Abdul Karim Nabil, the 22-year-old Egyptian blogger sentenced to three years in jail for insulting Islam, and an additional year for "insulting President Hosni Mubarak, was not born when Mubarak came to power. It is at once sadly pathetic and oddly gratifying that Mubarak's regime, which has ruled over Egypt for almost 26 years, felt it necessary to convict a young man "armed only with a keyboard and access to the Internet. Frightening as his conviction might be, surely it is a victory for the brigade of the young and determined who populate the Egyptian blogosphere and who like Nabil have known no other leader than Mubarak. Bloggers in Egypt have for months now irritated Mubarak's regime with the audacity of those who know they have not simply youth on their side, but also the ability to shame a regime that has plenty to hide. Some of those bloggers combine their online activism with good old fashioned street protests which last year got many of them thrown in jail for weeks on that chestnut of a charge - insulting the president. But that just boosted their legitimacy as the young ones who took on the aging ruler and made many of them household names in Egypt. The Mubarak regime would love nothing more than to shut down all blogs and throw their writers in jail. But it knows those bloggers' ability to make headlines as well as galvanize public outrage. A reminder of just such an ability will occur on March 3, when two police officers who beat up and sodomized a bus driver at a police station are due to appear before a judge. Those officers were arrested late last year after an outcry over a video they had made of the torture appeared on blogs and Web sites. But why has Mubarak's regime focused its wrath on Nabil in particular? Nabil has been outspoken not only in his criticism of the regime but also of Islam and Al-Azhar, the bastion of Sunni Muslim thought. There is nothing that Nabil could have said about either Islam or Mubarak that should have warranted such a trial and conviction. But in Mubarak's Egypt, the regime knew putting this young man on trial and accusing him of insulting Islam would earn it cheap public opinion points. Nabil's ordeal bears the tedious hallmarks of a regime that has spent a quarter of a decade quashing vibrancy and vitality out of a country that has always prided itself on having an abundance of both. Not only does the regime wield a sledgehammer to intimidate anyone who dares oppose Mubarak's rule, it has perversely co-opted Islam to such an extent that it has reduced the religion to a muscle-flexing competition with the Muslim Brotherhood over just who is the most Muslim of them all. This time last year Egypt was spearheading the campaign of manufactured outrage against cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten. Now as then, flying the flag of Muslim anger was the Egyptian regime's lazy way of burnishing its Islamic credentials at a time when domestic Islamists, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, were stronger than they had been in years. The irony is that the Brotherhood is the largest opposition bloc in Parliament precisely because that's what Mubarak wants. Although technically outlawed, the Muslim Brotherhood was allowed to contest parliamentary elections at the end of 2005. The 88 seats they managed to win are the perfect bogeyman that the regime waves in the face of a fearful US administration to make it compliant with Mubarak's priorities. That cynical use of religious credentials has not only left Egyptians feeling stuck between a rock - Mubarak - and a hard place - the Muslim Brotherhood; it has also laid the groundwork for what can only be described as religious hysteria. With the almost daily appearance on television of a bevy of clerics, Egypt's conservative, state-sanctioned Islam has become the altar upon which Mubarak has pushed Egyptians to worship. Is it any wonder Nabil's own parents seem to have disowned him because of the state's allegations that he had insulted Islam? But when a regime's religious camouflage is so obvious, it must be up to wearing it. If that same state is such an eager defender of Islam (and surely Islam, which has thrived for more than 1,400 years, doesn't need defending), then let us count the ways it honors and abides by it. What is it if not an insult to the social justice at the heart of Islam that systematic torture infects police stations and jails around Egypt? Surely it is an affront to that same Islam that while Mubarak, his family, and their inner circle benefit from the meager growth in the Egyptian economy that they so proudly point to, so many Egyptians cannot afford to buy meat or have to juggle two or three jobs to live the most basic of lives. Enter the bloggers. They make those connections, they text messages, they blog and they post on Youtube that the emperor has no clothes. They outmaneuver that same emperor and his henchmen by manipulating a technology that daily levels the playing field of information. Mubarak does not own Egypt and he does not Islam, the bloggers will continue to remind him. And they cannot be silenced. Not just because they know how to hopscotch over blocked IP addresses, but because it is impossible to silence youth. It will always find a way to have the last say. Mona Eltahawyis an Egyptian-born commentator. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
