Our thoughts are with you, Kareem

Kareem from Egypt is a good friend of some of us here at Mideast Youth, and one of the first people to give this website the support it needed. He e-mailed some of us about a week ago to inform us of the fact that he will be interrogated. However, this has been delayed, and the actual interrogation will take place tomorrow.

Ahmed sums up Kareem’s situation pretty well:

Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman has had a tough time of it.

First, the 22-year-old law student attending Egypt’s world-famous Islamic university, Al Azhar, witnessed late 2005’s Alexandria Riots firsthand.

Then the young man was arrested for posting his decidedly un-Islamic thoughts on his BLOG.

While he claims he wasn’t treated horribly (as many are in Egyptian prisons), the fact that he was even detained for speaking his (nonviolent) opinion in a country, no, region of the world where people routinely kill Copts and other Christians because we aren’t “smart” enough to believe in “the better religion,” as Islam is often called, is very sad. Sadder still is the fact that these violent acts are rarely, if ever, prosecuted.

Back to the “Abdelkareem’s Raw Deal Timeline,” the beginning of 2006 had young Kareem expelled from Al Azhar University. Keep in mind that this University bans Copts (Christian Egyptians) from attending, even though they pay the taxes that keep Azhar’s doors open.

After the expulsion, the Alexandrian native was featured on an Al Jazeera documentary about bloggers and freedom. Surprisingly, several famous Moslem bloggers supported Kareem, despite the fact that he dragged their religion through the mud. It should be noted here that Abdelkareem was born a Moslem.

Things had seemed to settle down for a while, until this week, when it turns out that Kareem is being interrogated again (in the Egyptian “neyabah al 3amah”) for his writings and sentiments.

Thankfully, lawyers from a big Human Rights Organization in the Middle East will be with him.

You can read more in Ahmed’s original entry.

I should also add that I’m very disgusted by some of the responses he has been getting over at his blog, where people claim that he’s a traitor to his religion, nation, and country. Why? Because he dared to question a belief and had the courage to do so in public? Because he felt the need to keep writing his thoughts even while receiving threats? Because he continues to speak his mind under his true identity? I hope he feels encouraged enough to keep this up in the name of not only freedom of speech, but the freedom to think in an otherwise sheltered society.

I’d like to thank Dalia Ziada, also one of our members here, for all of her work in helping him out through HRINFO. The lawyer who will appear with Kareem is Dalia’s friend and should anything happen, we will be informed. I’ll update this entry when or if we know anything about Kareem’s status. In the meantime, he has our prayers.

Read more about Kareem on Faith Freedom.

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