The long road to divorce for Coptic women
The case of Manal Naguib, beaten to death by her husband, has reignited debate over the issue of divorce among Egypt’s Christians—a process that is almost impossible for members of the Coptic Orthodox Church.
The man received a mere seven-year sentence for killing his wife, while their children are demanding his execution! The victim, Manal, was a mother of three daughters and one son, and a continuous victim of violence at the hands of her husband, Ayman. She endured years of beatings, insults, and death threats. All the while, she was the one working to support her children.
Last January, after two decades of suffering, Manal decided to separate from her husband and file for divorce. The result was a brutal beating which fractured her skull. She fell into a coma and, after a month in intensive care, tragically passed away in February.
The children confessed that their father consistently threatened them with knives and clubs, and would beat and insult them daily. During interrogations, the husband claimed it was a sudden quarrel. However, the testimonies of the children and neighbors confirmed his repeated death threats, in addition to a violent incident a week before the crime.
The biggest shock wasn't the crime itself, but the sentence. Only seven years in prison because the crime was not classified as premeditated murder, or even attempted murder, but rather "assault leading to death."
Maria, Manal's daughter, along with a large number of activists on social media, launched a campaign titled "Mama Manal's Right Must Return", demanding legislative amendments for domestic violence crimes.
Additionally, Manal's four children launched a social media campaign demanding his retrial on charges of premeditated murder with prior intent. They have called for the maximum punishment for their father, stating that they need to protect themselves from him, revealing that he had threatened them that their home will bid farewell to five boxes, and their mother's was only the first.
Controversy flares whenever one of the thousands of unhappy marriages comes to public attention. The inability to escape such marriages stems from a 1971 decree by Pope Shenouda III, who restricted grounds for divorce to adultery alone.
That decision overturned the 1938 statute, which permitted divorce or annulment of the marriage on nine grounds, including abandonment, imprisonment, insanity, contagious disease, entry into monastic life, addiction, and spousal abuse. Why did the late pope take such a drastic step? And how did the church acquire such sweeping legal power over personal status issues?
The Ottoman millet system
The Coptic Orthodox Church exercises near-total control over the personal status affairs of its congregants. To understand how it gained this authority, one must examine the relationship between church and state—an entanglement that dates back some 170 years.
In 1856, the Ottoman Empire introduced the 'millet' system as part of its 19th-century 'Tanzimat' reforms. Under this system, the head of each non-Muslim religious community acted as spiritual, legal, and even political, representative before the Ottoman state.
The millet framework was designed to safeguard minority rights across the empire’s vast territory. Personal status laws and their enforcement were shaped by these arrangements, both under the Ottoman Empire and during the period of the Egyptian nation-state after independence from Ottoman rule and until the establishment of the Republic.
According to scholar Ron Shaham, since the 16th century, millet courts were permitted to adjudicate personal status cases for non-Muslim subjects. But over time, a new phenomenon emerged: so-called “forum shopping,” whereby non-Muslims resorted to Sharia courts to benefit from Islamic legal rules that were more favorable to them. Christian men, for example, would go to these courts to divorce their wives. In a few cases, turning to Sharia courts would be accompanied by conversion to Islam.
In many instances, a spouse would change their denomination, from Coptic Orthodox to Greek Orthodox for instance. Islamic law, the default civil code, would then apply.
Adultery as sole grounds
These use of such judicial ploys continued until 1874, when the Coptic millet council was established. This elected body, comprised of lay Copts (non-clergy), shared power with the clergy over issues like the oversight of Coptic endowments and supervision of the ecclesiastical councils that ruled on personal status cases. Significantly, it also represented the community to the state.
Initially, this communal council’s members included senior politicians and titled elites. Its creation marked the start of a long struggle between laity and clergy over ecclesiastical authority, which had been exclusively held by the latter prior to the council's establishment. This power struggle would undermine the See of Saint Mark for decades.
In the 1920s, to consolidate its authority, the Egyptian state began efforts to unify the legal system and abolish sectarian privileges. Non-Muslim religious leaders resisted, however, prompting the government to backtrack and request each denomination to submit its own personal status regulations.
This led to the promulgation of the 1938 regulations, which remained in force even after 1955, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser abolished both millet and Sharia courts, formally unifying the Egyptian judiciary under a single, nonsectarian system.
Coptic Orthodox clergy were compelled to recognize civil rulings dissolving marriages and to permit remarriage. Though both the millet council and the church repeatedly demanded changes to the statute, the state did not comply.
In 1962, Nasser and Pope Cyril VI agreed to halt the working of the millet councils entirely, granting full control over personal status matters to the clergy. This moment marked the birth of the new millet order.
Pope Cyril formed a church committee, chaired by then-Bishop of Christian Education Shenouda (later pope), to replace the 1938 statute with a stricter one—limiting grounds for divorce to a single reason, adultery.
Preserving the Christian family
Pope Shenouda III ascended to the patriarchate in 1971, representing a generation of Coptic leadership shaped by the Sunday School Movement or the Coptic Awakening. This cohort aimed to restore the historic glory of the Church of Saint Mark by returning to patristic traditions.
That generation came of age amid the spread of Western missionary campaigns, especially Protestant ones, which prompted a defensive revival of tradition and identity.
Just days after taking office, Pope Shenouda issued his first decree: abolishing the 1938 statute and declaring “no divorce except in cases of adultery.”
In a 1999 interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Pope Shenouda defended the move, arguing that the repealed statute had been issued by a lay millet council without ecclesiastical authority. He insisted that the New Testament was the church’s sole source of law.
He also repeatedly stated that the measure aimed to safeguard the integrity of the Coptic family—the cornerstone of Coptic communal life—amidst social changes, in reference to the rise of the Islamist current that was a hallmark of his era.
To protect Coptic identity in an increasingly Islamized society, Pope Shenouda sought to clamp down on divorce as a means of preserving community cohesion. He even urged other Christian denominations to adopt a unified personal status law, aiming to close the backdoor to divorce via confession switching. Yet the state under Mubarak stalled such legislation, perhaps to preserve this loophole and avert potential social unrest.
In 2012, Pope Tawadros II ascended the apostolic throne and inherited thousands of unresolved divorce petitions. The issue exploded culminating in 2015 protests inside the cathedral during the papal procession, which prompted him to initiate structural reforms.
He restructured the ecclesiastical councils tasked with adjudicating personal status cases in order to speed up a process that had been administered for 30 years by one man, Bishop Paula Metropolitan of Tanta. Aside from the severe backlog, some alleged the existence of systemic injustice: actress Hala Sedki secured two divorces, while thousands of women remained trapped.
While often framed as an internal church matter, viewing it through the lens of the modern state raises concerns: Copts are treated as wards of the church, rather than full citizens with equal legal standing.
The church controls all aspects of personal status, starting with marriage. Priests not only perform the sacrament but also serve a civil function—documenting marriage contracts as if they worked for the Ministry of Justice. This fusion of spiritual and legal authority impedes the state’s role in upholding a unified civil law. The church’s unchecked power in these matters risks triggering social upheaval, regardless of Pope Tawadros’ administrative reforms.
Finding a way out
Changes introduced by Pope Tawadros and approved by the Holy Synod in the 2016 statute have reshaped the situation. According to Bishop Marcos of Shubra al-Kheima, who formerly headed the regional ecclesiastical council for Lower Egypt, the church has since issued numerous permissions for second marriages.
The new provisions expand the grounds for “dissolution of marriage”, which now include abandonment, health conditions that prevent marital life, addiction, and domestic abuse. But they still lack recognition by Egypt’s civil courts. To remarry, a person must secure both the church’s approval—via an ecclesiastical ruling—and a civil court verdict.
Meanwhile, the long-discussed draft law for a unified personal status code for non-Muslims, which Christian denominations have discussed for nearly ten years, remains buried in government drawers. Though representatives of the confessions have held periodic meetings with Justice Ministry officials, most recently in February, the bill has yet to appear on the parliamentary record.
Real progress will require not just legislative change but also a critical reexamination of church rhetoric that normalizes domestic violence. For example, the oft-repeated phrase “this is your cross, carry it”—invoking Christ’s endurance of suffering—is too often used to silence women enduring abuse.
A version of this story was published in Arabic on May 19, 2025