Author: Nadia Abou El-Magd
Publication: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Date: February 22, 2007
URL: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Egypt_Blogger.html
An Egyptian blogger was convicted Thursday
and sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam, the Prophet Muhammad
and Egypt's president, sending a chill through fellow Internet writers who
fear a government crackdown.
Abdel Kareem Nabil, a 22-year-old former student
at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, an Islamic institution, was a vocal secularist
and sharp critic of conservative Muslims in his blog. He also lashed out often
at Al-Azhar - the most prominent religious center in Sunni Islam - calling
it "the university of terrorism" and accusing it of encouraging
extremism.
His conviction brought a flood of condemnations
from Amnesty International and other international and Egyptian rights group
and stunned fellow bloggers.
"I am shocked," said Wael Abbas,
a blogger who writes frequently about police abuses and other human rights
violations in Egypt. "This is a terrible message to anyone who intends
to express his opinion and to bloggers in particular."
Judge Ayman al-Akazi issued the verdict in
a brief, five-minute session in a court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.
He sentenced Nabil to three years in prison for insulting Islam and the prophet
and inciting sectarian strife and another year for insulting President Hosni
Mubarak.
Nabil, wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting
in the defendants pen, gave no reaction and his face remained still as the
verdict was read. He made no comment to reporters as he was immediate led
outside to a prison truck.
Seconds after he was loaded into the truck and the door closed, an Associated
Press reporter heard the sound of a slap from inside the vehicle and a shriek
of pain from Nabil.
His lawyer, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, said he would
appeal the verdict, saying the ruling will "terrify other bloggers and
will negative impact on the freedom of expression in Egypt." Nabil had
faced a possible maximum sentence of up to nine years in prison.
Egypt arrested a number of bloggers last year,
most of them for connections to Egypt's pro-democracy reform movement. Nabil
was arrested in November, and while other bloggers were freed, Nabil was put
on trial - a sign of the sensitivity of his writings on religion.
Alaa Abdel-Fattah, a pro-reform blogger who
was detained for six weeks last year, said the conviction for insulting Mubarak
will "have a chilling effect on the rest of the bloggers."
"We (the Egyptian people) are enduring
oppression, poverty and torture, so the least we can do is insult the president,"
he said.
Amnesty International, the New York-based
Human Rights Watch and the France-based press rights group Reporters Without
Borders - along with a string of Egyptian rights group - warned that the ruling
would hurt freedom of expression in Egypt, a top U.S. ally in the Mideast.
Amnesty said it considered Nabil a "prisoner of conscience."
Nabil, who used the blogger name Kareem Amer,
was an unusually scathing critic of conservative Muslims - and his frequent
attacks on Al-Azhar, where he was a law student, led to the university expelling
him in March. Al-Azhar then pushed for prosecutors to bring him to trial.
His writings also appeared on a Arabic Web magazine called "Modern Discussion."
The judge said Nabil insulted Islam's Prophet
Muhammad with a piece he wrote in late 2005 after riots in which angry Muslim
worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church over a play put on by Christians
deemed offensive to Islam.
"Muslims revealed their true ugly face
and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and
inhumanity," Nabil said of the riots. He called Muhammad and his 7th
century followers, the Sahaba, "spillers of blood" for their teachings
on warfare - a comment cited by the judge.
In a later essay, not cited by the court,
Nabil clarified his comments, saying Muhammad was "great" but that
his teachings on warfare and other issues should be viewed as a product of
their times.
He blasted Al-Azhar, calling it the "other
face of the coin of al-Qaida" and called for the university to be dissolved
or turned into a secular institution. He said it "stuffs its students'
brains and turns them into human beasts ... teaching them that there is no
place for differences in this life" and criticized its policy of segregating
male and female students.
In other posts, Nabil criticized Mubarak,
writing at the time of presidential elections in 2005, "Let's pledge
allegiance to God's representative and caliph in Egypt ... the symbol of tyranny,
Hosni Mubarak ... Say goodbye to democracy for me."
The Bush administration has not commented
on Nabil's trial, despite its past criticism of the arrests of Egyptian rights
activists.
--------------------
Abdel-Kareem Nabil's blog, in Arabic:
http://karam903.blogspot.com/
Nabil's writings on the Modern Discussion
site, in Arabic:
http://www.rezgar.com/m.asp?i432
--------------------
AP correspondent Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed
to this report.
