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Cairo: A recent court ruling, obliging the Coptic Orthodox Church to allow divorced followers to remarry, has triggered rifts among Christian Egyptians, who account for around 10 per cent of this predominantly Muslim country of 76 million.
The ruling, passed by the Higher Administrative Court earlier this month, was condemned by Pope Shenouda, who is Egypt's top Christian cleric.
"The Church is committed to the Bible and anything that violates this Holy Book cannot be adopted," Shenouda said in a sermon last week.
He explained that the Bible allows the divorce of Christian couples only if one of them has committed adultery.
"If the innocent partner seeks marriage later on, the Church permits his/her to do so, but never allows the adulterer to remarry. No one can oblige us to deviate from the teachings of the Bible."
An estimated 25,000 Egyptian Christians have obtained civil divorce rulings, but the Church refuses to recognise them, affirming that the judiciary has no right to interfere in "such religious affairs."
The Coptic Church has said it will appeal the recent court ruling.
Sacred principles
"The Higher Administrative Court has overstepped its jurisprudence," Najeeb Gabriel, a Christian lawyer, said in press remarks.
"Marriage is part of the Church's sacred principles. Therefore, marriage cannot be reduced to a civil contract," added Gabriel.
Disagreeing, Coptic activist and writer Jamal Assad faults Pope Shenouda's interpretation of the Bible on the issue of divorce.
"If we contemplated the Bible, we would find that the only verse that speaks of adultery, if literally interpreted, would make us all adulterers," Assad told Gulf News.
Christ, noted Assad, is quoted as saying that he who looks at a woman and desires her has committed adultery.
"This literal interpretation of the Bible does not agree with the spirit of the text nor the problems now facing the Coptic community," argued Assad.
Christian secularists plan to discuss the issue at a conference due later this month, according to organisers.
"Shenouda's perception of adultery is limited to physical adultery. He must heed the fact that the man's humiliation of his spouse for many years makes their life miserable and warrants divorce," Kamal Zakher, a Coptic secularist and an organiser of the upcoming conference, told this paper.
The Orthodox Church's uncompromising stance on divorce and remarriage has prompted many Coptic Christians to convert to other sects or to Islam so that they can divorce their Christian spouse. This conversion has not been without problems, though.
On several occasions, the converts reverted to Christianity after they had been officially recognised as Muslims on their identity cards. The authorities refused to recognise this reversion until recently when a court ruled that 12 Christians, who had converted to Islam and then reverted to Christianity, be referred to as Christians in official documents, provided their previous conversion to Islam is stated on their IDs to "prevent social confusion."
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