13 January 2015

Egyptian student jailed for proclaiming that he is an atheist

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”. [The Guardian] Read more