Egyptian Film Takes Light Approach to Christian-Muslim Relations

Posted GMT 7-17-2008 15:25:29

CAIRO (AFP) -- A new film seeking to smash Egypt's sectarian taboos takes a light approach to Muslim-Christian relations but critics say it fails to lay the blame for religious tensions where it belongs -- with the state.

The big budget "Hassan wi Morkos" (Hassan and Morkos) traces the lives of Hassan, a Muslim sheikh played by the legendary Omar Sharif, now 76, and Morkos, a Christian priest played by comedy veteran Adel Imam.

The film opens with a scene at an annual Muslim-Christian dialogue convention, openly underlining the mistrust each has of the other through conversations on the sidelines.

As two priests discuss the lack of building permits for churches because of antiquated laws, two Muslim sheikhs whisper about Christians controlling the country's wealth, in a stab at Egypt's powerful real-life Christian tycoons.

A series of events puts both the lead characters' lives in danger and they are ordered by a senior state security official to go into hiding and take on new identities from the other side of the sectarian divide.

But despite the attempt to discuss such a sensitive topic, particularly in a time of deep tensions, the film fails to truly explain the root of the problem, ignoring the reasons behind Muslim hostility or Christian anger.

"The problem with the film is that it does not tackle the issue with depth, ignoring the political, economic, historical and security challenges facing national unity," film critic Tarek Shennawi told AFP.

It only tackles one facet of Muslim-Christian relations: "You like the other until you find out their religion," critic Ola Shafei said.

-- 'The state is behind the spread of corruption'--

Egypt's Copts -- the largest Christian community in the Middle East -- account for an estimated six to 10 percent of the country's 80 million inhabitants and complain of systematic discrimination and harassment.

In June, the Coptic Ecclesiastical Council issued an unusually strongly worded statement urging President Hosni Mubarak to guarantee the safety of Christians in Egypt after a violent attack on a monastery in May in which four Copts were injured and a Muslim killed.

The film "does not come anywhere near to dealing with the problem because it is too deep, especially in the last few years, as opposed to the 1930s and 1940s when Hassan and Morkos would have loved each other," Shennawi said.

Egypt's Muslims and Christians have traditionally had good relations, often celebrating each other's holidays together, but the rising fundamentalism of recent decades has seen each community adopting increasingly entrenched positions.

Shennawi said that the state's security-heavy approach to social issues has caused Muslim-Christian relations to turn sour.

"The state itself is behind the spread of corruption among the security apparatuses who have taken on the sectarian issue, turning the tensions into the full-blown crisis that we are witnessing today," Shennawi said.

"When a Muslim man finds that he cannot marry or live a reasonable life, he turns to the mosque and when a Christian man finds that he cannot obtain his rights in society, he turns to the church. All this leads to extremism," he said.

Social issues become religious because Christians often cannot reach senior official positions without the backing of the church, because the state wants men of religion, be they Christian or Muslim to show loyalty, Shennawi said.

While the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest political opposition grouping in Egypt, Mubarak's regime has sought to retain its own Islamist credentials through making many senior religious appointments political.

Today, the Grand Imam of Cairo's Al-Azhar -- Sunni Islam's main seat of learning, and the Mufti -- the government appointed interpreter of Islamic law, play political roles for the benefit of the state in order to retain their jobs, Shennawi said.

Muslim Clerics Seek Death for Christian Who Married a Muslim Woman
Posted GMT 7-17-2008 15:20:24

The Washington-DC based human rights group, International Christian Concern (ICC) www.persecution.org has just learned that Mr. Asim Pasha, a Christian resident of Attock, Pakistan, is searching for shelter after receiving death threats by local Muslim clerics for marrying a Muslim woman named Samina.

In an interview with ICC from an unknown location, Pasha said that he fell in love with Samina years ago and married her in front of a Justice in the Court in 2004. However, Samina's Muslim parents opposed the marriage due to Pasha's Christian faith. As a result, Pasha and Samina fled the city and hid themselves for years to protect themselves from Samina's parents.

They returned to Attock in 2007 with a child and Pasha started a music business in his neighborhood. In April 2008, a number of young Muslim boys found out about the mixed marriage and began harassing Pasha publicly. They told him that he had embraced Islam by marrying a Muslim and therefore he should follow the teachings of Islam. The boys also threatened him with "serious consequences" for "insulting" Islam. Pasha denied their charges and said that he had never embraced Islam.

" Sada e Jamhoor," a weekly journal in Attock, caught wind of Pasha's situation and published a story against him on June 22, 2008, alleging that he forced Samina into the marriage and that he forcibly converted her to Christianity. Pasha told ICC that his wife is living with him happily without any disputes about faith. This article followed an earlier advertisement in the journal from May 18, 2008, calling on the Muslim community to unite against Pasha to teach him a "good" lesson for this "sin."

Local Muslim clerics entered the fray and claimed that Pasha had converted to Islam to marry Samina but kept practicing his Christian faith and eventually forced Samina to convert to Christianity. They said that he had cheated a Muslim girl and made fun of Islam, and therefore must be hanged publicly.

Pasha has asked the authorities to protect him and has sought out a human rights organization to provide him a hiding place. Pasha is ready for exile along with his wife and child. He said he wants to live happily with his family without fear of disputes. This is not currently possible for him as the local police have refused to register a case against the clerics or the journal, and will not provide protection to Pasha's family.

International Christian Concern

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» 07/14/2008 12:29

PAKISTAN
Punjab: underage Christian sisters kidnapped and forced to marry Muslims
Qaiser Felix
The uncle of the victims launches an appeal for justice. He denounces a climate of silence and complicity on the part of the provincial government and the police, who are afraid of retaliation or episodes of violence. The support of Catholic associations, which are fighting to have the girls returned home.


Islamabad (AsiaNews) - Kidnapped by three Muslims, and forced to convert to Islam: this is what happened to two underage sisters in the district of Muzaffargarh, in the province of Punjab, last June 26. The charge is made to AsiaNews by a relative of the victims, providing further details about the affair involving, against their will, 13-year-old Saba Younas and her 10-year-old sister Anila.

According to their uncle, Khalid Raheel, the kidnappers presented a statement to the local district court affirming that "both girls converted to Islam following their marriage with two Muslims". For Islam, if a woman marries a Muslim, she embraces the religious faith of her husband as a direct consequence. The family's lawyer has rejected the demand of the three men, emphasising "the underage status of the sisters" and, in consequence, the impossibility for them to "change faith or proceed with regular marriages without the authorisation of a parent or guardian". In the course of the dispute, the judge asked to be able to see the two girls, but the Muslims flatly rejected the request.

"The local police and Ehsan-ul-Haq, a Muslim member of Punjab Assembly", accuses Khalid Raheel, "are completely in favour of the abductors. That is why we are not getting justice and are still struggling for the recovery of the girls". He emphasises his desire to "free the two sisters", and if the court does not "provide justice", he does not exclude the possibility of "appealing to the Supreme Court" of the country.

According to a statement released by the justice and peace commission of the Pakistani Church (NCJP), "the parents and Christian community of the place have been knocking on all the doors", but no one seems willing to help them. In particular, "the police, who have done nothing to restore them to their parents", are making themselves accomplices of the kidnappers. The commission also denounces the climate of intimidation that has been created around the family, which "has received serious threats from the kidnappers".

The NCJP and a Catholic women's movement have appealed to the governor of Punjab, that he personally act to "restore the sisters to their family", and punish "the guilty in an exemplary manner".

The village of Chak, where the kidnapping took place, is part of a majority Muslim area, where there are 158 Muslim families and only 14 Christian families; a climate of silence and fear dominates it, so much so that not even the structures created to uphold the law are taking "decisive measures to punish the criminals", out of fear of retaliation or episodes of interconfessional violence.

 

Egypt's Coptic Christians Driven to Isolation
Posted GMT 7-7-2008 17:51:59

CAIRO -- Under pressure from fundamentalist forms of Islam and bursts of sectarian violence, the most populous Christian community in the Middle East is seeking safety by turning inward, cutting day-to-day social ties that have bound Muslim to Christian in Egypt for centuries, members of both communities say.

Attacks this summer on monks and shopkeepers belonging to Egypt's Coptic Christian minority, and scattered clashes between Muslims and Christians, have compelled many of Egypt's estimated 6 million to 8 million Copts to isolate themselves in a nation with more than 70 million Muslims.

To a degree, the separation will stand as the legacy of one of the longest-serving leaders in the church's history, Pope Shenouda III, some Copts say. Shenouda has strengthened the church as the center of daily Coptic life, making it a bulwark for Christians, during a papacy that has spanned 36 years. Now 85, Shenouda is facing health problems, including a broken leg last month that was repaired in the United States.

Across much of Egypt, Muslims and Christians note a drawing apart of their communities, especially in the working class.

Many say they mourn the loss.

Others say the separation is for the best.

"It's natural," Ayad Labid Faleh, a Coptic Christian, said in his auto parts store in the Shobra neighborhood of Cairo. In the dim, oil-slicked shop front, Faleh waited for customers, surrounded by boxed hoses and florid icons.

Faleh shrugged as he described his life and the lives of his Christian neighbors, who begin their days smiling at a Christian satellite program in which a Coptic priest needles Muslims for their beliefs. Faleh and his neighbors send their children to church schools, and the children belong to church soccer teams.

Increasingly, Faleh said, they choose to spend their vacations on pilgrimages to holy sites with fellow Copts.

"When we all go together as Christians on those things, we feel like we're one. We're secure, and we're able to relax," he said.

Across the city, in the Muslim neighborhood of Kit-Kat, Alla Abdul Aziz, a clerk dwarfed by stacks of bedsheets, reflected on his childhood awe of a Christian playmate's soccer prowess and the beauty of a Greek Christian neighbor girl.

But while Abdul Aziz, 30, stayed in the neighborhood, he said his Christian childhood friends have all disappeared. He can no longer think of a single Christian living in the area, he said.

"We used to eat together, play together," he said. "Honestly, I don't understand how it has come to this."

But it was the Christians who pulled away, Abdul Aziz insisted. "They didn't used to sit to one side like this. They used to mingle. Now their lives are all centered around the church," he said.

"I get the feeling they don't want me to be part of their life. I get the feeling they are being told to be like this," he said. "And it makes me defensive."

The Apostle Mark founded the Coptic Church in the 1st century, bringing Christianity to Egypt. Theological disputes split the Coptic faith from the West in the 5th century. Muslims brought their faith to Egypt in the 7th century, and the 14 centuries of conversions to Islam that followed have made Copts a minority here.

To many, the first 50 years of the last century were a high-water mark of religious tolerance. Youssef Sidhom, editor of a Cairo newspaper read mainly by Copts, pointed to a photograph showing his father and other Christians alongside young Muslim friends in a Boy Scout troop.

The photo is a relic of a vanishing time, Sidhom said. Back then, Egypt and much of the rest of the Middle East was vibrant with varying cultures; clattering, clashing tongues; and traditions of ancient communities of Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Tensions between the Arab world, Israel and the West all but swept away the region's Jewish communities outside Israel by the 1960s.

Since the 1970s, the growth of Islamist politics and the flow of laborers back and forth from the Arab Gulf, where they absorb that region's stringent form of Islam, have increased the influence of fundamentalist Islam and made life more difficult for Christians.

War has devastated Christian communities in countries such as Iraq, where the number of Christians has shrunk from 1 million in 2000 to an estimated 400,000, according to a widely used estimate by Christian organizations. In the West Bank town of Bethlehem, the proportion of Christians has fallen from 90 percent in the 1950s to an estimated 50 percent or less.

About one Egyptian in seven in the 1950s was Coptic, but that has shrunk to one in 10 by some estimates, although the Egyptian government publishes no census numbers on the sensitive issue.

Violence between Muslims and Christians flares every few years. In the most dramatic confrontation this summer, settled Arab Bedouins on May 31 attacked monks who have been reclaiming the 1,700-year-old monastery of Abu Fana from the desert in southern Egypt.

Monks say the attackers fired on them with AK-47 assault rifles and captured some among them to torture. Attackers broke the legs of one monk by pounding them between two rocks. One Muslim man was killed.

A few days earlier, gunmen in Cairo killed four Copts at a jewelry store but left without taking anything. Strife over liaisons between Christian and Muslim men and women led to recent clashes between the communities in Egypt's countryside.

Egypt's government invariably denies that sectarian tension lies behind the violence. It blamed the violence at the Abu Fana monastery on a land dispute.

Abu Fana's monks deny that.

"Is it a land dispute when they kidnap monks and torture them?" Brother Michael, 34, asked from a hospital bed in Cairo, where he cradled an arm hit by shrapnel in the attack.

"Is it a land dispute when they tell you to spit on the cross, when they try to make you say the words to convert to Islam?" asked Brother Viner, 30, sitting on Brother Michael's bed. He wore a neck brace because of the beating he received in the attack.

When he was a boy, Brother Viner said, he and his neighbors played together without paying attention to who was Muslim and who was Christian.

But recently, he said, his niece came home from her first day at school with tales of Muslim and Christian first-graders refusing to share desks with children of the other faith.

Part of the separation stems from a policy by Pope Shenouda, who rose to prominence in the church by promoting Coptic Sunday schools. The church in Shenouda's time has built its institutions, so that Copts can count on the church for schooling, sports and socializing, as well as religion, said Sidhom, the newspaper editor.

"That has been the biggest change . . . the withdrawing," Sidhom said.

Many Copts think Egypt makes them second-class citizens -- requiring presidential approval, for instance, for construction of any church. Copts say state security services have little interest in protecting Christians.

Meanwhile, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood movement has helped squeeze Copts out of competition in politics and trade unions, increasing the importance of Shenouda's role as intermediary between the Copts and Egypt as a whole.

Sidhom said he has a simple rule for predicting where Muslim and Christian violence will break out. In a community where Muslims and Christians still live and work together, he said, there will be no problem.

At another auto parts store in Shobra, where Copts and Muslims intermingle, Copt and Muslim clerks laughed at the idea of religious strife.

"Any wedding, funeral, they will be there," Hussein Mohammed Negem said of his Christian friends. A black bruise on his forehead showed Negem to be a Muslim who regularly bows his head to the floor in prayer.

Nagib Emed Aziz George, a Christian shopkeeper from next door, smiled as he leaned on Negem, his arm and chin propped on the Muslim man's shoulder.

Once, when a neighborhood mosque caught fire during prayers, Christians came running to douse the flames, the parts dealers said. And when a beloved Christian customer died recently, Negem's co-workers shut their store for a day to travel across Egypt for the funeral.

"We feel like it is all one home," Negem said.

Invariably, Sidhom said, in communities where Muslims and Christians live separately, trouble comes.

Such is the situation in parts of rural Egypt, including around the monastery at Abu Fana, where monks stood one day in bare concrete sleeping chambers blackened by fires set by the Muslim men in May's attacks.

"I believe we will be the new martyrs," said one, Brother Shenouda, walking the desert road from his scorched church.

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post

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