Egypt: Obssessed with Celebrities’ Religion · Global Voices
Tarek Amr

Nour is a Lebanese actress who has been starring in Egyptian films for the last 10 years. She is always considered as one of the prettiest actresses of her age. Lately, Egyptian newspaper “El Youm El Sabee” (The Seventh Day) reported [Ar] that Nour gave birth to a baby boy and called him “Leonardo”. The child's name helped reveal the religion of the actress, which shocked some of those who left comments on the article there.
An anonymous reader left the following comment under the screen name “Masdoom” (Shocked):
Another reader replied to Masdoom:
And a third reader called “Asmaa” said:
Readers left more than 100 comments on the article. Some where just shocked, and some others like the following reader tried to urge people to be more reasonable:
Traveller Within wrote the following tweet mocking people's reaction after knowing Nour's religion:
In fact, it seems that even Nour herself – whose real name is “Marianne Phillip Abi Habib” – was aware of this, and either she or her producers decided to give her a new screen name that doesn't reveal her religion.
It's not only Nour, but another Egyptian Actress – Basma – was subject to rumours a while ago that her grandparents are Jews. People then had mixed feelings towards such news.
In his blog “The Egyptian Silent Majority” blogger Ahmed Samir wrote about an incident that happened to him some time ago and made him realize how much people are obsessed with knowing other people's religion.
He wrote:
He then continued:
Charafantah wrote a list of more than 15 questions [ar] each one should ask himself in order to know whether he is racist or not. And one of those questions was whether your opinion in someone changes after you know his/her religion.
Finally, just as Ahmed Samir said in his post, it's not always racism or sectarianism, but sometimes it's just curiosity that makes us eager to know other people's religions, yet why are we that curious to know? Why do we even care to know? Will such information make any difference to us?