In 2011, as we walked past Agouza on our march from Mohandessein, people cheered us on from their balconies. Families looked out of their windows, and they expressed both pride and joy, young men would stand with their mothers in balconies and ask them if they could go down and join us in our march, and the mothers would proudly send their sons down to join us, walk with us, chant with us, march...
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...
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...
There are certain things people need to realize first to sense the necessity of change and, in some cases, the urgency. Let’s start with a basic social truth – there is no ‘bottom.’ Your society, community, or state is not some rubber ball bouncing towards the ground that must inevitably hit bottom and bounce back up. Things that fall will – unless something changes – continue to fall. The...
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. Finally, in the 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...
This is the only Egypt your actions have allowed, one in which innocents are sentenced for standing up for their own rights or the rights of others. It is the same Egypt, in which you support a military dictator (whether elected or not) and believe his lying supporters on TV while you ignore everything your son or your daughter tells you about what’s actually going on at universities and on the...
When we speak of the imprisoned protesters in Egypt, many of whom are now, and have been, on a hunger strike, many of us think of the physical pain itself; how hungry you get in the first few days, what you feel as your body starts adapting to the lack of food, and if it’s a complete hunger strike, the body’s slow trip towards finality. The physical pain is indeed horrific, and, depending on how...
The military will starve you, then feed you. They will raise gas prices then offer you transportation on their buses. They will make deals with terrorists, then offer to save you from them. Behind all these actions lies one motive…one lesson they want you to learn; they are your god almighty, they are the takers, and they are the givers, by their will you starve, and by their providence...
Imagine that a corporation ran your country. Now imagine this corporation has managed to take over at least a third of the country’s assets. Imagine if this corporation enacted laws that allowed it to enlist most of the young men in the country as slave labor, getting paid peanuts, and having to work all day, sometimes in productive jobs, and sometimes sending men to do nothing more than smoke...
A few points need to be made here. First of all, I find it at least a bit strange when people refer to me as part of a ‘you’ that they call the ‘opposition’ and then tell me that this ‘we’ was supposed to create a coalition and that since we have ‘offered none’ – I, therefore, have no right to ‘complain.’ I am a video producer, a photographer, a graphic designer, a writer, and a musician. I...
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