An Egyptian Christian woman has been jailed for three years because her father's brief conversion to Islam 45 years ago made her legally a Muslim while her official papers said she was Christian, her lawyer said.

Shadia Nagui Ibrahim, 47, was charged with fraud for stating Christianity as her religion on her marriage certificate, unaware that her father's conversion to Islam in 1962 had made her officially a Muslim, Michael Maurice told AFP.

Nagui Ibrahim left home in 1962 when daughter Shadia was two years old, converted to Islam and took on the Muslim name Mustafa.

Three years later, after a reconciliation with his wife, he moved home and re-converted to Christianity. In the process, he got someone to forge his documents back to say he was Christian.

A rally is being planned on Sunday by Coptic Christians in Egypt who have decided "enough is enough" after a 47-year-old mother was jailed because she married as a Christian.

The seriousness behind this is this is the first time in the history of the Copts of Egypt [they are giving] a signal, a very, very important signal, that the people of Egypt … say, 'Enough is enough.' Sam Grace, of Coptic News told WND.

He said the rally in Cairo will be a march to the presidential palace where there will be several speakers addressing the issue of human rights in the nation that admits it governs itself by Islamic sharia law.

Mohammed Higazi is lucky that he was not present in an Egyptian courtroom on Tuesday. An Islamic fundamentalist lawyer made death threats against the Egyptian for converting to Christianity. To the dismay of Higazi's lawyer the judge made no objection.

What made matters even worse, the judge went so far as to express his loathing off the accused because he had converted. There was no verdict but the judge vowed that he would never let Higazy be registered as a Christian. He defended his decision by saying that Islam is the principal religion in Egypt. No mention was made of the freedom of religion established in the constitution which is a fundamental right of all citizens.

Higazy and his pregnant wife have been hiding for months at a secret location. He is the first convert who is attempting to get a judge to change the faith on his identity card from Muslim to Christian. Egyptian identity cards must report the faith of the holder. While freedom of religion exists theoretically, in practice Muslims are not allowed to change their religion in the municipal register.

When Higazy's wife, who is also a convert, became pregnant last year he decided to make the change official. Otherwise my child will automatically be registered as a Muslim. However, his application was rejected.

Higazi's lawyer Ramsis el-Naggar, who specialises in conversions, says there is no freedom of choice in Egypt, unless you're a Muslim. His law firm now represents some 400 converts. Most of his clients were originally Christian, for one reason or another converted to Islam, and now want to return to Christianity. Sometimes his clients are people who regret that they changed their faith. However, many times his clients are the victims of government bureaucracy, such as children whose Christian fathers became Muslims.

So far El-Naggar has only achieved success in cases in which he could prove the person had never changed faith. In 2004 he won for the first time in the case of Mira Makram. Her husband had converted to Islam in 2002 and had forced her to sign a statement confirming that she had converted to Islam. Her religion was changed to Islam in the register without her knowledge. After two years of legal proceedings.the judge ordered that the change be rectified. Fundamentalists called for the death of Mira Makram.

A Cairo court has rejected a request by a Christian convert from Islam to have his new religion written on his identity card.

The Court of Administrative Justice said that Mohammed Higazi had not followed the proper legal procedures and that in any case you 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 court said.

The person who has such an attitude is straying from the right path and threatening the principles, values and precepts of Islam and of Egyptian traditions, the judgement said.

Without the official ID cards, Egyptians cannot apply for jobs, buy property, open bank accounts or register their children in schools. They are also subject to arrest for not carrying valid identity papers.

The same court ruled that Egyptians from the Bahai minority could leave their religion blank on official documents, in effect restoring their access to jobs, schools and medical and financial services.

An Egyptian court has ruled that 12 Christians who converted to Islam and then reverted to Christianity can have their faith officially recognised.

The decision overturns a lower court ruling by a lower court, which said the state need not recognise conversions from Islam because of a religious ban.

This is a case that has tested Egypt's tolerance of conversions from Islam.

A lawyer for the 12 Coptic Christians described the case as a victory for human rights and freedom of religion. He says it could open the door for hundreds of other Copts who want to revert to their original faith from Islam.

It appears, though, that the court's decision will have a limited application. Reports say the judge decided that the Copts should not be considered apostates for converting from Islam, because they had been born Christian.

This suggests that Egyptians born Muslim will still be unable to convert to other faiths and have those conversions recognised on their identity cards. Many Muslims believe that converting from Islam is wrong, and some believe it is punishable by death.

Update: Christian Targets

21st February 2008

See full article from World Net Daily

The danger is just beginning for the christian converts, according to Magdi Khalil, director of the Middle East Freedom Forum.

Since the judge also ordered those Christians to display their "previous Muslim identity" on their national ID cards, the decision creates a high level of danger, Khalil said.

When extremists see their IDs, the Christians could be subject to discrimination or even killed, since they are considered apostates, Khalil explained.

Egyptian authorities raided a Christian bookstore in Cairo March 15 and arrested Shenouda Armia Bakhait, a bookstore employee. He was interrogated for several hours and then released on bail. Police also seized the Nile Christian Book Shop store records. Why the raid?

Nettleton says human rights advocate groups suspect it was because an Egyptian Christian, Mohammed Hegazy, had visited the store the previous day.

Hegazy was the first convert to petition the religious court to officially change his religion following his conversion to Christianity. It's against Islamic law for a Muslim to leave the faith, and so they denied his request to change his ID. He apparently had been to this Christian bookstore just the day before. It's unclear if the police were following him and that's how they came on the store, or if they were watching the store anyway and just picked this particular day to raid.

Christian-born converts to Islam in Egypt wishing to return to their former faith have found their way blocked by an appeal before the country's Supreme Constitutional Court.

Judge Muhammad Husseini asked Egypt's top judicial body on March 4 to review the constitutionality of a law granting citizens the right to change religions.

Egypt's top administrative court used Article 47 of Egypt's civil law to justify allowing 12 converts to Islam to return to Christianity last month. Husseini has demanded that the constitutional court rule on whether Article 47 conflicts with the Egyptian constitution's second article, which designates Islam as the main source of legislation.

The test before the Supreme Constitutional Court is if there is a conflict between Islamic sharia and the right to change one's religion, said human rights activist Hossam Bahgat.

This is a new legal fight that the Supreme Constitutional Court has never dealt with in the past, said Bahgat, of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). We see it as the single most important court case since the amendment that made Islamic sharia the main source of legislation.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat amended the constitution in 1980 to make sharia the main source of legislation, in order to bolster support from Islamists against his secular and leftist rivals.

The cases of several hundred converts to Islam seeking to return to Christianity have been frozen pending the constitutional court's verdict. Even the 12 Christian converts to Islam who won a legal battle to return to their original faith last month have been blocked from obtaining documents listing their change of faith.

Egypt's Civil Status Department turned down Bishay Farag Bishay, one of the 12, when he requested new documents, Egyptian Christian weekly Watani reported. The newspaper reported on March 9 that officials claimed their computerized system could only enter one word in the religion section. But Egypt's top administrative court had stipulated that Bishay and the 11 other converts write Christian, previously proclaimed Islam as his/her religion, in the February 9 ruling.

But one human rights activist said that Egypt's Interior Ministry had promised to solve the issue. Abu-Seada of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights said that authorities planned to list only converts' current faith on official documents, while keeping their religious history on file.

An Egyptian Coptic Christian woman has been sentenced to three years in prison for failing to uphold her Islamic identity – an identity she didn't know she had for over four decades.

Sisters Shadia and Bahia Nagy El-Sisi, both in their late 40s were arrested and tried for claiming their official religious identity as Christian. Unknown to them, their religious identity officially changed 46 years ago due to their father's brief conversion to Islam. Both are illiterate.

Shadia El-Sisi was tried for stating her religion as Christian on her marriage certificate and sentenced to three years in prison on Nov. 21, 2007. She was released two months later.

On September 23 a 'judge' also sentenced Bahia El-Sisi to three years in prison for forging her marriage certificate by stating her religion as Christian.

Their father, Nagy El-Sisi, converted to Islam in 1962 during a brief marital dispute in order to divorce his wife and potentially gain custody of his daughters, the sisters' lawyer Peter Ramses told Compass.

If Bahia El-Sisi's identity as a Muslim stands, then her religious status could potentially create a domino effect that would require her husband to convert to Islam or have their marriage nullified. Her children, too, would be registered as Muslims. Both women are married to Christians.

All of their children and grandchildren would be registered as Muslims, Ramses said: [The ruling] would affect many people.

An Egyptian convert to Christianity who spent 31 years officially identified as a Muslim has won a rare legal victory to be officially registered in his “new” faith.

An Alexandrian administrative court awarded Fathi Labib Yousef the right to register as a Christian.

Yousef, in his early 60s, was raised Coptic but converted to Islam in 1974 in order to divorce his Christian wife. Becoming Muslim typically allows for an easy nullification of marriage to a non-Muslim within sharia (Islamic law), and conversion is often employed for this reason by both men and women in Islamic countries.

He reverted to Christianity in 2005. Yousef applied to the civil registry to acknowledge his change of religion the same year. But the government refused to acknowledge his re-conversion, so he filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian prime minister, interior minister and Civil Status Organization chairman.

The court awarded him the right to revert to Christianity since it is his right according to Egyptian civil law, said Peter Ramses, an attorney familiar with Yousef’s case. Ramses said this case is an important development for Egypt to live up to freedoms promised in the constitution. And Yousef is not assured that his official religious identity will stand. His attorney, Joseph Malak, said other Egyptian Christians have won the right to return to Christianity only to see government officials stop implementation.

Last year Egypt’s top administrative court allowed 12 converts to Islam to return to Christianity, but the decision was appealed before the country’s Supreme Constitutional Court. The court was going to rule in November concerning the legality of reversion to Christianity, but its decision has been postponed indefinitely. If the court had upheld the decision, Egyptian converts to Islam would have had the constitutional right to return to Christianity.

In the latest hearing of a Muslim-born Egyptian's effort to officially convert to Christianity, opposing lawyers advocated he be convicted of apostasy and sentenced to death.

More than 20 Islamic lawyers attended the hearing on Feb. 22 in El-Gohary's case to obtain identification papers with Christianity designated as his religious affiliation. Two lawyers led the charge, Ahmed Dia El-Din and Abdel Al-Migid El-Anani.

[El-Din] started to talk about the Quran being in a higher position than the Bible, one of El-Gohary's lawyers, Said Fayez, told Compass. [El-Din said] people can move to a higher religion but not down, so people cannot move away from Islam because it is highest in rank.

El-Gohary was not present at the hearing, as attendance would put him at extreme personal risk. He had planned to obtain papers authorizing attorney Nabil Ghobreyal to act as his proxy representation in court, but staff members at the registry office swore at and beat him, lawyers said.

Judge Hamdy Yasin was forced to adjourn the case until March 28 because El-Gohary did not obtain the necessary proxy representation documents.

Our rights in Egypt, as Christians or converts, are less than the rights of animals, El-Gohary said: 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.

Egypt has taken a small but important step towards freedom of belief and equal rights when a court ruled that the religion section on national identity cards can be left blank.

In 1995 the Egyptian government began introducing computerised ID cards which forced everyone to identify themselves as belonging to one of the three heavenly religions: Islam, Christianity or Judaism. Cards could not be issued to anyone who refused to accept this, with the result that they effectively became non-citizens, unable to work legally, study beyond secondary school, vote, operate a bank account, obtain a driver's licence, buy and sell property, collect a pension, or travel.

The practice of restricting religion on ID cards to three officially approved choices had no basis in Egyptian law but was derived from the interior ministry's own interpretation of Islamic teaching. It was challenged in the courts by several members of the Baha'i faith, which is thought to have around 2,000 followers in Egypt.

The victory by the Baha'is in the supreme administrative court appears to mark the end of a five-year battle over the ID cards, since there is no route for further appeals by the Islamist lawyers who have been fighting them since the government dropped out.

Even so, there are likely to be continuing problems for Egyptian Christians, some of whom are recorded as Muslims on their ID cards against their will, while others try unsuccessfully to change their card after converting from Islam to Christianity. Officials often refuse on the grounds that the state cannot condone apostasy.

For the first time ever, Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Church issued a certificate of conversion to a believer with a Muslim background last week. The move is seen as an unheard of in a country where it is practically impossible for Muslims to legally change their religious status.

Maher al-Gohari requested and was granted the Egyptian Coptic church's first conversion certificate. Al-Gohari is seeking to officially change his religion on legal documents and his ID card. The Egyptian court had requested he provide a conversion certificate from an Egyptian church

To date, no convert from Islam has successfully won a court case to legally change his religious status.

In Egypt, religious conversion to Christianity is not illegal, but they have been functionally impossible. Yet any legal conversion to Islam is done with great ease.

An Egyptian court has refused a request by Muslim-born Maher El-Gowhary, who converted to Christianity 34 years ago, to order the Civil Registry to alter his religious designation on his ID. The Civil registry had refused to amend his State identification documents to show his Christian name Peter Athanasious and his Christian affiliation, leading him to file a lawsuit against the Ministry of Interior.

According to the Court ruling, the religious conversion of a Muslim is against Islamic law and poses a threat to the Public Order in Egypt.

It is a sad day for freedom of religion in Egypt, said Fayez Saeed, a member of the legal team working on El-Gohary's case, to the Coptic News Bulletin: Today the Egyptian judiciary was struggling between establishing the principle of religious freedom to which Egypt is committed and its support for the Islamic State advocated by the Salafis in Egypt (fundamentalist Islamic thought), but it (the judiciary) sided for the victory of an Islamic State at the expense of Freedoms.

The Egyptian Constitution, under Article 46, provides for freedom of belief and the practice of religious rites; while Article 2 which was introduced in 2007 states that Islamic Shari'a is the primary source of legislation. Many Coptic lawyers and activists see a contradiction between those two articles and believe that Article 2 supercedes Article 46.

ITwo Egyptian Baha'is have been issued new ID cards with the field allocated for religious affiliation left blank following years of legal struggles for state recognition.

The move follows a January 2008 court decision that granted Baha'is in Egypt the right to leave the box for religious faith unfilled on their ID cards and birth certificates. Egypt, otherwise, only officially recognizes Islam, Christianity and Judaism, leaving adherents of other faiths to live as second-class citizens in their own country.

Sixteen-year old twins Nancy and Emad Hindy obtained their new ID cards over the weekend and will now be able to practice their full citizen rights in Egypt for the first time in their lives.

Official documents like identity cards and birth certificates are obligatory in Egypt and not having them can cause immense obstacles. Egyptians cannot enrol in schools or universities, receive medical treatment, or even buy a car without a national ID card. Not carrying an ID card with you if you are over 16 years of age is considered a criminal offense.

But in order to obtain an ID card or birth certificate one must claim to be an adherent of one of Egypt's three state religions: Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Hence, those of other religious faiths who do not want to be religious posers and change religion on their official papers, effectively become stateless in their own country, without the right to access the most elementary public services.

The Hindy twins, for example, have been unable to obtain birth certificates as Baha'is and could therefore not enroll in school in Egypt as a result. Instead, their father had to send them to neighboring Libya for schooling.

Although the court ruled in favor of the Baha'is in 2008, none of them have been able to obtain official documents up until now. Hossam Baghat of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights stressed that the issuance of the new religiously-neutral ID cards over the weekend holds both administrative as well as symbolic value.

Hundreds more applications for “religiously neutral” ID cards have apparently been filed by Egyptian Baha'is since April of this year.