Singers jailed over ‘insults and debauchery’

Egyptian courts have jailed two singers for seemingly tame behaviour deemed threatening to society in a country growing increasingly repressive on all fronts.

The famous singer Sherine Abdel-wahab was given six months over a joke which suggested the Nile River is polluted, which prosecutors used to accuse her of insulting the state.

A fan had asked her to sing one of her popular songs referring to drinking from the river, Egypt’s lifeline, to which she playfully suggested that it is safer to drink bottled water.

The other, little-known Laila Amer, was sentenced to two years for inciting “debauchery and immorality” with a music video in which she plays a downtrodden but belly-dancing housewife, complaining to her husband about his bossy mother. The name of the song, Bos Omak, is a play on a popular Arabic profanity.

The charges, while not uncommon in conservative Egypt, come at a time when free speech in general is under assault.