Egypt seizes an adopted child from his Christian parents and sends him to an orphanage.​ 

Another tragic story surrounding a Christian household has just surfaced from Egypt.

Four years ago, a Coptic priest heard cries emanating from inside his empty church.  He located its source, only to discover a newborn baby boy, apparently abandoned by a mother who bore him out of wedlock.  The priest entrusted the newborn babe to a childless, pious, couple from his congregation.  Considering that they had been praying to God for 29-years to give them a child, they joyously embraced the boy as their own and baptized and named him Shenouda, a popular Coptic name, including of the current pope’s predecessor.

For the next four years everything went well.  The boy—known among the congregation as “Baby Shenouda”—was the pride and joy of his adopted parents’ lives. Seeing him as a miracle-child, a “gift from God,” they spared no care or expense on his upbringing.  Despite his young age, they even managed to teach him the alphabet as well as several biblical verses that he memorized in connection with every letter.

Then the Egyptian state learned about this otherwise happy development.  Because Egyptian law does not allow for adoption, the 4-year-old child was seized from his loving parents’ arms—to cries of “mamma, papa!”—and sent to an orphanage.

The police, the ministry of social affairs, and the family-status court based their decision to seize the child on one thing: because the religious affiliation of Shenouda’s biological parents is unknown, he must be considered Muslim. This is based on Islamic teaching, whereby every human being is born as a sort of prototypical Muslim; they only “lose” their Islam when taught false things or religions (in this case, Christianity).

At the orphanage, the child was forcibly “returned” to Islam: he was issued a birth certificate—marked “Muslim” under religion—and given an acceptable Muslim name, Yusuf.

Above and beyond these coercive measures, it should be noted that Egyptian orphanages are notoriously terrible and overly crowded dungeons where individual children are “swallowed” up into the mass.  There, they are at best neglected, and often have little to look forward to other than a becoming “street kids” and possibly turning to a life of crime on release.