At least 12 people have died and 232 were injured when Salafist Muslims gathered outside the Coptic Saint Mena Church to attack Coptic Christians in Cairo’s Imbaba district. More than 190 people detained after fatal clashes between Muslims and Christians in Cairo. It started after several hundred Salafist Muslims gathered outside the Coptic Saint Mena Church late Saturday (May 7, 2011) following rumours of an interfaith romance. The church was set on fire by the Muslim thugs. The Muslim thugs fired and hurled Molotov cocktails at Coptic churches, houses and businesses. For months Muslim extremists in Egypt have been protesting about the case of Camelia Shehata, the wife of a Coptic priest, who disappeared last year. They alleged that she converted to Islam and was being held against her will. But she has now appeared on a TV channel saying she is still a willing Christian. Last night’s attack by the Salafists on the Saint Mena church in Imbaba was about a different woman, who they also allege is being forcibly prevented from converting to Islam.
There are an estimated 2,000 churches in Egypt. As a religious minority, the Copts are subject to discrimination in Egypt, and the target of attacks by militant Islamic extremist groups. Coptic Christians account for about 10% of Egypt’s population, and have long complained of state discrimination against them, but their complaints were ignored by their fellow Christians in the West. Acccording to The Christian Science Monitor,
The US has provided Egypt with $1.3 billion a year in military aid since 1979, and an average of $815 million a year in economic assistance. All told, Egypt has received over $50 billion in US largesse since 1975.
The Coptic Christian community has been constantly targeted by hate crimes and physical assaults by the Muslim extremists. The most significant was the 2000–2001 El Kosheh attacks, in which the Muslims attacked the Christians following a dispute between a Muslim and a Christian. Twenty Christians were slaughtered by the Muslims after violence broke out in the town of el-Kosheh, 440 kilometres (275 miles) south of Cairo.
The Copts are the real native Egyptians of Egypt while the Muslims are either the descendants of the Arab invaders or native Egyptians who were forced to convert to Islam when the Arabs invaded Egypt in 7th century A.D.
The Arab-Muslim Invasion of Egypt
In 641 AD, Egypt was invaded by the Arab invaders who faced off with the Byzantine army, but found little to no resistance from the native Egyptian population. Local resistance by the Egyptians however began to materialize shortly thereafter and would last until at least the 9th century.
The ruthless Arab rulers imposed a special tax, known as Jizya, on the Christians who acquired the status of dhimmis, and all native Egyptians were prohibited from joining the army. Egyptian converts to Islam in turn were relegated to the status of mawali. Heavy taxation was one of the reasons behind Egyptian organized resistance against the new occupying power, as well as the decline of the number of Christians in Egypt. Conditions, however, worsened shortly after that, and in the 8th and 9th centuries, during the period of the great national resistance against the Arabs, Muslim rulers banned the use of human forms in art (taking advantage of an iconoclastic conflict in Byzantium) and consequently destroyed many Coptic paintings and frescoes in churches.
The Fatimid period of Islamic rule in Egypt was more tolerant with the exception of the violent persecutions of the evil Caliph Al-Hakim. Persecution of Egyptian Christians, however, reached a peak in the early Mamluk period following the Crusader wars. Many forced conversions of Christians took place. Monasteries were occasionally raided and destroyed by marauding barbaric Bedouin.
