In fact, some leading Muslims have expressed hopes that the current protests will lead to a post-Mubarak era that would rid the country of Islamic extremism.
“This is a revolution guided by the middle-high class which is asking before all for political and religious freedom,” Wael Farouq, a Muslim and a professor at the American University of Cairo told the Milan based on-line daily, Il Sussidiario.net Jan. 31.
“The fundamentalists will not take control of the revolt,” Farouq said. “What is happening in these days demonstrates that the true enemy of religious liberty in Egypt is the Mubarak regime, which seeks to divide Christians and Muslims to control the country."
Farouq said that although President Mubarak has sought to blame the Muslim Brotherhood for the protests, the protests are clearly “a secular revolution.”
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“The hundreds of thousands of people who have come down to the squares were asking loudly for the unity of Christians and Muslims. One of their slogans, for example, was ‘Christians and Muslims, we are all Egyptians’,” he said.
“At a certain point, one person tried to shout one of their slogans, ‘Islam is the solution,’ and was immediately chased from the area. Others … contested them … with these words: ‘We are Egyptians, not Muslims.’ A Christian carried a cross with him, and as soon as the other protesters realized it, they were happy and they raised it over their back, holding it high out of appreciation. I can tell you this because I saw it with my own eyes.”
The leader of the Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Christian community, Pope Shenouda III, has expressed his continued support for the stability of the Mubarak regime and has urged believers not to join the protest movement.
Catholic leaders, thus far, have declined to comment or take sides in the political debate.
The Catholic Church, Archbishop Fitzgerald told CNA, is “leaving it to the citizens to decide what they want to do."
Catholics, he said, are Egyptians and the Church’s concerns “are the same as all the Egyptians.”
He declined to speculate on the future of the country.
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“No one knows exactly what is going to happen so there is this sense of uncertainty and I think that everybody shares in that,” he said. “We don't know about the future. We have to wait and see.”