Category Archives: Egypt

History repeats itself: The case of Egypt

"Arab Spring", Architecture, Contemporary Art, Egypt


Ruling families not fondly remembered in Egypt

The history of divine kingship and dictatorial hubris has a consistent theme: elevating a ruler’s name above all others and stamping that name on just about everything in sight. In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq his image was everywhere, at times in the heroic proportions of a Babylonian king; visit Syria and you will find Assad and son lionized in every nook and cranny; Timur is resurrected in Uzbekistan. Then there is Hosni Mubarak, whose fall from power is now accompanied by an erasure of his public visage. As reported in Al Jazeera:

An Egyptian court has ordered the names of Hosni Mubarak, the country’s former president, and his wife Suzanne, to be removed from all public places, including streets and parks. Judge Mohammad Hassan Omar ordered on Thursday that Mubarak’s name and picture be removed from sport fields, streets, schools, libraries and other public establishments, according to the state-run al-Ahram newspaper. Currently, various public spaces, including squares, streets and about 500 public schools bear the names of either Hosni, Suzanne or Gamal Mubarak.

Continue reading History repeats itself: The case of Egypt →

The Arab Spring

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethics, Islamophobia 101, Libya, Orientalism, Tunisia, Yemen

By Rashid Khalidi, The Nation, March 21, 2011 and Institute for Palestine Studies, March 3, 2011

Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. And it has become respectable in the West as well. Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization. Events in the Arab world are being covered by the Western media more extensively than ever before and are being talked about positively in a fashion that is unprecedented. Before, when anything Muslim or Middle Eastern or Arab was reported on, it was almost always with a heavy negative connotation. Now, during this Arab spring, this has ceased to be the case. An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that has caught the attention of the world.

Three things should be said about this sea change in perceptions about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners. The first is that it shows how superficial, and how false, were most Western media images of this region. Virtually all we heard about were the ubiquitous terrorists, the omnipresent bearded radicals and their veiled companions trying to impose Sharia and the corrupt, brutal despots who were the only option for control of such undesirables. In US government-speak, faithfully repeated by the mainstream media, most of that corruption and brutality was airbrushed out through the use of mendacious terms like “moderates” (i.e., those who do and say what we want). That locution, and the one used to denigrate the people of the region, “the Arab street,” should now be permanently retired. The second feature of this shift in perceptions is that it is very fragile. Even if all the Arab despots are overthrown, there is an enormous investment in the “us versus them” view of the region. This includes not only entire bureaucratic empires engaged in fighting the “war on terror,” not only the industries that supply this war and the battalions of contractors and consultants so generously rewarded for their services in it; it also includes a large ideological archipelago of faux expertise, with vast shoals of “terrorologists” deeply committed to propagating this caricature of the Middle East. These talking heads who pass for experts have ceaselessly affirmed that terrorists and Islamists are the only thing to look for or see. They are the ones who systematically taught Americans not to see the real Arab world: the unions, those with a commitment to the rule of law, the tech-savvy young people, the feminists, the artists and intellectuals, those with a reasonable knowledge of Western culture and values, the ordinary people who simply want decent opportunities and a voice in how they are governed. The “experts” taught us instead that this was a fanatical people, a people without dignity, a people that deserved its terrible American-supported rulers. Those with power and influence who hold these borderline-racist views are not going to change them quickly, if at all: for proof, one needs only a brief exposure to the sewer that is Fox News. Continue reading The Arab Spring →

Mubarak did not get the message

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Egypt, Journalism and Media


In 1993 Anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi wrote a provocative call for President Mubarak of Egupt to resign. This was almost two decades before events forced him out of office. I post the 1993 commentary by El Guindi here, courtesy of the author.

Mubarak Should Call an Election and Step Aside

Egypt: The country is a wreck; before radicals force a bloody change, he should allow open elections for a successor.

By FADWA EL GUINDI, Los Angeles Times, FRIDAY MARCH 26. 1993

If President Hosni Mubarak is smart, he will take a hard look at the shambles Egypt has become and step down, before he is overthrown or assassinated. An honorable exit might earn him forgiveness for his otherwise disgraceful record.

Egypt had its revolution in 1952, yet it remains a dependency. For example, Egyptian cotton, the highest-quality cotton in the world, is marketed in the United States as towels and bed sheets made in Israel, Britain and America. Egypt’s only part is to provide the natural resource produced by the sweat and labor of peasants living under substandard conditions. This is how it was for Egypt under British colonialism. If Egypt cannot use its very fine cotton to also make and internationally market towels, after 40 years of the revolution that promised industrialization, and if most of its income comes from Westerners visiting the accomplishments of Egyptians of millennia past, something is fundamentally wrong. And it is not fundamentalism, as the government wishes to believe or portray. Continue reading Mubarak did not get the message →

Looting the Pharaohs before Mubarak

"Arab Spring", Archaeology and Antiquities, Architecture, Bible and Holy Land, Egypt


Statue of Ramses II in Aswan

The status of Egyptian antiquities today, 3 March, 2011

by Zahi Hawass, March 3, 2011

When the revolution began on January 25, 2011, and through its first week, there were only a few reports of looting: at Qantara East in the Sinai, and at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. However, since Mubarak’s resignation, looting has increased all over the country, and our antiquities are in grave danger from criminals trying to take advantage of the current situation.

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo

On Saturday, 29 January, I entered the museum the morning after the break-in and I could see through the museum’s monitor, objects were broken and thrown all over the galleries. However, all of the masterpieces seemed to be present. At first glance, it did not seem that objects were missing and I announced that the museum was safe.

After our preliminary inventory, we discovered that eighteen items were missing. Thankfully four of these items have already been recovered. The Heart Scarab of Yuya and the body of the goddess from the statue of Menkaret carrying Tutankhamun were both found on the west side of the museum near the new gift shop, and one of the missing shabtis of Yuya was discovered under a showcase inside of the museum. The statue of Akhenaten as an offering bearer was discovered by a young protester near the southern wall of the museum in Tahrir Square. His family immediately contacted the Ministry of State for Antiquities to arrange the statue’s return to the museum. I am now waiting for the Registration, Collections Management and Documentation Department to complete its final report on what else, if anything, is missing from the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. The General Director of the museum has told me that this report will be completed by Sunday. Continue reading Looting the Pharaohs before Mubarak →

THE STORY OF CRUEL PSAMTEK

Egypt, Humor and Satire, Poetry


The Great Sphinx, G. Lékégian & Co.

THE STORY OF CRUEL PSAMTEK

HERE is cruel Psamtek, see.
Such a wicked boy was he!
Chased the ibis round about,
Plucked its longest feathers out,
Stamped upon the sacred scarab
Like an unbelieving Arab,
Put the dog and cat to pain,
Making them to howl again.
Only think what he would do –
Tease the awful Apis too
Basking by the sacred Nile
Lay the trusting crocodile ;
Cruel Psamtek crept around him,
Laughed to think how he had found him,
With his pincers seized his tail,
Made the holy one to wail ;
Till a priest of Isis came,
Called the wicked boy by name,
Shut him in a pyramid,
Where his punishment was hid. Continue reading THE STORY OF CRUEL PSAMTEK →

On Egypt and Islam

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Islamophobia 101

Uprising in Egypt: Islam and the compulsion of the political
by Jeremy F. Walton, The Immanent Frame (SSRC), February 23, 2011

Invariably, contemporary discussions of Islam seem to begin and end with the relationship between Islam and politics—both anti-Islamic pundits and critics of Islamophobia vigorously assert that the mechanics and kinetics of this relationship are central to the evaluation of Islam today. A nexus of paranoia, fear, ignorance, and old-fashioned bigotry typically animates arguments on one side, while those on the other tend toward the polemics and apologetics of subaltern critique. Both camps, however, assume that discussions of Islam necessarily traverse and trouble the domain of the political. This exclusive emphasis on the political marks the difference between Islamphobia à la mode and the older Orientalist discourses of Edward Said’s interrogation: unlike today’s Islamophobia, classical Orientalism constituted a total romance of the East that subsumed political, aesthetic, religious, and cultural forms. In contrast, contemporary Euro-American public debate about Islam evinces what I call the compulsion of the political. While this compulsion achieved hegemony rapidly in the wake of September 11, 2001, it stretches back at least to the seventies and eighties, with high water marks during the Iranian Revolution and the Rushdie Affair.

Much commentary on the recent events in Tahrir Square, throughout Egypt, and across the Middle East has inevitably recapitulated the compulsion of the political in relation to Islam. Despite the deeply ambiguous relationship between the Egyptian pro-democracy demonstrations and politically-oriented Islamic organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, pundits from across the political spectrum have seized on the relationship between Islam and politics as the crux of the matter. Arguments have crystallized around two poles, dystopian and utopian, respectively: either the dismantling of Hosni Mubarak’s autocracy will yield the nightmare of a theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood (as Ayaan Hirsi Ali fulminated in the New York Times on February 3), or the post-Mubarak era will witness the triumph of pluralist, liberal democracy, with the Muslim Brotherhood as one prominent voice among a multitude (as Tariq Ramadan asserted in a recent interview on al-Jazeera). Continue reading On Egypt and Islam →

Dreams in Egypt

Anthropology/Sociology, Egypt, Folklore and Proverbs


[The following is an excerpt from a recent article published by contributor el-Sayed el-Aswad, entitled “Symbolic Transformations of the Seen and the Unseen in the Egyptian Imagination” in ANTHROPOS, 105:441–453, 2010.]

The study has shown that the world is constructed by Egyptian worldview and imagination as a place of seen and unseen dimensions. These dimensions necessitate two kinds of knowledge. One is related to the knowledge of everyday observation, the other to the knowledge of hidden reality, religious or otherwise. Taken in their totality, as far as they indicate psychological, social, and spiritual realities, dreams necessitate the two kinds of knowledge. Dream visions or dreams belong to the unknown or unseen sphere and assert the effectiveness of that sphere in the reconstruction of people’s everyday reality. Dreams serve as lenses through which individuals see or glimpse the hidden or unseen aspects of the world.

Put differently, dream experiences are open to possible interpretations generating possible worlds. Dream phenomena and related notions of spirituality and unseen realities are not dealt with here within the oppositions between tradition versus modernity, common sense reality versus dream reality, or belief versus science because such oppositions do not exist in Egyptian multidimensional worldviews, visible and invisible, in which there is always intermediate realm or barzakh connecting them. Continue reading Dreams in Egypt →

Winners and Losers in a Post-Mubarak Arab World

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Israel, Journalism and Media, Palestine

By Yousef Munayyer, Palestine Center, The Jerusalem Fund, February 14, 2011

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was at the beginning of a long campaign in Afghanistan, the average person was lucky to have an advanced recording technology called a “VHS tape,” and Mohammad Hosni Mubarak took control of Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab Middle East. This week, the last of these beginnings came to an end when millions of Egyptian protestors succeeded in toppling one of the longest standing rulers in the 5,000-year history of Egypt.

But as with all eras, Hosni Mubarak’s established norms, some national and others regional, which have now irreversibly changed. What type of government may take form in Egypt in the coming weeks and months is yet to be seen, however, it is highly unlikely that any new government can afford to repeat the mistakes of the previous regime which eliminated pluralistic political participation in the formulation of both domestic and foreign policy.

Many different global players had an investment in the outcome of the drama that finally concluded in Egypt with Mubarak’s departure. So after this transformational moment, who are the winners and who are the losers?

The Winners

1. The People of Egypt – After only 18 days, the people of Egypt succeeded in removing a ruler who had governed Egypt for three decades. But the victory for the people of Egypt is far greater than the removal of one person like Mubarak or his family. Continue reading Winners and Losers in a Post-Mubarak Arab World →