An elderly Christian woman was stripped naked by a Muslim mob, beaten, and then paraded through the streets.  Police did not respond for hours during her abuse and humiliation.  The assault was the result of accusations that her son had an affair with a Muslim woman.  Her assault, in other words, was punishment for something someone else is alleged to have done.

On the one hand this appears to be another example of what Muslim reformer Kamel Daoud refers to as “the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally[‘s,] sick relationship with women.”  Certainly its perverse and violent treatment of an elderly woman over something she herself cannot have been guilty of having done suggests that Daoud is right in his analysis.

However, the issue goes deeper than that.  This episode is part of a wave of ethnic cleansing by Muslims against Christians across Egypt.  In addition to the assault on the elderly woman, the mob burned seven Christian homes.  As the Washington Post points out, the sex itself is part of the ethnic cleansing efforts:  Christian men cannot marry Muslim women without first converting to Islam, whereas Muslim men can marry Christian women.  The law supports the eventual breeding-out of Christians in this way, while denying equality of rights to the Christian minority.

The burning of Christian homes is part of a wave of similar attacks aimed at Christian dwellings and, especially, churches.  The attacks have gotten so bad that now Christian prayer tents are being burned because the churches are already gone.

Why were these Christians meeting in a large “church tent” in the first place? Because the church they had built in 2009 was sealed off by authorities after local Muslims protested and rioted.

The Virgin Mary Church is not the first congregation in Egypt to be denied a church building, forced to worship in a tent, often to be attacked again…. After waiting 44 years, the Christians of Nag Shenouda were issued the necessary permits to build a church. Because of this, local Muslims rioted and burned down the church tent they had been using. Then, when a Christian allowed some of the congregation to use his home, a Muslim mob attacked it. Denied a place to worship, the determined Christians of Nag Shenouda celebrated Easter 2015 in the middle of the street.

Sometimes when the mob does not torch the church tents, the authorities do it themselves: Egyptian police destroyed the tent structure of St. Joseph Church, in another village in Minya, under the pretext that it was built without a license.

The local governor of the recent attack involving the elderly woman, Tarek Nasser, blamed the Muslim Brotherhood.  He said that they were “exploiting” a “sensitive” situation in his town.

The Brotherhood itself seems unperturbed by the attacks.  The head of the Brotherhood in Egypt recently gave a wide-ranging interview in which he re-iterated his perspective that “Islam is both a religion and a state” with rules governing “all social and political actions, as well as in every other aspect of life.”   He made no specific statements about Christians, Coptic or otherwise, but asserted that Islam’s rules could govern “all people.”  Presumably these mob attacks are just helpful nudges on the way to that imagined future in which “Islam is the solution” to all our problems.