Raymond Ibrahim, 10/21/24
A Coptic Christian man was recently murdered, hacked to pieces, and dumped into a canal in the Amiriya district of Cairo.
On September 29, Mina Musa, 21, left his family home in Minya for a new job in Cairo. He was responding to an advertisement on social media to assist an elderly person in Cairo, for a generous salary, along with broader networking opportunities in the field of physical therapy.
His family lost contact with him after he left Minya, only to receive a call from people—the ones behind the fake job advertisement—saying they had kidnapped and were holding Mina for 150,000 Egyptian pounds in ransom—a very sizable sum for poorer Egyptians. His family immediately contacted the authorities (Mina had taken this distant job precisely to help not exacerbate his impoverished family’s condition).
The authorities managed to track the young man down to a Cairo apartment, where his kidnappers were holding him. On breaking into the apartment, they found parts of Mina’s body—his torso with one arm, no head, legs, or other arm, which had already been hacked off and thrown into the nearby Ismaila Canal. Three men were arrested; they confessed to their crime. Last reported, divers were searching for Mina’s head in the canal.
At this point, there is no clear indication that the heinous crime was, strictly speaking, “religiously” motivated.
Yet, two points for consideration:
The very concept of jizya makes clear that the only way for “infidels” to exist under Islamic rule is for them to pay an extra annual “tax”—tribute to the Islamic state. For some rulers, the Copts were to be squeezed of every ounce of wealth they possessed. Thus, an eighth century caliph, Suleiman Abdul Malik, once urged the governor of Egypt to “milk the camel [Egypt’s Christians] until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”
Although the jizya was abolished due to pressure from colonial powers in the nineteenth century, the idea is still very much alive. As Anjem Choudary, a Pakistani cleric and welfare recipient in England, once boasted:
We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation, by the way, is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money — you work, give us the money, Allahu Akbar! We take the money.
In short, radicalized Muslims believe it is their “right” to shake down any infidel they come across—including through abducting and holding them for ransom, as in the case of Mina.
Second, not only do Muslim criminals hold Christians and other infidels in contempt—thereby relieving their “conscience” when engaged in such coldblooded slaughter—but they know that the broader society, including the authorities, if not sharing in the same hostility for infidels, will at the very least express a certain indifference, and possibly look the other way. This, for example, is precisely why Muslim men in Egypt regularly target Coptic Christian women: they know the authorities will not bother—certainly not to the level they would if a Muslim woman were preyed on—allowing wrongdoers a level of impunity.
So, what may have happened is this: from all the applicants, the criminals specifically chose Mina Musa because his name cries out “Coptic Christian.” Not only had they been raised in a nation where preaching hate for Copts is common, thereby rationalizing and justifying the heinous crime, but they hoped that the authorities would not bother too much over Mina’s disappearance. In general, they may have been right, but in this case, the authorities did indeed behave professionally—which is not the general rule.
In short prevailing fundamentalist Islamic teachings/education that permeate Egyptian society likely played a role in this latest atrocity. At the very least, they help create an environment where Christians and other non-Muslims are ideal targets for criminals.