Inanities

In the Giza court complex it is as if the revolution never happened. The same blue police vans spit out groups of handcuffed men and then hulk in front the building. Next to them groups of women seek shade and sympathy from the same plain-clothed police informants who offer the same platitudes about their loved ones.

Inside the building the lifts still don’t work – or aren’t for public use – and each floor is a little world of pain and resignation. A sign in the stairwell instructs people to keep the place clean, but does this injunction apply to the group of 20 men, handcuffed in pairs, who have completely blocked the stairwell as they wait their turn in front of the district attorney? How can it apply when on two floors the area in front of the lift has been entirely covered in sand being used for construction work? Lawyers and buffet boys unsteadily make their way across it. Next to them yet another group of handcuffed men wait, sitting on this sand, as if they are on a day out at the seaside.

The hallways that house the prosecution offices are grim, but more of an effort is made to conceal the neglect than the other areas. A faded red rug shoots down the middle of one corridor. Buzzers sound intermittently and a man disappears inside a room to take instructions. Lawyers wait outside and do battle with these middlemen for a chance to access the hidden decision makers inside.

We found Malek Adly, a lawyer with the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, waiting inside the secretariat of the South Giza Chief Prosecutor. He was waiting for a chance to ask the Chief Prosecutor to launch an inquiry into why a traffic cop had shot Mahmoud Sobhy twice and why Sobhy had then himself been handcuffed to his hospital bed before being removed to a police station cell days after his operation.

Adly appeared about half an hour later. The Chief Prosecutor had not consented to see him in person and had sent him a message via the middleman: “We will look into the case if we see fit”.

**

The lawyers’ outdoor café next to the courthouse is filled with brightly coloured plastic furniture, like Lego. Mahmoud Sobhy’s 4-year-old son, a tiny frail boy, disappears amongst the furniture, brandishing an LE 10 note in the air as he chases a waiter asking for orange juice in an inaudible voice. He is ignored until his mother, Samar Abol Magd, intercedes on his behalf twenty minutes later.

She continues describing how she heard about what had happened to Sobhy.

“I got a call from a friend of Mahmoud asking me where I was. I heard people in the background saying, ‘don’t tell his wife, don’t tell his wife’”, Abol Magd says.

On May 18 2011 Sobhy’s brother Hassan was going the wrong way up a one-way street in Giza’s Omraneyya area when a traffic policemen Eissa El-Sayyed Rashed flagged him down and confiscated the tuk-tuk Sobhy was driving.

An altercation ensued and Hassan called Sobhy who arrived to find his brother in tears as the tuk-tuk was hoisted onto a tow-truck.

According to eyewitnesses, a verbal altercation ensued and a large crowd gathered. Rashed is then alleged to have fired his weapon in the air and, according to Abol Magd, told Sobhy that he had “wasted the 25 piastres a bullet costs”.

As Sobhy was turning away from Rashed it is alleged that the latter loaded a gun cartridge and shot him twice, once in the upper thigh and another bullet that went through one side of his abdomen and came out the other.

After undergoing a six-hour operation Abol Magd says that he was questioned by police officers within half an hour of coming out of theatre, while still under the influence of the anesthetic. “They took his fingerprints and made him sign something,” Abol Magd says.

“My husband arrived at the hospital the victim of a crime and the next day we found out that he was accused of attacking a police officer with a knife”.

According to the Interior Ministry’s Facebook page, Hassan Sobhy threatened Rashed with a butcher’s knife, to which Rashed responded by advising him to leave the area.

Mahmoud Sobhy and others meanwhile were attempting to get the tuk-tuk off the tow-truck it had been loaded onto after it was discovered that Hassan Sobhy allegedly did not have the correct registration papers for the vehicles.

The statement says that Rashed shot twice in the air, and then shot Mahmoud Sobhy once in the leg. When he was taken to hospital the statement alleges that it was discovered he was wanted in connection with two criminal offences, denied by both his wife and El-Adly.

Lawyers have not been given a copy of the public prosecution office investigation with Sobhy. Witnesses who appeared to give evidence in defence of Sobhy were themselves arrested and all of them remanded in custody for four days pending investigations. Their detention was subsequently renewed for a further fifteen days.

Occasionally handcuffed to his bed while in hospital, Sobhy was taken to the Giza police station on May 30 – while Abol Magd was elsewhere arranging a power of attorney for a lawyer.

Abol Magd says that her husband is now being held in a police station cell with “around 60 others” and that she is able to see him once a day “for about a minute”.

Two days ago, after repeated complaints by Abol Magd, Sobhy was taken out and his dressings changed in a hospital before being returned to the police station.

Sobhy’s next chance of freedom will be on Saturday, when his detention will come up for renewal.

In the meantime, Abol Magd and her son Mohamed wait. Sobhy, languishes in a police station cell. Serious gunshot wounds were not enough to stop him being pulled out of hospital and dumped in the criminal justice system. Hosny Mubarak, residing in Sharm El-Sheikh hospital, has more luck. The Tora Prison Hospital “is not adequately equipped to receive him”.

June 6 is the one-year anniversary of the death of Khaled Said, beaten to death by police officers in Alexandria. Less than five months after the revolution began incidents of police brutality, of torture and death, are being reported all over again as the police slowly regain their confidence.

On Saturday June 4 Sobhy’s detention together with that of the witnesses who came to testify on his behalf was again renewed for another 15 days. El-Adly says that the judge refused to examine Sobhy’s injuries and ignored lawyers’ demands that their client be held in remand in hospital rather than a cramped police station.

Sobhy himself seems to have had no hope of justice from the start. El-Adly says that rather than appealing for his own freedom he entreated the judge to release the four men who took Sobhy to hospital, appeared on his behalf as witnesses and were themselves detained.

“If you’re going to detain me, detain me, but what have the people who took me to hospital and saved my life done to deserve this? Just tell me that you’ll release them and I’ll accept whatever happens to me”.

An edited version of this was published here.

Here is another installment by the New York Times in its series of illuminating articles on the Arab people and their customs.

SOMEWHERE ARAB: Frustrated at having to be in the vicinity of a New York Times writer, the young man, fatigued, was leaning on the horn of his picturesquely war-damaged but sturdy American car in an attempt to drown out the shrillness of the drone being emitted from the mouth of the journalist next to him.

The horn made a foreigner in the car next to him wince, because first world-ers have a superiorly-developed, delicate, inner ear structure, the product of centuries of listening to chamber music by gentle streams. Denizens of the Mohamedian countries lack this. Up until colonialism rescued them with pizza and espresso, they spent their time being centuries ahead of the west in the fields of medicine and mathematics, and thus had no time to develop a refined appreciation of silence which is why now they like to bang saucepans together just for fun and are not bothered by cacophony.

Then came one of those NYT moments.

“America no. 1. White man very good,” said a man with fresh dramatic injuries on a motorbike, providing excellent copy.

Americans and, for that matter, all Westerners are treated in these here parts with a warmth and gratitude rarely seen in any Mohamedian country, in that they are not eaten alive by braying savages.

It is that oddest of oddities, an Arab war zone that a NYT reporter has the privilege to enter and cover a historic uprising for NYT readers. Instead, he talks about himself.

Here, there must be a mention of a taxi driver because we’re discussing Arabs. Also let’s talk about translators, because this article is the journalistic equivalent of sitting down to watch a film and then discovering you’ve loaded the “making of” DVD. Here goes: A big problem for non-Arabic speaking journalists is that it appears that sometimes they do not fucking get it, but that’s OK because the NYT will still publish their simplistic bullshit.

In some restaurants, they seem almost reluctant to accept a foreigner’s money. This means they worship me as a liberator. I worship Espresso, and was surprised to find that Arabs stop scalping foreigners long enough to make a pretty good Espresso. While no one would confuse it with our first world coffee, it is pretty good for a region which serves either instant Nescafe or that thick brown shit – or a variety of other coffee-based drinks at Costa and Starbucks (but I wont mention that here).

I will deign to eat the pizza here. This will allow me to use food to suggest that over four decades of colonialism (during which nearly half the country’s Bedouin population were killed by the occupying military) was beneficial to the country. Remarkably, I will say this either as a tasteless witticism or actually mean it. Even more remarkably, the NYT will publish it.

One may wonder how it is I have the time and inclination to grasp my stupid little espresso cup and ruminate on pizza while in the middle of an uprising but there we are.

Then I will return to my central theme, and reflect on the natives’ adoration for the United States and our flag for two paragraphs of straight jingoistic froth.

What popular Arab movement has ever flown the flags of the US, the EU, NATO, Italy, France and Qatar all at once I will ask, without also asking whether there is any other country that has been similarly fucked by these countries all at once.

Many Libyan parents with newborn girls are reportedly naming them Susan, in honour of Susan E. Rice and the most important word in this sentence is reportedly, the key to a million kingdoms of bullshit.

Veteran TV presenter Mahmoud Saad gave an unparalleled demonstration of self-censorship and obsequience to the army tonight while talking to activist Hossam El-Hamalawy.

Hossam, together with OnTV presenter Reem Maged and journalist Nabil Sharaf Eddin have been summoned for questioning by the military prosecution office tomorrow after Hossam appeared on Baladna Bel Masry on Thursday and listed the multifarious ways in which the army have violated Egyptian people’s rights.

The army seems absolutely unable to not follow standard procedure even where a child could tell it that summoning for questioning a high profile TV presenter and journalist over statements made about the army is a crock of shit waiting to explode in their faces. And yet they persist, because they still think red lines can exist in 2011.

They are assisted in this by presenters like Mahmoud Saad, who interviewed Hossam in a phone call on Monday night and said “we trust the army…no army’s affairs are interfered with anywhere in the world” before quite literally cutting Hossam off saying “say your opinion as you like on Facebook and Twitter. Not on this station”.

If anyone reading this knows M. Saad please tell him this: hundreds of Egyptians did not die so you could replicate the same policies of self-censorship, self-interest and subservience that allowed the regime to (almost) hoodwink the people and made you a pile of cash in the process.

To Tahrir TV: get rid of this idiot or change the name of your station. Have some self-respect.

Egypt is currently strangely torn between wanting fundamental change in the way society is run, and complete, pre-January 25 normality.

Observers have for years peddled a lie that Egypt is a society that thrives on chaos and disorder, and have presented this as a self-evident truth – based on e.g. drivers’ freestyle attitudes to traffic rules and some Egyptians’ poor timekeeping – while ignoring the unwritten rules holding everything together, like thread running through a bracelet.

In Tahrir Square yesterday evening there was a confrontation between street peddlers and the police attempting to move them on. At around 10 p.m., after the main ruckus had subsided, there was still a huge group of men and around six hesitant looking low-ranking police officers gathered around a shirtless man who was then marched off, in the direction of the Qasr El-Aini police station.

Today’s Al-Ahram proudly announced that police officers have cracked down on both street peddlars and microbus drivers who had been blocking a main square in Giza. A number of “thugs and outlaws” were detained, we are told. Read between the lines: violence was used and random arrests made.

The background to this is that the police – still smarting from the lesson it was taught on January 28 – is not operating at full capacity (allegedly over pay demands) and refuses to engage directly with the Egyptian public out of a fear that any confrontation will result in officers getting pummeled to death.

The army and riot police meanwhile are more than happy to engage with members of the public – when they are protesting. Mysteriously, the Supreme Council of the Military Forces drums out its constant tattoo of stability, stability, national security, national security while not penalising or sacking police officers who refuse to do their jobs.

Stability has become a mantra and, inevitably, for some has a more powerful appeal than any of the most impassioned calls for justice and social equality – as it always will.

For all of the media’s talk about chaos and rampant crime and an economy on the brink of collapse, Egypt isn’t doing badly for a country that is in the throes of a revolution, has rid itself of a regime whose tentacles reached every part of society, and is saddled with a police force that can’t do it job without bribes and bullying (receiving and delivering both).

Crime is expressed differently these days. Before January 25 it was committed in: parliament; polling stations; police stations; during demonstrations against protestors who disappeared quickly and silently; in slum areas against nothing people who only mattered at election time. They didn’t call it the “Interior” Ministry for nothing. Its network of hundreds of thousands of police informants was (is?) inside everything, everywhere; the foul blood beat out by the regime’s heart.

And now that regime is slowly being disassembled and the police are adrift. There is more opportunity for both petty crime and the flagrant armed attacks hospitals are experiencing (despite pledges by Essam Sharaf of a permanent and armed police presence in every hospital).

But even more importantly the police’s absence has, for example, allowed the appearance of street peddlers in areas they formerly would have been beaten away from (downtown Cairo for example), has given microbus drivers the freedom to stop in places that block traffic and has led to the appearance of armed men in some informal areas who perhaps formerly would not have been so brazen in imposing their authority (or were perhaps in league with the police whose interest it was to keep them in check).

All this has created the impression of “anarchy”, as the media and commentators on SCAF Facebook statements remind us. Actual crime incidents aside, it is the way that public space is now being used that seems to most irk the stability crowd because it is in direct violation of the pre January 25 rules, i.e. normality as defined by them.

When I was passing through Tahrir Square yesterday afternoon I saw a group of around 20 young men and women, all of them poorly dressed, some of them in rags, other clearly high on something, hanging around and occasionally breaking into bouts of that wrestling that looks serious but may be horseplay, and generally making a racket.

I can’t ever remember a crowd like this being allowed to gather anywhere within a 500 metre radius of a potential tourist. A taxi driver later complained to me about them being “rowdy thugs from the slums”.

On Talat Harb Street peddlers sell their wares on huge almost permanent looking tables. Long gone are the light and easily dismantled objects they used when a passing police patrol was a threat.

All of this violates the unwritten rules governing everyday life. Bribe-taking psychopaths enforced some of these rules, but for years this is how society functioned. Things were ostensibly tidy.

The anarchy and chaos narrative has been integrated into the SCAF’s own campaign against protests and strikes of any kind, deemed responsible for Tantawy and friends for all of Egypt’s economic woes.

And now both the stability and normality camp are not happy and the process of fundamental root change (economic, institutional) seems to be held hostage by a sclerotic military institution that refuses any change and rejects all criticism (the latest almighty cock-up is its summoning of Reem Maged, presenter of popular talk show Baladna Bel Masry and activist Hossam El-Hamalawy for questioning by the military prosecution office after the latter criticised the army on Maged’s show) and a government incapable of upsetting existing power structures.

There seem to be two clear challenges now: firstly, satisfying everyone: the camp who believe that revolution is about proving that Egypt can function “normally” without Mubarak and clan, economically and stability-wise, and those who want a radically different society by which I mean one where citizens are not tortured, are not put on trial for their opinions and earn enough to live with dignity. (The first camp should not be dismissed wholesale as army-sympathisers, old regime stalwarts or conservative members of the economic elite, many of them belong to none of these categories. In any case mass support is crucial as Tahrir demonstrated).

Secondly, it remains a mystery why more noise is not being made about the impending elections, in the form of campaigning and awareness raising. There is (rightfully) a huge focus on holding the former regime to account (as well as the military for its endless transgressions) while little is said about where we go from here.

A group of friends and I spoke to two men playing dominos outside while we walking home from Tahrir Square on Thursday night and we asked them if they would be going to Tahrir to protest the next day (variously dubbed “Friday of rage” or the “2^nd revolution”).

“Of course,” one of them said, and when I asked him why, he said because “nothing’s changed”. (His own solution to Egypt’s problems was to distribute Saudi Arabia’s $4 billion equally amongst Egyptian citizens.

His response reminded me of a doctor I spoke to yesterday while they were marching against Ministry of Health failure to respond to increased health spending and better working conditions for doctors – the latest action in a campaign that has been going on for years.

“What’s new?” I asked him.

“Well, we’re free to march now but the demands are exactly the same,” he replied.

THE SUPREME COUNCIL OF THE ARMED FORCES

Facebook status update number “0″

Within the framework of the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces’ determination to continually bombard the people it has been saddled with with communiqués filled either with pompous aggrandisement of its own role in the glorious revolution or an announcement that one of the thousands of civilians, sons of this glorious nation convicted of crimes in a military court are going to have their sentences reviewed because Mona Seif and Ragia Omran wouldn’t shut up about the matter, we bring to you another Facebook photo – statement.

1. With reference to the lamentable events of Sunday 15^th May outside the Israeli Embassy in Cairo the Supreme Council states there is no truth to allegations that peaceful protestors were attacked with multiple volleys of tear gas canisters and shot at. The fact that army soldiers arrived at the protest wearing gas masks in no way indicates a premeditated intention.

The Supreme Council says that in reality events were as follows:

- A small group of thugs, members of a subversive counter-revolutionary group, stole a giant wheel of production with the help of criminals who escaped from a police station in 6 October. The criminals were able to escape not because our glorious police force is not doing its job, but because there is chaos in the country as a result of the continuous sit-ins and factories and protests you motherfuckers insist on involving yourselves in.

After stealing the giant wheel of production the group of counter-revolutionaries and outlaw criminals rolled it throughout the great nation, terrifying law-abiding sons of this country and in the process bringing the tourist industry and the economy to their knees.

The counter-revolutionaries and outlaw criminals used the giant wheel of production to smash through the many rows of army soldiers protecting the Israeli Embassy (because it isn’t a church. We don’t do churches).

The counter-revolutionaries and outlaw criminals were then able to steal the Israeli Embassy, after the army and the Central Security Forces, little lambs that they are, refused to open fire on the sons of this great nation. The counter-revolutionaries and outlaw criminals made off with the Israeli Embassy, blocking traffic and angering Naguib Sawiris in the process.

2. With reference to the events in Imbaba last week, and at Maspero on Saturday, the Supreme Council strongly refutes the rumours and human rights reports that it did fuck all as people killed and maimed each other. The Supreme Council says it thought they were just kidding.

The Supreme Council reminds you ungrateful shits that it is part of the fabric of this nation and that its primary duty is to preserve national unity against attempts to undermine it and it plans to do this by locking you all up while releasing anyone with a government position prior to January 28 2011.

و الله الموفق

I heard the roars almost as soon as I arrived at El-Noor Mosque, a huge sound which poured out of its doors and swept across the road where bored young men in a blue police minibus sat, journalists stood, a crowd watched.

The Imam, hysterical in his ardour exalted Osama Bin Laden. Another roar. A prayer for the martyr. Allaho akbar! Allaho akbar!

An army microbus went past and one member of a group of young men stiffened and saluted with studied and solemn ceremony, his head tracking the movement of the van as it slowly went past. The soldiers ignored him.

A bypasser asked them, what’s going on?

It’s about Osama Bin Laden, one of the group responded.

What about him, the bypasser asked.

“Te3eesh enta.”*

Breathlessly, insistently, the Imam announced a march from the mosque to the US Embassy in protest at Bin Laden’s killing, chants of impassioned assent followed from inside and then the supplicants began to file out as camera crews scrambled for their equipment and riot police fanned out across the road in readiness and a necklace of military police red berets formed a line outside the mosque.

Most men emerged, put their shoes on, and left.

A crowd of around 400 stayed behind, dallied briefly before moving en masse away from the mosque, and away from the Coptic Cathedral 5 minutes down the road where young Christian men were standing, waiting.

Journalists mentally rewrote their lead.

Off they went down the road leading to Ramsis. He’s not a terrorist, the US is the terrorist.

A middle-aged man in a turban and brown galabeya spent the entire march seated on the boot of a moving car, hoarsely leading chants. At one point he shouted out, at nobody in particular, condemnation of Salafi preacher Mohamed Yaqoub Hassaan because, “Hassaan didn’t say God rest his soul when he spoke about Osama in a television interview!”

They were a ragtag bunch: Salafis recognisable by their neatly-pressed, white galabeyas, sparkling in the sun, a couple of street kids, ordinary men, as well as a hybrid decked out in disco jeans, boy band sunglasses and puritanical moustache-less beard.

It was a hot day and lacking the religious fervour of their subjects most journalists opted for a ride in a flatbed minivan rather than walk for an hour and a half. Around 10 of them scrambled on board and stood pressed together, where they looked like fridges being delivered.

The central mass of the protest marched onwards flanked by protestors on mopeds and motorbikes – galabeyas drawn up around waists – and cars. As the march went past a road that leads to the cathedral the march stopped briefly, the chants paused, there was a moment of indecision, and then it continued.

Outside the Coptic Hospital a young man in the back of a car extended his arm out of the window and pointed, kept it pointed for around a minute, as the car slowly drove forward. People on the balconies watched, bemused. Again, the march continued.

With our lives, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Osama.

**

Imbaba is one of Cairo’s secret cities, a sprawling maze of alleys and unfinished houses and hidden people almost directly opposite one of Cairo’s most affluent neighbourhoods.

Bahaa “Bob” took my friend Noov and I down El-Loqsor Street in a Tuktuk. As we progressed further pedestrians warned him to stop and go no further. There’s gunfire, they said.

A gentleman, Bob ignored the warnings and took us to the back of the crowd near the Mar Mina church, as far in as he could go. We got out and joined the hundreds of people congregated at the police/army cordon. The sound of gunfire rippled through the air.

A man overheard us discussing how we could get nearer to the church. He asked us where we wanted to go, want we wanted to do, paused to consider when we told him we wanted to see what was happening, preferably from the roof of a building near the church.

“Come with me,” he said.

We went down a back street and he demanded to see our press credentials. We set off again with a warning: even if you’re not Muslim, if anyone stops you, say you are.

The backstreets were strangely devoid of army or police personnel. The man, whose name was Ashraf and who was a bodybuilder type, strode ahead of us, a bunch of keys dangling from his belt.

On one street we looked behind us and saw the shadows of men moving behind a fire. We rounded another corner and suddenly found ourselves behind the church. The gunfire at this point was so loud we had to shout to hear each other, the air was acrid with smoke, ahead of us men engaged in war stared at us.

Ashraf, never once breaking stride, looked back.

“Haa… Are you coming or not?”

“Do you trust him?” I asked Noov.

“No”, she said. We continued.

From the second to last floor of the building we were taken into we filmed a mob systematically ripping a café apart as the army and riot police watched.

“It belongs to Adel Labeeb”, the bawwab told us.

What struck me most about what I witnessed in the next few hours was that as we were taken up the stairs of a building we passed the open doors of people’s homes and saw families sitting in doorways as if outside all hell was not breaking loose. In a street leading off El-Loqsor residents ambled along and shot the shit. On the way out Ashraf discussed his exercise regimen and how he had given up kick boxing for something he described as Swedish weightlifting exercises.

Clearly the hell unfolding behind the good people of Imbaba was nothing new.

On the way home Hesham, a Twitter friend who we met shortly before we left Imbaba, discussed the events that night and the revolution generally with the taxi driver.

“If you’ve had a tap closed for 30 years when you open it some muck is bound to come out,” Hesham said.

**

The next day we caught a taxi home from Imbaba and got talking to another taxi driver, an Imbaba resident who had witnessed events and whose analysis slightly challenged what I had concluded about the events of Imbaba so far.

Abu Sayyed is a no bullshit loquacious sort of bloke with an ability to drive while maintaining almost unbroken eye contact with backseat passengers in his rearview mirror.

It was a long conversation but the two most important sentences he said were these:

1. e7na 3alatool benetkhane2 we bendrab 3ala ba3d naar. 3ady. El sana elly fatet 7asalat khana2a we maatet 30 wa7ed [we constantly fight and open fire on each other. It’s normal. Last year there was an argument and 30 people died]
2. makanetsh 7adsa ta2efeyya [it wasn’t a sectarian incident]

The government is markedly absent from Imbaba’s streets. Salafis are known to have gained a foothold there – to such an extent that for a while Imbaba was known as the Islamic Republic of Imbaba. It’s a tough neighbourhood. It’s full of illegal weapons. It’s poor. It has a high concentration of Upper Egyptians (famous for their propensity for violence and reluctance to compromise) and all that that brings. The Mubarak regime did little to give its residents a better chance in life.

Abu Sayyed presented the fight as just another installment in the history of Imbaba’s battles, a face off between two opposing sides that just happened to be Christian and Muslim, “but who usually live perfectly peacefully together”.

“Adel Labib is stupid” Abu Sayyed, said referring to the café owner whose café was destroyed. “Why did he open fire like that? He’s a donkey.”

Labib, Abu Sayyed said, had stood on the roof of his café while the church was surrounded and shot at people below. “Te-re-deb te-re-deb te-re-deb” he said, one hand firing an invisible gun.

“The problem is that the biggest arms dealers in Egypt live in Imbaba and some of the people who died on Saturday night worked on the railways. So their families will bring their railway colleagues for revenge and te-re-deb te-re-deb te-re-deb”.

But what about the Salafis alleged to have provoked the attack on the churches?

“What about them? Who is a Salafi? Anyone with a beard? Someone close to me died and I didn’t shave my beard for 10 years, in mourning. Does that make me a Salafi? Just because I had a long beard was I a Salafi even though I went out here and there and went to weddings and drove foreigners about and made friends with them and got up to all sorts?”

I don’t quite share Abu Sayyed’s nonchalance, but I would like to. I would like to believe that what happened on Saturday was just another rumble – like the huge, armed, street brawl that broke out last week on Abdel Aziz Street in Cairo between mobile phone traders.

But there is something that doesn’t fit into this version of the events as a shootout like so many shootouts before it: the video of the Virgin Mary Church being broken into, the sordid glee with which the mob marauded through it, the man they killed inside it.

**

Father Metraus sat next to a pile of objects recovered from the fire, including a children’s edition of illustrated stories from the bible and a magazine called El Karaza (the name for the jurisdiction of the Coptic patriarch).

The church was now various shades of gray after the fire, apart from the area to the side of the altar, which was an intense black. Melted ceiling fan blades hung like Weeping Willows. Young people wandered around taking photos and examining bits of debris, others talked to an army officer.

I got my video recorder ready and a man said to Father Metraus, yalla yaboya? [Begin, father]. The priest closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly, and began.

What happened was not the fault of Salafis, the priest said; it is the fault of the authorities that fail to take decisive action against perpetrators of attacks on Copts.

Why does it happen? Education, the media and preachers allowed to preach hate.

He delivered his analysis with an immoderate calm, given the events, only pausing occasionally to give the stink eye to people surrounding us making too much noise.

Let me pray, brother. Even if I pray in way different to you, let me pray.

**

My tentative conclusion is that an ideological spark (in the form of Salafi extremists) started the fire but it was kept burning by ordinary Imbaba residents, some of whom joined in driven not by considered anti-Christian sentiment but because they had heard a Muslim woman was being held hostage by a group of people who happen to be Christian (it could have been a Muslim woman raped by a Muslim man. Such happenings spark a million deadly feuds).

A woman (even one linked to a man as remotely as through a shared faith) is a measure of a man’s integrity and honour, his manhood. She is a public test. So of course he has to step up.

And this group of people who happen to be Christian were shooting at the crowd and throwing objects at them from roofs (in self defence but when the object lands on your head it doesn’t feel like that). Perhaps our ordinary Imbaba resident, or one of his friends, got hit by one of these missiles and it became personal. This is not an area where when one is the victim of a crime, one goes to the police. One deals with this sort of shit oneself.

Noov pointed out that the Egyptian revolution might not have happened if it wasn’t for protestors from Imbaba and Boulaq el Dakror (another working class area) who fearlessly turned out in their thousands and responded to police violence in kind.

Maybe religion wasn’t the driving factor behind events. Maybe equally critical factors were: the endemic violence in Imbaba; the position of women in Egyptian society generally and their disenfranchisement; the state’s failure to protect religious converts from both other citizens and the religious institutions they are attempting to break away from; the inability or reluctance of the police and the army to break the protest up in its early stages – if the army really wanted to stop the attack on Mar Mina Church in its latter stages they would have had to use force since this by that time it was an armed battle. They seem reluctant to use such force other than against unarmed protestors in Tahrir; finally there is the fact that the state frequently does not treat bring Muslim perpetrators of crimes against Christians to justice, preferring to use “reconciliation” sessions and hope the matter goes away.

None of the above eliminates the fact that religious tension does exist in Egypt. But an outbreak of violence in a community that take up arms for the slightest thing anyway, and which happens to position Muslims against Christians, and which takes place against a backdrop of a state which has continually demonstrated its complete inability to deal with similar incidents does not mean that Egypt is on the cusp of a sectarian war, as the media has suggested in breathless tones.

And anyway, the Salafis are too fucking humourless for their message to be embraced by Egyptian society.

(But sometimes they provide us with a laugh unintentionally)

* Literally, “you live”. Said when someone is asking about a deceased person who he doesn’t know has died. The humour is hard to convey in translation.

Covering current events in Egypt has numerous occupational hazards but I hadn’t imagined that being sat on by a middle-aged doctor was one of them.

The Doctors’ Syndicate extraordinary general assembly held yesterday changed that.

I arrived shortly after it was scheduled to start. The Syndicate was – as usual during its general assemblies – hemorrhaging doctors, and hundreds of them had spilled out on the street, where they had no clue what was going on inside.

Inserting myself in the mass of humanity that had congregated around a side entrance, I then fought my way through to the front. During the almost half an hour it took me to reach the front I wondered why the Syndicate had not bothered to book a bigger function hall for this meeting, as had been agreed during the last general assembly.

The revolution hasn’t yet translated into improved wages and conditions for doctors, although it has rid them of Hamdy El-Sayyed. The avuncular Essam El-Erian chaired this meeting, as he had the last.

Health rights activist Mohamed Hassan Khalil told the meeting that a delegation from the Syndicate met Essam Sharaf and relayed to him four grievances.  Firstly, Khalil said, they told him that 70% of accident and emergency departments in Cairo are closed because of a lack of security and frequent attacks by armed individuals. The delegation was apparently promised a permanent police presence in all hospitals immediately. Doctors roared that this promise has not been fulfilled.

In addition to demanding a minimum wage, doctors are calling for a wage ceiling to be imposed because according to Khalil, some senior officials “earn more than Obama”.

The delegation called for increased health spending and the removal of current health minister Ashraf Hatem, which elicited a huge cheer from doctors, as did the call for strike action on May 10.

Given the number of times that strike action has been discussed in the Syndicate it is remarkable that some doctors seem unclear about its scope and effects. Speakers advocating the strike stressed that it won’t extend to A&E, and that operations that cannot be postponed will be performed on the day of the action.

Mona Mina told doctors who don’t want to strike that they can take the day off as leave. Khalil said that doctors in one hospital (can’t remember which) launched strike action a while back and that “their grievances were addressed within two hours”.

Still, a sullen little bunch of doctors sat in one corner with their arms crossed, grim-faced, as other doctors chanted strike! Strike!

(In fact at one of the many points during the meeting when the speaker on stage was inaudible the people standing next to me asked each other what had been said. Nobody had heard, but in front of us the miserable bunch were all on their feet shouting AYWAN AYWAN [YES YES].

“As long as they’re saying yes I’ll say no, even if I don’t know what about,” the man next to me said dryly.)

The vote was carried (or at least I thought so) and then activist doctor Ahmed Atef up the ante and proposed that an open-ended strike begin on May 17 if the authorities fail to respond to the May 10 strike. Doctors also voted in favour of disciplinary action being taken against strikebreaking colleagues.

The response was mostly enthusiastic, other than from members of the miserable corner. It was at this point – about three hours into the general assembly – that El-Erian suddenly and for the first time became concerned with the doctors outside the Syndicate building.

It was decided that strike action should be decided on through a paper ballot rather than a show of hands, and doctors we all twiddled thumbs for half an hour while two thousand voting papers were photocopied.

When the voting papers eventually appeared there were three questions on them:

1. Do you agree with a strike on May 10
2. Do you agree that strikebreaking colleagues should be punished
3. Do you agree with an open strike beginning on May 17

Doctors seemed bemused by all this. It was clear that in the chaos not all doctors would receive a copy of the voting paper, and in any case most doctors seemed under the impression that a majority had already voted in favour of the three points they were being asked about.

El-Erian may have genuinely wanted to ensure that all Syndicate members were balloted, but it felt like me like obfuscation in the face of overwhelming enthusiasm for strike action. This impression was reinforced when El-Erian suggested to the general assembly that a paper ballot could be avoided if they agreed to one-day strike action on May 10 and forgot about the open strike on May 17.

By this point doctors were ripping up the voting papers and throwing them in the air while again chanting strike, strike. One doctor held up a sign saying, “we’re sick of fraud, we don’t want ballot boxes”. El-Erian changed tack and announced that Mona Mina, accompanied by a couple of Syndicate representatives would poll the doctors outside the Syndicate about their thoughts on the strike. She returned later and said that while 5 doctors objected to strike action, the number of hands raised in favour was uncountable.

There had been a throng of people on the stage (completely obscuring speakers) throughout the general assembly but this number surged about four hours into the meeting. While I watched my neighbour sketch out a makeshift sign I was suddenly aware of a commotion behind me. The physicians were fighting!

Whipping out my video camera I didn’t see the bottom that, like Jaws, was stealthily making its way towards me, and I was arsed off stage before the arse itself followed and it and its owner fell on top of me.

I escaped with a bruised leg and in any case if one must sustain physical injuries while one is working let one do so in a hall heaving with doctors is what I always say.

After this incident of crazy outrageous nonsense someone intoned the call to prayer into the mic and everyone calmed down for as long as it took to say it.

There was a proposal that incumbent members of the Syndicate board be barred from standing for election in September (the speaker making explicit reference to El-Erian). People chanted, “why is the Muslim Brotherhood refusing strike action? Are they not doctors?”

Five hours after the meeting began El-Erian announced that doctors had voted for strike action on May 10 with the possibility of further action of May 17 if their demands aren’t met. This won’t be the first time that doctors have voted for a strike (they did so in 2008 but the Syndicate unilaterally quashed that decision on the pretext that they were unsure of the legality of industrial action).

It will be interesting to see what both El-Erian et al and the government do in the next eight days. If the strike goes ahead it will be even more interesting to see how the army reacts.

Zahi Hawass recently launched a new clothes line, a preview of which we were lucky to see recently. Zahi “I am Egyptian Antiquities” Hawass was thankfully reunited with Egypt’s heritage after he was mistakenly included in the purge of hangers-oners, megalomaniacs and abusers of power which followed the January 25 revolution.

The proud heritage of Egyptian antiquities was momentarily lost in the wilderness as Zahi could no longer use the platform given to him by virtue of his ministerial post to star in American TV series and sell books.

Hosny Mubarak and his retinue are all serving 15 days in the clink but Zahi Hawass is back, and the latest important archeological project of this quite literally unstoppable man has come to light.

In November 2010 photographer James Weber posted these exciting images of clothes designed for the man who “values self-discovery, historicism and adventure” but also realises that having access to a country’s national heritage gives one the opportunity to launch numerous lucrative side projects. You may think that these are the nondescript jeans and shirts worn by middle-aged fathers of three trying to convince themselves they are still young. You would be wrong. This is the uniform of adventure, as well as a way for Zahi Hawass to “cultivate an international appreciation and knowledge of Egyptian antiquities”. Through denim.

You might be thinking that there is an ethical question surrounding a minister using 5,000 years worth of a country’s heritage as a backdrop for private enterprise in a crass fashion. Perhaps that he is a low rent hustler. You would be wrong. As Moftases points out, the Zahi Hawass trademark is owned by Andres Numhauser. Numhauser is international vice president of Arts and Exhibitions International which is responsible for the New York exhibition Weber used as his backdrop for the Zahi Hawass clothing line photoshoot. So it’s all above board.

Inanities has been given a sneak preview of Zahi Hawass’ new line, underwear. Here we see the Culture Minister cultivating an international appreciation and knowledge of Egyptian antiquities at the pyramids. Available at all good overpriced London department stores formerly owned by an Egyptian from next month.

There are some things that won’t change anytime soon, and one of these is the certainty that a woman will be made to wait outside a police station in order to deliver a plastic bag of food, cigarettes and love.

At visiting times there are whole groups of them, circles of black, standing, sitting on pavements, fanning crying children, silently doing battle.

When there is a rumour that a detainee has injured himself inside the cells, and that the other detainees are rising up, and the riot police have returned from their sabbatical then the women are less silent.

Police trucks line the front of the police station, next to them are two army jeeps, men standing on something are silhouetted in the darkness and a crowd gathers and watches, impervious to the commands of a police officer in plain clothes and an irate army officer to disperse.

Men are gathered in the entrance of the building (a residential tower block). Some are uniformed but some are unshaven and aren’t wearing coats and have a hand towel on one shoulder and are gesticulating at people in the crowd with only one hand.

The army officer swears by god that he “won’t move any of them until the crowd leaves”.

A young woman holding a child is unmoved. Shouts something at him. The officer repeats his promise and churlishly turns away from her before crossing his arms across his chest and adopting a sentry position.

Around the corner there is a small crowd gathered, of young men and boys. They are watching a young woman perched on an electricity box using a bottle of Miranda to tap on the window of the police station several metres off the ground. Inside the harshly lit room there is a ceiling fan going and every so often riot police helmets and red military police berets come into view.

The window is slid open by a balding man who has police written all over him. He exchanges words with the woman then slides the window shut again. The woman taps again, screaming something inaudible at the crowd. Her headscarf slides off, she doesn’t bother to pull it back up, goes back to knocking.

Below her in the crowd two riot police are having a cigarette. One of them is dressed in full uniform except that he is wearing a dark blue Puma tracksuit top. The white of the insignia reflects in the light. Further along behind the woman tapping on the window a middle-aged woman is at on the ground with her head in one hand staring at the ground. Another woman puts her arm round her shoulders and, strangely, laughs as she shouts something at the woman tapping at the window.

Eventually the window is slid open again. A man appears and talks to the woman and the crowd. She passes him a plastic bag of something through the iron bars on the window. Someone else wants to pass a bag to someone inside. It won’t fit through the bars and the bald headed cop takes each item out one by one. The woman leaves and a military police officer takes her place.

A young uniformed policeman has ventured out into the crowd. He is holding a sturdy looking stick but is hesitantly imploring the crowd. “Help us everyone, please. Help us”. The balance has changed.

The prisoners were moved. It took six vans to move them all. Maybe for once they were giving them space in the vans or maybe they were holding too many men in the police station in the first place and that’s why trouble started.

There are rumours that they’ll be taken to a nearby military academy; the same academy a Tahrir protestor says he was taken to during the revolution, handed over by the police. Not just him, the taxi driver driving him.

He joined other civilians there, was made to strip down to his underwear and beaten and kept for over a week. The same academy from which screams were occasionally audible after curfew. The same academy chatting deaf students stream out of now every afternoon, also keeping secrets amongst and from us

How many Egyptians are in this picture? Answers on a postcard

Here I go on about being half- Egyptian yet again.

The Supreme Military Council continued its experiments in Egyptian identity this week with a law that bans me from being involved in the establishment of an Egyptian political party or holding any position within one.

I happen to have been born to an Egyptian mother and British father. If their nationalities were swapped you wouldn’t be reading this and I might be busy peddling bullshit on satellite TV. But alas fate wanted otherwise and I have been saddled with this version of Egyptian citizenship, a car with no engine.

Luckily I don’t have any political aspirations. I do however resent belonging to a manufactured underclass, a status I thought I had cast off in 2005 when after a tortuous year of Egyptian bureaucracy I exercised my rights under the amended nationality law and got my filthy half breed hands on an Egyptian passport with my name (misspelt but never mind) on it.

Prior to 2004 Egyptian women could not pass on Egyptian nationality to their children. They had to marry an Egyptian man and have him do it. Egyptian men married to foreign women meanwhile have always been able to confer the nationality on their progeny, no questions asked (as far as I know).

There is no legitimate reason for limiting the extent of an Egyptian citizen’s rights on the basis of parentage but a brief survey of popular attitudes towards Egyptian identity may cast light on where this legislation has its roots.

In my experience when I meet a citizen of the Arab Republic of Egypt I am put through a sort of “triage” identity test.

1. Appearance

I do not conform to the popular conception of what an Egyptian should look like. Yes, yes I know, Egyptians come in many colours and the country’s history of occupation by all and sundry means that that there isn’t a single Egyptian “look”.

The spectrum may be vast, but it generally doesn’t extend to people who look white European (me) or black African, both of whom in my experience are automatically treated as outsiders unless and until they prove their Egyptian credentials.

Another complicating factor is that the idea of a standard Egyptian appearance isn’t restricted to genetics, either, as was revealed during the revolution, when one of my male “fully” Egyptian friends was challenged by members of the public because his hair was “too” long and one Egyptian female friend with very short hair accosted.

Attitudes towards the physical appearance of halfies are thus dictated by an oppressive homogeneity about what an Egyptian citizen is, and looks like.

2. Language

An Egyptian who doesn’t look Egyptian but speaks colloquial Egyptian Arabic fluently will generally be let off the hook at this point. If however like me you understand Arabic but speak it semi-brokenly with an accent you’re back to square one and will be told in no uncertain terms that “your tongue is heavy” or more bluntly “your Arabic is crap” and the onus of proving Egyptianness begins all over again.

Interestingly, bilingual card carrying fully 100% Egyptians also have similar difficulties. There exists a generation of Egyptian children educated in the Gulf and in international schools in Egypt who naturally and sometimes unconsciously drift between Arabic and English. Some of them speak (and very often write) better English than Arabic because of their education. Friends who fit this description say that they too have encountered a sort of masked scepticism about their identity.

Access to top-flight Egyptian language schools is restricted to the elite, from whose ranks many of the Mubarak regime were drawn. The associations explain a thinly veiled resentment against perceived members of this clique who abused political power to amass fortunes they did little to conceal.

3. An outright interrogation about nationality

I always describe myself as Egyptian-British, or alternatively the product of an Egyptian mother and British father, and the conversation usually goes thusly:

CLOTH-EARED INTERLOCUTEUR: Enty masreyya? [Are you Egyptian?]

ME: Masreyya-Englezeyya [Egyptian-English]

CLOTH-EARED INTERLOCUTEUR: Aih? / Gaza2ereyya? [What?/Algerian?]

ME: Masreyya-englezeyya ya3ni waldety masreyya we aboya englezy [Egyptian-English, my mum is Egyptian and my dad English]

CLOTH-EARED INTERLOCUTER: Englezeyya. Ahlan we sahlan / welcome [English. Welcome]

ME: sotto voce: For fuck’s sake

CLOTH-EARED INTERLOCUTEUR: Sakna fe masr? [Do you live in Egypt?]

4. Name

Egyptian names very often indicate their bearer’s religion and there exists a narrower range of familiar names compared with countries with a recent history of immigration (with an allowance made for the more unusual Coptic Christian names, occasionally unfamiliar to some Egyptians Muslims). Names in Egypt are three or four part and consist of a first name followed by a father’s name, grandfather’s name and family name.

Except mine. When I was getting my nationality for some reason they put my middle name as my father’s name. I’m happy with that because my name is not Sarah Richard Carr.

If by some unlikely miracle I happen to have passed the three preceding tests proceedings will come to a halt when I tell them that my name is Sarah (passes no problem) Marea (could be Christian) Carr (interloper).

At best I will be accused of being a car rental firm, as often happens on the phone. At worst I will be told that “no Muslim can be called Sarah Marea Carr” by a spy hunter holding my ID card in one hand while brandishing a large stick in the other at a popular defence committee.

How often I have seen the cogs turning in police officers’ brains as they look at the front of my ID card, which bears my name, and then turn it over in order to ascertain my religion, which makes them even more flummoxed. The name does not fit the schema.

Having already placed me somewhere in Western Europe on the basis of my appearance (a conclusion then confirmed by my name) their attempts to tidily box me away are then scuppered by this piece of state bureaucracy in their hands telling them that I am officially one of them even though my father is not.

My battle is thus on two fronts against conceptions of who can parent an Egyptian citizen and about what exactly constitutes an Egyptian citizen.

Society has yet to catch up with the nationality law, which upholds the jus sanguinis rule equally for men and women. The default setting for halfies born to Egyptian women seems to be that s/he is Foreign Until Proven Otherwise because of the triage test described above. We fail the name test. More often than not we also fail the appearance test if the father is white – patriarchy exists even before birth and paternal genes seem often to dominate their maternal counterparts. And on top of this is a belief that Egyptian women can’t create Egyptian babies without the input of a fellow citizen.

What makes this slightly sinister is that a minority in Egyptian society seems to regard relationships between Egyptian women and foreigners (by which here I mean non-Arabs) as morally dubious. The thinking seems to be: “he is a white European/American and is not a Muslim/he has no religion. They therefore met while she was lap dancing and got married in the church of Shahira in a pagan ceremony”.

This prejudice was particularly useful when state media wished to discredit Mohamed ElBaradei shortly after he began making a nuisance of himself politically. Luckily for them, his daughter is married to a British man. Over a year after he (sort of) returned to Egypt he was still having to explain publicly that his daughter is not an infidel.

(But then the media everywhere loves demonising strangers as was evident when Princess Di got it on with Dodi el-Fayed).

And the point is these attitudes occasionally translate into behaviour that is exclusionary and makes its target feel like outsiders, even if the intention is well meant. I remember when I was outside Maspero on the day Mubarak stepped down feeling a presence behind me. I turned around and he was gone, but my friend Om Nakad told me that a man had been photographing my hair. Not my general person, not the lovely female friends with me, a close-up of my lustrous (dyed, ratty) blonde hair.

Later on that evening while walking down Qasr El-Eini Street I saw a bunch of what were very obviously tourists spectating. A woman pulled a camera out of her bag and said to her companion, “estana 3owza atsawwar ma3 el aganeb” [wait I want to take a picture with the foreigners] like she was at the zoo. It was a bit like this nonsense (although the kid is charming I have to admit).

On a different day in Tahrir Square on one of the Fridays when people still congregated there I was accosted by a gentleman welcoming me to Egypt exuberantly in English in front of a line of large posters proclaiming that Egypt is safe for tourists.

I attempted to explain who I am, and then attempted to convey to him that when foreigners get “welcome” thrown at them every 10 metres while walking Egyptian streets it tends to have the effect of reminding tourists that they are strangers in a strange land, in addition to being fucking annoying and slightly dodgy when you are a lone female and the person doing the welcoming is inevitably a male under 40. He absolutely couldn’t see it, insisting that Egyptians “are friendly people” and that “foreigners like it”.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I hate generalisations about the Arab world, particularly when emitted by Pulitzer winning moustachioed morons, so I emphasise that NOT EVERY SINGLE EGYPTIAN thinks like this. My own experience, and that of my friends, and my reading of the media does show however that there exists an unfamiliarity with non-Egyptians, and with non-Egyptian culture amongst some. If you don’t believe me ask an African refugee in Egypt.

Egyptian modern history accounts in part for this unfamiliarity. The story goes that when Nasser and the free officers said hello, foreigners went bye-bye and Egypt’s cosmopolitanism (by which I mean foreigners and the Egyptian elite living it up while the majority of Egyptians were 2^nd class citizens in their own countries) died. But I question how much familiarity there was, how much mixing, and genuine friendship, existed between non-Egyptian residents of Egypt and say the Egyptian working class and rural farmers. If anyone knows, tell me.

In any case the numbers of foreigners reduced dramatically and they were to some extent demonised, as one expects after hundreds of years of occupation and exploitation.  Arabist puts it much more eloquently here.

I can’t help but make the comparison with the UK, particularly during the revolution when I heard gems such as “we don’t want you [non-Egyptians] in our country” and “go back to your country”. Yesterday during a march I got “why are you here?” and “Get out the way, foreigner” by a Hardees delivery prick on a moped.

The Hardees comment was throwaway and laddish, but I grew up in a culture where singling someone out (even more so when they are a British citizen) on the basis of their origins or colour and making remarks that make them feel ostracised is unacceptable. Every time someone refers to a non-Egyptian as “the foreigner” I cringe.

Prejudice is rife in the UK, as the English Defence League demonstrates, but outright racism is (mostly) a taboo (although some parts of the media have yet to realise this). 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd generation immigrants have fought long and hard to establish their right to be accepted as British by white nationals. The battle is ongoing (particularly for British Muslims), but at least society has moved on slightly from the Rising Damp days.

It’s difficult to complain about exclusionary attitudes as a foreigner without sounding like an arsehole because of the history. This isn’t Britain where waves of immigrants from former colonies arrived in the motherland and experienced the worst kinds of racism and discrimination.

The situation in Egypt is the inverse, and a (usually) privileged “1^st world” person whining about the natives’ behaviour will more often than not sound petulant and obnoxious, as is demonstrated by the Cairo Scholars mailing list. I am acutely aware of this and am not giving myself the licence to freely criticise Egyptian society just because I have the nationality. I’m writing this because this is a country I love. And I sincerely hope that thus far I haven’t sounded like an arsehole.

The ambivalence of Egyptian society towards outsiders was acutely demonstrated during the revolution. When I say outsiders, I don’t just mean non-Egyptians. I collected frightening testimonies of mob attacks against Egyptians perceived as being different and somehow not Egyptian enough.

The timing of this mass xenophobia coincided closely with the state media campaign against foreigners accused of fomenting unrest in Tahrir and elsewhere, and there is evidence to indicate that the attacks that occurred around the Square were not spontaneous. But further afield attacks were carried out with zealous enthusiasm by individuals who seemed genuinely to believe that the country was under attack from a plague of spies.

I experienced what felt like real contempt during this time. The worst thing is that every time I produced my ID card and stuttered out “I am Egyptian” I started to believe that I actually was an imposter. The fact that for three years I have faced similar (but less hysterical) responses while out reporting helped me deal with these situations but the constant threat of violence always left me in need of a drink.

Everything was topsy-turvy during the revolution and people exulted in power in the absence of a police force. These were exceptional circumstances. But this isn’t a reason to dismiss these incidents. I was shocked by the attitude of some activist friends who played down their significance. One person I spoke to, an Egyptian who was accused of being a foreigner/spy/whatever and made to leave a group of striking workers she was talking to asked me how I was going to use the testimonies I was gathering, saying that she preferred not to relate her experience unless it was presented in the context of a media-driven campaign of xenophobia.

Attacks on minorities jar with the popular narrative of the revolution, with the image of Tahrir being a utopia of tolerance and harmony. Tahrir was a dream, but protestors brought the Us vs. Them dichotomy with them into the square. Even revolutionaries can be arseholes. I’m thinking here of the protestors who found the time as rocks fell on our heads on February 2nd to tell me to stop taking photographs because they had decided I’m a foreigner.

The way a society treats its minorities really does indicate how healthy, and at ease with itself, it is; a society that treats its own citizens as outsiders is by definition scared of itself.

I hope that Egypt will one day complete its revolution by reducing poverty and closing income gaps, upholding the rights of its religious minorities, instituting an educational system that produces iconoclasts and thinkers. Maybe then society will be less insular, and suspicious, and stratified, and angry, and the definition of the Egyptian citizen will somehow be enlarged because with confidence will come the generosity born of trust.

Or maybe conceptions of identity will change as more of the children born to one, or two Egyptian parents abroad return to Egypt and force acceptance of their differences through their mere physical presence.

But there is something that can be done in the short-term, and that is for the government to stop passing bullshit discriminatory legislation that reinforces prejudice.

On Wednesday the army announced amendments to the political parties law. The amendments did not include removal of the clause in the law that states that anyone wishing to hold a post in a political party or be one of its founders must have an Egyptian father.

On Thursday the army presented its long-awaited Constitutional Declaration, a sort of collection of constitutional principles it has cobbled together until a committee appointed by parliament draws up a new constitution. Article 7 of this Declaration states that “all citizens are equal under the law and have equal rights and duties”.

Article 26 of the same document states that I can never be President of the Republic, even if I renounced my British nationality because I must have “two Egyptian parents”. Also, people married to non-Egyptians are not allowed to be president (note that, inconsistently, it doesn’t state the spouse can’t be a dual national. Which means that the First Lady* could theoretically be a naturalised Egyptian and exercise her evil khawaga voodoo on the president).

The prohibition on single nationality Egyptians with a foreign parent being president is of course perfectly logical, because as Mohamed Hosny Mubarak demonstrated only a proper Egyptian can really love el watan and run it competently. An Egyptian with a foreign parent would allow corruption and torture to spread and pursue policies that result in class divisions widening and the numbers of poor increasing and put Israel’s foreign policy needs before Egypt’s own and stay for 30 years.

I would like to bring a case challenging the prohibition on citizens born to Egyptian mothers taking part an active part in political parties, and invite any other halfies born to Egyptian mothers interested to add their crazy confusing names to mine.

In the meantime I appeal to you, dear Egyptian full breed readers of this blog to be a little bit more forgiving towards your halfie brothers and sisters, (particularly the Egyptian mother foreign father combo) and help spread the following message.

I don’t speak Arabic fluently. I can’t write a paragraph of formal Arabic. I didn’t grow up in Egypt and thus can’t laugh at your reference to a 1980s Channel 1 kids programme. I don’t have a solid grounding in any religion and thus the religious cultural references that litter casual conversation go over my head. I can’t list Amr Diab’s entire back catalogue. I don’t look like you.

I do though feel attached to Egypt as much as you, even if this attachment is expressed in unorthodox ways. Egyptian cultural identity is strong enough to withstand a few of its citizens bowling around not being able to identify famous 1980s Egyptian actresses and mispronouncing letters, so if people could refrain from going on about us ruining the fabric of society that would be marvelous**.

If the Tahrir sit-in proved anything it demonstrated that when it comes to the crunch differences don’t matter, social diversity is good and we all hate Mubarak. كلنا ايد واحدة يا حبايب

Don’t blame us for Suzanne Mubarak and I leave you with the grand wizard of the angry oppressed minority, Toyama Koichi.

*I am aware that in theory the president could be a woman and thus we might have a First Gentleman. But as Arabist says: http://twitter.com/#!/arabist/status/54138610500382720

** Oh and another request. When you go on about the British occupation of Egypt if you could resist the urge to make a reference to my grandfather and then expect me to laugh I would be grateful. The joke went stale in approximately 1987.