With America poised to strike Baghdad, the show trial of Cairo's leading political activist has just ended in an atmosphere of high theatre. Sa'd ad-Din Ibrahim, a US-educated sociology professor with dual nationality, was in the dock for offending Egypt's ruling family. Ibrahim, now a sick 64 year old, has spent most of the past two years in Tora prison, south of Cairo. However, the nine top judges of Egypt's highest court, who presided over his third and final trial on 4th February in the vast courthouse in the heart of downtown Cairo, have postponed their verdict until 18th March.
Ibrahim is being punished to set an example to others. Egypt's political system is dwindling into an atrophied autocracy, using short-term damage limitation to resolve problems ranging from the Islamist challenge to banking scandals. The past year has seen high-profile corruption trials, trials of apostates and homosexuals and a devastating train crash apparently caused by criminal mismanagement.
Nobody quite knows how the Cairo street will react if war with Iraq turns bloody. Huge, country-wide demonstrations last April against the Israel re-occupation of the West Bank frightened the police. The crowds chanted "Wahid, ithnen, al-geish al-masry wen?" ("One, two, where is the Egyptian army?")
Since the struggle against Islamic militants began to intensify a decade ago, torture in Egyptian police stations has become systematic. Some 16,000 people, mostly Islamists, languish in jails for political offences. The Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners told me about the case of a man who reported to a police station that his nine year old daughter had not come home. He was promptly arrested for murder and disappeared for two years into the prison system, even though his daughter returned home a few hours later.
Against this backdrop, Ibrahim's trial was bound to attract interest. The court was packed with Cairo's international elite, from ambassadors to human rights groups and a press corps which followed him around like a pop star. His American wife Barbara, who runs the local branch of the New York-based Population Council, and his lawyer daughter Randa, sat in the front row.
But the direct support of the US press and indirect support of the US government has not helped Ibrahim either on the street or with his fellow intellectuals. Among some of these intellectuals there is a sense of Schadenfreude. No petitions demanding his release are circulating; his former closeness to the Egyptian regime counts against him.
Ibrahim was a confidant of President Mubarak, his wife Suzanne and their two children. As a professor at the American University in Cairo he had supervised Suzanne's sociology masters degree and had written some of Mubarak's speeches. He was said to have been part of the family. And he had also hosted a television show watched by 20m Egyptians.
What went wrong? He upset the Mubarak court by criticising Egypt's flawed elections process, and Mubarak's apparent grooming of his second son, Gamal, to succeed him (something which the Egyptian army is unlikely to allow). A comparison he made in June 2000 between the succession strategies of five Arab countries-Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Egypt-went down very badly. Ibrahim was also fundraising for Egypt's Coptic minority who are seen as victims by Copts in the US. The government tried to portray him first as a traitor, then as a conman using foreign funds to tarnish Egypt's image.
Ibrahim and his Ibn Khaldoun Centre have been prominent in the dialogue with radical Islam. During the 1970s, he worked in Tora prison interviewing Islamists and studying their social profiles, research that has benefited writers studying the profiles of the 11th September terrorists. Today, Islamists win virtually every election they are allowed to stand in and have a reputation for "clean hands." The left and liberal centrists have long been silenced. Like most intellectuals, Ibrahim believes that, as in Turkey, the Islamists must be drawn into the system, not crushed. Most Islamist groups are committed to peaceful means; but the government still locks them up in their thousands.
In his youth, Ibrahim was a radical. In the 1960s he ran the north American branch of the Arab Student Association. He later went to Jordan where he fought alongside the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine during the 1970 civil war. Over the years, he mellowed and now calls for compromises with Israel. He regrets that Egypt failed to support Arafat during the Camp David and Taba talks hosted by Clinton just as it failed to show the US prompt support after 11th September.
"I have never sought US support," he told me before the trial. "I am an Egyptian and I want to depend on the justice of the Egyptian legal system." He is sceptical of American plans to foster democracy in the Arab world and believes that organisations like his own Ibn Khaldoun Centre can build democracy from within. "We introduced the word transparency to the Arab world," he told me. "Our slogans are 'Nothing to fear. Nothing to hide.'"
