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lost influence to more reform-minded cadres and, more signifıcantly, tomembers of the country's small, but increasingly active, entrepreneurialclass. In effect, the regime's relationship with the latter appears to havedeveloped on the basis of a bargain vvhereby in return for its political supportand growing participation in Egypt's economic life, the entrepreneurialclass has won a degree of influence in economic policymaking 4 .Beyond this, hovvever, the regime has made it increasingly plain thatit will not countenance any erosion of Egypt's authoritarian political system.Thus, it has taken particular care in recent years to constrain demandsthat economic liberalization be accompanied by democratization.Associational groups aiming to build up Egypt's nascent civil societyhave come under particularly strong government pressure. By the summerof 1998, existing legislation, which in itself already virtually eliminatestrue associational autonomy in Egypt, was in the process of beingamended in ways that would erect even stronger structures. After themid-1990s, press laws were altered with a view to giving the governmentfar greater legal power to impose sanctions, including jail terms, for theexpression of opinions deemed unduly critical of the regime. Inevitably, amajör target of official muscle-flexing was Egypt's liberal intellectualcommunity—a heterogeneous and largely unorganized mass of thinkers,writers and artists that includes classical liberals with whom John StuartMili would feel comfortable and various shades of Marxists, Nasseristsand traditional Arab Nationalists. Although obviously divided along multipleideological lines, such intellectuals have tended to share at least twocharacteristics. First, while largely suspicious of economic liberalization(at least insofar as it constitutes a goal of Egypt's current regime), theyhave nonetheless accepted that liberalizing economic reform cannot beavoided; yet, they insist that it must be paralleled by true political liberalization.Second, such intellectuals in the main cling to a secular view ofpolitics.Without being privy to the innermost councils of the Mubarak regime,it is impossible to know with certainty the calculations behind theEgyptian authorities'campaign to restrain and intimidate the country'sliberal, politically secular intellectual community. Hovvever, the undeniableincrease in official action against this group in the past few years suggestsan obvious underlying rationale. Thus, the fact that most of thespate of legal actions against journalists, vvriters, university professorsand human rights groups have been justifîed on grounds of Islamic law ormorality indicates that the regime seeks not only to silence critics whohope to transpose economic liberalization into the political realm but also4. On majör trips abroad, President Hosni Mubarak is now often accompanied by sizeablegroups of businessmen. For example, when visiting France in the spring of 1998,Mubarak journied with över 130 top Egyptian businessmen.596