We are back in the States now: on vacation in Wisconsin. A tasteful “Recall Walker” sign adorns my in-laws’ house in Madison. The kids are fine, riding a scooter up and down the sidewalk. (Sidewalk!) Jet lag; culture shock.
This blog will now stop attempting to respond to the day-to-day flow of events in Egypt. I will probably take a short break and then come back with several “feature” type stories or straight travelogue pieces that got started in Cairo but got pre-empted by the rush of political developments. (I gave up daily newspaper reporting 16 years ago but my mom once described me, very much in the AA sense, as a “recovering journalist.”) Haven’t decided what to do after that, once the semester begins.
But you don’t really need me. Unlike when I started learning Arabic 14 years ago (and that was the main reason why I started), there are now SO many articulate English-language voices commenting on developments all over the region. You can begin here for this week, if you haven’t already: Ahdaf Soueif’s reflection on the military’s brutalization of female demonstrators, and Mahmoud Salem/Sandmonkey’s astonishing piece breaking his silence about Islamist parties, parliamentary elections, the revolution’s mistakes, and more. The New York Times’ coverage has also been surprisingly good, for the most part: so, bravo to David Kirkpatrick (I don’t know him personally) and his stringers and fixers.
Backlogged ordinary street scenes coming soon. Take care of yourselves meanwhile.

Returned from Abu Dhabi at 4am today — just in time for another wave of unimaginable state violence. Military police (i.e., the army, NOT just the Ministry of Interior) have spent all day attacking protesters, breaking up a 3-week-old sit-in outside the Cabinet building with beatings and live fire, even (get this) throwing Molotov cocktails at protesters from the roofs of government buildings. I was offline this morning, taking the kids to visit the Pyramids (had to do it eventually), so first heard about the events because my journalist friend, with whom we were supposed to meet up at a birthday party in Kit Kat, said he was unable to leave his house in Qasr El Ainy. Under siege, again.
I’ll try to write more soon; meanwhile you can read this astonishing chronicle, from what is actually a state run-paper. Among the highlights:

2:15pm A doctor at the scene told Ahram Online that the fighting began when a group of protesting Ultras were playing a football match early in the monring in front of the Cabinet building. The ball flew into the building’s courtyard. When one of the Ultras, named Aboudy, jumped into the building to try and retrieve the ball, he was brutally beaten by security forces. He is now in Qasr El-Aini Hospital.

8:15pm Pitch battles continue in Qasr El-Aini Street as security forces attack protesters on the ground with rocks and Molotov cocktails from the roofs of smouldering government buildings. The protesters have been fighting back all day and, with the ruling military council failing to take any action to restrain the forces under their command, this shows no sign of ending any time soon.

The photos and videos circulating online are pretty amazing too. Army personnel attacking Egyptians with electric cattle prods, dragging them by the hair. A protestor who was an Azhar scholar of Islamic law has been killed; women wearing the full face-veil have been beaten. Yet someone I had coffee with late tonight (a professional actor, hangs out with liberals, etc.) blamed the protesters for what he called their naivete in retrieving a soccer ball (“You idiot! It’s the Ministry of Interior, not the yard of the lady next door!”), not at all the military for perpetrating obvious and gratuitous violence against its own people.

Can’t believe we are leaving this country tomorrow night. Don’t want to go. Feels like abandoning the bedside of a friend who is very dear — and very wounded. Who knows when and in what shape I will see him again.

“Come vote with us!” invited my acquaintance on our street, one of the few real working-class (actually, unemployed-class) liberals I’ve met, after we bonded over his otherwise unshared suspicions of the Brotherhood. I’m excited to be in Abu Dhabi for what promises to be a very fun conference on World Literature and Translation, but sorry to be missing the fun on Voting Day in our neighborhood. Here are some posters from Dokki/Mohandiseen.

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The one of Gamal Abdel Nasser is from the back window of someone’s car on our street; he’s not really running for office, just (as the caption says) “still in the hearts of millions.” The others are candidates. Not a lot of women running, but how do you like that lady whose symbol is the rifle? Or the Brothers represented by two objects they’ve perhaps never used, a stove and a blender? At least you can’t accuse the election committee of sexism. There’s a public service poster advising people on how to vote; most of these have been scratched up or pasted over with posters for particular candidates. Note the statue of Ahmad Orabi in the background of the Midan Orabi photo: he still has an eye patch commemorating the Nov 19-26 violence where several protesters got their eyes shot out. Oh, and one Egyptian Bloc candidate hung his banners over some street signs on major public roads, such that you can’t see the street signs anymore to know where you’re going. Trust him to prioritize the national interest over his own and steer the parliament in the right direction. Somehow don’t have photos yet, but the MB splinter party Hizb al-Wasat, now usually described as “moderate Islamist,” has recently sprouted a very strong presence in our neighborhood, with offices right near the Bahoos metro station and posters all over the place featuring their #1 guy on the list-based vote, a good-looking former Zamalek soccer star.

Turnout promises to be high. Apparently some number of people have had the daylights scared out of them by the MB/Nour sweep in the first round, and are voting Egyptian Bloc “to balance things out.” Certainly that’s the Bloc’s last best strategy: they’ve taken down their billboards with photos of tycoon/party founder Naguib Sawiris (a liability in general, and more so after he made a massive televised gaffe last week), and replaced them with huge posters simply showing the Bloc’s symbol (the eye) and the words, “For a Balanced Parliament.” (Pix of those on my other camera too.)
This was my earlier question about multi-round elections, which my friend Qifa Nabki described in his comment as “not ideal” — and in many cases of course they aren’t. But because late-round voters get to see how the early rounds voted, could this system allow for an early and healthy expression of buyer’s remorse?

This ran today.

Cairo, Up Close and Personal | BU Today | Boston University.

Thanks, Amy Sutherland!

Although there were some important runoff races, the turnout last week (Dec 5 runoff for candidates who didn’t win outright in the first vote; still the first of three rounds of parliamentary elections) was pathetic. Election workers and volunteers of various kinds far outnumbered voters. All the newspapers led with photos of empty polling stations. Here are mine.

Unsurprisingly, the FJP carried most of the runoff races. They are so professional. Their ubiquitous bright blue and yellow posters have become like wallpaper: you don’t even notice them anymore. Some people have told me they’re voting MB because they perceive them as competent. One taxi driver, in earnest: “Look at their campaign. They have so much money. Of course they’ll use it to fix the country.”
Those THREE FJP canvassers chatting with my husband (they were delighted to hear he was a religion professor) are not local. (Him: So, are you all here representing different parties? Them: Nope, one party.) When we told them there was a Brotherhood office on our street, they said, “Oh, that’s our office! We live in Dokki/Mohandiseen. Not around here. We are doing this election work in the daytime, but then we do outreach work through the neighborhood FJP office in the evenings.” (Dokki votes in Giza’s election round, not till Dec 14.)
For what it’s worth, “religious parties” are officially banned (e.g., the Salafi Nour party is a “party with a religious point of reference”). Anyway, since the FJP proclaims on its propaganda that it’s “the party created by the Muslim Brotherhood for all Egyptians,” theoretically there ought to be a separation between the religious organization and the political party. I don’t think it’s proper for the FJP to campaign out of the MB’s headquarters.
A sharp analysis of the first-round election outcome by Samuel Tadros here. But I don’t see how he says the parliament will be “solely composed of Muslim males.” Mostly, overwhelmingly, yes.

We got hope and change and yes we can. They got a revolution. But former Guantanamo detainee and current Egyptian prisoner Adel al-Gazzar has gotten… well, there is no polite way to put it. It seems the War on Terror is still doing its multinational damage.

Injured in an airstrike in Afghanistan, sold for a bounty to Guantanamo, forced to wait eight years (!) after the US cleared him for release, resettled in Slovakia but illegally imprisoned there, the man comes home to Egypt after the revolution and — gets arrested at the airport.  Read his whole story here.

My ferociously smart friend Katie Taylor, after working for years in Palestine, is now in London at an NGO called Reprieve, which advocates for the human rights of people on death row and people who are or have been at Guantanamo. She is working on Adel al-Gazzar’s case. She says it’s likely his in-absentia conviction, in a multi-defendant trial based on testimony extracted by torture from co-defendants while Adel sat at Guantanamo, will be overturned on appeal.  The Military Prosecution (of course this is a military trial) unexpectedly fast-tracked his hearing a few days before the election; ruling expected as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Remember the United States of Canada and Jesusland?  One friend of mine who lives in Heliopolis (where polisci professor and liberal hottie Amr Hamzawy has beaten out the FJP candidate for the individual seat) just jokingly offered political asylum to her friends from other districts.

Oh, and Al-Masry al-Youm, in its front-page editorial today, reminds its (predominantly liberalish) readers that the Islamist candidates who seem to have won a majority in the first round yesterday are indeed Egyptians. “Their ideological allegiance should not make us deny their Egyptianness, their citizenship, or their ambition to participate in politics.”  And it adds, a bit alarmingly:

Before the Islamic current are numerous examples of successful experiments of majority-Islamist parliaments. The [Egyptian] people wants [الشعب يريد] it to be closer to the Turkish experiment than to the Afghan one.

Umm, by “the Afghan experiment” do you mean the lloya jirga, or the Taliban?