Court upholds 4-year sentence on Egyptian for insulting Islam
ICC NOTE: Nabil was in a sense attempting to speak on behalf of Christians who were attacked. The judge in the original trial found that Nabil had insulted the Prophet Muhammad with a piece he wrote in 2005 after Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria.
3/12/07 Egypt For the full article (Canada.com) – An Egyptian appeals court on Monday upheld the four-year prison sentence given to an Egyptian blogger who criticized conservative Muslims and was convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt’s president, court officials said.
Abdel Kareem Nabil’s sentence last month had been widely condemned by local and international rights groups as a bid to curb free expression.
Nabil, a 22-year-old former student at Cairo ‘s Al-Azhar University , had been sentenced to three years in prison for insulting Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and inciting sectarian strife, and another year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak.
Nabil, who used the blogger name Kareem Amer, was an unusually scathing critic of conservative Muslims. His frequent attacks on Al-Azhar led the university to expel him in March 2006 and caused prosecutors to bring him to trial.
Court officials said Monday the
“Muslims revealed their true ugly face and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity,” Nabil wrote in his web log, or blog. He called Muhammad and his seventh-century followers, the Sahaba, “spillers of blood” for their teachings on warfare – a comment cited by the judge.
