Egypt

This week in 1937: Egypt’s censors ban their first film

Egypt Independent 

 

Mohamed Bashir

Celebrating the diamond jubilee of its confiscation of the film “Lashin” on 17 March 1937, Egypt’s Board of Censors marked the occasion by banning Amir Ramses’ “Jews of Egypt,” one day before it was set to be released in movie theaters last week.

 

The 1937 “Lashin,” directed by Fritz Kramp, was accused of bringing “insinuations related to the Royal Highness and the regime.” The film, set in an undisclosed Arab kingdom in the 13th century, moves between the impoverished and suffering people on one end, and a lavish sultan in his palace on another; in between lies the popular army head, Lashin.

As the kingdom swings between famine, conspiracies and Mongol conquests on its borders, Lashin tries to alert the deluded sultan, but gets crossed by Prime Minister Kangiar who puts him in jail, sparking a massive public revolt that ends with the sultan’s murder.

Having no choice but to lose their film altogether, “Lashin” producers Studio Misr reshot another end sequence for the film. Here, the sultan magically uncovers the conspiracy and triumphs over his enemies, ending with revolting waves of people by his palace door chanting, “Long live the fair sultan.”

Luckily, Ramses decided to take on the fight — although "Jews of Egypt" was previously approved by the Board of Censors, "security authorities" were the ones who asked for its ban last week. After widespread media coverage of the ban last week, the censors and security authorities were pressured to go back on their decision, Ramses announced on Thursday. "Jews of Egypt" is now due to hit movie theaters next Wednesday. This is one triumph for artists and workers —  but the nation's history with censorship is more complicated.

Despite the many sociopolitical twists in Egypt since "Lashin's" ban in 1937, state censors have generally found less drastic measures than to completely ban a film. They may well have subtly understood the psychological link between forbidding and desire, or, more intuitively, that both the parental ruler and eternally juvenile public — between which the censors operate — are bound to change.

Accordingly, a film labeled as troublesome under one ruler could very well turn revolutionary under the next. Thus, the Cohen who was tolerated in cinemas in 1954’s “Hassan & Morcos & Cohen” is not necessarily tolerated in the 2012 production “Jews of Egypt.”

Film censorship in the Egyptian consciousness has become synonymous over the years with the word “scissors,” referring to the process of physically editing out a problematic scene from the film reel — a castration that renders a dangerous film into a safer, more gullible version. And while film editors delicately tune their cuts in order to maintain a sensible, emotional flow to a film, the censors’ work is often evident in interrupted soundtracks, jumps in the flow and blunt stabs to dramatic logic.

Compared with the other parental state arms, censors have always abided by a set of relatively loose principles. Constitutional terms like “protecting public order, morality and the higher interests of the state” were the perfect excuse for this body to flourish, expanding its scope of control to oblige screenplays to have its stamp of approval to get the right security permissions to produce them as films.

With a few exceptions, the Board of Censors has almost always acted against the filmmakers’ freedom of expression. It is so at times like the present, where all that could be possibly banned is a few clicks away, where the body of censorship feels the absurdity of keeping up the facade, and it can openly respond to Haitham al-Khamissi, producer of “Jews of Egypt,” that his film cannot be screened before being approved by a certain “security authority.”

via www.egyptindependent.com

Update: Moqattam residents form committees to resist Brotherhood

Via Egypt Independent

 

Ahmed Taranah

Moqattam residents have reportedly formed popular committees, such as those assembeled during the 18 days of January 2011 in the absence of security forces, to prevent dozens of buses transporting members of the Muslim Brotherhood from entering the area.

The group’s members have been descending on the neighborhood since late Thursday to defend its headquarters. On Friday afternoon, fighting broke out between Brotherhood members and the popular committees. The buses headed to nearby metro stations to allow their passengers to reach their destination.

Near the headquarters, Central Security Forces began firing tear gas to break up clashes between opposition protesters and Brotherhood members. Security forces have continued to intensify their presence in the area throughout the day.

Fist fights between opposition protesters and Muslim Brotherhood continued into Friday afternoon in Moqattam. Minor scuffles escalated into stone throwing exchanges. Elsewhere in the city, state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper reported on its website that opposition protesters stormed the Muslim Brotherhood offices in Cairo's Manial neighborhood.

An Egypt Independent reporter  in Moqattam witnessed protesters hurling stones at any cars they suspected belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood. The witness also reported that two men with their faces covered ran to the frontline of the police forces, and hurled two Molotov cocktails at them. The police responded by firing shots into the air, dispersing the protesters.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reported that residents of nearby buildings were coming to the defense of the protesters, throwing stones at Brotherhood members.

Groups of Islamists were reportedly deployed in the adjacent streets to secure the headquarters.

Several marches are expected to arrive in Moqattam shortly. Two have already started, one from nearby Nafoura Square, and another from Sayeda Aisha Square. Demonstrators were chanting slogans against Supreme Guide Mohamed Badei.

The scuffles broke out between Muslim Brotherhood youth and dozens of opposition activists in the early afternoon. Hit-and-run operations were carried out by both groups in the streets surrounding the headquarters.

Tensions turned violent as the young activists chanted "Oh Badei, sell the revolution," and "Brothers are a herd following Badei," to which Brotherhood members responded by chanting, "No to secularism, Egypt our country is Islamic," and "Al-Banna has said long time ago: Brothers are everywhere."

Hassan al-Banna is the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Central Security Forces intervened to separate the two sides.

Earlier in the day, dozens of Muslim Brotherhood supporters had flocked to the area to defend the building during today's protests.

 

The demonstrations condemn assaults against political activists and journalists during last week's protests in front of the Brotherhood headquarters.

 

Islamists gathered in front of the Guidance Bureau, holding black flags bearing the words, “There is no god but God, and Mohamed is the messenger of God.”

Flag sellers swarmed the area, carrying national flags as well as white flags with religious statements, green flags bearing the slogan of the Freedom and Justice Party and photos of President Mohamed Morsy.

Twenty political parties and 30 public figures called for Friday’s protests, which demand early presidential elections in September that would be conducted under full international supervision; the prosecutor general’s dismissal; the formation of a national salvation government; the suspension of the new Constitution and a temporary return to the 1971 Constitution; and the formation of a new Constituent Assembly to draft yet another constitution to be put to national referendum.

On Thursday, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guidance Bureau asked members from the governorates to come to Cairo to help secure the main headquarters, fearing attacks from the opposition.

Hundreds of members headed to Moqattam with their luggage, intending to spend the night there to confront the protesters.

One of the members told Al-Masry Al-Youm on Thursday that they had been instructed to sacrifice anything to defend their properties.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the member said they would use sticks to defend themselves, but denied any of the Brothers possessed weapons.

Edited translation from MENA and Al-Masry Al-Youm

via www.egyptindependent.com

Egypt is not lost to Islamists: RAND report

Vai Ahram Online

The think tank's most recent report on Egypt is to be launched today in the US Congress

After analysing post-revolution voting in Egypt, RAND, a US think tank, reports that Islamists are losing ground and recommends the US not interfere in Egyptian politics.

'Voting Patterns in Post-Mubarak Egypt,' issued by RAND, a non-profit organisation that provides research and analysis to US policymakers, analyses four major votes that followed the 25 January revolution and identifies areas within Egypt where Islamists run strongest and, conversely, where non-Islamists are most competitive.

In a press briefing in the US Congress RAND will announce the publication of their new report. 

The report reveals that Islamists showed their strongest performance in Upper Egypt, North Sinai and the "sparsely populated" governorates in the west, while non-Islamist parties proved popular in Cairo, Port Said, South Sinai and the Red Sea governorates.

The Delta region was described as a "contested territory," despite an overall good performance by Islamists in absolute terms.

Time, says the report, has been able to reduce the gap of popular support for Islamists:

"Tracking electoral performance over time reveals a narrowing of the gap between Islamist parties and their non-Islamist rivals. Islamists thoroughly dominated the initial parliamentary elections held in late 2011 and early 2012, just as their position prevailed overwhelmingly in the March 2011 referendum on the interim constitution," reads the report.

"However the Muslim Brotherhood candidate eked out a victory in the June 2012 presidential contest, and the December 2012 referendum on the permanent constitution passed more narrowly than the interim charter."

Most importantly, the newly-issued document asserts that Egypt does not appear "lost" to Islamists, nor are non-Islamists "irrelevant" to the nation's future.

"Rather, Egypt appears headed toward a much more competitive political environment in which Islamists are increasingly challenged to maintain their electoral edge," the report points out.

Reflections on Egyptian-US relations

On the bigger picture, RAND's report states that such conclusions about Egypt's geopolitical map can help US decision-makers understand the mechanisms of post-revolutionary politics in the country.

Notably, RAND writes about the best-case scenario, under the circumstances, for Washington's interests in Egypt:

"Perhaps the best the United States can hope for in the coming years is greater parity in the representation of political forces so as to avoid the emergence of another single-party state," posits the report.

"If this is taken as the measure of success, then the trend lines reviewed in this report offer some reason for optimism."

Islamists will eventually be enforced to share power with their ideological rivals, since the Egyptian electorate seems "not monolithic" in its voting preferences, claims the report. Also the receptive response to the non-Islamist orientation in some regions in Egypt should be kept in mind.

The report argues there is no ideal partner for the United States among the current political forces in Egypt, because the US has disagreements with both sides of the Egyptian political spectrum.

For example: Salafists hold a different position than that of the US on issues of gender equality and minority rights, while the leftist Al-Karama party offers the "greatest source of concern" concerning free-market principles and maintaining the peace treaty with Israel.

"US policy is to avoid interfering in Egypt’s domestic politics; any attempt to do so would likely be counterproductive because recipients would lose credibility and open themselves to being branded as a fifth column," RAND warned.

As an example, the report referred to US statements urging the NSF to participate in the next elections, which w

 

via english.ahram.org.eg

Charter flights to connect Iran, Upper Egypt soon: Cairo

PressTv

File photo shows an Iran Air Boeing 747SP-86 aircraft.

An Egyptian minister says direct flights in the form of charter flights will resume between Iran and Egypt within the coming weeks.

Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Wael el-Maadawy was quoted by Egyptian daily Al-Ahram as saying on Wednesday that the flights will link Iran with three Egyptian cities of Luxor, Aswan, and Abu Simbel.

A private carrier owned by businessman Ramy Lakah is expected to run the new routes, El-Maadawy added.

The Egyptian official's remarks came after an agreement signed between the country's Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou and Iranian officials in Tehran in February.

Direct air travel between Iran and Egypt came to a halt after the two countries severed bilateral relations following Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.

But Tehran and Cairo moved to improve ties following the ouster of the Western-backed regime of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

Many observers believe that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cairo in February was a major step toward further improvement of bilateral relations between the Islamic Republic and the post-revolution Egypt.

Earlier in March, Tehran and Cairo signed a memorandum of understanding to promote tourism between the two countries.

via www.presstv.ir

Rating blow to Egypt

Arab News

A general view of street vendors in Old Cairo. (Reuters)

NEW YORK: Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded Egypt’s sovereign foreign currency credit rating from B3, citing unsettled political conditions, and said risks of a default have increased.
Egypt’s economy has been in crisis since the 2011 overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, with Islamist President Muhammad Mursi’s government grappling with sliding currency reserves, dwindling tourism, a soaring budget deficit and a wave of often violent street protests.
“More than two years into the Egyptian revolution, the continued unsettled political conditions have significantly weakened Egypt’s economy,” Moody’s said in a statement.
The government’s inability to secure financing from the International Monetary Fund has exacerbated a lack of predictability in the Middle East nation’s economy and fiscal policies.
The outlook on the credit is negative, Moody’s said.
Egypt is rated one notch higher at B-minus with a negative outlook by Standard & Poor’s while Fitch Ratings has Egypt two notches higher at B with a negative outlook.
“The sustained deterioration in Egypt’s external payments position and government finances have reached a level at which the country’s vulnerability to economic or political shocks has widened and the risk of default has consequently increased,” Moody’s said.

While the risk of a default has increased, Moody’s cautions that a default is not necessarily imminent.
“At the Caa1 rating level, the historical record shows that the average, cumulative default rate over a one-year horizon is close to 10 percent and over a five-year horizon slightly under 40 percent,” Moody’s said.
Egypt’s central bank, meanwhile, raised its main interest rates by 50 basis points, taking the overnight deposit rate to 9.75 percent and the overnight lending rate to 10.75 percent, the bank said after its monetary policy committee (MPC) met.
The bank said on its website that it had also raised its main repo and deposit auction rates by 50 basis points to 10.25 percent and the discount rate by 75 basis points, also to 10.25 percent.

Before the meeting, economists had been split on whether the bank would hold rates to avoid damaging a very weak economy, or raise them in the hope of curbing a sharp rise in inflation and supporting the Egyptian pound.
The pound has lost 9 percent of its value against the dollar since late last year, pushing up the cost of imported goods. Inflation in towns and cities jumped to 8.2 percent in the year to February from 6.3 percent in January.
Inflation is eating into Egyptians’ living standards as the country has slid into crisis since the overthrow of president Honsi Mubarak two years ago.

via www.arabnews.com

Morsi Gives Speech Riddled with Historical Inaccuracies

National Review Online, by Patrick Brennan--that man doesn't stop!

Thankfully, not offensive ones, this time. On Monday, Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Science and Technology in Pakistan, and delivered a speech at the ceremony recounting the accomplishments of Arab and Muslim scientists and scholars. Unfortunately, he got a lot of his points wrong, and the prominent Egyptian writer Youssef Ziedan decided to fact-check him, posting a piece on his Facebook that laid out a variety of Morsi’s inaccuracies, which he called “grave.” Al-Ahram explains the issues Ziedan took with them:

While Morsi cited Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni (973–1048) as the discoverer of pulmonary circulation, for example, Zeidan correctly attributed the discovery to Ibn Al-Nafis, an Arab physician who lived in the 13th century.

“Al-Biruni didn’t discover pulmonary circulation, nor had he ever heard of it,” Zeidan commented, adding that Al-Biruni had made no contribution to the field of philosophy, as Morsi had also claimed in his speech.

Zeidan also corrected Morsi’s pronunciation of Al-Biruni’s name.

The Egyptian president had also told his audience that Iraqi-born polymath Ibn Al-Haytham had introduced the world to, among other things, modern anatomy.

Yet Ibn Al-Haytham did not practice the science of medicine or anatomy, asserted Zeidan, who went on to call Morsi out on another mistake: “Mr. President, Gabber Ibn Hayyan [an 8th-century scholar] did not found the science of chemistry as you maintained; chemistry was known centuries before him by the Greeks, Alexandrians and Muslim Arabs.”

“Ibn Khaldun, Mr. President, did not ‘define sociology’ as you said in your speech . . . which was founded by Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim and others,” Zeidan continued, adding that Ibn Khaldun was only regarded as having provided an early introduction to the field of sociology.

The figures Morsi mentioned actually did all make important contributions to the development of various sciences . . . just not many of the ones he claimed. In fact, a casual observer of the history of science might notice that some of these assertions are self-evidently unlikely — Arab and Muslim scientists were generally not inventors of whole fields (such as anatomy or chemistry, as Morsi claimed) but took the accomplishments of Greek and Roman scientists in various areas and then made huge leaps forward on their own. Al Haytham, for instance, did write the seminal work on optics between Classical Europe and the Scientific Revolution, but he definitely didn’t invent the science of optics.

Further, Morsi seems to have associated a bunch of important Muslim scientists with fields they had nothing to do with; yet many of the key Eastern scientists were indeed polymaths — one Persian named Avicenna, for instance, wrote on topics ranging from philosophy and theology to geology and physics — but the Muslim Brotherhood leader somehow ended up making up various interests, too.

The work of Al Haytham is nicely emblematic of the substantial contributions the Arab and Islamic world made to science and how they happened — essentially, Greek and Roman authors (sometimes originally Egyptian and Mesopotamian ones) invented the various fields of inquiry, such as optics or astronomy, but then European culture took a little katabasis after the fall of the Roman empire, and the center of science moved east, to places such as Cairo, Baghdad, and Samarkand. Scholars there, sponsored by wealthy Muslim leaders, translated Greco-Roman works of science and philosophy, which were going unread or being buried in Europe, into Arabic and Persian, wrote commentaries on them, and turned out their own work. Through about 1500 or so (the eras of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, in part), many of the important scientific developments made in the world occurred in the East, helping to provide a foundation for the resurgence of classical learning in Europe. The first modern European translators and users of these works were in Muslim areas actually reconquered by Christian rulers, in Sicily and Spain; a few 11th century popes made great contributions to the revival, too.

The important work they did in translation throws into sharp relief the pathetic state of the Arab world since that golden age — the U.N.’s Arab Human Development Report in 2003 famously found the following:

In terms of quantity, and notwithstanding the increase in the number of translated books from 175 per year during 1970-1975 to 330, the number of books translated in the Arab world is one fifth of the number translated in Greece. The aggregate total of translated books from the AlMa’moon era to the present day amounts to10,000 books – equivalent to what Spain translates in a single year.

Mamun, mentioned in the report, was a great patron of scholarship, an important thinker himself, and caliph of Baghdad — in the 9th century. Morsi, like many modern Egyptian leaders, actually is a man of science, too (an engineer), but his comments at the Pakistani university tie him into another more prominent strain of the modern Arab world, that of the dishonest dictator.

via www.nationalreview.com

Egypt banks on bumper wheat harvest

IKHSAS, Egypt — The world’s biggest wheat importer, Egypt buys half of the almost 21 million tons it consumes annually on the international market. Traditionally, the government has maintained strategic wheat reserves equivalent to six months of consumption in order to eliminate risks to the supply of cheap bread, of which some 250 million loaves are baked every day.

But because of the economic woes that have accompanied the country’s political transition, those reserves are disappearing. And having slashed its wheat imports because of a severe foreign currency crunch, the Egyptian government is pinning enormous hopes on a bumper harvest this year.

As of last week, its wheat reserves stood at 2.4 million tons, which officials say is enough to cover subsidized bread for just under three months. With the addition of contracted imports, they say, there will be enough to carry the country through to the end of June.

Beyond that, the government is counting on the local crop. Weather has been good so far, and officials predict that it will be the country’s biggest wheat crop at 10.5 million tons, about 7 percent more than last year.

Farmers also see encouraging signs.

“It will be an excellent crop,” said Ali Asaker, who farms fields near the Nile Delta village of Ikhsas and heads the local agricultural cooperative. “We got good seeds from the ministry this season. Thank God it will be a plentiful year.”

But depending on the domestic crop carries its own risks. At stake is not just the government’s credibility but also social peace in a country where heavily subsidized bread, sold for less than one cent a loaf, is a mainstay of the national diet.

Egyptian policymakers have never forgotten the riots that swept through their cities in 1977 when the prices of subsidized staples were increased.

The failure of the crop, for any reason — and a crippling diesel shortage is a threat — would increase rural poverty, fuel anger in the cities and force the government to spend scarce dollars on wheat imports. It wants to defer this until later in the year, when it hopes it will have concluded a stalled loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

“[The Egyptians] are very short of cash. Things are very, very tight,” said one European banker involved in trade financing.

Even if they have a good crop, they will still need to continue importing wheat, the banker said.

Officials acknowledge there is enormous waste in the bread subsidy system, with many people feeding it to livestock. To tackle this, they are discussing the introduction of a rationing system using smart cards.

In the meantime, the state plans to buy some 4.6 million tons of locally grown wheat, or just under half the projected harvest. It is offering farmers about $434 a ton — a substantially higher price than the $357 it pays for imported wheat, though domestic purchases are paid for in local currency.

“The government is committed to making available the funding to buy from farmers,” said Nomani Nomani, an adviser to the supply minister who was until last month the man responsible for Egypt’s wheat imports.

“If we get 4 million tonnes [4.4 tons] locally, we will have enough wheat for five months beyond June,” he said. “That will give us enough time before we [need to] go back to the international market.”

Farmers and local millers say that assuming the harvest is successful, Egyptian authorities should be able to secure most of the quantities they are targeting because the majority of wheat growers are strapped for cash and unlikely to hoard the grain in the hope of higher prices.

In addition, only the government owns silos for proper grain storage. Farmers keep some of the crop for their domestic use, but they are eager to sell the rest to avoid the risk of spoilage. Many also need to turn their crop over to the government to repay loans from state banks.

Even though many farmers sell to private grain traders to avoid dealing with government bureaucracy, a significant portion of the crop still ends up with the state, insiders say.

“The government is offering a high price, so in the end the wheat will still find its way to it,” said Tarek Hassanein, the head of the Grain Chamber, an association of millers. “In just 40 days, the state comes in to collect 4.2 million tonnes, who can compete with that?”

Nonetheless, Clemens Breisinger at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute said food security in Egypt had deteriorated in the past few months.

“On national and household levels, there is not much of a safety net left,” he said.

 

via www.washingtonpost.com

The Muslim Brotherhood’s treatment of women reveals its agenda for Egypt

T#Mehe Globe and Mail, by Nervana Mahmoud

On Saturday in Cairo, a young Egyptian female activist, Mervat Moussa, was slapped to the ground by a member of the ruling Muslim Brotherhood. Her only crime was demonstrating in front of the Brotherhood’s main headquarters. Rather than apologizing for the appalling behavior of one of its members, some officials from the Brotherhood went on the offensive, claiming that their headquarters was attacked by “a number of demonstrators who devoted their efforts to insulting and cursing the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership using the dirtiest swear-words, provoking our young people in front of their headquarters.”

The incident occurred only a few days after the Brotherhood released a strong statementcondemning a draft United Nations declaration calling for an end to all forms of violence against women, claiming that it would lead to “complete disintegration of society.”

The two episodes are closely interlinked. The Brotherhood apparently thinks it is okay for a husband to rape his wife and asserts the need for his consent before she can travel or even use any form of contraception. It also seems to view Egyptian girls and women who protest their rule as bad Muslims – that is, Muslims who dare to challenge the social code of conduct that the Brotherhood wants to impose on society.

Despite their facade of modernity and their self-described “renaissance project,” the Brotherhood has always held very regressive, even misogynistic views on social and women’s issues. Apart from offering loud rhetoric of equality and freedom, the Brotherhood has never put serious effort into tackling violence or discrimination against women, and has viewed with suspicion any perceived efforts to address women’s problems – such as deriding the UN Declaration’s proposals to protect women as “misleading calls to decadent modernization and paths of subversive immorality.”

Rather than embarking on a serious mission to reconcile Islamic values with the contemporary challenges that Muslim women face, the Brotherhood opted for an easier path of using its female members on two convenient fronts: Locally to garner support among female voters; and abroad as part of its media offensive to improve its image in Western countries and paint an illusion of moderation, even liberalism.

The appalling assault on Ms. Moussa, a conservative Muslim who wears the Islamic headscarf, has finally exposed the myth that the battle for women’s rights in Egypt is between liberals and Islamists. In reality, it is a battle between one camp that uses religion as a tool and another one, equally pious, that wants to detach religion from the political equation.

Mervat Moussa did not head out to the Brotherhood headquarters to reject Islam, or to demand sexual freedom, but to protest the Brotherhood’s arrogant alienation of other political parties and its oppression of political debate. The slap on her face, in a way, symbolized a bigger slap and a sense of betrayal felt by a wide section of society. Egyptians witnessed how their elected Muslim Brotherhood president and his party have opted for domination rather than consensus in their gallop to consolidate their power, and in the process have adopted many of dictator Hosni Mubarak’s policies. Egyptian women were the first to bear the brunt of those policies.

Since the collapse of the Mubarak regime, the Muslim Brotherhood has not made a serious attempt to confront any of the mounting challenges that Egyptian women currently face; instead, it has used these challenges as weapons in its battle against its opponents. For example, with regard to thesexual violence that has become a daily peril for women in Egypt, the Brotherhood blames the opposition parties for failing to secure their demonstrations and allowing “thugs” to attack women.

In addition, the Brotherhood has refused to condemn other Islamist parties that went even further, instead blaming the women themselves for the harassment, claiming that women go to Cairo’s Tahrir Square not to protest, but to be harassed.

The differences between the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties, such as Salafists, are merely tactical, not ideological. The Islamists may allow women to wear colored garments and to expose their face (as opposed to the all-concealing niqab demanded by the Salafists), but beneath the surface, their core values and attitudes do not differ fundamentally.

According to a Brotherhood family expert: “A woman needs to be confined within a framework that is controlled by the man of the house.” He also added: “If a man beats his wife, she shares 30-40% of the fault.” Such views are endorsed and affirmed by various Salafist groups, and they confirm the fears of many that women will be the first to pay a hefty price for the rise of the Islamism in Egypt.

Ironically, Saturday was also National Women’s Day in Egypt; on that day in 1919, 300 women led by Hoda Sha’arawi joined the revolution against British occupation, and saw the death of Hameida Khalil, the first woman to die in the uprising. Four years later, on the same day, Hoda Sha’arawi called for the first Egyptian Women’s Union.

It took Egyptian women years to gain their full rights, and they have no intention of giving up on them. Nor do they have any desire to conform to a new oppressive social code that is based on twisted misinterpretation of Islamic values.

Islamists can slap one woman or denigrate others, but sooner or later, they will have to come to terms with the simple fact that Egypt is bigger than their project, and most of its tenacious women will continue their fight against all form of discrimination.

Nervana Mahmoud is a British-Egyptian blogger and commentator on Middle East issues. She blogs at Nervana and tweets at @nervana_1.

 

via www.theglobeandmail.com

Egypt: Too Big to Fail?

The Foundry, by Ryan Olsen

As President Obama visits Israel, one of the biggest elephants in the room is the ongoing financial crisis just across the desert in Egypt.

Since the Arab Spring uprising, Egypt’s economy has deteriorated. The country’s most immediate crisis is a foreign reserve shortage. Stocks of the country’s foreign currency reserves have fallen to dangerous lows, and the Egyptian pound has been in a free fall since New Year’s Day after a new currency regime was instituted. The Central Bank’s nearly two-year action to prop up the pound has drained its foreign reserve coffers, and traditional sources of foreign currency have been severely reduced since the revolution. This means that soon Egypt may not have the money to buy basic food and fuel from abroad.

The source of these troubles is home grown. First, the political system has been at a standstill. Egypt has lacked an effective government since 2012, when the Supreme Court dissolved the parliament. Elections scheduled for April 2013 have again been delayed by the courts. Without a government, international lenders like the International Monetary Fund, which is offering $4.8 billion in financial support, have found it impossible to reach an agreement.

Second, Egypt’s economy has been poorly mismanaged from the beginning, particularly so under President Mohamed Morsi. Subsidies on energy drain huge sums from the state budget and reserve accounts. While ostensibly for the poor, these payments mostly benefit rich, car-owning city dwellers. Central bankers should also have moved the currency to a float sooner. By letting the pound depreciate, they could have preserved the hard currency they now find lacking.

To get back on track, Egypt needs to return to the principles of economic freedom. Thanks to poor rule of law and closed markets, Egypt ranks below average for the region and the world in The Heritage Foundation’s 2013 Index of Economic Freedom.

Morsi claims he wants to transform the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) into the  E-BRICs, with Egypt at the head. If he can turn back to the principles of economic freedom, he could do just that.

via blog.heritage.org

In Egypt, Gamaa Islamiya goes from terrorist group to security force

Via the Washington Post, by Abigail Hauslohner

--excerpt only; read on.

 

The reformation of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya: The Islamist extremist group that carried out 1997 massacre of 62 people in the historic city of Luxor is now offering to lend a hand in keeping law and order.

Assiut, Egypt — There are generally two stories about how reliable the police force is in the southern Egyptian city of Assiut, and one of those is told by the police.

 

“We are present. We are efficient, and we work around the clock,” said Alaa Abdelsalam, one of the city’s two district police chiefs, in his office in an elegant, colonial-era station on a recent night, a fish tank bubbling to his right. An entourage of officers nodded in agreement.

Just about everyone else in the city disagrees.

“If you call the police, the police are not going to come,” said Alam al-Din Ibrahim, the manager of a car-parts shop in Assiut, where residents say crime is on the rise. “You can call on God to help you,” he said.

It’s a sentiment that is becoming widespread in Egypt, where one violent protest after another has threatened to upend the Arab world’s largest country and send an already devalued currency and government bureaucracy into rapid free fall.

And in Assiut, the sprawling capital of Egypt’s poor and conservative south, Gamaa Islamiya — the Islamist extremist group that carried out a 1997 massacre of 62 people in the historic city of Luxor — has offered to lend a hand.

Assiut has long been a stronghold for Gamaa Islamiya, whose name means “the Islamic group.” It was here and in other cities along Egypt’s rural Nile Valley where Islamist radicals waged a violent insurgency against the governments of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in the 1980s and ’90s. Many group members and affiliates consequently spent more than a decade in jail.

Group leaders in the Nile Valley and in Cairo now say that their violent days are over but that they still want to see Islamic law implemented in Egypt. After the country’s 2011 revolution created space for Islamist radicals to flex their muscles, the group developed a political party, and local leaders have formed what they call “popular committees’’ to help fill a void two years after Mubarak’s fall.

“Things had gotten out of hand,” said Shaaban Ali, a group leader in Assiut.

Several weeks ago, Gamaa Islamiya volunteers — in neon vests with the group’s name and “order committee” printed on the back — began distributing butane gas cylinders to the poor, along with subsidized meat. When Assiut’s trash collectors went on strike, the group put up fliers to recruit workers for a new trash-collection service it would run. They seized “thugs” accused of theft and handed them over to the police. They even rescued kidnapping victims from their captors, Ali said.

And when the national police force receded amid a nationwide strike, the Islamist volunteers offered to take over its work, too.

But Gamaa Islamiya’s initiative didn’t go over as well as members of the group had planned.

Christians, who make up a sizable minority in Assiut (as in Egypt overall), and liberal political leaders reacted with alarm, fearing a more forceful push for Islamic law. “The problems are coming from them. And that’s not just me personally saying that — it’s everyone,” said Rafaat Hakim, a Christian teacher in a nearby village.

 

via www.washingtonpost.com