By Samer al-Atrush

CAIRO, Nov 02, 2010 (AFP) - A chilling message from an Iraqi Al-Qaeda group warning Egypt's Coptic Christians to free two priests' wives it says converted to Islam and are being held against their will has touched one of Egypt's volatile fault lines.

The Coptic Church, which usually supports the Egyptian government, says it does not feel threatened by the warning from Iraq, purportedly made by the group behind Sunday's bloody hostage-taking at a Syrian Catholic church in Baghdad.

"We feel secure; we are under the protection of God and the Egyptian security," said church official Bishop Morcos.

Coptic activists say the message was a grim reminder of the perils of sectarian violence, which took the lives of six Coptic Christians in a southern Egyptian town in January.

The message threatened to target all the region's Christians if the women, Camilia Shehata and Wafa Constantine, were not released.

"This is the first time we get threats from outside Egypt. This reflects the sequence of crises we are going through," said Nagib Gibrail, a Coptic activist and human rights lawyer.

The warning from Iraq came as Islamist protests in Egypt demanding the release of Shehata were dying down amid police restrictions.

But the cases of Shehata and Constantine remain a third rail in Egypt's politics.

Both went missing for days -- Constantine in 2004, Shehata in July -- and were brought back by police amid Coptic protests as rumours abounded that they had been forcibly converted to Islam.

The church denied that either woman had become Muslim.

Shehata's case renewed demands by the church to bring back a procedure, suspended after the Constantine controversy, in which a Copt who was rumoured to have fled and converted to Islam would be brought before a priest for guidance.

"We hope these guidance sessions will return," said Bishop Morcos. "They provided transparency, and quelled such rumours."

The church says these sessions were voluntary, but security officials say police were involved in supervising the convert until the priest was done.

The dispute touches on a wider sense of alienation among the Copts, who face institutional discrimination amid an overwhelmingly Muslim culture.

Copts make up to 10 percent of the country's population of 80 million, but a Christian may not become president.

Yet the Coptic establishment views the ruling National Democratic Party as a bulwark against rising Islamism.

Smothered by this tangle of sectarian considerations are the voices of the women. Neither Shehata nor Constantine have appeared publicly or spoken to the press.

Camilia Shehata was 25 when police escorted her back to her home to quell Coptic unrest. The government press reported that she left home after a marital dispute.

Islamists in Egypt do proselytise, but critics say the church, which is the arbiter on matters of marriage, might be pushing away some of its congregation because of the control it exercises.

An Egyptian women's rights activist says the church's control has driven some Coptic women to convert to Islam -- not out of conviction, but to escape an unhappy marriage.

"There was a case I worked on when eleven women converted. Most of them were university graduates who were expected to marry their cousins," said Nehad Abul Qumsan, head of the Egyptian Centre for Women's Rights.

"They didn't convert because they were convinced of Islam, they did it as strategy, a form of protection," she said.

se/jaz/al

Copyright AFP 2010.