Christians Under Attack

and participate in the Coptic Orthodox mass. Just one week ago, the talented shoemaker may have had a good-natured argument with a friend about whether leather really was the best material to craft shoes from. A lot can happen in one week, though.

I say that because Fouad Fawzy is no longer with us.

While some of the reported details may seem to vary (very) slightly, it is a matter of record that the victim—heretofore known by his parental, marital, and religious status, rather than for the gruesome way he had to leave this world—was stabbed multiple times in his own shop on

al Hamam Street

.

One account has a bearded man entering the shop, going berserk, yelling “Kafir! Kafir!” and lighting into Fawzy with a knife, then leaving the scene of the crime muttering bits of the Koran.

Another account has the bearded youth calmly asking Fawzy if he was a Christian, after which came the brutal knife attack on Fawzy’s neck and torso.

Either way, however, people seem to agree that the bearded lad, a 27-year-old called Hossam Mahfouz, had not personally known Fawzy.

This most-recent entry in the string of attacks on Christians in Egypt has got me wondering what the motivation was, in each case, and whether they are all related.

Some might jump the gun and say “Yes! No question about it, they are definitely related!” But you know me, I have to analyze things before I can decide.

So let’s start with the obvious (and oft-volleyed) motive: Madness. One of the accounts above has the perpetrator shouting insanely before attacking his victim. And, while he was said to have been yelling about religion (or lack thereof), the truth is that busting in and screaming like a banshee (with no provocation) could be called insane (and so could busting into random churches and cutting people, but that’s another story..). And it is of interest to a psychologically-minded person like me that Mahfouz’s age, 27, matched the date of the attack, June 27^th. (This parallel is the type of thing that would please a paranoid schizophrenic—the perpetrator, I mean, not me—to no end.)

On the other hand, someone might say that religion drove young Mahfouz to commit his foul and bloody crime. After all, he was said to have asked after Fawzy’s religion, screamed “Kafir” (“infidel”), and muttered Islamic verses ex post facto, among other things.

Still others (“conspiracy theorists”) might posit that Mahfouz did indeed know Fawzy, and that the murder was pre-meditated, or a crime of passion—revenge for a real (or imagined) tiff between the men. These people might also suggest that eyewitnesses who happened to be Coptic might have used Islam as a convenient scapegoat for the murder, or that they were blindly pinning the reason for the murder on the fact that Fawzy was actually Coptic.

So which theory is correct? And WHAT was the reason behind the mid-April knife attacks at the Alexandria churches? And was it REALLY the “I Was Blind But Now I Can See” DVD that ignited the sad chain of events in Alexandria back in October? I can’t (and in fact never could) say; I wasn’t there, and I don’t have a psychic link with the perpetrators. (Meaning I can’t read their minds to find out the one, true answer to each mystery.) But that’s not the only problem.

See, I don’t think that any one answer is the correct one. Like the question of  “Nature Vs Nurture,” I believe that the true answer to any number of these “Why?” questions is a blend of several factors. Furthermore, I don’t think we can ever conclusively know why any of these tragedies happened, although we may like to think we have a good idea. And I don’t deny that we could, in our pondering, be close to the truth.

Unfortunately, however, this Not Knowing the True Motive is a rather large obstacle to finding a solution to the problem, or even deciding how to keep it at bay. (This is to say nothing of the different ways these problems can even be defined, but that’s another story for another day...)