WATANI International
8 May 2011
The church of Mar-Mina stands in a small street in the overcrowded district of Imbaba in Giza. Typically, it is surrounded by houses that are mostly occupied by Coptic residents.
On last Saturday afternoon, at around 4:00pm, the Copts in the neighbourhood were surprised to find a group of some 25 Salafi Muslims converge on an empty church-owned plot of land in the vicinity and hold Muslim prayers there. They then began chanting Islamic slogans and shouting: “Allahu Akbar (Allah is the Greatest)”.
Where’s that woman?
At the same time, a group of some eight sheikhs and Muslim elders headed to Mar-Mina church and told the priest, Father Abanoub Gad al-Rub, that they had been informed that a young woman from Assiut, Upper Egypt, who had reportedly converted to Islam, was being held captive in the church. The Salafis demanded that the church should hand over to them that young convert. Fr Abanoub denied the church was holding anyone, and invited the Muslim group to search the church and its near-by community service centre to make sure no-one was being held there. This done, the sheikhs announced the young convert was not held there.
Meanwhile, the numbers of Salafis converging on the neighbourhood swelled into the thousands. They came carrying bags which the local Copts say held weapons.
Building defences
The local Copts, however, were very wary of the heavy Salafi presence; they understood it boded ill for the church and the Coptic residents. The young Coptic men therefore decided to fortify the defence of the church by taking out all the wooden pews and piling them in the streets leading to the church, in order to form a separating ‘safe barrier’ before anyone who wished to attack the church. A police truck which had been parked at the entrance to the street but was later abandoned by the police was used, together with a car owned by a Coptic teacher, to block the road. This created a good 50-metre barrier before anyone who wished to reach the church. The residents got ready to defend themselves and their homes with bottles, sticks, and stones—anything that may be used in self-defence—which they had already hoarded during the days of unrest following the 25 January Revolution.
By 7:00pm the attack started. The Salafis found it almost impossible to cross over to the church, even though they had surrounded it from several sides by then, but so had the Copts also fortified their defences on all sides. The Salafis began hurling fireballs and Molotov cocktails at the church and surrounding houses, but were hit with a barrage of glass and stones by the Copts. A few Copts who owned firearms fired in the air, but the 50m-defence barrier held the Salafis at bay. The Salafi fireballs, however, set ablaze several Coptic homes, shops and cars. There was no way any fire truck could venture into the neighbourhood, so the Copts had to depend on their own efforts to put out the fires.
The demonstrators allowed no ambulance car into the crowded area, so the locals had to carry the injured to the hospitals by private cars or on motorcycle.
Where are the weapons?
Unable to get to Mar-Mina’s, the Salafis moved further down Imbaba shouting provocative Islamic slogans. “We want it Islamic, Islamic [as opposed to a civic State],’ they screamed. “Christians are the enemies of Allah. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. Christians are a minority; we won’t let them rule over us.” They marched down to the Church of the Holy Virgin on al-Wihda Street and burned it down.
The Copts called the police and the military for help, but none arrived till around 10:00pm, and then it took them another hour to launch an offensive against the troublemakers. Fourteen were killed—seven of them Copts—and some 234 were injured. Among the dead was Saleh Aziz, the brother of Ishaq Aziz who works with Watani and who was burned inside the Church of the Holy Virgin. The after-death official report revealed that Aziz had been slain with a knife before being left to burn in the fire. A colleague who had been with Aziz said, on the satellite TV channel CTV, that the Salafis who attacked them asked them where they stocked the weapons in church. “If there were any weapons here,” the Copt answered, “D’you think you could have made your way to this spot unhindered? D’you think we would not be using them now to defend ourselves?”
Out of the balcony
The fighting lasted well into the early hours of Sunday. But it resumed again at dawn, only this time the Copts were depleted and the Salafis were able to break into several homes and shops, plundering and torching them. In one case they threw the new furniture of a couple who were to wed in a couple of weeks out of the window and into the street where it broke into splinters. In another tragic case, they attacked the owner of the house—Nash’at Rateeb, a trader in his fifties—and set his house on fire. Rateeb in terror, jumped out of his balcony to meet his death. As fate would have it, his three Salafi attackers turned back to leave the house but could not do so because of the fire they had started. They too then jumped out of the balcony and died.
On Sunday morning, the military cordoned off the main roads of Imbaba in an effort to prevent further crowds from going in. But the fighting continued in the side streets. The military broke into several Coptic homes looking for weapons, and arrested anyone who owned a non-licensed gun.
Many Copts, especially those in the direct vicinity of churches, fled their homes to save their lives.
The funeral
At 4:00pm on Sunday, a collective funeral was held for four of the Coptic victims at the Church of Mar-Girgis (St George) in Giza. Presiding over the ceremony were Anba Yu’annis, secretary of Pope Shenouda III; and Giza bishop Anba Theodosius. The coffins were taken into the church in a procession headed by the deacons chanting the poignantly familiar, joyous Resurrection Melody: “Christ is risen from the dead. With His death He trod down upon death, and to those in the graves He granted everlasting life.” The weeping of the mourners was punctuated with that thoroughly Egyptian sound of jubilation: the ululations of the women. Tears of grief at the loss of loved ones mixed with cries of joy at their being now in Heaven, at having been granted “to suffer for His name” (Acts 5: 41)
In his word, Anba Theodosius said this funeral marked not only the death of the victims, but that a ‘white revolution’ had turned into a black one.
For his part, Anba Yu’annis offered words of comfort to those who had lost loved ones, pointing to the fact that 8 May marked the day of the martyrdom of St Mark who brought Christianity into Egypt and, for that, was martyred in the first century.
The other three Copts who had lost their lives were buried by their families in their respective home towns or villages.
“New Muslims” on Facebook
The ruling Military Council declared that the 190 persons detained during the sectarian violence in Imbaba would have to stand before a military prosecution, and that all the damages caused by the violence would be remedied by the military.
The military warned, on its Facebook page, that it would beat with an iron fist all attempts to incite sectarian violence. Yet Facebook boasts several pages and groups whose main purpose appears to be just that. According to Watani’s Milad Zaky, the 22,000-strong Alliance of New Muslims on Facebook has been calling on Muslims to move to rescue the ‘Muslim women held captive by the Church’. “The Egyptian army which, in 1973, crossed the Bar-Lev Line stands helpless before a church in Imbaba in which a Muslim woman is held prisoner,” it urged. Never mind that the Salafi sheikhs had searched the church of Mar-Mina and found no woman held there.
Reconciliation in the cooking
Prime Minister Essam Sharaf postponed an official visit he should have begun on Sunday to the Gulf countries, on account of the sectarian crisis in Imbaba. The visit was of particular significance, since it was planned to attempt to attract direly-needed Gulf investment to Egypt’s heavily troubled economy.
“These incidents benefit neither Muslims nor Copts,” Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar, said. He called for a meeting between Muslim and Coptic clerics and elders to clear the air, within the context of what he called ‘The Family Home’.
There were indications, particularly alarming to Copts, that Giza governor Ali Abdel-Rahman and high-ranking security leaderships as well as the military, were negotiating with Salafi leaders to hold a traditional reconciliation session with the Copts. Such ‘reconciliation’, once implemented, would place offender and victim on the same footing, and would implicitly deprive Copts of their legal rights.
Sunday morning prayers were held in Mar-Mina church in Imbaba, as well as in the church of the Holy Virgin whose altar escaped unscathed by the fire.
Charged
Sunday afternoon some 10,000 Copts, accompanied by moderate Muslims in support, marched from the Supreme Court in Downtown Cairo to the TV building in Maspero. Even though they clashed with hardline Muslims, they held their ground. They demanded full citizenship rights for Copts, and that culprits in sectarian violence cases should be brought to justice.
Monday morning, the military prosecution charged the Muslim Yassin Thabet, the husband of the Muslim woman convert who had allegedly been held by the Church, and the Coptic Imbaba resident and coffee-shop owner Adel Labib with inciting the violence. The general feeling among Copts, however, was that a Copt was being charged just to balance accounts and to appease the Islamists. Several major Cairo dailies, including the State-owned al-Ahram, the independent al-Masry al-Youm, and the mouthpiece of the liberal Wafd political party al-Wafd, ran front-page stories that said the Salafis were not responsible for the Imbaba violence against Copts. They blamed Muslim outlaws and the Copts for inflaming the riots. Add to that the allegations that it was the Copts—not the Salafis or the army, as testified by eyewitnesses—who used firearms; in addition to that old false, totally unsubstantiated allegation that Copts were stockpiling arms in their churches and monasteries; the Copts sensed that they were being framed.
Criminalised for self-defence
It is a well-known fact—and there for all to see—that Salafi websites carry an abundance of material which flagrantly incites against Copts. These websites use the harshest language to describe Copts as apostates and their pope as “filthy”, accuse them of stockpiling arms to wage war against Muslims, torturing Muslim women converts and holding them captive in churches and monasteries. Such written articles or videos usually end with a fiery call to Muslim men to run to the rescue of Islam and Muslims; otherwise, they would be no ‘men’.
None of the journalists or Salafis who claimed the Copts were the attackers in Imbaba bothered to answer the question of why, in the first place, the Salafis had gathered in Imbaba around Mar-Mina’s on Saturday 7 May in such huge numbers—an estimated 20,000-strong? And why were they shouting Islamic slogans and accusing Christians of being enemies of Allah? And why did they hurl fireballs and Molotov cocktails at Mar-Mina’s?
Should the Copts be criminalised for self-defence against such fierce aggression?