“We don’t want a church.” That was the chant heard from some residents of the village of Tal al Qibliya, in the Abu Qurqas district of Minya Governorate, directed at their Christian neighbors. The incident escalated into sectarian violence, with Christians reportedly trapped inside their church, the electricity cut off, and the parish priest’s car vandalized. But the question remains: why do some Muslims believe they have the right to decide whether a church should exist in their village?
According to a statement by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Tal al Qibliya, like several other villages in Minya, has no church despite having a sizeable Christian population. As a result, Christians have been forced to travel long distances to attend major religious services, such as holiday prayers, in churches located in neighboring villages. This has led to overcrowded places of worship while imposing the burden and expense of travel on the village’s Coptic residents.
According to testimony from one of the village’s residents cited by the initiative, Christians initially began holding regular prayers and liturgies in one another’s homes on a rotating basis. However, the varying travel distances each time made it difficult for some worshippers to attend consistently. Eventually, residents designated a building in the middle of their neighborhood to serve as their church, with the knowledge of both the security authorities and the village’s Muslim residents.
Despite this apparent approval, the church and its congregation continued to face repeated harassment while holding services there, according to a post by Bishop Makarios of Minya and its affiliated dioceses on his X account. The incidents were reported to the relevant authorities, but no action was taken.
On the morning of Wednesday, July 8, the harassment turned violent after an altercation broke out between a Muslim police sergeant and two Christian men over a church-owned pickup truck parked outside the officer’s home. The dispute quickly escalated into a gathering of Muslim residents chanting “We don’t want a church,” throwing stones at the church and nearby Christian homes, locking worshippers inside the church, and cutting off the electricity.
In his sermon following the attack, Bishop Makarios declared, “We support reconciliation, but only after justice and the rule of law are upheld.” What unfolded on the ground, however, fell far short of those principles. Although Christians in the village called the police as the violence unfolded, the security forces that initially arrived were unable to restore order. It was only after Bishop Makarios posted an appeal for help on X that the provincial security director arrived and Central Security Forces were deployed to disperse the crowd. In addition to arresting Muslim suspects accused of participating in the attack, security forces also detained four Christians. Two had themselves been assaulted, one had witnessed his wife being beaten, and another had documented the events. Despite promises that they would be released, all four remained in custody until complaints were withdrawn, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
The story of Tal al Qibliya is not unique. It closely mirrors the experiences of many other villages in Minya and across Egypt. Although ten years have passed since the enactment of Law No. 80 of 2016 regulating the construction and legalization of churches, disputes over building churches or even their mere existence continue to erupt from time to time.
Under the Church Construction and Legalization Law, the status of 3,804 churches and affiliated church buildings had been legalized as of April 2026, according to the Main Committee for the Legalization of Churches. This represents just over 71 percent of the 5,415 churches and church-affiliated buildings that submitted applications to the committee following the passage of Law No. 80 of 2016, underscoring the slow pace of legalization over an entire decade.
A Recurring Crisis
When a permit was issued to build a church in the village of Al Azib, in the Samalut district of Minya Governorate, in December 2023, Fikry Hanna, one of the village’s residents, was among those who felt hopeful. For years, he had traveled every holiday to attend services in neighboring villages, whose churches were already overcrowded with their own congregations. The prospect of having a local church meant more than just a place to pray. It also promised Sunday schools and Christian social gatherings, both of which the village’s residents had long been deprived of. What he did not anticipate was that the permit would trigger sectarian harassment targeting the village’s Christian community of approximately 3,000 people.
The attacks included the burning of the home of a Coptic resident, while other Christian homes were pelted with stones and Molotov cocktails. Demonstrators marched through the streets of the Christian neighborhood chanting, “Long or wide, we’ll bring the church down.” The Molotov cocktails and other incendiary materials set fire to two additional Coptic homes. After security forces restored order, construction of the church was suspended.
Al Azib was not the only church project halted during that period. According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, several churches either had construction suspended or were shut down altogether. In January 2024, a church in the village of Manshaat Al Zafarana, also in the Abu Qurqas district, was targeted when a tent prepared for Christmas Eve prayers was set on fire before dawn. Although the church building itself already existed, it was targeted after applying for legalization under the church regularization process established by Law No. 80 of 2016.
The church had already been subjected to a campaign of harassment before the arson attack, prompting Bishop Philopater of Abu Qurqas to announce that Christmas celebrations would be limited to the Divine Liturgy only. He also apologized for being unable to receive well-wishers.
The Law Is Not Enough
Coptic thinker and researcher Kamal Zakher argues that the recurring disputes over church construction, nearly a decade after the enactment of the law regulating the construction and restoration of churches, demonstrate that the issue is no longer primarily legal but rather “social and cultural.” In his view, legal provisions alone are insufficient unless they are accompanied by a broader shift in public culture and genuine political will to address the root causes of sectarian tension.
Zakher said that what he describes as a “collective mindset that rejects the other” has become deeply entrenched over decades and has persisted despite the country’s political changes. He noted that the official statements issued after each sectarian incident fail to address the underlying factors that allow such crises to recur.
According to Zakher, the solution lies in “drying up the sources” that fuel intolerance. This requires reviewing educational curricula from the earliest school years through university to strengthen the values of citizenship and pluralism. He also called for reconsidering media and television drama, arguing that they sometimes reinforce stereotypes associated with extremism and violence.
Zakher further argued that the limited Coptic presence in many areas of public life, including sports and senior executive positions, reflects a broader failure to implement the principle of equal citizenship. He said that Copts “are often treated as though they are a community apart rather than citizens with equal rights.”
He also criticized the state’s reliance on a security-centered approach to managing sectarian crises. While customary reconciliation sessions may temporarily contain tensions, he argued, they fail to address the underlying causes by imposing short-term calm without confronting what he described as “what lies in people’s hearts.”
Zakher concluded that reducing the recurrence of sectarian tensions requires clear political will to strengthen the principle of citizenship, expand civic education, and ensure fairer representation of Copts within state institutions. These, he argued, are essential steps toward addressing the roots of the crisis rather than merely containing its consequences.
Conservative Fatwas
Zakher’s assessment is consistent with the views widely found on Salafi websites and in religious fatwas concerning the construction of churches in what is described as Dar al Islam (the Abode of Islam). Since the presidency of Anwar Sadat, Egypt has increasingly been viewed by many as an Islamic state rather than a state with a Muslim majority. Classical Islamic jurisprudence has generally prohibited the construction of non-Muslim houses of worship in Muslim lands.
While Egypt’s Dar al Ifta has repeatedly issued fatwas stating that Islamic law does not prohibit the construction of churches, this discourse has stopped short of directly challenging the rulings found in classical jurisprudential texts and contemporary hardline fatwas. As a result, the field has largely been left to Salafi currents, which have gained influence in many villages and continue to promote religious opinions that fuel hostility toward Christians’ right to establish places of worship, arguing that building churches is impermissible in Muslim countries.
The influence of Salafi movements is particularly visible in Minya Governorate, which has witnessed the majority of attacks linked to opposition to church construction or licensing. In a previous report, Daraj quoted Ishaq Ibrahim, the former head of the religious freedoms file at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, as saying that during the 1970s and 1980s Minya became fertile ground for Islamist groups. Some of these groups later assassinated President Mohamed Anwar Sadat and Rifaat al Mahgoub, the former Speaker of Parliament. Their leaders subsequently established the Building and Development Party.
Ibrahim explained that the lack of basic public services in Minya, including healthcare and education, created a vacuum that Islamic charitable organizations stepped in to fill. Organizations such as Al Gam’iyya Al Shar’iyya and Ansar al Sunnah al Muhammadiyah began providing services including nurseries, medical clinics, schools, and social assistance. At the same time, he argued, they promoted an exclusionary interpretation of religion that views those of different faiths as second-class citizens with severely diminished rights.
