We remain in prayer for our brothers and sisters of the Coptic Orthodox Christian Church in Egypt as they are persecuted for their faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Not only they, but our 300,000 Greek Orthodox brothers and sisters in Egypt suffer sporadic persecution, discrimination, and harassment, and as we see so often, frequently Egyptian officials do little or nothing to alleviate their plight.
“Egyptian Christian Receives Three-Year Prison Sentence for Insulting Islam,” International Christian Concern, December 10, 2018:
12/10/2018 Washington D.C. (International Christian Concern) – International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that on November 27, Coptic Christian Abd Adel Bebawy was sentenced by an Egyptian court to three years in prison for “insulting Islam in the first degree.” His lawyer was granted access to the verdict on December 6 and has opened an appeal which is expected to be heard at the end of December.
Bebawy was originally arrested in Minbal, a village located in Upper Egypt’s Minya Governorate on July 6, 2018. He had posted on Facebook an image of God, the angel Gabriel, and a verse from the Quran. The day after he was arrested and charged by the police, a mob gathered in Minbal and attacked several Christian homes. It is common for Islamic extremists in Egypt to collectively punish the Christian community for the perceived wrongs of one individual.
One Christian woman, Mariam, shared with ICC shortly following the July attack, “The mob stoned the houses of all the Christians (in Minbal). The Christians were afraid and all locked themselves in their houses and closed the wooden shutters of the windows.”
The attackers have continued to make it clear that Bebawy and his family would not be welcomed back into the village. He has remained imprisoned since July. Regarding the recent verdict, a close relative shared with ICC how she “was expecting this to happen in the first degree. But what I hope is that he will be freed in the appeal.”
She continued to say that she “didn’t care if [they] had to leave their village or the country, [I] just want his freedom.”…
Photo by Przemyslaw “Blueshade” Idzkiewiczderivative work: MrPanyGoff – Cairo,_Old_Cairo,_Hanging_Church,_Egypt,_Oct_2004.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13171476
