WATANI International
15 May 2011
Saturday 7 May started off as an ordinary weekend day with splendid summer weather. Around 5:00pm, however, a telephone call from Watani’s Mervat Ayoub, who lives in Imbaba next to the church of Mar-Mina, changed all that. “We’re being surrounded by huge numbers of Salafis,” she said. “We’ve called the police and the military but none has come.”
“We heard of …”
I again informed the police and the military, and rushed to Imbaba. Nearing the neighbourhood of Mar-Mina’s, the sight that greeted the eye was that of huge numbers of men in typical Salafi beards but shaved moustaches, and clad in typical Salafi garb: the short white galabiyas and trousers. They were surrounding the immediate neighbourhood of Mar-Mina’s shouting “Allahu Akbar (Allah is the greatest); many of them carried guns, and a young man who stood by a box full of Molotov cocktails was handing them out, while a sheikh stood by egging them on. They started firing in the direction of the Copts’ houses and attempted to break in, but the Copts fired back and threw glass and stones at them. Hundreds of Copts were already gathered in front of Mar-Mina’s to stop anyone from going in.
The lights went out, but the violence continued. We could see the wounded being carried away by private cars or on motorcycles.
Upon asking several of the attackers about the reason for the attack, the unanimous answer was that “we heard of a woman who had converted to Islam and was being held by the church”. No-one knew anything about this woman, not even her name.
Suddenly there was a cry: “Help! The Copts are killing our Muslim brothers,” upon which the neighbourhood Muslims began joining the Salafis in their attack against the Copts.
“Raise your head high, you’re Muslim”
It was 10:00pm when three armoured vehicles and two groups of central security soldiers arrived. The military fired shots in the air to disperse the rioters but, in a few minutes time, several of the soldiers were carried away, wounded. The military and security then stopped by while the attack thickened against the Copts who had also stopped defending themselves once the military arrived, being under the impression that the military would protect them. The Salafis set two Coptic houses on fire; the residents were seen jumping out of the balconies from the first and second floors.
An hour later, additional forces came to the rescue. Giza governor Ali Abdel-Rahman arrived at the scene accompanied with Giza security chiefs. They tried to talk the Salafis out of the attack, but the Salafis insisted the Copts had started the violence, and broke into chants of “Islamic, we want it Islamic [State]; there is no god but Allah; the Copts are the enemies of Allah.”
Every time a fire erupted in a Coptic home the Salafis jubilantly congratulated one another crying: “Raise your head high, you are Muslim.” Firemen tried to put out the fires but were hindered by the Salafis, until an armed officer was able to secure their way in towards the houses that were on fire.
When a few Muslims tried to persuade the crowd to stop the attack, that “sedition is worse than murder” and that “Muslim or Christian, we are one hand”, they were pushed away. In one case, the moderate Muslim was described as “crazy”, in another he was branded an apostate. In general, speakers egged the attackers on with words such as: “Copts have reached outsize growth. They are a minority, so how can we allow them to rule over the majority? Muslims, rise and defend Islam.” The crowd shouted: “we’ll slay them, we’ll slay them.” One man told a reporter who was around: “Unless we cut the devil’s head, there will be no peace for Islam.” Who’s ‘the devil’? the reporter asked. “The head of the Copts [Pope Shenouda III],” he replied.
Personal tragedy
At around 1:00am, word was being circulated that the church of the Holy Virgin on al-Wihda Street, some three kilometres away, was on fire. The building was up in flames. A Coptic crowd was gathered there trying to put out the fire, but it was not until the firemen came in that the fire was finally extinguished at 2:30am.
A personal tragedy was in the making, though. My eyes picked a Watani colleague, Ishaq Aziz, who stood, wet and in tears, looking for his brother Saleh who works at the Holy Virgin’s. We tried to find him but were told he had been moved to hospital. There we discovered the blackened body of the forty-something Saleh Aziz who had been slain and left to burn on the church. It was heart-breaking to see Ishaq crying: “Why do they do this to us? Aren’t we Egyptian?”
The clerics
On Monday morning, Interior Minister Mansour al-Essawy visited Imbaba. A number of Salafis greeted him with the by-now familiar: “Islamic, Islamic.” After he left, the Salafis engaged in verbal clashes with the Copts, which later developed into violent assaults against the Copts’ homes and shops. To the sound of aggressive jihadi slogans, a number of shop windows, homes and cafés were smashed, among them a coffee shop owned by the Copt Adel Labib. When the army fired in the air to disperse the rioters, they took the fighting to the side streets. It was not till noon that the Police and the Army gained control over the area, after having cordoned it off and imposed tight security on the churches.
In an attempt to find some solution to the seemingly insoluble situation, the Police arranged for a meeting between the region’s Salafi imams, including Sheikh Mohamed Ali, head of Imbaba’s Islamic society. During the meeting Sheikh Mohammed Hassan and Dr Safwat Higazi were contacted and asked to preside over a reconciliation session to be held between Imbaba’s Copts and Muslims. Sheikh Ali told Watani that he denounced the assault, and confirmed that the allegations that the church was holding a Muslim woman were untrue. He tried to deny that Salafis were behind it all, explaining that nowadays anyone with a beard is considered Salafi. He said churches and monasteries ought to be searched in order to ensure they stocked no arms within their walls. But when Watani volunteered that this would be a laissez-passer for extremists to attack churches, he replied that the search should be done by the Police and the Army. Predictably, the meeting accomplished nothing.