RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: And Soraya, help us understand how this is all unfolding.</s>SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: And so the tensions are rising, even though the incident is now a few days ago.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: Give us a little background here. Christians in Egypt - it's an old community. Who are they exactly and where are they concentrated?</s>SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: And so they really are merged with the Muslims. They don't live separately. They're not a different ethnicity. They're just Egyptian Christians who never converted when Islam came to Egypt.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: And Soraya, haven't Egyptian Christians long complained of discrimination?</s>SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: For example, that Christians are converting Muslims secretly and doing all sorts of things that sort of raise the ire or sensitivities on the Muslim sides, and the government doesn't seem to do anything to stop that.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: And how is the government responding to this? I know Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, came out rather quickly with a statement about this.</s>SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: And this time, the Christians say, they won't put up with it.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: Soraya, thanks very much.</s>SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: You're welcome, Renee.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, Host: That's NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson speaking to us from Cairo.
In Egypt, the divide between Muslims and Christians took a violent turn over the weekend with a deadly bombing of a Coptic Christian Church in the coastal city of Alexandria. The suicide attack is not the first, but it's the worst attack against the country's minority Christian population in a decade.