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Goodbye Mohamed Mahmoud…

By on Mar 31, 2016 in Politics | 0 comments

The battle of Mohamed Mahmoud, as it is called, was one of the most important battles of the January revolution, and for several reasons – We had failed, as a people and as a revolutionary community, to defeat the military/Islamist alliance over the March referendum, a referendum that both the state and the media presented as an option between “a roadmap” or “unknown chaos”. It was based on this referendum that the forces of so-called ‘political Islam’ defined very clearly their position in relation to the revolution, by abandoning it completely, and it became clear to any who still doubted it that the Muslim Brotherhood was not an enemy of the regime, but a rival… And along came Mohamed Mahmoud, and within days, hundreds, or rather thousands of people were wounded, and dozens were killed. Men, women, Egyptians. Mohamed Mahmoud is dear to...

Was It a Mistake to Protest Against Morsi?

By on Jan 6, 2015 in Featured, Politics | 1 comment

On the 30th of June, 2013, we took to the streets to protest the rule of Dr. Mohamed Morsi, a member of the so-called Muslim Brotherhood, and then president of Egypt. We protested against him, and our reasons were as diverse as we ourselves were; some of us were with the revolution and against the Muslim Brotherhood, some of us were clearly Mubarak loyalists who salivated at the chance to depose the Brotherhood, and some of us had, ostensibly, gone down to protect their Egyptian ‘Identify’ from the Pseudo-Islamist fascism that we had all seen crystalized before our eyes in the mostly-Islamist parliament in which we had seen the face of so-called ‘Political Islam’. Since that day, since Morsi was removed, events have taken on their own momentum; the military exploited our protests just as it had exploited the revolution from the very start. The generals took control just as they had...

Egypt: Waiting for Sunset

By on Dec 23, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

How long must we endure? It is difficult to take events in Egypt seriously right now. It has become normal to see legal and judicial travesties on a daily basis; a news story about two people being arrested for speaking English while on the subway, another story about a man getting arrested, or brought by a mob to a police station, for writing the frequency of satellite channels on a bathroom wall, as though it were some sort of political pornography. We are almost used to the frequent violations of the basic legal rights of anybody suspected of homosexuality or atheism, as though those were crimes when even Egypt’s mockery of a legal system has not yet found the time to officially criminalize them. The courts, initially resorted to by human rights activists, have about as much blood on their hands now as the police force does. The army has become, first covertly, but now quite...

Le Morte d’Egypte

By on Oct 30, 2014 in Featured, Politics | 0 comments

Excuse the title. I like the Camelot myths. I’ve never read the original Malory though and wasn’t quite so interested in it when I was a child. The whole knight in shining armor thing never quite caught my fancy. However, I was lucky enough, years later, to run into The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White’s wonderful take on the Arthurian myths, in the first volume, we see a young Arthur, slowly becoming aware of what Merlin’s oblique lessons were forcing him to understand. It is a key moment, and here it is, brutally shortened, for your benefit. It’s still a bit long for an excerpt, but it’s important, and if you give me your attention for a few minutes, you’ll see why it’s so important that you get a feel for how it unfolds… “I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought...

Egypt’s Growing Catalog of Absurdities

By on Oct 27, 2014 in Politics | 0 comments

As an Egyptian in Egypt these days, you get used to absurdity, it starts when you wake up and look at the news, and then frustrates you during the day as you see it resonate with some of the people you meet and interact with, and finally, at evening, on TV screens across the nation, the absurdity is re-framed into ever more convoluted scenarios before which any sane mind would surely strap on a nuclear bomb and rid humanity of its’ misery. It seems only appropriate, at times like these, to show the world just how crazy we have become… Here are some samples in no specific order: 1. General Hamdy Bekheet, on TV, saying, in no uncertain terms that “We are in a war on terrorism! We are at war with the world! We are at war with great countries! We are at war with the European Union! We are fighting the United States! We are at war with Israel, Turkey, and Iran! We are at...

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