New MRG report on cultural citizenship for Egyptian minorities

Image: Minority Rights Group

The newest report by Minority Rights Group examines the concept of citizenship as it appears in the 2014 Egyptian Constitution and its exclusion towards religious minority groups, such as Shia, Ahmadi, or Qur’ani Muslims, Jews, Bahá’ís, atheists, and ethnic minority groups such as Nubians, Amazigh, and Sinai Bedouins.

In the report, cultural citizenship is defined as “the rights of a minority or marginalized cultural community to reflect cultural difference without compromising their right to belong to a broader society”. Building on this, it finds that the existing narrative of citizenship in the Egyptian Constitution favors a single cultural identity, which is a historical trend in both laws and policies that can be traced back to British colonial rule. In the pursuit of this single cultural identity, ethnic minorities are “often misrepresented as a threat to nationalist notions of Egypt as a single and homogenous society”, which reinforces their marginalization.

The Group provides a list of recommendations to the Egyptian government to recognize and equally protect all cultural rights of minorities. Chief among them is the amendment of the Constitution to expand the recognition of these cultural rights with particular emphasis on the promotion of minority languages, as well as the inclusion of the histories of minorities in school curricula and increased representation in the media.

The full report is available on the MRG website.

Author: Laura Vizi