For Jesus .. Egypt Once Said Yes!

This Easter, the world is celebrating a story that begins with a refugee family. It has simply stopped noticing that part

This week, a large part of the world is pausing to mark Easter. Churches are full. Families are gathering. A story that has been told for two thousand years is being told again. Another part of the world do not celebrate Easter. But I think there is an important part that we all should pay attention to it.

At the heart of the story being honored this week, before the theology, before the doctrines, before everything that divides the traditions, there is something that belongs to all of us. There is a mother. There is a child. There is a night crossing. There is a family that had to flee.

And there is Egypt, which opened its door. That part of the story is not contested across traditions. It is simply forgotten. And in a week when much of the world is gathered around this narrative, I think it deserves to be remembered.

Before the Theology, There Was a Flight

The story begins like this. A ruler learns that a child has been born, a child whose future might, somehow, challenge his power. His response is the response of frightened authority in every era of history: eliminate the threat before it can grow. An order goes out. Families in Bethlehem are destroyed.

One family is warned in time. A mother, and a newborn child slip away in the night. They cross a border. They enter a country that is not theirs, whose language they may not speak, whose customs are different from everything they know. The family arrives with nothing but a child and their need.

The country they enter is Egypt. And Egypt, with no obligation and no fanfare, shelters them.

This is the story recorded for Christians, and it is part of a larger sacred narrative. But the human core of it, a family fleeing violence, crossing a border, depending on the kindness of strangers, belongs to no single religion. It is a human story. It is, I would argue, the part of this week’s celebrations that the world most needs to sit with.

What Egypt Did, and Why It Matters

When that family arrived in Egypt, Egypt was not a Christian country. It was not a Jewish country. It was a civilization more than three thousand years old at that time, shaped by its own religions, its own philosophy, its own way of organizing the world. It owed these arrivals nothing. It helped them greatly anyway.

“Egypt sheltered a refugee mother and her child two thousand years ago. The world has not stopped telling that story. Perhaps that is what welcome actually costs, and what it earns”

The Coptic Christian tradition of Egypt, which traces its origins precisely to this period and this story, honors the memory of that welcome deeply. There are more than twenty sites across Egypt where, by tradition, the Family of Jesus rested, was fed, found safety.

The journey took them through villages along the Nile, into the south, into the hills. At every step, ordinary people, ordinary Egyptians, made ordinary decisions to offer food, shelter, and silence to a family that needed protection.

No record survives of their names. No monument was built for them. They simply did what the tradition of hospitality, older than any of the religions involved at this stage, had always asked: they saw a human being in need and they responded.

That act of welcome became, centuries later, part of the identity of an entire civilization. The Coptic Church is among the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. It exists, in part, because Egypt said yes to a mother and her child. I find that remarkable. Not as theology. As history.

The Instruction Every Tradition Shares

Here is what I want to say carefully, as a Muslim reflecting on a story rooted in Christian tradition. Islam honors The Honorable Mrs. Maryam deeply. There is an entire surah in the Quran named after her. It acknowledges that God sheltered her and her son, gave them refuge and provision. Islam also honors Jesus, and whenever his name is mentioned to Muslims, they follow it with “Peace Be Upon Him”. But this is not our story today.

The vulnerability of that mother and child is not a detail confined to one tradition. It is honored across the three great Abrahamic faiths and, in different forms, across traditions far beyond them.

We did not need a single religion to discover it. We needed all of them to keep reminding us

Every civilization, every religion, every ethical framework that has survived the centuries carries some version of the same instruction: welcome the stranger. All were making it one of the most emphasized commandments in the scriptures and traditions.

Care for the traveler and the displaced. Indigenous traditions across every continent embed hospitality to the stranger as a foundational social value. and some even speak of the stranger as a teacher in disguise.

This is not coincidence. It is convergence. Across thousands of years and many cultures, humanity has kept arriving at the same conclusion: how you treat the one who has nothing, the one who arrives without power or connection or claim, is the truest measure of who you are. Egypt, in that ancient moment, passed the test.

The Gap Between the Story and the Policy

Now I want to name the contrast that this week makes impossible to ignore. The civilizations that most loudly celebrate this story, the story of a refugee family welcomed by a foreign land, are the same civilizations most loudly debating whether to turn away refugee families today.

I say this without indictment. I say it as an observation that I think deserves honest reflection. The Mediterranean Sea has become the deadliest migration route in the world. Since 2014, more than thirty thousand people have drowned attempting to cross it.

Families. Children. People who did not leave because they wanted to. They left because staying meant dying. That is what it means to be a refugee. It is not a lifestyle choice. It is the last option remaining. Remember now the family of Jesus, and what Egypt did.

Political discourse across much of the Western world has, for years now, framed these arrivals as threats. The language of invasion, of cultural erosion, of economic burden has become normalized. Leaders have built careers on it. It has become, in some countries, the central organizing idea of political life. Again .. remember now, Jesus, Mary, and Egypt!

I understand that nations have systems. I understand that policy is complex and that no single metaphor resolves every practical question. But I also understand history. And history shows us, with remarkable consistency, that the societies which welcomed the stranger were enriched by the encounter.

The civilizations history honors are rarely the ones that built the highest walls. They are the ones that opened the door when a family arrived with nothing

The scientist, the artist, the builder, the farmer, and the teacher who arrived with nothing and was given a chance, helped our civilization at large. Every major civilization was built, in significant part, by people who came from somewhere else. The stranger at the gate has, more often than we remember, turned out to be the gift we did not know we needed.

What Civilizations Are Actually Remembered For

Egypt has been many things across its long history. It has been an empire. It has been a center of science and philosophy. It has been conquered and colonized and rebuilt. It contains multitudes. But one of the things Egypt is still remembered for, two thousand years later, in the stories of more than four billion people (Muslims and Christians), is that it said yes to a family that needed shelter.

Not because it was powerful. Not because it was paid. Not because it was obligated by law or treaty or political alliance. Because a mother was holding a child. That is the simplest version of the story. And I believe it is also the most important one.

The question of how we treat the refugee is not, ultimately, a policy question. Policy matters, yes. Systems matter. But beneath all of it is a human question, the same question that was asked of Egypt two thousand years ago: when someone arrives at your border with nothing but their need, who do you choose to be?

The Question Egypt Already Answered

This Easter week, I am sitting with that question as an Egyptian, a Muslim, and a human. My tradition honors the mother in this story, and the child that is named Jesus (ISA). My country sheltered her and the child. That is a history I carry with some weight and an abundance of honor.

Across the world tonight, mothers are holding children and crossing borders in the dark. They are not doing it for adventure. They are doing it because the alternative is worse than the risk. They are doing exactly what that family did, in the same ancient geography, driven by the same ancient fear.

Egypt answered the question once, long ago, and the world still remembers the answer. The question is being asked again. What will we say?

Prof. Bassem Khafagy, 10 April 2026

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Prof. Bassem Khafagy : An academic leader, best-seller author, award winning researcher, and stra

tegic thinker whose work spans the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently dedicating his time to rethinking the “University” as a transformative force in society. Prof. Khafagy is the founding force behind several global academic initiatives, most notably the World Universities Foundation, WUF, World Summit on Universities, WSU, and the Re-Imagine University Newsletter & book series.

The visual compositions throughout this newsletter and the series are original copyrighted works by Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy. They are crafted using advanced technological tools, including artificial intelligence, guided entirely by the writer’s artistic vision and design sensibility. In a series about being you, it felt only right that the art itself reflect that spirit of creative possibility. © All rights reserved, 2026.