Her sentence, should she be convicted? Eighty lashes, pending the approval of the sheikh of Al-Azhar, Egypt's highest religious authority. A harsh penalty, for sure, but unsurprising given the utterly vacuous nature of Egypt's vexing hisba ordinances.

But first, let's take a step back and gauge the concept of hisba legislation in the first place.

Originally an Islamic injunction "commanding the good and forbidding the evil," hisba legislation in Islamic jurisprudence enabled individual Muslims to defend matters of faith in the public arena. A putative tool of civilian empowerment, hisba authorized ordinary Muslims with the ability to hold fellow citizens -- and indeed the state -- accountable for the upholding of religious virtue.

The practical application of hisba in Egypt, articulated in Articles 89 and 110 of decree law 78, gives all Egyptians the right to file lawsuits in cases where an exalted right of God has been violated. Certainly a broad statute, but the stated purpose was ostensibly to encourage civilian participation in the political process.

Clearly this wasn't the outcome. Since the rise in Islamist movements in Egypt after Sadat, hisba legislation has been used almost exclusively to stifle rather than encourage civic engagement.

Predominantly a domain of Egypt's conservative religious establishment, hisba cases flippantly target activists and intellectuals judged Islamic deviants, in an attempt to silence their otherwise perfectly legitimate critiques of Egyptian society.

Arguably the most famous case of religiously-motivated hisba involves Cairo University Arabic Professor Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, who in 1993 was refused promotion to full professor for producing allegedly heretical Islamic scholarship.

Following his denial of promotion, zealous Islamist lawyers went a step further by launching a hisba case against him, accusing him of being an apostate (murtad) and consequently demanding that he be divorced from his wife, Ibtihal Younis, on the grounds that a Muslim woman may not marry an apostate.

Despite the fact that the plaintiff had no vested interest whatsoever in such a personal matter, an appeals court supported the apostasy charge, and the Court of Cessation (Egypt's highest court) in 1996 concurred. With no legal recourse, Dr. Abu Zeid and his wife fled for the Netherlands, where they have been in self-imposed exile ever since.

Otherwise secular intellectual activists and artists, moreover, are equally victimized by arbitrary hisba charges. The famous Egyptian activist and feminist Nawal al-Sadawy, after being quoted as saying that the pilgrimage to Mecca was a "vestige of pagan practices," was slapped in 2001 with a hisba lawsuit, demanding that she be declared an apostate and as such be divorced from her husband.

More recently, Egyptian poet Helmi Salem was chastised by the religious establishment for his poem, "The balcony of Laila Mourad," deemed an affront to Islam. Queue the routine hisba lawsuit, and Salem is duly rebuked, the prestigious literary award he won last year (and the accompanying $9,500 prize) rescinded. Not a terribly encouraging environment for aspiring artists, one would think.

Perhaps most frightening of all, hisba litigation has now metastasized into a purely political enterprise, targeting activists seeking to challenge the status quo.

Two particularly illuminating examples come to mind.

Earlier this year Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the independent Cairo newspaper Al-Dustur, was sentenced to six months in prison. His crime? Printing stories questioning the health of Egypt's president -- an act which, according to the hisba suit against him, could destabilize the entire Egyptian economy, should anyone think that President Mubarak is feeble enough to have any health problems.

Even starker is the ongoing saga of Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, one of Egypt's leading democracy advocates, who already endured a lengthy prison term for challenging Egypt's repressive policies. On Aug. 2, Dr. Ibrahim was sentenced, in absentia, to two years imprisonment, for "harming Egypt's image abroad."

Writing opinion columns in foreign newspapers criticizing Mubarak, goes the logic of this case, is tantamount to treason. In both cases, hisba legislation was employed by NDP loyalist attorneys, on utterly baseless charges, in the name of public interest.

Clearly the flippancy of these hisba lawsuits must be curtailed. Despite a 1998 amendment limiting the jurisdiction of hisba cases to the general prosecutor, private parties are still deeply entrenched in spearheading hisba campaigns against potential detractors.

More safeguards must be put in place, to protect political activists and intellectuals, like Saad Eddin Ibrahim, from such frivolous charges. The alternative is an environment of constant intimidation, where NDP loyalists and Islamist zealots use vacuous legislation to prevent alternative viewpoints in Egypt from ever seeing the light of day.

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Daanish Faruqi is a senior researcher, and editor, at the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo.