Saad Eddin Ibrahim (, ) (born 31 December 1938) is an Egyptian sociologist and author. He is one of Egypt's leading human rights and democracy activists, and a strong critic of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Biography Born in Bedeen, Mansoura, Egypt, 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, Ibrahim was a professor in the American University in Cairo's (AUC) Department of Sociology, having previously taught sociology at Indiana's DePauw University from 1967 to 1974. He was a visiting professor at UCLA in Los Angeles in spring of 1979, and on leave from AUC to serve as Secretary General of the Arab Thought Forum, chaired by Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan from 1984 to 1989. He founded both the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo and the Arab Organization for Human Rights. He is married to Barbara Ibrahim, the director of the Gerhart Center for Civic Engagement and Philanthropy in Cairo; they have two children, Randa and Amir Ibrahim, and four grandchildren, Lara and Seif (through Randa) and Adam and Gebriel (through Amir). 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, Baháʼís. 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. The High Court ruling was 35 pages long and makes for important reading. It stated that as a public intellectual, Ibrahim's writing and other civic activities were protected. It also ruled that the executive