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)

At another auto parts store in Shobra, where Copts and Muslims intermingle, Copt and Muslim clerks laughed at the idea of religious strife.

"Any wedding, funeral, they will be there," Hussein Mohammed Negem said of his Christian friends. A black bruise on his forehead showed Negem to be a Muslim who regularly bows his head to the floor in prayer.

Nagib Emed Aziz George, a Christian shopkeeper from next door, smiled as he leaned on Negem, his arm and chin propped on the Muslim man's shoulder.

Once, when a neighborhood mosque caught fire during prayers, Christians came running to douse the flames, the parts dealers said. And when a beloved Christian customer died recently, Negem's co-workers shut their store for a day to travel across Egypt for the funeral.

"We feel like it is all one home," Negem said.

Invariably, Sidhom said, in communities where Muslims and Christians live separately, trouble comes.

Such is the situation in parts of rural Egypt, including around the monastery at Abu Fana, where monks stood one day in bare concrete sleeping chambers blackened by fires set by the Muslim men in May's attacks.

"I believe we will be the new martyrs," said one, Brother Shenouda, walking the desert road from his scorched church.