Tortured for converting from Islam, Egyptian lawyer had Daniel experience

Like the lions in Daniel’s den, the ferocious attack dogs meant to torture Majed El Shafie in his Egyptian jail cell refused to do anything to him. They sat placidly, and one even licked his forehead – to the rage of the guards.

“These dogs are trained to listen to their masters,” El Shafie told Sid Roth. “But there is no higher Master than the Lord Jesus Christ.”

How did El Shafie, a remarkable law student, wind up on the wrong side of law? First, he converted to Christianity from Islam, a big no-no in Egypt, which defines itself as officially Muslim. Then he founded a pro-Christian legal aid organization with thousands of members. But the last straw was he wrote a book expounding his ideas.

On August 15, 1998, the government came after him. “At 1:30 in the morning, I heard a knock at my door.” El Shafie said. “Five officers came and broke the door. They took me to the police station behind the Parliament. They told me, ‘We know who you are. We know about your book. One thing we don’t know is who is rest of your group.”

The feared Abu Zaabal torture prison in Cairo

Since El Shafie refused to name his associates, the police resorted to torture. They escorted him to Abu Zaabel prison in Cairo, known in the Middle East as “Hell on Earth,” where he endured seven days before nearly dying, El Shafie said. He recovered slowly in a hospital.

El Shafie was born into an influential family in Cairo of lawyers and Supreme Court justices. But he learned of the injustices of Egyptian law in his first year at law school, when there were up to 7,000 prisoners languishing in Egyptians jails whose only crime was being a Christian.

“From my knowledge, if there is persecution, it means the enemy is trying to hide something.”

His friend very discreetly dodged the question and instead offered him a different book, one “that answers every question he could have.” In the pages of the Bible he discovered a justice, love and forgiveness he had never known before.

Providentially, he first opened the Scripture to John 8, the story of the woman caught in adultery. “Judge her according to the law of Moses!” the Pharisees cried out to Jesus.

“Whoever of you is without sin, cast the first stone,” Jesus replied.

“The only one who could cast the first stone was the Lord Jesus because He was the only one who had no sin,” he observed. “But He didn’t. He told the lady, ‘Go and sin no more. I forgive you.’ This was my first time to see true forgiveness.” Read the rest of the story.

Another ‘suicide’ of Christian soldier in Egypt’s military

Egypt’s largely Muslim military ruled that the mysterious death in 2015 of a Christian soldier within their ranks was a suicide, despite clear signs he was murdered, his family said.

It was the third questionable death of a Christian within Egypt’s military in the last year.

Bishoy Natei Kamel, 21, was bullied in his unit to the point he could stand it no more and stood up for himself. The ensuing fight resulted in his being jailed and put on trial, but before the outcome of the trial, his family was notified of his suicide and called to bury their son, according to the World Watch Monitor (WWM).

“His body bore signs of torture and extensive violence,” his father told WWM. “His forehead was protruding from swelling. He had an injury to his nose, clear bruises under his arm, his right ear and his right cheek, and other bruises to his back and abdomen.”

Natei Kamel rejects the official version that Bishoy hung himself in his cell and he has hired a lawyer to push for an investigation, but such legal wranglings generally do not go far in Egypt, which is officially a Muslim nation with 88% of population following Islam.

Bishoy’s case punctuates a year of violence perpetrated against Christians in the Egyptian military. On June 24, 2015, Private Bahaa Gamal Mikhail Silvanus, 24, received two bullet shots that killed him at his Air Defense Unit in Suez. His death was classified a suicide, WWM reported.

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