This interview was conducted in July 2015 with Father Hātūr ʿAbdullāh [Hathur ʿAbdullah], pastor of the Church of The Holy Virgin in Kafr Darwīsh, district of al-Fashn, Beni Suef governorate, around a month after reports about sectarian strife in his village. The interview was arranged through father Yū’annas, from the neighboring village of Qufāda. Both priests believed that it would be too sensitive for two non-Egyptians, Cornelis Hulsman and researcher Matthew Anderson, to visit Kafr Darwīsh since this could result in some local Muslims accusing Christians of seeking foreign support for their case, thus playing up nationalist sentiments. It was thus agreed that we would meet in the neighboring village of al-Fant and so this happened. Most questions were asked by Khālid Ḥassan who was working with the Center for Arab-West Understanding at the time.
Father Hātūr approved the recording of this interview. We initially did not publish this interview because of sensitivities, but the situation in Kafr Darwīsh has returned to normal. The expelled Christians have returned in 2015 to their village and have been living there ever since. No new tensions have erupted.
Some names have been removed because this was considered too sensitive. The translation of the Arabic recording has been made by Jeanne Rizq Allāh [Jeanne Rizkallah].
Please note the historical background to the tensions in 2015. In 1971 a church was built without permit. Prior to 1971 Christians went to the church in al-Fant, only two kilometers from Kafr Darwīsh. Father Hātūr said that a permit was not required at the time. I am not so sure about this. Christians might not have been able to obtain a permit and thus established a church by what they call “amicable agreement.” I do not know how the church looked in 1971. This may have been a very simple structure that local Muslims did not object to. These were also the days that Kafr Darwīsh belonged to the diocese of Metropolitan Athanāsius who passed away in 2000. Metropolitan Athanāsius has built over 60 churches in the time he was bishop and always took Muslim sensitivities into consideration. Problems in Muslim majority villages usually arise when the church building shows clearly from the outside that it is a church, usually with a dome and church tower with a cross. When the structure is too obviously a Christian building, village Muslims may object. As a consequence, the Bishop was willing to make compromises where it came to the exterior of the building.
Father Hātūr was appointed in 1993 to become the first parish priest of Kafr Darwīsh, which had a church building in a deplorable condition. It is a church policy to send a priest to a village where there had been no previous churches in order to build one. In this case to enlarge the church building. Father Hātūr submitted in the late nineties to build a two-floor church. This was a period, father Yū’annas recalls, that there was a high-ranking security officer who indeed facilitated permissions for new church buildings. In 2001 the request was granted by a presidential decree. After the first floor was completed, Father Hātūr said, authorities prevented the construction of the second floor, despite the site inspection and the approval granted in the same year by the Municipal Engineering Department. One needs to be careful here. Did the presidential decree include the second floor? It may have been that only part of the procedure for the second floor had been completed. Procedures can be very tedious and one needs to see all documentation in order to see what exactly took place here.
Anyhow, the church building was a change in the village that hitherto had never seen a church building. A number of Muslims may have objected this, and this may explain the experiences of the priest in Kafr Darwīsh with ongoing acts of vandalism for more than twenty-two years at the time of the interview, that is since he became village priest. If in such already tense circumstances accusation are made that a Christian from the village had placed blasphemous material on his Facebook then tensions are more likely to erupt.
After the interview father Yū’annas commented that he did not see Father Hātūr as a sufficiently strong village diplomat, since he has never been accepted by all Muslims in the village. Priests in such situations need to be relations builders, and reach out to the Muslim leadership in their village. Of course, Father Hātūr has relations with local Muslim leaders but insufficient to the extent that he was able to end previous vandalism and sufficiently address the case around Ayman Yūsuf. Such critique is of course easy to make but it is far from easy to act as a village diplomat in villages that experience new church building.
The interview with Father Hātūr is over three years later still extremely interesting in understanding local village dynamics. I much appreciate the work of Jeanne Rizq Allāh to first transcribe the Arabic interview and then translate this.
Cornelis Hulsman
