It is 1:30 in the morning on August 15, 1998. A man named Majed El Shafie is in his Cairo office working late. He hears an unexpected knock at the door and, after some hesitation, answers the incessant banging.
A man he does not know asks for someone he does not recognize. He says there is no one here by that name, and the man leaves. Three minutes later El Shafie is being taken away by several soldiers. He is dragged to a police station, where they yell at him, “We know everything about you, but one thing we do not know is who the rest of your team is.”
Majed El Shafie was born to a wonderful Muslim family, most of whom were involved in the legal profession. He grew up surrounded by a library filled with books on human rights, justice, and freedom—and he believed in them.
Upon entering his first year of law school in Alexandria, El Shafie took notice of an interesting problem.
“The persecutions happening to the Christians in Egypt shocked me. I did not understand why this was happening,” he says.
Perplexed, he went to his best friend Tamir, a Christian and fellow law school student—a man who El Shafie later had to bury with his own hands after he was killed for his faith—and asked him why the Christians were being persecuted. Tamir worried that if he told El Shafie it would potentially damage their friendship. Instead, he offered the Holy Bible, saying it would answer all his questions.
El Shafie opened to a random passage, John 8 and the story of the adulteress, which has the famous line “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” From this one passage, he began studying the Holy Bible closely. A year later, he spoke to Tamir, saying, “I now understand. Christianity is not just about going to church and it is not about religion, it is about a relationship with God. I know who Jesus is. He is a flower in the middle of the dessert, an almightily light in the middle of the darkness.” He became a Christian that day.
He also decided that there was a need for action: “The Bible says faith without action is a dead faith.”
El Shafie and Tamir started an underground organization made up of only seven members at first, most of whom were law school students. They called themselves The Blood of the Lamb, and within only two years this organization grew to number 24,000. The Egyptian media referred to them pejoratively as the Black Tigers.
The operations they carried out were going rather well and it was only after El Shafie started writing his book on Islam and the history of the Coptic Church that the government began to take notice. This is when he was taken away to the Abuzabel jail, a place he described as hell on Earth.
When put in this jail, “they change your name in the official files so if any human rights organizations or even your family ask about you, you are not in the files. My name was Ibrahim Sada,” he says. “For me it felt like 700 years.”
On day four of his internment he was faced with a proposition, the offer made by a masked man known only as Officer 27. He said that whatever El Shafie desired he would give him—a bigger house, beautiful girls, a car, and freedom, if he only told the names of his friends and group members. El Shafie said that he did not have the strength to talk and needed food. After eating, he asked for tea. When he had finished the tea he was given, he said: “[It] is a big group. I cannot tell you all their names but I can give you the name of our leader and you can catch him and he can give you all of their names. The name of out leader is Jesus Christ.”
After slapping him, the officer took him to a dark room where there was a piece of wood in the shape of a cross and for the next two and a half days they mock-crucified him, without nails, and placed lemon on his wounds. To this day, he cannot stand to eat or even smell lemon. As he sits in the Greek restaurant where we are doing our interview, I noticed how the servers who know him avoid placing the typical lemon slice on his plate.
While being forced to imitate the suffering of Jesus in that dark room, he counted the ants that passed by in order to keep sane. His body could not cope with the torture and after two and a half days, he was taken to a hospital where he stayed for several months.
After leaving the hospital, he was placed under house arrest and then charged with converting to Christianity, trying to convert the official religion of Egypt, planning a revolution, and lastly, for worshipping Jesus Christ—a charge he pled guilty to. He was then given the death sentence, but managed to flee Egypt before it was carried out
Hiding behind a police station in Alexandria, he realized that the number of countries he could escape to were few and far between. He decided to try heading to Israel first. After stealing a jet ski, he drove between Egyptian water border patrol agents and was captured and detained by Israeli forces. They did not know what to do with him, considering the tenuous political relations involved, and he was placed in a jail where he spent the next year. With the help of Amnesty International and the United Nations he was granted a release and lived for another year and half in Jerusalem under the name Max Smith—an odd choice for a native Egyptian. He was then was given the options of living in Canada, Denmark, or Australia.
He chose Canada. “A cold country,” he says, “but the people are warm.” It was here that he founded One Free World International, a human rights organization that focuses on the rights of all religious minorities and promotes respect for diverse religious beliefs. They have plans to expand to Iraq and China and have recently worked in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—the one location El Shafie does not go himself as the death sentence for him still remains.
In the end there is an element of hope that has emerged from Majed El Shafie’s story of persecution. His experiences have encouraged him to reach out and help those in similar situations. His work will hopefully help those who suffer as he did for their beliefs—something that happens all too often in many places of the world.
