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Egyptian activists have begun an online campaign against sectarianism in the wake of a deadly attack on mourners at Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral this month.

To begin the process of disentangling religion and citizenship, the “None of Your Business” campaign, driven by a Facebook group and a YouTube video, urges Egyptian citizens to cover up the section of their national identity cards that states their religion. The group’s Facebook page describes the initiative as “a campaign against interference in citizens’ private lives by the state, and by other citizens. We are for the removal of religion from official documents — the most important of which is the personal ID card — as a small but important step towards ending discrimination on the basis of religion.”

In response, supporters of the campaign have uploaded photographs of their ID cards to social networks with messages along the lines of “my faith is my own business” obscuring their religions. One inventive blogger even used text copied from the cartoon “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

حارب #مصر الطائفية وحط ستيكر يبسطك مكان خانة الديانة المحشورة ف البطاقة انا حطيب سبونج بوب :) #حاجة_تخصني //t.co/18rF9WRQXQ — – (@Fatnnnnnnnnna) 15 Apr 13

One of the organizers, the British-Egyptian journalist and blogger Sarah Carr, explained in an e-mail to The Lede on Monday:

I reported on the Cathedral clashes last week, and was at Maspero when nearly 30 Christian protesters were killed; shot or run down by armored personnel carriers. I felt angry and powerless after both incidents until the idea of covering up the religion field on my ID card came to me. I couldn’t think of a single use for the religion field; the Egyptian state has a well documented thirst for bureaucracy and collecting information about its citizens but there is absolutely no need for it to have this information, which serves no purpose other than giving prejudiced state officials (and anyone else who sees the ID card) the opportunity to give a hard time to citizens.

She wrote that it was initially a polite notice to the state:

You can continue to follow divisive policies by classifying your citizens according to their religion while simultaneously bleating about citizenship but I won’t be part of it. I wrote “none of your business” on a piece of paper and covered up both the religion field and the social status field (married, single) because there is also no need for the state to document that information in this way, nor for the rest of the world to know about the progress of my romantic life. I put this picture on Facebook and got an amazing and unexpected response from people who felt the same way. So I started the inevitable Facebook page with a friend, Mohamad Adam, and it currently has nearly 700 likes. Serendipitously, Aalam Wassaf was thinking about the same thing at the same time and made a great video, so it all came together. Ultimately I would like ID cards to be abolished altogether, because they are unnecessary and sinister, but this is still some way off I think. Removing the religion field from ID cards is a symbolic first step towards this. If it ever did happen it would be a message that the state need not and should not have a role in defining, controlling or exploiting religious identity.

The campaign’s video was produced by Aalam Wassef, an artist, musician and blogger who made subversive Web videos during the Mubarak era under the pseudonym Ahmad Sherif.

In response to questions about the campaign from The Lede on Monday, Mr. Wassef wrote: