EGYPT: ANOTHER CONVERT TRIES TO CHANGE RELIGIOUS IDENTIFICATION
Only second case of Muslim-born Egyptian endeavoring to officially alter affiliation. ISTANBUL, August 7 (Compass Direct News) – One year after the first attempt by an Egyptian Muslim convert to Christianity to change his religious identity, another convert this week became the second to make such a controversial legal request.
After 34 years of practicing Christianity, 56-year-old Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary filed a case at the State Council Court on Monday (August 4) to replace the word “Muslim” on his identification card with “Christian.”
El-Gohary is the second person raised as a Muslim to make such an appeal to the Egyptian government after Muhammad Hegazy, who filed his case on Aug. 2, 2007. Hegazy’s case was denied in a Jan. 29 court ruling that declared it was against Islamic law for a Muslim to leave Islam.
“He can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can’t convert,” the judge had told the administrative court, according to a member of Hegazy’s legal team.
The judge had based his decision on Article II of the Egyptian constitution, which enshrines Islamic law, or sharia, as the source of Egyptian law. The judge said that, according to sharia, Islam is the final and most complete religion and therefore Muslims already practice full freedom of religion and cannot return to an older belief (Christianity or Judaism).
“I am so surprised by the Administrative Court verdict refusing the case of Hegazy,” said one of El-Gohary’s lawyers, Nabil Ghobreyal. “This is against all the international conventions as well as the [Egyptian] constitution and Islamic law, which guarantee the freedom of belief.”
Ghobreyal said that if his client could not claim his rights in Egypt, he was determined to take the case to the U.N. International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands.
“No human has the right to choose the religion for someone else or to force him to embrace it, and no court has the right to order different religions in degrees,” Ghobreyal said.
Hegazy’s open declaration of conversion last August, the first of its kind in modern Egypt, caused public outcry. His father told the press that he would kill his son if he did not return to Islam. Since the court’s denial of Hegazy’s appeal, he and his wife have been in hiding with their baby due to numerous, serious threats on their lives.
“I wish for all converts to have one huge case, so that together we could show the world what is lacking in our rights,” Hegazy told Compass in an interview last week. Hegazy and legal experts have said that one case alone would not stand in court, but that many cases of converts should be filed concurrently in order to have any sway.
Impact on Daughter
El-Gohary accepted Christianity as a young man in his early twenties after becoming curious about the Bible. Through reading, he was convinced that the New Testament said the truth about Jesus. His family opposed his choice of faith and repeatedly pressured him to come back to Islam.
In an interview with Compass in November 2003, El-Gohary said that often he would come home to his farm in an undisclosed location to find his property vandalized. At that time he was considering leaving Egypt for the sake of his daughter.
“We want to live in a place with no persecution,” he had told Compass. He said he could make ends meet with his inheritance money, “but I’m afraid for my little girl, for her future. She loves Jesus so much.”
The convert has raised his 14-year-old daughter, Dina Maher Ahmad Mo’otahssem, as a Christian, and she has also embraced Christianity. When she turns 16 she must be issued an identity card designating her faith as Muslim unless her father can win this case on her behalf.
At school, she has been refused the right to attend Christian religious classes offered to Egypt’s Christian minorities and has been forced to attend Muslim classes. Religion is a mandatory part of the Egyptian curriculum.
The case of the father-daughter duo was filed against Minister of Interior Habib El’Adly, the president of the National Council of Human Rights and former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
“Man chooses his god and His God calls him, and there is no power on Earth that can separate them,” El-Gohary and his lawyers wrote in the appeal filed earlier this week. “He is totally free to reach Him as his mind leads him.”
El-Gohary’s lawyers criticized the decision of the court in Hegazy’s case to establish a hierarchy among religions, making Islam the highest.
“No court can decide for God how and to what standard religions are ordered, nor intervene in a person’s freedom to believe, since God will judge them and their choice,” they wrote.
The appeal stressed that the case was that of an Egyptian citizen and was filed on the basis of his individual freedoms granted in the Egyptian constitution and international conventions of human rights. When El-Gohary embraced Christianity, the document stated, he did so “believing that personal faith is a relationship between man and God” and was not a sectarian issue.
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An Egyptian Muslim's long journey towards Christianity
11 hours ago
CAIRO (AFP) — Maher al-Gohari converted to Christianity 30 years ago, but the Muslim-born Egyptian only recently took the decision to make his conversion public.
The 56-year-old former policeman has put applied to the Higher Administrative Court to have his religion changed from "Muslim" to "Christian" on his official ID card.
In Egypt, citizens are required to carry their personal ID cards at all times. Without an ID card, one has no access to basic services.
It's ony the second time this year that such a request has been made in a country where converting to Christianity, while not illegal, is practically impossible.
In January, a court rejected a request by a Christian convert from Islam, Mohammed Higazi, to have his new religion written on his identity card.
The following month however, a court decision authorised 12 converts to Islam who then reverted to Christianity to have their original faith marked on their ID cards.
In Higazi's case, the judge based his decision on Sharia, Islamic law, to prove that one cannot convert to an "older religion".
"Monotheistic religions were sent by God in chronological order... As a result, it is unusual to go from the latest religion to the one that preceded it," the judge said at the time.
The Higher Administrative Court is due to hear on September 2 the case of Maher al-Gohari, whose chosen Christian name is Peter Ethnassios, and who has been in hiding after receiving death threats from his family.
"I was forced to leave my family home where I have lived with my mother and daughter," he told AFP.
"My family has threatened me with death after the press published reports about the legal request I made," he continued.
The rage felt by members of his family, many of whom belong to the police forces, comes from the fact they feel "dishonoured" by his choice and consider him an apostate, a crime in Islam, he said.
"I never insulted Islam. I simply wanted my rights and wanted the state to treat me according to the belief I have chosen," said Gohari, after years of keeping his conversion to himself.
Gohari, graduated from the police academy himself 34 years ago, said he was attracted by Christianity but had trouble being accepted by several churches who refused to baptise him for fear he was an undercover spy for the Egyptian security services.
He was eventually embraced by the Greek Orthodox Church, having since turned to the Coptic Church which boasts the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and whose members account for six to 10 percent of Egypt's 80 million people.
After two failed marriages, Gohari found love the third time round with a Muslim woman who converted to Christianity.
His daughter from a previous marriage as well as his new wife's own two girls, all consider themselves Christian.
His 14-year-old daughter Dina is officially considered a Muslim and has to study the Koran at school.
Gohari first announced his conversion on a television programme.
"My younger brother knew about it but since then he's been waiting for outside my building ... with a gun," he said. "He wants to kill me."
After January's court decision rejecting Higazi's official conversion, Gohari's case will once again test the issue of freedom of religion in Egypt, and even in Muslim countries.
A year ago, Ali Gomaa, Egypt's grand mufti (the government appointed interpreter of Islamic law) decreed that Muslims were free to change their religion despite an opposite trend in the Islamic world, where apostasy is sometimes punished by death.
The fatwa, or religious decree, was never officially implemented.
The presence of a religion field on ID papers has been highly criticised by the New York-based Human Rights Watch as being at the root of discrimination against converts to Christianity and members of religious minorities.
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please tigerlily spend more time on the internet posting stupid articles like you do. PLEASE - I so enjoy after a hard day of work reading your stupid ****.
Posts: 1369 | From: California | Registered: Aug 2007
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This is so pathetic. For a person to get attacked simply because he wants the truth of Jesus and Christanity.
The fact is that the bibel is the *TRUTH* no other book can come on to it. This shows the different way that religion is practised in Muslim and Christian Countries. How much death threats do muslims get in Christian nations. It's sad that people have to follow a Faith that they don't really like simply because there is a risk of dying for converting. I wish muslims would free there mind and realize that Jesus from the *BIBLE* is what they need.
Stop the Hate.
Peace
Posts: 9651 | From: Reace and Love City. | Registered: Oct 2005
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