Posted on Facebook on June 24, 2013 Just finished reading Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. What an amazing imagination!! What radical rereading of every single detail of this most powerful of stories!! What subversive thinking of some of the most fundamental ideas of this cataclysmic event in human history!! Above all, what prose!! Among the many fascinating, gripping accounts and character portrayals I was amazed by Joseph the carpenter’s character and his deep feeling of guilt; the wise, motherly, earthly figure of Mary Magdalene and her true love for and belief in Jesus; the tense jealous rivalry between Mary…
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Posted on Facebook on April 28, 2014 About two years ago, I had a very interesting conversation with my neighbor who lives in the same apartment building in Zamalek, Cairo. I remembered this conversation today in light of the notorious verdict today by a judge in Minya sentencing 720 people to death. My neighbor is a nice, decent man in his late sixties, and we have always had a cordial relationship with each other, despite me once causing serious damage to his apartment when a water pipe burst in my apartment flooding his just below. I was rushing to some demonstration…
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Last week, I invited some friends over for dinner, and I thought I’d make them the fish with saffron that my dear friend Nadia Benabid taught me. So I took the subway to Citarella on B’way and 75th to buy some fresh red snapper. On the way back, I got out a book that I had just borrowed from the library earlier that day. The book was a thick one—actually three Arabic books bound together. They were all by a Saudi historian called al-Jaser حمد الجاسر, and dealt with the history of Najd in the eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula.…
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A few days ago when I was writing the CNN Op-Ed piece on Egypt’s referendum, I had a sentence that compared the propaganda campaign and the Sisi mania with North Korea’s sick regime. Then at the last minute, I removed it thinking this is an unnecessary and unrealistic comparison. Today with preliminary results of the vote indicating that the yes vote may be close to 98%, I realize how right I was to remove the sentence comparing Egypt to North Korea. I was being unfair to North Korea. I then received some remarks criticizing me for making the comparison between…
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An interview with the BBC Radio 5 on the referendum on the new constitution, January 14, 2014.
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Published as an op-ed for the CNN on January 14, 2014 Today millions of Egyptians are going to the ballot boxes to decide on a new constitution, the third time they have done so in as many years. They are voting with high hopes that this referendum will put an end to the bloodshed, social tensions and instability that followed the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsy in July 2013. Seen as the lynchpin in the “roadmap” that was declared soon thereafter, the referendum is to be followed by presidential and parliamentary elections. Once these elections are conducted, it is…
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I was interviewed in this PBS Frontline documentary titled “Egypt in Crisis: The inside story of a revolution gone wrong“. Here is the press release of the documentary : Less than three years after the popular uprising that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, and just one year after Egypt’s first free and fair elections, the democratically elected government has been overthrown and the Egyptian military is running the state. And the Muslim Brotherhood—the secretive, long-outlawed Islamist group that came out of the shadows to win the presidency in June 2012—is once again being driven underground, its members killed and…
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An interview with Muslim of the PBS flagship Frontline program conducted on July 18, 2013, and published on September 17, 2013, to coincide with the broadcast of the documentary “Egypt in Crisis”. Khaled Fahmy is professor and chair of the American University in Cairo’s Department of History. A liberal supporter of the revolution, Fahmy worried about human-rights abuses under President Mohammed Morsi, and now a return to the military state under Gen. Sisi. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on July 18, 2013 in New York. Help me understand the context of the Muslim Brotherhood and how they…
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Published in Ahram Online on September 14, 2013 Following the 9/11 events, a discourse of fear proliferated in America, shutting down rational thought. Wars abroad and attacks on rights at home followed, with dear ethical and legal consequences. The sound of the two explosions rocked the entire city. The smell of smoke wafted all the way north to Houston St, while the sound of the sirens of ambulances, fire trucks and police cars was deafening. People’s gazes were unfocused and confused, unable to grasp the tragic events their city was witnessing. Drivers stopped their cars in the middle of the…
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Published in Ahram Online on September 3, 2013 Western media misunderstood the Brotherhood and underestimated Egyptians’ desire for democracy and social justice One of the signs of the crisis that Egypt is currently going through is the gap between the vision of a large portion of Egyptians that revolted against Mohamed Morsi on 30 June and that of Western media coverage of Egyptian events. Despite the fact that this dissonance initially revolved around the term “coup,” I believe the core of the problem is not related to how the army’s move was characterised, as much as to how the Muslim…
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