Egypt Authorities Detain Christian Woman For “Converting To Christianity”

ICC Note

“Why are we going through all this? Is it because we are Christians? We are humble people, living in peace in a small village.”

By Nader Shukry

05/11/3008 Egypt (watani)-In the wee hours of dawn last Monday, the police knocked on the door of Bahiya Nagy al-Sissy in the small east-Delta town of Mit Ghamr , woke the family up, and arrested her. Bahiya is a 34-year old Coptic peasant woman, and she was caught in order to serve a three year prison sentence she was handed, together with her 36-year-old sister Shadya, in absentia in 2000 by a criminal court. Bahiya’s and Shadya’s crime: forgery, even though there were no forged documents to indict them in the first place. The two sisters were born Christian, had lived and had married as Christians, and had Christian children. The court, however, considered that they should have been Muslim according to their father’s brief conversion to Islam more than thirty years ago. Shadya and Bahiya had then been children and were ignorant of their father’s conversion, especially that he later reverted to his original Christianity. The story was kept secret by the father, but surfaced in 1996 when Ramadan Hassan Hussein, a forger, was arrested and, among his confessions, related how he had helped Sissy acquire Christian identity papers which were practically almost impossible to obtain once he had reverted to Christianity.

Bahiya’s son, Mehdat Farag, expressed his anguish wondering “Why are we going through all this? Is it because we are Christians? We are humble people, living in peace in a small village.”