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| Egyptian Actor Sentenced to 3 Months for 'Defaming Islam' | ||
| 2012-02-03 | ||
| [An Nahar] A Cairo court has sentenced the Arab world's most famous actor, Adel Iman, to three months in jail for "defaming Islam" in several roles on stage and screen, the Egyptian comic said on Thursday. Imam, a U.N. goodwill ambassador who has been described as the Arab world's Charlie Chaplin, was sentenced to hard labor in absentia, he told AFP after being sued by Asran Mansur, a lawyer with Islamist ties. "I will appeal the ruling," Imam said. "Some people seeking fame filed a suit against me over works I have done which they consider insulting to Islam, and this is of course not true," he said. The 71-year-old celebrity has a long history of legal tangles with Islamists who regard the actor's work as blasphemous.
"All the works in which I have starred went through the censors. Had they been found to be defamatory, the censors would have banned them," Imam said.
In a 1998 TV debate, called "Star on a Hot Tin Roof", Imam squared off with three Islamists from the Moslem Brüderbund, the movement whose members now hold a strong majority in Egypt's parliament. Since 2000, Imam has served as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. refugee agency, alongside likes of film star Angelina Jolie and Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani. "In the course of his rich career, he has mixed humor with sadness to portray ordinary people who are victims of injustice and poverty," the agency says in a biography of imam on its website. "For all these reasons, Imam became a symbol for people promoting tolerance and human rights ...which often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless... in the Arab world," it said. | ||
| Posted by:Fred |