Egypt's Coptic Christians Are Choosing Isolation

Brother Sawiris, left, Brother Viner and fellow monks were attacked in May by Arab Bedouins. The monks are reclaiming a 1,700-year-old monastery from the desert. (Ellen Knickmeyer - Twp)

"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.