Istanbul, Turkey - Egypt’s top administrative court has ruled in favor of 12 converts to Islam seeking to return to Christianity but has left the group vulnerable to discrimination by mandating their former religion be noted on official documents.
In his ruling Saturday (February 9), Judge El-Sayeed Noufal ordered Egypt’s Interior Ministry to issue the converts “Christian documents” noting their “ex-Muslim” status.
“Every citizen should have a document confirming his civil status … mentioning one’s religion is very important to express one’s beliefs,” Noufal said in his verdict.
Human rights activists heralded the decision as a breakthrough for religious freedom in Egypt, where conversion away from Islam, though not illegal, has been forbidden in practice. But they remained wary, saying that listing the converts’ former religion on their documents would make them vulnerable to discrimination.
“It’s obviously a stigmatization to have [“ex-Muslim”] on your ID card,” a representative of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) told Compass.
Sharia Rule
The previous week, an administrative court ruled against a Muslim-born convert to Christianity who wished to have the change noted on his official documents. The January 29 verdict rejected Muhammad Hegazy’s request on grounds that it was against sharia, Islamic law, to convert from Islam to an older religion.
All schools of Egyptian Muslim thought agree that sharia, enshrined in Article 2 of Egypt’s constitution, clearly forbids conversion away from Islam, the EIPR representative told Compass. But the EIPR spokesperson, whose organization had joined the case on the side of the converts, said that Saturday’s ruling was not about apostasy.
“The state was just acknowledging the fact that these people have already changed back [to Christianity] and that the church has already accepted them back,” the spokesperson said. “So in a sense it was not about someone wanting to leave Islam and go to Christianity. It was just acknowledging what had already happened.”
In his decision Saturday, Noufal claimed that it was important for official documents to note a person’s former religion, said a lawyer who attended the hearing.
Noufal said that the converts’ new identification documents would designate them as “ex-Muslims” in order to protect “public order,” according to human rights advocate Athanasius William. The designation would help keep a former Muslim from using his religion deceitfully – for instance, trying to marry a Muslim woman, the judge commented.
Family law in Egypt, governed by sharia, does not allow a Christian man to marry a Muslim woman.
Opening Door to Discrimination
Many mainstream interpretations of sharia in Egypt demand the death penalty for anyone who leaves Islam.
“[This] will open the door to discrimination against those citizens by extremist officers or civil servants when they see in the entry that they left Islam,” Gamal Eid, head of the Arabic Network for Human Rights, told Reuters.
The activist said the organization hoped that Egypt’s interior ministry would not expose the converts to further discrimination by noting their former faith on their IDs.
Coptic rights activist Father Markus Aziz called on the government to not list previous religions on ID cards, saying the document was not for recording history, Copts-United reported yesterday.
The issue of conversion is a sensitive one in Egypt, in part because religion, marked on each individual’s national ID card, governs family law. Several converts now returning to their original faith first joined Islam to get a divorce (not allowed by the Orthodox Church), or to marry a Muslim woman.
Between 2004 and last year, 32 converts to Islam won court battles to change back to Christianity. But in April 2007 a lower court denied 12 former Christians the right to revert to their original faith, causing some to question whether the religious freedom gains of those three years would be lost.
Several hundred similar cases of converts to Islam wishing to return to Christianity are pending before lower administrative courts, Christian lawyers told Compass.
Egypt’s Christians, known as Copts, are estimated to make up 10 percent of the country’s population. The majority of Copts belong to the Orthodox Church, though significant numbers of Catholics and Protestants exist.