simply repeated the shahàdabefore the qà∂ì. She
neither rescinded nor apologized for her views.
After hearing al-Fayßal’s statement, the court found
no proof of apostasy and declared her innocent of
all charges.
The international response was even greater
when Nawàl al-Sa≠dàwìwas charged with apostasy.
In 2001, al-Sa≠dàwìwas the best known of the Arab
feminist or women activists, the international
women’s human rights movement was burgeoning,
and the Internet had become a major tool of com-
munication. The case began when a lawyer asked
the prosecutor-general to put her on trial for
“deriding Islam and ridiculing its fundamental
principles.” He said he was motivated by an inter-
view published in the independent weekly, al-
Midan, in early March, 2001, in which al-Sa≠dàwì
stated, as she often has, that the veil was not oblig-
atory. He alleged that she had claimed that the
Islamic pilgrimage was a vestige of pagan practices
and that the Islamic inheritance law, which gives
males twice the share of females, should be abol-
ished due to the fact that up to 35 percent of fami-
lies in Egypt are currently dependent on the income
of a woman. Nawàl al-Sa≠dàwìissued a statement
on 18 May 2001 that was immediately posted on
her website and read around the world. She argued
that the case was an attempt to make scapegoats of
two intellectuals, herself and her husband, Sharìf
£atàta, who had both been active in the struggle
for democracy and human rights. She insisted that
she had only said that caring for the poor was more
important than religious rituals and that kissing the
Black Stone in the Ka≠ba was considered by some
Islamic scholars to be a “historical vestige of
paganism adopted by the Prophet with the aim
of rallying the tribes of Mecca under the banner
of Islam.” Al-Sa≠dàwìcited Article 40 of the
Egyptian constitution: “that all citizens are consid-
ered equal before the law, that they have the same
obligations and enjoy equal rights, that they should
not be discriminated against for reasons of gender,
race, language or belief.” As al-Fayßal had done a
dozen years earlier, al-Sa≠dàwìargued that the
Islamists were using religion to further their strug-
gles for political power.
Like Jordan, Egypt has both secular and Sharì≠a
laws and no law of apostasy. Article Two of its
amended constitution, however, states, “Islamic
Sharì≠a is the basis of legislation.” Unlike Jordan,
™isba, regulation of public morality, is legal in
Egypt, which loosely follows the £anafìlaw
overview 9school. £isbatraditionally allowed any Muslim to
sue another for beliefs that may harm society, but
because of recent abuses it had been amended so
that a private citizen must request the state prose-
cutor to bring suit.
In May 2001, the prosecutor-general’s office dis-
missed the ™isbacase, but the Cairo personal status
court decided to consider al-Sa≠dàwì’s forced sepa-
ration from her husband. Journalists, lawyers,
human rights activists, and private citizens from
Egypt, the Arab world, Europe, and North America
rallied to her defense. After several postponements,
on 30 July, the court rejected the forcible divorce
case and ruled that no individual can petition a
court to forcibly divorce another person.
Both of these cases were sensationalized in the
international media and were major embarrass-
ments for their respective governments. Both law-
suits were apparently more political than religious
in intent, both were well outside the boundaries of
traditional Sharì≠a law, and the presiding judges
eventually dropped both of them. Nevertheless
their legal importance should not be under-
estimated. Taken together the lawsuits illustrate the
intense and ongoing confrontation between advo-
cates of Sharì≠a law and advocates of secular con-
stitutional and international human rights law over
the freedom of women activists to call for political
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