Abu Ghraib. Botero.
The local and international press reported this week that Egypt’s military regime was closing Nadim, a prominent center in Cairo that treats victims of torture. Nadim was one of the last lights flickering in the sea of darkness that Egypt under Sisi has become; the history of the center’s creation, the nature of its work, and the personalities of its founders all ordained its closure.
Magda Adly is not the type to be easily intimidated.
Ismail Alexandrani in North Sinai. Photo: Al Safir Al Arabi
There are not many Egyptian journalists like Ismail Alexandrani. A sociologist by training, he was always drawn as a writer and journalist to those who are marginalized in the excitable hurly burly of Egypt’s press and popular culture: Nubians, disabled people, the Sinai Bedouins. This week, his expertise and erudition have dealt him a grim fate: he has been arrested and is being held incognito on improbable charges of supporting terrorism.
Forced to live abroad since last year, Alexandrani tried to slip into Egypt under the radar this week to visit his ailing mother.
Screenshot from The Jewish Quarter TV series.
The most talked about Egyptian TV series this summer, a historical drama with Jews as the heroes: hard to imagine a fresher angle than that, right? But as Orient XXI’s Celine Lebrun writes here, Harat al-Yahoud, which explicitly exchanged as ‘bad guys’ Jews and Zionists for the Muslim Brothers, was transparent propaganda for the country’s new military rulers.
With sensationalist title, the subject of the TV series by Egyptian director Medhat el-Adl seemed a risky gamble for this summer’s Ramadan month season.
