Sa'd ad-Din Ibrahim

▪ 2002

      On May 21, 2001, less than two hours after the defense lawyers had completed their summation, Egypt's High Security Court found Saʿd ad-Din Ibrahim, a respected university professor, guilty of having accepted money from overseas without government approval, embezzled grant funds, and defamed Egypt abroad. Sentenced together with 27 co-defendants, Ibrahim received seven years' imprisonment at hard labour, despite the fact that he was 62 years old and in poor health.

      Ibrahim was born on Dec. 3, 1938, in Mansurah, a city in Egypt's Nile Delta. He graduated from Cairo University (B.A., 1960) and was awarded a government scholarship to study sociology at the University of Washington (Ph.D., 1968). He took U.S. citizenship and, while teaching at DePauw University, Greencastle, Ind., met his future wife, Barbara Lethem. In 1975, however, Ibrahim returned to Cairo, where he won a tenured position at the American University. He performed pioneering research on militant Islamic movements in Egypt. In 1988 he founded the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which soon became a leading institution in the Muslim world for the study of human rights, civil society, and minority rights.

      On June 30, 2000, Ibrahim was arrested and imprisoned by the authorities. Two of the charges against him were related to a $250,000 European Commission grant Ibrahim had won to make a documentary about voting rights in Egypt. The charge that he had received funds from foreign organizations without government approval was considered suspect by many because the Ibn Khaldun Center was a registered organization that paid Egyptian taxes and therefore was entitled to make such transactions. Similarly, the embezzlement charge was shaky because Ibrahim's handling of the grant money had been properly audited. The third accusation—that Ibrahim had defamed Egypt's reputation abroad—stemmed from his participation in seminars on the plight of Christian Copts, who had suffered widespread discrimination at the hands of the Egyptian authorities, and from his studies on parliamentary elections that proved unflattering to the Mubarak regime. On Aug. 10, 2000, Ibrahim was released on bail, and his trial opened in Cairo some three months later, on November 18.

      At the end of 2001, many Egyptian people felt themselves squeezed between the authoritarian Mubarak regime and the radical Islamists. The possibility of a third alternative—a country in which the citizens enjoyed democracy and the rule of law as well as their Islamic faith—seemed quite distant as long as men like Ibrahim languished in prison.

Marius K. Deeb

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