If this were enforced even-handedly, it might be necessary to construct new prisons to hold the convicts....

That is the least interesting part of this trial.

The law itself is going on trial.

Not to mention that lawyer claiming civil damages in the middle of it.

Though it has been a matter of government policy to offer such nsult for many years to Judaism in particular.

Insult to religion does not bother me; put bluntly, insult to religion is a healthy sign, and should be encouraged. But if a law is in place, it should be enforced even-handedly, and this one, if the translation is accurate, would be rum fun to watch being so enforced.

Rather than chortle over a brandy at the spectacle of religious zealots attempt to enforce a patently unenforceable law, the intrigue is in watching the attempt to defend the law in this open forum. It is a MidEast Chicago 8, lacking only a Hoffman.

Parenthetically, insulting religion as a de rigeur activity is not really healthy. It becomes a tired habit tedious to those who observe the habitue habituating.

This law, as written, could certainly be enforced; it is just that even-handed enforcement of it would entail arrest and trial for the common run of anti-Israeli commentators resident in Egypt, and a number of Islamic clergy engaged in stem-winders against Copts. The trial does not put much onus on the Egyptian government 'to defend this law'; most of the quotes cited in the article regarding the difference between 'freedom of opinion' and 'freedom of belief' would meet with nods of agreement by a majority of Egyptians, however damning they might seem to people brought up in Enlightenment traditions.

You are here commenting to expose and discredit a law which criminalizes insult to religion, which taken at its face must mean that you consider such insult a legitimate activity, for if you did not, you could have scant quarrel with its being forbidden under penalty of law. So there is that much agreement, that people certainly should be able to insult religion freely. My view as to the desirability of such insult is based on the conclusion that the essential element of the flowering of the West in the Enlightenment and beyond was the decreased seriousness with which religion was taken, first by thinkers and rulers and then by the populace at large. It ceased to be a matter people were killed or imprisoned over, and killing and imprisoning are very stark measures of how seriously things are taken by a society and a government. Our government and society, for example, certainly does not take grand scale bank fraud seriously, because people very seldom go to prison for it, but we take petty larcenies quite seriously, since we prosecute and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people yearly for such acts. Very few Christians, no matter how devout they may profess themselves to be, take their religion as anything like so serious a matter as the average Moslem does. Insult to religion, statements deriding the creeds and dogmas of a religion, are part of the process of easing a culture and society out of taking religious belief so seriously that it is taken to be a thing worth killing over.

The social, ecconomic and political cost of enforcing this law makes it unenforceable.

While insulting religion is legitimate, it is hardly desirable and often reflects a misperception of society. The usual litany of horrors caused by religion generally stops there. What is shunted aside is that these horrors can only have occured by the employment of state power. The more productive critique is the use of religion and religious institutions to maintain that state power. Without state power, religion remains at best benign, at worst irrelevant. The Enlightment at its core was a revolt against medievalism and the purported authority on which it rested. Religion was but one component of that and one, I submit, that was subservient to the dominant economic system.

By all means, continue to insult religion if you find that sort of thing gratifying. Just watch out for who's holding the gun at your back while you point and cackle. I assure it is not being aimed by a priest, imam or nun.