‘Why Do They Hate Us?” Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy laments on the cover page of Foreign Policy, in an article illustrated by provocative photos of a naked woman painted to look as if she were wearing a niqab. Who are the ‘They’ and who are the &l… Read full post »

Now that the Republican primaries in the U.S. have been decided in favor of Mitt Romney, and Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are facing off in France, perhaps the most critical presidential ‘primaries’ of all are being fought out in Egypt. Everything is at stake… Read full post »

The crazy woman is back. You hear her shouting on the street in front of the building, early in the morning and at sunset, ranting yells as indecipherable as an infant’s existential angst. I never see her, only hear her; I don’t know how she survives. For several months there was… Read full post »

The death of Pope Shenouda, spiritual head of Egypt’s Coptic Church for four decades, threw millions of Copts into mourning, and was marked by the Egyptian government as a state funeral, attended by top political authorities and the Muslim religious establishment, as well as foreign di… Read full post »

Today is International Women’s Day, and women in Egypt are uneasy about where they will be same time next year. “Iran,” gloomily prognosticates a friend as she dithers between chocolate soufflé and Om Ali from the dessert buffet at lunch in a private home. “Next year we… Read full post »

Today is International Women’s Day, and women in Egypt are uneasy about where they will be same time next year. “Iran,” gloomily prognosticates a friend as she dithers between chocolate soufflé and Om Ali from the dessert buffet at lunch in a private home. “Next year we… Read full post »

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once brutally centralized state. The &… Read full post »

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once brutally centralized state. The &… Read full post »

Today, February 4th, is the anniversary of the so-called ‘Battle of the Camel’, the decisive turning point of the Revolution of January 25^th, when the peaceful democracy protesters in Tahrir were able to beat back a vicious onslaught by pro-Mubarak thugs who attacked them… Read full post »

Yesterday, as I walked to Tahrir Square along the Kasr el-Nil Bridge, I met friends and acquaintances along the way, the same people who, like me, had been so moved by the revolution a year ago, and who had shunned the ugly confrontations in Tahrir since the divisiveness and the… Read full post »

 So you had a revolution…and now, you have the first democratically-elected parliament in sixty years. Today was the day when the new parliament was seated, and all of Egypt watched the spectacle in the hemi-circle parliament hall as newly-elected candidates stood up to… Read full post »

 So you had a revolution…and now, you have the first democratically-elected parliament in sixty years. Today was the day when the new parliament was seated, and all of Egypt watched the spectacle in the hemi-circle parliament hall as newly-elected candidates stood up to… Read full post »

The day before, there had been thousands of people demonstrating against the brutal stripping and beating of women protesters at the hands of the Military Police.  But on Saturday, when I went to Tahrir Square for the first time since March of this year, it was quiet and somewhat b… Read full post »

A Western superpower invades a Middle Eastern country with overwhelming force, under the pretext of defending its interests in the region, but with the ulterior motive of extending its military, strategic and economic power overseas. The commander of the military expedition proclaims to… Read full post »

Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for thirty years under emergency powers with the justification of ‘après moi le deluge’, an argument that played better in the West than at home. He presented his military-backed regime as the sole bulwark against the flood water… Read full post »

The first inkling, for many of us in Cairo last February, was the sinister text messages that appeared on our cell phones. I remember my eighty year old mother calling me in alarm: “The military forces are sending me SMS (as text messages are referred to in Egypt)… Read full post »

 In the Middle East, the Western superpower is withdrawing its occupying troops. In Egypt, the sudden overthrow of a military-backed autocracy, followed by ‘a series of ephemeral revolutions’, plunges the country into a state of political uncertainty and general insec… Read full post »

I remember when London was the best place to get arrested- if you were Arab and not Irish, that is. That was back in the seventies, when I was a student at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. At the time, the terrorists setting bombs in the ‘Tube’… Read full post »

Schadenfreude has had a field day the past couple of weeks. First it was ‘the humblest day of my life’ for Rupert Murdoch, before whose power prime ministers groveled, Scotland Yard bowed and trade unions shattered. But that was closer to comedy than tragedy, with farcica… Read full post »

Anders Breivik’s own father wishes he’d committed suicide after his unconscionable massacre of teenage campers, but I am fervently grateful that he did not. If he had killed himself or if he had died in a firefight with police, if all they found was the dead body of the blond… Read full post »

I had never heard of Osama Bin Laden before 9/11, but within months my name was on a book about him as contributing editor. In an uncanny coincidence, a book titled Au Nom d’Oussama bin Laden, by French counter-terrorism expert Roland Jacquard, had just been published on September 11^th; Duke Un… Read full post »

In February, Vogue magazine published a flattering piece on the lovely, elegant Syrian first lady, Asmaa al-Assad- “A Rose in the Desert”- gushing about the hyperkinetic first lady’s supercharged day, the accessibility with which she and her husband President Bashar supposedly live,… Read full post »

The Mubaraks in Jail: My Memories of Torah Prison

The idea of former president Hosni Mubarak behind bars is not met with unmitigated schadenfreude in Egypt, even among those who demonstrated to end his regime. The first time I stood with the million protesters in Tahrir Square, I… Read full post »

Yesterday saw Egypt’s first free referendum in sixty years, and the results come as a deep disappointment to the very revolutionary movement that made them possible- but that’s the price of democracy. Or rather, the price of democracy after sixty years of single-party dictatorship, during… Read full post »