Tag: egypt

Do what is necessary

Isn’t it interesting that the MB, in an editorial on its English-language website, appeals to the Bush administration to do something about a group of senior members being sent to a military tribunal:

In astonishing step that reflects the ruthless nature of the Egyptian regime; the Military ruler of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, ordered Khayrat el Shater, Second Deputy Chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a number of its leaders to be tried by a military tribunal!

It is a sad day for freedom and human rights when patriotic civilians who did not commit any crimes are being tried in a military tribunal only because of their political views and for daring to oppose a corrupt government.

It is time now for President Bush to decide either to go with freedom and democracy as a principle claimed by his administration and lectured to the egyptians by Mrs. Rice, his Secretary of state, or to continue supporting despotic regimes by turning a blind eye to their oppressive actions. In either case the consequences are expected to go beyond Egypt leaving ample room for all extremists to reinforce their claims against democratic reformers who renounce violence like MB.

They’ve been reading the Washington Post too much. Also checked the Arabic site, no similar argument that I can see. (And by the way, when will people stop reporting that the Ikhwan sites have been shut down? It’s just not true.)

More seriously, MEMRI / FrontPageMag (my Ziotrolls’ favorite publication, as we’ve established) has a media analysis of the regime vs. the ikhwan that’s actually fairly thorough in covering the mainstream media debate, albeit with the usual slant. And this Jerusalem Post writer really, really cares about Egypt:

Egypt’s security is Israel’s security.

If the Brotherhood does come to power, it might spell disaster for all progressive-minded Egyptians, for Egypt’s allies, and for Israel. In spite of the regrettable but inevitable restrictions on human rights that Mubarak’s crackdown entails, perhaps the West would be wise to let the Egyptian rais do what is necessary, without undue criticism.

The article is titled “Long live Egypt’s ‘rais’.” Nice to see Israelis care so much about “progressive-minded Egyptians.”
Back to the issue of the MB: if Khairat al-Shatir (#3 of the group, alleged key financier) and his pals are sent to a military court, they are going to be convicted. Military courts don’t find people not guilty. And we already know from past experience that putting mid-level and senior cadres in jail might be a setback, it won’t shut down the organization, which has plenty of able and willing people who can step in.

Mufti not against women presidents after all?

I got hold of a press release from Dar al-Iftaa saying that the Mufti was not in fact against women being president. The fatwa in fact referred only to barring women from being caliphs — which is hardly relevant to modern politics. Or at least, if the Caliphate is ever restored, whether women can hold the position will be the least of our concerns. The fatwa obviously plays on the distinction between Sultans and Caliphs — on a related note, I highly recommend Fatima Mernissi’s The Forgotten Queens of Islam (in the original French Sultanes oubliées) on the history of Muslim sultanas.

Since we were fairly negative about the earlier reports of the Mufti’s fatwa, I’m reproducing the statement for Dar al-Iftaa below, after the jump.

[Thanks, Paul]
Update: Apparently the Mufti considers the Organization of the Islamic Conference to be the contemporary equivalent of the Caliphate, as opposed to the Salafi/MB “imperial” vision of a modern Caliphate. It’s an interesting argument, within the confines of Islamic (ist?) discourse.

Continue reading Mufti not against women presidents after all?

Azimi on Egyptian bloggers

Our friend Negar Azimi has a a very nice, long piece in The Nation about Egyptian bloggers and the recent video torture scandals. It’s all good stuff, but I’ll highlight the part about our own Hossam:

But how threatening, we may wonder, can a handful of bloggers be–and how much of a threat could they be to the twenty-five-year-and-running rule of a leader like Mubarak? After all, many of them are simply tech-savvy twentysomethings recently out of university. And besides, how big a role can bloggers play in a country in which they number just over 3,000–a mere fraction of whom write political content?

Hossam el-Hamalawy runs arabawy.org, a blog that has been central to documenting what he has dubbed Egypt’s very own Videogate. “We’re exploding,” he tells me. “The government didn’t see it coming, and it’s creating a domino effect. You read bloggers in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and they take pride in the Egyptian gains. Once you get this far, there’s no going back. You can’t take the plug out.” As recently as January 2005, there were only about thirty blogs in the country. “My dream is that one day there will be a blogger with a digital camera in every street in Egypt.”

Exploding or not, this sort of electronic activism defies facile definitions. No longer simply an upper- or middle-class phenomenon, blogging has become an outlet for expression among a broad spectrum of people. Some bloggers post exclusively from Internet cafes (those without PCs), some are without a university education, many are women. Today there is a blogger in every urban center in Egypt–from the stark Sinai Peninsula to Mansoura in the Nile Delta. Most write in Arabic. Recently one blogger went so far as to set up a site devoted to bringing attention to police brutalities taking place in the Sinai following bouts of terrorism (hundreds, even thousands of Bedouins have been disappeared by state security, often locked away and abused with impunity). Other blogs broach the sensitive subject of how the country’s religious minorities are treated–particularly the Copts, who make up Egypt’s Christian community. Blogs have also been a crucial space for engaging such uncomfortable topics as sexuality, race and beyond. Suddenly, the (improvised) Arabic word mudawena, signifying a blogger, has found its way into the lexicon.

Read it all. One small criticism: quoted stats about print media are not accurate, independent newspapers now play a much bigger role and state press figures are believed to be over-inflated. I don’t think we should underestimate the importance of the feedback loop between the new dailies with websites such as al-Masri al-Youm and bloggers.

It could happen to anyone we know

This al-Masri al-Youm report highlighted by Hossam is truly terrifying:

Two police corporals are currently under investigation for attempting to rape a woman in Tahrir Square’s underground metro (Sadat Station) on Wednesday, Al-Masry Al-Youm reports.

The woman approached a police corporal inside the underground station, asking him for directions to the nearest exit to KFC at 1:30pm. To her surprise, he pointed at the security office in the station, and told her that was her destination, before grabbing her to the office and attempting to rape her with the help of another police corporal. The woman managed to escape, in complete trauma with torn clothes.

This could happen to your sister or mother.

Egyptian bloggers help uncover torture

AFP has a story looking at the most recent torture case and the role bloggers — including our own Hossam el-Hamalawy — have played in bringing evidence to light. Let’s hope they can keep on doing so considering Minister of Interior Habib al-Adly recent threats against bloggers.

Egypt-rights-Internet-torture-trial,sched-FEATURE
Egypt bloggers reveal new torture case
by Paul Schemm

CAIRO, Feb 1, 2007 (AFP) – Egypt’s politically active blogger community has brought to light another torture case against the regime’s security services amid a rising tide of outrage over police brutality.
On Saturday, lawyers from the Association for Human Rights and Legal Aid (AHRLA) will go to court in a last-ditch effort to keep alive the case against a state security officer accused of torturing to death a man he arrested three and a half years ago.
The case against Captain Ashraf Safwat is gaining new attention following the decision by Egypt’s activist blogger community to post the details online in the wake of several other cases of police brutality in recent weeks.
“The most significant aspect of the case is this is the first state security officer to truly be put in front of a criminal court,” said Mohsen Bahnasi, a member of AHRLA’s board, referring to the country’s feared plainclothes security service.

Continue reading Egyptian bloggers help uncover torture

Renowned philosopher to head Kifaya movement

A few days ago, Kifaya announced that George Ishaq, its general coordinator for the last two year, will be stepping down. His replacement is Abdel Wahab al-Messiri, a renowned philosopher best-known for his Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism — the most comprehensive and serious study of these issues in Arabic. When I first read about this a couple of days ago in the Daily Star, I couldn’t believe it. Al-Messiri is a heavy caliber academic known, among other things, for being a critic of Arab anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial (although there is some controversy on his views on the Holocaust and Zionism, since he is an anti-Zionist, but I am not familiar with the arguments – update). He has lectured widely in the West, notably the US. This would suggest a major change in Kifaya’s direction is possible.

I spoke to al-Messiri briefly a few minutes ago — he confirmed the appointment but declined to give me an interview before Kifaya drafts its new policy next week. (Watch this space.) I haven’t been reading a lot of Arabic newspapers for the past week so it’s quite possible I missed coverage in Arabic, but the Daily Star and other English-language outlets have not really grasped the potential significance of al-Messiri’s appointment.

Last month, Kifaya, a rag-tag collection of socialist, Nasserist, anti-globalisation and human rights activists, held a protest on to celebrate its two-year anniversary. As per usual, a small number of demonstrators were pinned down to the Press Syndicate building, outnumbered by Central Security Forces by at least five to one. The protest was a far cry from the founding outing of Kifaya, on 12 December 2004, which marked the birth of the first overtly anti-Mubarak non-violent movement. Although that protest was even smaller, it was groundbreaking in that it was Egypt’s first movement that overtly campaigned against President Hosni Mubarak’s re-election and against the prospect of an inheritance of power scenario for his son Gamal.

Over the next year, Kifaya jolted the Egyptian political class out of its complacency and pushed back the margins for political activity. Its message, that Egyptians had enough (“kifaya” in Arabic) of poor governance and one-man rule, reverberated across the country and was partly embraced by Egypt’s traditionally cautious opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood and liberal parties such as al-Ghad.

Fast forward two years later and Kifaya seems to be heading nowhere. Its primary goal, preventing Mubarak’s re-election, has clearly failed and Gamal Mubarak’s ascendancy continues. Kifaya never reached enough critical mass to become a genuine popular movement, with the same activist faces seen at most protests. It has tried to widen its campaign to include social issues such as rising prices, unemployment and poverty, but to no avail. Neither political party nor underground revolutionary movement, Kifaya has stagnated.

In early December, Egyptian newspapers reported that at least seven senior figures in the movement quit over what they say is the dominance of Kifaya by a few personalities. While this will have a negative impact on its organisational efforts, core Kifaya members are frequently members of several groups and may redirect their efforts towards other activities, such as supporting activists or taking an interest in opposition party politics, since several left-wing parties are expected to undergo a change of leadership early next year. Another alternative is the establishment of new specialized institutions, such as the “Union of the Unemployed” created in mid-December, that campaign on specific issues.

It will be interesting to see what al-Messiri’s leadership brings to Kifaya.

Also read: a 1999 profile of al-Messiri by Fayza Hassan.

al-Masri al-Youm’s recent coverage

I noted a while back that my friend/former boss Hisham Kassem had left his position as executive publisher of al-Masri al-Youm, the independent daily newspaper he launched in 2004 and that went on to become the premier source of reporting in Egypt. Many people have asked me if it has had any impact on al-Masri al-Youm’s editorial line. I have not noticed anything special, except that these days it seems al-Masri seems to run a front-page article about a stories on Egypt that appear in foreign media nearly every day. Today’s it’s a negative FT report that touches on the Gamal/succession issue. Before that there was an Economist article, and before that a Carnegie Endowment report (and there have been others I can’t remember.)

What’s the bloody point? Al-Masri does a great service by doing original reporting. Who cares what other publications are saying? Why is it worth prominent placement? I hope this isn’t an indicator of a loss of quality.

New ICG report on Sinai

I haven’t had time to read it yet, but the ICG has just published a very interesting-looking report on Egypt’s Sinai question in light of the three bombings that have taken place there in the past three years and the subsequent indiscriminate crackdown on the Bedouin population:

Thus, beneath the terrorism problem is a more serious and enduring “Sinai question” which the political class has yet to address. Doing so will not be easy. Since this question is partly rooted in wider Middle East crises, above all the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a definitive solution depends on their resolution. But the solution also requires the full integration and participation of Sinai’s populations in national political life, which means it is also dependent on significant political reforms in the country as a whole, which are not at present on the horizon.

While a comprehensive solution of the Sinai question cannot be expected soon, the government can and should alter a development strategy that is deeply discriminatory and largely ineffective at meeting local needs. A new, properly funded plan, produced in consultation with credible local representatives and involving all elements of the population in implementation, could transform attitudes to the state by addressing Sinai’s grievances.