Published in Ahram Online on May 9, 2013 Researchers in Egypt face suspicion and a misguided obsession with security concerns, which is both a symptom and a cause of the country’s cultural backwardness On a trip to London last week, I visited the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses an impressive museum about the history of medicine and surgery from the 18th century to the present. As I have an interest in the modern history of medicine in Egypt, I spent an entire day at the museum and the College’s archives. I was intrigued at how the museum told the…
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Published in Ahram Online on February 24, 2013 The fate of forensic medicine in Egypt is illustrative of a wider collapse of state institutions Egyptians worked hard to build in the modern period In December 1877, a woman called Om Ibrahim went to the Alexandria police station to report that her son, Ibrahim Al-Masry, in his 30s, was missing. In her report, she said that she had accompanied her son to Alexandria a few months earlier when he arrived to look for work. Eventually, he found a job at a tailor’s shop owned by a Jew called Hanin Astafan, whom she…
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Published in Ahram Online on December 29, 2012 The public prosecutors who protested against the manner in which the president dealt with the prosecutor-general stand in the tradition of a courageous Cairo Police Commissioner of a century and a half ago The National Archives of Egypt holds a remarkable collection of documents which were produced by 19th-century legal institutions and which attracted the attention of only a handful of historians. The most significant of these institutions is Maglis al-Ahkam, a legal body that was founded in the early 1840s and which was the highest court in the land until it…
Leave a CommentA panel discussion (in Arabic and English) presented with Emad Abou Ghazi and Mosireen Collective at the American University in Cairo on Archiving the Revolution, November 21, 2012. (my English sections are at : 1:00:00 and 1:49:35)
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An article by Ursula Lindsey published in the Chronicle of Higher Education on June 12, 2012 Group hopes to encourage inquiry with an open archive of the revolution THE EGYPTIANS who poured into the streets of their cities early this year were well aware that they were making history. “In 10 years, when I see my children studying Egyptian history, I want to say: ‘I was there,’” Ahmad, a young demonstrator on his way into Tahrir Square, told me on February 4, a week before President Hosni Mubarak was driven from office. Egypt is still living through its revolution, and…
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