The very first line — “Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men” — flies right by but actually it is telling. Islamic law for dhimmis forbids them to hold authority over Muslims, so they generally occupied the most menial positions in society. Thus this is not just evidence of “discrimination,” but of the lingering effects, and new resurgence, of Sharia in Egypt.
“Egypt’s Copts fearful amid increasing tensions,” by Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times, February 7:
Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men and runs a newspaper for Coptic Christians from an office crammed with brittle archives above vegetable sellers and fishmongers barking out prices along the muddy roads of a Cairo neighborhood.
Few have it easy here. From dawn until deep into the night, there is the clatter of making a living, no matter how small. But these days, Mankarios, his face engulfed by a graying beard, worries more about the increasing discrimination and resentment from Muslims who attack monasteries and teach their children that Christians are infidels.
“It’s dangerous today,” he said. “Egypt is going in new directions that are starting to affect the harmony between religions. This attitude is evident not only among ordinary Muslims but among top government and Islamic officials.”
Egypt’s Copts and Muslims have co-existed for centuries, through spasms of bloodshed and recrimination but mostly in relative peace. In recent years, however, tolerance has ebbed and tensions have multiplied in a predominantly Muslim society that has grown more conservative and inclined to drawing religious distinctions in schools, public offices and in mixed neighborhoods.
They’ve “co-existed for centuries” as long as the Christians knew their place, and acquiesced quietly to ever-dwindling numbers brought about by the depredations of Sharia for dhimmis.
The atmosphere was further agitated this month after a bishop received death threats and six Christians attending a Coptic Christmas Eve Mass north of Luxor were killed in a drive-by shooting. The Muslim assailants were reportedly seeking revenge for the alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Copt.
The killings highlighted years of sectarian unease in the village of Nag Hammadi, where riots erupted immediately and shops and businesses were burned.
A human rights group accused a member of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party of inciting the animosities through his connection to one of the attackers. The group, which filed a lawsuit, alleges that lawmaker Abdel Rahim el Ghoul intervened to have one of the gunmen released from prison days before the shooting. Ghoul has denied wrongdoing, and the prosecutor general’s office announced that there was no larger conspiracy.
“We need a parliamentary investigation to find out who was really behind this massacre,” said Ashraf Radhi, one of a number of Muslim political activists who condemned the deaths. “It is clear to all of us that the three criminals or mercenaries did not act alone. They were backed by someone with authority.”
The shooting roiled deep-seated religious prejudices in a nation where Islamic clerics were outraged by a recent ban on minarets in Switzerland but have been less vigorous in speaking out against abuses or protecting the rights of Copts in their own country.
Nag Hammadi “was not an individual act. It is a political, religious, social and above all a governmental crime,” wrote Mohamed Shabba in the independent Nahdet Masr newspaper….