For those who have not already seen the picture beside this article on Facebook, it is not that of the devastation brought about by the strife in Syria or Somalia; they're the gutted homes of Copts living in the Cairo suburb of Dahshour — the work of an enraged Muslim mob on Aug. 3. A quarrel between a Muslim and a Christian triggered this latest episode of Muslim attacks on the Copts, in which numerous Coptic homes and businesses were destroyed and looted and more than 100 Christian families were expelled from the area.
The Copts are not strangers to such attacks by Muslim mobs on their lives and property under successive Egyptian governments, or to the regular occurrence of sporadic violence by militant Islamists. The fall of Mubarak’s autocratic regime, however, raised hopes of a soon-to-be democratic Egypt, where the rights of minorities are respected. But Egypt's Arab Spring, contrary to expectations, ushered in a deep winter for the Copts, as violence intensified against them in terms of the virulence and frequency of the attacks and the escalating incidents of brutality against individual Christians that take place almost daily in one or the other of Egypt’s 27 provinces.
