Our reading of the Cairo press this month takes us to the daily State-owned Rose al-Youssef which printed a fatwa by Sheikh Aly Hamed al-Rifai of the grand mosque of the Mediterranean town of Marsa Matrouh. The fatwa bans serving any food or beverages to non-Muslims during the day throughout the month of Ramadan, out of respect to the feelings of the fasting Muslims. The fatwa remarked that Islam is the State’s official religion and that non-Muslims must respect that. In his daily column in Rose al-Youssef, Hany Labib wondered why the government allows poorly informed imams to issue fatwas or to dictate their rules on non-Muslims as well.
The priest’s wife
Wafaa’ Qostantine’s case is again in the limelight. The story goes back to 2004 when Qostantine, who was a priest’s wife from a small Delta village disappeared from her home and it was rumoured she had converted to Islam. The incident led to demonstrations by angry Coptic crowds who claimed she had been abducted and forced to convert. A few days later Qostantine was brought by the police; she made her by-now famous declaration before the prosecutor: “I was born Christian, have lived as a Christian, and will die Christian”. Since she had originally left because of family problems, and since she could not go back to her ‘normal’ life, Qostantine was allowed to stay on at St Bishoi monastery in the Western Desert where she remains today. A few weeks ago, however, the Islamist writer Zaghloul al-Naggar told the independent weekly al-Khamees that he got to know from a trusted source that Qostantine who, according to Zaghloul, had actually converted to Islam in 2004 and refused to renege on it, had been killed at the monastery. Zaghloul’s declarations gained wide publicity with many claiming that the Church was holding Qostantine captive, forcing her to remain Christian. However, Ibrahim Eissa, editor in chief of the independent weekly al-Dostour wrote a cynical piece criticising such unjustified claims, and sneering that some acted as though Qostantine’s conversion to Islam would solve all the problems on earth for Muslims. Later the weekly, independent al-Masry al-Youm printed an unsubstantiated news item that the Church had decided to let Qostantine appear in a televised interview on Aghapi satellite channel, to prove she was alive and well.
Qostantine’s husband, Fr Youssef Moawwad, died two years ago.
Thought vs. thought
The recently published novel by Youssef Zeidan Azaziel produced controversy aplenty in the Egyptian press. Azaziel is the name of a devil which haunted the wilderness during the biblical times of the Exodus. The story is written in the form of the translation of an ancient manuscript which cites the details of a meeting between the writer and Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople in AD428-31, in which Nestorianisn is strongly defended. Zeidan appeared on a televised interview and declared the novel was fully fiction, nevertheless the book ruffled not a few feathers among Copts. Anba Bishoy, secretary of Holy Synod, said the novel contained a lot of falsities against Christianity and that he was currently in the process of writing a book to refute all the unjustified claims it included. Fr Abdel Messih Baseet said the Church was absolutely against the confiscation of books and that thought could only be fought with counter-thought. Father Rafiq Greiche, the official spokesman of the Catholic Church in Egypt, wrote in Rose al-Youssef that the author of the book is reviving Nestorius’s thought which denies that the Holy Virgin gave birth to God, supporting thus the Islamic belief that Christ is not God.
Worth remarking is that, despite the heated controversy, the Church never called for confiscating the book, but insisted it would refute the claims it made.