Blasphemy

Children ingesting what they hear from those around them.  Learning to be resentful because fear and suspicion surrounds them.  Acting out their defiance in childish bravado, never imagining what the penalty might be.  In the instance of two little boys nine and ten, living south of Cairo in Beni Suef province, one earned a cuff on the ear, before being turned over to his parents.

This was the extent of the punishment meted out by their local priest.

Circumstances being such, some kind of action was required to demonstrate to a local imam, Ibrahim Ali, who brought the two boys to the priest, since they are Coptic Christians, that the matter of insulting Islam is taken seriously indeed by him, as a fellow clergyman.

The imam informed the priest he saw the boys tear pages of a Koran.  No question, they had to be punished.  The priest apologized before taking custody of the boys.

But that didn't stop the imam from filing a complaint at the police station.  This time the complaint was somewhat enlarged.  Evidently the boys, according to the outraged imam, had also urinated on the Koran.  So the two little boys were taken into police custody in a juvenile detention area, and their actions are 'under investigation'.

Charges were laid that they had defiled the pages of a Koran in the village of Ezbet Marco. That imam, of the village's local mosque insisted he saw the children insulting the Koran.

So this and other incidents circulate in a society that is majority Muslim with an ancient, minority Christian population living among them.  On tenterhooks, quite often.  All the more so, since the fall of Egypt's former President Hosni Mubarak and the ascendance to political power of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

Ishak Ibrahim, researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights states there have been at least 17 cases involving charges of contempt of religion since the 2001 uprising.  A blogger from a Coptic Christian family has been put on trial because his neighbours have accused him of posting the video trailer for Innocence of Muslims on his Facebook page.

That might be a reasonable enough accusation if Alber Saber is suicide-prone. He is old enough to realize that such an act of defiance represents a death wish; the children, not so much.

As an antidote to the venomous rage that Muslims have been spilling in street protests against infidel insults against the sacred relics and symbols of Islam, a prosecution of an Islamic cleric, on trial on charges of tearing up and burning a copy of the Bible.