Protesters used methods devised by a U.S. scholar.

BOSTON - Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood in East Boston. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few in his own country have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades his practical writings on nonviolent revolution - most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages - have inspired dissidents around the world .

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, they stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.”

Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger who later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp’s work into Arabic, and that his message of “attacking weaknesses of dictators” stuck with them.

Peter Ackerman, a onetime student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center , cites his mentor as proof that “ideas have power.”

Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he protested segregation in the American South and spent nine months in a federal prison as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had “From Dictatorship to Democracy” posted on its Web site.

While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of “encouragement,” Mr. Sharp said, “The people of Egypt did that - not me.”

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution, an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard University and teaching political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the Einstein Web site.

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, Mr. Sharp has concluded that advancing freedom takes strategy and planning . Peaceful protest is best, he says, because it provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,”

Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon .” Mr. Sharp has seen action. In 1989, he witnessed the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s, he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey, a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition .

They met when Colonel Helvey was at Harvard; the military man thought the professor had ideas that could avoid war. “Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene Sharp’s work by candlelight,” Colonel Helvey recalled. “This guy has tremendous insight into society and the dynamics of social power.”

But As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, complained that Western journalists were looking for a “Lawrence of Arabia” to explain Egyptians’ success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians.

Mr. Sharp says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a manuscript for a new book, “Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,” to be published this autumn . He wants readers to know he did not pick the title. “It’s a little immodest,” he said.

He also has a manuscript in the works about Einstein, who was also concerned about totalitarianism .

In the meantime, Mr. Sharp is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He was struck by the Egyptian protesters’ discipline in remaining peaceful, and especially by their lack of fear. “That is straight out of Gandhi,” Mr. Sharp said. “If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in big trouble.”


By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG