The headline reads “The Tainted Visit: Albright Invades our House”
I thought I would include the picture Issandr referenced from al-Osbua. This is a most unflattering picture. But the article that accompanies it on page three is more unflattering still.

The Ibn Khaldoun Center, the institution which hosted last week’s meeting with Madeline Albright (and others) in Cairo, has published a press release on the event. Since there has been some discussion of this meeting over the past few days, I am posting it in full here.
I also wanted to mention something else that might [...]

I spoke to Ayman Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail (who is a journalist and in charge of public relations for Hizb Al Ghad) tonight. She told me that the case against her husband was expedited with highly unusual alacrity, on a day that would normally have been a holiday. State Security notified the Prosecutor General [...]

Ehab Hashish & others working for the Kuwaiti Daily, al-Rai al-Aam, published a story on the front page of their newspaper (27th of January 2005) detailing an Albright-led delegation’s visit to Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center. If Chatham House rules were in effect, this is a violation because they names names and cites direct quotes.
To [...]

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about Hizb al-Ghad (Party of Tomorrow) in Egypt.
They have been publishing things from local press to Daily Star, entertaining foreign embassy staff, and visiting delegations. Mona Makram-Ebied is the party’s the spokesperson. I have been arguing with anyone I can get ahold of that she, in [...]

Bush gave an 40 minute interview to the NYT which was published this morning as a sort of prelude to the State of the Union Address next week.
Apparently, he does not have time to read Foreign Affair articles – even if written by Condi. He also ready to use Iraq as a jumping point for [...]

The AP has a story, seemingly mostly sourced from Saudi dissidents based in London, on how Saudi clerics in “the Kingdom” are encouraging wannabe mujahideen to fight in Iraq rather than at home. In other words, they are encouraging a split between Al Qaeda, which calls for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, and local [...]

You will find below the first post by Simon Kitchen, a new occasional contributor to arabist.net. Simon comes from an economic and risk analysis background, a perspective that I am sure will enrich the debate. [issandr]
In all the current discussion of political reform in the Middle East, and a possible dynastic succession in Egypt, the [...]

I just read in The Note that the results for Iraq’s elections won’t be known for at least two weeks. Can anyone explain to me why that is the case?

As Issandr indicated, Bush’s inaugural speech covertly unleashed the “freedom” doctrine. For those of us studying and living in the Arab world this meant the GMEI. In what feels like the film Groundhog day, Bush 43 admin 2 is looking about reviving the Greater Middle East Initiative (whether they call it that or not) which [...]

The press attache of the Egyptian embassy in Washington has replied to the scathingly anti-Mubarak Washington Post editorial of a few days ago. Note that he makes use of the recent demonstrations to prove that Egypt is free after all:
The editorial concluded that the elections would be fraudulent before they were held. Ironically, the Cairo [...]

I just saw the much talked about movie Bab Es-Shams (Door of the Sun), Egyptian director Yousri Nasrallah’s adaptation of a the novel by Palestinian-Lebanese director Elias Khoury. The ambitious five-hour saga is a cooperation with the French ARTE TV channel, as well as with companies from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Morocco. It has a [...]

As Americans rush to study Arabic in order to become spies, the Pentagon makes sure to filter out the gay ones. Because, as everyone knows, gay Arabists have never amounted to much.

Hassan Fattah, the former editor of the sadly defunct Iraq Today, has resurfaced in the NYT, writing about Mecca’s unlikely liberalism.
Update: Related is this report by Brian Whitaker.

Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies and a key mentor of Gamal Mubarak, penned this piece on Egyptian-Israeli relations for the Daily Star:
Yet Egyptian-Israeli relations are a function not only of Palestinian-Israeli, or even Arab-Israeli relations. The domestic economic and political situation in Egypt plays its part. It is [...]

…in President Mubarak’s recent attempts to explain how little power he actually has. At a meeting with writers and intellectuals earlier this week (he has one every year before the Cairo Book Fair), the president was asked some “direct” questions about democratization and the concentration of power in the presidency. According to Masr Al-Youm newspaper, [...]

The NYT has a story (published yesterday) that more or less brings the deteriorating situation in Columbia’s Mealac department to date. The center of the storm is Joseph Massad who has been attacked by certain right-leaning interest groups. If anything, the Times piece erred on the side of being too balanced.
Massad, for his [...]

After a longer absence than expected, I am back in Cairo and to work. Look forward to contributing to the Arabist network’s activity.

The excellent folks at electronicintifada.net and electroniciraq.net — perhaps some of the first activist/news sites focusing on these regional conflicts — are worried that they’ll soon have to work on electroniciran.net too. No doubt that was inspired by Seymour Hersh’s story, which gets top billing on the site. There are also links to background info [...]

The Washington Post has another strongly anti-Mubarak editorial on the forthcoming elections in which they call President Bush to task for not keeping his word on promoting democracy in Iraq. In fact, they argue, Mubarak has been one of the strongest opponents of this plan for Arab democratization:
Mr. Mubarak has done the opposite: He has [...]

Here is a blog I just discovered today after its author left a comment on the previous post: Al Hiwar. It’s run by Stacey Philbrick, who describes herself as a
Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, living in Cairo and conducting research in Lebanon and Yemen. I work on the transformation [...]

Two great pieces in the current New Yorker: another great scoop by Seymour Hersh on how the Pentagon is taking over covert ops from the CIA to avoid congressional oversight and carrying out missions in Iran; and a long profile of Iraq’s interim PM Iyad Allawi (on which the Angry Arab has a few critical [...]

Although the locust plague that hit Mauritania a few months ago has now passed, the consequences remain:
Locusts and drought have obliterated agricultural production in Mauritania, leaving 400,000 people in urgent need of food aid, the UN food agency says.
Mauritania was the country worst hit by last year’s locust invasion in West Africa – the most [...]

Will this farce never end?
“I could put on an act for you and say I won’t stay. The world would rise up in protest and I would have messed everything up. I don’t like to play these con games… I am a man who’s serious in my work and I work from morning till I [...]

This is the first story I’ve seen in the Israeli press that it relatively complimentary on the state-owned Nile TV’s Hebrew-language broadcast. Mind you, it’s probably tongue-in-cheek:
The exposure is limited, the competition is stiff and rumors of dismissals and even impending closure are mounting. The staff at the Egyptian broadcasting authority’s Hebrew-language channel are worried.

“Our [...]

Megan Stack of the LA Times had a very good story on the veil in Egypt a few days ago exploring the different reasons Egyptian women choose to veil and the notions associated with it. It’s a lot better and subtler than most similar stories I’ve read, perhaps because a female journalist can understand women, [...]

Noha El-Hennawy has a great story in Egypt Today this month about Gamal Al Banna and the debate around the sanctity of the Sunna in Islam, which I referred to in my previous post.
El-Banna dismisses accusations that he is calling on the faithful to abandon the Sunnah, but insists that the orally transmitted [...]

The author of the book “The Calls of Prophecy in History”, which Al Azhar recently recommended banning, is bringing a lawsuit against Al Azhar for refusing to publicize a copy of its report on why the book should banned.
Walid Toghan, the book’s author, said that Al Azhar rejected his book because it denied the [...]

Gamal Mubarak has once again positioned himself in the role of defender of the public interests. In the course of responding to contradictory statements about when the presidential referendum would be held, and why parliament had announced that it would be swearing in Mubarak before the referendum, Al Masry Yom quotes Gamal in today’s paper:

Gamal [...]

Attention to the issue of divorce in Islamic Sharia seems to be getting more and more attention these days. The issue featured prominently at a conference in Bahrain on violence and discrimination against women in the countries comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council. Conference participant Dina Mamoun submitted a paper about the unequal marital status of [...]

The Syrian human rights activist Aktham Naisse has been awarded one of the most prestigious human rights prize in the world. The Martin Ennals Award is awarded by a group of 11 of the most well-known human rights NGOs in the world, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Aktham Naisse is a man who [...]

In the latest development on the growing power of “official Islam” in Egyptian public life, the Ministry of Information has decreed Al Azhar will now review new soap operas:
Cairo – Egyptian television dramas will soon be subject to review by a panel of religious censors, sparking an outcry by authors who say the move is [...]

My good friend and former colleague Steve Negus had a gem in this morning’s Financial Times: Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is bribing reporters at $100 a head for favorable coverage in the upcoming elections.
After a meeting held by Mr Allawi’s campaign alliance in west Baghdad, reporters, most of whom were from the Arabic-language press, [...]

Perhaps the metaphor is a little stretched, but this editorial captured my feelings about the Palestinian elections:
If this election is like a wedding, it is a surreal, even pantomime,
marriage, a show presented partly for distraction, but mostly to
suit other interests and desires that do not coincide with the
expected reasons — and requirements — of most [...]

Here’s my story for WomensEnews on how the struggle to change Egypt’s divorce laws is largely a debate over competing visions of Islam. There are many different angles to a discussion on Egypt’s divorce laws. It is a subject that promises to feature prominently in the public debate in coming months. Divorce falls under Egypt’s [...]

Here are a few paragraphs from a story published in The Guardian today, written by an Iraqi doctor who visited Falluja when most journalists could not get in. His testimony will also be broascast by the UK’s Channel Four News, and you can watch an excerpt here.
As I went into the graveyard, the bodies of [...]

Here’s an interesting result from the Palestinian elections: Egyptian activists are using the pretext of free, multi-candidate elections there to push for constitutional reform at home.
Egyptian reformers have demanded that, like Palestinians, they too should have a chance to choose their leader from a host of candidates. 
Egyptian President Husni Mubarak, who has won four presidential terms [...]

A friend emailed me these two letters published in the London Review of Books:
Unfair to Revenants
From Yisrael Medad
Virginia Tilley (LRB, 6 November 2003) wrote of ’settlers in “Judea and Samaria” who are indeed gun-toting religious zealots (mostly from the US)’. In the same article, she also presumed that Ariel Sharon would not support the [...]

An association of imams and rabbis will be creating an institute for inter-religious and inter-cultural diplomacy in Fes, the old Moroccan imperial capital:
The creation of a permanent institute for inter-religious and inter-cultural diplomacy will be announced next June in Fes, during the Sacred Music Festival, held every year in this Moroccan central town.
The announcement was [...]

So Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak says he’s OK with having competition in the presidential elections — but of course he’s not saying he’s OK with changing the constitution so that others can run against him:
CAIRO (Reuters) – Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981, said he did not mind others seeking nomination [...]