At 2:30 a.m. on May 28th Egyptian police broke into Abdellatif Muhammad Said's Cairo apartment, blindfolded and arrested him, and seized his computer. At the same time, Said's three cousins were arrested in another apartment. No one knows where they are being held.

Arrests like this happen frequently in Egypt, which receives $2 billion yearly in U.S. aid. Why Said? He works with the Quranists, a Muslim reform group, and is the half brother of the movement's leader, Sheikh Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour. (Full disclosure: Mansour is my friend).

Being a progressive Muslim is a dangerous business, whether in Cairo or Tehran. Although he has not been officially charged, Said's "crime" appears to have been the form of Islam he promoted -- reformist, non-violent, and based exclusively on the Koran. The plot thickens: Said's cousin, Amr Tharwat, another Muslim reformer, worked for the Ibn Khaldun Center, headed by Egypt's most prominent democracy advocate, Saad Eddin Ibrahim.

The Quaranist movement was recently denounced as "non-Muslim" by a representative of Al-Azhar University, often referred to as "Islam's Vatican." Sheikh Mansour, once a faculty member at al-Azhar, was forced out because of his beliefs and imprisoned by the regime for the crime of wanting to reform Islam from within. He was eventually given asylum in the U.S., admitted to Harvard's "Scholars at Risk" program, and then sued by the Islamic Society of Boston when he complained about anti-Semitic and anti-Christian hate literature in the ISB's Cambridge mosque...