...ted and sustained by the perfect storm of historical forces, social conditions, and a strong state hand. Since Egypt gained its independence from Britain in 1952, Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak all used state-controlled media to entrench their own rule. Most recently, Mubarak manipulated and utilized public mood to two effects during his twenty-year reign. By fabricating and encouraging foreign conspiracy t...
...wrote Ibrahim Nafie, a columnist for the Al-Ahram weekly newspaper, referring to Egypt’s first multi-candidate elections in 2005. But this comment could not be more relevant to Egypt’s political climate today. Now that Hosni Mubarak has been removed from power and Mohamed Morsi has been elected through a fair and free election, Egypt seems to be on its way to democracy. In the United States, the two-party system has emerged as the accepted parad...
photo from Wikimedia Commons It was March 2011 and the Egyptian military had assumed executive power in what was dubbed a democratic transition. As I stood next to a military tank, I saw slogans such as “the people and the army are one hand” and believed that military rule was the best alternative to Mubarak. The tanks indicated the military’s role as protector during the transition to democracy, but the military’s actions since have amounted t...
...political inequities, more than just the economic explanations of poverty, were responsible for the ferocity of the revolution. Consistent fraud, increased police brutality, and the seeming readying of power transfer to Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal, in addition to the semi-recent success of revolutions in Eastern Europe, South America, South Africa, and finally, Tunisia, were what sparked this revolution. Of course, the fuel for this flame was provi...
...since cried out against the law and have claimed that the regulatory provision will restrict civil society activity (much of which works to promote democracy) to an even greater extent than the one previously instituted under Mubarak’s heavy hand. March 25, arrest warrants were announced for five Egyptian activists accused of inciting recent violence and championing anti-Islamist claims—a claim which is questionable at best. March 26, the Shura C...
...ds Israel. The conservative and still very much empowered Bashar al-Assad posed no serious threat, and the recent 2006 Israel-Lebanon war left Hezbollah exhausted from conflict. But most importantly, on Gaza’s southern border Mubarak in Egypt was just as much suspicious of Hamas in Gaza as was Israel. A time-old enemy of Islamist movements, Mubarak long suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—of which Hamas is an offshoot—and preserved cordia...
Illustration by Amalia Rinehart It is undeniable that the economic trends that ran throughout Mubarak’s rule played a major role in both the trajectory of his reign and the future of the nation. The popular “citizen Mubarak” who took power in 1981, declaring that “the coffin has no pockets”, slowly became the $70 billion dictator; at the same time, his early rule was characterized by a mish-mash of policies that leveraged one economic problem t...
photo by Yuli Weeks/VOA On May 23rd and 24th, citizens in Egypt voted between thirteen candidatesin what were deemed the first free and fair presidential elections. By Friday evening, state news agencies reported that Mohammed Morsi, chair of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, gained 25.3 percent of votes and Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s former Prime Minister Shafiq gained 24.9 percent with a difference of less than 100,000 between...
...e East. That is not to say that these events are any less momentous than all the hype; I will try to avoid repeating it here, but forgive me if my enthusiasm shows through. The past 18 months have seen the ousting of Ben Ali, Mubarak, Qaddafi, and Saleh, one way or another, and the explosion of popular uprisings that have not been seen in the Middle East in a long time. And although the Middle East has seen plenty of tumult in the modern period,...
The situation in Cairo is changing daily. When Max posted it seemed as though Tahrir Square was emptying out and Mubarak’s wait-it-out strategy was sapping the will of the protesters. What the world thought was the beginning of a revolution was looking more like a rearrangement of the regime that would revolutionize little for the Egyptian people who craved a transparent, democratic government. However, today, Al Jazeera reported that 20,000 fac...
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