An Egyptian court has sentenced a 21-year-old student to three years in jail for insulting Islam after police discovered he declared his atheism on Facebook. The young man had been harassed for his atheist views and had his own father testify against him.
Karim Ashraf Mohammed Al-Banna was tried in Idku city in northern
Egypt. The student was arrested last November when he came to
police to file a harassment complaint. It was revealed that
Al-Banna was harassed in public for announcing he was an atheist
online.
The student was kept in custody till the trial, which determined
he made Facebook posts “insulting” to Islam.
“He was handed down a three-year prison sentence, and if he pays
a bail of 1,000 Egyptian pounds ($140) the sentence can be
suspended until a verdict is issued by an appeals court,”
the student’s lawyer, Ahmed Abdel Nabi, said, adding that they
plan to file an appeal in the beginning of March.
According to the lawyer, Al-Banna’s own father testified against
him saying he “was embracing extremist ideas against
Islam,” the Daily Mail reports.
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This case is not the first trial concerning atheism in Egypt. In
2013 student Sherif Gaber Abdel Azim was handed 15-day detention
being charged for contempt of religion as he created a group on
Facebook called “atheists.”
In 2012, blogger Alber Saber was taken into custody after he was
accused of posting the incendiary film Innocence of the Muslims
on his Facebook account. He was charged with defamation of Islam
and Christianity, insulting the divine and satirizing religious
rituals and sanctities and sentenced to three years in prison but
he managed to leave the country in 2013 when he was released
pending an appeal.
Last August, the Ministries of Religious Endowment and Culture
signed a joint protocol, according to which they are to confront
both religious extremism and atheism and to spread Islam. The
actual Egyptian constitution states that Islam is the religion of
the State and the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main
source of legislation.
The special department of the Egyptian government for religious
affairs, Dar Al-Ifta, reported last December there are 866
atheists in the country which is about 0.001 percent of the
87-million population.