Be careful what you blog

Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman – an Egyptian student with the nom de blog “Kareem” – has been jailed for four years for insulting Islam and the Egyptian president, as reported by the BBC How depressing is that?

Here’s a brief summary of the BBC report. Abdel Soliman is a secularist, who was expelled from his University law studies for criticising religion. The University was responsible for reporting him to the police.

Mr Nabil had declared himself a secularist who does not fast during Ramadan and he criticised al-Azhar, the most prestigious institution of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world.
He accused it of spreading radical ideas and suppressing freedom of thought.

Well, that’s certainly proved his point then.

The BBC claims that Egyptian bloggers have gained an influence that greatly outweighs their numbers and have been instrumental in exposing some true horrors carried out by the Egyptian state. This is rather humbling to the rest of us bloggers, who usually just about manage to expose what we think about the latest top-selling indie record.

2 thoughts on “Be careful what you blog

  1. “Well, that’s certainly proved his point then.”

    It certainly has! With the rise of the internet one would think that people have never been so free in being able to express their views but we’re seeing a lot of cases such as this, many of them unrelated to religious belief. China is leading the way in oppressing Chinese journalists and bloggers. Google doesn’t seem to be helping the cause much either but that’s another story….

    But it’s nothing new. Aung San Suu Kyi has been in prison for 11 years now (?) for what exactly?

    I do think however, freedom of expression is becoming more difficult in the West, partly due to religion’s intolerance of criticism. It doesn’t matter whether you’re atheist or a Christian criticizing Islam, you’re not going to find favor in a world where religion is seen as being immune from questions we ask of any other belief system.

  2. I am also against the call to prayer. While alone one mosque is able to have a call to prayer, just think how many mosques are in this country and just imagine if they all started giving there call’s to prayer over speaker’s which by the way they have started doing. When you think about it, it no longer will be a small problem and it also imposes on our rights.

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