Ahmed Yussuf Rashid. Cover photo on his Facebook page.
Fighting a remarkably unsuccessful war against Bedouin insurgents in the Sinai, the Egyptian state seems to have given up even pretending to adhere to the rule of law, as Heba Afify’s story from Mada Masr makes clear:
It was dawn on one of the final days of November when Suleiman was awakened to the flashing lights of a police car and then a military armored personnel carrier filling up the street where he lives.
Rabaa Square in Cairo, the protest before the massacre. Photo Courtesy of Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
Since it was driven underground after the coup of the summer of 2013 and the massacres that followed soon after, what has happened to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt? The vast and powerful century-old organization, survivor of so many cycles of repression and rejuvenation, has split and turned against itself, writes Ahmed Al Tellawi in Noon Post.
The conflict began around August, 2014,
Mohamad Kamal. Photo: Rassd.
Massacred and driven underground or into exile following the 2013 coup, Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are nevertheless an extraordinarily resilient organization. But when security forces in Cairo this week killed one of the group’s most important leaders, a widening rupture between two major factions in the Brothers broke to the surface, writes Ahmed Al Tellawi in this very perceptive analysis:
In a Tuesday press release, the Egyptian Interior Ministry announced that it had liquidated Mohamed Kamal.
1980, Amnesty International campaign poster about human rights in Turkey.
A month after the Turkish army failed to overthrow the country’s democratically elected president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an enormous and unprecedented witch-hunt against all potential dissenters is overrunning the country. A general atmosphere of hysteria has seized the Turkish press where most recently accounts of shady secret witnesses -called “confessionists”- are flourishing.
In the past month since the coup attempt of July 15 against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, followed by a massive crackdown
The Prisoner, Memorial to the Resistance. France. Photo CC: Dennis Jarvis.
How do you avoid plagues of burrowing parasitic mites in an overcrowded prison cell? How do you avoid catching them while you sleep, in the most contaminated wards of Egypt prisons: the “political prisoners” blocks? How do you deal with the itching and with the shame of the itching? With songs, with a mixture of euphemism and bluntness, and with endless endurance, writes poet and novelist Omar Hazek, who walked out of prison in Alexandria recently.
Scratch, Scratch, try just once to quit!
Waiting for death: Sayyid Qutb and fellow Muslim Brothers on trial in Cairo.
Egypt has filled its prisons with some 40,000 people since the 2013 coup, the vast majority of them young activists of the now-banned Muslim Brotherhood subjected to torture and mistreatment. And so once again the country is turning out a new generation of violent radicals. In this illuminating history of the links between the country’s prisons and violent extremism, the complex history of the Sinai based ISIS affiliate that weeks ago blew up an airliner full of Russian tourists, murdering more than 200 people:
The present wave of arrests and mistreatment of detainees in today’s Egypt is nothing new for the country’s Islamists.
Egyptian Ministry of Education officials burning books in a Cairo school.
The most curious thing about the list of books burned in an official ceremony organized recently by bureaucrats of Egypt’s Education Ministry is the list of titles: it reads like a syllabus on Islamic Modernism, the Enlightenment-inspired movement that swept Egypt and the Arab world at the end of the 19th century.
Islam and and the Foundations of Governance, by Ali Abdel Raziq. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the biography by Uthman Amin.
A Palestinian makes a Rabaa sign from the town of Rafah in Gaza. Photo Mohamed Saber, EPA.
It has been six months since the Egyptian army and police massacred over a thousand civilian protestors in Rabaa al-Adawiya square, in Cairo. They had camped in the square for two months, demanding the reinstatement of President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who had been overthrown in a military coup July 3.
Despite the savage repression, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have taken to the streets.
Morsi supporters arrested in Cairo, Photo: Mohamed Omar (Daily News Egypt)
Life underground with the Muslim Brothers in Cairo: call-in television shows to denounce the neighborhood ‘terrorists’; the predawn knock at the door; the terror and confusion of now-leaderless protestors. Scenes from post-coup Cairo by one of France’s finest feature reporters, Florence Aubenas.
On the television, the show has just begun. One of those talk shows that Egypt's new private channels love so much: on this one, viewers can call in to denounce 'terrorists,' live on the air.
Zeinhom morgue, Cairo. Photo Al Khabar Now.
In Cairo morgues, the bodies are piling up, and not merely due to the scale of army massacres. Almost unbelievably, the government is trying to force unwilling families to sign falsified death certificates: their murdered children ‘committed suicide.’
Zeinhom morgue has become an obligatory destination here, though it is a dreaded building that people in Cairo once refused to drive past, shied away from even mentioning by name. Today, they stand outside it in long lines, frantic to recover the bodies of loved ones.
