From Barbara G. Baker of Compass Direct comes this report of a persecuted brother in Christ in Egypt...
An Egyptian convert to Christianity is being held in a Cairo mental hospital where supervising doctors have told him he will stay until he recants his faith and returns to Islam.
Gaser Mohammed Mahmoud, 30, was committed to the El-Khanka Hospital in early January by his adoptive parents, with the assistance of local state security police, after they learned he had become a Christian two years earlier. Under the supervision of Dr. Mohsen, director of the hospital's medical committee, Mahmoud was subjected to psychiatric examination and placed in Section Three, a closed ward for mental patients. He has remained there ever since, under the care of a woman physician identified only as Dr. Nevine.
Sources describe Dr. Nevine as a "fanatic Muslim" who had treated Mahmoud "badly" for deserting Islam. Since his forced confinement, Mahmoud has reportedly endured beatings, whippings and potentially fatal injections.
Egypt's Muslim citizens do not have the legal right to change their religion, although non-Muslims are allowed freely to convert to Islam and change their official religious identity. Officers of Egypt's State Security Investigation regularly harass, interrogate and sometimes arrest Muslims suspected to have converted to Christianity.
This, of course, is but one of so many injustices enacted against Christians around the world. Jesus warned us but the sense of tragedy and evil involved in each case should never cease piercing our hearts. Our prayers and our efforts to speak in the defense of the persecuted are more necessary than ever.
