Generation Freedom by Bruce Feiler

Author:Bruce Feiler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter IV

Freedom to Believe

Abraham and the Road to Reconciliation

The smell of a burned-out church is a haunting, memorable stench. I have experienced it several times in my life. In east Tennessee in the mid-1990s after a string of attacks on predominantly black churches. In Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks, at the Chapel of St. Paul’s at Trinity Church, which wasn’t destroyed when the towers fell but was covered in a layer of soot and debris. And I smelled it again not long after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, at the Church of the Two Martyrs (St. Mina and St. George), 130 miles southeast of Cairo, in the small city of Soul, in Helwan Governorate.

One afternoon I drove through the scorching, empty desert, passed through a bleak antechamber of cactus and vegetation, and finally arrived in this still-tense city of sixty thousand, which had suddenly erupted in sectarian violence in the days after the revolution and found itself thrust into the crosscurrents of one of the most pressing questions of the modern world: Can members of different religions live alongside one another without killing one another? At that moment, the answer appeared to be no.

The streets of Soul are not exactly paved with dreams. In fact they’re not even paved at all. They’re packed with a dense chocolate-colored dirt; they’re bumpy, ridged, potholed, occasionally muddy, and lined with trash, donkey dung, and squatters, who tuck themselves between the motorcycles and car repair shops, waiting for prayers, trouble, or, as the world had unfortunately just discovered, love. About 80 percent of Soul’s residents are Muslim, and fairly traditional Muslims at that. The rest are Copts, members of Egypt’s leading Christian sect and, at around 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, the largest Christian denomination in the Middle East. The community traces its roots to the apostle Mark, who introduced Christianity to Egypt in the first century during the rapid spread of the so-called Jesus movement around the Mediterranean.

For several recent months, a forty-year-old Christian man named Ashraf Iskander had been having a romantic relationship with a Muslim woman. Some Muslims disapprove of such interreligious dating, and the woman’s cousin confronted her father, demanding that he take her life to protect the family’s reputation. Such in-family murders, not unknown around contemporary Egypt, are called honor killings. The father refused. The cousin promptly shot and killed the father. The man’s son—the brother of the woman in the relationship—then retaliated by shooting and killing the cousin.

Two murders. One day. Both Muslim-on-Muslim.

The victims were buried on a Friday. Following the funeral and noonday prayers, the crowd became agitated. They went looking for the Christian man at the heart of the relationship and were told he had sought refuge in the church. Four thousand angry Muslims then marched en masse to the house of worship, a four-story sanctuary and neighboring community center located down a tiny alley in the back of town. The crowd exploded five or six gas cylinders inside the building, pulled down the cross and other icons, and watched as the entire building was burned to a shell.

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