It's difficult to answer. I would say you're talking about two different kinds of discrimination. One is informal in terms of areas of employment being off limits and so on.
If you look at Egyptian law, you'll find virtually no trace of that. Juridically when it comes to most things, Egyptian Muslims and Egyptian Christians are absolutely equal. Property ownership is the same thing. That there are places where Christians can't own property you will not find in Egyptian law books. What you will find is an environment which, as an American, I would compare to the situation in the northern States prior to the civil rights movement. Juridically there is no segregation. Informally there is tremendous segregation. It is accentuated by what I talked about with the nature of Egyptian religion being very strongly a communal affair. It tends to be that if you're hiring, you hire who you know. You hire who you are related to. So there probably tend to be pockets where Christians would not feel welcome, and there are probably pockets where they feel especially welcome. That creates that kind of environment. That is on an informal level.
On a formal level where the discrimination can exist has to do with worship, as you said, and it has to do with repair work and the incredible bureaucratic hurdles that have existed to building churches and even to doing very slight repairs in churches. I don't see either of those situations getting better any time soon.
What I do see is a spirit of activism among the Christian population which was not there before. If you go back 20 years or so, I think the dominant approach within the Egyptian Christian community was essentially to try to operate within the system as it was, and when demands were made, to emphasize what I'm calling the Sunday Christian, the church rights, the freedom of worship, the freedom to repair churches and so on.
What has happened especially since the Egyptian revolution has been a spirit of activism within the Christian community itself which says that we need rights not simply as Christians to repair our churches but as Egyptian citizens. They are willing to tackle that area of discrimination that is largely informal. They are willing to place it on the agenda and to insist very publicly on a new conception of Egyptian citizenship that really looks right past religious affiliation.
So far I'm not sure they have actually had much success in making any changes in Egyptian society, but they have placed it on the public agenda, and there is a way in which when you go to Egypt and ask who speaks for the Christian community, you find a different leadership than you would have found 20 years ago. There is now not simply the church but a strong lay leadership as well that emphasizes a whole panoply of rights and not simply the religious ones.