I should clarify that the suggestion articulated in my previous post that the regime may have had some hand in yesterday’s bombing is total conjecture, suspicious though it is that it falls on the same day that one of Cairo’s newest dailies, El-Shorouk carried the (perhaps-premature) headline “Repeal of Emergency …
Category: Masr —مصر
All things related to مصر, both in the sense of Egypt and Cairo
Explosion at Hussein Mosque in Cairo—إنفجار عند جامع الحسين بالقاهرة
Photo from AP As several people have noted, this comes at a very suspicious time, considering that the extension of the State of Emergency (in place since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, with a brief break during Sadat’s presidency) was just about to be considered once again. Mubarak’s government has been …
Demonstration at AUC to Free Philip Rizk—مظاهر في الجامعة الأمريكية لإطلاق سراح فيليب رزق
This afternoon, AUC students—not generally a very politically-active lot—and a number of faculty came out in support of one of their own.
The Kidnapping of Philip Rizk—إختطاف فيليب رزق
Sarah Carr has written an excellent eyewitness account and brief analysis of the kidapping of Philip Rizk, a German-Egyptian AUC graduate student in the Middle East Studies program. He was abducted by state security forces (أمن الدولة) coming home from a march to Qalubiyya. I generally would have just added …
Trip to Upper Egypt & Sudan—رحلة إلى الصعيد و السودان
This is coming a bit late, but I wanted to get some photos up from our recent trip to Upper Egypt and the Sudan. Adrienne has a more of the story here.
More on the “General Strikes”—مزيد من الكلام عن الإضرابات العامة
ّI just read a few of my friend Daïkha Dridi’s articles and they made me a bit depressed. Mostly because, even after all this time with Arabic, I could largely read them in French, even with my 17-year-old high-school French that I never practiced with actual French-speakers. I could skim …
Can Ug99 Speak?—هل تقدر أوغندا٩٩ على الكلام؟
This article was originally commissioned for Is Greater Than. It follows a wheat plant disease, Ug99, through the constellation of human and non-human actors that have turned a decades-old and once-regional fungus into a major threat to global wheat production. The place that most people in the West think of …
Facebookists for Regime Change—الفيسبوكيون لتغيير النظام
Collection of Facebook banners by Sami Ben Gharbia/Global Voices Advocacy This article was commissioned for Is Greater Than When Mark Zuckerberg, a 19-year-old Harvard drop-out, launched Facebook in 2004, he could not have imagined that one day his project would become the primary organizing tool for a vast movement of …
May Day, May Day—This is Egypt—عيد العمال في مصر
This article was commissioned for Is Greater Than In this year’s May Day address to the nation, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak promised government workers a 30% salary increase. This came a day after the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest parliamentary opposition group, unexpectedly called upon its members to participate in a …
The Egyptian Bread Crisis—أزمة الخبز المصرية
This article was commissioned for Is Greater Than Speakers of Egyptian colloquial Arabic use the same word, عيش (‘aish), for both “bread” and “life”. Indeed, bread represents on average around 50–60% of Egyptians’ caloric intake and is the perennial complement to every meal. Cairo streets in the mornings are awash …
The High Dam & the “General Good”—السد العالى و المنافع العمومية
The following is a slight modification of my in-class essay for Dr. Rick Tutwiler’s class on the Nile river. The question was quite simply, “Should the Aswan High Dam have been built?” (the “general good” in the title is a reference to Rifa’a Rifa’ al-Tahtawi’s equation of the notion of …
Mega-projects on the Nile—مشاريع هائلة في النيل
A post on “mega-projects on the Nile” can perhaps best be introduced by pointing out the differences between the English and the Arabic versions of the term “mega-project”. The English version is a strange neologism which, according to Merriam-Webster, arose in 1976. “Mega”, literally, is of course a simple multiplication …
Desert Development Center—مركز تنمية الصحراء
Today took us on a field trip to AUC’s Desert Development Center (DDC) in Liberation Province. Liberation Province is part of the “New Lands” of Egypt, desert areas that have been reclaimed for agriculture (although they haven’t technically been REclaimed because the area has been hyper-arid desert for eons, it …
Nile water quality management—رقابة جودة الماء النيلي
Today we had a visit from Edward Smith, a professor in AUC’s Construction and Environmental Engineering department. He informed us about the particulars of pollution and water quality management on the Nile through a very well-organized lecture. Almost too organized.
The Violence of the Nubian Museum—بطش المتحف النوبي
How wonderful of Egypt and the International Community to come together to construct this museum to depict the lives of a disappeared culture as a monument in honor of…their own generosity.