Coptic activist Mīlād Ḥannā was born in June 1924 and is the co-founder of the left-wing opposition party al-Tajammuʿ Party. Ḥannā said that he could have easily been a minister if he had chosen to do some lip-service to President Mubārak; however, the fact that he has criticized the government on multiple occasions has prevented him from becoming a cabinet member. According to Ḥannā, the idea of “accepting the other” started to grow in his mind in 1995 which was declared the Year for Tolerance. It developed as a counterargument to Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” argument.