A court in Alexandria has blocked the demolition of a church and in doing so set an important legal precedent. The case arose out of a land dispute as to who owned the property the church was built on. However, the Egyptian court not only blocked the demolition of this particular church building, but also established a wider legal precedent that effectively banned other churches from being either destroyed or converted for other uses.
Until recently Egyptian Christians needed special permission from the president to repair churches, which was extremely difficult to obtain. To add to these difficulties many churches were destroyed by Islamists after the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power in 2013.
However, what is significant about this new court ruling was that the court interpreted sharia to mean that it was forbidden to destroy any church building. The ruling reflects the new Egyptian constitution introduced in 2014 after the overthrow of President Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government. Although this stipulates that the principles of sharia are the main sources of the constitution, it also states that the actual interpretation of those principles should be done by the Supreme Constitutional Court. After consulting Al Azhar University, the court ruled that churches could not be demolished because the Supreme Constitutional Court ‘equates the mosque and the church as houses of worship’.
