Coptic Christians Marginalized
Image generated courtesy of Photoshop A.I.
“When returned to the police station, Nada [Sobhi Zahi Khalil] was beaten and stripped naked to give false witness against herself in order to protect officials who aided and abetted in her Islamization,” according to Coptic Solidarity.
Khalil is one of many women and young, teenage girls in Egypt who has been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam for the sexual pleasure of a Muslim man.
Khalil described her experience with Egyptian police to Coptic Solidarity:
“I was only in my underwear under the gown, so once he unzipped the gown, I was undressed, standing in front of him in my underwear. He told me: If you don’t say what I tell you, I will bring you two guys to assault you … I was afraid so I said I will do whatever you ask, I was terrified and I was crying. He was telling me what he wanted me to say, which I did, I told him what he wanted to hear, which is that Hussein came to me four times and my relationship was discontinued with him after that. He also made me say that I had sex with Saleh in his apartment, which I never did.”
Coptic Solidarity released a report Jan. 29 highlighting the magnitude of the problem facing the Coptic Christian community. The crime is kept hidden from the general public and false labels of “Islamophobic” are given to those who report on the very real persecution of marginalized Christian communities in majority-Islamic countries.
Sonja Dahlmans, a Dutch journalist and theologian, wrote the report and is preparing her master’s thesis paper in Islamic theory for Melbourne School of Theology.
In the West, our religion is largely a personal, private matter, Dahlmans said, but in some of these states in Africa and the Middle East, your religion is on your identification card and it comes with social and economic consequences in Islamic countries.
Dahlmans added a story about a 70-year-old Christian woman who was attacked by an Islamic mob because her son supposedly was friends with a Muslim woman. The mother was slapped, spit upon, and undressed before being dragged along the streets of her village to shouts of, “Allahu Akbar.”
“There is no real equality for the law,” Dahlmans said, “when these things happen to Copts and when Copts protest against this sort of attacks, they get arrested.”
According to Dahlmans, Islamic states like Egypt will sometimes have secular laws that say it is illegal for underage girls to be married but, in practice, because the constitution dictates that Islamic Sharia law supersedes secular law and government officials will ignore cases of child marriage which can affect Christian girls too, who are abducted and forced to marry and convert.
Dahlmans added, “Sometimes in Egypt, women will even be sexually harassed in the police station by security officials if they report crimes against themselves and some Christian women also stated that this happened to them.”
“My hope lies with the western press. They need to start doing their job and start reporting on these cases,” said Dahlmans, “Because they hold the power to challenge their governments, to hold their members of parliaments - or Congress - responsible and to ask the questions, because only then can we put pressure on Egypt.”
