Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Sa’ad Ibrahim

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Topic: Egypt

 

PLEASE NOTE:  The April 19 luncheon is on a Thursday, not Monday, and it will begin at 11:15AM to accommodate our speaker’s travel schedule.

Sa’ad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian American sociologist and author. He is one of Egypt’s leading human rights and democracy activists, and a strong critic of former Egyptian presidentHosni Mubarak.

Ibrahim is credited for playing a leading role in the revival of Egypt’s contemporary research-based civil society movement. For most of his professional career Saad Eddin Ibrahim was a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo. He is the founder of both theIbn Khaldun Center for Development Studiesin Cairo and the Arab Organization for Human Rights. He is married to Barbara Lethem Ibrahim, director of the Gerhart Center for Civic Engagement and Philanthropy in Cairo. He is on the Board of Advisors to the Project on Middle East Democracy. The Ibrahims have two children, Randa and Amir Ibrahim. Randa has two kids Lara and Seif, and Amir has Adam and Gebriel.

[edit]Biography

Well before his confrontations with the Egyptian government in the early 2000s, Ibrahim had become a controversial figure in Egypt. He reversed his earlier criticism of Anwar Sadat for his peace initiative with Israel. He gained the respect of Egypt’s human rights and civil society community for championing different causes, including Copts, Bahá’ís. and other minorities at a time of rising sectarian tensions.

Ibrahim was arrested, imprisoned and prosecuted in 2000 for using European Union funds for election monitoring, and for allegedly defaming Egypt’s image abroad. He was sentenced to seven years in prison. His defense team countered that the real motives behind the government’s prosecution of Ibrahim and his assistants was his outspoken criticism of President Hosni Mubarak and his administration. He was tried twice on the same charges in State Security Courts, winning each time on appeal. During a third trial before the highest civil court in 2003, he was cleared of all charges and released, but not before a storm of international protest had put the Mubarak regime on the defensive.

As an independent-minded intellectual, Ibrahim has supported fair elections when they were viewed as incompatible with Egyptian politics, promoted international democratic alliances, and accepted NGO funding from any source that shares peaceful and democratic values, including those in the US. He has recently been under attack in the official press for calling on the U.S. Congress to condition its military aid to Egypt on improvements in the country’s human rights record and the freeing of another political prisoner, Ayman Nour.^[1]

In 2006 Ibrahim was awarded the Ion Ratiu Democracy Lecture Prize at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he previously had been a public policy scholar. He is currently a Board member of the Arab Democracy Foundation.