CBN News
The case of Christian convert Rifqa Bary captured the attention of America over the past year.
The teenager ran away from home in fear that her Muslim parents would harm her for deciding to leave Islam -- something many other converts say they have experienced.
Amani Mustafa is a former Muslim who fled oppression in Egypt only to experience further abuse in America, where she thought she would be safe.
"The first thing I said, 'this cannot happen here. This is the land of freedom. They cannot reach me here,'" Mustafa recalled. "I couldn't believe it."
For more than 10 years, Mustafa and her two children were on the run in the United States hiding from her ex-husband and his brother. She says both had threatened to kill her if she did not return to Egypt and to Islam.
A Father's Wrath
Mustafa became a Christian after reading the Bible in secret in the bathroom. When her father learned she had left Islam, he summoned her to his home.
"He said, 'I have a straightforward question for you. Is it Islam or is it Christ?' As I was about melting, I answered, 'It is Christ' and at this point he got up to hit me," explained Amani. "He was very threatening and said he was going to tie me to his car and make me an example in the city."
Mustafa fled and was in hiding for several years. She later married a Muslim who promised she could practice her Christian faith in secret. But his attitude changed after their second child was born. Mustafa was no longer allowed to attend church. She had to wear a veil.
Forced to Read the Koran to Her Children
Still a Christian in her heart, Mustafa tearfully explained how she struggled when her husband forced her to read the Koran, the Islamic holy book, to their children.
"I felt like I'm feeding my children poison and that was the hardest thing to know the truth and not be able to speak it," she told CBN News.
Mustafa's husband agreed to send her and the children to live in the United States. He vowed to join them later.
She says she felt a sudden sense of freedom and relief when the plane left Egyptian airspace.
"The first thing that went was my veil," she recalled. "That terrified my son as he looked at me and he said, 'Mom you're going to go to hell' and I said, 'Son, we just left it.'"
On U.S. Soil, Persecution Continued
Once in America, Mustafa recommitted herself to Christ. That's when the persecution returned. When she told her husband that she was filing for divorce. He demanded the children be brought back to Egypt and Islam. He told her she would "pay a price" for her decision.
"He sent his brother after us," she told CBN News. "His brother threatened me and said if I wouldn't comply and go back with him with the kids that I will pay the price and I will go by force. And when I said, 'No I'm not going to come,' my phone in the apartment that I lived in was tapped. They were listening to our conversations for myself and for my family, my mom also. There were people doing surveillance on us. I didn't know that this could even happen," she explained.
Mustafa and her children fled to another state where her husband could not find them. Today -- more than 10 years later -- the threats have disappeared. She's no longer in hiding. Mustafa has moved forward publicly with her life.
Reaching Out to Women Facing Islamic Oppression
She feels called to serve in various ministries, reaching out to women facing Islamic oppression. She is the host of a new woman's television show that is broadcast throughout the Middle East. Mustafa and her co-hosts -- all former Muslims -- talk about their experiences with Islam.
"There are so many women living under Muslim husbands or Muslim fathers or Muslim families that are living the same things that I lived back then," she said. "There are so many women that need to know and hear about the freedom of Christ that I experience today. Those tears are not tears of pain, but actually they are tears of appreciation, because now I know that I am saved though the grace of Christ."
Mustafa feels privileged to share her joy on television and she is proud of her children. Her son, Joshua, has become an ordained pastor. Her oldest daughter is also in ministry.
Mustafa now enjoys a loving marriage with her American Christian husband and their daughter, Mary.
"I am convinced that every experience that I lived through in my life was to be for His glory, to be used for His glory," she exclaimed. "You see, we have a choice. Either we sit and mope over spilled milk, or we can just use the hardship and the bad experiences for His glory and I choose to glorify God's name."
Showing posts with label Apostacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apostacy. Show all posts
Monday, August 2, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Muslim Preachers, Missionaries, Scholars, Mullahs, & Imams leave Islam and enter Christianity
JOURNEYTOORTHODOX.COM
Ex-Muslim Scholar’s Book Refutes Islam
A former leading Muslim scholar has written a book refuting the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion, despite fears for his life.
While many people have been arguing that those behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks do not represent true Islam, Mark Gabriel has been putting the finishing touches to a study that analyzes Muslim history and looks at what he says are the roots of violence in the Quran.
But his scrutiny of his faith led him to discover Islam’s dark underside. He could not understand why Islamic nations had been so violent toward one another through history, and he wrestled with the many contradictions he found in the Quran.
“I became very confused between the teachings of Islam and the Muslim practice of Islam,” he recalled. “This was a very big issue to me, but I was not allowed to question anything. No one is.”
Gabriel’s questioning led to his suspension from the school and eventual imprisonment. “I didn’t know where to turn,” he said.
“I had always been told that Christianity is the wrong faith because they believe in three gods. So, for a year I was without a god.”
While working for his father, Gabriel developed chronic headaches and started visiting a local pharmacy for help. The pharmacist, a Christian, finally asked what was wrong because she feared that he was becoming addicted to the medication.
He told her he had been searching for the true God.
“She smiled and said, ‘I don’t think this is something you can deal with by taking tablets,’” he said. “She handed me her Bible and made me promise not to take any more tablets until I had at least read some of it.”
He took the Bible home and started reading in the book of Luke.
“I lost all track of time,” he remembered. “It felt like I was sitting on a cloud above a hill, and in front of me was the greatest teacher telling me about the secrets of heaven and the heart of God.”
Gabriel gave his life to Christ. But when his father learned of the conversion, he tried to shoot his son. Gabriel’s sister and mother helped him flee the country. He made his way to South Africa, where he received discipleship training with Youth With a Mission. Because of continued threats on his life, he was forced to move to the United States last year, seeking religious asylum.
Summary and Direct Links to So-far Posted “High-Profile Converts to Christianity from Islam”
Ex-Muslim Scholar’s Book Refutes Islam
A former leading Muslim scholar has written a book refuting the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion, despite fears for his life.
While many people have been arguing that those behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks do not represent true Islam, Mark Gabriel has been putting the finishing touches to a study that analyzes Muslim history and looks at what he says are the roots of violence in the Quran.
But his scrutiny of his faith led him to discover Islam’s dark underside. He could not understand why Islamic nations had been so violent toward one another through history, and he wrestled with the many contradictions he found in the Quran.
“I became very confused between the teachings of Islam and the Muslim practice of Islam,” he recalled. “This was a very big issue to me, but I was not allowed to question anything. No one is.”
Gabriel’s questioning led to his suspension from the school and eventual imprisonment. “I didn’t know where to turn,” he said.
“I had always been told that Christianity is the wrong faith because they believe in three gods. So, for a year I was without a god.”
While working for his father, Gabriel developed chronic headaches and started visiting a local pharmacy for help. The pharmacist, a Christian, finally asked what was wrong because she feared that he was becoming addicted to the medication.
He told her he had been searching for the true God.
“She smiled and said, ‘I don’t think this is something you can deal with by taking tablets,’” he said. “She handed me her Bible and made me promise not to take any more tablets until I had at least read some of it.”
He took the Bible home and started reading in the book of Luke.
“I lost all track of time,” he remembered. “It felt like I was sitting on a cloud above a hill, and in front of me was the greatest teacher telling me about the secrets of heaven and the heart of God.”
Gabriel gave his life to Christ. But when his father learned of the conversion, he tried to shoot his son. Gabriel’s sister and mother helped him flee the country. He made his way to South Africa, where he received discipleship training with Youth With a Mission. Because of continued threats on his life, he was forced to move to the United States last year, seeking religious asylum.
Summary and Direct Links to So-far Posted “High-Profile Converts to Christianity from Islam”
Muslim preacher converts to Orthodoxy
JOURNEYTOORTHODOX.COM
We’re speaking in London with a new Orthodox Christian who was baptized today with the name Daniel. Daniel is not a Muslim name, far from it [actually, it does exist as a Muslim name, but it’s quite rare]. Although information about his conversion will inevitably circulate among the Muslims of London, for reasons of security we will not deliberately give details about this subject because there are very often cases of threats and violence and sometimes even murders perpetrated by fanatics. That said, Daniel’s experience is very precious for the Orthodox. Fr. Nicholas Savtchenko, interim rector of the Church of the Dormition (ROCOR) in London speaks with him.
Daniel, please tell us about yourself.
For many years I was a zealous Muslim, as were my wife and children. I was born in the UK, but during my life I have travelled a lot in Muslim countries. I knew both British and Muslim culture. I lived in Saudi Arabia, where I studied theology and contributed to the Muslim mission among foreign laborers. I also spent time in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, in Pakistan, and in the Pakistani part of Kashmir. I also spent time in Bosnia.
In recent years, I’ve been living with my family in London, where, some time ago, I became the Muslim representative in a well-known inter-religious organization dedicated to peace. For the past two years, I was an advisor on Islam to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two days ago, I called him to tell him I was entering Orthodoxy in the Russian Church.
What was his attitude?
Oh… The Archbishop of Canterbury was very happy. Once, he told me that recently two of his employees in the personnel department of the Anglican Church had been received into Orthodox churches: he respects their choice and they will continue their work in the administration of the Anglican Church.
What led you to Christ?
The first time that I had the desire to study the New Testament in detail was when I was in front of the Kaaba in Mecca—I lived for a time in Mecca. Christian literature is strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia and many websites are even blocked, but with the development of modern communications, it is not difficult for those who are looking to find the Word of God. After a time, I tried to convince and American who was working in the Saudi capital to convert to Islam.
When I spoke to him, he responded with much courage and conviction. I was surprised by his courage, because in Saudi Arabia a man who preaches Christianity can easily be killed. Conversations with Christians in Saudi Arabia were very important for me. As someone associated with the Islamic mission in Arabia, I encountered many foreigners. I always remarked that in most cases, people converted to Islam, not because it was their free choice, but in order to keep working in Saudi Arabia and to obtain a release from the taxes imposed on non-Muslims.
The fact is that the salaries of non-Muslims are lower than those of Muslims because of the need to pay a special tax, set by Muhammad.
Salaries for Christians in Saudi Arabia are rather low, and some convert to Islam in order to earn more money. The majority of Filipinos who return home immediately renounce Islam. I began to explore Christianity even more and, little by little, I sensed its superiority over Islam.
I first consciously encountered Orthodoxy in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Unfortunately, the priests in Sarajevo did not speak English and I could not really express what I wanted. After waiting for a group of Imams to pass by, I went into the Serbian church and I felt the astonished look of the Serbian priest when I made the sign of the cross in the Orthodox way and I made a prostration onto the ground. Then I knew that Orthodoxy was, of all the Christian confessions, the closest to me.
I studied Christianity and Orthodoxy even more, reading books and watching films. I also liked the movie Ostrov (the Island). Slowly, I decided to ask for baptism in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Finally, we hear growing reports of the propagation of Christian missions in Muslim countries. Is it considerable in these countries?
I agree that there are many secret Christians in Saudi Arabia. Several times I myself have encountered people who were probably secret Christians. We need to understand that in Saudi Arabia and other countries, maybe the majority of Muslims go to the mosque not because their faith encourages them to, but because they are obliged to do so under the pressure of laws and customs. Visiting the mosque becomes a burden. Muslims of today are rather less religious than people in the Christian world believe. In Muslim countries, there are many mosques and they say prayers there five times a day, but besides on Friday no one goes to the mosque.
Other than on Friday, in any mosque at the time of prayer, you won’t see more than five men, even though there are many homes inhabited by Muslims around it.
Most Muslims don’t go to the mosque even on Friday. Some start going during Ramadan, but after the fast they disappear until the next year. In the mosque, once a week during Ramadan there are maybe a hundred people, even though there could be thousands, and after Ramadan there won’t be more than five people. In Muslim countries, many people search for truth and it’s because of this that the Christian mission will grow.
Most promote Christianity among friends, and recently there have been television networks and many more internet sites dedicated to mission among Muslims. In general, many Muslims distance themselves from Islam and this is especially visible in Western countries. In Great Britain, many Muslims have converted to Christianity. In the Anglican Church, Muslims who have adopted Christianity are estimated at a hundred thousand people. Many of them are Pakistanis. They have their own Christian churches and are forced to hide because of the danger of reprisals from the Muslims. There are also Arab and Bengali converts to Christianity. Very many convert because of mixed marriages.
Recently in the press there have been reports about the strong growth of Islam in western countries and they have even claimed that the number of Muslim faithful will soon overtake the number of parishioners in Christian churches. It seems strange that the press has mentioned the number of Muslims, of faithful in mosques, many times greater than the capacity of the mosques themselves! But that is not mentioned in the press. What is the truth?
The presence of mosques in the UK is very weak. Most Muslims won’t ever go to a mosque. The young people have effectively left Islam, even if they say that they’re still Muslims. In the mosques they don’t find a common language with the Imams from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Young people can barely speak Urdu or Bengali but only English.
Many are ashamed of Islam because of terrorism. Our inter-religious council investigated mosque attendance and we know what the real picture is and it is especially alarming for Islam, but it is to the advantage of certain people to present Islam as an immense force.
If one takes the list of mosques in Muslim publications, for example, in West London, we find that there are twenty mosques and much free space in each of these mosques, even though the number of people of Muslim origins in London is such that they would need even more mosques if a majority went. In one large mosque in London there might be three hundred people for Friday prayers. Many mosques are just small halls that are only used on Friday. In general, believers are very rare in mosques and most are children who bring their parents. When they grow, they disappear. Christianity offers a free choice, thus it is much better adapted to life in a climate of tolerance, and Islam is unable to pass this test.
The media talks about the adoption of Islam by many British people. Muslims make an almost triumphant image of Islam in the West. However, the real number of British in the Muslim population is very small, only around 1200 people. How do you understand this contradiction?
It is not a simple question. I was a part of the Islamic mission to the British and I can say that the number of converts is minimal. At Friday prayers in the center of London, the number of British Muslims at the mosque is maybe one percent. Outside of London, they don’t even reach this number. All the Muslims know the real number of converts to Islam. There are those who accept Islam because of marriage to Muslims.
These British will never go to mosques and their acceptance of Islam is a formality. Very often they remain in practice Christians. Most of those who accept Islam because of marriage are women. Additionally, many descendants of Muslims immigrants to Britain consider themselves British but could not be considered to be ‘British Muslims’ in the full sense.
I’ve spoken a lot to women who divorced their Muslim husbands, and I can say from memory that in London there are maybe 25 British women who have remained Muslim after divorcing their Muslim husband. But, as a general rule, mixed marriages lead to an estrangement from Islam. The Islamic mission in the West has not been successful. In London, there is an organization of missionaries dedicated to the preaching of Islam.
They are mostly youths. But, they realize their mission among Muslim immigrants because it’s much more effective, and the British do not convert to Islam. When some Muslims say that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, London imams say that this growth is primarily because of the fertility rate, but there is no real mission. I do not doubt that Christianity is much stronger in terms of mission.
Are there many Muslims who convert to Christianity in Great Britian?
On the one hand, there are very many. This happens without any publicity. In effect, according to most schools of Islam an apostate from Islam should be executed, even though the imams of the chief mosques of London say that they cannot be executed for apostasy from Islam.
However, on the other hand, we can say that there are very few, since many Muslims simply abandon their faith and become unbelievers. Unbelief is an illness common to all. Certain Muslims try to present atheism and the absence of religion as characteristics of Christian civilization, but Muslims themselves, even more than Christians, lose their faith in the Western world. However, there is the very good example of Russia and the other Orthodox countries where the Church is growing, even with freedom of choice. I hope one day to go to Russia, but in the meantime I need to rebuild my life as an Orthodox Christian.
We’re speaking in London with a new Orthodox Christian who was baptized today with the name Daniel. Daniel is not a Muslim name, far from it [actually, it does exist as a Muslim name, but it’s quite rare]. Although information about his conversion will inevitably circulate among the Muslims of London, for reasons of security we will not deliberately give details about this subject because there are very often cases of threats and violence and sometimes even murders perpetrated by fanatics. That said, Daniel’s experience is very precious for the Orthodox. Fr. Nicholas Savtchenko, interim rector of the Church of the Dormition (ROCOR) in London speaks with him.
Daniel, please tell us about yourself.
For many years I was a zealous Muslim, as were my wife and children. I was born in the UK, but during my life I have travelled a lot in Muslim countries. I knew both British and Muslim culture. I lived in Saudi Arabia, where I studied theology and contributed to the Muslim mission among foreign laborers. I also spent time in Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban, in Pakistan, and in the Pakistani part of Kashmir. I also spent time in Bosnia.
In recent years, I’ve been living with my family in London, where, some time ago, I became the Muslim representative in a well-known inter-religious organization dedicated to peace. For the past two years, I was an advisor on Islam to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Two days ago, I called him to tell him I was entering Orthodoxy in the Russian Church.
What was his attitude?
Oh… The Archbishop of Canterbury was very happy. Once, he told me that recently two of his employees in the personnel department of the Anglican Church had been received into Orthodox churches: he respects their choice and they will continue their work in the administration of the Anglican Church.
What led you to Christ?
The first time that I had the desire to study the New Testament in detail was when I was in front of the Kaaba in Mecca—I lived for a time in Mecca. Christian literature is strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia and many websites are even blocked, but with the development of modern communications, it is not difficult for those who are looking to find the Word of God. After a time, I tried to convince and American who was working in the Saudi capital to convert to Islam.
When I spoke to him, he responded with much courage and conviction. I was surprised by his courage, because in Saudi Arabia a man who preaches Christianity can easily be killed. Conversations with Christians in Saudi Arabia were very important for me. As someone associated with the Islamic mission in Arabia, I encountered many foreigners. I always remarked that in most cases, people converted to Islam, not because it was their free choice, but in order to keep working in Saudi Arabia and to obtain a release from the taxes imposed on non-Muslims.
The fact is that the salaries of non-Muslims are lower than those of Muslims because of the need to pay a special tax, set by Muhammad.
Salaries for Christians in Saudi Arabia are rather low, and some convert to Islam in order to earn more money. The majority of Filipinos who return home immediately renounce Islam. I began to explore Christianity even more and, little by little, I sensed its superiority over Islam.
I first consciously encountered Orthodoxy in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Unfortunately, the priests in Sarajevo did not speak English and I could not really express what I wanted. After waiting for a group of Imams to pass by, I went into the Serbian church and I felt the astonished look of the Serbian priest when I made the sign of the cross in the Orthodox way and I made a prostration onto the ground. Then I knew that Orthodoxy was, of all the Christian confessions, the closest to me.
I studied Christianity and Orthodoxy even more, reading books and watching films. I also liked the movie Ostrov (the Island). Slowly, I decided to ask for baptism in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Finally, we hear growing reports of the propagation of Christian missions in Muslim countries. Is it considerable in these countries?
I agree that there are many secret Christians in Saudi Arabia. Several times I myself have encountered people who were probably secret Christians. We need to understand that in Saudi Arabia and other countries, maybe the majority of Muslims go to the mosque not because their faith encourages them to, but because they are obliged to do so under the pressure of laws and customs. Visiting the mosque becomes a burden. Muslims of today are rather less religious than people in the Christian world believe. In Muslim countries, there are many mosques and they say prayers there five times a day, but besides on Friday no one goes to the mosque.
Other than on Friday, in any mosque at the time of prayer, you won’t see more than five men, even though there are many homes inhabited by Muslims around it.
Most Muslims don’t go to the mosque even on Friday. Some start going during Ramadan, but after the fast they disappear until the next year. In the mosque, once a week during Ramadan there are maybe a hundred people, even though there could be thousands, and after Ramadan there won’t be more than five people. In Muslim countries, many people search for truth and it’s because of this that the Christian mission will grow.
Most promote Christianity among friends, and recently there have been television networks and many more internet sites dedicated to mission among Muslims. In general, many Muslims distance themselves from Islam and this is especially visible in Western countries. In Great Britain, many Muslims have converted to Christianity. In the Anglican Church, Muslims who have adopted Christianity are estimated at a hundred thousand people. Many of them are Pakistanis. They have their own Christian churches and are forced to hide because of the danger of reprisals from the Muslims. There are also Arab and Bengali converts to Christianity. Very many convert because of mixed marriages.
Recently in the press there have been reports about the strong growth of Islam in western countries and they have even claimed that the number of Muslim faithful will soon overtake the number of parishioners in Christian churches. It seems strange that the press has mentioned the number of Muslims, of faithful in mosques, many times greater than the capacity of the mosques themselves! But that is not mentioned in the press. What is the truth?
The presence of mosques in the UK is very weak. Most Muslims won’t ever go to a mosque. The young people have effectively left Islam, even if they say that they’re still Muslims. In the mosques they don’t find a common language with the Imams from Pakistan or Bangladesh. Young people can barely speak Urdu or Bengali but only English.
Many are ashamed of Islam because of terrorism. Our inter-religious council investigated mosque attendance and we know what the real picture is and it is especially alarming for Islam, but it is to the advantage of certain people to present Islam as an immense force.
If one takes the list of mosques in Muslim publications, for example, in West London, we find that there are twenty mosques and much free space in each of these mosques, even though the number of people of Muslim origins in London is such that they would need even more mosques if a majority went. In one large mosque in London there might be three hundred people for Friday prayers. Many mosques are just small halls that are only used on Friday. In general, believers are very rare in mosques and most are children who bring their parents. When they grow, they disappear. Christianity offers a free choice, thus it is much better adapted to life in a climate of tolerance, and Islam is unable to pass this test.
The media talks about the adoption of Islam by many British people. Muslims make an almost triumphant image of Islam in the West. However, the real number of British in the Muslim population is very small, only around 1200 people. How do you understand this contradiction?
It is not a simple question. I was a part of the Islamic mission to the British and I can say that the number of converts is minimal. At Friday prayers in the center of London, the number of British Muslims at the mosque is maybe one percent. Outside of London, they don’t even reach this number. All the Muslims know the real number of converts to Islam. There are those who accept Islam because of marriage to Muslims.
These British will never go to mosques and their acceptance of Islam is a formality. Very often they remain in practice Christians. Most of those who accept Islam because of marriage are women. Additionally, many descendants of Muslims immigrants to Britain consider themselves British but could not be considered to be ‘British Muslims’ in the full sense.
I’ve spoken a lot to women who divorced their Muslim husbands, and I can say from memory that in London there are maybe 25 British women who have remained Muslim after divorcing their Muslim husband. But, as a general rule, mixed marriages lead to an estrangement from Islam. The Islamic mission in the West has not been successful. In London, there is an organization of missionaries dedicated to the preaching of Islam.
They are mostly youths. But, they realize their mission among Muslim immigrants because it’s much more effective, and the British do not convert to Islam. When some Muslims say that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, London imams say that this growth is primarily because of the fertility rate, but there is no real mission. I do not doubt that Christianity is much stronger in terms of mission.
Are there many Muslims who convert to Christianity in Great Britian?
On the one hand, there are very many. This happens without any publicity. In effect, according to most schools of Islam an apostate from Islam should be executed, even though the imams of the chief mosques of London say that they cannot be executed for apostasy from Islam.
However, on the other hand, we can say that there are very few, since many Muslims simply abandon their faith and become unbelievers. Unbelief is an illness common to all. Certain Muslims try to present atheism and the absence of religion as characteristics of Christian civilization, but Muslims themselves, even more than Christians, lose their faith in the Western world. However, there is the very good example of Russia and the other Orthodox countries where the Church is growing, even with freedom of choice. I hope one day to go to Russia, but in the meantime I need to rebuild my life as an Orthodox Christian.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Egyptian convert to Christianity, sings about religious persecution
markdurie.com blog
In a video interview posted on July 8 with Free Christian Voice, Ms Al-Imam reported that she was taken into custody by the Egyptian security forces. The colonel took her by the hair and bashed her head against his desk, which is the reason for the bruises on her face. She also broke a tooth. She says that the colonel tightened the chain around her neck, mocking her cross on the chain, and told her to watch her neck. She also said that he told her if she dares to come out of her house he will send some "women" and she should be expecting what will happen to her then. She said that she has not worked for the past year and she has been threatened with being deregistered as a lawyer, and false statements have been made on her behalf to defame her.
According to Islamic law, any Muslim who leaves Islam loses custody of their children. The children are to be placed in the custody of a Muslim relative. This is one of the points made in apostasy fatwas (rulings) issued by the Chief Scholar of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute, His Excellency Shaykh Sa‘id Hijjawi, during the time when he was Grand Mufti of Jordan (from 1992-2007). (The Aal al-Bayt Institute was the sponsor of the Common Word letter to the Christian world.)
Islam is the only world religion which demands that people who leave it should be killed. As a graduate of Al-Azhar university, Ms Al-Imam is an expert in Sharia law. She knows this. Also, Ms Al-Imam's decision to sing this song with her children would have been done in the full knowledge that, even if she escapes with her life, she is liable to lose custody of her children. Moreover, as an apostate from Islam, Ms Al-Imam has become a legal non-person. She would be unable to act in her own defense in a court of law, and has most likely lost any capacity to earn her living as a lawyer.
Ms Al-Imam would have been fully aware of the risk of losing her children when she converted to Christianity. This video has a similar function to the tattooed cross on the wrists of Coptic Christians: it is a declaration of faith in Christ no matter what may happen. The fact that her children are singing in this video shows that they share their mother's Christian faith. She is, I believe, asking the world to pay attention to their fate, and has established a visible witness to the children in the future, should they be taken from her and forced to re-accept Islam.
Nagla Al-Imam has declared on the internet that she will not flee, but is determined to stay in Egypt.
You can sign a petition on line here for the support of the freedom of religion in the Muslim world. Your voice will count in removing the suffering of those who suffer for choosing to follow their conscience by leaving Islam. Please take a moment to sign this petition and pass this message on to others who may be willing to sign.
In a video interview posted on July 8 with Free Christian Voice, Ms Al-Imam reported that she was taken into custody by the Egyptian security forces. The colonel took her by the hair and bashed her head against his desk, which is the reason for the bruises on her face. She also broke a tooth. She says that the colonel tightened the chain around her neck, mocking her cross on the chain, and told her to watch her neck. She also said that he told her if she dares to come out of her house he will send some "women" and she should be expecting what will happen to her then. She said that she has not worked for the past year and she has been threatened with being deregistered as a lawyer, and false statements have been made on her behalf to defame her.
According to Islamic law, any Muslim who leaves Islam loses custody of their children. The children are to be placed in the custody of a Muslim relative. This is one of the points made in apostasy fatwas (rulings) issued by the Chief Scholar of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute, His Excellency Shaykh Sa‘id Hijjawi, during the time when he was Grand Mufti of Jordan (from 1992-2007). (The Aal al-Bayt Institute was the sponsor of the Common Word letter to the Christian world.)
Islam is the only world religion which demands that people who leave it should be killed. As a graduate of Al-Azhar university, Ms Al-Imam is an expert in Sharia law. She knows this. Also, Ms Al-Imam's decision to sing this song with her children would have been done in the full knowledge that, even if she escapes with her life, she is liable to lose custody of her children. Moreover, as an apostate from Islam, Ms Al-Imam has become a legal non-person. She would be unable to act in her own defense in a court of law, and has most likely lost any capacity to earn her living as a lawyer.
Ms Al-Imam would have been fully aware of the risk of losing her children when she converted to Christianity. This video has a similar function to the tattooed cross on the wrists of Coptic Christians: it is a declaration of faith in Christ no matter what may happen. The fact that her children are singing in this video shows that they share their mother's Christian faith. She is, I believe, asking the world to pay attention to their fate, and has established a visible witness to the children in the future, should they be taken from her and forced to re-accept Islam.
Nagla Al-Imam has declared on the internet that she will not flee, but is determined to stay in Egypt.
You can sign a petition on line here for the support of the freedom of religion in the Muslim world. Your voice will count in removing the suffering of those who suffer for choosing to follow their conscience by leaving Islam. Please take a moment to sign this petition and pass this message on to others who may be willing to sign.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Egyptian Convert Endures Life at a Standstill – on the Run
From the mosque across the street, words blasting from minaret megaphones reverberate throughout the tiny apartment where Maher Ahmad El-Mo’otahssem Bellah El-Gohary is forced to hide. Immediately following afternoon prayers, the Friday sermon is, in part, on how to deal with Christians.
“Do not shake their hands. Do not go into their homes. Do not eat their food,” an imam shouts as El-Gohary, a convert to Christianity from Islam, looks through his window toward the mosque, shakes his head and grimaces.
“I hope one day to live in a place where there are no mosques,” he says. “How many megaphones do they need?”
For nearly two years, El-Gohary and his teenage daughter have been living in hiding because he abandoned Islam and embraced Christianity. During this time he has been beaten and forcibly detained, and his daughter has been attacked. He has had to endure death threats, poverty and crushing boredom.
Asked what gets him through the constant pressure of living on the run, El-Gohary said he wants to show the world how Christians are treated in Egypt.
“My main driving force is I want to prove to people the amount of persecution that Muslim converts and Christians face here, and that the persecution has been going on for 1,400 years,” he said.
When asked the same question, his 16-year-old daughter, Dina Maher Ahmad Mo’otahssem, pushed back tears and said one word.
“God.”
Hiding
El-Gohary, 57, and his daughter were forced into hiding shortly after August 2008, when he sued the national government to allow him to change the religion listed on his state-issued ID from Islam to Christianity.
El-Gohary followed in the footsteps of Mohammed Ahmed Hegazy, 27, also a convert from Islam, in filing an ID case because he didn’t want his daughter to be forced to take Islamic education classes or have her declared an “apostate” by Egyptian Islamic authorities if she decided to stay a Christian into adulthood. Dina is required by law to possess an ID card. The ID card is used for everything from opening a bank account to receiving medical care. The identification also determines whether Egyptians are subject to Islamic civil courts.
Dina is the daughter of El-Gohary and his first wife, who is a Muslim. El-Gohary said that before he got married, he told his future wife that one day he would be baptized as a Christian. He said he now thinks she was convinced that he would eventually turn back to Islam. Over time, she grew tired of his refusal go back on his faith and complained to El-Gohary’s family, demanding a divorce.
“She started crying. She went to my parents and my brother and said, ‘This is not going to work out, I thought that he was going to change his mind. I didn’t think he was that serious about it,’” El-Gohary said. “She started talking about it to other people to the point where they started calling me from the loudspeakers of the local mosque, asking me what I was doing and ordering me to come back and pray.”
Eventually El-Gohary married another Muslim, and over the years she became a Christian. She has fled Egypt and lives in the United States; El-Gohary hasn’t seen her since March 2009.
On April 11, 2009, El-Gohary’s lawyers presented a conversion certificate from the Coptic Church in court. He obtained the certificate under court directions after going to Cyprus, at great expense, to obtain a baptismal certificate. The next month, the State Council, a consultative body of Egypt’s Administrative Court, provided the court with a report stating that El-Gohary’s change of faith violated Islamic law. They instructed that he should be subject to the death penalty.
In February 2009, lawyers opposing El-Gohary’s case advocated that he be sentenced to death for apostasy. On June 13, 2009, a Cairo judge rejected El-Gohary’s suit.
On Sept. 17, 2009, authorities at Cairo International Airport seized his passport. He was trying to travel to China with the eventual hope of going to the United States. On March 9, 2010, the Egyptian State Council Court in Giza, an administrative court, refused to return his passport. He has another hearing about the passport on June 29.
“I think it’s a kind of punishment, to set an example to other Muslims who want to convert,” El-Gohary said. “They want me to stay here and suffer to show other converts to be afraid. They are also afraid that if they let me go, then I will get out and start talking about what is happening in Egypt about the persecution and the injustice. We are trapped in our own country without even the rights that animals have.”
Conditions
As recently as last week, El-Gohary and his daughter were living in a small, two-bedroom apartment across the street from a mosque on the outskirts of an undisclosed city in Egypt. The floor was littered with grime and bits of trash. Clumps of dust and used water bottles were everywhere.
El-Gohary had taped over the locks, as well as taped shut the inside of windows and doors, to guard against eavesdroppers and intruders. He had taped over all the drain holes of the sinks to keep anyone from pumping in natural gas at night.
Even the shower drain was taped over.
The yellow walls were faded, scuffed and barren, save for a single picture, a holographic portrait of Jesus, taped up in what qualified as a living room. El-Gohary motioned through a door to a porch outside. Rocks and pebbles thrown by area residents who recently learned that he lived there covered the porch.
“I would open the window, but I don’t want the rocks to start coming in,” he said.
El-Gohary has an old television set and a laptop with limited access to the Internet. Dina said she spends her time reading the Bible, talking to her father or drawing the occasional dress in preparation for obtaining her dream job, designing clothes.
Even the simple task of leaving El-Gohary’s apartment is fraught with risk. Every time he leaves, he places a padlock on the door, wraps it with a small plastic bag and melts the bag to the lock with a match.
El-Gohary cannot work and has to rely on the kindness of other Christians. People bring him food and water and the occasional donation. When the food runs out, he has to brave going outside.
“Our life is extremely, extremely hard. It’s hard for us to attend a church more than once because people will know it is us,” he said. “We can’t go to a supermarket more than once because we are going to be killed.”
Girl, Interrupted
Possibly the worst part for El-Gohary is watching his daughter suffer. A reflective youth with a gentle demeanor, Dina is quick to smile. But at a time when her life should be filled with friends, freedom and self-discovery, she is instead confined between four walls.
Even going to school, normally a simple thing, is fraught with dangerous possibilities. Dina hasn’t gone to school in about a year. She said that the last time she did, other students ridiculed her mercilessly, and a teacher hit her when she tried to attend religious classes for Christians instead of Muslims.
Now she and her father fear she could be beaten, kidnapped and forcibly converted, or simply killed. She can’t even go to church, she said.
“I don’t understand why I am being treated this way,” she said. “I believe in something, Christianity – I chose the religion because I love it. So why should I be treated this way?”
Dina was a little girl when she starting hearing about Jesus. Her father used to sit with her and tell her stories from the Bible, and he also told her about his conversion experience. Like her father, she cites a supernatural experience as a defining event in her faith.
One night, she said, she had a dream in which an enormous image of Jesus smiling appeared in a garden. She said the image became bigger and bigger until it touched the ground and became a golden church. She told her father about the dream, and since then she has believed in Christ.
Under Islamic law, Dina is considered a Muslim because her father was born as one. Because, like her father, Dina has decided to follow Christ, she is considered an “apostate” under most interpretations of Islamic law.
She gained national prominence in November 2009, when she wrote a letter, through a Coptic website, to U.S. President Barack Obama. She told the president that Muslims in the United States are treated much better than Copts in Egypt and asked why this was the case. She hopes the president will pressure the Egyptian government to ensure religious rights or let her and her father immigrate to the United States.
One afternoon last month, Dina was walking to a market with her father. As the two walked, El-Gohary noticed smoke and vapors coming off Dina’s jacket. The canvas was sizzling and dissolving. Someone had poured acid over the jacket. El-Gohary ripped it off her and threw it away.
“I asked people if they saw what happened and everyone said, ‘No, we didn’t see anything,’” El-Gohary said.
Luckily, Dina was not physically injured in the attack, but since then she has been terrified to go outside.
“I am very, very scared,” she said. “I haven’t gone outside since the attack happened.”
Change of Faith
El-Gohary, also known as Peter Athanasius, became a Christian 36 years ago while attending an academy for police trainees. During his second year of school, he became good friends with his roommate, a Copt and the only Christian in the academy. After watching cadets harass his roommate for praying, El-Gohary asked him why the others had ridiculed him.
“For me, it was the first time I had heard something like that,” El-Gohary said. “I didn’t have any Christian friends before, and I didn’t know about the level of persecution that takes place against Christians.”
Eventually, El-Gohary asked his friend for a Bible and took it home. His family tried to dissuade him from reading it.
“No, you can’t read the Bible,” his father told him. “It’s a really bad book.”
Undeterred, El-Gohary began reading the Bible in the privacy of his room. In the beginning, he said, the Bible was difficult to understand. But El-Gohary concentrated his efforts on the New Testament, and for the first time in his life, he said, he felt like God was speaking to him.
El-Gohary read the account of Jesus meeting the woman caught committing adultery, and the level of mercy that Jesus showed her transformed him, he said.
“Jesus said, ‘If anyone among you is without sin, then let him throw the first stone.’ The amount of forgiveness and love in this story really opened my eyes to the nature of Christianity,” El-Gohary said. “The main law that Jesus talked about was loving God ‘with all your heart, soul and mind.’ The basis of Christianity is love and forgiveness, unlike Islam, where it is based on revenge, fighting and war.”
Also, El-Gohary said, when he compared the two religions’ versions of heaven, he found that the Islamic version was about physical pleasure, whereas for Christians it was about being released from the physical world to be with God.
El-Gohary said his decision to follow Christ was final after he had a brilliant vision of light in his bedroom at his parents’ home, accompanied by the presence of “the peace of God.” El-Gohary said at first he thought he was seeing things, but then his father knocked on the door and demanded to know why the light was on. He told his father he was looking for something.
Persecution Begins
As a budding Christian convert, El-Gohary went back to the police academy and learned as much as he could about Christ and the Bible from his roommate. Persecution wasn’t long in coming.
One day an upperclassman spotted El-Gohary absent-mindedly drawing a cross on a notebook. The cadet sent El-Gohary to a superior for questioning.
El-Gohary avoided telling academy officials that his roommate had taught him about Christianity, but a captain at the school was able to piece together the evidence. The captain called El-Gohary’s father, a high-ranking officer at the academy, who in turn told the captain to make the young convert’s life “hell.”
Officials were imaginative in their attempts to break El-Gohary. He had to wake up before all the other students. He was ordered to carry his mattress around buildings and up and down flights of stairs. They exercised El-Gohary until he was about to pass out. Then they forced him to clean bathroom facilities with a toothbrush.
El-Gohary was not swayed from Christ, but he decided he couldn’t stay in what he said is the agency that “is the center of persecution against Christians” in Egypt. He tried numerous times to resign, but officials wouldn’t let him. Then he tried to get kicked out. Eventually, officials suspended the police cadet and sent him home for two weeks. At home, his family had a surprise waiting; they had hired an Islamic scholar to bring him back to Islam.
The scholar started by yelling Islamic teachings into El-Gohary’s ears, then moved on to write Quranic verses on his arms. El-Gohary remained seated and bore the humiliation in silence. Suddenly El-Gohary stood up, pinned the man against a wall and started yelling at him; the convert had caught the distinct smell of burning flesh – when he looked down at his arms, El-Gohary saw the scholar burning his hands with thin, smoldering iron rods.
“I said, ‘Enough! I have tolerated all of your talk. I have listened to all you have said, but this has gone too far,’” El-Gohary recalled. “The man said I had a ‘Christian demon’ inside me.”
Hope
As bad as things have been for El-Gohary and his daughter, their dedication seems rock-solid. They said they have never regretted their decisions to become Christians.
El-Gohary said that eventually, he will triumph.
“By law, my circumstance will have to change,” he said. “I have done nothing illegal.”
Dina is not so sure; she said she doesn’t feel like she has a future in Egypt, and she hopes to move to a place where she can get an education.
Whatever happens, both El-Gohary and his daughter said they are prepared to live in hiding indefinitely.
“There are days that I break down and cry, but I am not giving up,” Dina said. “I am still not going back to Islam.”
“Do not shake their hands. Do not go into their homes. Do not eat their food,” an imam shouts as El-Gohary, a convert to Christianity from Islam, looks through his window toward the mosque, shakes his head and grimaces.
“I hope one day to live in a place where there are no mosques,” he says. “How many megaphones do they need?”
For nearly two years, El-Gohary and his teenage daughter have been living in hiding because he abandoned Islam and embraced Christianity. During this time he has been beaten and forcibly detained, and his daughter has been attacked. He has had to endure death threats, poverty and crushing boredom.
Asked what gets him through the constant pressure of living on the run, El-Gohary said he wants to show the world how Christians are treated in Egypt.
“My main driving force is I want to prove to people the amount of persecution that Muslim converts and Christians face here, and that the persecution has been going on for 1,400 years,” he said.
When asked the same question, his 16-year-old daughter, Dina Maher Ahmad Mo’otahssem, pushed back tears and said one word.
“God.”
Hiding
El-Gohary, 57, and his daughter were forced into hiding shortly after August 2008, when he sued the national government to allow him to change the religion listed on his state-issued ID from Islam to Christianity.
El-Gohary followed in the footsteps of Mohammed Ahmed Hegazy, 27, also a convert from Islam, in filing an ID case because he didn’t want his daughter to be forced to take Islamic education classes or have her declared an “apostate” by Egyptian Islamic authorities if she decided to stay a Christian into adulthood. Dina is required by law to possess an ID card. The ID card is used for everything from opening a bank account to receiving medical care. The identification also determines whether Egyptians are subject to Islamic civil courts.
Dina is the daughter of El-Gohary and his first wife, who is a Muslim. El-Gohary said that before he got married, he told his future wife that one day he would be baptized as a Christian. He said he now thinks she was convinced that he would eventually turn back to Islam. Over time, she grew tired of his refusal go back on his faith and complained to El-Gohary’s family, demanding a divorce.
“She started crying. She went to my parents and my brother and said, ‘This is not going to work out, I thought that he was going to change his mind. I didn’t think he was that serious about it,’” El-Gohary said. “She started talking about it to other people to the point where they started calling me from the loudspeakers of the local mosque, asking me what I was doing and ordering me to come back and pray.”
Eventually El-Gohary married another Muslim, and over the years she became a Christian. She has fled Egypt and lives in the United States; El-Gohary hasn’t seen her since March 2009.
On April 11, 2009, El-Gohary’s lawyers presented a conversion certificate from the Coptic Church in court. He obtained the certificate under court directions after going to Cyprus, at great expense, to obtain a baptismal certificate. The next month, the State Council, a consultative body of Egypt’s Administrative Court, provided the court with a report stating that El-Gohary’s change of faith violated Islamic law. They instructed that he should be subject to the death penalty.
In February 2009, lawyers opposing El-Gohary’s case advocated that he be sentenced to death for apostasy. On June 13, 2009, a Cairo judge rejected El-Gohary’s suit.
On Sept. 17, 2009, authorities at Cairo International Airport seized his passport. He was trying to travel to China with the eventual hope of going to the United States. On March 9, 2010, the Egyptian State Council Court in Giza, an administrative court, refused to return his passport. He has another hearing about the passport on June 29.
“I think it’s a kind of punishment, to set an example to other Muslims who want to convert,” El-Gohary said. “They want me to stay here and suffer to show other converts to be afraid. They are also afraid that if they let me go, then I will get out and start talking about what is happening in Egypt about the persecution and the injustice. We are trapped in our own country without even the rights that animals have.”
Conditions
As recently as last week, El-Gohary and his daughter were living in a small, two-bedroom apartment across the street from a mosque on the outskirts of an undisclosed city in Egypt. The floor was littered with grime and bits of trash. Clumps of dust and used water bottles were everywhere.
El-Gohary had taped over the locks, as well as taped shut the inside of windows and doors, to guard against eavesdroppers and intruders. He had taped over all the drain holes of the sinks to keep anyone from pumping in natural gas at night.
Even the shower drain was taped over.
The yellow walls were faded, scuffed and barren, save for a single picture, a holographic portrait of Jesus, taped up in what qualified as a living room. El-Gohary motioned through a door to a porch outside. Rocks and pebbles thrown by area residents who recently learned that he lived there covered the porch.
“I would open the window, but I don’t want the rocks to start coming in,” he said.
El-Gohary has an old television set and a laptop with limited access to the Internet. Dina said she spends her time reading the Bible, talking to her father or drawing the occasional dress in preparation for obtaining her dream job, designing clothes.
Even the simple task of leaving El-Gohary’s apartment is fraught with risk. Every time he leaves, he places a padlock on the door, wraps it with a small plastic bag and melts the bag to the lock with a match.
El-Gohary cannot work and has to rely on the kindness of other Christians. People bring him food and water and the occasional donation. When the food runs out, he has to brave going outside.
“Our life is extremely, extremely hard. It’s hard for us to attend a church more than once because people will know it is us,” he said. “We can’t go to a supermarket more than once because we are going to be killed.”
Girl, Interrupted
Possibly the worst part for El-Gohary is watching his daughter suffer. A reflective youth with a gentle demeanor, Dina is quick to smile. But at a time when her life should be filled with friends, freedom and self-discovery, she is instead confined between four walls.
Even going to school, normally a simple thing, is fraught with dangerous possibilities. Dina hasn’t gone to school in about a year. She said that the last time she did, other students ridiculed her mercilessly, and a teacher hit her when she tried to attend religious classes for Christians instead of Muslims.
Now she and her father fear she could be beaten, kidnapped and forcibly converted, or simply killed. She can’t even go to church, she said.
“I don’t understand why I am being treated this way,” she said. “I believe in something, Christianity – I chose the religion because I love it. So why should I be treated this way?”
Dina was a little girl when she starting hearing about Jesus. Her father used to sit with her and tell her stories from the Bible, and he also told her about his conversion experience. Like her father, she cites a supernatural experience as a defining event in her faith.
One night, she said, she had a dream in which an enormous image of Jesus smiling appeared in a garden. She said the image became bigger and bigger until it touched the ground and became a golden church. She told her father about the dream, and since then she has believed in Christ.
Under Islamic law, Dina is considered a Muslim because her father was born as one. Because, like her father, Dina has decided to follow Christ, she is considered an “apostate” under most interpretations of Islamic law.
She gained national prominence in November 2009, when she wrote a letter, through a Coptic website, to U.S. President Barack Obama. She told the president that Muslims in the United States are treated much better than Copts in Egypt and asked why this was the case. She hopes the president will pressure the Egyptian government to ensure religious rights or let her and her father immigrate to the United States.
One afternoon last month, Dina was walking to a market with her father. As the two walked, El-Gohary noticed smoke and vapors coming off Dina’s jacket. The canvas was sizzling and dissolving. Someone had poured acid over the jacket. El-Gohary ripped it off her and threw it away.
“I asked people if they saw what happened and everyone said, ‘No, we didn’t see anything,’” El-Gohary said.
Luckily, Dina was not physically injured in the attack, but since then she has been terrified to go outside.
“I am very, very scared,” she said. “I haven’t gone outside since the attack happened.”
Change of Faith
El-Gohary, also known as Peter Athanasius, became a Christian 36 years ago while attending an academy for police trainees. During his second year of school, he became good friends with his roommate, a Copt and the only Christian in the academy. After watching cadets harass his roommate for praying, El-Gohary asked him why the others had ridiculed him.
“For me, it was the first time I had heard something like that,” El-Gohary said. “I didn’t have any Christian friends before, and I didn’t know about the level of persecution that takes place against Christians.”
Eventually, El-Gohary asked his friend for a Bible and took it home. His family tried to dissuade him from reading it.
“No, you can’t read the Bible,” his father told him. “It’s a really bad book.”
Undeterred, El-Gohary began reading the Bible in the privacy of his room. In the beginning, he said, the Bible was difficult to understand. But El-Gohary concentrated his efforts on the New Testament, and for the first time in his life, he said, he felt like God was speaking to him.
El-Gohary read the account of Jesus meeting the woman caught committing adultery, and the level of mercy that Jesus showed her transformed him, he said.
“Jesus said, ‘If anyone among you is without sin, then let him throw the first stone.’ The amount of forgiveness and love in this story really opened my eyes to the nature of Christianity,” El-Gohary said. “The main law that Jesus talked about was loving God ‘with all your heart, soul and mind.’ The basis of Christianity is love and forgiveness, unlike Islam, where it is based on revenge, fighting and war.”
Also, El-Gohary said, when he compared the two religions’ versions of heaven, he found that the Islamic version was about physical pleasure, whereas for Christians it was about being released from the physical world to be with God.
El-Gohary said his decision to follow Christ was final after he had a brilliant vision of light in his bedroom at his parents’ home, accompanied by the presence of “the peace of God.” El-Gohary said at first he thought he was seeing things, but then his father knocked on the door and demanded to know why the light was on. He told his father he was looking for something.
Persecution Begins
As a budding Christian convert, El-Gohary went back to the police academy and learned as much as he could about Christ and the Bible from his roommate. Persecution wasn’t long in coming.
One day an upperclassman spotted El-Gohary absent-mindedly drawing a cross on a notebook. The cadet sent El-Gohary to a superior for questioning.
El-Gohary avoided telling academy officials that his roommate had taught him about Christianity, but a captain at the school was able to piece together the evidence. The captain called El-Gohary’s father, a high-ranking officer at the academy, who in turn told the captain to make the young convert’s life “hell.”
Officials were imaginative in their attempts to break El-Gohary. He had to wake up before all the other students. He was ordered to carry his mattress around buildings and up and down flights of stairs. They exercised El-Gohary until he was about to pass out. Then they forced him to clean bathroom facilities with a toothbrush.
El-Gohary was not swayed from Christ, but he decided he couldn’t stay in what he said is the agency that “is the center of persecution against Christians” in Egypt. He tried numerous times to resign, but officials wouldn’t let him. Then he tried to get kicked out. Eventually, officials suspended the police cadet and sent him home for two weeks. At home, his family had a surprise waiting; they had hired an Islamic scholar to bring him back to Islam.
The scholar started by yelling Islamic teachings into El-Gohary’s ears, then moved on to write Quranic verses on his arms. El-Gohary remained seated and bore the humiliation in silence. Suddenly El-Gohary stood up, pinned the man against a wall and started yelling at him; the convert had caught the distinct smell of burning flesh – when he looked down at his arms, El-Gohary saw the scholar burning his hands with thin, smoldering iron rods.
“I said, ‘Enough! I have tolerated all of your talk. I have listened to all you have said, but this has gone too far,’” El-Gohary recalled. “The man said I had a ‘Christian demon’ inside me.”
Hope
As bad as things have been for El-Gohary and his daughter, their dedication seems rock-solid. They said they have never regretted their decisions to become Christians.
El-Gohary said that eventually, he will triumph.
“By law, my circumstance will have to change,” he said. “I have done nothing illegal.”
Dina is not so sure; she said she doesn’t feel like she has a future in Egypt, and she hopes to move to a place where she can get an education.
Whatever happens, both El-Gohary and his daughter said they are prepared to live in hiding indefinitely.
“There are days that I break down and cry, but I am not giving up,” Dina said. “I am still not going back to Islam.”
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