We’re the ones who lost. We’re the ones who took to the streets in the hope that if there were enough of us out there, things would change. We’re the ones you saw down from your balconies, the ones you were kind enough to throw water bottles to, and the ones you felt proud to see your son and daughter join. We’re the ones who chanted and got gassed, and we scattered, and...
You’re impatient. All you have to do is wait. Everything takes time. Give the man a chance. This has been the chorus, and it arose within months after El Sisi came to office. It’s still there, spoken once in a while by the loyalists, as it was previously played on and on by those who believed the regime would work things out to their interests, one way or another. Those that believed they’d...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The summer of 2011 must’ve been an incredible time for Hamdein Sabbahi. He was one of the darlings of the revolution, known as a left-leaning Nasserist (whatever that means), ignored only by the hardcore revolutionaries who would only rubber-stamp a batter front-liner, but mostly admired, and generally just liked by almost everybody else. He was tight with what you could, with some effort, call...
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