The circumstances surrounding last month’s murder trial where two monks were found guilty for last summer’s killing of Bishop Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Abu Makar Monastery, are troubling. They have revealed how Arab-Muslim Bedouins and the Coptic pope of the Egyptian Orthodox Church benefited from the sordid ordeal. The state was the facilitator. The former succeeded in a covert land grab that would have otherwise and in any other way sounded an alarm. The latter solidified a provocative faith initiative when the loudest voice against his stance was expunged. This voice belonged to Bishop Epiphanius who was murdered on July 29 inside the fortress walls of the Abu Makar Monastery in the middle of the desert (110 kilometers west of Cairo). Bishop Epiphanius had two ideological enemies. The first was the Egyptian government of which he had become a serious thorn in the side since 2014. The state wrongfully ignored the bishop’s written complaints about desert Bedouins stealing monastery agricultural products, squatting on monastery acreage and confiscating ancient Christian relics off the land since 2013. Carrying firearms, the Bedouins gradually displaced the monks and took over their land. Consequently, the monastery lost 1,300 acres by the time Bishop Epiphanius was silenced once and for all last year under mysterious circumstances.

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