Some 15 University of South Carolina students, many of them Egyptians, gathered in front of the Statehouse on Tuesday for a peaceful protest against the 30-year-old regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Holding signs with messages such as "Free Egypt," singing the Egyptian national anthem in Arabic and chanting "Hey-ho, Mubarak must go," the students said they were there to show solidarity with fellow Egyptians.
"We are delivering a message to the regime back home," said student leader Mohamed Sharef, 34, a doctoral candidate in computer science and engineering. "We are saying, 'Enough is enough.'"
USC has more than 90 students from the Middle East, with the largest contingent - 43 - being from Saudi Arabia, university officials say. Ten are from Egypt.
Joining the students Tuesday was Abdel Bayoumi, 63, a tenured professor of mechanical engineering at USC who has dual American-Egyptian citizenship and who spent the first 30-some years of his life in Cairo.
"I believe in their cause, and I want to support them," said Bayoumi, director of the College of Engineering's biomedical engineering program.
Waleed El-Ansary, an Egyptian-American who is assistant professor of religious studies and Islamic world studies at USC, said the conditions that have brought millions of Egyptians out to protest in the past week are hard to understand for Americans.
"What we went through here [with the down economy] is nothing compared with the suffering of the Egyptians," said the Cairo-born El-Ansary, 46.
In Egypt, a country of 80 million, the lower classes live in desperate straits, and even the middle classes have little hope, he said.
Gordon Smith, USC professor of political science and an associate of the Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, which makes its home at USC, visited Egypt last month before the current upheavals as part of his research.
Smith, who spoke at length with members of various Egyptian human rights organizations, said the evidence is overwhelming that Mubarak's regime has the hallmarks of many dictatorships - making its opponents "disappear," indeterminate jailings without proper charges and torture of people in police custody.
El-Ansary, the religion professor, said that if Mubarak leaves, there will be much work to do to make Egypt a functional country. But fortunately, he said, his homeland has resources - an industrious people, land, water - to do a lot of things, given wise stewardship.