Woman Gets Prison for "Illegally" Claiming Christianity

(Cairo, Egypt) Here's a sad, but unsurprising, religion of peace news story. An Egyptian Christian woman has been sentenced to three years in prison for "illegally" stating that she is a Christian.

Shadia Nagui Ibrahim, 47, was charged with "fraud" because her father's brief conversion to Islam 45 years ago made her legally a Muslim. However her official papers claim she is Christian, said her lawyer Michael Maurice.

In a statement released by French news agency AFP he said she wrote Christianity as her religion on her marriage certificate in 1982, because she was "unaware" that her father's conversion to Islam two decades earlier had made her "a Muslim".

Her father, Nagui Ibrahim, left home in 1962 when daughter Shadia was two years old, converted to Islam and took on the Muslim name Mustafa. Three years later he reconciled with his wife and re-converted to Christianity. In the process, he reportedly got someone to forge his documents back to say he was Christian. [ ... ]

In 1996, the man who forged Ibrahim's documents was reportedly detained for falsifying dozens of documents and confessed to changing Ibrahim's papers. Authorities detained Ibrahim and also informed his daughter that on paper, Ibrahim was still a Muslim and therefore so was she, AFP said.

Since Egyptian children automatically take their father's religion, Shadia Nagui Ibrahim was charged with "providing false information on official documents" for stating she was Christian on her marriage certificate in 1982 even though she apparently didn't even know until 1996 that she wasn't supposed to do that.

In a nutshell, Shadia Nagui Ibrahim is prosecuted in 2007 for her entry on a piece of paper in 1982 indicating that she is a Christian and, as a result, she was sentenced to three years in prison.