Authoritarianism makes for bad journalism — often, very bad journalism. The truism is self-evident and more than amply demonstrated by lived experience, not only in Egypt but everywhere in the world.
Yet, the experience of Al-Ahram Weekly, which (...)
Authoritarianism makes for bad journalism — often, very bad journalism. The truism is self-evident and more than amply demonstrated by lived experience, not only in Egypt but everywhere in the world.
Yet, the experience of Al-Ahram Weekly, which (...)
Authoritarianism makes for bad journalism — often, very bad journalism. The truism is self-evident and more than amply demonstrated by lived experience, not only in Egypt but everywhere in the world. Yet, the experience of Al-Ahram Weekly, which (...)
This is not the famous phantasm of the Communist Manifesto, which the youthful Marx and Engels rather optimistically believed had been haunting Europe in the mid-19thcentury. It's more like the ghost of Hamlet's father, the majesty of buried (...)
It seemed to be working: the army was – more or less – back in the barracks, the police were now doing their torture and killing for the Brotherhood, the Judiciary was being subdued and MB and Mubarak Oligarchs were making nice
9. Mapping the (...)
8. The tanks at the tip of revolt
We need first to clearly set out the most fundamental feature of the 30 June uprising; to see the forest, before we can begin to examine the trees, shrubs and weeds. This in a word is: revolution. Millions of (...)
7.Uprisings, love-fests and strange bed-fellows
There is a Sisyphean aspect to the Egyptian revolution. Incessantly pushing the boulder of radical democratic transformation up a steep, jagged hill composed of the resistance of the old authoritarian (...)
6. One-way ticket to cliff edge
No sooner would the Muslim Brotherhood, the very mother of modern day political Islam, seem to have achieved its decades-long dream of ascending to the very summit of power in Egypt than it would rush headlong towards (...)
5. “We at the height are ready to decline”
The course of the Egyptian revolution, always contradictory, always complex, dialectical, non-linear and “messy,” is destined to take prominent place in the “sociology of revolution.” An ever-present, (...)
4. It's the people, stupid!
At the risk of over-tiring a metaphor, let me recount a bit of personal history.
My paternal grandfather was a clerk with the British army in Egypt. I never knew what the job involved exactly, but apparently back in the (...)
3. Continuing revolution, the great spoiler
Looked at one way, the course of Egypt's history since January 2011 would appear as a progressive descent into chaos and mayhem. There are indeed those who see it only as such – and if anything, they've (...)
“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
2. What's the big deal?
We now know (...)
Egypt's current reality – muddled, chaotic and overcast with ambiguity – can be understood only by situating it within the nation's tumultuous revolutionary history. Ahram Online will run the essay in daily instalments
“The memory of oppressed (...)
Democracy is constituted by the express and active will of real, living people, not by a box; this is especially true when these people are engaged in an on-going revolution, charting their and their nation's future
The US government, a substantial (...)
Egypt is making world history; in particular, world revolutionary history. Already, it is firmly up there with the two axiomatic revolutions of the modern world, the French and Russian revolutions. The popular upsurge on 30 June has been described (...)
Though President Morsi's fondest Western cultural creations are apparently “Good Morning America” and the original (1968) version of Planet of the Apes, to observe Muslim Brotherhood practice since the revolution one cannot help but be reminded of (...)
As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians yet again go on the streets to regain their hijacked revolution, it might prove useful to re-imagine what might have been, as way to help chart what could be
Mohamed Hassanein Heikal has likened the Egyptian (...)
Cairo, Al-Qahira, is literally The Vanquisher, or the vanquishing city. Max Rodenbook, in the title of his delightful history of the Egyptian capital, rendered it, “Cairo: City Victorious”. And for a great part of its millennium-long history, (...)
On Friday morning, and as Egypt's resurgent revolution was preparing to lock horns yet again with forces bent on its destruction, I received (an exceedingly) long distance call from an Australian broadcast journalist. They wanted a phone interview (...)
To chants of “Command, command oh Badei, you command and we obey,” the Muslim Brotherhood in power was fast mutating into the very caricature of itself as painted for years by its bitterest enemies. It's easily mobilized, effortlessly bussed (...)
The Egyptian revolution blew the top off a deeply divided society. It did much more, as its creators recreated themselves, the few thousands became hundreds of thousands, and a nation in which political space had all but withered away, found itself (...)
I'm bored with the Brotherhood. They persist in repeating the same mistakes, the same grabbing, grasping offensives, and the same bungling, bungled retreats, they make promises in the morning only to renege on them before the day's end, continuously (...)
This column has been absent for two weeks. I'd been on a longish trip to a slice of heaven on earth, Ubud, Bali. The six-day Writers and Readers Festival, to which I'd been invited, stretched to 11 days as I travelled from one end of the Silk Road (...)
The ruling (in a manner of speaking) Muslim Brotherhood faces a strategic, even fateful decision: granting that they'll be removed from power within 4 years at the outside, they need to make up their minds whether they'd rather bow out gracefully or (...)
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I strongly sense conspiracy in the whole sordid "film maligning the Prophet" fracas, which, in a few hours, claimed the lives of three American diplomats and delivered a devastating blow to the Arab revolutionary (...)