Tag: egypt

Baheyya on new books

Don’t miss Baheyya’s reviews of new books at this year’s Cairo International Book Fair: Sonallah Ibrahim’s “Sneaking,” Khaled al-Khamissi’s “Taxi” (which I got a chance to take a look at the other day) and of course Alaa al-Aswani’s “Chicago,” which we mentioned earlier here. I haven’t gone to the fair yet this year, but I really recommend it to anyone, even if you don’t read Arabic. I am particularly interested in the latest in religious books and anything that might explain the recent increase of munaqabat (women wearing the full-face veil) in Cairo.

The Maadi stabber

Those of you who live in Egypt will know that over the past week there has been much brouhaha over a series of stabbings in the well-heeled neighborhood of Maadi, land of expats, embassy housing and fine pork products. The press has been having a field day with this, as it has over past “serial killer” affairs, and Rose al-Youssef has taken to accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being behind the mysterious stabbings — because lately, for Rose al-Youssef, anything bad happening in Egypt is the fault of the MB.

Amidst all this hand-wringing, a courageous reader of the Egyptian Gazette has suggested a solution to snare the evildoer. It was published in Thursday’s paper (right next to a column where Tarek Heggy surpasses himself in pomposity by listing every Islamic thinker he has heard about), and proves yet again that the Gazette is essential reading for crime-fighters.

Maadistabber

Mufti of Egypt against women presidents

Book-banning, Bahai-hating, regime bigot-in-chief Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Mufti of Egypt, has decreed that women are barred from the presidency in Egypt.

“Under Islamic sharia (religious law), a woman cannot be head of state because it is one of the duties of the position to lead Muslims in prayer and that role can only be carried out by men,” said the fatwa carried by leading state daily Al-Ahram.

“If by political rights, we mean the right to vote, stand as candidate or assume public office, then the sharia has no objection to women enjoying them, but a woman cannot serve as head of state.

“Women can stand as candidates for parliament or the consultative council, in so far as they can reconcile their duties with the rights that their husbands and children have over them.”

I’m afraid this AFP article rather misses the point when it ends with the following paragraph:

But in a country where the Muslim Brotherhood is the main opposition group, social pressures still limit women’s political role.

This implies that the MB is behind the growing conservatism of regime clerics, even though women’s representation has steadily dropped under Mubarak (partly because he removed quotas in 1987) and the ruling NDP did not give much if any backing to female in the last elections (whereas the admittedly also bigoted MB fielded one female candidate). It is becoming increasingly clear that the Mubarak regime and the NDP has its own Islamo-conservatives, and in some ways they are worse than the MB. Just look at the recent uproar in the NDP over Farouq Hosni’s veil remarks, the agitation of “clash of civilization” issues, and Mubarak’s own pronouncements over Shias’ loyalty to Iran.

Who will rid us of these turbulent priests?

Saddam is dead, long live SADDAM

I have an op-ed about US strategy in the Middle East and the growing Sunni-Shia divide over at TomPaine.com. Let me know what you think.

Later today I will post a hyperlinked version here.

Update: The New Saddam

Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in Washington these days.

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally the support of what Rice has described as the “moderate mainstream� Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the “GCC + 2,� meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of the 20th century’s deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them against Iranians, either).
Continue reading Saddam is dead, long live SADDAM

the crossing (and the CSF conscript)

Inspired by sandmonkey’s remark on gifts to Egypt from foreign revolutionaries, I went to see the 1973 War Panorama the other day – also to learn more about the war’s first half. (For some reason, the show stopped before the IDF built four pontoon bridges crossing the canal into the other direction and before Egypt’s Third Army got trapped.)

The panorama is a gift from North Korea:


Now my visit got quite a sad note to it, if you see this CSF conscript who is so scared from his superiors that he does not dare to answer which two countries were fighting in the 1973 war and in which year it started. (See this post on 3arabawy.)

Back to The Crossing: I’ll hire these guys next time I need to cross Salah Selim during rush hour.

I’ll hire these guys next time I need to cross Salah Selim during rush hour.
PS: On a (maybe not) related note, I’d sponsor one shark soup for anyone who can tell me the secret history of the Korean restaurant deep inside the Cleopatra bunker on Midan Tahrir.

Update: The sign on the first picture reads Panorama creators D.P.R. Korea 1989. I’ll try to enlarge the pictures.

New Torture Cases

From the Shebab Kifaya mailing list. Haven’t verified the information or obtained the victim’s full and informed consent to publish the details here, so names and details redacted for the moment:

Citizen […], known by […] was subject to severe beating and use of electricity on sensitive parts of his body at the state security intelligence headquarters in the city of […] by the hands of officer […]. […] had been arrested in the early hours of the […] from his house in the district of […] in the city of […], Gharbeyya governorate in the Delta of Egypt.

[…] woke up at about 2 a.m. upon a heavy knocking at his door. As soon as he opened the door the police was all over the house. […] asked for the prosecutor’s permit to search the house, upon which the state security officer reached into his pocket, got out a small piece of paper, which […] did not read, returned it back into his pocket again and said: “This is the permit. And even if there is no permit, I shall detain you as I wish”. The police then took […] down into the police car, then went up again in arms to search his house causing panic to his wife and children. The police took school books and botebooks of the children, a praying carpet, a computer which was searched by the officer himself at the state security office in violation of the law which states that examination of a computer should be carried out by the technical office upon an order of the prosecution.

As soon as […] arrived in the state security office in […] he was beaten, slapped and kicked all over his body by officer […] and […]. Then […] stripped […] of all his clothes, forced him to the floor on his back with his hands tied and eyes blindfolded. He then put a chair between his legs and used a baton to pressure sensitive parts of his body. While […] was screaming of pain, officer […] was laughing and saying: “I shall make you lose your manhood totally. You will sleep with your wife with no difference between the two of you!!”

After 20 hours of torture, […] was referred to the prosecution charged of membership of the Muslim Brotherhood. His file was registered as administrative case no. […].

[…]’s lawyer has filed a complaint to the public prosecutor’s officer and the National Council for Human Rights.

Perhaps the formal complaint with the prosecutor’s office makes this fair game for public distribution, but absent confirmation, and given Imad al-Kabir‘s momentary retraction of his story in the face of intimidation after the details of his case were publicized, I’m erring on the side of caution.

It’s rare for members of the Muslim Brotherhood to face torture these days. Those who do tend to be young, rank-and-file members from the governorates, like this unfortunate man from Gharbeyya. More senior members, and members from Cairo, now generally say they are not physicaly abused in custody.

Update: Hossam reports on another Kifaya anti-torture initiative here.

A petition

My friend Sandmonkey and I disagree on most things (because he’s wrong!), but a few days ago he spotted reports of an Egyptian blogger attending a conference in Israel who said things that have raised the Egyptian blogosphere’s collective eyebrows. Among other things, he alleged that we are all opposition journalists, there are only 100 of us and he knows us all, and we spend vast fortunes at internet cafés where we hold conspiratorial meetings. In fact there are well over 6,000 Egypt-based bloggers, the vast majority of which are not political, and even the political ones are generally not linked with the opposition, although they might support Kifaya or other movements.

To read more about it, see the petition a bunch of us have signed to alert the Israeli organizers that they have been duped — the so-called “blogger” appears to be a US-based Egyptian academic who puts up his scholarly articles online. It’s one thing to want to speak about blogging in general terms as an academic, but another to paint a vibrant and diverse group of bloggers as a cabal of spoilt rich kids with political agendas. And kudos to Sandmonkey — the very proof that the Egyptian blogosphere is not what you might expect it to be — for putting it all together.

cheap dig

nose-guard.jpg

Ok ok. My apologies to the fine boys who come out to make sure that law and order are maintained during these demos. Sometimes you just can’t resist though.

Today’s Kefaya demo at Sayeda Zeinab mosque, marking the thirty-year anniversary of the Bread Riots, was more energetic than usual, and the crowd seemed more diverse. At the same time security seemed more at ease, though the tactics followed routine practise: squish the protestors into the smallest possible space and keep a troupe of beltagaya posted around the corner just in case.

I’ve posted a couple of other shots of the proceedings on my flickr site.

Also see Hossam Hamalway’s report here or check out a contemporary account of the events by Henry E. Mattox, economic reporting officer at the US Embassy at the time. He seems to have observed the events from the vantage point of his office, but he did offer this:

The root cause of the recent unpleasantness was what we in the economics racket call in technical terms an effort to extract blood from the corpus of a turnip.

And then he went on to describe how the government has “painted itself into an uncomfortable corner” with “this subsidy lashup.”

Worth noting that Sadat’s government got itself out of the corner not by easing off subsidies while doing something about the repressive and corrupt mode of economic “management” that they enabled, but by a cheap sleight of hand: keeping the price of bread the same while reducing the size of the loaves (oh yeah, and bashing a lot of heads). So the working class today finds itself in the same position as 1977: dependent for their daily bread on a regime that acts like a violent dead-beat dad, at once stifling the ability of those without the capital to buy up state assets at knock-down prices to support themselves, and unable to provide an alternative.

Mattox’s conclusion also says much about the nature of US-Egyptian state-level relations, though perhaps unintentionally. After bemoaning the billions of dollars that the subsidies are costing the Egyptian government, referring to cutting out the subsidies as “bringing sanity” and hiding under his well-polished desk for several days, Maddox reports that “the natives are quiet again.”

What a relief.