This week a wedding became the latest scene of violence between ordinary Egyptians and Islamic extremists in this Nile Valley city, famous for fertile fields and politics.
Everyone agrees the Christian family involved asked for protection because they feared extremists would hear the dance music and disrupt the festivities.From there, accounts diverge.
Adherents of the al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, or Islamic Group, said they ignored the wedding, but violence broke out when a jubilant relative fired blanks into the air. Security police, believing they were under attack, fired into the wedding and furious relatives drove them away with rocks and bottles.
The official version says four young extremists attacked the band with chains and sticks. Two wedding guests were wounded when security forces opened fire. The four extremists were arrested.
Many are baffled by the increasing violence and do not know who to believe.
The militants want to implement Islamic laws that they think will yield a more equitable distribution of wealth and greater respect for religion. They say the lack of real opposition parties makes violence their only option.
They want to pull Egypt out of what they see as a client relationship with the United States, which provides more than $3 billion annually in aid to its most important Arab ally. They opposed Egypt's participation in the anti-Iraq coalition during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Islamic Group's spiritual leader, is suspected in Egypt of backing terrorism and is fighting deportation from the United States, where he has been living in self-exile since 1990.
Four of the five suspects detained so far in the Feb. 26 bombing of New York's World Trade Center, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000, prayed at the mosque in Jersey City, N.J., where the cleric preached.
In Egypt, some fear their country is in a low-level war, like Algeria. Clashes and three bomb explosions in the past month have brought the death toll to more than 150 in 15 months.
Police said Tuesday that a blast went off near the Giza pyramids, Egypt's most famous tourist attraction, wounding two Egyptians. Muslim extremists have targeted the tourism industry to embarrass the government and cut off its main source of foreign currency.
In Manfalut, 20 miles north of Assiut, the radicals' mosque is squeezed along the railroad tracks directly in front of the walls that surround the Coptic Cathedral.
Like all al-Gamaa mosques, it is made of the rough-hewn bricks and unfinished cement that the group considers a mark of its poverty. All are open around the clock, unlike the government mosques that unlock their doors only for the five daily prayers.
At least 100 followers in this city of 500,000 have been jailed in a government crackdown that started last year.