c. 2005 Religion News Service

JERSEY CITY, N.J. _ He says he has not yet made up his mind, but when Essam Fahim looks from the restaurant window to Journal Square below, a sadness in his face suggests he knows what he will do. He cannot stay because this is not the place he thought it was.

“It is so sad,” says Fahim. “But it is too late. Things like this cannot be changed _ and I have two children, daughters, and I don’t want them to live like this.”

Fahim is manager and part owner of Al Solymania, an Egyptian restaurant, coffeehouse and catering hall that overlooks the main square of Jersey City. He once believed in living in cities like this, where people from different backgrounds come together at a place like this restaurant, and talk and laugh and remember home and be entertained. Enjoy life.

But now this is a city where a family _ also with two daughters _ has been killed. Why? No one but the killer knows. But many believe it has to do with religion, even though authorities investigating the murder have repeatedly said, as late as Monday (Jan. 24), that they have found no evidence to back up that theory.

“It is so sad,” he says again. “Did it start with 9/11? I don’t know. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. It cannot be changed. It is too late. I think I want to live in Florida.”

He is still looking down at the square. Snow is falling. Fahim’s voice is soft and modulated, his English perfect, the accent a mix of Europe and Egypt and here.

“Every second person down there is Egyptian,” he says, although he cannot know this. He is not talking literally, but using Journal Square as a symbol. A metaphor. Al Solymania is the name of a large square in Cairo, a place where people meet.

“Of two of them, one is Muslim and one is Christian.”

Fahim is quiet for a moment. “They just walk by each other and pay no attention. They do not know what the others believe or don’t believe. But if what we all fear is true, every second one of them will be afraid and will have a gun or a knife soon and I don’t want to be here when that happens.”

What he says is jarring because Fahim is an educated, candid man. A reasonable man. With a German Christian mother and a Muslim Egyptian father, now both dead. He was raised in _ and loves _ both traditions. Foil Christmas trees hang from the ceiling of Al Solymania. He has an American wife and Christian daughters. He was an airline pilot, but now is a businessman and programmer who designs Web sites.

“I believed everyone could eventually get along. But maybe it is too late.”

In some of the Egyptian coffeehouses of Jersey City, the talk of conspiracy and fear has been as thick and blinding as the smoke from the hookahs the men puff at while they talk about the murder of Hossam Armanious, 47; his wife, Amal Garas, 37; and their two children, Sylvia, 15, and Monica, 8. Their bound and gagged bodies were discovered Jan. 14.

The men say two things. They say they do not know why the family was killed. Then, as if it were no contradiction, they say they know the family was killed because the father used computer chat rooms to promote his Christian creed and to attack Islam.

“His name in the chat room was `I love Jesus,”’ says a man who will identify himself only as Aran, although he says he is a cousin of Hossam Armanious’ and a Coptic Christian as well. “You make people angry that way, but he would not stop. It is easy in these rooms to find out where people live.”

The Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office has not been able to discount a religious motive, but it has released information pointing to robbery as a possible cause. Christian and Muslim religious leaders have tried to defuse the issue.

Essam Fahim says he has visited the chat rooms. They scare him.

“People fight,” he says. “They threaten each other. They think they can say anything they want, no matter how insulting, because no one will know who they are. But people can find out, you know. And they do. They find out.”

He is looking at Journal Square again. “Chat rooms are not like the square. Not like places like this, where people meet and get along and talk.”

There is something especially odd about this murder, and the idea of a religious feud. Egyptian Copts and Egyptian Muslims live dispersed throughout all neighborhoods. They are not isolated in small areas; it’s not a city divided geographically. Anyway, Copts and Muslims are not easily identifiable, one from the other.

“People do not argue on the street,” says Fahim. “They do not argue in here _ well, maybe about the check, but never about religion. They come here to have a good time. But you do not argue on a chat room to have a good time.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

He is right, of course. Life on the square, here in Jersey City or even in Cairo, at Al Solymania, is open and busy and rushed and people must think of things other than ideas. Like ducking traffic or hailing a cab or finding shelter from the snow. Just surviving means you do not insult your neighbor’s religion in an open public square.

But alone, at a keyboard, behind monitors, in chat rooms where words and arguments are disembodied from people who make them, where anonymity is promised but illusory, ideas take on lives of their own.

“If it could have been stopped before, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened,” says Fahim, still contemplating the square.

“But now it is too late. If what we fear is true, there will be hate out there, too. In the square. And my daughters will not be safe.”

MO/PH RNS END

(Bob Braun writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)