and North Africa. “The right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers,” she said. “As a strong, economically healthy country we have the strength to do what is necessary.” She opened Germany’s borders to nearly a million migrants and refugees from the world’s most terrorist ridden regions.

In 2016, Germany began to reap the horrors of the seeds of radical Islam and jihad that Chancellor Merkel had so enthusiastically planted. For example, ISIS claimed responsibility for the deadly December 19th truck assault on an outdoor Christmas market near a landmark church in Berlin, which killed 12 people and injured nearly 50 other victims. The individual who had allegedly carried out the attack was a 24-year-old Tunisian man whom had traveled to Italy from Tunisia in 2011 and spent time in an Italian jail before arriving in Germany in 2015. Last summer, there were four violent attacks in Germany within just a week’s time, which resulted in deaths and serious injuries. Two of them were committed by Syrian migrants. A third was committed by an Afghan asylum seeker. The fourth, a mass shooting in Munich, was committed by the German-born son of Iranian asylum-seekers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mutilating Little Girls in Michigan’s Little Palestine A female genital mutilation horror in the Midwest. Daniel Greenfield

By on April 14th, 2017

Livonia, Michigan is known as Little Palestine. The Detroit suburb is famous for its anti-Israel meetings. You could go hear Mustafa Barghouthi, Omar Barghouti and Ali Abunimah without taking a long drive.

It’s also known for its shady doctors.

Dr. Murtaza Hussain was busted for letting unlicensed employees diagnose patients and write prescriptions. Dr. Waseem Alam and Dr. Hatem Ataya pleaded guilty in the nation’s largest Medicare fraud case totaling $712 million in false billings centering on Shahid Tahir, Muhammad Tariq and Manavar Javed’s Livonia medical firms. But what was going on at one Livonia clinic was far worse than the theft of millions. Anyone passing by at the right time could hear the screams of little girls.

We think of horrors like female genital mutilation as a terrible thing that happens over “there.” But as the implacable tide of Muslim immigration swept across Europe, “there” became the United Kingdom.

England recorded 5,700 cases of FGM in less than a year. France has jailed 100 people for FGM. An estimated 50,000 women in Germany have undergone FGM with a 30 percent boost due to the rise of Islamic migration in the last several years. In Sweden, it’s 38,000. And now, as American towns and cities are reshaped by Muslim migration, “there” is now right here. The terrible practice is in America.

Sweden was the first Western country to outlaw FGM. But despite the prevalence of FGM in Sweden, there have only been a handful of convictions. The United States banned FGM in 1997. A Federal report in 2012 warned that 513,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk for FGM.

Now after twenty years of the law’s existence, a Muslim doctor has become the first to be charged.

Operating out of a Livonia clinic, Jumana Fakhruddin Nagarwala abused unknown numbers of little girls. The end came when law enforcement traced calls to her from a Minnesota number. Then they followed the trail to a hotel in Farmington Hills; a Michigan city at the center of an Islamic Center controversy.

It was Friday evening; the holy day of the Islamic week when Muslims are told to “leave off business” and “hasten to the remembrance of Allah.” That is what the two women leading two little girls to be mutilated thought that they were doing. Muslims believe that on Friday, angels stand outside the doors of mosques to record who shows up for prayer. But it was the hotel surveillance cameras that watched and recorded as the two little girls arrived, unaware of the horror that was about to happen to them.

The 7-year-old girl had been told that she was going to Detroit for a “special” girls’ trip. Instead her special trip turned into a nightmare. After the Muslim doctor allegedly mutilated her, she warned the child not to talk about what was done to her.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Flattens ISIS Terror Complex The Mother of All Bombs takes out a terrorist stronghold. April 14, 2017 Matthew Vadum

By on April 14th, 2017

The United States dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal yesterday on an Islamic State complex in the mountains of Afghanistan, a powerful indication that the Trump administration takes its responsibilities in the war against Muslim terrorism seriously.

This successful mission is part of President Trump making good on a campaign promise made in late 2015 to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). Yesterday the president referred to the military operation as “another successful job,” after acknowledging he trusted his generals in the field enough to delegate strike authority to them.

It is a welcome change after the Obama administration did little for years to combat Muslim terrorism and engaged in many activities that strengthened and emboldened terrorist groups. It also puts hostile regimes, like those in North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Russia, and Syria on notice that America’s new president is dramatically different from his predecessor.

“This president understands that diplomacy without force behind it is nothing,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Trump White House counterterrorism guru, said on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night.

“It’s words. It’s pieces of paper. Statecraft and leadership are when you use these things together to reinforce each other.”

Trump, unlike Obama, refuses to lead from behind and play friendlies off against each other, he said.

What we have seen is eight years of divisiveness, of the Obama White House dividing our nation against itself, and dividing us against our allies and friends. And in just 84 days, President Trump has replaced divisiveness with decisiveness, whether it’s to do with the border, whether it’s to do with manufacturing, whether it’s to do with NATO, or whether it’s to do with our enemies in ISIS, or in this case, the chemical weapons attack [in Syria] last week, we have changed the geopolitical reality in the world in just a matter of weeks.

President Trump is serious about confronting the terrorist threat, Gorka said.

People now understand just how much the president means what he says. When he says – unequivocally – in front of a joint session of Congress, at CPAC, when he says I am going to obliterate ISIS, literally, when he says, I am going to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth, it’s not empty rhetoric.

“It’s stunning” if you read the memoirs of Obama’s defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Gorka said.

The former Pentagon chiefs tell of National Security Council meetings that last “three to four hours with nobody taking a decision,” he said. “That was the last eight years. That was the reality of the red lines. Along comes President Trump, that’s gone. We have a threat. We’ve promised to deal with and we’re dealing with it right now.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Drain the Higher Ed. Swamp That Produced the ‘Hang Trump’ Prof. Lunatic lecturer is only a symptom of a larger disease. Bruce Thornton

By on April 14th, 2017

The uproar over a Fresno State history lecturer’s tweets about assassinating President Trump is understandable, but in the end the outrage is pointless. It’s doubtful the feds will charge the fellow, given how outlandish and obviously hyperbolic the tweets are. Nor is he likely to be fired. All the commotion has accomplished is to turn a nobody into a left-wing martyr persecuted for “speaking truth to power.”

The fact is, there is nothing this guy said that wouldn’t be applauded by most faculty in the social sciences and humanities, even if they don’t have his gumption to say so out loud. The politicized university is entering its fifth decade, and was already a done deal when Alan Bloom publicized it in his surprising 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Thirty years later, focusing on the stupid statements of individual professors, or in this case lecturers, does nothing to get at the root of the problem. They are symptoms of deeper structural changes in the administrative apparatus of most colleges, and these changes in part have been responses to federal laws, particularly affirmative action, sexual harassment law, and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. With federal agency thugs backing campus leftists by threatening administrators with investigation or the reduction of federal funds, it has been easy to transform the university from a space for developing critical thinking and intellectual diversity, into a progressive propaganda organ and reeducation camp.

The most important of these government-backed instruments is “diversity.” This vacuous concept was created ex nihilo by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the 1979 Bakke vs. University of California decision as a way to protect admissions “set asides” for minorities without falling afoul of the law’s prohibition of quotas. Since only a “compelling state interest” could justify exceptions to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race, which naked quotas obviously did, “diversity,” along with all its alleged social and educational boons, was by judicial fiat deemed a “state interest.” In 2003, Grutter vs. Bollinger, and again in the two Fisher vs. University of Texas cases (2013, 2016), the Supreme Court confirmed Powell’s legerdemain in order “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Republican-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Conner said in the first Fisher case.

Of course, there exists no coherent definition of “diversity,” and no empirical evidence demonstrating its power to improve educational outcomes or create “educational benefits.” If there were such pedagogical benefits from diversity, we would have long ago dismantled the 107 historically black colleges and universities. On the contrary, there is much evidence that mismatching applicants to universities damages minority students and segregates campuses into identity-politics enclaves.

But using race to privilege some applicants over others wasn’t just about admitting students. The campus infrastructure had to change, which meant the expansion of politicized identity-politics programs, departments, general education courses, and student-support administrative offices and services. As a result, the cultural Marxism ideology that created identity politics in the first place now permeates the university far beyond the classroom, and enables an intolerance for competing ideas, not to mention shutting down the “free play of the mind on all subjects” that Matthew Arnold identified as the core mission of liberal education. And this corruption is encouraged by federal law and its leverage of federal money that flows into higher education.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Davies’s Emily Dickinson Film Is a Fine and Furious Work of Art But the Bulgarian Glory leaves viewers hopeless. By Armond White

By on April 14th, 2017

Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius in Amherst, Mass., where she lived around the time of the Civil War. The film is not simply a biopic; it’s also an emotional autobiography, as are all Davies’s films, from last year’s Sunset Song on to The Deep Blue Sea, Of Time and the City, The House of Mirth, The Neon Bible, his family chronicles Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and his debut Trilogy, which depicted his struggle with Catholicism and sexuality.

As those titles indicate, Davies is a cinematic poet who rigorously challenges conventional storytelling with fixed compositions, bold camera moves, and sound design that mixes music and narration with stark, complex imagery: A transition scene of an open window, with curtains blowing, overlaps with the silhouette of a preacher whose sermon deeply moves Dickinson. In this, Dickinson’s longing is palpable, but the scene also expresses an agnosticism so candid and stubborn that it even includes metaphysical awe.

Though far different from this week’s action franchise The Fate of the Furious, A Quiet Passion could also have borne that movie’s title. Dickinson’s isolated intelligence and artistry are subjects unique to Davies’s filmmaking. A kind of creative fury — apparent in Davies’s radical formalism (and made vivid by actress Cynthia Nixon) — is what drives this movie.

Determined to show how Dickinson’s art was born out of both suffering and inspiration, Davies makes her an exasperating presence at school, at home with her family, and even for her admirers. The opening sequence of her resistance to the era’s Evangelism makes her a “no-hoper.” From this funny but pointed scene, Davies launches a bravura transition, borrowed from Michael Jackson’s revolutionary 1991 music video Black or White, in which Dickinson family portraits morph each character into adulthood.This age and time device is a miniature of the entire film’s powerful style. Every sequence — especially a montage showing reclusive Dickinson’s subconscious fantasy of desire (“up the stairs at midnight”) — attests to Davies’s fearless emphasis on Dickinson’s single-minded integrity. There is a tendency to make a martyr of Dickinson — “You have a soul anyone would be proud of,” says her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle, whose luminous smile balances Nixon’s tight-faced bitterness). Sometimes Davies records Dickinson’s intransigence as though he is paying tribute to her proto-feminism. Yet Vinnie also warns her sister: “Integrity, if taken too far, can be ruthless.”

Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet.

Despite Davies’s dour approach, his artistry prevents him from indulging in self-pity. Like pop singer Morrissey, a fellow British Catholic manqué, Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet. In one scene, Dickinson welcomes her brother’s newborn child by improvising the famous “I’m Nobody / Who are you?” It’s like a moment from a biopic about a Hollywood pop composer, but the “Eureka” moment gives the audience a sense of discovery.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard Activists Say They’re So Sorry for Posting Fake Deportation Notices The students apparently thought posting the fake notices would be a good way to help people facing deportation. By Katherine Timpf

By on April 14th, 2017

A group of activists at Harvard University have apologized for posting fake deportation notices in dorm rooms, explaining that they were simply trying to get people to think about how bad deportation is.

“We regret to inform you that a resident of this dorm has been detained indefinitely due to suspicious actions, suspected violent inclinations, or suspicion of being a deportable alien (i.e. questionable residency status),” the notice, which read “Harvard Special Investigations Unit” at the top, read.

The back — and only the back — of the flyer clarified that it was, in fact, “not a real notice,” and that the reason for the “unsettling nature” of it was to encourage “Harvard community members to reflect on the reality of people who face these kinds of unwarranted disruptions of life in unexplained suspicious circumstances before a state power that can hold ‘suspects’ indefinitely.” It also included information about an upcoming panel on incarceration. 



According to an article in the Harvard Crimson, the notice was signed by Harvard Concilio Latino, the Harvard Islamic Society, and the Harvard Black Students Association “and orchestrated by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee.” The Crimson reports that students from at least two of the groups — Concilio Latino and the Palestine Solidarity Committee — have already apologized.

In the apology statement from the Palestine Solidarity Committee, co-president Fatima M. Bishtawi explained that the purpose of posting those flyers was to make people think about the fact that people “do not always get to walk away from a notice knowing that it is fake.”

Bishtawi is right. Deportations and deportation notices are very, very real — but that’s exactly what made this whole stunt so disgusting. These activists say that they were trying to help people who may face deportation by getting others to think about what it must be like to face deportation, but apparently, they never stopped to think about the fact that making people who may face deportation think that they are at risk of being deported might not be the nicest way to help them.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coptic Christians’ Endless Struggle for Survival in Egypt The Copts have been persecuted for thousands of years. ISIS’s brutal Palm Sunday bombing in Alexandria is just the latest episode. By Samuel Tadros

By on April 14th, 2017

Viewed from the outside, there is nothing remarkable about Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria, where an Islamic State terrorist blew himself up during the Palm Sunday liturgy last weekend, leaving 17 people dead. The building is new, erected in 1952 and renovated several times since, but the site itself is much older — so old, in fact, that it can tell the story of the Coptic Church itself, in all its triumph and despair.

It was his first day in Alexandria and Saint Mark, the Evangelist, walked around the city bedazzled by its wonders. The small village that Alexander the Great had chosen to build into a city bearing his name had grown to equal Rome in its greatness. By night, as the strap of his sandal fell off, Mark stopped at the first shoemaker he found. While repairing the sandal, the shoemaker accidentally pierced his finger. “Heis ho Theos,” Anianus, the shoemaker, screamed. God is one. Mark took some mud from the ground, put it on the wound and miraculously healed Anianus’s hand. Mark began telling him how Jesus had died on the cross for mankind’s sins, preaching to him the message of Christ. The message fell on a welcoming heart. Anianus took Mark to his home and, with the rest of his family, converted. The Evangelist baptized them and, in due time, ordained Anianus as the city’s bishop.

Thus begins the story of Christianity in Egypt. Anianus’s house, in a district called Baucalis, became the first church in Egypt. While historians are unsure of the truth, according to Coptic tradition, this is the same site where Saint Mark’s Cathedral stands today. His mission would take him to other corners of the Roman world, but eventually he returned to Alexandria, and, in 68 a.d., shed his blood on its streets. Anianus followed Saint Mark onto the papal seat, starting a chain that continues to the present day with the 118th pope of Alexandria, Tawadros II, who was leading liturgy as the bombs exploded in Saint Mark’s last Sunday.

Even as Christianity spread across Egypt, Alexandria remained its spiritual center. In the small church in Baucalis, Coptic popes confronted waves of Roman persecution and preached to the faithful. If Christianity was to survive in Alexandria, home to the greatest library of late antiquity and a number of influential pagan philosophers, it would have to compete with Greek philosophy and defeat it. The Catechetical School of Alexandria emerged as Christianity’s greatest theological center, with men such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen defending the faith. The 17th Coptic pope, Peter, would be martyred at the same site in Baucalis.

By the end of the Roman persecution at the hands of Emperor Constantine the Great, Alexandria and its popes had emerged as one of the leading pillars of Christendom. The Church of Alexandria would soon discover that the end of persecution did not bring an end to its pains. Arius, a Libyan priest in the Baucalis church, touched off a controversy that would threaten to tear the whole Church apart by arguing that the Son was not equal to the Father. But if Alexandria gave birth to the greatest heresy threatening the Church, it also gave birth to the greatest defender of orthodoxy: Saint Athanasius. “The whole world is against you Athanasius,” a friend said to him. “Athanasius Contra Mundum,” he replied. I am against the world. The seat of Alexandria at Baucalis would soon discover how true his words were.

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