Egyptian bloggers will hold a “wedding party” in Talaat Harb Sq., Friday 4 May, 6pm, to celebrate the marriage of our future president Gamal Mubarak to the lovely Khadiga, which will be held simultaneously in Sharm el-Sheikh.
The bloggers’ protest party will be held under the slogan: “Heyya ah! Baladna La!” (basically: Go and marry [...]

Two members of parliament from the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested yesterday, an escalation in the ongoing campaign against the group. There is a feeling in the air of a looming storm with this crackdown…

My friend Andrew Tabler, the editor of Syria Today and a very knowledgeable guy on all things shami, has a thought-provoking piece in the NY Times Magazine about the “Shiitization”of Syria:
Over the last five years, however, Iranian donors have financed the restoration of half a dozen Shiite tombs and shrines in Syria and built at [...]

A week or two ago The Independent ran a portrait-interview of Muhammad Hassanein Heykal by Robert Fisk. It was a rather odd piece — an ode of admiration and self-admiration by two aging Middle East hacks who, while arguably important men, are highly divisive figures. I was rather disappointed that Fisk, quite the controversial figure [...]

As they face one of the biggest crackdowns in decades and the military trial of some of their top funders begins, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers are attracting ever more attention. There is a long piece in the NY Times Magazine — a pretty decent and sympathetic portrait of the group and some of its personalities, [...]

Rather depressing news from the Egyptian blogger I love to hate:
Today is going to be the day that I’ve been dreading for quite sometime now. Today is the day I walk away from this blog. Done. Finished.
There are many reasons, each would take a post to list, and I just do not have the energy [...]

Seeking Justice focuses on Egypt’s official discrimination against Bahais, an issue we’ve talked about before. It has links to other Egyptian Bahai sites and blogs.

This Prospect piece by Edward Luttwak argues that the Middle East, far from being the center of world affairs, is actually completely unimportant. A thought-provoking argument, and he has some good points (alarmism, Mussolinini complex) but also some pretty stupid ones (Israel-Palestine not important? Maybe if can convince Jews and Muslims elsewhere not to care.) [...]

At last some Western coverage of Egypt’s labor strikes — Labor movement possible future for Egypt opposition:
For every single strike over the past few months, government agencies have been quick to negotiate with the workers and grant their demands, which have generally been for unpaid bonuses, benefits, and salaries.
“The government has the money to pay [...]

This month’s issue of the Arab Reform Bulletin pits two Egyptians against one another over the constitutional amendments. Since the two are Karim Haggag, the director of the Egyptian press office in Washington and former aide to Gamal Mubarak who operated out of the presidency, and firebrand journalist Ibrahim Eissa, there is really almost no [...]

Jason Burke, author of “Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror”, has a long Magazine piece in today’s Observer. It’s pretty much your standard Morocco at a crossroads between modernity and tradition piece of the kind that gets written all the time by foreign journos, even if it does contain a decent and eclectic selection of [...]

From Yediot Ahronot:
We need to kill him
Israel should not shy away from threatening to kill Iran’s Ahmadinejad
Uri Orbach
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has to be killed. Really be killed, I mean, physically. He should be eliminated, put to death, assassinated, and all those words that serve to say the same thing.
Former Mossad Director Meir Amit said [...]

The Kevorkian Center at NYU (were I currently study) organized a wonderful literary symposium yesterday. In the morning, Elias Khoury, Yitzhak Laor and Yael Lerer spoke of “Representations of the Other in Literature,” particulary Israeli-Palestinian literature.
I have just recently read Ghassan Kanafani’s novella “Return to Haifa,” which is generally considered to have the [...]

I got home this evening after a day spent at NYU at a very interesting literary symposium (that I hope to blog about tomorrow). Flipping channels, I happened on a segment of the PBS series “America at a Crossroads” called “The Brotherhood.” It’s interesting but I can’t help finding parts of it a bit tendentious [...]

YouTube now has a dedicated channel for al-Jazeera English’s main shows. Very nice.

Oh yes it is:
The campus project was planned by conservative writer and activist David Horowitz as a response to attempts last year by officials at Pace University to prevent a Jewish student group from hosting a screening of “Obsession” on the university’s West-chester, N.Y., campus.
Mr. Horowitz, whose Terrorism Awareness Project is sponsoring tomorrow’s [...]

Bill O’Reilly interviews Condoleeza Rice. Laughable (bold mine):
QUESTION: We have Madame Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the line, and last time we spoke was last summer and you were confident then that the UN was going to really get tough on Iran. It didn’t happen until last week. Why the delay with Iran? [...]

Today, one of the nastiest Khamseen in years is blowing through Cairo. My balcony is covered in dust, and the old doors and windows of my 1940s apartment are letting the fine red sand carried by the wind blow in, covering everything in the house with a thin sliver of dust. Your mouth feels dry [...]

We’ve all seen the massacres and crimes and atrocities that some US forces have committed in Iraq and Afghanistan–as inevitably as members of every occupying power before them.
But as this article in today’s Washington Post makes clear, what’s perhaps even more worrying are the actions of the 20,000 or so private security contractors in Iraq, [...]

When opposition politicians and rights groups complained that amendments to Egypt’s constitution would enshrine the Emergency Law in the Constitution by giving police free rein to arrest, search, and spy on citizens without judicial warrants, some government officials responded with the line, “You just need to trust us. These powers are only for legitimate investigations [...]

Via Reporters sans frontières:
(RSF/IFEX) – Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of arrested human rights activist Ibrahim Zoro, who regularly posts material on foreign-based opposition websites. It noted that two other people were in prison in Syria for posting similar material.
It said the state security service, whose agents arrested Zoro on 5 [...]

Ever since I read this New York Times article a few days back about the identitarian fashion issues of Muslim American women I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what bothers me about it. It’s not just the article’s utter naiveté (the New York Times discovers that Muslim women–even veiled ones–care about fashion!) or the [...]

The beating that John McCain continues to take over his assertion that Petraeus goes out everyday in an “unarmed Humvee” and that Americans can stroll about downtown Baghdad in shirt sleeves might be old news now, but it still has entertainment value.
“I think you ought to catch up” McCain told Wolf Blitzer when he [...]

Half way through the Presidential campaigns, another French champion national is threatened by foreign powers. A study has found out that relics attributed to Jeanne d’Arc are actually bones of an Egyptian mummy.

The charred bones that were long believed to be remains of St. Joan of Arc don’t belong to the French heroine but are [...]

Yesterday I went to the Met to see this exhibit on “Venice and the Islamic World.” While not perfect, the show was facinating. Did you know the first Koran was printed in Venice in 1537? Or that Venetians learned the art of glass-blowing from the Arab world, Syria in particular?
There are many examples throughout [...]

I’ve been meaning to signal George Packer’s article “Betrayed” in the New Yorker from 2 weeks ago. I know the issue has been out for a while now, but this article is the definition of a must-read. Everything about it, including the accompanying photographs, is stellar reporting. Packer tells the stories of different Iraqis working [...]

The same black, thick smoke again, as just ten days ago.

Not having checked the source of the smoke, I’m assuming it’s houses burning again. This will serve as another argument to those who claim that the government uses the fires to pursue its relocation plans for parts of Sayyeda Zeinab. But I remember Masr el [...]

This is Palestine under Fatah: it doesn’t have a real state, doesn’t give proper support for military operations against the occupation, but still builds the elaborate domestic security infrastructure of the classic Arab national security state.
Fatah training new force in Egypt for renewed infighting
By Avi Issacharoff
Fatah has established a new security apparatus in the Gaza [...]

A new theory on how the Pyramids were built:
A French architect says he has cracked a 4,500-year-old mystery surrounding Egypt’s Great Pyramid, saying it was built from the inside out.
Previous theories have suggested the tomb of Pharaoh Khufu was built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape around the [...]