CAIRO (Reuters) - Mohamed Talaat didn't like the fact Christian music was
being played at a party to promote interfaith harmony in the Egyptian town
of Minya south of Cairo, so together with a group of like-minded Islamist
hardliners, he showed up to put a stop to it.
It was simply un-Islamic to broadcast Christian songs, Talaat explained.
"Egypt is Islamic and so we all have to accept Islamic rules to halt any
strife," he said by telephone.
Four months since Egypt elected veteran Muslim Brotherhood politician
Mohamed Mursi as president, human rights activists say hardliners are trying
to impose Islamist ways on society.
Although reliable data on social trends is hard to find in Egypt, many
people believe that cases of religious intimidation have increased.
"There is no doubt that the rate of strange and violent practices by strict
Islamists has increased tremendously since the election of Mursi," said
Gamal Eid, founder of The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, a
human rights group.
"We have in a few months seen many more of such incidents than we have seen
in years before Mursi," he said.
Seemingly sporadic incidents are turning into what rights activists describe
as an emerging pattern of abuses in the street by radicals, defying both the
authority of the state and Mursi's own promises to protect personal
freedoms.
From the fatal stabbing of a young man who was out with his fiancée to the
case of a conservative teacher who cut schoolgirls' hair because it was
uncovered, the examples are stacking up.
Such actions have grabbed local headlines and fuelled the
worst-case-scenario fears of moderates worried by the rise of Islamists who
were tightly reined in by Hosni Mubarak but have emerged as a major force
since he was swept from power.
In Cairo, it seems little has changed. The capital is still a place where
teenagers hold hands in public, Egyptian-brewed beer is sold and pleasure
boats cruise the Nile blasting out the kind of pop music frowned upon by the
hardliners.
And importantly for a tourism industry that employs one in eight Egyptians,
it is business as usual at Red Sea beach resorts that are a major draw for
Western tourists.
Yet, say activists, the hardliners are flexing their muscles more than
before, particularly in some of the more far flung corners of a country of
83 million.
CHRISTIANS FEAR VIOLENCE
Egypt's Christian minority, the Middle East's largest, has lived with
increasing fear of sectarian violence, which worsened in Mubarak's final
weeks and the early days of the interim military rule that followed his
ouster in February 2011.
Weeks before Mubarak was ousted, 23 Coptic Christians were killed in the
bombing of a church on New Year's Day 2011. Five months later, with generals
still in charge of the country, several churches in Cairo were torched and
Christian houses and businesses destroyed. Fifteen people died and hundreds
were wounded in the May 2011 religious unrest.
The period since Mursi took power has so far been spared violence on last
year's scale, but there have been flare-ups, such as in August when about 16
people were injured in attacks on a church in a village near Cairo.
Christians say overall the atmosphere has become increasingly menacing as
the presence of hostile Salafi Muslim hardliners in public life has grown
more pronounced.
"Extremists' actions are worrying all Egyptians and not only Christians,"
said Karim Goher, a Christian and one of the organisers of the halted
interfaith celebration in Minya.
INTIMIDATION
Since a group of youths killed a young man while he was out with his fiancée
in the port city of Suez in July, there have been a steady stream of reports
in a similar vein.
This week, a Suez grocer filed a legal complaint against a group of Salafis,
or ultra-orthodox Muslims, who had threatened to enact religious justice
against his son by cutting out his tongue. The Salafis accused the boy of
insulting religion, according to Gharib Mahmoud, the grocer.
Self-appointed "committees for the propagation of virtue and elimination of
vice" have surfaced elsewhere. The name evokes the religious police of Saudi
Arabia, whose strict brand of Wahhabi Islam has inspired Salafis in Egypt in
recent decades.
In Kafr el-Sheikh, a town in the Nile Delta north of Cairo, one such
committee handed out flyers in late October warning it would "use force
against violators of its instructions". Similar acts of intimidation have
been reported by Christians in the middle-class Cairo district of Shubra.
"We warn you Christian people to give up your filthy trade in filthy statues
and paintings," read a letter warning Victor Younan, an 83-year old
Christian shopkeeper, to stop selling images of Jesus. Eight other
Christians told Reuters they had received similar notes.
During his presidential campaign, Mursi reassured Egypt's Christians,
estimated to represent about a tenth of the population, they would be
protected. Yet many remain uneasy.
The same can be said for many moderate Muslims in a country where piety runs
deep but a history of violent Islamist radicalism in the 1980s and 1990s has
made many suspicious of hardliners willing to take the law into their own
hands.
The radicals present a headache for the Muslim Brotherhood and other
Islamist parties that have entered mainstream politics since Mubarak was
toppled, such as the Nour Party, a salafist group which has distanced itself
from what it describes as individual acts of vigilantism.
Mahmoud Ghozlan, the spokesman for the Brotherhood, said of the vice
committees: "They don't represent the Brotherhood or most of Egypt's
moderates, but only a group of minority, hardline individuals."
"We hope such incidents vanish soon."
But the Brotherhood has been criticised for failing to adequately spell out
a moderate interpretation of Islam, leaving space for hardliners to
propagate their ideas on the rights of women and Christians, for example.
"They say they will not discriminate, but don't say what that means in terms
of actions," said Nabil Abdel Fattah, an Egyptian political analyst and
expert on Islamist groups.
The authorities appear to be applying the law where possible: the three
youths behind the Suez stabbing were handed 15-year sentences in September.
The Christians who received the threatening letters in Shubra reported the
incident to the police, though they say there have been no arrests.
The teacher who cut the hair of her unveiled pupils was given a suspended
six-month jail sentence by a Luxor court this week.
The police did not get involved in Minya, where the organisers cancelled the
interfaith celebration to avoid trouble. Planned for the Muslim holiday of
Eid al-Adha, the October 28 event had been named "Light in Times of
Darkness" and marked an effort to ease friction in the shifting political
landscape.
Musicians at the event were playing both Christian and Islamic music, before
Islamists ordered them to stop, said Alaa Kabawy, a Muslim who was one of
several thousand attendees.
"Similar events used to happen during Mubarak's time and nothing like this
happened before. It was so shameful to see that happen," he said.
