Recently an Egyptian court sentenced 80-year-old academic scholar, Dr. Ahmed Abdu’ Maher, to five years in prison for his honest commentary on the Islamic conquest of Egypt and the Christian Middle East. Dr. Maher was found guilty of reciting ancient Christian and Arab sources of the conquest that described the events in the 7th and 8th centuries as pillage, slavery, slaughter, and discrimination by Arab Muslim invaders who established iron-clad control over Christian areas. Under today’s Islamic blasphemy laws, even the reciting of authentic Arab sources, which accurately—but negatively—portray the carnage of such early Islamic conquests can result in imprisonment.

Dr. Maher first brought condemnation upon himself in 2017 when he asked Muslim critics of President Trump’s “Muslim ban” to consider the act in light of Islam’s own history. President Trump halted immigration from a minority of Muslim countries that were on the government’s list of nations embracing terrorism. The Islamic conquests of Egypt and the Middle East and even current Islamic doctrine, however, call for bringing “enlightenment” to infidels through jihad. Reasoned Dr. Maher:

Friends, in regards to … Donald Trump, we wanted to ask our brothers … a question: if this man … were to coerce, through the power of arms, the greater majority of Muslims living in America … to become Christians, or pay jizya, otherwise he takes over their homes, kills their men and enslaves their women and girls, and sells them on slave markets; if he were to do all this, would he be considered a racist and a terrorist or not? … So I wonder O sheikh, O leader of this or that Islamic center in NY, would you like to see this done to your wife and daughter? Would you—this or that sheikh—accept that this be done to your children? That your daughter goes to this fighter [as a slave], your son to this fighter, a fifth [of booty] goes to the caliph and so forth? I mean, isn’t this what you refer to as the Sharia of Allah? … So let’s think about things in an effort to discern what’s right and what’s wrong.

Dr. Maher’s continued depiction of past events has now earned him what is tantamount to a death sentence in prison. Our question to Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep.Rashida Tlaib, and other Muslim leaders in America is simply this: will you officially protest this unjust decision of an Egyptian court? Will you ask President Biden and the State Department to do the same? In light of your continued portrayal of this nation as imperialistic, racist, and Islamaphobic—can you be counted on to defend the rights of this 80-year-old historian with the same passion you’ve defended the rioters, looters, and arsonists who helped pillage and destroy many of our nation’s cities over the last several years?

The writer has been a social studies educator, founder of Rho Kappa—The National Social Studies Honor Society—and a former elementary school principal of the year for Lee County, Florida. He may be reached at: JSBovee@aol.com

Image: Lorie Shaull, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0

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