Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman was sentenced to four years in prison yesterday in a Cairo court. He will sit in jail for three years for the crime of “contempt for religion” and one year for “insulting the president”.
For those of you who haven’t been following the case, welcome to the Middle East. They do indeed have crimes like that around here.
Almost as disturbing as the sentence was the public reaction. As the court hearing ended, the media moved to the street in front of the courthouse and started interviewing people about what they thought of the trial. With the exception of human rights activists and bloggers, the Egyptian public seemed satisfied with the verdict, if not disappointed it wasn’t longer.
Many people expressed the view that Abdel Kareem should be killed for what he wrote, and each of them shared their preferred way to kill him: stabbing, hanging, and of course, the classic beheading. One actually asked a lawyer if it was legal to now kill him, since this verdict clearly brands him as an apostate, and the Sharia punishment for an apostasy is death. People were talking about killing him in the most casual manner, as if he was no longer a human being to them.
Very scary. It is difficult to see how freedom of speech can develop in a country where such opinions are commonplace, and I see freedom of speech as a necessary condition for democracy.
Abdel Kareem is not only risking to spend the next four years in an Egyptian jail; being branded an apostate means he carries a very serious risk of being killed there.
