Muhammad Hegazy's case did not succeed. Without batting an eye about the sheer absurdity of it, the judge told a member of Hegazy's legal team, 'He can believe whatever he wants in his heart, but on paper he can’t convert'."
"Egypt: Another convert tries to change religious identification," from Compass Direct News, August 7:
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.
""When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all.""
"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)."
Lewis Carroll, please meet the State Council Court.
Marwan,
Perfect! Lewis Carroll nailed that one on the head!
We all know the reason behind this ruling.
Whew! Glad I got that clarified by a state approved judge! I didn't realize Islam permitted "freedom of religion".
Care to prove that, Mr. Ghobreyal? Is this not a "Houston, We have a problem." moment?
Question to Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarek: Who exactly is in charge over there?
"There is no compulsion in religion."
The next time this is trotted out by an apologist for Islm, present him, and the assembled audience if there is one, with a list. It need not go back 1350 years. It need not include every detail about the legally-imposed humilitation, degradation, and physical insecurity that the status of dhimmi carried with it, though that should be mentioned. It need not include the massacres of even the so-called "Protected Peoples," as with the entire Jewish population of Granada in 1066, or massacres in Fez, or the later pogroms, prompted by the successful attempt of Jews to ward off the Arab armies that attempted to snuff out the young life of the nascent state of Israel.
It need not include the massacres in Fustat (Cairo) of the Copts, especially during the periods of mass forced conversions, though that might be mentioned. It need not include the forced conversions of Christians (Armenians) and Jews in Persia, in Tabriz, under Shah Abbas II, though that might be mentioned in passing.
No, you can stick to today. You can stick to the persecution and death threats (in an Arab country, death sentences can be carried out by informal means, and the state need not be invovled) made against Robert Hossein (ne Ahmad Qambar) in Kuwait, back in the late 1990s, for openly converting to Christianity. If you don't know about that case, google a bit. His life was saved when the case became a cause celebre in Great Britain. Even the most advanced Kuwaitis, the ones who send their children to the American School in Kuwait City, and who are self-consciously forward-thinking, when asked about this case, become distinctly uneasy, as Muslims do when they discover the Infidel they have been talking to, and with whom they have been displaying their advanced open-mindedness, suddenly reveal that they know just a bit too much, and therefore are themselves turning out to be far too piercingly critical of Islam.
Ask about the murders of Jews, Bahai's, and Christians in Iran, either judicial murders (Hanging Judge Khalkhali) or unofficial murders, by enforcers of Islam, as soon as Khomeini came to power and Islam was back, in a big way, stalking the land, as it has ever since, in blighted and benighted Iran.
Ask about Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity who was sentenced to death for apostasy in a country held together, and owing its continued existence to, the forces of Infidel nation-states whose governments pay no attention, it seems, to the deep, essential Islamic nature of those they are attempting to rescue and lavish attention and money upon, in a hopeless -- see Rory Stewart's excellent cover essay in Time a few weeks ago -- attempt to sweep back the Islamic tide.
Ask about what happens to converts to Christianity anywhere in Dar al-islam, whether or not they receive official death penalties, and ask why they must hide their belief, as this man in Egypt did for 34 years, lest....well, lest, as it turns out, in Islam there is, after all, despite that misunderstood phrase above so useful for Muslim apologists....compulsion in religion.
Being a Moslem, or becoming one, is like riding the tiger. Once one is on the tiger's back, there is no safe way to get off.
Why can't we let these people immigrate to "The West" and leave the muslims to live in the beauty that is islam?
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).
This is rich, considering that "supercessionism", a la Ann Coulter's comments that Christians are "completed Jews", has been pretty much discredited in mainstream Western theology.
Also adding to the richness is the FACT that Islamic theology harkens back to Greek pantheism and monism, at least according to Franz Rosenzweig, whome I'm inclined to agree with, having studied philosophy for many years now.
'Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."'
Now who is "returning to an older belief"? Of course, Muslims' near-complete lack of self-reflection makes even putting their inherently contradictory insistence on Allah's unity and simultaneous insistence on creation "from scratch" at every instance right in front of them means nothing in the big scheme of things. Muslims will continue to insist, wrongly, that these things are not contradictory in the same kind of "Everything I say three times is true" way that they have, and harass or kill everyone who doesn't toe the line. Tell me again why we in the West even consider the possibility that we might be able to negotiate with these people?