The inter-communal violence in Egypt is just ghastly. Friday, one
or more knife-wielding attackers attacked worshippers in three Coptic
churches in Alexandria, Egypt, killing one worshipper and injuring 16
others.
Members of the very ancient Coptic Church make up about 10 precent of
the Egyptian population. (Did you know that our word “Egypt” actially
derives from the word “Copt”?)
Saturday, the violence escalated some… and it got even worse today,
Sunday. According to this
AP piece from Alexandria, about 2,000 members of the riot police
had surrounded the Saints Church in the downtown area–
presumably, “for the protection of the church community”. It
seems that Muslim rioters had surrounded the police cordon, though
that’s not clear… But anyway, in inter-communal clashes that
accompanied Saturday’s funeral of the man killed on Friday, one Muslim
was reportedly killed.
The AP reporter, Omar Sinan, described the scene around the church thus:
Police fought back against Coptic
Christians, who were encircled by
a security cordon around the Saints Church … after
hurling stones and bottles from inside the police line. Fellow
demonstrators tossed Molotov cocktails from the balconies of nearby
buildings.
Police could be seen repeatedly beating a
boy of about 12, who was
among the crowd of Coptic young people who fled into the church,
slamming the doors behind them, or dashed down narrow streets
surrounding the church. Most of the protesters were between the ages of
12 and 25.
Later, a huge mob of what appeared to be
Muslim protesters charged the police cordon from the other side.
Mustafa Mohammed Mustafa, a Muslim
Brotherhood parliamentarian, said
a 24-year-old Muslim died early Sunday of wounds from a beating by
Christians during rioting Saturday…
Sirens blared as ambulances raced toward
the scene. Armored police
vehicles surrounded the church as tear gas fumes sent protesters
fleeing down narrow streets in the neighborhood.
It all sounds so ugly and so terrifying. Sectarian clashes
are., sadly, not at all a new thing in Egypt… But nearly every
time it happens the actions of the police seem to inflame tensions even
more. I think the police needs to have much better training in
crowd control.
But ithe political situation in the country also needs some much
broader attention, too. How can you have a police force that
treats people humanely and with dignity if the political system as a
whole is one that treats the average Egyptian like the downtrodden
subject of a Pharaoh?
Anyway, I was reassured to read at the end of that AP piece that,
Abdel Salam Mahgoub and local
politicians were trying to calm the situation with the help of the
powerful Muslim Brotherhood.
The MB is still actually outlawed in Egypt. But if the
government folks think the MB can help to calm the situation, then
certainly it should be brought into the process. It occurs to me,
too, that leaders from within the Coptic community need to brought in
to help calm things down, too.
Helena,
It is indeed a sad thing. On that we agree. And, it is not a new thing either. Such clashes have a very long history in Egypt.
The current, so far as I know, force which pushes today’s problems is the revived place of Islamic governing notions into the politics of Egypt. Such revival, whatever good it is perceived to embody or may, in fact, be for most Egyptians, is divisive as Islam, not secularism and not Christianity and not something akin to the First Amendment, claims the right to control the heights of society.
Copts are known to complain that justice for them is fast disapearing (e.g. unpunished rapes of Copt women) with the rise of Islam’s influence on governance and that the ability of Copts to practice their faith is, for the same reasons being impaired (e.g. the ability to obtain a permit to build a church is now very difficult).
Similar sad events, I might add, occur all across the Arab regions, wherever the influence of Islam as a governing principle has grown.
Please note: this is not an attack on Islam. Were Christianity to gain similar influence over government – as one was common – so that crimes against non-Christians went unpunished, that would properly be blamed on the influence of Christianity on government. The same can and should be said in the Arab or any other region when Islam comes to have an unhealthy influence on government.
That such problem is occuring in the Arab regions has been rather well documented. Such is, so far as I know, a major reason for Christians fleeing in very large numbers from the Arab and greater Muslim regions.