Replies

Note: The following post is a quote:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1930477/posts

Christian Woman Sentenced To Three Years For ‘Lying’ On Marriage Certificate [Egypt]

AHN ^ | Nov 26 2007 | Joseph Mayton
Posted on 11/25/2007 7:35:29 PM PST by camerakid400

Cairo, Egypt (AHN) - An Egyptian court has sentenced a woman to three years in prison because her father converted to Islam briefly 45 years ago. Under Egyptian law, religion is passed to children from the father.

Shadia Nagui Ibrahim, 47, a Christian, was charged with fraud for putting Christianity as her religion on her marriage certificate, even though she was unaware that her father’s conversion in 1962 had made her officially Muslim.

According to reports, Ibrahim’s father left home in 1962 when the woman was only two years-old and converted to Islam.

However, only a few years later he returned to the family after a reconciliation with his wife, moved back in and re-converted to Christianity.

Egyptian law stipulates that a citizen cannot convert away from Islam, so the elder Ibrahim was forced to forge his documents to show he was Christian.

The main problem in the case is that under the law, Muslim women are forbidden to marry a Christian man, and thus Ibrahim was charged with “providing false information on official documents” for stating she was Christian on her 1982 marriage certificate.

She was sentenced previously to three years in absentia in 2000, but those charges were later dropped. When she was detained this August, after a brief court appearance, the judge sentenced her to three years.