By Sally Bishai
Despite the fact that the calendar says “2006″ rather than “1006,” Copts in today’s Egypt are sometimes kidnapped from their homes, jobs, or schools and forced to change religions, as in the recent case of Theresa Ghattas Kamal, missing from el-Saff (30 miles south of Cairo) since January 3.
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February 23 (Compass) - Missing for over a month, a young Christian woman has telephoned her relatives and reported being imprisoned in a Cairo apartment while facing pressure to convert to Islam.
Last seen in the village of El-Saff 30 miles south of Cairo on January 3, Theresa Ghattass Kamal briefly contacted her aunt on January 24. She told her aunt that she had not yet succumbed to her unknown captors’ demands that she become a Muslim, her brother Sa’eed Ghattass Kamal told Compass.
Her phone call contradicted earlier police statements that she had converted to Islam voluntarily and did not want to see her family again. Police made the claims last month in the wake of a three-day protest by clergy and lay members of the Coptic Orthodox church.
Further investigation by Sa’eed Kamal revealed that no official records of his sister’s conversion existed at Cairo’s Al-Azhar Islamic center. Egyptian law requires that all conversions be registered at Al-Azhar and then validated with the security police, the State Security Investigation (SSI).
The Kamal family traced the origination point of the 19-year-old woman’s call to an apartment in Cairo’s Shubra district owned by Muslim Mostafa Mahmood Ali.
A local priest who asked not to be named for security reasons characterized Ali’s house as “a dangerous place, full of fundamentalists.”
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February 15 (Compass) - Imprisoned for nearly 11 months without formal charges, the fate of an Egyptian sheikh suspected of blasphemy is to be decided at a court hearing on Sunday (February 19).Arrested on April 6, 2005, Bahaa el-Din Ahmed Hussein Mohammed El-Akkad’s detention has been repeatedly renewed, but he hopes that the February 19 hearing before the South Giza Court will provide better results.
Because the sheikh has not yet been officially charged, the court could free him without any verdict, El-Akkad’s lawyer Athanasius William told Compass. According to William, Prosecutor General Maher Abdel Wahed could also renew El-Akkad’s detention for six months or open a blasphemy case against the prisoner.
With no formal charges, El-Akkad, 57, can only guess at the reasons for his arrest. After William took El-Akkad’s case in May, he was allowed to attend the prisoner’s interrogation sessions conducted by the State Security Investigation (SSI) and state prosecutor Tarik Abdel Shakur.
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According to Al Ahaly Egyptian newspaper :
Secular tension between Copts and Muslims in the village of Udayssat, Luxor, Egypt, has continued this week as a result of the distribution of a new leaflet
- widely circulated-, which caused the security forces to enforce their presence, inside and outside the village.
Copy of the leaflet distributed in Udayssat threatening Copts to “demolish the church or else….”
This new leaflet includes a warning “To whom it may concern” meaning the Copts, saying that if they want to live in peace and be allowed to stay in the village, they have to “Demolish the church where they pray within few days, or else………” According to a report made by the security officials who are trying to find the source of the leaflet, there is now a state of increased tension between the Muslims and Copts.
On the other hand, there has been an important meeting of the leaders of the National Democratic Party (NPD) of Luxor, held inside the village of Udayssat, and attended by over a 1000 Muslim youths. This meeting was called for by Abel Aziz El Udayssi, the local administrator of the party, Mamdouh Hassan Saad, member of the Egyptian parliament , and other party leaders such as Mohamed El Malawany, Mohamed Abel Zaher, and Nasr Herzallah the secretary of the party’s political committee.
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February 3 (Compass) - Two young Coptic Christian women whose father had converted to Islam when they were infants have won a court battle in Egypt to retain their official religious identity as Christians.
Now 18 and 19 years old, Iman and Olfat Malak Ayet will be issued national identity cards matching their Christian birth certificates tomorrow.
In the final verdict, presiding Judge Farouk Ali Abdel Kader of Cairo’s District No. 1 Administrative Court declared that the civil authorities had conducted a “non-justified intervention” by imposing upon the two plaintiffs a belief they had not chosen.
“It is not in any way acceptable that the civil authorities take advantage of their authority to force the plaintiffs to embrace Islam,” the ruling specified.
The court also ordered the government’s Civil Affairs Department, which had refused to issue Christian ID cards to the Ayet sisters, to pay all legal fees in the lawsuit.
Although the verdict was handed down more than eight months ago, on May 31, 2005, civil authorities refused to implement the decision. “They were pretending that they were waiting for the approval of the State Security Investigation,” attorney Naguib Gibrael told Compass.
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