As a follow-up to my interview with a Cairene Protestant pastor, I asked Cornelis Hulsman, Editor-in-Chief of Arab-West Report, for an interview on pious fraud. “I first learned about the term Pious Fraud from my long-time friend Dr. Otto Meinardus, German scholar and former pastor of the Maadi Community Church. It is fraud because such stories are made up, yet it is pious because the person who makes such stories public does so out of the belief that a particular story will ‘glorify God’ or has a beneficial message for the audience. It should therefore not be described as an outright lie. A lie is usually made for personal gain but a pious fraud story is made to edify the audience. Yet, the audience that hears a pious fraud story usually does not distinguish between the meaning and historical facts. In fact many people seem to believe that a story only can be meaningful if it has actually happened in history, recent or a long time ago,” Hulsman says.