Many Egyptians and Western critics of the Muslim Brotherhood welcomed the military coup that recently toppled the country's elected Brotherhood-led government, praising the military for safeguarding secularism and "democracy." This betrays a gross misreading of the...
Read Part 1. While media in the United States has focused on the Egyptian uprising that triggered a military-led coup in which the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) led government was dissolved, hardly any media reports here have considered the regional implications of the...
Cross-posted from Counterpunch. “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called...
“Do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men, it is the music of a people who will not be slaves again.”-- Les Miserables 32 million Egyptians in the streets can’t all be wrong This time the Egyptian people did not wait 41 years to bring down what could...
For U.S. policy-makers, the annual allocation of 1.3 billion dollars provided to Egypt has been a vital tool for maintaining its sphere of influence with the Egyptian government. When I read that the Egyptian military had issued an ultimatum to the Morsi government to...
New York Times columnist David Brooks was rightly taken to task for his July 4th column about the current upheavals in Egypt. Writing about what happens when groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood assume the leadership of a nation, he makes sense at first. Democracy,...
Following the Egyptian military’s ousting of the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, public officials and media personalities have debated whether or not to call the recent upheaval a coup. Supporters of the action see the military’s removal of the...
The taxi driver was excited. Driving through the busy streets of Cairo a little more than a year ago, he wanted us to see his most prized token from the revolution that brought Egyptians to the streets in 2011.He passed his cell phone to the back seat to share a YouTube video of his children were singing the Egyptian national anthem—backwards. Backwards, he explained, because that was how former President Hosni Mubarak was ruling the nation. “We want Egypt to be for all Egyptians—Christians, Jews, and Muslims,” he declared, smiling broadly.
There are serious differences between Egypt’s latest upheaval and the 2011 revolution, and major dangers. This time, the deposed president was Egypt’s first democratically and popularly elected president in several generations.
The lesson from the streets of Brazil, Turkey, and the Arab world is to avoid underestimating half-baked social movements still in their infancy. With technological advancements and opportune conjunctures, the underdogs of yesterday can quickly turn into the makers of tomorrow. Not every nascent movement cascades into a full-blown revolution, but the pathfinders whose thoughts and actions carry forward to make history must get their due recognition.