MER Article Gender, Population, Environment Miryam lives with her family in Manshiyat Nasir, originally a squatter settlement at the foot of Cairo’s Muqattam hills, now largely a brick-built community of small apartment buildings and box-like single family homes. Most now have piped-in water and electricity. Her family is one of the thousands Sally Ethelston • 8 min read
MER Article "Silencing Is at the Heart of My Case" When a group of Islamist lawyers filed a suit this summer to divorce a Cairo professor from his wife, against the couple’s wishes and without their knowledge, on the grounds that he was an apostate, the story got attention even in the Western media. But little attention was given to the intellectual Elliott Colla • 11 min read
MER Article The Egyptian Regime and the Left: Between Islamism and Secularism In the spring of 1992, Cairo University’s administration declined to elevate Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd from assistant to full professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature after a member of the promotions committee of the Faculty of Arts reported that he is an unbeliever. Abu Zayd’s Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Studies of Structural Adjustment Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey: The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (World Bank, 1991). Heba Handoussa and Gilliam Potter, eds. Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s (AUC, 1991). Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, “Privatization: The Egyptian Debate,” Cairo Papers in Social Marsha Pripstein Posusney • 6 min read
MER Article Class, State and the Reversal of Egypt's Agrarian Reform On June 24, 1992, the Egyptian People’s Assembly reversed the agrarian relations law, a centerpiece of the 1952 revolution, under which some 1 million families enjoyed quasi-property rights -- secure tenancy at fixed rents -- over more than 1.5 million of Egypt’s 6 million feddans of agricultural land. Raymond A. Hinnebusch • 10 min read
MER Article Secularism, Integralism and Political Islam “The sheikh of al-Azhar should thank God profusely that the shari‘a is not in force in Egypt, for it it were he would certainly be in for a good flogging in punishment for smearing virtuous people,” wrote Farag Fawda in March 1988 -- thus contributing to a debate that had been raging since the begin Alexander Flores • 20 min read
MER Article Egypt's Islamists and the State It has been 20 years since the Egyptian state first unleashed the Islamists against the left. Today the Islamic upsurge has taken on dimensions far beyond state manipulation. The mid-term confrontation, marked by the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, ended in a draw. Now, more than a Ahmed Abdalla • 9 min read
MER Article Islam and Public Culture Walk the streets of Cairo or village lanes in Egypt any early evening and you will see the flicker of television screens and hear the dialogue and music of the current serial (musalsal). Read the newspapers and you will find articles and cartoons that can only be understood if one is following these Lila Abu-Lughod • 15 min read
MER Article Aspects of Egyptian Civil Resistance Several films with critical political content opened during the 1992 Ramadan season in Egypt. The most popular was al-Irhab wa al-Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab), directed by Sharif ‘Arafa and starring Egypt’s foremost comic actor, ‘Adil Imam. The protagonist repeatedly visits the hub of the central government bureaucracy Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article Islam, the State and Democracy The quest for democratization and human rights in the Middle East has prominently featured the term “civil society.” Oppression and corruption, it is agreed, have followed from an overly intrusive state and its bureaucracies. Democratization must include a withdrawal of the state to allow free spheres of social autonomies and Sami Zubaida • 20 min read
MER Article Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation Smadar Lavie, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Bedouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (California, 1990). The era of the nation-state has increasingly put into question pastoral nomadism as a way of life and as a distinctive cultural identity. In Saudi Arabia, Bedo Ted Swedenburg • 7 min read
MER Article Sadowski, Political Vegetables? Yahya Sadowski, Political Vegetables? Businessman and Bureaucrat in the Development of Egyptian Agriculture (Brookings, 1991). Robert Springborg • 6 min read
