Since his State of the Union speech in January, George W. Bush has been promising that the United States would wage war against terrorism in part by pressing for the spread of democratic values in the Muslim world. Apart from his call for reform of the Palestinian Authority, there has been little practical follow-up, especially with those autocratically ruled Arab nations that have produced most of the militants of Al Qaeda. Now President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, one of those states, has presented Bush with an important opportunity to prove that his policy amounts to more than rhetoric.

On Monday in Cairo an Egyptian court for the second time sentenced the country's most important campaigner for democracy and human rights, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to seven years in prison on patently trumped-up charges. Ibrahim, 63, a sociologist and dual Egyptian-American citizen, has for years courageously and peacefully promoted the very values that Bush has said must be strengthened inside the Arab world: free elections, civic participation and nondiscrimination against women and religious minorities. Funded by modest grants from the European Union, his Ibn Khaldun Institute produced documentaries about discrimination against Egypt's Coptic Christians and urged citizens to participate in parliamentary elections despite the massive fraud that invariably occurs.

According to Mubarak and his state prosecutors, these acts were crimes. Ibrahim's reports on religious discrimination and election irregularities, the state alleged, tarnished Egypt's image, while his acceptance of EU grants supposedly violated one of the strictures of the state of emergency under which Mubarak has ruled the country for two decades. The fact that the European Union submitted an affidavit testifying to Ibrahim's proper use of its funds made no impact. Nor, apparently, did the repeated statements from the U.S. State Department criticizing Ibrahim's prosecution. Maybe that is because Mubarak is unwilling to forgive Ibrahim's greatest offense: publishing an article calling attention to the fact that the Egyptian dictator is grooming his son to succeed him.

Mubarak depends on U.S. support to prop up a regime that is both politically and economically bankrupt. Yet far from accepting Bush's call for liberalization, he is directly challenging it. His jailing of an ailing professor who is both an American citizen and his country's foremost advocate of peaceful reform, at a time when anti-American and anti-Semitic hate speech spews from government-controlled media, can only be seen as a calculated slap in the face to a U.S. administration and Congress that support his government with more than $2 billion in annual aid. In an address at West Point last month, Bush said the 20th century had ended with "a single surviving model of human progress, based on nonnegotiable demands of human dignity." America, he said "cannot impose this vision - yet we can support and reward governments that make the right choices. ... In our development aid, in our diplomatic efforts, in our international broadcasting and in our educational assistance, the United States will promote moderation and tolerance and human rights." In Egypt, a man who has tirelessly promoted moderation and tolerance and human rights was sent to prison by a regime that consistently makes the wrong choices, yet is supported and rewarded by America more than any other in the Arab world. Will Bush alter his administration's "development aid, diplomatic efforts, international broadcasting and educational assistance" to Egypt to reflect his own announced policy? At stake is not just the welfare of a single courageous man but the credibility of Bush's policy toward the Islamic world.