Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
The New Elite
The Elite dynamics in Egypt has very little to do in terms of personal achievement or fame, but more to do with how connected you are with the people in power
President Morsi called upon to fix the damage
Egyptians are clinging onto hopes that their first civilian president will right Egypt’s political ship, as it veers off course into uncharted and dangerous waters. While revolutionary camps wait to see if the 25 January uprising’s goals will ever be fully achieved under Mohamed Morsi’s leadership, most stand guard awaiting a retun of a Mubarak-era …
The elections and their aftermath in the Western press
While most Egyptians’ sights have been homed in on the future, after the election of Muhammad Morsi to the presidency, it was through the prism of the past that the Western press viewed this week’s news.
Egypt: Major Challenges Ahead
The moment of announcing Morsi as president was an extraordinary moment for Egyptians. Tahrir was screaming and crying in joy and celebrations did not stop during the night. Pleasure expressed was not limited to Egypt; especially in Gaza that has suffered a lot as a result of Mubarak’s policies. The streets of Gaza witnessed similar scenes …
The devils you know
What it fortunately doesn’t convey are the sounds of backdoors closing on deals and compromises cracking through the heart of its own sentiment. Mohamed Morsi is no Mandela.
Win some, lose some
It is truly a moment of pride to see Egyptians thriving for democracy. Even though the revolution is far from being the winner in this scene, yet the revolution of the minds of Egyptians is what matters.
Egypt at a crossroads
By Alya Essam After a successive series of postponements, the Supreme Electoral Committee decided to finally announce the presidential vote results on Sunday 24 June 2012. The uncertainty surrounding the results was evident ever since both campaign teams seized on the first exit polls. While the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi unilaterally proclaimed himself as …
Before Morsi’s arrival
One day before a little more than half of Egypt celebrated the newly-elected civilian presidency of Mohamed Morsi, ordinary Egyptians were still carrying the burden of an uncertain future amid an atmosphere of perplexity at how the nation as a collective had reached this point of tension. Hundreds of thousands converged on Tahrir Square since …
The paradox of a military-sponsored civilian rule
Supporting a military dictatorship to impose our ideals is paradoxical and is neither civilian nor secular and will only perpetuate the presence of the deep state, if not further entrench it
Editor’s letter: Irreversible optimism
We don’t let ourselves get stuck with these miserable realities on the ground, simply because we look to the future. Not to the near future, but to the medium- and long-term.
SCAF, Islamists and the‘instable’ nation
The delay of announcing the official results of presidential elections raised fears and doubts among almost all Egyptians. Questions keep popping up every morning, while Egyptians debate who will conquer the pitched battle between the two dichotomies. As Egyptians await the formal announcement of a winner in the presidential run-off, columnists in several Egyptian newspapers analysed the current political …
Outlandish
I have always enjoyed talking to the drivers of the ubiquitous Cairo taxis, my broken Arabic and their often limited use of English make for an easier exchange than expected. Trying to understand, as opposed to listening to words, can suddenly go a long way, even if the traffic outside the windows is proving the opposite.
Brotherhood and military split debate
Review: This week’s Egyptian columnists sought to understand the maladies of the past and the dominant institutions of the future, Islamists and the military junta.
Divided, we fall
Last Monday I headed to Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protests which brought down strongman Hosni Mubarak. I was driven by a sense of nostalgia for the 25 January 2011 revolution, an all inclusive movement that united pro-reform activists from across cultural and religious divides against the oppressive regime.
Baffling public opinion
By Alya Essam In the space of one week, Egypt’s political map has been in a state of constant flux, with only one institution standing solely to represent the state. Major political developments rapidly alter the scene. Egypt’s public opinion is lost in a general mood of perplexity. Only two days before the presidential elections run-off, two strong verdicts issued by the Supreme Constitutional Court …
The Egyptian Shock Doctors
More Egyptians may or may not have picked Morsi or Shafiq, but they have all let SCAF know, you will not make helpless dogs out of us.
SCAF’s transition in Western press
This week, the Western press was gripped by the electoral drama in a Mediterranean nation with a history of military meddling now in the midst of a national crisis. I am talking, of course, about Greece, whose elections piped Egypt’s to the front pages. Not that the great game of Egypt’s own electoral politics hasn’t attracted its fair share of commentary. They all knew …
Egypt: one step forward, two steps back
As Egypt plunges further and further into the aftermath of a contentious presidential election, unofficial ballot counts seemed to indicate that the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, had claimed victory with a little less than one million votes. Upon the news, hundreds of Morsi supporters streamed into Tahrir Square to celebrate the victory, but lost in the small celebratory fervor …
Islamists: The old and the new
The conditions of the previous regime have diminished revolutionary tendencies in Islamist groups.
The Game of Thrones
Despite everything, Egyptians do survive. And mind you, they learned to say NO.
Islamists: The old and the new
Much of the general public as well as revolutionaries are not the only ones frustrated with Islamists’ lack of revolutionary furor. Islamist masses themselves are frustrated with their leadership’s incompetence and their inability to achieve deep and structural changes. While certainly lack of revolutionary strategies is not true of all Islamists, it can be easily …
The Euro cup: A Coping Mechanism
I decided to give myself a break from both work and the revolution and headed to a nearby coffee shop (ahwa) to gaze at England playing Sweden, just as I would have in the years before politics became the new football with presidential elections as the premier league
Editor’s letter: Old friends matter
DNE has always been the journalism school that many of today’s Egyptian star writers have graduated from.
Resolving the niqab issue in Tunisian universities
By Lotfi Radhouane Chebil TUNIS: Recently at a university in Tunis, a female student approached her professor after class and told him that she had decided to wear the niqab, which covers the female body, face and head, to class. After some discussion on the topic, the professor said that he respected her decision and …
Tweeting democracy across the Arab world
By Guy Golan Over the past few years, the political landscape of the Middle East has wholly transformed by the diffusion of social media across the region. Accounting for 50-65 percent of the region’s population, young Muslims quickly embraced these new platforms of mass communication and soon thereafter, they became leaders of revolutions. Social media …
Iran’s last chance?
By Javier Solana MADRID: The latest round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program between Iran and the so-called “5+1” group (the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China — plus Germany) has now begun. Following more than a year of deadlock, after negotiations in …
To normalize or not to normalize with Israelis?
By Tahseen Yaqeen RAMALLAH: Toward the end of January a group of young Palestinians held a silent demonstration in front of the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah, demanding that their leadership halt the negotiations that were taking place in Amman between the Palestinian Authority’s representative Saeb Erekat and Israeli chief negotiator Yitzhak Molcho. This small …
Down with debt weight
By Robert Skidelsky LONDON: Nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, many are wondering why economic recovery is taking so long. Indeed, its sluggishness has confounded even the experts. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world economy should have grown by 4.4 percent in 2011, and should grow by 4.5 …
How Brazil broke loose
By Mark J. Roe and João Paulo Vasconcellos CAMBRIDGE: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s visit last week to Washington, DC, offers an occasion to consider how some once-poor countries have broken out of poverty, as Brazil has. Development institutions like the World Bank have advocated improving business law as an important way to do so. Are they …
Is North Korea losing China?
By Christopher R. Hill DENVER: For most countries, the spectacular failure of a rocket launch would mean a return to the drawing board, or at least some introspection aimed at figuring out what went wrong. But that does not appear to be the case in North Korea, where the flubbed launch of its long-range Unha-3 …