Ben Lynfield from the biweekly Jerusalem Report provides a thorough three-page report dedicated to Kareem Amer’s case.

The newsmagazine is print-only, but the reporter has kindly granted the Free Kareem Coalition permission to have the article available as a PDF file for Kareem’s supporters: Deleting Dissent. (Or click on the image below.)

Excerpts:

In a blog about the sacred fasting month of Ramadan posted in October, Soliman argued that many Egyptians fast because of social pressure, not because they want to, and called it the “month of hypocrisy.” He described how when he and a friend ordered meals and began eating them in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Cairo shortly before the end of one fasting day, families waiting for the end of the fast looked at them “as if we came from another planet.” This caused the meal to become “an unbearable torture because of the staring of those around us,” Soliman writes.

The Egyptian army is another object of Soliman’s broadsides. He calls for abolition of the draft, which he says is a form of “slavery” papered over with slogans such as “national duty,” “national service” and “defending the land of the ancestors.” To prove his point that the draft threatens the lives of those drafted, he posted a picture of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier being held in Gaza, on his blog and writes that armies have no right to expose their soldiers to harm “like the Egyptian soldiers who lost their lives on the border with Israel and Israeli soldiers captured by Hamas and Hezbollah.” He accused Egypt’s military of “inhuman treatment” of conscripts.

But Soliman’s fateful, and thus far losing, battle is with al-Azhar, the state religious institution whose role in Islamic jurisprudence extends beyond Egypt’s borders into the wider Sunni Muslim world. Al-Azhar says on its website that the standing of its sheikh, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, is equivalent to that of the prime minister of Egypt. Faced with Soliman’s youthful irreverence, Al-Azhar crushes with the weight of history. It has been around for 1,035 years.

Al-Azhar termed Naguib Mahfouz’s allegorical novel “Children Of Our Neighborhood” blasphemous when it was serialized in al-Ahram newspaper in 1959. Unlike Soliman, who heaps scorn on al-Azhar and vowed on his last blog, before going to jail, that he would not change a word of his writings, the cautious Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1988 and died last year, was deferential to al-Azhar and agreed that “Children Of Our Neighborhood” would not be published in book form in Egypt during his lifetime. A 2004 study by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights documented the activity of al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Council in thwarting the distribution of literary and artistic works deemed objectionable, including confiscating books from Cairo’s main book fair.

With the Soliman case, al-Azhar’s censorship has penetrated cyberspace.

[…]

Asked to comment on Soliman’s imprisonment, Stewart Tuttle spokesman of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, said the United States is “concerned about the conviction and sentence meted out to someone for his opinion. The State Department does not follow this blog. It is important to respect all religions, including Islam, but freedom of expression is criticial to a democratic and prosperous society.” Officials at Egypt’s embassies in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.

Al Shafei, the Bahraini blogger, says she is “deeply disappointed” by what she views as a lack of American response to Soliman’s plight. “We at the Free Kareem Coalition believe that if we had the American government’s support in this case, that would be much more meaningful than trying to spread democracy through military intervention like we have seen in Iraq. This is the kind of support we need and we would find it very worrying if this case was easily dismissed or ignored.”

Al Shafei is also greatly disappointed by Arabs and Muslims who refused to sign the coalition’s on-line petition because they do not agree with Soliman’s opinions. “If we aren’t able to express ourselves, that’s a huge issue for Arab youth,” she wrote. “How are we expected to grow as a civilization if we aren’t allowed to question and criticize without risking our lives for it?”

Read it all. This is a magnificent piece of journalism.

Share This