COPTOLOGY CONFERENCE COMING IN EGYPT:

Scene set for Coptic studies
The Third International Seminar on Coptic Studies will be held in Sohag early next year.
Jill Kamil looks at the preparations [Al-Ahram Weekly]

"People have come to know that the series of Coptic studies seminars that take place in monasteries are serious affairs," well-known Coptologist Gawdat Gabra says. "Already we have had a most satisfactory response to our announcement that the next seminar will take place in Sohag early next year, and it promises to be even more successful than the other two."

[...]

UPDATE: It sounds like an interesting conference, but if this story is accurate, maybe I shouldn't attend:

Egypt arrests blogger
04/11/2005 09:28 - (SA)

Cairo - Egyptian police have detained a blogger for his anti-Islamic and anti-government writings and confiscated his books and copies of his articles, his family and other bloggers said on Thursday.

Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman, a 21-year-old law student at Al-Azhar University, was arrested on October 26. His whereabouts are not known.

[...]

Another blogger, Malik Moustafa, closely followed Seliman's detention and accused followers of the fundamentalist Islamic Salafi movement in Alexandria of being behind the arrest. Moustafa said the arrest followed articles in which Seliman accused the Salafis of inciting the latest sectarian tensions in his neighbourhood of Mouharm Bay.

Blatant remarks

Seliman was detained three days after posting an article to his blog commenting on the violent riots that erupted when thousands of security forces clashed with streams of angry Muslim worshippers in front of a Coptic Christian church over a play put on by Christians deemed offensive to Islam.

[...]

In addition to his anti-Islamic writings, Seliman posted several articles blatantly attacking Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak regime and describing it as a "symbol of dictatorship".

[...]

Criticising the Salafis and the Egyptian Government. What could he have been thinking?

According to this article, the poor guy's mother even had to condemn him to stay out of trouble.

For more on those riots, see this AP article . For more on the detention of Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman see here (includes links to his blogs if you read Arabic) and here.