Under the current laws, a Muslim man can marry a Christian woman but if Christian man wants to marry a Muslim woman he must first convert to Islam. The strict rules have led to clashes between different religious sects and in 2013 one man was killed and five others injured in a remote village in Menya province over a dispute about an interfaith relationship.  US-based monitor International Christian Concern (ICC) said while communities have welcomed some of the reforms ushered in by the president they want to see him go a step further.

Claire Evans, ICC’s regional manager for the Middle East, told Express.co.uk: “The older generation, the over 50s, they see Sisi as the best to have come in their lifetime because he has brought in a very positive church legalisation process so churches are being legalised. 

“Before this the churches that had been built were not legal. 

“There’s still a long way to go but so far over 1,000 churches have received legal status. 

“However the younger generation of Christians don’t like the government at all. They think it is harming the Christian communities.

“They want civil marriage laws.”  

Churches in Egypt are slow to approve marriages between different sects and when it becomes to different religions it is even harder. 

Ms Evans said weddings, adoptions, divorces and inheritance settlements can be “messy” due to the lack of common rules for all Egyptian citizens. 

The country’s Christians, which make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 97 million, suffer heavily due to widespread persecution. 

Ms Evans claimed sources on the ground have told ICC that teachers are ignoring children in the classroom simply because they are Christians. 

“Sometimes Christian children are not given the same attention as Muslim children and they are pulled out of school,” she said.

“But the parents also pull their kids out of school for economic reasons because they are poor and the girls are married off young. 

“It is against them from the start.

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“In Egypt we have seen a lesser amount of cases of persecution being reported. That’s not to say cases are not happening but the government has restricted free speech so much that people are afraid to say what is happening to them. 

“People think if you stand up and say, I want more rights, what is the government going to do to you? 

“People are either afraid to say what is happening or else even if you did speak out what good would that do?” 

The recent case of prominent Coptic activist Ramy Kamel who was arrested and charged with terrorism has sparked fresh fears over going public about unfair treatment. 

Mr Kamel had been raising awareness on social media about the poor treatment of Christians in his homeland, particularity the widespread sectarian violence and the targeting of churches. 

On November 23 he who was dragged from his home in the early hours of the morning by seven plainclothes police officers and interrogated. 

He had been due to travel to Geneva to attend the United Nations Forum on Minority Issues days later. 

The state prosecutor charged him with joining and financing a terror group, accepting foreign funding and spreading false information, AFP reported. 

Coptic solidarity, a watchdog group, has dismissed the charges as “shocking if not absurd”.

The group said in a press release: “Kamel is at the forefront of reporting on and sharing footage of the persecution of Copts in Egypt — which many observers believe to be his real crime.”

Mr Kamel suffers from a respiratory illness and his symptoms are being exacerbated due to the poor conditions of the jail where he is detained. 

Coptics are the largest non-Muslim religious group in the North African country. 

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