Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (17 page)

On December 17, 2008, twenty-two-year old Martha Samuel Makkar was arrested at Cairo’s airport on charges of forging official documents as she attempted to leave for Russia with her husband and two sons, aged four and two. Five years earlier, she had converted to Christianity, changed her name from Zeinab Said Abdel-Aziz, and married a Christian, Fadel Thabet. Subsequently, not only was she persecuted by the police, but also her family attempted to kill her. There are reports that Makkar was sexually assaulted by Egyptian police at El-Nozha police station; at the National Security office in Heliopolis, she was assaulted by other prisoners while in detention; and she was also tortured to force her to return to Islam.
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On January 24, 2009, she was granted bail but not before the judge said she should be killed for leaving Islam.
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There are no reliable figures on the number of converts from Islam in Egypt, since the government refuses to recognize them, and they often live in hiding, but the number is likely to be several thousand. Many converts are afraid to speak of their new views, while others move in the hope of beginning a new life where they are not known. Unfortunately, Egypt’s identity cards make religious anonymity nearly impossible, and government officials are able to abuse converts wherever they go.
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Despite exposing themselves to attack, in recent years, several people who have converted from Islam have challenged the Egyptian government’s refusal to recognize their conversion. Most of these are people who were born Christian, converted to Islam, often for reasons of marriage, and then decided to convert back. On April 24, 2007, the Court of Administrative Justice ruled that recognizing reconversion to Christianity by individuals who had been born Christian and previously converted to Islam would violate sharia apostasy prohibitions and that the government was not required to grant such recognition.
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The case was appealed, and on February 9, 2008, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that twelve Christian-born Muslims could convert back and have their identity documents changed to reflect this. However, the ruling was narrow and worded only to apply to those twelve. Moreover, the court also said that the reconverts should have the words “formerly declared Muslim” on their IDs. This would essentially mark them as apostates and expose them to persecution and attacks by extremists and security officials.
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While the appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court was being heard, the government consulted Al-Azhar about reconversions. Al-Azhar’s fatwa committee described them as “grave crime[s] that cannot be met with leniency.” In line with these statements, Judge Muhammad Husseini appealed to Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court to review the constitutionality of Article 47 of Egypt’s civil law—cited by the Supreme Administrative Court to justify accepting the reconversions—on the grounds that it violated Article 2 of the constitution.
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Meanwhile, there were signs that the administrative court’s decision was not being enforced. On March 9, 2008, the newsweekly
Watani
reported that a request for new documents from one of the twelve reconverts, Bishay Farag Bishay, was rejected by Egypt’s Civil Status Department on the grounds that their computerized system allowed them to enter only one word in the religion section. With the constitutional court case delayed indefinitely, and the Ministry of the Interior refusing to follow administrative court decisions, reconverts had little hope in the near term of having their religion recognized.
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As distinct from “reconverts,” no Muslim-born convert to Christianity has won the right to have his new religion recognized. One who has been trying to do so is Mohammed Ahmed Hegazy, who converted to Christianity in 1998. Shortly after, he was tortured by the police for three days and was held again for ten weeks in 2002 in conditions he describes as being like a “concentration camp.” On August 2, 2007, when his wife was expecting a baby, who would have to be raised as a Muslim, Hegazy filed a court case challenging the government’s refusal to recognize his conversion. After receiving death threats, he went into hiding. The Minister of Religious Endowments, Mahmoud Hamdi Zakzouk, publicly stressed the legality of capital punishment for converts, and Hegazy’s lawyer, Mamdouh
Nakhla, withdrew from the case after receiving death threats and being told by Egyptian State Security that he might be killed.
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At a January 15, 2008, hearing, Islamist lawyers demanded that apostasy be outlawed, and a dozen Islamist lawyers tried to attack Hegazy’s attorneys. On January 25, 2008, when asked what he would do if his son did not return to Islam, Hegazy’s father said, “I will kill him with my own hands. I will shed his blood publicly.”
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On January 29, 2008, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled that Hegazy could not have his conversion recognized since “monotheistic religions were sent by God in chronological order” and, therefore, one cannot convert to “an older religion.” Hegazy tried to flee the country but was unable to get a passport, and he went into hiding.
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Another Muslim-born convert who has challenged the law is Maher El-Gohary, now named Peter Ethnasios. On August 4, 2008, he filed to change his official religion from Islam to Christianity. He had converted some thirty years previously, and his main motive for going to court was that his fourteen-year-old daughter, who had been forced to attend Muslim classes at school, was, at age sixteen, scheduled to be issued an identity card designating her faith as Muslim, which would make it illegal for her to marry a Christian.
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On February 22, 2009, about twenty Islamist attorneys demanded that he be convicted of apostasy and sentenced to death. Given the risk to his safety, El-Gohary could not attend the hearing; when he had sought to obtain the documents for his lawyer, Nabil Ghobreyal, to act on his behalf, registry office employees beat him.
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In order to proceed legally with the conversion, the court asked him to provide a conversion certificate from Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, something that had previously proved almost impossible. Realizing it would be difficult to obtain the certificate in Egypt, El-Gohary traveled abroad, returning with a conversion certificate from a church in Cyprus that the Coptic Orthodox Church officially accepted in April 2009.
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Despite the certificate, the judge rejected his appeal. In spite of this setback, El-Gohary vows to continue his quest for official recognition as a Christian Egyptian.
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Near the end of March 2010, fifteen-year-old Dina El-Gohary, his daughter, ventured out of hiding in Alexandria to get some water and had acid thrown on her; it damaged only her jacket.
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One method that the state, in cooperation with Al-Azhar and other establishment Sunni bodies, uses to control Muslims’ thoughts is the censorship of religious works. Egypt also censors works that have little to do with religion, as well as works by non-Muslims. However, the major goal of censorship is to ensure that nonapproved views of Islam are not circulated.
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The earlier part of the twentieth century was comparatively free: in 1937, Ismail Adham was even able to
publish his
Why Am I an Atheist
. But the situation worsened dramatically after 1952, when Egypt’s ostensibly secular military rulers established close links with the Al-Azhar religious establishment in order to combat Islamic political groups. Under Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, this relationship has strengthened. Al-Azhar itself, as well as the Council of Ministers, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Education, has censorship powers. In 1985, Al-Azhar’s IRC was authorized to advise on censoring books it deemed heretical. In 2003, it received power to recommend confiscation of “publications, tapes, speeches, and artistic materials deemed inconsistent with Islamic law,” though a court order was necessary for the actual confiscation. In June 2004, Al-Azhar’s inspectors were given authority to confiscate any publications dealing with Islam.
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In 1981, the Ethical Court in Cairo ordered the destruction of 3,000 copies of
One Thousand and One Nights
and jailed the publisher for “corrupting the morals of the young.” In 1997, the IRC listed 196 books that should be banned, and a High State Security Court ordered Sayed Al Qimni’s
God of Time
to be banned based on the IRC’s recommendation. In 1998, two books by Khalil Abdel Karim were seized because the IRC disapproved of their content, and the March 19 issue of the
Cairo Times
was banned for including an interview with Abdel Karim on the grounds that it “harmed the image of Al-Azhar,” and the magazine was subsequently banned from being printed in Egypt.
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Haydar Haydar’s novel,
Banquet for Seaweed
, was originally published in Syria and available in Egypt since 1983. In 2000, the book was reprinted in the Ministry of Culture’s Arab Classics series, but Haydar was accused of apostasy because of it. The pro-Islamist newspaper
El Shaab
called the novel an attack on Islam, which led to riots by Al-Azhar students, and Al-Azhar called for it to be burned.
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Bannings and confiscations have continued and even increased in the twenty-first century, including bannings of books by noted authors and reformers such as Salah El Din Mohsen, Khalil Abdel Karim, Gamal Al-Banna, Nawal Al-Sadawi, Naguib Mahfouz, and Mohammed Futuh.
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Al-Azhar’s censorship of views at variance from its official version of Islam also directly restricts academic freedom. Probably the institution most affected has been the American University in Cairo (AUC), since other universities usually already follow Al-Azhar’s rules. On May 13, 1998, the Minister of Higher Education ordered the removal of Maxime Rodinson’s book
Muhammad
from the curriculum, claiming that it contained fabrications harmful to respect for the prophet and Islam. The government censor then banned seventy other titles that the university had tried to import. Between May 1998 and April 1999, out of a total of 450 books reviewed, the censor’s office reportedly declared eighty-nine books impermissible for sale in the AUC bookstore.
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Egypt’s government also represses Shias, who comprise perhaps one percent of the population. Egypt’s Shias are commonly divided into two groups: those whose
families immigrated more than a century ago from Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, and those, often known as Neo-Shias, who are more recent converts from Sunnism.
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Both groups have suffered numerous crackdowns, especially since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, including in 1988, 1989, 1996, and 2002. More than 100 have been arrested.

On March 22, 2004, Shia leader Mohamed Ramadan Hussein El-Derini was arrested by the State Security Intelligence service (SSI) and detained without charges for fifteen months. On four occasions, the Supreme State Security Emergency Court ordered his release, but, each time, the Minister of the Interior countered by issuing a new administrative detention decree, saying that he was “under the influence of Shia ideas.”
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The government released him after a 2005 report by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared that he was “detained solely on the basis of his religious beliefs.” There are credible reports that El-Derini was repeatedly tortured. He was again arrested on October 1, 2007, for making claims about torture in Egypt in his book
The Capital of Hell
, as well as for preaching Shia doctrine.
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In June 2009, a wave of arrests of Shias began with the detention of cleric Hassan Shehata, along with some of his followers. By the end of the year, there were reports of as many as 300 arrests. Among the charges that have been leveled against those detained are holding extremist views that go against true Islam as well as organizing, and possibly being linked to, members of a Hezbollah cell.
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Book banning is not the most serious barrier that Sunni intellectuals face in Egypt. The authors are also accused of being anti-Islamic and blasphemers or heretics and perhaps apostates. Most attacks have a similar pattern: a reactionary Islamic writer attacks the author’s work, and then media assaults quickly follow. This is often followed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Parliament attacking the government for allowing such offensive materials to be published and then threatening, and actually attacking, those accused. Some prominent cases follow.
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Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best-known liberal thinkers, was a role model for many others, since he was one of the first to attack the Islamization of society that began in the 1970s and 1980s. He was born in 1945 and became a professor of agriculture. Foda resigned from the liberal El Wafd Party in 1984 after it formed an electoral alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, and then he tried unsuccessfully to establish a new party, Al Mustaqbal.
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His book
Terrorism
attacked violent Islamic groups, not only for their actions, but also for their religious rationale. His book
The Trick
criticized the infiltration of financial markets by Islamic banks and “money investing companies” and the
role these companies played in fundamentalist political campaigns; he correctly prophesied their eventual collapse, in which many Egyptian families lost their money. His
A Discussion About Secularism
defended the separation of religion and the state and mocked Islamist interpretations of the Qur’an and hadith, which had led them to issue fatwas banning people from eating cucumbers and bananas because they had sexual meaning. Perhaps his best-known work is
Absent Truth
, which argues that a pious Islamic state has never existed, and he discusses atrocities and killings from the first caliph Abu Bakr to the end of the Arab Caliphate of the Abbasids.
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His 1990
To Be or Not to Be
was banned, and he was brought into state security for questioning.
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