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.

In step with the sharp increase in Islamic fundamentalism since the Islamists came to power, an overt fanatical spirit is now exhibited by many Muslims in all walks of life, coupled with a pervasive feeling of hostility toward Christians among broad sectors of Egyptian society.

Discriminatory behavior and hostility toward the Copts as well as violence against them is not something new; it existed under Mubarak as well as his predecessor. What is new now is the wider scale, and the increased virulence and, most importantly, the level of openness of it all. Copts are now blatantly and publicly abused, castigated and demeaned in mosques and in published articles as polytheistic pagans. Groups and individuals, some of whom are public figures, now openly, in the press and on TV, proudly claim — citing some Quranic verses and alleged sayings of the Prophet — that hatred and suppression of the Copts is an intrinsic edict of Islam; militant Islamists now distribute leaflets “promising Christians a tragic end” and urging all Muslims to attack and kill Christians unless they “revert to the true religion of Allah” — which is understood to mean non-Muslims in lands conquered by Muslims must pay the jizya (a tax to be paid by Christians and Jews in “submissive humiliation” as per the Quran) if they wish to retain their faith.