On social justice issues, the Muslim Brotherhood is not what it was, having changed direction to recant the public ownership and the wealth redistribution for which it used to campaign, and to support Mubarak's land reform reversals. But it could easily be talked into changing back, especially since it is by no means clear how convinced the party at large has ever been about these revisions at the top. Remind you of anyone? http://www.online-legal-info.com/

David - yes, in Yemen the fundamentalists are likely to take over once Saleh is gone - the ex Communists were always a paper tiger!

But unlike you, I am profoundly depressed that the "Arab Spring" is unstoppably leading into the creation of fully Islamic religion-based states, with all the horrific implications that has for Copts, secularists, liberals or socialists.

Look at Tunisia, which on paper had the best chance of establishing a secular democracy..even there Islamists have been demanding that women can wear burka/niqabs at university and school; or in Egypt where the extremists are running their "million beards" campaign, and as I said in Libya where the Islamists have already won...

One quarter of the Egyptian Parliament should be elected on a constituency basis, one quarter elected on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) nominated by the Coptic Patriarch.

No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?

On social justice issues, the Muslim Brotherhood is not what it was, having changed direction to recant the public ownership and the wealth redistribution for which it used to campaign, and to support Mubarak's land reform reversals. But it could easily be talked into changing back, especially since it is by no means clear how convinced the party at large has ever been about these revisions at the top. Remind you of anyone?

If Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, and the Lebanese coalition including Hezbollah are anything to go by, then the Copts are very well-placed to strike an excellent deal, in stark contrast to our beloved Israel, Turkey and Mubarak.

And the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by British intelligence in order to agitate against independence, has always enjoyed excellent Foreign Office connections. So Commonwealth membership beckons, especially for a country which even still has a currency called the pound.

This is Britain's moment. Otherwise, such are the historic ties and the widespread proficiency in English that we should expect each our cities to contain several, and each of our large towns to contain one, of those Coptic churches as one tenth of Egyptian population decamps to the most obvious alternative country from there point of view.

As with the Arabs inside Israel's 1948 borders, why did we not do for them what we later did for the East African Asians, but a generation earlier, when we were still just about in a position to back it up?

Tariq - George Bush and Tony Blair probably did not know that there were Christian communities in the Middle East, and no doubt imagine even now that they are made up only of very recent converts served by missionaries who have arrived since the “liberation” of Iraq.

Their neoconservative puppet-masters relied on that, and the corresponding popular, ignorance in order to use those communities as bait for the jihadis whom they knew would pour into Iraq if the Ba’ath regime were removed, the easier to kill them.

Although at an academic level Evangelicalism is returning to its more cerebral roots within the Great Tradition, at any popular level the existence of Christian communities going all the way back to the Day of Pentecost remains almost unknown.

The forms that they take make them as unmentionable as the Sub-Apostolic Fathers, with their matter-of-fact presentation of all things “Romish” as the context presupposed by the New Testament text, even by those who are aware of them.

And that ridiculous, utterly anti-intellectual nineteenth-century aberration, Dispensationalism, remains staggeringly influential.