Muslim Freedom

CONVERT RELEASED FROM MENTAL HOSPITAL  (Excerpts)

New Christian still suffers from security police torture. 

Five months after he was forcibly committed to a mental hospital for converting from Islam to Christianity, Gasir Mohammed Mahmoud has been discharged from his locked psychiatric ward in Cairo and set free. 

Mahmoud was released June 9 from Cairo's El-KhankaHospital for Mental and Neurological Health, where two police officers from his home city of Suez had institutionalized him last January. 

Adopted as an infant, Mahmoud was raised by [a] Muslim couple, who were alarmed last December to learn that he had converted to Christianity two years earlier. But his father's angry appeal to local Muslim sheikhs prompted them to issue death threats against the son for committing apostasy. 

Initially, Mahmoud said, he was questioned "in a decent way" in front of a state security officer named Mohammed Amar. He was then transferred to another official who brought two Muslim sheikhs to talk with him, trying to convince him to return to Islam. After eight days' detention, eating only food that other detainees shared with him, he was sent to the Suez Security Directorate for an investigation that lasted four days. 

Mahmoud’s supervising physician, Dr. Nevine, had told him he would never be allowed to leave the hospital unless he came back to Islam. But a round of international publicity released in May focused considerable attention on the case, apparently convincing hospital authorities to discharge him. 

Although Mahmoud’s mother reserved a hotel room for him in Cairo after his release, he has since found other lodging through Christian friends in the city. 

Egyptian law forbids Muslims the right to change their official religious identity when they become Christians, although non-Muslims can freely convert to Islam and legally change their I.D. cards from Christian to Muslim. 

Under the virtual impunity of emergency law regulations, officers of Egypt's State Security Investigation regularly harass, interrogate and arrest Muslim citizens suspected to have converted to Christianity (Egypt - Tuesday June 21, 2005, Compass International).

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