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Jailed for blogging

In a cramped jail cell in Alexandria, Egypt, sits a soft-spoken 22-year-old student. Kareem Amer was sent to prison for over a month for allegedly "defaming the president of Egypt" and "highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt." Where did Amer commit these supposed felonies? On his weblog.

If the Alexandria prosecutors' standards of censorship were applied in the United States or Europe, thousands upon thousands of bloggers would be behind bars. The basic right of individual free expression is sadly not respected in today's Egypt. Yet the authorities' decision to jail an obscure student for his writing reveals a larger struggle for free speech playing out between dissident bloggers and state prosecutors across the Middle East.

For decades, the region's dictators maintained a monopoly on public information. Newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasts were nearly all state owned. These regime-controlled media outlets toed the government line, maligned political opponents and blocked critical voices. By inverting the watchdog role of the press — in which journalists question, investigate and expose — what should be a critical independent institution was instead transformed into a mouthpiece for regime propaganda.

The advent of blogs in the past few years, however, has altered the playing field. While some regimes — like the Algerian leaders — may still own the main printing presses and control the national supply of ink, any citizen can access free blogging services. Now an individual's voice — even that of a random student at Al-Azhar University, like Kareem Amer — can reach audiences around the globe.

Regimes accustomed to control have struggled to respond. In Tunisia, a Web publisher, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was dragged from an Internet café by security forces and tortured into revealing his site's password after he posted a quiz mocking President Zine Abidine ben Ali. In Iran, authorities arrested a student, Mojtaba Saminejad, after he condemned the arrest of several fellow bloggers and "insulted the Supreme Leader." Daif Al-Ghazal, an investigative reporter for the Web journal Libya Al-Youm, was found murdered in Benghazi — his fingers cut off as a warning sign to anticorruption online writers.

Protecting free speech in the Middle East hinges on the fate of young activists like Kareem Amer. Raised in a strict household, Amer was placed in Al-Azhar's religious school system at age six and watched as his sisters were forced to quit school and wear niqab, the full-body veil. After 18 years inside the Al-Azhar system, Amer rebelled. Rather than embrace the religious establishment, he became a critic of discrimination against women and non-Muslims.

Blogging became Amer's outlet — and his downfall. When Al-Azhar officials discovered a blogpost criticizing extremist professors, Amer was expelled and his case referred to the public prosecutor.
 

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