In January 2014 the interim government approved a new constitution, leading to the May 2014 election of Abdel Fattah El Sisi as the country's new president. The elections were boycotted by the Muslim Brotherhood as well as other political groups.
Since his election Sisi has been praised for receiving representatives from both the Orthodox and Catholics, as well as Protestants.
However, despite the fact that the situation has "officially" improved under Sisi, who has said and done the right things, many Christians are still persecuted, especially in the rural areas where they are very much a minority.
Most Catholics in Egypt belong to the Coptic rite, and most Christians in Egypt are Coptic Orthodox. Christians compose about 10 percent of Egypt's population.
On Feb. 15 of this year the Islamic State released a video purporting to show the grisly beheadings of 21 Coptic Christians from Egypt. The beheadings occurred just weeks after some 20 Coptic Christians had gone missing near the coastal city of Surt, also known as Sirte.
Right now Islamist movements "are feeling very emboldened and are feeling that there is minimal accountability," Tadros said, so the silence only opens the door wider for extremist sentiments to take root.
Many Egyptians, including Copts, travel to Libya seeking employment opportunities. Tadros explained that up until 2010 there were 350,000 Christians living in Libya, the majority of whom were migrant laborers from countries such as Ethiopia, Eritrea, Ghana and other African countries.
Of those 350,000 Christians, 300,000 belonged to the Coptic Orthodox faith, she noted, explaining that they had been well integrated into Libyan society and were not discriminated against until the rise of Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS came to power, encouraging anti-Christian sentiments.
She cautioned against the dangers of a harsh authoritarian rule of any kind, but said that Islamic authoritarianism seems to be the worst form.
"All authoritarianism is bad," Tadros affirmed, but stressed that the forms of Islamic authoritarianism that gripped Egypt in 2012 under Morsi's rule and which have been seen by Hamas in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as in Iraq, Syria and Libya are "particularly disconcerting and worrisome."
This, she said, is first of all because these groups base their Islamic governance on their own interpretation of Sharia law.
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She clarified that this isn't necessarily true for average Muslim believers, but "those who wish to organize politics and society along their lines of what they see as the right way to be ruled in alignment what they see as God's laws."
What this does, then, is that it "eats at the heart of the concept of equal citizenship that is not premised on gender, on class, on ethnicity, on religion" and creates a specific hierarchy in which Muslims are put at the top solely on the basis of being Muslims.
All other faiths, including Muslims who don't share the radical, extremist ideals, become second-class citizens and are "denigrated, ostracized, demonized."
With these type of authoritarian regimes, "anybody who expresses political dissent to the autocrat is wiped out" or subject to encroachment, she said, noting that this is especially true for women.
Throughout the Middle East and surrounding areas, "we have not seen a context…where people who rule in the name of Islamic Sharia have produced a system of government that increased women's choices" or enhanced their rights, she said.
"At the very best they only eroded at some of it," she said, explaining that women are often targeted for modesty, and told to cover themselves. In controlling a woman's body, the regimes believe they are able to control society.