By Raymond Ibrahim – Coptic Solidarity –
On October 23, 2025, the village of Nazlet Jelf in Egypt’s Minya province became the latest site of anti-Christian violence. The trigger was familiar: rumors alleging a romantic liaison between a young Coptic man and a Muslim woman. As has so often been the case across Upper Egypt for centuries, the accusation alone sufficed to mobilize a mad Muslim mob.
Eyewitnesses reported scenes of chaos: “A large number of villagers surrounded the Copts’ homes,” one resident said. “They threw stones at the houses, breaking doors and windows. Fires were set in some of the farmland owned by the Copts. Women screamed repeatedly; children cried in terror. Even those with no connection to the alleged affair were attacked.”
The mob’s fury was indiscriminate, a collective punishment inflicted for supposedly violating Islamic sensibilities. According to one report, the attacks transformed a community once accustomed to a reasonable degree of coexistence into one gripped with fear. Residents described how moments of shared daily life—children playing together, neighbors visiting—turned, like the flip of a switch, into hatred, aggression, and terror.
Police eventually restored order (once the mob was sated) but the damage—physical and metaphysical—was extensive. Christian households kept their children home from school, afraid they would get attacked again. Many are looking into relocating.
Local officials offered the usual lip service: “Law must be applied to everyone,” they declared. Yet those familiar with Minya know that similar pronouncements have followed almost every comparable incident, rarely leading to any accountability.
Nazlet Jelf’s violent outburst is not an anomaly; it is the latest chapter in a centuries-long pattern of anti-Christian violence in Egypt. The mere accusation of transgressing sharia—which bans relations between Christian men and Muslim women—has been enough to mobilize Muslim mobs to collectively punish the Copts for nearly fourteen centuries.
Minya itself has a long record of such incidents. In past decades, militant Muslim groups like al-Gamaʿa al-Islamiya targeted Copts. Today, even without organized militancy, the logic of collective guilt persists: a rumor about a Christian man becomes a justification to terrorize his entire family and, by extension, his community.
Indeed, this most recent violence mirrors other egregious cases in Minya. In 2016, an elderly Christian woman, Soad Thabet, was publicly stripped naked, beaten, spat upon, and paraded through the streets of al-Karm village by hundreds of Muslim men—her only “crime” being that her son was accused of associating with a Muslim woman. Even as video evidence and eyewitness testimony clearly identified the attackers, they were acquitted.
“Though I am strong,” she later reflected, “it is sometimes hard for me to speak; I’m always fighting back tears and sometimes break down.”
As yet another example, in January 2012, a mob of over three-thousand Muslims attacked Christians in an Alexandrian village because a Muslim accused a Christian of having “intimate photos” of a Muslim woman on his phone.
Some months later, the village of Dahshur witnessed another large-scale attack on Copts after a Christian launderer accidentally burned a Muslim’s shirt. A brawl ensued, and in retaliation, some two-thousand Muslims attacked multiple Christian homes and businesses, causing widespread property damage and forcing dozens of families to flee.
All of these incidents demonstrate the enduring logic, first laid out in The Conditions of Omar, a key juridical text outlining Muslim and Christian relations: the offense of a single “dhimmi” justifies the collective punishment of an entire Christian community—a pattern repeated across centuries.
To the Muslim mob, the alleged “infraction” is not a private matter but a violation of divine and social order. Eyewitnesses in this latest uprising in Nazlet Jelf made this clear: “Even people with no relation to the accused were assaulted. The violence was indiscriminate. Fires were set. Houses were destroyed. Women and children were screaming for help.”
It is worth noting that many of these attacks occur on Fridays—the one day of communal Muslim prayer—when sermons and mosque gatherings often stir congregants to outrage over perceived offenses by non-Muslims. Ideological reinforcement, combined with long-standing social norms, ensures that collective punishment is not only tolerated but expected.
The rumors of a Christian man courting a Muslim woman, or minor disputes, thus become sufficient to mobilize a mob that perceives itself as enacting divine justice—as when thousands of Muslims attacked and burned Christian properties in another Minya province village on learning that a Christian household was about to have a mobile network booster installed on their roof..
In short, the most recent outburst in Nazlet Jelf follows a well-known script:
1. A rumor or accusation arises, often of a Christian “overstepping” his or her bounds and wounding Muslim sensibilities (by, for instance, dating a Muslim woman, trying to build or repair a church, etc.).
2. A Muslim mob gathers, compelled by collective notions of honor and religious obligation.
3. Coptic homes and property are attacked; women and children are terrorized.
4. Authorities intervene belatedly, restoring superficial order but rarely punishing the perpetrators.
5. Christians are compelled to “reconcile” with their attackers, without seeing any justice done, and brace themselves for the next time the pattern repeats.
The failure to punish offenders reinforces the perception that such acts are acceptable. Impunity, reinforced over generations, has normalized collective punishment. In every case of the collective punishment of Copts, the same logic applies—and has for centuries: rumor plus Islamic law plus lenient enforcement equals unchecked violence.
The script is old, familiar, and unbroken—and history will repeat itself so long as the conditions remain the same.
