CAIRO, Egypt – A friend is behind bars. Wednesday evening Egyptian security personnel arrested George Ishaq, a leading figure in the Egyptian democracy movement, at his home in Cairo. No formal charges have been filed, so it’s not clear at this point why and for how long he will be detained.

I met George four years ago while covering a demonstration by Kifaya—which in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic means Enough—outside the Journalists Syndicate in downtown Cairo. Kifaya is a small but vocal group bringing together activists from across the political spectrum, from old school Marxists to Islamists, joined by a common desire to see an end—thus their slogan—to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, in power since October 1981.

 I saw George again and again at similar events, where protesters were often outnumbered ten to one by riot police and plain-clothed policemen clutching rubber truncheons.

At first glance George doesn’t look like a political firebrand determined to bring down the regime. George is a bespectacled former school teacher in his sixties with a shock of white hair and an unwavering, mischievous smile. He possesses that unique Egyptian ability to combine biting humour aimed at the high and mighty with razor sharp political analysis, his observations on contemporary Egypt always on the mark, often funny but deeply saddening at the same time.

In an interview when his movement was at its height, George told me “The door [to democracy] is open and nobody can close it again. We will go through this door and we will struggle until the end, to be a democratic country. We will insist on it.”

But his determination to bring about change has been met by an even more uncompromising determination by the Mubarak regime to hold on to power.

George’s arrest is just the latest in a campaign by the Egyptian government leading up to the municipal elections held on Tuesday. More than a thousand members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood were rounded up, plus, according to Kifaya, around 50 of its members.

The vote was met with indifference by most of the population, disillusioned by decades of rigged, sham elections. The same day, Egyptians were shocked (and some thrilled) by photos circulating on the internet of angry striking workers in the industrial town of Mahalla Al-Kubra destroying a billboard featuring a picture of President Mubarak.

A Coptic Christian, George identifies himself first and foremost as an Egyptian patriot, a man profoundly committed to a tolerant Egypt which, alas, is slowly disappearing, a country fiercely proud of its profoundly rich culture stretching back thousands and thousands of years, the Arab world’s cultural and political centre of gravity, where literature and music and theatre and art flourished.

Today Egypt is impoverished, economically and politically, its cultural life a mere shadow of what existed fifty or sixty years ago.

But the spirit of Egypt—and an unflagging optimism that Egypt will rise again—is kept alive by people like George. Even if he is behind bars.