A Christian legal expert details the story of a Christian woman who faced extreme difficulty in seeking asylum after resisting Islam
Soon after Christmas, the first major date of significance in the Christian calendar is the 6 January: slaughter of the innocents.
Those of us from less liturgical backgrounds will scratch our heads and ask the question, what’s the relevance of slaughter of the innocents?
The day marks the arrivals of the Magi – also known as the Three Kings or the Wise Men – visiting Jesus. Soon after the visit by the Magi, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream telling him to flee to Egypt with Mary and the infant Jesus since King Herod would seek the child to kill him.
In an ironic inversion of the Exodus story, Egypt became a place of refuge for the family. Christianity arrived in the country over the coming centuries and was the majority religion until 10th century, when Islam (which had arrived in 641 AD) became the majority religion. Now, the Christian population stands at about 10% (10 million) of the population.
Christians and Muslims now live separate lives and mostly in peace. But things are not easy for the Christian community; especially not for Christian women. Between January 2011 and March 2014, 550 Coptic girls were kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and forced to marry their captors[1]. The same source indicates that 40% of the girls were raped prior to the conversions and marriages. The Research Fellow said that Coptic women who have been kidnapped have also been raped, in some cases by multiple perpetrators.
‘Maria’[2] was one such Christian Egyptian woman that the Christian Legal Centre helped for four years. She was a married, middle class, Coptic Christian mother of one, working in a high-flying role in an Egyptian bank. She and her family lived in a nice area of Cairo; they sent their daughter to a private Christian school and they belonged to a country club. She and her family now live in a bedsit in England, her husband has not worked for 4 years, they have no money and she works in low paid employment. Why?
After leaving university, Maria began working at the large, international bank. This bank was eventually taken over by an Islamic bank. She was the only Christian in her department and her Muslim colleagues tried to convert her. Initially their attempts were inoffensive: sharing Islamic videos and talking to her at work. But she refused to convert. Then their tactics changed. She found herself in trouble at work, accused of committing a fraud, despite being sure that she had done nothing wrong. However, her Muslim mangers offered a way out. If she converted, the problem would go away.
Her husband was away, so she was unable to talk to him and too afraid. Foolishly, she agreed to convert. Apart from a new identity card in her ‘Muslim’ name, nothing changed at first, but soon the pressure was ramped up. She was told that she would have to have her cross tattoo removed, that she would have to leave her husband, that her daughter was now a Muslim and that she would have to wear a veil. Initially, she acquiesced. But then she stood up to her Muslim mangers and told them she was still a Christian and that she would never convert.
Then started a series of events that you might make you think you were reading a John Grisham book. Just before Christmas, two men approached her daughter’s school bus on motorbikes, opened the doors and went in, asking for her daughter. The driver and another bus driver fought the men back, who were attempting to kidnap Maria’s daughter.
A few days later, as Maria was pulling out in her car, a black car blocked her car, and she noticed her manager in the car with two other men. One of the men put his hand in through the window and pulled her by the hair. She started screaming as the man tried to hold her arm and threatened to kill her. But when the men saw another car pulling up, they fled.
Following this Maria, finally decided to tell her husband. They spoke to a Christian priest who put them in touch with a Christian Egyptian lawyer. The lawyer advised that it was almost impossible to change her ID card from Muslim to Christian, and her life would be in danger forever if she chose to remain Christian and in Egypt.
Maria, her husband and their daughter fled to the UK. Why? They had a holiday visa and friends and family in the UK. They thought the UK would be safe and welcome them with open arms.
Their reception? Granted Asylum at first instance? That’s what you might expect given the UK welcomed 20,000 Syrians between 2014 and 2020 under the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.
But no. A Muslim Home Office investigator rejected Maria’s claim, believing that she had made it all up. Worst of all, the investigator in her report repeatedly misinterpreted passages from various international reports and the Home Office’s own reports on Egypt, to make it appear that Egypt was a safe country for Christians.
Did she then get justice from the UK courts? She appealed to the Immigration Tribunal and assumed she would get a fair trial. On the day of trial, her documents, and most importantly her Islamic conversion certificate, was received back from the Home Office. Most shockingly of all, her certificate had been tampered with by someone at the Home Office. The certificate, the primary evidence of her forced conversion, had been lost and the Home Office posted back a photocopy.
The trial then proceeded to hear from Maria, her family, her UK vicar and Dr Parsons (an expert witness on the Islamic world). Dr Parsons told the tribunal that ‘the pattern that the appellant has described of being first invited to voluntarily embrace Islam, then following her rejection of this, being coerced into converting, exactly parallels the pattern set out in Shari’a law.’
Maria produced police reports, witness statements, and WhatsApp texts, all evidencing what happened. Judgment was reserved, and, anxiously and prayerfully hopeful, they waited for the reserved judgment. To their horror, Judge Chaudhary rejected all their evidence as it was all too ‘incredible’.
Again, she appealed, this time to the Upper Tribunal. Thankfully, Maria finally received justice. The court overturned the verdict as the judge had not properly considered all the documents that were put before the tribunal and there was a ‘total absence of reasoning’ at times given for rejecting the expert’s opinion.
The case was remitted for retrial before a different judge, and a few weeks later Maria wept with joy that when the verdict arrived – the judge believed her. She and her family had finally got justice: three years after her arrival in the UK, they were granted asylum.
Sadly, this is not a one-off event.
The case provides tragic insight to Christian persecution in the Islamic world (most particularly Egypt) and the Islamic influence on the Home Office and the Courts. In March 2019, the Independent newspaper reported that an Iranian Christian had been refused asylum by a Home Office official on grounds which strongly implied there was direct, conscious bias on the part of the Home Office assessor. The refusal letter, photographs of part of which were subsequently published by another newspaper, stated that passages in the Bible were “inconsistent” with his claim to have converted to Christianity after discovering it was a “peaceful” faith. It then went on to claim that Revelation, the last book of the Bible, was filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence” citing six extracts from it, before concluding “These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a ‘peaceful’ religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge.”
Reports state that often Christians are asked “Bible trivia” to ‘prove the genuineness of their faith. Examples include: “Can you name the twelve apostles?” and “when is Pentecost?”. Many mature Christians would struggle with these questions, given that Christianity is about faith in Jesus Christ, not facts and figures.
Frequently, the Home Office provides Muslim interpreters and the Home Office investigator will often be Muslim as well. It is suspected that the system has been manipulated to stop real Christians, especially converts, from getting asylum.
During the Syrian war, non-Sunni minorities, including Christians, were disproportionately underrepresented to a very significant extent in Asylum acceptances.
Christians need to be salt and light and speak up for all those that are vulnerable but most especially ‘as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.’
[1] According to the Association of Victims of Abduction and Forced Disappearance, as cited by the Christian Post and others,
[2] Name changed for confidentiality
