As Pakistani Christian Rimsha Masih’s imprisonment demonstrated, Islamists are not above accusing children of blasphemy, or of manufacturing incidents to fuel rage against vulnerable Christians. Since Arab “Spring” and the new Muslim Brotherhood government, such accusations are appearing more frequently in Egypt. Fortunately, as with the case of Rimsha Masih, the fraudulence of some of these Egyptian blasphemy cases has been exposed.
In one such case, a Coptic secondary school teacher was arrested and charged with “contempt for religion and insulting Prophet Mohamed.” According to AhramOnline, Nevine Gad, an Upper Egypt social studies teacher, gave a lesson on the life of Mohamed (talk about land mines!) on Wednesday, September 26. The next day, a pupil, Mohamed Moustafa Ahmed Hashim, accused her of saying something offensive. On Sunday, the 30th, Gad, who is eight months pregnant, was arrested at the insistence of the student Hashim’s Salafist father. She was taken to the local police station and held in solitary confinement.
Gad was released on Wednesday, October 3, and all charges dropped when it was revealed that her accuser was absent on the day of the history lesson. Attorney Magdy Farouk said that the police concluded that it was a “malicious complaint” and closed the case file. Gad’s defense was funded by wealthy Coptic businessman Amir Abu Ghali. Ghali declares he will fund the defense of other falsely accused Christians as well.
Sadly, there are many such cases. In the Upper Egypt governorate of Beni Suef, two Coptic boys, Mina Nady Farag, 9 and Nabil Nagy Rizk, 10, were arrested and held in juvenile detention earlier this month for allegedly tearing up pages of a Koran and urinating on them. Coptic sources revealed that outside Islamists connected with the radical Gamaa Islamiya stirred up the trouble. The boys were released but not acquitted on Thursday, October 4. The Egyptian Coalition on Children’s Rights denounced the boys’ arrest, declaring that there was no legal basis for it. They warned against “actions which escalated religious tensions in Egypt” and “using children as part of the conflict to ignite sectarian strife.”
Hopefully Egypt will not continue to emulate Pakistan by using the Blasphemy Law for personal vendettas and inflaming mob violence. Accusations against innocent, often illiterate, children violate international standards of human rights. There is also danger that the threat of such blasphemy accusations against Coptic bloggers and others will further repress free speech — already a disappearing commodity in Egypt.
Comment by dover1952 on October 10, 2012 at 10:23 pm
Well, I feel sure someone here will accuse me of being a troll, but here goes:
First of all, I do not support whatever the Islamists are doing to Coptic Christians and other sorts of Christians in Egypt. However, with that said, I think you are seeing about what one would expect to see from fundamentalist religionists of any type—anywhere in the world—including Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals in the United States. It is what one saw with the purge of so-called liberals and moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention after the Pressler/Patterson takeover in 1979. Anyone whose beliefs do not fully comply with the new revolutionary party line are in error, tools of Satan, enemies of Christ, and antagonists of all that is good and right. Therefore, you have to get rid of them. Getting rid of them harshly is better because it allows one to dig a figurative “pound of flesh” out of them as punishment for all the people they have “led astray” over the years in nearly ruining the bride of Christ. Because Jesus is not here in the body to do it to them personally, they know what He would do if He were there, and so they will do this harshness personally on his behalf.
Of course, here in the United States back in 1979 and in the years thereafter, we had laws that would have prevented conservative Southern Baptists from kidnapping people and torturing them, beating them up on the streets of Nashville, confiscating their homes, selling their children into slavery overseas, and other such things. Therefore, conservatives were limited to the softglove sorts of things one can do in a civilized society with laws that are actually enforced.
Egypt is not that civilized society, and one could argue from numerous historical revolutions that no human society is especially civilized in the midst of a political revolution. In addition, I will concede that most of the people who live in Egypt are sons and daughters of social and religious historical institutions/traditions that are barbaric and violent in nature. Therefore, the treatment of Christians there is about what one would expect from a bunch of religious fundamentalists going nuts in the streets.
However, I would remind everyone here that the United States has historically been a violent nation in many ways too—although admittededly not as bad as in Islamic nations because of our legal tradition and some (not all) Christian traditions that have tempered that violence. However, I am under no illusions about this. I feel and believe, deeply to my core, that if Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals ever succeed in erasing true religious liberty in this nation as it exists now, succeed in the Seven Mountains Movement, and establish a theocracy, the abuses against Christians that we are seeing now in Egypt will be done here to people who are Christians (but you believe are not really Christians) and all sorts of other people. After all, in your eyes already we are “enemies of God” who have destroyed the once great United Methodist Church and numerous other churches. Do we not deserve torture and death? Can any one of you truly say that you would not give us what we so richly deserve if our constitution and all laws suddenly evaporated to where you could do anything you wish to us with zero chance of justice or retribution ever coming your way? How many of you would like to kill me right now after reading this?
The fact of the matter is this. I believe that you people here at IRD have an enormous capacity for committing evil that you are not willing to admit to yourselves. It is easy to criticize the Egyptians—but you do it rightly. I think the thing you fail to see is that you would be those same Egyptians here on our own American streets if you were given the proper circumstances and the opportunity. The bottom line is, and I am not saying this to get I rise out of you, I really and truly do—hand on my Bible—believe that you are every bit as evil as you think I am—and those Egyptians. Millions upon millions of Americans feel about you exactly the way I do. The thing we do not understand is why you have lost the ability to see within yourselves what everyone else sees in you so plainly.