U.S. Copts Association

By Nader Shukry

In the wee hours of dawn last Monday, the police knocked on the door of Bahiya Nagy al-Sissy in the small east-Delta town of Mit Ghamr, woke the family up, and arrested her. Bahiya is a 34-year old Coptic peasant woman, and she was caught in order to serve a three year prison sentence she was handed, together with her 36-year-old sister Shadya, in absentia in 2000 by a criminal court. Bahiya’s and Shadya’s crime: forgery, even though there were no forged documents to indict them in the first place. The two sisters were born Christian, had lived and had married as Christians, and had Christian children. The court, however, considered that they should have been Muslim according to their father’s brief conversion to Islam more than thirty years ago. Shadya and Bahiya had then been children and were ignorant of their father’s conversion, especially that he later reverted to his original Christianity. The story was kept secret by the father, but surfaced in 1996 when Ramadan Hassan Hussein, a forger, was arrested and, among his confessions, related how he had helped Sissy acquire Christian identity papers which were practically almost impossible to obtain once he had reverted to Christianity.

Shadya was caught last August, three days before her son’s wedding, and sent to prison. Bahiya went into hiding. Their case aroused a wide furore, especially considering that it involved several legal irregularities. Worth noting is that neither Shadya nor Bahiya had any official documents other than the birth certificates. None of them had an ID; both are illiterate. The controversy, however, was between Islamic fundamentalists who considered them irrevocably Muslim once their father had converted, thus were not to ‘desert’ Islam otherwise they would be punishable by death according to sharia, and the rights groups who demand freedom of belief as a basic human right. The case became a public opinion case, with activists and intellectuals collecting signatures to demand Shadya’s release from prison. Last January she was set free by order of the prosecutor-general. Bahiya came out of hiding, went to welcome her sister home, and both have since then been leading a normal life.

Following her arrest, Bahiya stood before the Shubral-Kheima prosecutor last Tuesday, who ordered her detained till Sunday 11 May pending a decision by the Court of Appeals to set a date to see her case. Nadia Tawfiq, Bahiya’s lawyer, said Bahiya was bewildered and upset, knowing not what destiny awaited her.
Scores of Bahiya’s relatives gathered before the police station of Shubral-Kheima, protesting her arrest and demanding her release.
Lawyer Peter al-Naggar fears the police may have detained Bahiya as revenge against her sister Shadya who last week applied for an ID proving her Christian identity, as ordered by the prosecutor-general last January. That a lower prosecution should refer Bahiya, to whom the order also applied, to the Appeals Court was highly irregular, Mr Naggar said.
Bahiya’s son, Mehdat Farag, expressed his anguish wondering “Why are we going through all this? Is it because we are Christians? We are humble people, living in peace in a small village.”