Consider the pain of this family -- only one of thousands:
On February 28, a 15-year old girl named Amira Hafez and her mother went to church in Egypt. Hafez took a quick trip to the store and never returned. When her parents filed the police report, they were fairly certain of who the police should interview: Yasser Mahmoud, an Egyptian soldier stationed nearby that used to protect their church.
Since the fall of Mubarek from power in 2011, Egyptian Christian women have increasingly suffered, from daily harassment in the streets to abduction and forced marriages, from having their Christian jewellry snatched and destroyed to rapes and enslavement -- and the police and courts do nothing to protect them.
Girls that are victims of forced conversions [through abduction] that are lucky enough to escape face additional problems. Firstly, any known conversion from Islam to Christianity (even if one was originally Christianity) makes her an “apostate.” That puts a giant target on her back because sharia’s punishment for apostates is death.
Secondly, the Egyptian government won’t let the girls’ change their registered religion back to Christianity. That makes the healing process extraordinarily more difficult and makes it tougher to assimilate back into the Christian community. It also stops the victim from having privacy. Wherever she goes, she will have to relive her trauma by explaining her story to whoever finds out she is registered as a Muslim.
The problem is two-fold: “twin-headed cultural hydra” of “deep-seeded Muslim and male supremacism,” according to a 2012 report on the issue. They combine in the sense that historically, Muslims have considered wives to be property, non-Muslim women to be loot, and hegemony to be proven by force.
Comments