Yes.
Thank you very much for inviting me here to discuss this issue. I think it's highly important to know that we are here because of the last event, and the uniqueness of this event is that military, police, and Islamists, all of them, operated on one ground, which is religion. Now we will shed light on how the military or interim government behaved or what kind of attitude it has.
I'm not going to dwell too much on the incidents because all of them are recorded in many avenues, but I want to shed light on the causes and why this is happening in Egypt.
After the invasion of Arabs to North Africa in 641, Muslims persecuted Egyptians up and down, but they had managed to co-exist until 1970, when Sadat introduced the second article in the constitution, which, in sharia law, is the source of legislation. That automatically changed the attitude of everyone on how this country should perform.
It is important to look at the context of militant Islamism in Egypt. It's easy to understand that the more Islamism we have in Egypt, the more violation to minorities. With sharia, by definition, any non-Muslim is considered a second-class citizen. Introducing sharia law in the constitution automatically defines the identity of each person based on whether they are a Muslim or Christian. Any legislation will affect whether you are a Muslim or a Christian; it defines the line of identity of every individual.
In Egypt, we shed light on discrimination in the legal framework. Once sharia law was in place, it automatically affected the freedom of religion, the international law, and all other things. Although we have section 2 in our constitution, sharia law introduced articles 40 and 46 in the same constitution. The first one says that everybody is equal in this country. Article 46 says that everybody has the right to practise his or her religion. Yet after the assassination of Sadat, these were lifted and it was left to the courts to run any case according to what they liked. The tendency is to run it as per the constitution, section 2, which is sharia law.
With regard to international law, the president has a right to sign any agreement with any international set-up, any country, but the limits of any agreement end where sharia law starts. If the agreement is complicit with sharia law, it becomes accepted; if not, then it ends right there. That's why the government in Egypt is willing to sign any agreement, but when it comes to the application, they will stop it right there because it does not comply with their sharia law.
When it comes to discrimination at a local level, it has affected four areas: conversion, day-to-day difficulties, family law, and building churches.
With respect to conversion, any Muslim who changes his or her religion and becomes apostate is given a period of time to repent. If she or he fails to repent, then imprisonment--or maybe termination--is required. If any Christian is willing, they are welcome to convert from Christianity to Islam, yet he or she cannot reverse it. If he--or she--personally reverses his belief, it will be on his ID card that he previously adopted Islam. He automatically becomes a target in every avenue of life.
Many adopted Christianity, but they were captured and tortured--in prison, at the airports, and everywhere. I'm not going to go through the cases; we can discuss them later.
Under family law, any Muslim can marry any Christian, but the Christian must convert to Islam and must divorce and consider her husband as apostate. The offspring, the children, must be Muslims. If need be, their children will be taken away from the mother and handed over to another person or another mother to be raised according to the Koran or sharia law.
On building churches...this is a long story. In 1856 a law was issued saying that permission to build any church should be given by the president or the government of the country. In 1999 President Mubarak lessened that by saying that repairs may be allowed. In 2005 he retracted that and said that it was up to the government of each area to decide whether permission for the building a church could be issued. Until today we have seen nothing, because it's up to the government to decide.
In regard to Christians in positions of authority, sharia law says that non-Muslims cannot seek authority over a Muslim, so automatically you will not see any Christian as an ambassador or a professor or someone of high rank in any area. There has been silent discrimination now for so many years. People say: “Too bad. You're so good, but you're Christian. We cannot give a job to you.” So what's happening right now is that all the people who have projects and money in Egypt are Christians and try to hire Copts, and the opposite is correct. In fact, they are trying to force business people to hire Muslims as much as they hire Christians, but the opposite is not correct.
In conclusion, I'm not too sure we can describe what's happening in the Arab world as the Arab Spring. I would call it Islam Spring. And we have to pay attention to that, because spreading from Tunisia, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia, and all around that area, they're all adopting sharia law. Any international institution, including the United Nations, has to look at this, not necessarily at a democratic level, but in fact it is concerning, alarming, because the level of democracy and the language that we use in a democratic society do not necessarily have the same definition in these lands.
It has to be taken really cautiously. I'll leave it at that stage.