It is dangerous in Egypt nowadays not to conform. If you support the Muslim Brotherhood you could end up joining many hundreds of Islamists in jail.

If you are a journalist, as the al-Jazeera staff know well, jail is a real possibility. Now it appears that if you are an atheist, you could well be jailed too.

A student has been sentenced to three years in prison for announcing on Facebook that he was an atheist and thereby “insulting Islam”. Karim Ashraf Mohamed al-Banna, aged 21, was arrested in November 2014 with a group of other people at a cafe in Cairo.

Police then closed down the so-called “atheists cafe” in what is being viewed as a coordinated government crackdown on atheists. A local administrator told a news website that the coffee shop was “known as a place for satan worship, rituals and dances”.

AFP was told by al-Banna’s lawyer, Ahmed Abdel Nabi, that al-Banna’s father testified against him on the grounds that he “was embracing extremist ideas against Islam”. He was bailed until his appeal is heard in March.

The authorities under Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s regime have stepped up measures to counter atheism, blasphemy and other forms of so-called dissent.

“Atheists are one of Egypt’s least-protected minorities, although the constitution ostensibly guarantees freedom of belief and expression,” said Sarah Leah Whiston, the Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch (HRW).



In December 2014, a wing of the justice ministry that issues religious edicts released a survey claiming that Egypt was home to 866 atheists, the highest number of any country in the Middle East.

From 2011 to 2013, Egyptian courts convicted 27 of 42 defendants on charges of contempt for religion.

Last June, an appeals court upheld a five-year sentence, handed down in absentia to Karam Saber, for his short story collection entitled “Where is god?”

In June 2013, a Coptic Christian lawyer, Roman Murad Saad, was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison with hard labour for “ridiculing” the Qur’an.

In December 2012, a 27-year-old blogger, Alber Saber, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of blasphemy for creating a web page called “Egyptian atheists”.

As the My Secret Atheist blogger points out, atheism itself is not illegal in Egypt. So people who profess it are charged with contempt of religion, meaning blasphemy laws.

Sources: AFP via Yahoo/HRW/My Secret Atheist