WATANI International
15 June 2011
The administrative court, headed by Judge Kamal al-Lamei, has overruled the demand by Islamist lawyers that Kamilia Shehata, the wife of the priest Taddaus Samaan of Deir Mawwas, appears before the court.
Shehata who had left her home back in July 2010 following domestic problems, was found a dew days later by the police and returned to her church and family. Islamists since then claimed Shehata had converted to Islam and was being held by the Church to force her to remain Christian. Despite official declarations by al-Azhar, the only body in Egypt authorised to enact Islamic conversions, that Shehata had never so much as stepped into al-Azhar, and despite her appearance with her husband and little son on TV to declare they were back as a family together, Islamists held their stance. They staged countless violent, abusive demonstrations in Alexandria and Cairo demanding that she be handed over to them, and went to court requesting her appearance in public to declare her religion.
Last Tuesday, the court overruled the demand that Shehata appears before the court, on grounds that the court was not mandated to look into matters of faith, since freedom of belief was mandated by the Constitution. The judge declared the court was in session to verify Shehata was not being held against her will, a matter which had nothing to do with faith.
The court adjourned to 28 June.
The session witnessed a hot debate between Shehata’s lawyer, Naguib Gabrail, and the Islamist lawyers who claimed Shehata’s case was a national security issue, since it set the sectarian scene in Egypt on fire.
“If we consider this one woman’s case a national security issue,” Gabrail commented, “then what can we say about the scores of Christian women—many of them underage, meaning they are not legally qualified to get married or to convert to another religion—who have gone missing, and their destiny kept in the dark? What about the Christian children who are taken away form the bosoms of their Christian mothers and placed with their fathers and stepmothers simply because their father converted to Islam so the children must—by law—follow suite? What can we say about the thousands of Christians who had converted to Islam either of their own accord or because they had to since their fathers had at one point converted, and were all deprived of their prerogative to revert to their original Christianity?”