On Sunday, July 28, 2024, a military court sentenced a Coptic Christian conscript to three years in prison for “blasphemy” against Islam.
According to court documents, Yusuf Sa‘d Hanin was charged with “committing behavior that is harmful to discipline, order, and military requirements,” after he exchanged, what prosecution called, “statements offensive to Islam” in a private conversation via Messenger.
These “offensive” statements were made last May, 2024, while Yusuf was on leave from compulsory military service, and celebrating Easter with his family in his residence in Beni Suef governorate. During this time, Yusuf got into a verbal altercation and exchanged insults with a Muslim man via text.
The Muslim man immediately broadcast what the Christian said, which were private, personal exchanges. This, as is often the case, instantly provoked unrest among the Muslim populace of his village. Local officials, however, managed to quell the nascent uprising by assuring Muslims that the Christian would pay.
On the next day, Yusuf returned to the Central Security camp, to resume his military training. He was seized and taken blindfolded to a National Security headquarter, where he was savagely beaten, insulted, and interrogated, including on whether he was following any Christian preachers or involved in any Coptic organizations, all of which he denied.
Soon thereafter he was sent to and sentenced by a military court to three years’ imprisonment.
Yusuf Sa‘d Hanin’s case is hardly unique. According to a Nov. 19, 2021 report, “An Egyptian court sentenced an 80-year-old-intellectual … to five years in prison over his remarks on the early Islamic conquests.” Dr. Ahmed Abdu‘ Maher, a high-profile lawyer, expert on Islam, and author of 14 books on Islamic history and jurisprudence, was found guilty of “contempt of Islam, stirring up sectarian strife and posing a threat to the national unity.”
His “crime” was to have written an honest history concerning Islam’s spread—which, according to Arabic sources, was replete with violence, atrocities, slavery, and the rest.
Perhaps one of the most notorious cases occurred in 2015. Then, three Christian teenagers were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for “blasphemy.” A fourth defendant, 15, was handed a juvenile detention for an indefinite period. Earlier they were detained for 45 days and, like Yusuf, subjected to “ill-treatment.”
Their crime was to have made a 20-second video on a mobile phone mocking the Islamic State — an act which was, rather tellingly, interpreted as mocking Islam. In the video, the boys appear laughing and joking, as they pretend to be ISIS members praying and slitting throats. The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent rights group, confirmed that the four teenagers were performing scenes “imitating slaughter carried out by terrorist groups.” Even so, according to their defense lawyer, Maher Naguib, the Christian youths “have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife…. The judge didn’t show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment.”
Considering that even Egypt’s Al Azhar — the Islamic world’s most prestigious university —refuses to denounce the Islamic State as being un-Islamic, it is not surprising that mockery of ISIS is seen as synonymous with mockery of Islam.
One can go on and on with examples of Christians being punished and imprisoned for blasphemy in Egypt. One young Christian man was sentenced to six years for “liking” an Arabic-language Facebook page administered by Muslim converts to Christianity. A female Christian teacher was imprisoned for six months after Muslim parents accused her of insulting Islam and evangelizing. Bishoy Armia Boulous, a Muslim convert to Christianity, was imprisoned on trumped up charges of blasphemy, according to his lawyer.
Although Egypt is not as well-known as other Muslim nations for its blasphemy codes—Pakistan chief among them—here, then, is a reminder that censorship of and punishment for anything that might be deemed unflattering to Islam is alive and well in the Land of the Nile.