With every security and political event related to Egypt's Copts, the question arises about the real number of this minority that the presidents stress on their enjoyment of full citizenship, and enabling them to exercise their rights on an equal footing with the Muslim majority.

Today, Sunday, the Coptic issue returned to the fore of political and national affairs in Egypt, after 41 people were killed in an electrical fault in Abu Sefein Church in Imbaba, Giza Governorate, in Greater Cairo.

Immediately, the Egyptian government initiated a wide investigation into the incident, and decided to award compensation to the families of the victims, and the Ministry of Health confirmed that hospitals were providing treatment to the wounded to the fullest.

This behavior is not unique, as the state is often keen to show its support for the Coptic minority in political events and security events and disasters.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi previously directed the construction of a church in every new housing project that includes a mosque, even if the number of Copts in the targeted area does not exceed 150 people.

But the decisive state in standing by the Copts in the political, security and religious aspects seems hesitant or ambiguous when it comes to declaring the true number of the followers of this minority, within the population census statistics that are carried out every few years, the last of which was published late last year, when it indicated that the population of Egypt reached 102 million;

51.5% of males and 48.5% of females.

It appears from statistical data in recent years that the state deliberately conceals the percentage of Copts in the population of Egypt, and its supporters justify this by not wanting to give the population any sectarian character.

On the other hand, the Copts see that withholding this percentage is behind political goals aimed at marginalizing them and losing their demographic weight in Egypt, while activists believe that the purpose of the blocking is to cover up that the real percentage of Copts is much lower than what the church declares.


huge chasm

Faced with the official ambiguity, the Copts claim that their number is 17 million, which means that they represent about 15% of the population of Egypt.

In an interview he conducted in 2018 with a Saudi newspaper, Pope Tawadros II said that the number of Christians in Egypt is about 15 million, in addition to two million outside it residing in about 60 countries around the world.

Tawadros pointed out that the church does not have a census, but there is a so-called "church membership" that records those who belong to the church through "baptism", and the church records deaths.

This percentage seems very far from official information disclosed by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2011 after the popular revolution that toppled the regime of late President Hosni Mubarak, after 30 years in power.

On that day, the head of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (government), Major General Abu Bakr al-Jundi, said that the number of Egyptian Copts reached 5 million and 130 thousand.

Al-Jundi said that the Copts are more emigrating and less in childbearing, stressing that these numbers are documented and official and are not in doubt.

These statements sparked strong anger and condemnation in Coptic circles, which they described as "deliberate leaks to achieve political goals and influence their rights."


numbers from history

But a return to the history of the Egyptian population census from 1897 to 1986 shows that the percentage of Copts remained between 6% and 8%.

In his book "The State and the Church", the historian and consultant Tariq Al-Bishri explains that the percentage of Christians in Egypt was 6.3% in 1897, 6.4% in 1907, 8.1% in 1917, 8.3% in 1927, and 8.3% in 1927. 2% in 1937.

This percentage reached 7.9% in 1947, then new scientific methods were introduced into the census method. The 1960 census showed that the percentage of Christians amounted to 7.3%, then it became 6.7% in 1966, and 6.24% in 1976, then less than 6% in the general census. 1986.