Yasmin Mohamed
Karmel Kamal El-Din, an Egyptian woman over sixty, married, had children and was divorced, yet she is still listed as “Miss” in her Egyptian identity documents, as recorded in the Egyptian civil registry, because Egyptian law does not recognise Baha’i marriage contracts.
It took Dr Karmel eight years, from 2001, to register her children in Egyptian records as Egyptian citizens, after she married in 1985 under a Baha’i contract that she could not register in Egypt; she was, however, able to register it at the Sharia court in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. She says: “I was able to obtain a certificate from the Sharia court in Dubai ratifying an existing marriage, proving my marriage after I travelled to work in the UAE, and I obtained birth certificates for my children from the Sultanate of Oman, with their religion recorded as (-).”
But the Egyptian authorities did not recognise her children’s registration, and Karmel faced problems enrolling them in schools, while the civil registry threatened to file a “hisba” lawsuit against her, known as “separating spouses”, on the grounds that the husband’s name was Christian and Karmel’s was Muslim.
She adds: “We then filed a lawsuit in which we proved our marriage and our children’s adoption of the Baha’i faith.” Dr Raouf Hendy, Karmel’s ex-husband, was able to obtain national ID cards with a dash (-) for his children, born in 1993, after years of litigation in case No. 18354/58, once they reached the age of 16, according to a statement by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. They then received Egyptian birth certificates in August 2009, after five years of litigation.
Arrest and Referral for Investigation
Karmel’s troubles did not end with being unable to register her own and her family’s papers; she was referred for investigation and members of her family were imprisoned. Karmel says: “My father was arrested in 1965 and 1973, my mother was imprisoned in 1973, and my brother and sister were imprisoned in 1985, for adopting the Baha’i faith. My uncle became our guardian after our father’s death instead of our mother, who in the eyes of the law was not married to my father.”
She adds: “After returning to Egypt, I worked in school health under the Health Insurance Organization, and in 2004 I was referred for investigation on the grounds that I should not deal with students because, being Baha’i, I was a danger to them; but the committee understood my position and I returned to work normally.”
Members of the Baha’i community in Egypt suffer from being unable to register their marriage contracts, which deprives their families of their personal rights, and from the difficulty of having a dash (-), indicating the Baha’i faith, entered in the religion field of the ID card, even though some have obtained court rulings.
The author of this investigation documented six cases of Baha’is who could not register their marriage contracts and who carry “Muslim” in the religion field of their identity cards, while some complained of persecution at their workplaces, which pushed them to emigrate, in addition to their suffering in burying their dead and enrolling their children in schools.
Separating Spouses
The history of the Baha’i faith in Egypt dates back to 1868, when the ship carrying Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i faith, docked at the port of Alexandria because he had fallen ill, before heading to his final exile in the city of Acre. Baha’u’llah stayed a full year in Egypt, during which some Egyptians adopted the Baha’i faith.
In addition to the 1925 ruling by the Beba Sharia Court in Beni Suef Governorate annulling the marriage contracts of three Baha’is for apostasy from Islam and adopting the Baha’i faith as a new religion, the Baha’i faith is not recognised as a religion in Egypt, and there is no count of their number, according to Bahaa Ishak, head of Baha’i media. However, the International Religious Freedom Report issued by the US State Department in 2021 stated that the number of Baha’is in Egypt is between one thousand and two thousand.
Baha’is face discrimination in Egypt because official institutions evade recognising their rights, and the religious and human rights committees in the House of Representatives deny knowing about the discrimination they face. Some officials even preferred not to comment on the findings of this investigation, including the deputy heads of the Religious Committee and the Human Rights Committee in the Egyptian House of Representatives, and former Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, in his capacity as current head of the House’s Religious Committee, despite our repeated attempts to obtain his comment.
Lawsuits to separate spouses in Egypt are old, dating back to 1925, when the highest Sharia court at the time ruled to separate Hamida Farghali from her husband, Hafez Mohamed Fallah, after the mayor of their village in Beba district, Beni Suef Governorate, filed a lawsuit against them and two others who had adopted the Baha’i faith, according to their granddaughter Rouhiya Hassan: “My grandmother and grandfather were joined by an Islamic marriage contract, but in 1925 the court ruled to separate him from his wife on the grounds of his apostasy from Islam, and that he had no right to be married to a Muslim wife.”
The most famous hisba lawsuit Egypt has seen is the one filed against Dr Nasr Hamid (a researcher and thinker in Arab and Islamic heritage and thought), after he submitted academic research to obtain the rank of “professor” from Cairo University, which formed an academic committee for this purpose; but some of its members accused Dr Nasr of unbelief because of what was in the research and books submitted for the rank, and a lawsuit was filed to separate him from his wife, Dr Ebtehal Younes, and the ruling was issued against him after he was accused of atheism, so he was forced to leave Egypt for the Netherlands in 1995.
The Ninth Circuit of the Sayeda Zeinab Family Court also issued a ruling on 27 July 2009 removing the child Aser Osama Sabry from the custody of his parents because they had adopted the Baha’i faith, and granting custody to the child’s mother’s paternal aunt, a Muslim, in case No. 164 of 2007.
According to the court’s reasoning on removing the child from his parents’ custody, a copy of which was obtained by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, “custody is not established for an unbelieving custodian over a Muslim child, because custody is guardianship, and God has not given the unbeliever guardianship over the believer… Muslim scholars have agreed that the Baha’i or Babi faith is not an Islamic faith, and whoever adopts this religion is not a Muslim and is an apostate from Islam.”
Court Rulings Rejected
Hazem El-Hady (a 54-year-old computer engineer, born in Cairo Governorate) registered his marriage in China and the United States, but could not register it in Egypt, repeating the very ordeal of his parents, who married under an Islamic marriage contract in 1965 and adopted the Baha’i faith in 1978, but could not register their marital status as spouses on their national ID cards after changing their religion field to (-), because the Civil Status Authority refused to recognise the marriage.
He says: “I married an American Baha’i woman under a civil contract in Hong Kong in 1992, and began the process of registering my marriage contract in Egypt in 2016, but the Civil Status Authority refused to register the marriage, which led me to file a lawsuit in 2019, and a ruling proving the marriage was issued in 2020.”
According to El-Hady, the Egyptian Ministry of Interior filed a lawsuit to overturn and cancel the ruling, on the grounds that it violated the constitution, the law and public order, and that the court had been deceived because his and his wife’s religion had not been disclosed.
He asks: “Do Egyptians who do not follow the three religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, lose their personal rights?” El-Hady had to file a lawsuit in September 2023 against the Ministry of Interior’s appeal, which is still before the courts as of the publication of this investigation.
According to Bahaa Ishak, head of Baha’i media, there is no official count of the number of Baha’is in Egypt: “We are subject to Decree No. 520 of 2009, which provides for registering with (-) Baha’is who were previously registered, or whose fathers were registered, as such, or under previous court rulings.”
Ishak stresses that Baha’is in Egypt suffer from the state’s non-recognition of their marriages, and that their marital status is recorded on national ID cards as either single or Miss, so that their children do not enjoy their family rights. He points out that Baha’is in Egypt were forced to file lawsuits between 2018 and 2020, and the courts ruled to prove 25 marriage contracts out of 50 for which proof lawsuits were filed during that period.
He adds: “In five cases where rulings proving marriage were issued, the authorities refused to implement the ruling, and two of them were referred to the State Lawsuits Authority. About twenty Baha’is were able to have their marriages recorded on their ID cards, and more than 80% of us (meaning Baha’is) have Muslim or Christian recorded in the religion field of our identity documents, which is the opposite of the truth.”
No Cemeteries for Baha’is, by Court Ruling
After El-Hady and his family returned to Egypt in 2016, they settled in Aswan Governorate for a while, when his father-in-law died, which forced them to travel from Aswan to Cairo to bury him in the only Baha’i cemetery, in the Basateen area, as there are no other cemeteries for them.
It is worth noting that the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights filed lawsuits against the governors of Alexandria and Port Said to oblige them to allocate land to bury Baha’is in the two governorates. The Administrative Court in Port Said, in case No. “398” of 2022, refused to oblige the governorate to allocate a plot of land for cemeteries for the fourth category, “Baha’is”, and the Supreme Administrative Court rejected appeal No. “29171” against the ruling of the Administrative Court in Alexandria, which had refused to oblige Alexandria Governorate to allocate a plot of land to replace the Baha’i cemeteries in the Shatby burial grounds.
The late President Gamal Abdel Nasser issued Law No. “263” of 1960, which ordered the closure of the Baha’is’ religious assemblies and banned their members from any activity, with the funds and “assets” of these assemblies and their centres going to bodies designated by the Minister of Interior. In response, the community submitted a memorandum in 2011 to Dr Essam Sharaf, then prime minister, to reopen the closed assemblies and centres, 51 years after their closure; but nothing changed.
Article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution states that “Islam is the religion of the state, Arabic is its official language, and the principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation”, while Article 3 states that “the principles of the laws of Egyptian Christians and Jews are the main source of legislation regulating their personal status, their religious affairs and the selection of their spiritual leaders”.
Article “64” states that “freedom of belief is absolute, and the freedom to practise religious rites and to establish places of worship for followers of the heavenly religions is a right regulated by law”.
According to Ishak Ibrahim, senior researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, there is no legal provision allowing inheritance to be distributed according to each religion in Egypt; inheritance is distributed according to Islamic Sharia, whatever the heirs’ religion.
Ibrahim describes the failure to allocate cemeteries for Baha’is to bury their dead as unjust and inhumane, forcing some to travel 900 kilometres from Aswan to Cairo to bury their dead, with the resulting financial and psychological burdens, as if they were Egyptians with diminished citizenship. The EIPR researcher called on the Egyptian state to recognise them, grant them the right to obtain their identity documents, register their marriage and divorce contracts, allocate land for their cemeteries and allow them to hold their celebrations freely.
Dr Mohamed Mounir Megahed, one of the founders of the “Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination” movement, attributes the state’s refusal to register or recognise Baha’i marriage contracts to marriage in Egypt being based on religion, calling for a unified civil personal status law for all Egyptians to regulate their relations away from religion, and saying: “The state will not lead people to paradise.”
A Life in the Shadows
Some Baha’is do not disclose their beliefs in order to protect their families, because society rejects Baha’is and describes them as atheists and unbelievers. Hossam Mohamed (50), born a Muslim, adopted the Baha’i faith and works as an employee at a food company in Cairo Governorate. He says of adopting the Baha’i faith: “I married a Muslim woman in 2010, and adopted the Baha’i faith shortly afterwards. When I told her, she said she would remain a Muslim; but we did not separate. I have not forgotten a conversation with a colleague about the Baha’i faith, in which he accused me of atheism, so I decided to hide it so as not to lose my job.”
Mohamed has not forgotten the problems his friend faced because of his faith. He says: “My Muslim friend converted to the Baha’i faith, married a Muslim woman and told her about his religion afterwards. She was convinced by the Baha’i faith and adopted it without her family’s knowledge, and they both remained registered as Muslims in their identity documents for six years, until her family found out about their religion and tried to take their grandson so that he would live as a Muslim and not an unbeliever like his parents, as they put it. This pushed my friend, who works with a band, to flee with his family to Australia, and he has not returned to Egypt since.”
Mohamed adds that his friend’s parents had to resign from their jobs after his father-in-law filed police reports against their son and defamed him on television, ending with him filing a lawsuit to take his grandson. These events forced Mohamed to hide his religion from those close to him, so as not to be separated from his wife or lose his son: “The biggest obstacle I face is hiding my true religion. I take part in Muslims’ social and religious occasions, I perform funeral prayers for the dead in mosques, and I carry identity documents as a Muslim.”
The Search for an Inheritance and the Chance to Travel
Nermin Gamal (37) nearly lost her mother’s inheritance after her mother’s death in 2018, because her mother’s Baha’i marriage contract, concluded in 1982, had not been registered. Nermin says: “My mother died in 2018. We tried to register our details in her inheritance determination, but the court ruled not to recognise her marriage contract, and the judge decided that her property would go to Nasser Bank because, under the law, she had no heirs.”
Nermin appealed the ruling, and the case was before the courts for four years until a final ruling was issued in 2022 proving Nermin’s relationship to her mother and her right to the inheritance, divided according to Islamic Sharia.
Like other Baha’is, inheritance was not Nermin’s only problem; she could not register her son because the civil registry did not recognise the marriage, and the family used hospital reports to prove the birth. Nermin says: “For nine years we could not travel or stay in hotels, because we had nothing to prove our marriage.”
In 2022, seven schools refused to accept Nermin’s child because of their religion. She recounts what passed between her and the principal of one of the schools: “‘I won’t accept your child and I’ll report you to the police; your blood can be shed with impunity.’ This pushed us to inform National Security so that the principal would retract his threat, but he insisted on his position, and my son lost a school year.”
Ishak Ibrahim, senior researcher at the Egyptian Initiative, says: “If the state recorded Baha’is’ marital status in official papers, that would amount to official recognition of the Baha’i faith as a religion, which the state avoids.” According to Ibrahim, this behaviour violates Baha’is’ human rights because of the social problems it causes, pushing some to record in their identity documents a religion they do not believe in, which contravenes international human rights instruments guaranteeing citizens’ right to freedom of belief and to practise it.
Mostafa Mahmoud, a lawyer and legal researcher specialising in personal rights cases, describes the situation of Baha’is as “racist and illegal”.
Baha’is Between Outdated Laws and Parliament’s Neglect
In November 2018, Dr Mohamed Fouad, then MP for the Omraniya constituency, submitted a briefing request to Dr Ali Abdel Aal, then Speaker of Parliament, on Baha’is and their problems registering their papers, establishing places of worship and obtaining land to bury their dead; but without any results or discussion worth mentioning.
MP Monsef Soliman, deputy head of the Religious Committee in the House of Representatives, says: “Absolutely not. As deputy head of the Religious Committee, nothing has come to my attention regarding any discussion of the possibility of registering Baha’i marriage contracts.”
The author of this investigation contacted Dr Osama El-Abd, deputy head of the Religious Committee in the House of Representatives, and Mohamed Abdel Aziz, deputy head of the House’s Human Rights Committee, for comment on the findings of the investigation, but both declined to comment. We also tried to call Dr Ali Gomaa, head of the House’s Religious Committee and former Grand Mufti of Egypt, and messaged him on WhatsApp, but had not received a response from him as of the publication of this investigation.
This investigation was produced with support from ARIJ
