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January 20 - August 19, 2022
The text you are holding is living history. Many of these words were first written with pencil and paper in a cell in Egypt’s notorious Torah Prison, and smuggled out in ways we likely will never understand.
he had lost his liberty, missed his son’s birth and early years, been absent for his father’s death – in large part because he believed, and the Egyptian military state agreed, that words had power. So why were so many frittering away their relative freedom of expression by treating words so lightly?
Alaa understandably rejects the common formulation that Egypt is one large prison: no, he writes, prison is a very specific place, with specific cruelties and barbarities.
The members of the Assembly weren’t just ignoring the people’s proposals, one member went so far as to claim that the majority of proposals demanded the retention of the Shura Council.23 This is an outright lie, and everyone knows it’s an outright lie, and the Assembly members know that we know it’s an outright lie.
When the authorities insist that non-violent actions (roadblocks, institutional disruptions, strikes and rude chants) be treated as violent, it follows that non-violence is abandoned
a saying attributed to Ali ibn Abi Talib: ‘Do not be turned from the righteous path by the lack of those walking upon it.’
Which of us hasn’t been gripped by a wish to howl or cry or curse or hug or kiss at the ‘wrong’ moment?
The Lysenko of the Ministry of the Interior announced the end of terrorism. ‘Anyone who wants to take us on,’ he offered, ‘come try it.’ And then the Security Directorate in the capital was blown up.
Anyone who tells you that the solution is to apply the law is bullshitting you. The solution is to apply the law to the strong before the weak, to the rich before the poor, to Sisi before the doorman. And that’s on condition that the law is consented to by society, particularly by those most affected by it, and has been formulated through a democratic process. And on condition that the law doesn’t infringe on the basic rights and freedoms of the individual. And on condition that the law is logical, comprehensible, accessible to people, and known to them before its application – not an ambush
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Cassandra warning of an all-consuming fire when no-one would listen.
I don’t question their legal grounds, of course; I’m not stupid enough to assume that the constitution, the law, or prison regulations are matters that concern the heroic men of the Ministry of the Interior.
My feeling is that the world is in such crisis that it has made us incapable not of action, but of imagination. The generation that’s taking over now came up in the 1990s, when there were lots of ideas and lots of theorizing, but no action, so action was the necessary thing. Now we’ve spent ten years acting and have discovered that we’re acting on ideas born out of the Second World War. There is a dire crisis of imagination,
Let’s set aside the Islamists. They are oppressed and we must speak about the abuses against them, but their ideology is a disaster and will remain so.
the wrath of the heavens descends on humankind as a punishment for ignoring all the evidence and busying ourselves with conflicts and ambitions unworthy of the approaching, existential threat.
(See the policies of the French government in Libya to protect the interests of Total, or the varied forms of political and material support given to Peugeot.)
And so it seems that the Bible story most aptly prefiguring the coming apocalypse is not the story of Noah’s Flood but the story of the Tower of Babel: as a punishment for our pride in our technological prowess and our appetite to construct, consume and expand without limit, the Lord has confounded our tongues – we cannot communicate with each other, and so our fragmentation cannot be undone.
Our rosy dreams will probably not come to pass. But if we leave ourselves to our nightmares we’ll be killed by fear before the Floods arrive.
Only the innocent feel guilt.
‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?’ — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx
I discover that a new neighbour, the mysterious Amm Seif (who had hijacked a plane to demand the female prisoners’ release),97 had met my father in southern Lebanon when they had both joined the resistance.
There are cities that inspire poets and musicians and so become immortalised in depictions that might not reflect their reality. Free Jerusalem; tranquil Alexandria, Bride of the Sea; Beirut, the Sheltering Tent—the symbols seem more real than the cities. But Gaza and Cairo are both cities that resist romanticisation and so elude song. No one sings to Cairo, but it is the capital of the Arabs. No one sings to Gaza either, but it remains the indisputable capital of Palestine.
‘I call out to you/I clasp your hands’, a solidarity poem written in 1966 by Nazarene poet, communist and politician, Tewfik Ziad.
16-year-old member of the Lebanese resistance who drove a Peugeot 504 into an Israeli army battalion in southern Lebanon in April 1985 and exploded it.
