Spotlight on Egypt
A 2010 Pew Research Center poll found that 84 percent of Egyptian Muslims believe those who leave Islam should be killed.63 Nor is death for apostasy in Egypt a phenomenon of recent years. E. W. Lane, an Arabist who traveled around Egypt in the 1820s disguised as a Muslim, was one of the first modern Europeans to witness the execution of an apostate—in this case, a female convert to Christianity who was exposed by her Coptic cross tattoo. In Lane’s own words,Apostasy from the faith of Islam is considered a most heinous sin, and must be punished with death, unless the apostate will recant on being thrice warned. I once saw a woman paraded through the streets of Cairo, and afterwards taken down to the Nile to be drowned, for having apostatized from the faith of Muhammad, and having married a Christian. Unfortunately, she tattooed a blue cross on her arm, which led to her detection by one of her former friends in a bath. She was mounted upon a high-saddled ass, such as ladies in Egypt usually ride, and very respectably dressed, attended by soldiers, and surrounded by a rabble, who, instead of commiserating, uttered loud imprecations against her. The Kadee [or qadi, a Muslim judge] who passed sentence upon her, exhorted her, in vain, to return to her former faith. She was taken in a boat into the midst of the river, stripped nearly naked, strangled and then thrown into the stream.64
Little has changed in Egypt since the 1820s. In 2007 Eman Muhammad Al-Sayed, a twenty-six-year-old woman who had converted to Christianity, was violently attacked by her relatives in a park where she was walking with her husband, also a Muslim convert to Christianity. She had escaped her family four years earlier, gotten married, and lived in hiding ever since. As her family was beating her and vowing to kill her in public, police eventually intervened, taking the woman into custody and handing her over to state security, who proceeded to strip her naked and take photographs of her to shame her; they also “subjected Al-Sayed to severe torture, including electrocution of sensitive parts of her body.” She was eventually handed over to her family, who dragged her away from the police station screaming, even as they violently beat her some more before forcing her in a waiting car and driving away.65
There are dozens of cases in Egypt of Muslims apostatizing to Christianity only to be attacked by their family, neighbors, colleagues, or the notorious mob. But as in Iran, perhaps the more telling cases are the ones that actually involve Egyptian courts and authorities ruling in accordance with Sharia, such as the aforementioned case of Muhammad Hegazy, who was not permitted to change his religion from Islam to Christianity on his I.D. card. In February 2009, another apostate, Maher Al-Gohary, fifty-eight, tried to officially convert to Christianity—only to be accused of apostasy, with prosecutors calling for the death penalty. As Maher himself put it: “Our rights in Egypt, as Christians or converts, are less than the rights of animals. We are deprived of social and civil rights, deprived of our inheritance and left to the fundamentalists to be killed. Nobody bothers to investigate or care about us.”
He has been attacked in the street, spat upon, beaten, and threatened by text messages and phone calls—all simply because he petitioned to be granted the right to convert to Christianity. Eventually he and his daughter fled to Syria, once a moderate nation under secularist Bashar Assad. However, since the “Arab Spring” reached there, too—with Syrian Christians under attack by jihadis—in 2011, Maher and his daughter managed to flee to France where they applied for asylum.66
A December 2010 report by World Watch Monitor tells of Ashraf Thabet, a forty-five-year-old Muslim who apostatized to Christianity. He lost his wife, children, and business—all in keeping with Sharia law—and he was further charged with defaming Islam under Article 98(f) of the Egyptian Penal Code. According to Thabet, the charges against him stem from his six-year soul search for spiritual truth, which culminated with his conversion to Christianity: “During his search, he shared his doubts about Islam and told others what he was learning about Jesus Christ. Local religious authorities, incensed at Thabet’s ideas, notified Egypt’s State Security Intelligence service (SSI), which arrested and charged him with defamation.” Because his case has not yet been tried, “Thabet lives in limbo and is subject to a regular barrage of death threats from people in his community in Port Said in northeast Egypt.”67
In the summer of 2010, Nagla Imam, a lawyer, was fired for converting to Christianity. As is usual, the government would not allow her to change her religion from Muslim to Christian formally on her I.D. card. As a result she tried to organize a public demonstration against the government with other Muslim converts to Christianity. Police quickly dispersed the demonstration and the demonstrators were beaten and threatened, including by the Muslim mob, which naturally got in on the action. The young daughter of one Christian convert had her arm broken but was denied medical attention.
Then in July 2010 it was revealed that state security had arrested Nagla and taken her to a government building in Cairo. There, as described earlier, a top official twisted the crucifix she was wearing, tightening the chain around her neck, while saying “the cross will be the death of you.” At one point after her release, she and her two young children were trapped indoors—their entire Muslim family having turned their backs on them—and besieged by a mob that banged on the doors and windows and cut off all electricity to the house, leaving Nagla and her children in the dark (one YouTube video shows a battered and bruised Nagla singing a psalm with her children while trapped in her home).68
To give all this the Islamic seal of approval, a Muslim cleric, Salim Abdul Galil, appeared on an Al Azhar affiliated station proclaiming Nagla an “infidel,” adding she must either return to Islam or spend the remainder of her life indoors. As mentioned earlier, this pronouncement accords very well with Sharia law, especially the Hanafi school, which has strong roots in Egypt: rather than kill apostate women outright, the “lenient” Hanafis recommend that females be beaten and then permanently imprisoned in their homes until such time as they see the “error of their ways” and resubmit themselves to Islam.69
As Egypt continues its descent into Sharia, hardline clerics are becoming even more emboldened. In June 2012, on a popular Egyptian show, Sheikh Yassir Burhami, a leading figure among Salafis, unabashedly proclaimed,Is it the right of the Muslim to convert to Christianity or another religion? Of course this is not a right! This is a matter that Sharia has clearly addressed, according to the agreed upon hadiths [including Muhammad’s statement “He who changes his religion [Islam] must be killed”]. It is impermissible, for any reason, for a Muslim to leave the community. Of course, you cannot force the infidel to enter into Islam [Koran 2:256]—but you must force the apostate. It is impossible to let the apostate remain in [a state of] apostasy, calling it a form of “freedom.”70
Recent attacks on Muslim apostates to Christianity from one end of the Islamic world to the other—from Afghanistan to Zanzibar—all evince the same patterns documented in the above examples from Iran, Somalia, and Egypt. All demonstrate the unwavering persistence of Muslims—regardless of their nationality, race, ethnicity, language, or culture—in persecuting apostates to Christianity.
Afghanistan
In late 2010, Said Musa, an amputee and the father of six young children, was one of dozens of Afghans arrested after a Christian worship meeting was videotaped and exposed. A former Muslim who had converted to Christianity eight years before, Musa was charged with apostasy and pressured to renounce Christianity on television, but he continued to say he was Christian. He was imprisoned, suffering “sexual abuse, beatings, mockery, and sleep deprivation because of his faith.” On November 27, he appeared shackled before a judge. No Afghan authority would defend him. The deputy secretary of the Afghan parliament, Abdul Sattar Khawasi, said that “those Afghans that appeared on this video film should be executed in public.”71 Then in late February 2011, after “intense diplomatic pressure,” Musa was released and fled Afghanistan. Of course, many other nameless and faceless Christians still languish in Afghan prisons for apostati
zing to Christianity.72
Bangladesh
In April 2012, “Vincent,” a former Muslim prayer leader in Bangladesh who had converted to Christianity, was “welcomed by threats and violence” from members of his former Muslim community, who “beat him almost to death,” causing him to be hospitalized for almost two months. According to AsiaNews, “the same Muslims who followed him and held him in high esteem when he was their imam now cannot accept his new ‘status.’”73
Eritrea
An August 2011 Worthy News report tells of the plight of Eritrea’s apostates, who are “imprisoned for the testimony of Christ,” and sometimes tortured to death “for refusing to recant” Christianity—one such example being a forty-two-year-old man who died while in solitary confinement. “With these recent deaths, the confirmed number of Christians who died while imprisoned for their faith in Eritrea totals eight. At the same time, the government of President Isaias Afwerki has ramped-up its campaign against unregistered house churches, thereby earning Eritrea a slot on the U.S. State Department’s list of Countries of Concern as one the worst violators of religious freedom.... Church leaders in Eritrea told Open Doors that nearly 3,000 Christians were imprisoned by last December.”74
India
In March 2012, Rekha Khatoon, a twenty-two-year-old Muslim woman in India, was attacked and kicked out of her home “for daring to give thanks for healing in Christ’s name.” Her own parents “helped Islamic extremists to beat her nearly unconscious.” According to the young Christian convert, “‘I boldly told those who beat me up that I may leave my parents, but that I will not leave Jesus. . . . Jesus has healed me, and I cannot forget Him.’”75 Muslims also harassed and threatened the Christian woman who had “lured” Rekha to convert to Christianity.
In March 2011, Selina Bibi, once a Muslim, converted to Christianity—even as Muslims surrounded the Believers Church that she was being baptized in, disrupting the service and hurling anti-Christian insults .76 Later, two Muslim women “summoned” Selina to their home, where the Christian convert was forcefully stripped naked and beat by a Muslim mob; more recent reports indicate that she continues to receive severe threats, including to burn her home down, if she does not return to Islam.77
Kuwait
In January 2012, Kuwaiti Prince Abdullah al-Sabah boldly declared his conversion to Christianity, saying in an audio recording, “First of all, I fully agree with the distribution of this audio file and I now declare that if they kill me because of it, then I will appear before Jesus Christ and be with him for all eternity. ”78 The prince’s words make very clear that he, a native of Kuwait, is under no delusions as to the penalty for converting to Christianity.
Lebanon
In May 2012, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a Lebanese Shiite cleric who was “physically and psychologically tortured by her father for converting to Christianity three years ago,” managed to escape and get baptized by a Christian priest—who was then abducted and interrogated about the whereabouts of the renegade woman. Muslim assailants also fired gunshots at the house of another priest and at a church. This “is part of an escalating pattern of violence against local Catholics,” said the region’s prelate .79
Pakistan
In 2010, after Muhammad Kamran, a Muslim man, converted to Christianity and told his wife, she abused and exposed him, resulting in his being severely beaten by local Muslims: “‘No one was willing to let me live the life I wanted [as a Christian]—they say Islam is not a religion of compulsion, but no one has been able to tell me why Muslims who don’t find satisfaction in the religion [such as myself] become liable to be killed,’” he said. Kamran eventually divorced, escaped, and remarried a Christian woman. In May 2012, it was reported that his family had again discovered his whereabouts and resumed threatening him. According to his new Christian wife, “Every other day, we receive threatening phone calls.... They are now asking him to abandon us and renounce Christianity, threatening that they will kill me and our child.”80
The Philippines
In April 2012, in Mindanao, which has a significant Muslim population, Pastor Mario Acidre, a former Muslim who had converted to Christianity, was murdered in front of his wife in his home: “‘My husband staggered into our bedroom and I was shocked because he was full of blood,’ she recalled. ‘I brought him to the hospital right away. He was operated on for eight bullet wounds, but did not survive.’” The Philippines is a mostly Christian nation, but in the south, especially Mindanao, “Muslim fundamentalists are trying to build an Islamic state. Christians there face persecution and even death.” According to another pastor, “This incident triggered threats to other Muslims who converted to Christianity, and that is why the house churches closed down.”81 Also in April 2012, another pastor was shot in the head five times and killed “by two unknown gunmen in front of his teenage daughter.”82
Saudi Arabia
In the summer of 2012, a twenty-eight-year-old Saudi woman, “Maryam” (or “Mary,” a pseudonym) embraced Christianity and fled the country, ultimately to Sweden. Earlier the woman had said that, though she “was raised to hate Judaism and Christianity she has come to love those religions since finding peace in Christianity.” Two men, a Christian Lebanese and a Muslim Saudi, are respectively accused of proselytizing to her and helping her escape. Prosecuting lawyer Humood al-Khaldi pointed out that the penalty for apostasy is death but also said that “the roles played by the two men, the Saudi and Lebanese, in the woman’s apostasy, should be taken into consideration”—meaning they too must be punished for their roles. The Saudi Gazette reported that Swedish authorities were actually helping to find and extradite Maryam, the Christian fugitive, back to Saudi Arabia to face Sharia justice.83 Considering that a few years earlier, as reported by Gulf News, a Saudi father cut out his daughter’s tongue and burned her alive for converting to Christianity, Maryam is sure to be treated brutally—if not murderously—if she is returned.84
Sudan
In May 2010 in Khartoum, Sudan, Omar Hassan and Amouna Ahamdi, both twenty-seven, were attacked by masked and knife-wielding assailants after relatives learned that they had converted to Christianity. Amouna had earlier been stabbed by her brother three times in the stomach, seriously injuring her spleen, after she had confessed to having apostatized to Christianity. “‘We cannot deny Christ—this is a big challenge to us, because we do not have a place to go,’ she said, through tears: ‘We have no food, and we are jobless. I am still in pain, besides having a 2-month-old baby boy to care for.’”85 In June 2012, a Muslim woman divorced her husband, Muhammad Khidir Khalil, a convert to Christianity, causing the court to automatically grant her custody of their two sons (according to Sharia, Muslim children of apostates are to be taken from the apostate parent). When the father tried to visit his children, his ex-wife threatened to notify authorities. “They might take the case to a prosecution court, which might lead to my sentencing to death according to Islamic apostasy law—but I am ready for this,” said the Christian man. “I want the world to know this. What crime have I done?”86
Tanzania
In August 2012 Eva Abdullah, a seventeen-year-old Tanzanian girl who had converted from Islam to Christianity, was arrested and later sentenced to two years in prison for desecrating the Koran. She had converted to Christianity three years earlier, her parents had disowned her, and “a group of radicals” had tried to “persuade” her to renounce her Christian faith. “When she refused, they falsely accused her of desecrating a Qur’an.”87
Turkey
A February 2012 report from CBN News tells of Hussein, a twelve-year-old Turkish boy who converted to Christianity along with his family. The young boy decided to profess his Christian faith by wearing a silver cross necklace in school. As a result, Muslim classmates began spitting on him and beating him. When the boy threatened to report one of the bullies, the latter’s father threatened to kill him. His Islamic studies teacher beat him severely. As CBN reports,Like in most Islamic coun
tries, students of all faiths are required to attend Islamic studies in school. Those who refuse to recite the Koran and Islamic prayers are often beaten by the teacher. And so it was for Hussein. He said he was punished regularly with a two-foot long rod because he wouldn’t say the Islamic Shahada [Islam’s profession of faith].... The teacher’s beatings, the bullying, and the assaults from classmates took a toll on young Hussein. Stressed and traumatized, he started to experience grand mal seizures. He now takes medicine to treat the condition. Hussein also attends a new school where he suffers fewer attacks. He insists he will never return to Islam even if he is forced to endure worse abuse. “Christ said, ‘You would suffer for me.’ So it’s okay to suffer and we should be happy to suffer for Him. The Lord is with me,” the boy said. Hussein said he will continue to tell others about Jesus, with or without that silver cross necklace.88
Uganda
Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians Page 15
