WATANI International
29 May 2011
Unable, unwilling, or both?
It is over two years ago today that the problem concerned with the church of the Holy Virgin and Anba Abra’am in the eastern Cairo district of Ain Shams Gharbiya began.
The story goes back to 2002, when two local Copts purchased a building in Ain Shams Gharbiya, which had been a garment factory. They renovated the building and turned it into a community service centre. In 2008, the Church obtained official licence to use the third floor to “practise religious rites”. This place was outfitted as a simple church and, on Saturday 22 November 2008, an evening service was held in the new church.
Closed down
The sheikhs of an adjacent mosque which was yet under construction—it had been established once the Muslims in the neighbourhood got wind of the fact that the building next door might be used as a church—set up microphones on the unfinished walls and began to conduct prayers. The police came, removed the microphones, and halted the activity.
Sunday morning, the first Mass was held in the building. At sunset, Muslim crowds gathered in the neighbourhood streets for prayers, then the sheikhs sent out calls for jihad; the crowds began pelting the church building with stones and the riots began. The ranks of the rioters swelled to some 7000 men, women and even children. To the beating of drums, the rioters chanted Islamic slogans, calling upon all Muslims to bar the building of any church. They denounced the presence of anything Christian in their neighbourhood. They threw stones, rocks, empty bottles and Molotov bombs at the church and the police, injuring one officer and several policemen, burning three cars and destroying the glass front of the building. The Christian residents kept to their homes; those who could flee the area did so. The church was closed down.
The Muslims later proceeded with establishing the mosque so as to occupy the ground floor of a residential building. The building itself was built in violation of the building regulations and has, since November 2008, been issued 16 demolition orders by Cairo governorate. None of these orders was implemented.
Closed again
Earlier this month, and in the wake of a fortnight of Coptic protests against the regular injustice and violence Copts are subjected to, the Cabinet responded by issuing a package of reforms which included a decision to reopen 16 churches that had been formerly closed down on security pretexts. Among the first three picked for reopening was the Holy Virgin’s at Ain Shams. Ashraf Edward, the legal councillor of the Ain Shams church told Watani that it was the Interior Minister Mansour al-Essawi who alone picked up the churches that would be re-opened.
The church was opened on the morning of Thursday 19 May. By early afternoon, thousands of Muslim locals surrounded the church and protested against its reopening, claiming it was no church in the first place, but a small factory. In a repeat scene of the 2008 riots, the Copts and their church were attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails. But this time, the Copts hit back. The army, unable to secure the reopening of the church, promptly closed it again.
The Coptic community was livid. Was it impossible for Copts, they asked, to exercise the basic Constitutional right of all Egyptians to practice their religious rites? Obviously, they insisted, the State acted as though it was unable or unwilling to protect them or secure their right.
Anything but a church
In an attempt to resolve the problem, the ruling Military Council decided to hold a traditional ‘reconciliation session’ between the local Muslims and Copts. The meeting was held at a guest house owned by the Imam Ibrahim al-Kirdassy, the influential member of a clan of Muslim Brothers in Ain Shams, and was attended by Muslim and Christian elders and clerics.
Even before any discussions began, one of the sheikhs presented a document signed by dozens of Ain Shams’s Muslim residents refusing the idea of having a church in their midst. This aroused a general wave of dissent and embarrassed the representatives of the Military Council. The document was set aside and the meeting proceeded.
The Muslim side claimed the building was no church in the first place, but was a garment factory. As such, they insisted it should not re-open as a church. They offered suggestions for alternative uses for the church-owned building, such as a hospital or community centre, or for it to go back to use as a garment factory to provide job opportunities for the neighbourhood youth. The Copts, they proposed, may be granted another plot of land outside the area to build a church.
Dead end
The Muslims’ suggestions were roundly rejected by the Coptic negotiators who could not see why a church-owned building that has a permit to host religious rites should not be used as such. Especially given that the neighbourhood’s 10,000-strong Coptic community has no other church in the vicinity to pray in or to offer them services.
After five long hours of heated discussion and no resolution reached, it was decided to refer the matter of re-opening the church to the legal authorities, the Military Council and the Cabinet; while keeping the church closed until a verdict is issued.
All the parties involved stressed the supremacy of the law. They said that in case the church under dispute obtains official license, it will reopen.
The Muslim negotiators insisted that, should the building re-open as a church, no bell should be rung from there and no feature of the building changed to indicate it is a church.
The two sides signed a document of the agreement reached.
Fatwa against churches
Outside, crowds were waiting to know the results.
The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) had set up a marquee where a popular convention was being held to discuss the issue at hand.
Ahmed al-Banna, a MB leader, presented a paper in which he claimed that, in 2006, there were 2626 churches in Egypt and that only 900 among them were non-licensed. He denied that Copts were persecuted in any way, fiercely attacking enlightened Muslims who defend Copts’ rights to build churches.
“Building churches should not be made that easy,” Banna said. “The tolerance of Islam should not be tried; the truth that we should recognise is that building churches is not allowed under Islam,” he concluded. He called on his addressees to ‘wake up and confront this matter’.
Other speakers focused on renouncing the building of churches, and talked of various fatwas—fatwa is an Islamic legal edict—which stress that.
According to Rizq Anwar, a Ain Shams Muslim, the majority of the region’s Muslims are MB. He reminded that the district was rife with poverty, unemployment and illiteracy which, he said, made fertile ground for sectarian strife. Anwar suggested the answer to the problem lay in the passage of a unified law for places of worship.
“Why can’t we pray? What harm can a church do?” asked the Coptic Osama Saad who lives in the region. “Till when will the law stand impotent before the discrimination against Egyptian Christians?”