Coptic Engineer Seized for Criticizing Islamic Curriculum
Held since October 5 in Alexandria, he faces Egypt’s blasphemy statute as arrests of non-Islamic voices mount.
Egyptian National Security arrested Sherif Wagih Fahmi, a 41-year-old Coptic Christian engineer, in Alexandria on October 5. Two casually dressed men arrived at his apartment complex around 1 p.m. When his young daughter answered the door, they said they were from the gas company. Fahmi met them, left with them, and told her he was going to pay the gas bill.
Neighbors judged the scene suspicious and recorded the men escorting him into a white minivan. They did not immediately alert the family or show the footage. Hours later his wife, unable to find him, asked around until friends learned he was being held at the National Security office in Alexandria. He has remained incommunicado.
Charges and a widening crackdown
Authorities moved against him over online posts criticizing the promotion of Islamic education to students across the country. Authorities have charged him under Article 98(f) of Egypt’s Penal Code, which criminalizes any use of religion to promote or advocate extremist ideologies with a view toward stirring up sedition, disparaging or showing contempt for any divinely revealed religion, or prejudicing national unity and social harmony.
Since September, 14 people have been arrested for expressing non-Islamic beliefs. The pattern has drawn sharp concern from human-rights monitors who track freedom of religion and expression in Egypt.
Mahmoud Shalaby, regional researcher at Amnesty International, said: “Egyptian authorities must stop criminalizing discussions about religious beliefs, including those deemed as divergent from socially dominant views, or sometimes purely for reflecting and questioning them.” Christian Solidarity Worldwide has likewise voiced disapproval of the growing threat the government poses to freedoms of religion or belief and expression.
A Church that knows the cost of witness
Coptic Christians form Egypt’s largest Christian community and have long lived under legal and social pressures that fall hardest on public speech about faith. Article 98(f) and similar provisions have repeatedly been used against believers who question dominant religious messaging in schools and public life. For a practicing Catholic audience, Fahmi’s detention is not an isolated police file: it is another instance of a baptized Christian paying a price for refusing silence about the formation of children and the free profession of belief.
The Church teaches that religious liberty is rooted in the dignity of the person and that no state may coerce conscience in matters of God. When plainclothes agents use a false gas-company pretext to remove a father from his doorway, and when neighbors must piece together his fate at a security office, the concrete stakes of that teaching become clear. Fahmi’s family still seeks reliable word of his condition; the charge sheet, if confirmed in court, will test whether Egypt’s law leaves room for a Coptic engineer to criticize compulsory Islamic instruction without vanishing into detention.