CAIRO, Egypt - Many Egyptians remain surprisingly indifferent to local curbs on freedom of speech.
Few were stirred by the recent legal attempt to forcibly divorce the outspoken feminist writer Nawal el-Saadawi from her husband on the grounds that she allegedly made declarations contradicting her Muslim faith and therefore became an "apostate from Islam," or someone who renounced the religion.
Western outrage and concern voiced by Egyptian human rights activists over the banning of books and the jailing of sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim for defaming Egypt have sparked little or no local reaction.
There have been no wider protests or campaigns for free debate on sex, politics and religion in the national press.
"Ninety-eight percent of people in Egypt have nothing to do with all those issues, they are concerned about day-to-day issues and their bread and butter," said Hisham Kassem, a publisher and rights activist.
There have been few reports in the mainstream press on Saadawi and her fight against accusations of apostasy and the attempt to divorce her from her husband of 37 years. On July 30 a court threw out on a technicality an Islamist lawyer's petition for Saadawi's divorce.
Analysts say public complacency over such cases reflects several factors, including the success of society's more conservative factions in seizing the moral high ground, as well as alienation, a reaction against globalisation and economic pressures.
"ACADEMIC FREEDOM UNDER THREAT"
Most disturbing to some, such as social anthropologist Hania Sholkamy, are the implications for academic research and critical debate in the Ibrahim case.
An Egyptian court jailed the 62-year-old sociology professor on May 21 for seven years on several different charges.
They included the illegal receipt of European Union funds to monitor parliamentary elections, offering bribes for forging official documents and defaming Egypt in a human rights report about relations between Egyptian Christians and Muslims.
The case, now under appeal, was accompanied by a virulent media campaign against Ibrahim and his work as a pollster and researcher.
"It was like having a doctor accused of malpractice and having the papers attacking medicine," Sholkamy said.
Newspaper columnists questioned the value of opinion surveys and cast suspicion on the ultimate use of information gathered for research, Sholkamy said.
"The message being sent was that any time there is critical thinking, analytical thinking, any dissent from...the official dogma that interprets whatever our ailments are as Egyptians or Egypt...(it) is a crime in itself and Egypt's reputation is harmed," Sholkamy said.
Eberhard Kienle, Middle East politics lecturer at the School of Oriental Studies in London, said the cases against Ibrahim, Saadawi and others, find a resonance in society.
Saadawi, lauded in the West for writing against customs oppressing Arab women including female circumcision to which she herself was subjected, has generally been regarded as a troublemaker on her home turf who gained fame by confirming to Westerners their own prejudices about Arab and Islamic culture.
"I have never read any of her work, but people are writing that she is trying to be shockingly vulgar and that she has no genuine, good ideas. Also I'm sure she's probably very angry at society for being circumcised and she cannot get over it and may not be very rational," said Cairo businesswoman Hoda Sultan.
Such views raise the question of whether the government is bowing largely to public pressure in its periodic clampdowns on free speech.
"There is a lot of communal authoritarianism going on, pressures that come below, from what we often call society, and not necessarily from government, which very often reacts to these things in order to remain legitimate in the eyes of its own potential constituency," Kienle said.
"That does not mean that nothing comes from above, but it (pressure) comes from both sides," he added.
CONSERVATIVE BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALISATION
Kienle also sees conservatism as a backlash among Egyptians against globalisation akin to the lingering hostility of many Britons to the European Union and the adoption of the euro currency.
Ironically, it was a small group of students at the American University of Cairo who in 1998 forced the government to ban a scholarly text on the life of Islam's Prophet Mohammad.
Since then, the university, popularly perceived as a bastion of Western liberal values, has itself banned dozens of books from its shelves, according to Kienle and others.
Sholkamy blames the government and university authorities for bowing to conservative pressures and preventing a diversity of opinions or a deviation from accepted dogma.
"Rather than entering into debate, everyone is trying to be more royal than the king," Sholkamy said.
"People are opting to be more conservative because critical liberal confrontational thinking bears no dividends and, with this competitive conservatism process, the authorities came to realise that there was no was no point in defending critical liberalism."
But an Egyptian academic, who did not want to be named, said years of poor education, and a lack of public debate or shared public discourse, have made free debate a non-issue in Egypt.
"Now issues are bread and butter, issues have to have an immediacy that social diagnoses and social exegeses of religion, and so on, do not have," the academic said.
Kassem said intellectuals had also been deprived of a voice and access to the Egyptian "street" for decades via censorship and other modes of repression.
But he said continued repression was not a real option in Egypt precisely because of the pressure of globalisation. Nonetheless, there was still no guarantee that freedom of speech would become a priority.
22:05 07-30-01
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