It didn't take long for the admirers of authoritarianism to reject the Arab Spring and to yearn for the simpler days when Arab leadership was passed tidily from father to son. After the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections, Western pundits (...)
Temperatures may be falling across the Middle East as the long, hot summer finally recedes into fall, but the political heat is rising. Arab publics are using their newfound freedoms to express their displeasure with the regional status quo, nowhere (...)
Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the scorching streets beginning July 8, seeking justice for those killed and injured during the revolution and long-overdue reforms of the Ministry of Interior, among other things. Their steadfastness has (...)
Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the scorching streets beginning July 8, seeking justice for those killed and injured during the revolution and long-overdue reforms of the Ministry of Interior, among other things. Their steadfastness has (...)
The neoliberal critique of post-revolutionary Egyptian politics is emerging, and the argument goes something like this: by caving in to demands for social justice, subsidies and welfare, the transitional government is effectively continuing the (...)
Egyptians have just triumphantly finished off the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. They did so by taking courageously and peacefully to the streets, in defiance of their own overlords, and in defiance of a pervasive discourse that dismissed Arabs as (...)
In Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent Adrift on the Nile, written just before the June War, a group of politically and socially alienated Egyptians gather on a houseboat every night to smoke hash and forget about the troubles of their country. Enveloped (...)
In Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent Adrift on the Nile, written just before the June War, a group of politically and socially alienated Egyptians gather on a houseboat every night to smoke hash and forget about the troubles of their country. Enveloped (...)
International attention remains focused on the recent spate of gruesome shark attacks in Egypt. But the real threat is not from wandering Makos in the glittering alternate tourist universes of the Sinai, but rather from the sharks of the regime — (...)
One of the most internationally well-known pieces of Arabic literature is "One Thousand and One Nights , in which a new bride forestalls her execution by spinning yarn after yarn for her homicidal husband. After watching Benjamin Netanyahu deliver (...)
Last week I awoke from a fever dream in Zamalek, sleepwalking, believing the ceiling was about to collapse on me. Still asleep, I rushed from the bedroom blindly through the empty, hushed apartment to the window.
The listless 3 am calm, (...)
In his 1846 short story "The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allen Poe recounts the story of Montresor, who, seething from years of slights, kills his friend Fortunato by burying him alive in his wine cellar, brick-by-painstaking-brick. Little did Poe (...)
Everyone stops killing each other at some point, right? This must be what the Iraq hawks are telling each other after the failure of their latest turning point and the explosion of violence over the past month. Not that anyone seems to care anymore, (...)
One of many reasons for Dick Cheney's jaunt to the Middle East is a desire to stabilize the global oil market, presumably by putting pressure on regional oil producers to kick in some extra supply. In addition to being a bad idea like nearly (...)
The US seems to enjoy sending its most hated figures to the Middle East to promote its most unpopular policies. Shipping Dick Cheney off to the region is like sending Danish cartoonists to Cairo to improve Muslim-Christian relations.
Cheney's (...)