Egypt Extends Jail Time for Christian Rights Workers
Muslim scholars demand convert’s death.
by Peter Lamprecht
ISTANBUL, August 22 (Compass Direct News) – Egypt yesterday renewed the detention of two Christian rights workers, held without charge since their arrest on August 8.
Police detained Adel Fawzy Faltas and Peter Ezzat after their organization was involved in several controversial human rights cases, including that of Mohammed Hegazy, who made an unprecedented bid to have his conversion to Christianity legally recognized.
Top Egyptian religious scholars called for the convert’s death yesterday in London-based, Arabic-language daily Al-Quds al-Arabi.
Faltas, 61, had conducted a high profile Internet interview with Hegazy only days before his arrest, sparking claims in Egyptian media that he had led the Muslim to Christianity.
Yesterday, a state prosecutor at New Cairo’s State Security Investigation (SSI) renewed Faltas and Ezzat’s detention. Muhammad al-Faisal refused to give a reason for his decision to hold the two Christians until September 4.
“It’s not right for Peter to remain in custody,” said Peter Ramses al-Nagar, a lawyer for the two Middle East Christian Association (MECA) members. He said that Ezzat, a volunteer with MECA, should be freed because police had already finished investigating him.
Police initially arrested Faltas and Ezzat on suspicion of insulting Islam, degrading Egypt’s reputation and converting Muslims to Christianity, according to MECA president Nader Fawzy.
But during the investigation, state prosecutor Al-Faisal has also considered charging the Christians with causing public agitation and possessing a gun with an expired license, according to the defense lawyers.
“He is under pressure from higher officials and the SSI to keep them,” Al-Nagar commented.
Accused of Converting
A Canadian non-governmental organization that applied for legal recognition with the Egyptian government in June, MECA has been involved in several controversial human rights cases in recent months.
On August 7, the day before Faltas and Ezzat’s arrest, MECA members helped register a police complaint on behalf of a Muslim family whose father fell from his balcony and died during a police raid. The man’s family accused the police of murdering him.
In July, a MECA lawyer brought a case demanding compensation for Christian families from the village of al-Kosheh who were attacked in a three-day rampage in January 2000. At least 21 Copts were killed, 18 injured and several hundred homes destroyed while police waited outside the town.
The North Cairo preliminary court has postponed ruling on the al-Kosheh case until September 6.
But according to lawyer Al-Nagar, the main reason for Faltas and Ezzat’s detention is their work with Christian convert Hegazy. The weekend before his arrest, Faltas conducted an online interview with the convert about his bid to have the change to Christianity legally recognized.
“The media have been saying that they arrested Adel and Peter because they are the main reason Hegazy became a Christian,” Al-Nagar said.
During a telephone interview with an Egyptian talk show today, Fawzy of MECA said that Islamic scholars had accused his organization of converting Hegazy to Christianity.
“The first question they asked was whether we converted Hegazy,” Fawzy told Compass. “I told them, ‘We don’t convert anyone, we are a human rights organization. But even if we had, there is no law against that.’”
The interview on Dream satellite TV program, “al-Hakikah” (“The Truth”), is scheduled to air at 5 p.m. on Saturday (August 25).
New Lawyer
Hegazy went into hiding earlier this month after his case sparked death threats and his lawyer withdrew. He told Compass last week that he had found a new lawyer but declined to reveal the name for security reasons.
Al-Nagar said from Cairo today that his father, prominent Coptic lawyer Ramses Raouf al-Nagar, would not take Hegazy’s case as had been previously announced. He said that Hegazy had not given them the necessary church documents that could be used in court as evidence of his conversion to Christianity.
It is rare for Muslims to openly convert to another religion in Egypt. Though leaving Islam is not illegal, doing so can prompt harassment and torture at the hands of family members and police.
Most converts lead double lives, unable to openly attend church, marry a Christian or withdraw their children from Islamic education classes.
“The Egyptian government should find Hegazy and apply sharia [Islamic law], giving him three days to reconvert and then killing him if he refuses,” Sheikh Gad al-Ibrahim told Al-Quds al-Arabi yesterday.
Sheikh Youssef al-Badri and Souad Saleh, a professor at Egypt’s al-Azhar university where Egypt’s top Islamic scholars work, agreed with Al-Ibrahim, openly challenging statements by Egypt’s second highest religious authority last month that apostasy should not be punished in this world.
Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa later clarified his controversial statement by saying that only “apostates” who “actively engaged in the subversion of society” should be punished, Agence France-Presse reported on July 26.
But with sharia enshrined as the basis of Egypt’s legal code in Article 2 of the constitution, many Muslims see no distinction between “apostasy” and subversion.
Though no conclusive figures are available, Egypt’s indigenous Coptic Christians constitute between 8 and 15 percent of the country’s population. The number of Muslim converts to Christianity remains unknown.
END