The pan-Arab, Saudi-owned newspaper Al Sharq Al Awsat has published an op-ed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s number two, Mohammed Habib, outlining what a MB government would pursue in eight points. It is reproduced in full after the jump below. I don’t particularly want to dwell on the content of the points: they are all [...]

After the now famous report Daily Mirror report, a bunch of Al Jazeera staffers have launched a “don’t bomb us” blog. Best of luck to them.
Update: This interview with Yousri Fouda, Al Jazeera’s London bureau chief, is worth reading.

The NGOs involved in monitoring Egypt’s parliamentary elections have released a statement on the abuses that took place and made demands on how the third and final round should be held.
Two interesting recommendations stand out: they are asking President Mubarak to “announce his full responsibility” for the third round, and asking the Muslim Brotherhood [...]

They may say otherwise now, but if you had asked any expert on Egyptian politics how many seats the Muslim Brotherhood would get a month ago, not a single one would have said anywhere close to 76. That’s the number preliminary results indicate, and it is also the number of years the Muslim Brotherhood has [...]

Over the last 24 hours I’ve updated the design of arabist.net to give it a cleaner and more attractive look. The basics won’t change, but the old design lacked some basic usability functions. Most notably, the long list of links that used to be on the left have been moved to a special links section, [...]

G. Willow Wilson, a freelance journalist based in Cairo whose worked has appeared in Cairo and The Atlantic Monthly, has started New Cairo, a “blogmag” to collect “articles people would like to see get a little attention, but which are either too local or too in-depth (requiring prior knowledge of regional politics, etc) to publish [...]

Rather nasty stuff:
CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt’s parliamentary polls claimed a second victim when supporters of a newly-elected MP seized backers of a losing candidate, tied them to the back of tractors and dragged them through the streets, police said.
Another 21 people were wounded, some of them seriously, in the incident in the neighbouring villages [...]

November 24, 2005
The sign as we left airport instructed us to do a number of things. The one that really jumped out at me as we sped by was the order to “lock and load” weapons because we were entering an insecure area—i.e. the rest of the country.
Just boarding the flight in Amman, Jordan [...]

More comment later, but for now read this article by Khairat Al Shatir, the vice-president of the Muslim Brotherhood, published in today’s Guardian:
The violence that has erupted across Egypt in recent days is the result of government panic at the success of the Muslim Brotherhood – even in the rigged polls that pass for elections [...]

I’d like to take a moment to plug Patrick Haenni’s new book, L’Islam de marché: L’autre révolution conservatrice (Market Islam: The other conservative revolution), which has just been announced. Haenni, a Swiss researcher who worked on his PhD in the Cairo district of Imbaba, when journalists and academics nicknamed it “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba” [...]

As is by now well known, there were at least 300 arrests of members and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood made today, the second round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections. Many of us who observe Egyptian politics had thought it would happen after their upset in the last round, where they already doubled the number of [...]

Elijah Zarwan, the author of the recently released HRW report on internet censorship in the Middle East, sent me a long email about his experience so far in Tunisia. He agreed to let me share it here:
I’m always paranoid when I’m in Tunis. Maybe it’s the ubiquitous Amn al-Dawla thugs following me, loitering in the [...]

HRW has just released its long-awaited (well, by me, anyway) report on online censorship in the Middle East, penned by my good friend Elijah Zarwan. You can get it here, and it covers four countries in depth, each with its own specific problems: Egypt, Iran, Syria and Tunisia. Some cases in other countries are also [...]

It had been predicted, but it’s still hard to believe that after only one round of parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have secured some 34 seats in the next People’s Assembly. And that’s with still nearly two-thirds of parliament seats to go, even though the constituencies in the next two rounds are likely [...]

I usually complain to virtually anyone who’ll listen that Tunisia is always forgotten in the long list of rather nasty Arab regimes. This is because it’s a small country and not politically important, but also because the regime there is quite clever at appearing moderate and buying off the foreign press when it needs to [...]

Oh the irony dept.:
You are cordially invited to a book discussion of
PRINCES OF DARKNESS
THE SAUDI ASSAULT ON THE WEST
BY HUDSON INSTITUTE SENIOR FELLOW
LAURENT MURAWIEC
featuring a keynote address by
RICHARD PERLE
Hudson Institute Trustee
Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
The funny thing, of course, is that Perle himself is known as “the prince of darkness” in Washington circles because, er, [...]

I just received this Email:
Abdolkarim Nabil Seliman [aka: Kareem Amer] is a 21 year-old Egyptian student of law at the Azhar University, Damanhour Campus, a women’s-rights activist and a correspondent for Copts United. In addition to writing at Civic Dialogue, he also publishes at a blog he maintains.

On Wednesday 26 October 2005, Egyptian State [...]