Egypt: Blogger convicted for insulting Islam

Abdel Karim Suleiman

Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 23-year-old former law student, has been sentenced to 4 years imprisonment by a court in Alexandria for insulting both Islam and the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in articles that he published in his Internet blog. The trial took merely five minutes. The judge sentenced him to three years for insulting Islam and to one year for insulting the president, whom he called a dictator. Suleiman is the first person in Egypt, who has been convicted for nothing else but peacefully expressing his opinion in the Internet. His lawyers announced that he would appeal against the judgment.

Suleiman was a law student of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam’s highest institute of learning [see also the next article]. When he criticized the university in his Internet blog for suppressing free thought and promoting extreme ideas, calling it a “university of terrorism”, they expelled him and pressed prosecutors to put him on trial. He was arrested in November 2006 and kept in solitary confinement since then.

Among the articles branded as insult against Islam is a report with the title “The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it”, describing savage Muslim attacks on Christians, who watched a video clip of an allegedly anti-Islamic theater play in their church in Alexandria in 2005. After publishing this report, Suleiman had been arrested for the first time, but was released after 12 days.

Though many oppositional bloggers were temporarily arrested during the last year - some in connection with the circulation of a video clip showing police brutalities - the Internet remained the major forum of political criticism in the country. After introduction of a harsh new press law in 2006, the press is kept at a tight leash, and there have been repeated violations of press freedom. Suleiman’s trial and conviction has sent out shock waves in the blogger scene, as they could set a dangerous precedent.

The Paris-based press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders has listed Egypt among 13 “enemy-of-Internet-freedom” countries and demands that the United Nations respond to Suleiman's conviction by disqualifying Egypt from hosting an Internet Governance Forum in 2009.

[Bulletin # 165]