Under pressure from fundamentalist forms of Islam and bursts of sectarian violence, the most populous Christian community in the Middle East is seeking safety by turning inward, cutting day-to-day social ties that have bound Muslim to Christian in Egypt for centuries, members of both communities say. Attacks this summer on monks and shopkeepers belonging to Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, and scattered clashes between Muslims and Christians, have compelled many of Egypt's estimated 6 to 8 million Copts to isolate themselves in a nation of more than 70 million Muslims.Across much of Egypt, Muslims and Christians note a drawing apart of their communities, especially in the working class. Many say they mourn the loss. Others say the separation is for the best. "It's natural," Ayad Labid Faleh, a Coptic Christian, said in his auto parts store in the Shobra neighborhood of Cairo. In the dim, oil-slicked shop front, Faleh waited for customers, surrounded by boxed hoses and florid icons.
Faleh shrugged as he described his life and the lives of his Christian neighbors, who begin their days smiling at a Christian satellite program in which a Coptic priest needles Muslims for their beliefs. Faleh and his neighbors send their children to church schools, and the children belong to church soccer teams. Increasingly, Faleh said, they choose to spend their vacations on pilgrimages to holy sites with fellow Copts. "When we all go together as Christians on those things, we feel like we're one. We're secure, and we're able to relax," he said.
Violence between Muslims and Christians flares every few years. In the most dramatic confrontation this spring on May 31, settled Arab Bedouins attacked monks who have been reclaiming the 1,700-year-old monastery of Abu Fana from the desert in southern Egypt. Monks say the attackers fired on them with AK-47 assault rifles and captured some among them to torture. Attackers broke the legs of one monk by pounding them between two rocks. One Muslim man was killed.
A few days earlier, gunmen in Cairo killed four Copts at a jewelry store but left without taking anything. Strife over liaisons between Christian and Muslim men and women led to recent clashes between the communities in Egypt's countryside.
Egypt's government invariably denies that sectarian tension lies behind the violence. It blamed the violence at the Abu Fana monastery on a land dispute. Abu Fana's monks deny that.
"Is it a land dispute when they kidnap monks and torture them?" Brother Michael, 34, asked from a hospital bed in Cairo, where he cradled an arm hit by shrapnel in the attack. "Is it a land dispute when they tell you to spit on the cross, when they try to make you say the words to convert to Islam?" asked Brother Viner, 30, sitting on Brother Michael's bed. He wore a neck brace because of the beating he received in the attack.
When he was a boy, Brother Viner said, he and his neighbors played together without paying attention to who was Muslim and who was Christian. But recently, he said, his niece came home from her first day at school with tales of Muslim and Christian first-graders refusing to share desks with children of the other faith.
Sidhom said he has a simple rule for predicting where Muslim and Christian violence will break out. In a community where Muslims and Christians still live and work together, he said, there will be no problem. At another auto parts store in Shobra, where Copts and Muslims intermingle, clerks laughed at the idea of religious strife. "Any wedding, funeral, they will be there," Hussein Mohammed Negem said of his Christian friends. A black bruise on his forehead showed Negem to be a Muslim who regularly bows his head to the floor in prayer.
Nagib Emed Aziz George, a Christian shopkeeper from next door, smiled as he leaned on Negem, his arm and chin propped on the Muslim man's shoulder. Once, when a neighborhood mosque caught fire during prayers, Christians came running to douse the flames, the parts dealers said. And when a beloved Christian customer died recently, Negem's co-workers shut their store for a day to travel across Egypt for the funeral. "We feel like it is all one home," Negem said.
Invariably, Sidhom said, in communities where Muslims and Christians live separately, trouble comes. Such is the situation in parts of rural Egypt, including around the monastery at Abu Fana, where monks stood one day in bare concrete sleeping chambers blackened by fires set by the Muslim men in May's attacks. "I believe we will be the new martyrs," said one, Brother Shenouda, walking the desert road from his scorched church.
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