Abdel Kareem Soliman, a 22-year-old Egyptian blogger sentenced last month to four years in prison for insulting Islam and the presidency, might have been idealistic - but he was not naive.
His blogs showed that he was keenly aware he was likely to pay a heavy price for continuing to proclaim his blend of humanism, libertarianism and strident secularism in cyberspace.
Soliman, who blogged under the name Kareem Amer, intensified his criticism of Egypt's powerful Al-Azhar religious establishment even after he was summoned to appear in October at a police station in Alexandria, his home city. Before his appearance, he posted a blog entry rejecting the legitimacy of laws that prevented criticism of religion and of the police for enforcing those laws.
Critics of President Hosni Mubarak's regime say that by putting Soliman behind bars, Egypt is trying to silence other bloggers, who have become a thorn in the regime's side.
'Kareem is being used,' said Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born commentator on Arab issues based in New York. 'The government thought they would put him on trial because of the religious dimension and scare the other bloggers through what's happening to him.'
Last year, bloggers exposed sexual assaults on women in central Cairo during a religious holiday by drawing media attention to the issue. In December, a police officer was detained and accused of sexually assaulting a prisoner after bloggers circulated a video that police themselves had made of the prisoner being sodomised.