The law can be a peculiar thing; its application, even more so. Every country seems to have its fair share of peculiar and often outdated laws, and Egypt is no exception. The recent high-profile sentencing of Egypt’s iconic Sherine Abdel Wahab is just the latest in a list of peculiar applications of the law, yet bizarre criminal incidents are not new. As such, we thought to create a round-up of some of the strangest incidents. Most recently, pop star Laila Amer was sentenced to two years in prison for ‘inciting debauchery and immorality’ in her music video bearing a play on an Arabic profanity. The video shows her gesturing to a man watching a belly dancer on television, and then being trapped between the man and an older woman as she tries to cook and do laundry. The older woman is assumed to be her mother. At the end of February this year Egyptian singer Sherine Abdel Wahab was sentenced to six months in prison for suggesting that a fan should not drink from the River Nile. The ‘false news’ that she was spreading claimed that drinking from Egypt’s famous…
