March 28, 2003

Egypt's Highest Court Rejects Charges Against American Scholar

By DANIEL DEL CASTILLO

Egypt's highest court, the Court of Cassation, last week acquitted a prominent Egyptian-American professor, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, of "undermining the dignity of the state and tarnishing its reputation," bringing to an end a three-year legal saga that many scholars and human-rights leaders say exposed the fragility of academic freedom in the Arab world's most intellectually prominent country.

Mr. Ibrahim, 64, had been a professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo