ABDEL-KARIM NABIL Soleiman is a very dangerous man. For starters the 22-year-old blogger aka Karim Amer is a kafer (apostate). He attacks, or has attacked, Islam, the Prophet (PBUH), President Hosni Mubarak, and Al-Azhar University.

Naturally, accusing the ancient institute of learning of stuffing its students’ brains with nonsense is a crime that cannot go unpunished.

Never mind that Amer is just a kid who is foaming and frothing at the mouth as he harangues against The Establishment. Never mind that his foaming and frothing took place in the sanctuary of his own bedroom, probably while wearing his pajamas and shibshib.

The Pajamahideen, as local bloggers are known among themselves, had emerged as a threat. Something had to be done.

And so it was that the good folks at Al-Azhar got together and decided that the best way to stop the blasphemous fiend in his tracks was to give him publicity. Lots and lots of publicity — so much publicity that the whole world would start paying attention to him.

Even better than publicity, they reasoned: Let’s turn him into a martyr.

This is exactly what they set out to do. First, Al-Azhar suspended Amer, a law student at the university, and then it set the authorities on him. He was taken into custody last November,and charged with insulting Islam and the president, whom he had compared to ancient Egyptian rulers. In February, an Alexandria court sentenced him to four years of prison: three years for insulting Islam, and one year for insulting the president.

In March, the court refused Amer’s appeal and even accepted a hisbah case against him. (Hisbah is when a citizen asks the court to declare a person, to whom he is not a relation, an apostate. A hisbah suit drove Dr. Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid into exile after his marriage was declared null on the grounds that a kafer can’t marry a Muslim woman.)

Lest anyone think I am defending Amer — and subject me to hisbah — let me make one thing clear: I am not. I think his blog is childish, with badly written entries. But it is important to note that Amer wrote whatever he wrote to express himself. Before this whole hullabaloo, Amer’s blog was not very popular. With no news value and very little wit, it bears no resemblance to the constantly revamped and very newsy blogs such as Hossam El-Hamalawy’s Arabawy at Arabist, or Wael Abbas’s Misrdigital, or Demaghmak, Tortureinegypt, Bigpharaoh or even Manal and Alaa’s bit bucket.

Why not just let him be? I’ll tell you why not: Because an insecure system fears words and ideas more than weapons and ammunition. Freedom of expression is not something such a system can afford. Agree with Amer or not, what he was doing could have given other young people ideas. People would have started expressing themselves, talking about things that were troubling them, letting off steam.

We have a popular saying here in Egypt: idrab el-marboot, yikhaf el-sayeb, which basically means if you strike the one that is tied down, you scare off the free ones. In sentencing Amer to four years of prison, you scare all the other bloggers out there. Unimportant as his blog may have been in comparison with the blogs mentioned earlier, Amer gave the authorities the excuse they needed to scare off the more active bloggers, those whose work is more widely noted and who cannot be imprisoned because they largely focus on recording the truth. Although many of them have been arrested in the past, it was very difficult to build a case against them and they were consequently released.

Amer was easy prey and the court that ruled against the young offender hoped to show bloggers the rod.

But let us look at the publicity that such an action has brought: Hot on the heels of last year’s inclusion of Egypt on Reporters Without Borders’ blacklist of countries considered “enemies of the internet,” Amer’s verdict was a rather defiant action, albeit one forecasted by international media.

Immediately after the sentencing, spokesmen at Amnesty International told the press the conviction was a “slap in the face of freedom [of] expression” and called Amer a “prisoner of conscience” who had peacefully expressed his views. It called for his immediate, unconditional release.

Meanwhile, over in the United States, congressmen Trent Franks (Republican-Arizona) and Barney Frank (Democrat-Massachusetts) were busy writing a letter to Egypt’s ambassador to the US, Nabil Fahmy. “The Egyptian government’s arrest of Mr. Amer simply for displeasure over writings on the personal weblog raises serious concern about the level of respect for freedoms in Egypt,” they warned.

Did Al-Azhar want to set an example? I am sure it did. Is this really the outcome it wanted? I do not think so.

Ultimately, Al-Azhar’s bid to set an example has backfired: While attempting to sidestep criticism at home, it has only managed to unleash a storm of dissent abroad.

The international media attention and concern has made blogger Karim Amer’s name synonymous with the fight for freedom of expression. The FreeKarim campaign has circled the globe. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — have seen it, and hundreds of blogs carry a link to it. He has become a martyr, a symbol for many of Egypt’s youth — and for activists around the world. et