INFLUENTIAL Muslim clergymen are trying to stymie a new bill submitted by Parliament's Health Committee for sterilising poor couples.
With the undivided support of conservative families and law professors, the clergymen are claiming that the bill 'defies the divine rule'.
So far, Coptic clergymen in Egypt have declined to comment.
The infuriated Muslim clergymen are also protesting that the new bill will also allow pregnant women to have an abortion if their unborn child is not developing properly and healthily.
In its bill, the Health Committee, led by prominent cardiologist Hamdi el-Sayyed, claims that sterilisation will help poor families to lead better lives.
The angry sheikhs appear to be confident of winning the Doctors' Union, which is also led by the cardiologist, has strongly rejected such 'an outrageous and cruel' solution for poverty.
The union's shocked members have also vowed that they will not allow poor people to be punished in this cruel way, physically and biologically, for their poverty.
Law professors, sociologists, social workers and human rights organisations have also taken sides with the sheikhs, in anticipation of the forthcoming battle.
Prof. Mohamed Mukhtar el-Mahdi from Al-Azhar (the highest Muslim institution in Egypt) maintains that the people behind the bill are using an axe to chop away at the foundations of the Muslim faith and its creed.
In his thunderous criticism of the new bill, el-Mahdi, who is the head of the Gamiya Sharieya (a conservative Muslim society, which uncompromisingly sticks to the teachings
of the Prophet Mohamed), says:
“This bill is a cunning step by
Parliament's Health Committee to challenge the credibility and integrity of the Muslim faith.”
El-Mahdi discloses that the bill includes resolutions announced at the UN's ICPD (International Conference for Population and Development), held in Beijing in 1995.
“The resolutions concluded at that conference fly in the fact of religions and people's time-honoured traditions and norms,” the sheikh
says, adding that certain laws
already approved in Egypt, such as raising the minimum age at which a
girl can get married to 18, were ratified after Beijing had recommended them.
The bill has been described by Prof. Mohamed Raafat Osman of Al-Azhar University as reviving the chaos that existed before Islam. Osman, a member of the Islamic Research Academy, denies that poverty should justify abortion and that the improper development of the foetus is a good reason for condoning abortion in Muslim society.
Meanwhile, a senior professor of criminal law says that it would be an insult to the time-honoured reputation of the Egyptian People's Assembly (the Lower House of Parliament) to debate this outrageous bill. Prof. Fawziya Abdul-Sattar from the Cairo University's Faculty of Law, protests: “Abortion is not part of Islam.”
She describes the bill as an abuse of human rights. “It's an insensitive and improper bill,” she told the press.
Members of the Health Committee have also come under harsh attack from Hafez Abu Seda, the Secretary-General of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.
Describing abortion as murder, Abu Seda says: “Saving the family by sterilising the woman is offensive in any society.”
