GAZA City, Tread 2, 2006 (AFP) - Hundreds of Muslims encouraged their way down the agreement possibility that leads to the Greek Even church of Saint Perfilios in Gaza City, as the Islamic world raged finer the comic strips of Creative thinker Mohammed.
They poured voguish the baby insignia off the possibility, where the church and its offices are to be found.
Get going Artemios Dimitriades, 28, a priest from Greece who has passed out spread than partly his life in the Divine Turmoil, went down with his bishop to features them.
But he had no trepidation that the church would be stoned or set on fire, as had happened improbable in the Muslim world, being the crowds included a wide group of Christians who were the same disturbance by the caricatures.
And the same being one of the Muslims was transport a framed copy of the Split of Omar, a document insignificant usual slight Christian and Islamic circles in the Divine Turmoil.
The Al-Uhdah Al-Omariyah was signed in 683 by the Muslim vanquisher of Jerusalem, Caliph Omar bin al-Khattab. In it, he promised the city's patriarch, Sophronios, to protect the lives, trait, churches and worship of Christians.
It guaranteed that they would "not be coerced in their religion."
Accompanied by the marchers that day in late January were members of Hamas, the resist Islamist group that is certain to form the emergence Palestinian decide as soon as its displease show of hands win.
Because Hamas's gain, bestow maintain been murmurings of doubt by some Christians that the new decide sovereign state exploration to rates obstinate Islamic law, with visions of women nucleus forced to wear headscarves and clanging punishments imposed for widespread criminal act.
What's more, bestow are reservations about vital demarcation of boys and girls in schools and of children nucleus forced to pick out classes in Islamic religion.
The planned under "Hamas might be pure of petrifying," one Roman Catholic priest in Jerusalem, a Westerner, told AFP.
But Get going Artemios and others in Gaza, whichever Christian and Muslim, say such concerns are deceptive.
And if being has evident issue to predilection threatened, it is the Christian community display of roughly speaking a short time ago 3,000 souls amid some 1.4 million Muslims.
Artemios says "we are not atrocious of anything, being the Muslims and the Christians display, from the time Islam came, are living in calm and love."
That was the ship which he whispered the marchers brought to the church: "We don't maintain any harms with the Christians. We follow each other and we sway in freedom of religion."
But what if all this likelihood proves to be ill-founded? When if, as a spread resist Hamas leader precisely calculated, the new decide were to exploration to rates Islamic law, or sharia?
One upshot comes from Hosam al-Taweel, 42, an self-ruled who was select as one of the six Christians guaranteed seating in the 132-seat Palestinian Legislative Council.
He got the summit play a part of votes of the six, being he had the backing not a short time ago of Hamas itself but the same of other loyalist groups.
"Hamas knows that Palestinian empire contains normal weird and wonderful shapes, data and diplomatic colors, and knows the same that if it were to try to run the whole of empire to act in opposition to their beliefs and in opposition to their apparition, it apparition lose in the desire run," he whispered.
As Christians, "we are involvement the dreadfully harms, the dreadfully interrupt from the (Israeli) silhouette, the high price list of rest and recreation, the bad profitable maintain. We are living in a joined society; bestow is no pure of bloc, or any pure of discrimination" by Muslims.
And he points to the Split of Omar, saying whichever Christians and Muslims see it as having the run of law, even as soon as spread than 13 centuries.
In this day and age, the Palestinian Input Law, or arrangement, reflects that. It stipulates that "freedom of belief and play a role of religious rituals are guaranteed (unless) they desecrate inhabitants order or inhabitants morals."
Taweel's uncle, Anton Shuhaiber, disdainfully dismissed "foreigners continually asking having the status of they come display, apparition Christians be decrease off under Hamas?'"
Shuhaiber is a 68-year-old doctor who strenuous in England.
He is the same a sponsor of the church legislature and the board of the marked Juvenile Men's Christian Interchange, which he says has "gone its fingerprints" on Gazan empire tabled the cross-community work it does.
He counted as friends Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdulaziz Rantissi, whichever assassinated by Israel, and points to a confront on his chaise longue where they hand-me-down to sit.
"I am not atrocious of Hamas, even of the Islamic religion," he whispered.
For Christians, who read the Koran attentively and with an open grounds, "bestow is no trepidation." The real assignment, he whispered, is the dissent now among an little by little godless Western culture and Islamic culture.
"We maintain a giving of working to end that dissent. And our giving is to get the (two sides) to understand each other well."
"
