WATANI International
22 May 2011
She was Abeer Talaat Fakhry, born in 1985 into a Christian family in the Upper Egyptian province of Assiut, one of three sisters to a single brother. Today, she is Asmaa’ Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, the young woman who converted to Islam in September 2010, and on whose account so much carnage and death was inflicted upon the Copts of the neighbourhood of Imbaba in Giza some two weeks ago. But she is known in the Egyptian media simply as “Abeer”.
In prison
Today, Abeer is an inmate of Qanater Prison where she has been held—her two-year-old daughter is with her—since Thursday 12 May for 15 days pending investigation. Following the Imbaba incident, she handed herself over to the authorities. Abeer was charged with forgery since she was cited as “Miss” in her conversion certificate even though she was married then and had a daughter; bigamy since she married, albeit urfi (unofficially), the young Muslim Yassin Thabet while still legally the wife of another man; and being the cause of public unrest.
Thabet has also been caught and imprisoned for 15 days pending investigations on charges of inciting sedition.
In the interval between the Imbaba violence and the day Abeer handed herself over, she gave several interviews to the media. Some believed her story which in many instances sounds perfectly likely, while many felt she was not telling the truth. “She says something then goes back on it. Her stories are full of gaping holes,” one blogger commented.
How credible?
So what is Abeer’s story, after all? And what credibility does it carry with readers or listeners?
In the absence of solid information, Internet blogs and comments offered some insight to Abeer’s credibility.
Islamic sites, in general, highly applauded the story and took it at face value, questioning nothing. On sites of no religious affiliation or on Christian sites, however, Abeer’s story raised eyebrows.
Abeer says she ran away from an abusive Coptic husband and unsupportive parents, taking with her Mariam, her daughter who was then one year and four months old. Abeer converted to Islam and married her Muslim husband Yassin Thabet. All this sounds highly likely. Her second husband may have abused her too, otherwise why should she move to the town Benha, north of Cairo, with the aid of one Gaafar who she describes as a friend of her husband’s.
Abeer’s story goes that, upon some dispute over a petty sum of money with Gaafar, he tells her father of her hiding place. Her father takes her back to Assiut—bloggers found it weird that all throughout, her husband was not there at any point to either prevent her from falling into her father’s hands or, later, to rescue her. “If Yassin was able to recruit all those thousands in Imbaba to rescue his ‘wife’,” one comment said, “how was it that she was taken from under his nose and travelled all the way to Assiut while he did nothing?”
Huge risk
And so it was that, in March 2011, Abeer’s father reportedly hands her to the church in Assiut. It is an open question whether or not she admitted to the Church that she had converted. In one interview she says she did and claims she was imprisoned and tortured to go back to her original Christianity; in another she says she did not but was still kept forcefully anyway.
A Church source familiar with cases of returnees to Christianity and all the legal quagmire involved told Watani on condition of anonymity that it is very unlikely that the Church could have kept Abeer against her wishes. “Apart from the fact that it goes against all the very basic tenets of Christianity to force anyone to become Christian—how can she be made to pray or partake of Communion if she is in her heart a non-believer, to say the least,” the source said. “Apart from that, and even assuming she was kept against her will, her presence would have represented a ticking time bomb. The Church would have never taken such a huge risk to its own security. The only thing that makes sense is that Abeer should have told the Church that she had converted while under desperate circumstances and wished to go back to the faith. Then, and only then, could the Church have been under moral obligation to help her out,” the source said.
Especially indicative
In all cases, whether as a Muslim convert who wished to go back to being Christian, or as a young Coptic wife and mother who needed shelter because she had fled an abusive husband, the Church might have offered Abeer protection.
But Abeer says it was not protection she was offered, it was imprisonment and torture. A ‘priestess’ took care of her while she was imprisoned, she says. The Coptic Church does not ordain women priests, as Coptic bloggers were quick to note. She says she was tortured, moved from the monastery of the Holy Virgin in Assiut —again, bloggers retorted that the Holy Virgin’s was a monastery not a convent; no women were allowed in there—then to the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Abbasiya, Cairo, for more torture, and finally to a church-owned ‘home’ in Imbaba. Mar-Mina’s in Imbaba does own such a home.
At that point, Abeer’s story goes that she was able to somehow avail herself of a cell phone through which she called her husband and asked him to come to her rescue.
When the riots began in Imbaba on that fateful Saturday afternoon, Abeer says she received a call, presumably on that same cell phone—which gave rise to wry comments that her ‘prison keepers’ must have been so kind to allow her to keep her own cell phone. An army officer on the other end said he would come to rescue her, but would she just step outside. Abeer says she became so terrified that she hung up. A ‘nun’ then comes in and tells her there’s too much trouble on her account so she must directly leave. “I am innocent of your blood,” the ‘nun’ says, according to Abeer. The ‘nun’s’ remark is particularly indicative; it implies a sense of having to abandon Abeer, not to set her free.
So much pain
The hardest part to swallow in Abeer’s story was yet to come, however. Outside the home in Imbaba, she says she “carried her daughter, took a tuk-tuk and left”. “Why didn’t she go out to the thousands of Islamist rioters who were out there vowing not to go away without her, and already attacking all the Copts in the neighbourhood for her sake?” several comments asked. “The girl is a miserable wretch who led a hard life, but she’s rather stupid and a very big liar,” one comment on Watani’s site said.
Bearing in mind that truth may sometimes be stranger than fiction, the public will probably have to wait for the truth to come out. That is, if it ever does.
And in all cases, no matter what the truth may be, it is obvious so many social ills lie behind the tale which should never have metamorphosed into so much pain for so many people.