Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi has been in the international news nearly every day for the past week or two. First it was the positive press coverage of his cooperative role in defusing the breakout of Israeli/Hamas hostilities in Gaza. President Obama him… Read full post »

Since his recent election, Egypt’s Islamist president is executing a series of breath-taking power grabs that confirm the worst fears of his detractors and confound the expectations of observers who expected the obscure, uncharismatic Morsi to be a toothless, figurehead president.… Read full post »

 Ramadan is the Islamic holy month of fasting and devotion, but it is also the Islamic world’s television drama addiction month. At the end of a day’s deprivation, millions of Muslims from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf gather in front of their television sets to… Read full post »

If ever a man knew too much, it was Omar Suleiman. The most powerful spymaster in the Middle East, Mubarak’s black box, the C.I.A.’s rendition agent in Egypt, Israel’s intermediary. The head of Egypt’s dread Mukhabarat, a spy chief so powerful that his very ident… Read full post »

On February 3^rd, 2011, the day after Mubarak ‘loyalist’ thugs rode into Tahrir Square on horses and camels and started bludgeoning the peaceful protesters camping there, I wrote:  ‘If (Mubarak) stays, the events of the past ten days will be referred to as "the upr… Read full post »

I grew in Egypt during a revolutionary regime that brought great political and social upheaval. My earliest memories of an idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end in the early sixties when the Nasser regime designated certain politically-prominent, landowning families like mine as enemies of the peop… Read full post »

There really is no other way to put it. More than anything today, Egyptians of all political stripes, whether devastated or delighted, are experiencing the surrealist sense of a parallel universe. In that universe, the all-powerful and ineluctable Pharaoh of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, is a p… Read full post »

Egypt today was a country divided, nearly as neatly down the middle as the votes- 51% versus 49%- that elected Islamist Morsi over his rival for the presidency, the military-backed Shafiq. On the one hand, in Egypt today, there was celebration, horns tooting, flags flying; on the other… Read full post »

‘Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated,’ Mark Twain said, and of no one is that more true than of Hosni Mubarak. From a ‘clinically dead’ diagnosis on Tuesday, he seems to have made a miraculous recovery in the Maadi military hospital.

Ironically, it… Read full post »

It couldn’t have been more blatant or more predictable: late Sunday evening, as the polls closed and the presidential run off elections projected a win for the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Morsi, the military rulers of Egypt declared a new interim constitution that severely restr… Read full post »

It’s not that a military power grab was not a scenario foretold: back in January 2011, with the revolution ongoing in Tahrir and Mubarak still in power, the warnings were many: Be careful what you wish for! You may get a historical first: an authentic people’s revolution th… Read full post »

Egypt’s liberal progressives are going about stunned today. They shake their heads in despair: Has is come to this? A choice between equal evils for President: either Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood or Mubarak Redux personified in Ahmed Shafiq, the Mubarak-era Prime Minister who preside… Read full post »

 ‘Why Do They Hate Us?” Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy laments on the cover page of Foreign Policy, in an article illustrated by provocative photos of a naked woman painted to look as if she were wearing a niqab. Who are the ‘They’ and who are the &l… Read full post »

Now that the Republican primaries in the U.S. have been decided in favor of Mitt Romney, and Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande are facing off in France, perhaps the most critical presidential ‘primaries’ of all are being fought out in Egypt. Everything is at stake… Read full post »

The crazy woman is back. You hear her shouting on the street in front of the building, early in the morning and at sunset, ranting yells as indecipherable as an infant’s existential angst. I never see her, only hear her; I don’t know how she survives. For several months there was… Read full post »

The death of Pope Shenouda, spiritual head of Egypt’s Coptic Church for four decades, threw millions of Copts into mourning, and was marked by the Egyptian government as a state funeral, attended by top political authorities and the Muslim religious establishment, as well as foreign di… Read full post »

Today is International Women’s Day, and women in Egypt are uneasy about where they will be same time next year. “Iran,” gloomily prognosticates a friend as she dithers between chocolate soufflé and Om Ali from the dessert buffet at lunch in a private home. “Next year we… Read full post »

Today is International Women’s Day, and women in Egypt are uneasy about where they will be same time next year. “Iran,” gloomily prognosticates a friend as she dithers between chocolate soufflé and Om Ali from the dessert buffet at lunch in a private home. “Next year we… Read full post »

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once brutally centralized state. The &… Read full post »

It is hard to paint a coherent picture of today’s Egypt from the inside; you experience daily life and news items as a fragmented reality. Things are not following apart, the center holds, but centrifugal forces pull at the periphery of this once brutally centralized state. The &… Read full post »

Today, February 4th, is the anniversary of the so-called ‘Battle of the Camel’, the decisive turning point of the Revolution of January 25^th, when the peaceful democracy protesters in Tahrir were able to beat back a vicious onslaught by pro-Mubarak thugs who attacked them… Read full post »

Yesterday, as I walked to Tahrir Square along the Kasr el-Nil Bridge, I met friends and acquaintances along the way, the same people who, like me, had been so moved by the revolution a year ago, and who had shunned the ugly confrontations in Tahrir since the divisiveness and the… Read full post »