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Sunday, December 23, 2012

Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt is no place for Christians


I predict that either Alexandria will break away from Egypt (as it should given that the Copts need a safe haven from the Islamist takeover of Egypt and given that Alexandria has the majority of Egyptian Copts within its borders) or the number of  Christians in Egypt will dwindle down to a mere hundred or so within  a  decade.

Raymond Ibrahim writing at GatestoneInstitute:
....While the conflict in Egypt  has largely been portrayed as a conflict between secular Egyptians -- or "moderate Muslims" who oppose full-blown Sharia -- and Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, who want a Taliban-style Sharia to govern the nation, largely missed have been the people in the middle, the Christian Copts, who find themselves in an especially awkward position.

Moderate Muslims are still capable of offering the requisite lip service to Islam -- saying "prayers and peace upon Muhammad" and all the other Muslim blessings -- even as they reject the full application of Sharia. This makes it more difficult for their radical brethren to portray them as infidel enemies. Moderate Muslims can resist Sharia, but in subtle ways, arguing over Islamic exegesis, calling for ijtihad [modern interpretations, questioning], and so forth.

But when Egypt's Christian Copts resist Sharia -- as dhimmis [religious minorities who are second-class, "tolerated," members of society] -- pro-Sharia Muslims retaliate with a vengeance, portraying them as infidels who reject the law of Allah.

This has been truer than ever in recent days, as President Morsi and his Islamist and jihadi allies push for a Sharia-based constitution, and Egypt's secularists resist this. The Copts, trapped in the middle, are aware their suffering is only about to begin.

A video from Egypt that recently surfaced shows Salafi Muslims holding a man, his hands tied behind his back, in an alley. They grab him by the collar, interrogate and threaten him, humiliate him by poking and slapping him in the face and calling him "boy"-- as they try to determine if he is a Christian. "No, I'm a Muslim!" he insists. One of his captors can be heard saying, "Can you imagine if he turns out to be a Christian?" -- implying that would be the end of him.

The video ends with him sobbing and saying, "Have mercy," followed by, "There is no god but Allah," the first half of the Islamic shehada, or profession of faith, which, unlike the second half -- "and Muhammad is his prophet" -- Christians in Egypt are only too happy to declare.

The poking, throttling and slapping is a reminder of the Islamic textbook way of treating dhimmis. Such degradation appears regularly in the commentaries of Islam's doctrines, so that in the Medieval Islamic Civilization Encyclopedia one can read that Muslim "jurists came to view certain repressive and humiliating aspects of dhimma as de rigueur. Dhimmis were required to pay the jizya [obligatory tithe, or extra tax] publicly, in broad daylight, with hands turned palm upward, and to receive a smart smack on the forehead or the nape of the neck from the collection officer." Islam's jurists mandated a number of humiliating rituals at the time of jizya payment, including slapping, choking, and pulling the beard of the paying dhimmi............

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