A growing band of bloggers have made their presence felt in the Arab world - and some have been imprisoned by authorities alarmed at their activities

BY DAY SHAHINAZ Abdel Salam works as a telecommunications engineer in Cairo. But when the 29-year-old opens up her laptop at home each evening, she becomes Wahda Masrya - "Egyptian Woman" in Arabic - one of Egypt's best known bloggers.

Shahinaz, who started her blog in 2005, is a proud member of the Arab world's growing band of young bloggers - commonly known as al modaweenoonin Arabic - and her site is a frank mix of the personal and the political. An activist with the Kefaya opposition group, Shahinaz also uses her blog to chronicle the fortunes of Egypt's pro-democracy movement. "It was my dream to have a space where I could say what I want - without censorship. Blogging provided that," she explains.

It is estimated there are over 7,000 blogs in Egypt alone and many more scattered throughout the Middle East. Bloggers say it is hardly surprising the phenomenon has spread so rapidly in the region, where the majority of Arabs are under the age of 30 and have few, if any, other outlets through which they can express their views freely.

Though only 17 per cent of people in the Arab world use the internet, the number has soared in recent years, multiplying ninefold between 2000 and 2007, according to internet World Stats, a website that monitors internet usage.

Activists have used their blogs to organise demonstrations and boycotts, and as platforms to criticise corruption and government policies. They have made their presence felt in several Arab countries. As well as playing a crucial role in Egypt's opposition movements, bloggers have helped stage protests against the government in Bahrain, chronicled political unrest in Lebanon, orchestrated anti-corruption campaigns in Libya, and helped mobilise voters during Kuwait's 2006 elections.

The less overtly political blogs host often heated debates on religion, tradition and culture, with many providing a space to explore taboos or share personal experiences and intimacies.

In Saudi Arabia, young women are estimated to make up half the blogging community. Several female bloggers praise the anonymity of the internet for allowing them swap stories, ideas and rants against the restrictions placed on them in that country and other conservative pockets of the Middle East.

Such anonymity is highly appreciated in a region where avenues for political dissent are limited and where there is much pressure to conform to social and religious norms. For many bloggers it has been nothing short of revolutionary.

"BLOGGING CHANGED ME," says Haitham Yahya, a 22-year-old medical student from the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, who set up his blog three years ago. "Reading discussions on other blogs meant I picked up a lot of ideas I would not have been exposed to otherwise. It encourages a cross-pollination of opinions.

"The growth of internet and satellite TV means that people in the Middle East are seeing how the world outside works - something that was not possible to such an extent before. Now there is a wide sea of information. It's changing people's ideas, making them more open. You could call it a change in the infrastructure of the mind."

Middle East regimes, long used to tightly restricting the flow of information through state-controlled media, have become increasingly alarmed as they grow more aware of the challenges the blogging phenomenon poses to the status quo. In many countries, authorities now closely monitor blogs and restrict access to certain sites. Bloggers and online journalists have been imprisoned in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Tunisia. The mukhabarat(intelligence services) regularly harass or threaten bloggers and their families.

"Blogs act as a pain in the tooth for many Arab governments which fear citizens gaining the means to reveal their illegal and anti-democratic practices," Gamal Eid, a Cairo-based lawyer and director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, wrote last year.

This has been particularly true in Egypt. During elections in 2005, bloggers invited members of the public to report cases of fraud.

Activist bloggers involved in the country's pro-democracy movement use their blogs to advertise in advance the times and venues of protests, and then post photographs and accounts of police crackdowns. Both state and opposition newspapers regularly quote from blogs, most recently in their coverage of protests that turned violent in a Nile Delta town as workers demonstrated against rising food prices.

Haitham Yahya says eyewitness reports of the riots posted on his blog drew 50,000 hits to his site that day. It was typical of the kind of material Haitham likes to blog. Two years ago, he won an award from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle for his site. The citation lauded his work as an example of citizen journalism, saying he had covered issues "more bravely than your typical media outlet".

Last year, Egyptian bloggers saw just how powerful the medium could be when footage showing a bus driver screaming as he was sodomised with a stick while in police custody appeared on a blog and was then posted on YouTube. One of the police officers present had filmed the assault using a mobile phone. The clip was later used as evidence to convict two officers.

However, bloggers also witnessed how far Egyptian authorites are prepared to go to crack down on what they consider to be subversive blogging. In the first sentence of its kind, a 22-year-old student from Alexandria was jailed for four years for views he expressed on his blog. Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman was convicted of contempt of religion - "inciting hatred of Islam" - insulting Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and spreading false information.

The case against him hinged on a complaint from Cairo's al-Azhar University, the foremost centre of religious learning in the Sunni Muslim world. Kareem had studied law at al-Azhar until he was expelled because of his controversial writings about religion and the university itself.

He had been detained initially in 2005 after criticising Muslims who had participated in sectarian riots in his home city in a post titled The Naked Truth of Islam as I Saw it. Declaring himself a secularist, Kareem compared Mubarak to the pharaohs and likened some of the companions of the prophet Muhammad to terrorists.

WHILE MANY EGYPTIAN bloggers believe Kareem was foolhardy to voice such opinions without taking pains to preserve his anonymity, they worry that his case sets a dangerous precedent.

Amnesty International called his sentencing "yet another slap in the face of freedom for expression in Egypt".

A "Free Kareem" campaign has been launched with the support of human rights groups who say he is a prisoner of conscience and held only for his opinions. Shahinaz is a friend of Kareem's and regularly visits him in prison.

"It's so sad — he is with all those criminals simply for writing a blog. When I saw him last he just seemed broken."

She admits that sometimes she is afraid that the jailing of bloggers may become a more regular occurrence.

Last year, Reporters Without Borders added Egypt to its list of "enemies of the internet" - 13 countries that censor websites and harass those who publish views considered unacceptable by the state.

The authorities have put pressure on Shahinaz's family to force her to shut down her blog, but she refuses. "How could I stop? There are so many oppressions in Egypt and I have come to realise that what we are doing . . . the words we are using, are very powerful. I couldn't just give up like that but it's hard when your parents tell you to stop because it puts them in danger," she says, her eyes welling up.

Later wiping away her tears, Shahinaz turns defiant. "The government is scared because they know we are writing what the people on the street are saying. They can't stop this. Anyone can be a blogger. If they stop three or five bloggers, there will be another 10 to take their place."