Christianity is under intense attack in Egypt, where more than 15 percent of the population embrace the faith. Most recently, a court in Egypt sentenced a mother and her seven children to up to 15 years in prison for the crime of converting from Islam to the Christianity.
Nadia Mohamed Ali converted to Islam from Christianity 23 years ago after marrying a Muslim, and when her husband died, she and her children went through the process of converting back to Christianity so that she could receive an inheritance from her family. Between 2004 and 2006, the widow sought help in one of the country's registration offices to obtain new identity cards that reflected Christian names and showed new residences.
“When the conversion came to light under the new regime,” reported Fox News, the woman, her children, “and even the clerks who processed the identity cards were all sentenced to prison.”
Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom said that while such conversions were commonplace in the past in Egypt, under the now intensely sharia-influenced government, arrests and jail terms may be the trend. He called the new Islam-heavy constitution “a real disaster in terms of religious freedom,” and speculated that persecution will become more prevalent. “It will be much harder for people to return to Christianity,” he said.
Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which has represented several Christians imprisoned in Islamic countries over their faith in God, agreed. “Now that Sharia law has become an integral part of Egypt's new constitution, Christians in that country are at greater risk than ever,” Sekulow told Fox. He said that the case of the imprisoned mother and her family “underscores the growing problem of religious intolerance in the Muslim world. To impose a prison sentence for a family because of their Christian faith sadly reveals the true agenda of this new government: Egypt has no respect for international law or religious liberty.”
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