May 23, 2013
BY MAI SHAMS EL-DIN Cairo – Full of enthusiasm, Iman El-Mahdy, member of Tamarod (Rebel) campaign says she never expected that the dream she shared with a group of her friends would become reality. Tamarod, a grassroots movement petitioning for a withdrawal of confidence from President Mohamed Mursi, in office since June 2012, announced last week that they had already collected 2 million signatures against Egypt’s first ever elected civilian president. The campaign has set a target of 15 million signatures by the end of June, when mass protests are scheduled to coincide with the first anniversary of Islamist-backed Mursi’s…
Cairo – Several thousand protesters converged in marches to Tahrir Square on May 17 spurred by the ‘Tamarod’ (Rebellion) campaign. The grassroots movement aims to withdraw confidence from Egypt’s elected President Mursi and bring about early elections. They have claimed to have collected 2 million signatures so far, but are targeting 15 million by the end of June to mark one year of Mursi’s term in office. Islamist leaders have criticized the campaign as “illogical”. According to several news reports, former Freedom and Justice Party MP and leading member of the party Mohamed El-Beltagy said : “I call on the…
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo – Few performances can move their audience emotionally, while engaging them artistically and intellectually. But some very lucky Cairenes had the opportunity this week, watching highlights from the renowned musical “Les Miserable” at The American University in Cairo (AUC). The remarkable performance was presented in Arabic for the first time late last week at the Malak Gabr theater. The successful Broadway musical “Les Miserable” by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alain Boublil is based on Victor Hugo’s powerful novel about poverty, injustice and the struggle against oppression, set during the 1932 student revolt against the French monarchy. The…
BY LEYLA DOSS Cairo – Almost a year ago, Abdel-Khalek Betiti (Abbouda), owner of Fekra Center in Aswan, realized that the family farm of his childhood, overlooking the beautiful Philae Island along the banks of the Nile River, had reached a standstill. His land was overused, economically unsustainable and arid. This is where Nawaya, a local agricultural non-profit organisation, comes in. Last month the NGO gave a weeklong introductory course on a concept new to Egypt, permaculture design, to provide farmers with the tools to combat the very issues that many like Abbouda face. Permaculture, short for ‘permanent agriculture’, is…
BY TAMIM ELYAN Cairo – Carrying a poster of her 20 year-old son, Moaz, who was killed in clashes with police in Tahrir Square in the early days of the January 2011 uprising, Sanaa Saeed doesn’t expect punishment to be meted out to her son’s killers, but she won’t give up the case. Outnumbered by media and riot police, Saeed and a handful of victims’ relatives stand under the blazing sun outside the police academy in an eastern Cairo suburb which plays host to what is dubbed the “trial of the century”. This is where ousted President Hosni Mubarak and…
May 22, 2013
May 18, 2013
May 17, 2013
May 17, 2013
May 12, 2013
BY ITAMAR RABINOVICH and TAMARA WITTES Washington, DC – The rocket strikes that a militant Islamist group recently fired from the Egyptian Sinai into the Israeli city of Eilat served as yet another reminder of how delicate bilateral relations remain two years after Egypt’s revolution. Terrorist activity could easily cause a crisis on the border, with the potential to trigger an unwanted confrontation that would threaten the peace treaty that normalized bilateral relations in 1979. To avoid such an outcome, Israel and Egypt must take convincing action now to uphold the treaty. Last November, when hostilities erupted in Gaza, Egyptian…
BY SOPHIE ANMUTH and MARWA NASSER Cairo Clashes in Egypt between Muslims and Copts earlier this month have sparked fears of further sectarian violence for the Egyptian Copt minority, which makes up approximately 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 90 million. As a foreigner and a native Egyptian living in Cairo, we have both heard first-hand the stereotypes about faith relations in Egypt. For example, the one of us who grew up here remembers being five, in a middle-class neighbourhood in Cairo, and overhearing two schoolmates whispering and pointing at another girl: “She’s Christian”. They probably didn’t even understand what…
BY NAEL M. SHAMA Cairo Scant budgets, fanaticism, encroachments on freedom of expression and a growing isolationist, inward-looking attitude to the world have undermined the quality and reach of Egypt’s cultural production. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The real misfortune is that knowledge in Egypt has been deformed and commodified. Like a Pepsi can or a bag of chips, products with fine packaging and generous marketing campaigns win the race, leaving little room to any real transmission of knowledge. From a historical perspective, the “commodification of culture” is certainly not a new phenomenon, but lately it has…
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo – Few performances can move their audience emotionally, while engaging them artistically and intellectually. But some very lucky Cairenes had the opportunity this week, watching highlights from the renowned musical “Les Miserable” at The American University in Cairo (AUC). The remarkable performance was presented in Arabic for the first time late last week at the Malak Gabr theater. The successful Broadway musical “Les Miserable” by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and Alain Boublil is based on Victor Hugo’s powerful novel about poverty, injustice and the struggle against oppression, set during the 1932 student revolt against the French monarchy. The…
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo – In its second edition, the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) which closed on April 28, presented a mixed fare of theater performances with a focus on works never seen in Egypt before. The world premiere of Lebanese performance “Alice”, created by Sawsan Bou Khaled in collaboration with Hussein Baydoun, is a case in point. This one-woman show was directed, authored and performed by Bou Khaled, a theater veteran who made her directorial debut in 2006. The exceptionally talented Hussein Baydoun, is an architect by training, but is known in the Arab world and beyond as…
BY DALIA BASIOUNY Cairo Stunned by news that Rawabet Theater, the only affordable independent performance space in downtown Cairo was shut down, two theatre technicians decided to take matters into their own hands. As technicians Saber El Sayed and Mido Sadeq knew how to turn empty, unequipped spaces into full-fledged performance venues. Rawabet’s abrupt closure in February for lack of funding triggered the ingenious idea to transform The Factory, a space run by the TownHouse Gallery, and debut an arts festival they dubbed “Alternative Solution”. Click here to open the gallery. Converting this huge empty white-walled hall into an equipped…
BY WAFAA WALI Cairo Imagine the oddity of watching on screen Cairo’s visually noisy streets without the actual noise. The phrase “eerie vacuum” comes to mind, but that’s precisely what director Hassan Khan has done in his latest offering “Blind Ambition”. Khan’s work, which was commissioned for the prestigious dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, premiered in Cairo Sunday as part of the downtown D-Caf festival. The 46-minute film split into nine different episodes taking place around Cairo shows diverse groups of people engaged in conversation which do not all revolve around a specific issue. With no clear aim and not reaching…