The concerned authorities in Egypt today (Wednesday) decided the issue of the child "Shenouda", which has occupied public opinion during the past months, after his Coptic family received him for "adoption" this morning from one of the social care homes of the Ministry of Social Solidarity.
Amidst a state of joy mixed with "crying", Amal Ibrahim, 51, embraced a "housewife" who found him five years ago inside a church in Cairo, and raised him with her husband as their son, and said: "I was in a state of collapse during the past months… Life without him was impossible..I felt the time of his exit from social care..to embrace him in my chest again.” Describing the Attorney General’s decision to return to his adoptive parents as a “humanitarian decision” in the first place, it embodies the humanity that Egyptians, Muslims and Christians, live side by side in the most splendid way. Her pictures, and she continued, is an issue that does not concern a Muslim or a Christian at all, but rather concerns every Egyptian father and mother, and added that she was denied childbearing after years of passing through doctors, but without hope, until our Lord compensated me with “Shenouda.”
Farouk Boulos, the father of the child, Shenouda, added, while receiving his son, I thank God who responded to us after suffering for many months, and I thank the Public Prosecution. And he continued with tears in his eyes: "My son is finally in my lap, and I will give him my whole life, and I will compensate him for what he was deprived of during a year inside the house, and may God forgive every person who caused harm to this child."
And the Egyptian investigation authorities ordered that the child, “Shenouda”, be temporarily handed over to his family, which found him as a trusted family, after making a pledge to take good care of him, preserve him, and not expose him to danger, and instructed them to complete the procedures for his sponsorship in accordance with the alternative families system, after the Public Prosecution sought the opinion of His Eminence, the Grand Mufti of the Republic in The child's religion in light of the circumstances of the investigation, and he issued a fatwa stating that the child follows the religion of the Christian family that found him according to detailed jurisprudential opinions.
It was the story of the child “Shenouda”, which sparked public opinion in Egypt months ago, when he was found inside the Church of the “Virgin or the Light” in the Al-Zawiya Al-Hamra neighborhood, a neighborhood in northern Cairo in 2018, and he is a child whose age is only a few days old, and he was raised by a Coptic family who did not provide for her. God bless children, and they called him "Shenouda Farouk Fawzi" and his life began to settle in their confines for 4 years, but the winds do not always blow as ships desire. The reason for the communication was the disputes between the head of the family and his niece over inheritance, as she believed that the little boy would withhold the inheritance from her, so she informed the police station that this infant was not found inside the church, but rather outside, and therefore he is of unknown parentage.
After that, the story of the “child” began to take another turn, especially after the DNA analysis proved that the child was not related to them, and he was placed in an orphanage and his name was changed to “Youssef” after it was impossible to find his family, and the concerned authorities issued a new birth certificate with the name Ruba’i. New and new religion.
The head of the Human Rights Organization and the lawyer for the child’s family, Najib Gabriel, took over the case file by communicating to the Attorney General to hear the witnesses to prove that they found the child in the church, and he said in his lawsuit that according to Islamic law and Al-Azhar’s opinion that if a child is found in a Christian place then he is considered a Christian, adding that eyewitnesses and one Church officials reported in the investigations that the child was found in the church, and after 6 months of deliberations between the Administrative Court and the family lawyer, the Administrative Court in Egypt ruled that it had no jurisdiction to hear the case, which led to a state of extreme frustration for the parents, until Al-Azhar’s response came as a lifeline for them. Al-Azhar’s answer was that the child’s religion is for whoever found him, in order to resolve the jurisprudential debate about the religion of children of unknown parentage, without specifically mentioning the child Shenouda, or talking about the issue directly.
Gabriel announced that the adopted child's first name, "Shenouda", would not be changed and that it would remain the same, stressing that he would communicate with the concerned authorities to choose a Christian quaternary name for the child.
As soon as Al-Azhar’s fatwa spread on social media platforms, these platforms flared up with conflicting opinions about how to determine the child’s religion and the extent of the legality of his parents’ position, amid some sympathy for the parents and others accusing them of the illegality of what they had done, and even the matter came to the criminalization of what they did with the child. The case of the child Shenouda opens a thorny file on the issue of adoption and change of religion in Egypt, an issue that has always raised controversy about it.
Mohamed Hefny (Cairo)