Rumor leads to harassment of Christians in Egypt

MEET BASHAR, Egypt — Tensions remain high in an Egyptian village where as many as 5,000 mostly Salafi Muslims went on a rampage over a false rumor that a church was holding a girl against her will in order to convert her back to Christianity. 

Dismissing media reports of 20,000 rioting Muslims, sources said between 2,000 and 5,000 hard-line Muslims, most of them from the Salafi movement, harassed Christian villagers in February in Meet Bashar in the Nile Delta, attacked a church building to “save” the girl, damaged a priest’s house and then destroyed his car. The girl was not in the church building. She reportedly said her father, a Coptic convert to Islam, treated her poorly and that she had fled of her own accord, and that after hearing reports of the attacks, she contacted police. 

The Salafis have used such rumors to incite other attacks. In January, Salafists terrorized Christians of a village in northern Egypt after an unsubstantiated rumor spread about a video recording of an affair between a Coptic man and a Muslim woman. 

The Muslims in Sharbat forced numerous Christians to abandon their property in informal but binding “reconciliation councils,” though a parliamentary commission overturned their rulings in February, and most of the evicted Christian families have returned home.