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
