By Salama A Salama I am starting to think that someone is intentionally fomenting sectarian tensions in this country to distract us from the things that really matter. How otherwise to explain the demonstrations that keep calling for Camellia Shehata, the wife of the Dir Muwas priest said to be locked up in a church, to be released. Then Anba Bishoi, secretary of the Synod, gets it into his head to tell us that some verses of the Quran were introduced after the death of Prophet Mohamed. Clearly, some people are desperately trying to distract us from the problems of daily life, inflation, the bequest of power, and the way parliamentary elections are being manipulated in favour of some political figures. Camellia and Wafaa Constantin are mere pawns in this game, as is any overheated love story that may emerge between a Copt and Muslim. This is how ordinary people can be kept busy, so as not to think of their daily situation or explore a better future. Every week one or two thousand people demonstrate in Alexandria after Friday prayers, calling for the whereabouts of Camellia to be revealed and asking the pope, the mufti and the grand imam of Al-Azhar to interfere. But does anyone really care about Camellia, whether she converted or not, whether she is detained or not? The security forces arrest dozens of citizens everyday in demonstrations that call for freedom and no one raises a finger about it. People are detained if they even think about protesting the planned bequest of power and no one objects. Yet hundreds are allowed to take to the streets to make a point about Camellia and the security apparatus is perfectly ok about it. Thugs hired by the police don't break up the demonstrations. The police, if anything, seem to protect the demonstrators -- a far cry from the treatment meted out to Khaled Said, the young Alexandrian who was allegedly beaten to death when it was feared he might expose police corruption. The remarks by Anba Bishoi can only be described as ill-timed and misguided. The whole furore is a throwback to pointless theological arguments about who came first or matters most, Copts or Muslims. Arguments of this type have been refuted by the scholar Selim El-Awwa and should have been laid to rest. El-Awwa himself wanted the debate to end, in order to spare the country possible sedition. Who is to blame for the resumption of such needless debate? Is it the church or Al-Azhar, or clerics on both sides? And in whose interest is it that emotions are kept running high over irrelevant theological debates some times, at others over the results of a football game? A lot of the blame rests with the clerics, Muslim and Christian. The increasingly high profile of clerics at political and social occasions, something the security services are encouraging, is also to blame. The fact that sectarian disputes are being handled alternately by the police and the clerics is disconcerting. It is not how disputes are settled in a secular state. Laws are being set aside as the sheikh and the priest ponder their options and National Democratic Party representatives consider what the bishop had to say. The state is powerless, and seems to have absented itself, abandoning its responsibilities, abdicating its duties, and leaving matters of national consequence in the hands of local governors and security chiefs. Sectarian tensions are not matters for the clerics or the security chiefs to sort out. They must be decided by the letter of the law. Otherwise, all hell will break loose.
