On the tenth anniversary of the Arab uprisings of 2011, the BBC’s The History Hour program devoted an entire episode on Saturday, 30 January 2021, to the event. Here is the BBC’s blurb: In the early months of 2011 a wave of social unrest swept across the Arab world as people protested against repressive and authoritarian regimes, economic stagnation, unemployment and corruption. It began with reaction to the self-immolation of a young market trader in Tunisia, but soon became an outpouring of resentment after generations of fear. On The History Hour, Professor Khaled Fahmy of Cambridge University, helps us unravel…
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Ten years ago, the Middle East was in convulsions as protesters attempted revolution in several countries. Looking back, what can we learn from those experiments in human collaboration? Nahla Ayed of CBC interviews Ahdaf Soueif, Hossam Hamalawy and Khaled Fahmy.
Leave a CommentOn the occasion of receiving the Social History Society Book Prize, I had this interview with Prof. Naomi Tadmor, the Chair of the Society
2 CommentsThis conversation with Youssef El Chazli was published din Mada Masr on 8 June 2019 Khaled Fahmy, who holds the Sultan Qaboos bin Said chair in modern Arabic studies at the University of Cambridge, has worked tirelessly to scrutinize and reevaluate dominant narratives and historical assumptions about the Egyptian state and its many institutions. In his first book, All the Pasha’s Men, Fahmy took up the narrative of Mohammed Ali’s construction of modern Egypt, in particular the role the construction of the army played in this trajectory. As Amr Ezzat wrote in an article in al-Shorouk in 2013, the book was an attempt…
Leave a CommentAn interview with Sonja Zekri published originally in German in Suddeutsche Zeitungand then in Qantara.de on June 23, 2017 In interview with Sonja Zekri, Harvard-based Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy describes the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the year 1967 as triggering the rise of Islamism It was a short war, just six days, yet during that time Israel destroyed the armed forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, captured the Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt and occupied East Jerusalem, which up to that point had been part of Jordan. And that was only the military debacle. The political and cultural…
Leave a CommentAn interview with BBC Radio 4 “The World Tonight” program on Sisi’s declaration of the state of emergency in the wake of the IS terrorist attacks on churches in Tanta and Alexandria. You can listen to the program HERE (Egypt section starts at 20:39, my section starts at 23:40).
Leave a CommentAn interview with Dina Ezzat in Ahram Online on January 29, 2017 Lack of access to official state documents leaves significant gaps in the understanding of Egypt’s modern history, the ‘Cairo Fire’ of 26 January 1952 being a prominent example, says historian Khaled Fahmy Some 65 years later, the true story of the Cairo Fire is still untold, and the mastermind and culprits behind one of the worst acts of arson to ever hit the capital remain unknown to the public. On Saturday 26 January, 1952, almost 24 hours after the soldiers of the British occupation killed 50 Egyptian auxiliary policemen…
Leave a CommentPublished in Al Jazeera on January 25, 2017 By Khaled Diab Khaled Diab is an award-winning Egyptian-Belgian journalist, writer and blogger. He is the author of Intimate Enemies: Living with Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land. He blogs at www.chronikler.com With the world’s attention on Washington and the new administration’s open assault on the media and journalists, whom Donald Trump described as “among the most dishonest human beings on earth“, few eyes are turned to Egypt, where “alternative facts” have been a reality for some time, and its continued clampdown on the press and civil society. Among the recent…
Leave a CommentInterview with NPR’s Leila Fadel on the anti government demonstrations in Cairo protesting against ceding the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia, April 26, 2016.
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