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  • johnpi 4:44 pm on February 9, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, ,

    Human rights activists charge Egyptian government is placing cameras in mosques to monitor sermons.

    Egyptians are protesting against a plan to install surveillance cameras in thousands of mosques throughout the country.

    Egypt’s Ministry of Islamic Endowments (Awqaf) denied the existence of such a plan on Monday, but the reports have caused ripples throughout the Egyptian media and the blogosphere.

    Critics say the security forces are abusing their power by violating people’s privacy in their efforts to fight terrorism and extremism.

    Responding to a public outcry, ministry spokesman Sheikh Shawqi Abdel Latif told several media outlets that cameras have been set up in one mosque alone – the Sayyida Nafisa Mosque in Cairo – with the declared purpose of ensuring people do not steal money from charity boxes, rather than to monitor religious sermons.
    ….

    According to official government statistics, Egypt accommodates around 104,000 mosques, but has appointed only 48,000 preachers. The significance of this is that many mosques have preachers who are not on a government payroll, and who are not subject to government guidelines in their teachings.

    (via)

     

  • arif 2:17 pm on February 4, 2010 | 9 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, ,

    Former head of the fatwa council of Al-Ahzhar wants to ban Facebook:

    He called the site a destructive tool that helps form “forbidden relations.”

    “When one side in a relationship is working hard, if the other side has lots of free time and hasn’t got much of a conscience, they form illegitimate relationships,” the cleric said.

     

  • arif 12:28 pm on January 21, 2010 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt, ,

    But what about emails, sms, texts containing scriptures and polemics people bombard each other with on daily basis? Egypt mufti wants to put prayer ringtone on silent.

     

  • aziz 10:21 am on January 19, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt,

    Michael Hanna previews the future of Egypt – US relations, calling it “defensive”. In related news, the Muslim Brotherhood has elected a new General Guide.

     

  • johnpi 8:27 am on January 15, 2010 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt,

    Egyptian soccer coach says he wants only pious Muslims on his team.

    Egypt coach Hassan Shehata wants only players who observe Islam, and says team selection is based equally on religious piety and skill.

    Shehata’s comments, published Thursday in Egyptian newspapers, show how sports and religion are increasingly mixing in the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of 80 million.

    The intrusion of religion into sports is part of the country’s gradual movement toward religious conservatism over the last few decades, with more people praying at mosques, most women adopting the Islamic veil in public, and diminishing tolerance for secular Muslims or minority Christians.
    ….

    Shehata’s comments take religion in sports to a whole new level. He was quoted by Cairo newspapers as saying skill alone won’t guarantee anyone a place on the national team.

    He said “pious behavior” was the main reason for selection.

    “Without it, we will never select any player regardless of his potential,” he said. “I always strive to make sure that those who wear the Egypt jersey are on good terms with God.”

    One newspaper, the independent al-Shorouk, quoted Shehata as saying that striker Ahmed “Mido,” on loan from England’s Middlesborough to Cairo’s Zamalek, was cut four days after his initial selection because he did not fit the manager’s prerequisite for piety.

     

  • johnpi 9:58 am on December 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, , , ,

    Difficult political project ahead for new leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

    The next leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will have to heal divisions between moderates and conservatives if the opposition group is to have any political role, a senior member of the group said.

    Internal elections for the Brotherhood’s 16-member governing body, known as the guidance bureau, were held last week for the first time in 14 years, with members of the old guard securing the bulk of the seats.

    Ideological differences within the group, officially banned but tolerated, have been aggravated by the inflexibility of a number of senior members, Abdel-Moneim Abul-Futuh told Reuters in an interview on Saturday.

    “The Brotherhood is more active politically now than previously, but has grown more conservative in thought,” following years of state oppression and curtailment of its freedom of assembly and participation, said Abul-Futuh, a prominent reformist member.

     

  • johnpi 8:55 pm on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Egypt, ,

    How a group of critics and film editors in Egypt saved James Cameron’s new movie ‘Avatar’ from the censorship brutes.

    Top American film critic Roger Ebert has published a letter from a fellow critic in Egypt who tells how he and a small group of writers and film editors advanced on the censorship office, protested to fix the changes that had been made by the censors and eventually did fix them.

    This article will also probably get some interest for the colorful Egyptian insult that was leveled at the critic: ‘Sushi eating testicle.’ And of course the other great Egyptian cuss word: ‘liberal,’ as in

    …before we knew it a line of security guards and some police officers were between us and the two censorship guys. One of the guys told the security guards “Don’t let them in…they’re liberals.”

     

  • johnpi 9:29 am on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Egypt, , ,

    Egypt university to appeal niqab ruling.

    A leading Cairo university will appeal a court decision allowing female students to don the full face veil on campus dormitories, a university official said on Monday.

    “Cairo’s Ain Shams University will immediately appeal the decision issued by the Supreme Administrative Court on Sunday,” the official said.

    The court had said that donning the niqab– a veil covering the entire face– “is one example of freedom that no administrative body or any other body can ban.”

    The court is also expected to rule on December 27 on the case of female university students who have been told they will not be allowed to sit exams if they insist on wearing the full face veil.

     

  • johnpi 8:46 am on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, , , ,

    Analysts say results of Muslim Brotherhood’s internal election for its governing body show a ‘coup d’etat’ has taken place against the reformists camp, which has now been ‘crushed.’

    In media reports, the reformists are synonymous with the youth cadre of the Brotherhood.

     

  • johnpi 1:46 am on December 15, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt,

    The doing business in Egypt SATs.

    I recently stumbled across an online ‘cross-cultural training’ website for globe-trotting business execs about to enter the frothy world of Egyptian business.

    I’ve put together a short True/False quiz based on the informative cross-cultural training I just absorbed. The answers are below the fold, along with a link to the font of wisdom from wence they were gleaned.
    ________________________________

    1: Arabic is a language of exaggeration and Egyptians love to be flowery in their speech. True or false?

    2: It’s a good idea to attempt to learn at least a few words or phrases of Egyptian Arabic, such as thank you, hello, good-bye, and please. True or false?

    3. Unlike whatever place you come from, the exotic concept of honour governs all interpersonal relationships in Egypt. True or false?

    4: Egyptians prefer to do business with those they know and trust. Therefore you should go find somebody else who is Egyptian to act as a go-between with your Egyptian counterparts. True or false?

    5: Islam is a religion of fatalism. The fatalistic approach to life is often significant in the decision-making process of many Egyptians. As a result it takes Egyptians longer to make a decision. True or false?

    (More …)

     

  • johnpi 7:57 am on December 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt, , , ,

    Egypt demolishing Muslim Brotherhood hospital.

    Egypt has begun the demolition of a new hospital built by the opposition Muslim Brotherhood for the poor in the capital over what it called the building’s ‘unsafe’ edifice.

    The decisions to tear down the 250-bed Islamic Medical Association’s Central Charity Hospital built with a burgeoning budget in Cairo comes over the seven-story building’s height, officials told Reuters.

    “These demolitions are being carried out on buildings higher than the expected range, raising safety concerns,” local government spokesperson Khalid Mustafa said on Thursday.

    However, Egypt’s main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, has accused authorities of playing politics and trying to undermine the party’s status in public.

    There is a pattern developing among governments that are in opposition to Islamic groups, especially Israel, Egypt and the US. The Islamists gain popularity and power by establishing charities and social services to meet unmet needs among underserved communities. So the governments have begun attacking and attempting to dismantle the social services of the Islamist groups.

     

  • johnpi 10:05 am on December 9, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt, , , ,

    Egyptian men form group to fight for their rights against ‘tyranny’ of women in unconditional divorces.

    The group is advocating the position that giving women the right to initiate unconditional divorce violates Shariah.

    I think it’s easy to come in from a Western perspective informed by feminism and mock the men as upended tyrants, but I’m more interested in taking the pressures on the men seriously in forming this group and highlighting that.

    In the conservative, male-oriented, Egyptian society divorced men are considered weak as they are ridiculed for not living up to the stereotypical concept of manhood being about control of women.

    “Divorced men also face a lot of difficulties upon trying to start a new life. Most of them are rejected when they propose to women as if they are infected with some contagious disease.”

     

  • johnpi 9:10 am on November 7, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Egypt, ,

    Hijabis banned from Egyptian state TV: “It is part of our society’s culture to show hair.”

    Female presenters will no longer appear on Egypt’s state television channel wearing the Muslim veil, according to the head of the public station, al-Masriya. Osama al-Sheikh said: “You will not see any veiled female TV presenters on air on the screens of Egypt’s state TV any more.”

    The channel’s director made the remarks during a seminar at the faculty of science and communications at Cairo University, according to a report in Egyptian magazine al-Youm al-Saba.

    “It is part of our society’s culture to show hair. Now I am not saying it is a bad thing to wear the veil, but because this is state TV, everything that is seen must be official,” he said.

    “The TV presenters who are veiled will be able to continue to work in private satellite TV stations,” he said.

    His remarks provoked uproar in the Egyptian parliament by members who are close to the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement.

     

  • johnpi 10:08 am on November 5, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Egypt, , Muslim drug addicts, , Muslim psychologists, Muslims in therapy, , , , ,

    Egypt has an estimated 6 million drug addicts, about 7 percent of the population. Al Jazeera reports.

    Psychiatrist quoted in the report: “You need to go to the people who have started to experiment with cigarette smoking by the age of 8, who are dropouts of school, who are not doing very well in school, who have violence in their family or in their personal history, who are experimenting with sex. So these are the sort of ‘naughty boys’ and the programs are not designed to reach out to them.”

    The psychiatrist is identified as a specialist in drug addiction, but his specialty has limited application in fighting addiction. He is a medical doctor who can write prescriptions that will treat the side effects of drug detox, but more psychologists and social workers are needed, an assertion that in both my experience and my reading is controversial.

    Here’s Khaled Abou El Fadl (book: ‘The Great Theft’) describing Islamic ‘puritans’ approach to the social sciences:

    To become truly modernized, according to the puritans, means to regress back in time and recreate the golden age of Islam. This, however, does not mean that they want to abolish technology and scientific advancements. Rather, their program is deceptively simple – Muslims should learn the science and technology invented by the West, but in order to resist Western culture, Muslims should not seek to study the social sciences or humanities.

    The puritanical strain’s influence on ‘orthodox’ or conservative Muslims in discouraging individuals from choosing these professions damages the larger community’s ability to engage drug addicts with talk therapy and other therapys derived from the social sciences that could greatly improve treatment. I take this as an answer to why there are not enough Muslim psychologists and social workers. This seems to be a trans-national problem in Muslim communities.

     

  • aziz 12:39 pm on November 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt

    POMED has a great roundup briefing on the issue of who will succeed Hosni Mubarak as Pharaoh of Egypt.

     

  • buzz 9:03 am on November 2, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Egypt, , , , , ,

    ishr-burka-1CAIRO (Reuters) – Rokaya Mohamed, an elementary school teacher, would rather die than take off her face veil, or niqab, thrusting her to the forefront of a battle by government-backed clerics to limit Islamism in Egypt.

    Egypt’s state-run religious establishment wants teachers like Mohamed to remove their veils in front of female students, sparking a backlash by Islamists who say women should be able to choose to cover their faces in line with their Islamic faith.

    “I have put on the niqab because it is a Sunna (a tradition of the Muslim prophet Muhammad). It is something that brings me closer to religion and closer to the wives of the Prophet who used to wear it,” she said.

    “I know what makes God and his prophet love me, and no sheikh is going to convince me otherwise. I would rather die than take it off, even inside class,” she added.

    Egypt, the birthplace of al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, fought a low-level Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, has faced sporadic militant attacks targeting tourists since then, and is keen to quell Islamist opposition ahead of parliamentary elections next year and a 2011 presidential vote.

    The spread of the niqab, associated with the strictest interpretations of Islam, is a potent reminder to the government of the political threat posed by any Islamist resurgence emanating from the Gulf, where many young Egyptians go to work.

    (More …)

     

  • johnpi 8:04 am on October 31, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, , , ,

    Hard-liners in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood dig in amid calls from youth for reform.

    The Middle East’s most powerful Islamic political movement is undergoing a leadership struggle as young, more moderate activists try to push the Muslim Brotherhood to soften its fundamentalist ideology and become a more democratic force.
    ….

    Young Brotherhood moderates say it needs to become a more open and modern political movement if it is going to survive. Some want to imitate Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, an Islamic-rooted party that has embraced mainstream politics. The young critics contend the Brotherhood’s old guard is holding it back.

    “Those in charge aren’t connected with today’s world,” Abdelmonem Mahmoud, a journalist and blogger, told The Associated Press.

    Mahmoud, once a prominent spokesman for Brotherhood youth who was jailed several times for being part of the movement, said he froze his membership a year ago because of repeated intellectual clashes with the conservative leadership.

    Several others have done the same. Mahmoud said that while it wasn’t an organized exodus, if the leaders didn’t start to pay attention to the younger generation, the Brotherhood would begin to lose many of its “open-minded” members.

    “Their thirst for change is not sated by the Brotherhood, so they look for it elsewhere,” he said.

    But conservatives are digging in. While some urban youth push to liberalize the Brotherhood, its large rural membership has become more hardline in recent years.

     

  • johnpi 7:59 am on October 24, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Egypt,

    Rift among Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leaders raises questions about the political group’s ability to tolerate internal dissent and disagreement.

    “The way the Muslim Brotherhood group manages internal disagreement shows … the low level of the group’s flexibility in dealing with those who disagree with it. The competition between the group wings seems to be a “zero sum” game,” writes Khalil al-Anani, an analyst at Egypt’s Al-Siyassa Al-Dawliya magazine.

    “Therefore, very often the conservatives will insist on punishing the reformists organisationally, politically and morally and under the claim of keeping the cohesiveness of the group.”

    I’m highlighting the excerpt above because it rings true with my experience generally that conservatives tend to retaliate in-group and have trouble sharing power (the tendency of conservatives in any polity to drift toward authoritarianism is well-documented). The strength of the movement overall will in part be determined by conservatives ability to restrain themselves.

    Also in the article, some MB supporters say government media is hyping the conflict to try to weaken the group.

    For background here’s a previous story about the clash here.

     

  • johnpi 5:26 am on October 20, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, , , ,

    Analysis of the split that’s developed in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leadership.

    “There’s a problem of ideas. There’s a conservative tendency that controls the leadership and does not believe in opening up to society in political work,” said Abdel Moneim Mahmud, a journalist associated with the reformist wing.

    Mahmud said reformists want to see the Brotherhood, which controls a fifth of seats in parliament after it ran independent candidates to get around a ban on the movement, to take on more political action in alliance with the country’s leftist and liberal opposition.

    The reformists were especially appalled by a draft of the Brotherhood’s political programme in 2007, which opposed women or Coptic Christians leading the country, and proposed a council of clerics to oversee the drafting of laws, in a manner redolent of Iran’s Islamist regime.

    “The conflict is not on strategy in regards to the government,” Rashwan said. “They have the same strategy of non-confrontation with the regime. But there are differences in ideology, specifically on allowing women to rule, and clerical oversight.”

     

  • johnpi 6:40 am on October 19, 2009 | 2 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt,

    Egypt’s Brotherhood in crisis after leader quits.

    The leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, has quit in a row with conservatives sparking a crisis within the leading opposition group, reports said on Monday.
    ….

    In a statement on the Brotherhood’s website, Akef neither confirmed nor denied he had quit, saying only that he had been surprised by the press reports.

    He said they distracted attention from a continuing police crackdown against the movement, which remains an outlawed organisation in Egypt despite having members in parliament.
    The crisis came after weeks of speculation that conservatives led by the Islamist group’s secretary general, Mahmud Izzat, were blocking the appointment to its politburo of Essam al-Erian, a leading reformer who spent five years in jail for Brotherhood membership.Erian refused to comment on the row.

    Abdel Moneim Mahmud, a journalist associated with the reformers, told AFP that Akef’s resignation would trigger a deep rift in the group. “Akef is a balanced man. He tried to reconcile different points of view. Without him, there will be an explosion in the Brotherhood,” he said.

     

  • Kawthar 1:55 am on October 12, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt,

    One of the best articles I’ve read so far on the niqab controversy in Egypt: It’s not about niqab, it’s about credibility

    The question, which we all should consider now is why Al-Azhar scholars are not obeyed by the public any more? The simple and direct answer to this very complicated question is because Al-Azhar lost its credibility in the eyes of Egyptians. Al-Azhar has been used as a tool in the hands of the regime to satisfy personal and elite interests at the expense of Egyptian’s religious sympathies. Under the claim of defending Islam, Al-Azhar committed some unforgivable violations against open-minded intellectuals and fighters for freedom of expression and freedom of belief. They cracked down on Bahai’s for merely calling for the right to have a national ID card and other official papers that prove them being ordinary Egyptian citizens. They also cracked down on Shiites and Sufis and distorted their image in an unacceptable way.

     

  • johnpi 11:51 am on October 5, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Egypt, , , ,

    Egyptian newspaper: Egypt will purge niqab from schools and colleges.

    Following the imam’s [Tantawi] lead, Egypt’s minister of higher education is to ban female undergraduates from wearing the niqab from the country’s public universities, Cairo’s Al-Masri Al-Yom newspaper reported.

    The Egyptian government has become increasingly uneasy about the growing popularity of the niqab, seeing it as another manifestation of the religious puritanism it has long sought to suppress.

    Although the Koran does not require women to cover their faces, Sheikh Tantawi’s edict is likely to prove unpopular among fundamentalist Muslims. One popular Saudi cleric has already argued that the niqab is not conservative enough and has called on devout women to ensure they only reveal one eye in public.

    While undoubtedly influential, Sheikh Tantawi has plenty of detractors who deplore his moderation in many fields.

     

  • thabet 8:50 am on October 5, 2009 | 19 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt, , , , , , ,

    Egyptian authority will issue an edict banning ‘full veils’:

    Egypt’s highest Muslim authority has said he will issue a religious edict against the growing trend for full women’s veils, known as the niqab.

    Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of al-Azhar university, called full-face veiling a custom that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith.

     

  • johnpi 9:33 am on September 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Egypt,

    Bloggers in Egypt are now being arrested for not moderating comments on their blog posts.

    There is a question of blogging ethics here, in that an anonymous commenter launched into a personal attack against an employee of a company mentioned in the blogger’s story. The employee was not a public figure. The blogger eventually said “that he will delete them [the comments] because the attack is personal and unfounded.”

     

  • thabet 11:18 pm on August 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: age of consent, , Egypt, , , , ,

    Egypt’s ‘marriage (sex) tourism’ problem:

    Tourism is viewed in Egypt as a positive force, providing jobs and cultural interaction and driving the country’s economy. But a sinister side to the industry has come to the fore again following the launch of a campaign against “marriage tourism”, where a visiting Arab man pays to wed a young Egyptian girl, usually below the legal age of marriage.

    The marriages last any amount of time, from a couple of hours to years. Often they are simply a pretext for the man to have sex with the girl legally, while sometimes the man will take the girl back to his country, where they often serve as maids to other wives.

    Last week, Moushira Khattab, the new minister of family and population, launched a campaign against underage marriages to Arab tourists in the villages of Cairo’s 6th of October Province, about 40 kilometres south of the city, known for their high levels of poverty and unemployment and where marriage tourism is rife.

     

  • johnpi 5:55 am on July 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, gender segregation for Muslims only, , swimming

    In Egypt, Western women can swim in Western-style bathing suits, but Muslim women are disallowed from swimming in the same areas with the burkini.

    “It is very ironic that in Norway and Sweden I have no problem swimming with the Islamic bathing suit’” said Caroline Boston.

    “When she was about to enter the pool area, the security told her that there is a swimming pool for veiled women in the hotel. When we went to this other pool, she refused to swim there,” Morshedi told Al Arabiya.

    “The pool was surrounded with brown glass and looked like an animals’ cage,” Caroline said. “This is against humanity and that is why I refused to swim in it.”

    Caroline has vowed to never go back to Egypt after what happened.

     

  • thabet 7:19 am on July 6, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, ,

    Egypt expels 20 French Islamists.

     

  • thabet 12:40 am on July 6, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Egypt, , , , ,

    An Egyptian woman, who was killed in a German courtroom by a man she was suing for insulting her, was three months pregnant.

     

  • johnpi 2:22 pm on June 29, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt, , , , ,

    In Egypt, police shut down Iran solidarity march.

    An attempt by Egyptians to march in solidarity with Iranian protesters and to honor Neda-Agha Soltan — whose death earlier this month made her the icon of Iran’s opposition movement — was halted by security forces in Cairo over the weekend.

    The Cairo rally was called by democracy activist and opposition leader Ayman Nour and was scheduled to be held in Talaat Harb square in the Egyptian capital’s downtown. But dozens of security vehicles surrounded Nour and his fellow protesters upon their arrival at the square. Police arrested four protesters belonging to Nour’s party and prevented reporters from covering the event.

    “It is very ironic how Egyptian authorities, who earlier expressed their dismay against the Iranian regime’s oppressive means of handling protesters, are now banning us from a march that shares the same perspective,” Nour said at a news conference at his party’s headquarters. “Such acts only prove one thing and it is that the Egyptian and Iranian regimes are quite the same when it comes to their autocratic path and rejection of democracy.”

     

  • aziz 8:41 pm on June 18, 2009 | 28 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Egypt,

    Anyone have any theories why the world is so invested in Iranian democracy but not Egyptian?

     

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