The Arab spring uprising opened the way to public debates inconceivable in North African countries before 2011. Yet, the reaction of the Cairo authorities has been very hostile to “free thinkers”, including citizens who eschew religion.
Egypt is expected to hold new presidential elections in less than eight weeks. Despite this, the list of presidential hopefuls remained unclear until early afternoon of January 29 – that is, the real last hours of the last day to submit the required paperwork to the National Elections Authority to be allowed to run in the electoral competition.
How did many Egyptian liberals – who, two years earlier stood side by side with Islamists against Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir square, and one year earlier voted for Mohammed Morsi – come to side with a return to military dictatorship?
In Egypt liberal and left elites had missed out to organize and compete with right wing groups during and after the revolution. Amr Hamzawy, former Egyptian parliamentarian and human right activist explains that human rights abuse and economic and social crisis are threatening today’s Egypt and corroding the trust of the citizens. The illusion that an autocratic regime would guarantee stability is constantly disintegrating.
Political repression in Egypt ravaged the Jama’at al Ikhwan al Muslimiin, the Muslim Brotherhood, formerly the strongest and most organized opposition group in the country.
Just a couple of weeks ago, writing for Reset, Azzurra Meringolo wrote about how it is becoming increasingly difficult to celebrate the date of January 25th, in Egypt. The symbolic anniversary of the beginning of the revolution that five years ago led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak, following 18 days of unprecedented protests, has increasingly become the symbol of the new regime’s repressive brutality and the weakness of opposition movements. It is also an anniversary that, in recent years, has left a long trail of bloodshed: a balance worsened in the last days by the news of the death and terrible abuse suffered by young Italian national PhD researcher Giulio Regeni.
From Reset-DoC’s Archive – For people of the Maghreb, or at least for those who are interested in the intellectual life, 2010 will undisputedly be associated with the heaviest harvest of intellectual and political figures of the region. As if death plotted against the region and decided to take away the emblematic figures of a glorious period of intellectual and political life. Mohamed Abid Al Jabiri, Edmond Emran El Maleh and Abraham Serfaty from Morocco; Mohamed Arkoun and Tahar Ouettar from Algeria and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd from Egypt, took their leave in 2010. As much as these intellectuals’ works are widely studied in Western academia, especially in Europe and America, they remain unknown to large sections of the Arab world. Many factors inform this ignorance. First, the objective discontinuities that exist in terms of free circulation of knowledge between the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world) and the Maghreb (the west). Second, the historical jealousies that have always existed between the two sides of the Arab world. (This article was published on Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations in 2011)
After a hundred individuals were kept in arbitrary detention at the Karmooz Police station in Alexandria, Egypt, they began a hunger strike to bring international attention to their plight. But their last battle started in October 2014. The majority of the 74 refugees-detainees in Karmooz police station are part of a group of Syrian and Palestinian-Syrians that left from Turkey by boat on 23 October last year. They wanted to reach their family members in Europe, but they were arrested in early November 2014 by Egyptian coast guards, after becoming victims of the smuggler mafia.
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