News

Abdel Karim Nabil Suleiman's online diary was not so different from the hundreds of blogs run by the hip, young Egyptian intelligentsia railing against the system: A law student who said his goal was to form a human-rights firm, he posted a pledge to defend Arab and Muslim women against discrimination, alongside song lyrics and advertisements against censorship.

But the 22-year-old, who wrote under the name Karim Amer, also made some enemies for his harsh online criticism of radical Islam, for his attacks on the Egyptian President as a "symbol of tyranny," and for repeated criticism of Alexandria's Al-Azhar University, where he studied until his expulsion in March.

The Islamic school is highly respected among devout Sunni Muslims; Mr. Suleiman called it the "other face of the coin of al-Qaeda," and called for it to become a secular institution.

Detained last November and held until his case finally came to trial last week, Mr. Suleiman got just five minutes in the courtroom -- long enough for a judge to read out his sentence of four years in prison, three for incitement and insulting the Prophet Mohammed and Islam, and an extra one for defaming President Hosni Mubarak.

It's a precedent-setting move that has cast a new fear into an otherwise spirited place of free expression for Egyptians, outside the mainstream of state-run newspapers and television.

"The message is really clear: If that is a window that has opened to freedom of expression in this country, we as a government are going to close it," said Fadi al-Qadi, a Cairo-based regional adviser for Human Rights Watch, among several international organizations to condemn the prison sentence.

Across the Arab and Muslim world, online weblogs have become an increasingly popular forum for political dissent not normally tolerated among state-censored broadcast or print media. Writers report about demonstrations and political happenings given little attention in state-run media, debate issues of democracy and religion, and pick apart conservative social customs.

In Egypt, though, bloggers have also done groundbreaking work revealing police beatings, torture and arrests without cause, by the meticulous documenting of court hearings, first-hand accounts of torture cases and posting of photographs and video of police beatings and physical wounds left on victims, including autopsy pictures and, last year, a video of a bus driver being sodomized in a police station.

"They touch places that no official journalist dares to go," said Wael Abbas, a blogger who last fall broke the story of an anti-Mubarak rally in which numerous women were sexually assaulted by police during mass arrests.

He has been receiving threatening phone calls, which he believes are due to his blog, misrdigital, where he publishes graphic photo and video evidence of police brutality.

The audience for such blogs is still limited; the vast majority of Egypt's citizens are too poor or uneducated to have access to the Internet. But their reach is thought to be growing exponentially.

"They have reflected over the last two years a diversity of opinions on politics which you rarely find anywhere else," said Amr Hamzawy, a Carnegie Endowment scholar in Washington and Cairean political scientist. "Bloggers have really helped the ideological division between sectarianism and Islam. You go onto the blogs and you will find you really have cross-ideological discussions going on."

But when the window slammed shut on Mr. Suleiman, his online contemporaries found themselves thinking once again about the risks they are taking.

"I think it is a message from the government to us, to slow down a little," said Mohammed Khaled, whose blog was among the first to have videos of police torture. "But we've already crossed the line until we can't go back. Nobody is going to slow down from the bloggers."

Mr. Suleiman's lawyer, Ahmed Seif el-Islam, has promised to appeal, telling news agencies the ruling will "terrify other bloggers and will [have a] negative impact on the freedom of expression in Egypt."

But bloggers and other human-rights activists practised in Egyptian affairs also believe the situation is not entirely bleak: While they're afraid the sentence will deter some of their more wary counterparts, they think the case has also stirred public interest, and may increase their Web traffic at home and abroad.

"I am worried it will have a chilling effect," said Alaa Abd el-Fatah, 25, who with his wife Manal runs the manalaa.net blog.

He was detained for six weeks last year after a demonstration organized in part through blogs, but says he is not deterred and believes there are many others like him.

"Egypt has a very strong record of activists not accepting these limitations and struggling against them. From what I see, the number of people who are willing to engage, who are willing to accept the consequences, is growing."