"In the court judgment, which Human Rights Watch obtained, the charges against the seven varied. But the court convicted them all of joining Facebook pages to “incite protests, illegal gathering, and breaking allegiance with the king” and of “assisting and encouraging these calls and corresponding with the [Facebook pages’] followers and concealing them.” All seven were also convicted of violating article 6 of the Anti-Cyber Crime Law, which prohibits producing, sending, or storing any material via an information network that “harms public order.”
"The court imposed its harshest sentence – 10 years in prison – on Abd al-Hamid al-Amer. Prosecutors accused him of founding two Facebook groups, through which he allegedly “conscripted others to join the movements” and “gave them ideas and guidance on the important sites in which to protest and set the timing [of the protests].”
"None of the charges accused the seven of using or advocating violence, as the presiding judge confirmed in the judgment, saying, “Breaking allegiance [with the king] comes by way of arms and it comes by way of protests, marches, and writing articles and publications … the behavior of the [second] course … is sometimes the more dangerous and more malicious method.”"]
"It is the grandiosity of power and the increasingly punitive state that has pushed people onto the streets and keeps them hanging from the windows of their homes every day, banging pots into the night. Even the revered father of the traditional family is expected to care about all this. But Prime Minister Erdogan, after insulting the protesters and refusing to acknowledge that there was any problem whatsoever, instead left for Morocco to attend a trade meeting."
Jenny White's further insights may be found on her highly readable blog, Kamil Pasha.
This essay in the NY Review of Books offers a good sampling of Coptic concerns about the rising profile of Egyptian Islamist groups, including Salafists, as well as efforts by the Ikhwan to mitigate those concerns.
However, there is one error in the piece by Yasmine el-Rashidi, namely that the author asserts that Rafiq Habib, the Christian intellectual who was an original member of Hizb al-Wasat and is now aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, is challenging his father, the Bishop Samuel Habib.
She writes: "Many say Habib likes to provoke his father, a conservative Christian preacher."
This cannot be so, on this plane of existence at least, because Samuel Habib died in 1997. I interviewed the elder Habib in the 1990s.
Excerpts from my interview with the younger Habib appear in my contribution to Remaking Muslim Politics
. The contents of the chapter are found here.
