Free Republic

The first woman elected to head an Egyptian political party expressed doubt over the country’s transition to democracy on Monday, criticizing the interim authorities’ increasing intolerance of dissent. Hala Shukrallah, a 59-year-old Coptic Christian, condemned the security crackdown that has resulted in mass detentions and trials in the months since the military overthrew the Islamist president last July. […] Hundreds of Islamists have been killed and thousands detained. But by the end of last year and with the issuance of a draconian protest law, the appetite for dissent decreased and the clampdown widened to include some of the main figures...

Jihad Watch Egypt: Muslims kidnap and enslave thousands of Christian girls "Forbidden to you are your mothers and daughters, your sisters, your aunts paternal and maternal, your brother's daughters, your sister's daughters, your mothers who have given suck to you, your suckling sisters, your wives' mothers, your stepdaughters who are in your care being born of your wives you have been in to -- but if you have not yet been in to them it is no fault in you - and the spouses of your sons who are of your loins, and that you should take to you...

Sharia justice in Arab Spring Egypt. Islamo-Christian violence in Minya: life imprisonment for 12 Copts, eight Muslims acquitted," from Asia News, May 22 (thanks to C. Cantoni): Cairo (AsiaNews/Agencies) - An Egyptian court has sentenced 12 Coptic Christians to life imprisonment and acquitted eight Muslims, in a trial heavily criticized by human rights activists and legal experts. The ruling came yesterday, at the end of a trial called to shed light on the sectarian violence last year in the province of Minya, in the southern part of the country, about 220 km from Cairo. Ishak Ibrahim, a researcher and expert...

Let My People Go  Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic EqualityBy S. S. HasanOxford University Press. 320 pp. $49.95.Reviewed by Robert W. ShaffernSana Hasan, an Egyptian scholar best known for her Enemy in the Promised Land, has written another important book in Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt—a book in which she honestly confronts the sorry condition of Christians in Egypt, where the “problems faced by the Christian minority are for many . . . a taboo subject.” Hasan courageously describes the discrimination and harm often visited upon one of Christianity’s oldest communions—the Coptic...