Farsi: 3rd-most popular language for blogging worldwide?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

PolicyWatch #1205

Internet Freedom in the Middle East: Challenges for U.S. Policy

By Andrew Exum February 27, 2007

On February 22, Egyptian blogger Abdul Karim Suleiman was sentenced to
four years in prison for messages posted on his personal website.
Suleiman, who blogs under the name Kareem Amer, was a student at Cairo's
al-Azhar University when he posted comments deemed by Egyptian authorities
as blaspheming Islam, inciting sedition, and insulting President Hosni
Mubarak. For the first two offenses, he drew three years' imprisonment;
for the third, an additional year. Among other things, Suleiman posted
comments harshly critical of Muslims in his native Alexandria during their
violent 2005 clashes with Coptic Christians. He also labeled his
conservative religious university "the university of terrorism" and called
Mubarak a "dictator."
The Suleiman case highlights two important issues for U.S. policymakers:
America's continued bilateral relations with the Mubarak regime, and the
greater issue of internet freedom in the Middle East. While the focus of
this article is the latter, the way in which U.S. allies in the region
treat political speech on the internet will most certainly have an impact
on future bilateral relations with countries from Tunisia to Bahrain.

Blogging in the Middle East

Blogging -- along with satellite television, instant messaging, and text
messaging -- has irrevocably changed the way Arabs interact both with each
other and with the outside world. Egypt alone is estimated to have more
than one thousand bloggers -- internet users who run their own websites
and post regular messages to their readers -- with numbers increasing by
as much as 50 percent every six months. Not all blogs in the Middle East,
however, are political. Most blogs, like those in the United States and
elsewhere, are personal websites on which users post updates about their
daily lives and interests, with links to friends' sites.

In Egypt, blogs have also become a place where political dissent and
commentary can be posted with -- until now -- relatively little fear of
retribution from government authorities. Unlike the nation's tightly
controlled, state-run television stations and newspapers, blogs give
Egyptians (often writing anonymously or under pseudonym) the opportunity
to air their opinions on current events or Egyptian religious and
government authorities. The number of blogs and the inherent challenges of
internet policing make blogs far more difficult to shut down or control
than Egypt's few independent newspapers or pan-Arab media outlets.

This is not to say that the authorities have not tried. A November 2005
report by Human Rights Watch on internet freedom in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria,
and Iran found that these four countries had "detained dozens of online
writers for their activities online in recent years."

The Suleiman case is just the latest in a series of crackdowns on Egyptian
bloggers and online journalists. In 2002, an Egyptian journalist was
sentenced to six months in prison for alleging in an online journal that
the state-appointed editor of al-Ahram newspaper was corrupt. In March
2003, Egyptian activist Ashraf Ibrahim was arrested by authorities for
e-mailing human rights agencies photographs of state security agents
violently dispersing a peaceful protest. Ashraf was charged with "harming
Egypt's reputation" abroad. The Muslim Brotherhood's internet activities
in Egypt have also come under scrutiny. And 2006 witnessed perhaps the
most disturbing incident of intimidation, when imprisoned blogger Muhammad
al-Sharqawi was beaten and sodomized with a cardboard tube by Egyptian
police officers.

As might be expected, the censorship and suppression of internet political
speech in Syria and Iran is even more severe. In Iran, however, more than
75,000 bloggers post on the internet -- making Farsi, according to one
estimate, the third-most popular language for blogging worldwide. Staunch
U.S. allies such as Tunisia and Bahrain also intimidate online journalists
and bloggers. In Tunisia, Zoheir Yahiaoui was jailed for a year for posts
made on the web journal Tunezine. Another online journalist in Tunisia,
Muhammad Abu, is currently serving a three-year prison term for an article
he published criticizing a decision made by Tunisian president Zine
al-Abidine Ben Ali.

In Bahrain, meanwhile, bloggers criticizing the ruling Sunni minority are
being increasingly harassed by authorities. The Bahraini government even
banned the website Google Earth for three days last year during the run-up
to parliamentary elections, when bloggers used it to highlight the vast
palaces of the Sunni aristocracy versus the slums in which much of the
Shiite majority resides.

Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are still struggling to respond
to the challenge posed by Arab satellite networks such as al-Jazeera and
al-Arabiya -- where ordinary Arabs can call in and voice their unedited
grievances live before 30 million other viewers. In this context, blogs
and online journals are yet another headache for ministries of information
that, just ten years ago, could still claim a stranglehold on the flow of
information reaching their populace. This challenge is intensified as
nations such as Egypt and Jordan attempt to make the internet and its
corresponding economic and educational opportunities more available to
their citizens.

U.S. Policy and Freedom of Expression

As authoritarian Arab regimes face complex challenges in the way they deal
with the explosion of political speech on the internet, U.S. policy should
be clear. The Egyptian regime's recent sentencing of Suleiman, and the
censorship of internet speech in Egypt and other allied states, runs
contrary to American values and undermines long-term U.S. interests in the
region.

U.S. officials are worried about how much political speech in the Arab
world is hostile to the United States, as well as the way in which radical
Islamists use the internet to spread messages of hate and to celebrate
attacks against Western civilians and military targets. These are not
empty concerns -- the internet is jihadists' propaganda machine of choice.
U.S. enemies in Iraq, for example, have used the web as a weapon to
publicize and even coordinate attacks against U.S. forces. The Egyptian
government, and others, would claim that complete freedom of political
speech on the internet plays into the hands of Islamist parties such as
the Muslim Brotherhood.

This claim, however, should ring false in the ears of U.S. policymakers.
Egyptian authorities played the "Islam card" themselves in the case
against Suleiman. Although al-Azhar University expelled and brought
charges against Suleiman (who had claimed that the religious institution
stifled freedom of expression), it was the government of Egypt that tried,
convicted, and imprisoned him. The state used the excuse of Suleiman's
"insult against Islam" and his criticism of Mubarak to punish him under
Article 179 of the Egyptian Penal Code, which allows for the detention of
"whoever affronts the President of the Republic." By using criticism of
Islam as a pretext to silence political speech, the government violated
the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Egypt
ratified in 1982.

The United States is in a difficult position when its support of free
speech conflicts with concerns about the radical Islamist message conveyed
by some of those speaking freely. This, of course, does not apply to
Suleiman's case. It may be of special concern to the United States that
the Egyptian government decided to come down hard on a liberal blogger.
Nevertheless, in condemning Suleiman's treatment, Washington should not
make the content of what he wrote its primary concern. U.S. officials --
both in condemning such treatment and articulating a policy for internet
freedom in the Middle East -- should instead uphold the principle
attributed to Voltaire: "I detest what you write, but I would give my life
to make it possible for you to continue to write."

That principle extends to criticism of Egypt and Jordan's ties with the
United States and Israel, as well as to blogs written by young members of
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and articles spreading falsehoods about the
U.S. occupation in Iraq. The one exception should be speech that incites
violence or is grossly and morally offensive -- an exception that exists
in U.S. law as well. That exception should not be an excuse that
authorities use to stifle any speech they consider offensive to government
interests, however.

Conclusion

As President Bush's democracy agenda in the Middle East falters amid
difficulties in Iraq, the American public and U.S. policymakers should not
lose sight of the fact that a freer, more open Middle East remains in the
long-term interests of the United States. Pan-Arab satellite stations,
text messaging, and blogs have gone a long way toward increasing freedom
of expression in the Arab world, with little or no encouragement needed
from Washington. "The new Arab sphere is a genuine public sphere," writes
American political scientist Marc Lynch, "characterized by self-conscious,
open, and contentious political argument before a vast but discrete
audience."

Such argument ultimately benefits the Middle East and the United States
alike. When, in fall 2006, Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas posted videos of
police officers beating and sodomizing a bus driver, this served U.S.
interests by giving diplomats leverage to pressure Cairo on human rights
issues. It is equally important to realize that, like the pan-Arab
television networks, blogs and bloggers are here to stay. Political speech
on the internet will only grow more prominent in the years to come. The
United States is better off embracing this trend than joining those
regimes engaged in fruitless attempts to reverse the new wave of free
speech spreading throughout the region.

Andrew Exum is a Soref fellow at The Washington Institute and author of
Hizballah at War: A Military Assessment. He lived in Cairo from February
to August 2006.

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2574
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