The southern Egyptian city of Assiut has long been a haven for radical Islamists, and its Christian minority has largely kept a low profile. That all changed this weekend.
An estimated crowd of 50,000 packed the streets this weekend to join protests calling for President Mohammed Morsi's ouster, prompting a violent response that left three people dead.
The show of defiance can only be fairly measured in view of the city's bloody history and the shifts in the local centers of power when Morsi became president a year ago, empowering many of the hard-line Islamist groups around the country, including those in Assiut.
The bloody end of the protest -- 32 people were also injured -- points to the high risks that Assiut residents, particularly Christians, face if they were to join the wave of opposition to Morsi's rule that culminated Sunday when millions of Egyptians came out across the country to demand his ouster.
"I, my kids Mariam and Remon and my husband, Nabil, came out because we miss the Egypt we know and we want it back," Assiut resident Mary Demian said. "These people (militant Muslims) say we are infidels and they terrorize us, but we are not scared. This is our nation and we have always lived with Muslims in peace."
The size of Sunday's rally was nearly five times the demonstration that celebrated the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. But what is equally important is that the protesters showed a level of defiance and courage that may have been unthinkable just days ago.
It defined a change of mood in a city of 1 million people where political activism has traditionally been the exclusive domain of the powerful Islamists of Gamma Islamiya, a hard-line group that fought a bloody insurgency against Mubarak's regime in the 1990s. The insurgency left more than 1,000 people dead, including foreign tourists and Christians.
I keep wondering if the best thing Egyptian Christians could do would be to join together in a relatively small, out-of-the-way place in Egypt, declare a separate nation, and put up a high fence. They'd need a military, too. But it's really clear that the Muslims and Copts aren't living together so well, and that is destined to continue.
Good fences make good neighbors. I think a poet said that once. |
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