Progress in Egypt on some politico-religious issues?
J. Scott Carpenter of Harvard has some thoughtful comments on the Fitna controversy and the related topics of apostasy and its punishments:
in an unprecedented ruling by Egypt’s highest administrative court, the court determined that a group of Coptic Christians who had converted to Islam could have their re-conversion officially recognized. This was proclaimed by the New York Times as something of a triumph to be celebrated: “Egyptian Court Allows Return to Christianity,” it trumpeted.
Although a fairly radical step for Egypt, it was not a blossoming of religious freedom. Agreeing with the lower court that Islam does not envision conversion from Islam to “a less complete religion,” the court required an asterisk of sorts be placed on the returning Christians’ national ID cards. The cards will have added to them the brief phrase: “adopted Islam for a brief period” — marking their bearers as apostates and possibly for death.
In May of last year, Habib al-Adly, Egypt’s Minister of Interior, wrote a memo urging the blanket rejection of all re-conversions to Christianity. Al-Adly insisted that Islam is the state religion, meaning that any Muslim man who abandons his faith should be killed. Happily this was not the case for women. A Muslim woman, he wrote, “should only be imprisoned and beaten every three days until she returns to Islam.”
What is ironic about this is that al-Adly is also charged with protecting the Egyptian state from the purported scourge of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Punishing apostasy is a form of psychological torture that forces an unbeliever to live a hidden intellectual and spiritual life. It should be a crime itself to impose any penalties for apostasy, let alone death or beatings. However, achieving consensus on this would appear to lie a number of generations in the future.