If the poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi gives you an appointment for an interview in a public place, you are well advised to think twice. The likelihood of holding his attention for more than few minutes, much as you both might try, is almost next to (...)
: We were thinking that, having lived through the military takeover in 1980 and having witnessed the rise of political Islam in Turkey after so many years of secularisation, you decided to veil all of these things in your works. I recall you saying (...)
I have to admit to having been strongly moved by the opening session of the new People's Assembly (the lower chamber of the Egyptian parliament), which I sat watching on television for almost 12 hours on Monday 23 January. Glued to the television (...)
Mona Anis, Friday 13 Jan 2012
With ten days to go before the lower chamber of the Egyptian parliament, the People's Assembly, is scheduled to open, the elections are drawing to a conclusion. The results of the run-offs of the third and final (...)
Today, and as I am writing this column on Tuesday, the third stage of the elections for the lower house of the Egyptian parliament has begun. According to the law, the elections are to be conducted over two consecutive days, to be followed by (...)
When the Iraqi poet and critic Sinan Antoon described the scene in Tahrir Square before former president Hosni Mubarak stepped down on 11 February as a “Cairo commune, ready to conquer the skies to achieve the legitimate demands of the popular (...)
The intensity of the past few days separating the announcement of the results of the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections and the beginning of the second round yesterday have been such that every new day has carried with it developments (...)
It has been some 25 years now since I first began voting in national elections, and in all those years I have never experienced a greater quandary than the one I faced this week as a result of the complex voting system introduced into the country (...)
On Monday and Tuesday, and as millions of Egyptians went to the polls to vote in the first stage of the parliamentary elections, the mood was decidedly one of tolerance and optimism. Long queues outside polling stations were to be seen everywhere in (...)
Egyptian political forces go to the polls in a fortnight's time as polarised and divided as they have ever been. While the Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, are readying themselves for a ballot-box victory they believe they well deserve (...)
Eight and a half months after the ouster of former president Hosni Mubarak, Egyptians are finally readying themselves for national elections. On Monday, the process of registering candidates for both the lower and upper chambers of parliament (...)
I am not sure how many of my compatriots will recognise the allusion in the title of this piece. Some, who are not old enough to remember the original 1972 incident I am referring to - the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland, also known (...)
“The discrepancy between important political, moral, and cultural gains on the one hand, and, on the other, a droning ground bass of land alienation is at the heart of the Palestinian dilemma today. To speak of this discrepancy in aesthetic terms as (...)
Now that autumn has officially begun, perhaps it's time to abandon the term "Arab Spring" when talking about the revolutionary tide sweeping across the Arab world. The term, which has not sat well with Arab analysts, some even claiming it is an (...)
The civil resistance protests that sparked the January revolution and continue to define it have had spectacular moments. Those, it would seem, belong more to the realm of the imaginative or the visionary than to that of the real. One such moment (...)
On Monday morning, most Egyptians were glued to their television screens. But while they watched the proceedings of the second session in the trial of the man who ruled their country for three uninterrupted decades until six months ago – transmitted (...)
The theatricality of the whole affair sent many commentators wondering whether the scene had been deliberately staged to elicit sympathy, or if the health of the former president really prevented him from taking up a more erect position – in a (...)
On Friday 28 July, a great many liberal or socialist Egyptians were jolted out of their apparent slumbers when they heard tens of thousands of people chanting “Islamic, Islamic, neither eastern nor western” in the streets.
Over the course of the (...)
Mubarak has fallen, but not his regime. So says poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi in his most recent poem, published at the beginning of this month. It is a sentiment shared by many Egyptians who express their dissatisfaction with the slow pace of trials (...)
As I write this, it's already five days since hundreds of thousands of Egyptians converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo for what was dubbed the Friday of Revolution First, an initiative called for by many political movements and parties to express (...)
The prospect of holding parliamentary elections any time soon is getting less clear by the day. While on Monday evening the Egyptian prime minister announced that the elections would take place at the end of September, as scheduled, on Tuesday (...)
Last week, I mentioned that the arrest of a suspected Israeli spy in Cairo and the revelation that the alleged Syrian lesbian blogger was a fictitious character created by an American man had set me wondering about the fine lines that divide (...)
Two seemingly disparate incidents set me wondering about the dividing lines between academic research, espionage and xenophobia: the arrest in Cairo of a suspected Israeli spy; and the revelation that the Damascus lesbian blogger was in fact an (...)
It is impossible to have a political conversation these days – and politics is all Egyptians ever talk about – without the word Turkey cropping up within minutes. Turkey is the topic of interest: meetings are being held to discuss it, and writers, (...)
This week marks five years since the death of Ahmed Abdalla, leader of the early-1970s student movement, political activist and social scientist. Abdalla's untimely death shocked numerous friends and admirers who followed with approbation his heroic (...)