Email to Friend  |

EGYPT: CHRISTIAN CONVERT FROM ISLAM JAILED
Secret police flout court order to release former Muslim sheikh.

Din Ahmed Hussein

October 18, 2006 (Compass Direct News) - A Muslim sheikh jailed in Egypt for 18 months has declared from his prison cell that he is under arrest for "insulting Islam" by becoming a Christian.

Egypt's secret police transferred Bahaa el-Din Ahmed Hussein el-Akkad, 57, to the Wadi el-Natroun Prison last month. He was told he would remain there indefinitely unless he agreed to work as a government informer against other converts to Christianity.

According to the prisoner's Cairo attorney, Athanasius William, his client remains incarcerated in this desert prison "only because he has chosen a different belief, to be a Christian."

Arrested in 2005 and subjected to repeated interrogations, the former Muslim was never told the specific accusations against him. But several of his cellmates spread rumors that he was converting and baptizing people into Christianity, sparking verbal abuse and at least one severe beating from a fellow prisoner.

When the courts finally ordered El-Akkad's release from provisional detention months ago, SSI authorities deliberately ignored the ruling.

Disillusioned with Islam
In a series of handwritten notes smuggled out of prison in recent months and obtained by Compass, El-Akkad declared that he had "chosen the Christian faith" after years of research on Islam.

For more than 20 years, the former sheikh was a member of the fundamentalist Islamic group Tabligh and Da'wa, which actively proselytized non-Muslims but strictly opposed violence. He also led a mosque community in Al-Haram, in the Giza area adjacent to Cairo. In 1994 he had published, Islam: the Religion, a 500-page book reviewing the traditional beliefs of the Islamic faith.

But he became disillusioned, and five years ago the sheikh said he began to pray that he could somehow know God personally. It was not until January 2005 that he talked for the first time with someone who explained the tenets of the Christian faith to him. He began intensive study of Christian Scripture, and within weeks he became a follower of Jesus.

"This is a proof to all Muslims," El-Akkad wrote, "that the person who studies the two religions from an objective and serious perspective will choose the Christian approach."

But within two months, word of El-Akkad's conversion to Christianity had reached the SSI, and secret police picked him up without warning from his private trade office.

Desert Prison
Authorities recently transferred El-Akkad to the maximum security Wadi el-Natroun Prison, where the majority of Egyptian Islamists sentenced for anti-government activities are incarcerated.

Notorious for its Spartan conditions in the desert, the prison facility houses its prisoners in small cells measuring one by two meters.

According to William, his client is in weak health from prison, suffering from high blood pressure as well as skin diseases caused by extreme temperatures, unsanitary cell conditions and bites from insects and small reptiles.

"He is locked in a place where he may die because his age, body and mind cannot tolerate this cruelty and stubbornness of the state security authorities," William said.

Although Egypt's Christian citizens are free to embrace Islam and obtain legal Muslim identities, Muslim citizens are not allowed to change their religious identity. Those who become Christians are subjected to severe harassment by the SSI, which often arrests converts for either insulting Islam or "threatening national security."

##