“Bozizé started to turn the people against Muslims,” the imam said. “He said the Seleka were Arabs, that they would come to enforce Islam and change your schools into Quranic schools. He told the people, ‘Take up your knives and axes and machetes,’ and he identified Muslim neighborhoods by name. So the spirit was created.”

Archbishop Nzapalainga agreed: “The problem was the politicians who used religion.”

The Christian majority would have accepted a Muslim leader who governed justly, the archbishop said. Many, in fact, welcomed the overthrow of Mr. Bozizé. “It is a question of competence,” he said. “People will accept a leader who is competent.”

But the actions of the Seleka ruined any hope of that. The undisciplined troops who seized the country this year carried out such lawless killing and pillaging during their nine months in power that the suspicions conjured by the previous government were reinforced, both religious leaders said.

“They did much harm,” Imam Layama said of the Muslim rebels. “The former government has profited from the misbehavior of the Seleka. They have been able to use that, since the people suffered so much under the Seleka.”

Spillover from conflicts farther north has added fuel to the fire. Arabic-speaking Muslim fighters from Chad and Sudan who joined the Seleka rebels were particularly ruthless and beyond the control of the government, worsening the religious divisions, the imam said.

The violence has started to look like the broader sectarian conflict that he and the archbishop feared. When Christian fighters tried to seize control of the capital, Bangui, on Dec. 5, the Seleka fighters in the city repulsed them and then unleashed a wave of killings of Christians whom they accused of being collaborators. Christian mobs retaliated, lynching Muslim civilians and attacking several mosques.