The Reality Of Islam And Religious Equality

Note: This posting is a tale from Egypt. It concerns a muslim who converted to Christianity. It shows the reality of Islam and apostasy in a muslim country. The tall tales readers may hear about the religious 'tolerance' of Islam need not be believed.

This posting is from 'Chiesa' an Italian site, published in English.



Thou Shalt Have no Other Allah

by Dina Nascetti


CAIRO - At 13 years of age, Ibrahim knew the Koran by heart. The imam in his Cairo neighborhood used him as an example for many young people, and foresaw for him a future as a great preacher of the most radical sort of Islam. Ibrahim had become that young preacher: already at 16 years of age, on Fridays, with the exuberance and impetuosity of his youth, he harangued the faithful who came running to the mosque to hear him, the rising star of the jihad, the holy war. "I had imposed the veil on all the women of my family; my grandmother, my mother, my sisters," he recounts. "I could not endure the non-Islamic expressions of our society in daily life. I kept watch and denounced anyone who did not respect the rules and deviated from the right way."

Ibrahim was preaching in the mid-1990¿s, when, under the pressure of the Islamic movements, many of them connected with the university of Al Azhar, the hadit had been reintroduced to Egypt. The hadit are the sayings of Mohammed on the isba, the principle that allows anyone to begin an inquiry against someone who strays from the teaching of the sharia, the Islamic law, and on the ridda, the accusation of apostasy. One of the first hadit holds that the blood of a Muslim "may be spilled in three cases: homicide, adultery, and apostasy." Thus the pious citizen is authorized to kill the sinner. On the basis of this dogma, many intellectuals condemned for their unorthodox works were assassinated during those years, or seriously injured, like the Nobel-winning writer Naghib Mahfuz.

Two years ago Ibrahim, who was born into the faith in Allah and the Koran, converted to the Catholic faith. He took the name Mikeil, Michael, the archangel most venerated in Egypt. Convents, churches, and chapels are dedicated to Michael all over the country. The remnants of places of worship consecrated in pre-Islamic Egypt are still visible in the Babylon fortress in Old Cairo.

But Ibrahim-Mikeil lives his conversion in great secrecy. His family, his friends, and even his wife are unaware of it. He risks being run over by the accusation of apostasy, he says, "on the part of old friends, a relative, which could become a death sentence, or in the best of cases a sentence which would inflict years of imprisonment and certain torture."

Are Ibrahim¿s fears well-founded? In a formal sense, no. Article 3 of the Egyptian constitution of 1923 proclaims the equality of all Egyptians before the law, without distinction of race, language, or religion. But the reality is different. Since 1971, a constant tendency toward the islamicization of the Egyptian justice system has been in course. President Anwar Al-Sadat, later killed by Islamic fundamentalists, was the one who accepted certain requests from the Muslim Brotherhood aimed at combating the nationalist parties and the left, which opposed his economic policies: he introduced into the constitution an amendment according to which "sharia is one of the principal sources of legislation," which became, in 1980, the "principal source."

"A Muslim from birth can never change religions," affirms Youssef Sidhom, the director of the Christian weekly "Watani": "They will not only seek by every means to dissuade him, but his very life will be in danger. He will be excluded from his inheritance and from the community to which he belongs. But on the contrary, an Egyptian Christian who embraces the Muslim faith is welcomed with many parties, his identity card is quickly changed, he is helped in his job and with his house."

The secrecy in which he lives his new faith has permitted Ibrahim-Mikeil, for now, to escape the police roundups that have led to the arrest of 23 Egyptian converts to Christianity, while hundred of others are being sought. This news, completely ignored by the Egyptian media, was broken from Rome by the agency "AsiaNews", which provides information on the critical situation of Christians in the Islamic world. The only Arabic newspaper to have recounted the arrests has been "Al Quds," which is produced in London and banned in Egypt. It denounces: "The work of the Egyptian police to criminalize ex-Muslim converts to Christianity continues in silence. We are amazed that a matter of such delicacy should be left in the hands of police forces. It is true that sharia does not allow apostasy, but in a state ruled by law this question should certainly not be confronted in conformity with fundamentalist tendencies."

According to a priest who asked to remain anonymous, "the arrests by the police, which have been infiltrated by now, like the magistratures and professional corporations, are due to the rooting of fundamentalism in the Egyptian educational system. As a matter of fact, there are many cases in which students belonging to minority religions have been heavily discriminated against and maltreated. It happens, for example, that Christian girls in elementary schools are forced to wear the veil. The public schools have suffered strong interference from the imams of Al Azhar and the governing authorities, which have long been inclined to satisfy the requests of the fundamentalists in order to maintain their own power. For months one hears nothing of the arrested converts. And in the meantime, they suffer beastly mistreatment. Then their fate will be asked of a judge, who is not always impartial. Assuming they are not condemned, the only thing they can do is to go into exile in the United States, Canada, or Australia, in order to avoid disdain both within their families and in the communities around them."

These aspects are completely overlooked by the Egyptian media, but not by "Watani." "Ours is an independent newspaper," says the director, Sidhom, "without particular relations with the Church, from which it receives no subsidies." In the face of this return to the crude repression of Christians, Coptic Patriarch Shenuda III, accustomed in the past to remarking on the harmony between Christians and Muslims, has changed his stance, bewailing the numerous attacks against his community. The life of the Christians, among whom the Copts, at 6-7 million, are the great majority, has not been easy in recent years. The persecution of this community hearkens back to the forms of martyrdom used against the first Christians. One¿s memory turns back to the terrible events in October of 1998, when Egyptian security forces carried out rapes and crucifixions during incursions into the Coptic village of El-Kosheh, near Luxor. The crucifixions were carried out in groups of 50 persons, who were literally nailed or chained to doors, with each person¿s legs joined to the next¿s. There were victims beaten and tortured through the application of electric current to their genitals by the police, who accused them of being infidels. Romani Boctor, 11, was strung up with an electric cable in an attic.

But it is the discrimination perpetrated in all aspects of society that makes life difficult for Christians. By constitutional law, the president must be a Muslim. Christians cannot be prime minister, though they have been in the past. Of the 32 ministers, only two of them are Christian: the finance minister and the minister of the environment. The mayor of a city or village cannot be a Christian. The highest posts in the army, the police, and the president¿s guard are granted only to Muslims. A Christian cannot assume an important role in a tribunal. Even worse, according to the law, two witnesses must be obtained before a sentence can be passed, but if one of the two is a Christian, the judge may disallow his testimony.

A Christian cannot be the rector of a university or dean of a faculty. The government pays the salaries of the imams, but not of the Christian priests. The university of Al Azhar does not accept Christian students, even though it is maintained by taxes taken from both Muslims and Christians. Added to all of this are the insurmountable obstacles to be faced in building a church. These difficulties can be traced back to a 1934 law that dictates ten conditions for the granting of a permit. For example, a church can not be built on farm land; it must not be close to a mosque or a public monument; police authorization must be obtained if it will be constructed near bridges on the Nile, canals, or railway lines. And the president of the republic must give his signature. "In spite of the protests, the state wants to maintain these conditions, and that provokes in all Egyptians a spirit of fanaticism and of division among Christians and Muslims," says Sameh Fawzi, a Christian journalist.

"The culture and life of the Copts have completely disappeared from the Egyptian press. For this reason, we have intensified our interest in the Christian minorities. We want to foster union among Egyptians, both Christians and Muslims, because all are children of the same nation," says Sidhom, warning: "The state¿s indifference is bringing Christians to the bitter conviction that Egypt considers them second-class citizens. That a Christian is a kafir, an infidel, neither knowing the true religion nor possessing the true faith, and thus does not deserve to be heard. And that, in this country, an humiliating discrimination on religious grounds has been created."

Ibrahim-Mikeil understands all of the dangers of his conversion, but lives his Catholic conversion with great serenity. "When I opened my eyes to the violence, I began to consider my religion," he recounts. "I wanted God to be very close to me, but in Islam he seemed very far away. There he is the master of all things, but he is not a God who lives among us. This is what tormented me. Then one day I visited the monastery of St. Catherine of Sinai, and there I received the true inspiration." St. Catherine was the young Egyptian princess who converted to Christianity and was ordered to be beheaded by the Roman emperor Maxentius. Ibrahim-Mikeil¿s dream? "To go to Rome to be able to pray freely at St. Peter¿s, ideally with my wife."



Comment: The best move any Australian government could do would be to open Australia to muslim apostates who consider that they must, for safety sake, leave the muslim country in which they live because of their abandonment of Islam.

The West needs to fight, with many 'weapons', against the ideology of Islam. This ideology has captured the religion of Islam (so muslim reformers tell us), and is in political struggle against the West. So be it. We must fight back.

Apostasy undermines the ideology of Islam. The West can encourage it by providing safety for those muslims who want to be free of the backwardness which is the common lot of muslims around the world. Australia can lead the way for such a sensible policy, if it had a government with any imagination.

Is anyone awake in Canberra?