Sectarian sedition looms over Egyptian villages

 Sectarian sedition comes back to hover over Egypt Cairo – Akram Ali Despite its disappearance during the January 25 revolution last year, sectarian sedition comes back to hover over Egypt, following the Marinab church explosion and the Maspero incidents, which killed 23 civilians, and the Imbaba incidents which led to the injury of dozens and the burning of a church.
Two Egyptian governorates showed signs of new sectarian strife, the first in the village of Mit Bashar in Sharqiya, following the disappearance of a Christian girl who announced her conversion to Islam 6 months ago, celebrating her engagement to a Muslim, according to village residents.
Rania Khalil, a 16-year-old Coptic Christian, is the daughter of a Coptic mother and a Muslim-convert father. Khalil has lived with her mother all her life except for the last six months, during which she moved to the home of her father, who converted to Islam some four years ago and married a Muslim woman.
According to residents of Mit Bashar village in which her father lives, Rania converted to Islam earlier this month and celebrated her engagement to a Muslim man 10 days ago. On Sunday, however, she abruptly vanished.  
So far, two explanations have been posited for the girl's disappearance. Some say she was kidnapped by her family and is being held against her will in the village's Virgin Mary Church; others suggest that she ran away from her father to live with her Christian mother.
The suggestion that Rania was being held in the Virgin Mary Church prompted several local residents to converge on the church on Monday evening. The following day, some 2000 people surrounded the building, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails and chanting sectarian chants.
For the next three days, the unrest continued, with cars in the area being set on fire and a fence surrounding the church being broken.
The missing girl, however, was not found inside the church building.
On Wednesday, Sharqiya Governor Azazi Ali Azazi declared that the girl had not in fact been kidnapped, but was being held at the local security directorate. "The escalation of this incident is an attempt to sow sectarian violence in Egypt with the aim of destabilising the country," Azazi said.
The situation eased considerably after members of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), along with the imam of a local mosque, urged village residents to exercise restraint. They also formed a human chain around the church to protect it from attacks by locals. The girl’s father also denounced the violence and said he would not allow for sectarianism to take over the village.
"What you're doing violates the rules of Islam," the imam told village residents on Wednesday. "The Church is God's home."
Nevertheless, several Coptic-Christians have taken refuge inside the church out of fear for their safety.
In a step aiming to contain the situation, Father Girgis Gamil, priest in Virgin Mary Church in Mit Bashar, stressed that FJP MPs and Mosque Imams played a great role in calming the angry residents and protecting the church.
Meanwhile, 8 Coptic families were evicted from their homes in Nahda Village in Amerya district, Alexandria, earlier this month, following an informal hearing held by a local sheikh.
The crisis erupted in late January when obscene footage of a Muslim woman was sent from the cell phone of a young Christian man. Brawls quickly ensued between local Muslim and Coptic youths, which escalated after several Coptic homes were set on fire.
Under the auspices of a local reconciliation committee that met Feb. 1, the Christians are now forced to leave their homes because their safety cannot be guaranteed, in a move a local rights group called “collective punishment.”
Political forces condemned the eviction and called the ruling unwarranted collective punishment without any legal basis, and a move that will feed sectarian tension and damage the sense of national unity. They also accused the government of not applying the law properly and frequently resorting to informal hearings to solve any sectarian crisis.
Among those who signed a dissenting statement are the Popular Socialist Coalition Party, the Egyptians Against Discrimination Movement, the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, and the Egyptian Socialist Party.
Meanwhile two Coptic movements, the Maspero Youth Union and the Mina Daniel Movement have announced that they would stage a march at 11am Sunday from Abdel Moneim Riyad Square in downtown Cairo to the parliament headquarters to protest the incident.
However, IkhwanWeb, the official English website of the Muslim Brotherhood, denied that the incident even took place. The site published statements by Hossam Al-Wakil, media spokesman for the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Alexandria that there are no problems between Muslims and Christians in Nahda village.
"The crisis that broke out between Muslims and Christians in the village, after the recent circulation of video footage showing scenes of an illicit relationship between a young Christian tailor and a Muslim woman, ended with a decision by the village’s residents to remove the people of both Christian and Muslim families involved only, in order to prevent further bloodshed and sectarian trouble," El-Wakil told IkhwanWeb.
He also said that the decision was made by the governor of Alexandria, MPs from the FJP and the Salafist El-Nour Party as well as village elders. He justified the holding of an informal hearing to resolve the crisis by saying that the Bedouin nature of the village made this type of hearing appropriate.
Al-Wakil criticised the media’s coverage of the event as "dangerous, misleading and just not true at all."
A parliamentary committee is set to visit Amerya district, Thursday, to look into alternate solutions to the eviction of the families, after the case has been referred to the Human Rights Committee in the parliament following its meeting with Muslim and Coptic activists protesting the incident.
MP Ihab Ramzy stated that the committee heading to Alexandria comprises 8 MPs, including himself, Ahmed Sherif Hawari (Amerya MP), Mostafa el-Naggar, Suzi Adli, Atef Makhalif, and other Alexandrian MPs. The parliamentary committee is to look into ways to solve the issue legally and ensure the safe return of the evicted families.