Peace with Israel, signed in 1978, was never widely popular, but the context of a poor, war-torn nation made feelings vary widely.
Source: MADA MASR
Mada Masr is an independent Egyptian online newspaper, founded in June 2013, with content in Arabic and English.
Abdelrahman al-Gendy, a standout student and Harry Potter aficionado, was just 17 when he was arrested in Cairo, charged with multiple crimes, and given a 15-year prison sentence.
CAIRO — A friend of mine lived alone in downtown Cairo. She was single when she moved in but after getting into a relationship, her boyfriend joined her. One day in 2012, her neighbors saw her heading to the apartment with her boyfriend and two friends, a man and a woman. Once they were inside, […]
BERLIN — On the bus I now take to university in Berlin every day, I reach compulsively for my phone to check Facebook for updates from Egypt. I see that someone else has been arrested, this time a PhD student like me, who was also doing his fieldwork in Egypt. I get flustered and feel […]
GOTHENBURG — I’m often asked: “Where do Yemenis escape to?” Syrians largely flee to Lebanon and Turkey, but where do Yemenis go? “The majority cannot afford to flee,” I respond. “For those who can afford it, their destination always depends on which country hasn’t closed its borders to Yemenis.” Often, they head west, across the […]
Egypt’s Finance Minister says the country is actually benefiting from the Turkish crisis, but so-called ‘hot money’ can burn long-term prospects.
Is religion numbing Egyptians into acquiescence amid a number of merciless austerity measures?
Egypt’s ‘operating system,’ to borrow a tech-world term, needs replacing — and the military must relinquish power. It looks impossible today, but is inevitable in the long run.
The two-year-old housing project is clean and orderly, unlike the makeshift dwellings its thousands of relocated residents left behind. But it’s also isolated and dull.
RAFAH — It has been one month since the Rafah Border Crossing was opened, marking the longest window in which Gaza residents have been permitted to leave and reenter their besieged territory since 2013. What was initially purported to be a four-day opening was extended on May 17, when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced that […]
-Essay- CAIRO — As someone who fully supports the Palestinian cause, it is challenging to write an article about boycotting Israel for fear of being dragged into the particulars of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In a world that is very much manipulated by biased media, it is hard to resist the urge to first rebut Israel’s […]
CAIRO — In the year of Mohamed Salah’s rise to fame as one of the world’s best soccer players, his every move and success has been well documented across the globe, no more so than in his native Egypt. Here, the cult of personality around him runs much deeper, hitting at the heart of struggles […]
The Yarmouk Camp for Palestinian refugees in Damascus has been the site of a grueling “zero-hour” offensive since last month.
Low wages, government censorship and even arbitrary detentions. Practicing journalism has become an increasingly risky business in Egypt.
Beirut-based contemporary artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan uses sounds to shine a light, so to speak, on some of the darkest places on earth.
CAIRO — On a hot summer day in 2012, two smartly clad Filipina women arrived at the JW Marriott Hotel on Cairo’s ring road, toting handbags in the crooks of their arms as they had often observed their female employers doing. They lingered in the lobby for hours over small cups of coffee as they […]
Even the most anti-democratic election can reveal much about the system.
As the state’s efforts to secure churches become more centralized, church scouts play an increasingly pivotal role.
Set for a second term, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has evolved in tone and substance over the past four years: from soft-spoken insider to all-powerful leader.
CAIRO — Over the course of the past two months, since Ghad Party head Moussa Mostafa Moussa decided to run for president, the party and its relatively unknown candidate have found themselves suddenly wading into uncharted waters. Before he submitted his papers to the National Elections Authority on January 29, only minutes ahead of the […]
-Essay- CAIRO — I dropped her off at the first of many stops that make up the long journey back to her home, and I went back to mine. We both like “homemaking;” we hoard the smallest of things, collect candles, eat what we grow – both of us are lovers of life, even fighters […]
CAIRO — There are “forces of evil” that control Egypt’s media outlets, according to a statement issued last week by Public Prosecutor Nabil Sadek. To protect “national security” and prevent “spreading fear throughout society,” Sadek instructed public prosecutors and regulators to monitor media outlets and arrest anyone who disseminates or broadcasts false news. However, it […]
Basic health care services are hard to come by.
CAIRO — I was four years old when, while visiting a relative at his home, he urged me to eat some food. He told me playfully, as children are often told: “Eat, you donkey.” But, according to my mother, I refused. It bothered me that he was asking me to eat in this way. I […]
CAIRO — “Angry” was the way many described President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s improvised speech during the inauguration ceremony of the Zohr natural gas field on January 31. The president declared that the only way Egypt’s national security could be compromised was over his “dead body” and the “dead body of the military.” But with whom […]
Egypt’s Zohr gas field is the largest ever natural gas find in the Mediterranean. But reshaping the global energy balance of power must factor in other equations.
MINYA — Anba Makarios, a bishop in the governorate with Egypt’s highest number of violent sectarian incidents, does not employ the usual appeasing rhetoric of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox church. He is a man who makes his voice heard but avoids being seen, expressing himself through official statements and brief phone calls to television talk shows. […]
Egypt’s St. Catherine’s Monastery holds a treasure trove of ancient texts. But spectral imaging technology shows there’s even more there than meets the eye.
In villages in Minya, Christians and Muslims are confined to separate districts, a condition that feeds into sectarian dynamics.
BIR AL-ABED — “For 20 minutes, they kept firing at us. We couldn’t hear anything else because of the sounds of the gunfire. Everybody was running. Some were trying to escape and others were looking for their children — no one was spared, young or old. When the militants were done firing, one of them […]
-Essay- CAIRO — I had never really thought much about my position on the death penalty. After I watched the film The Life of David Gale, I started to ask myself how one might possibly work on an issue as difficult as this. I don’t remember if I watched the movie before or after going […]
In light of the devaluation of the Egyptian pound and increasingly difficult visa processes, more and more Egyptians are turning to domestic tourism. Yet, while tourists continue for the most part to visit South Sinai, there are still widespread security concerns over travel in the rest of the peninsula, particularly areas of North Sinai, where […]
An Egyptian writer shares her struggle with keeping bipolar disorder from invading everything she does and everyone she knows.
The restaurant ‘Garemt Akl’ (eating crime) aims to tap into Hunger Games morbidity and real-life curiosity about incarceration among Egyptians. But it is chillingly insensitive to real inmates and their families.
The absence of Christian players at the professional level can be traced to discrimination that begins young.
CAIRO — Just north of the Egyptian capital, a short ferryboat ride will take you to the southern tip of the Nile island of Warraq. It has patches of agricultural land and scattered houses and deeper in, the island resembles a typical Cairo neighborhood with tightly-stacked buildings and narrow streets packed with motorcycles and tuk-tuks. […]
CAIRO — “It’s a hobby, but it’s also more than that,” Ahmed Shaloufa says, as we climb the final ladder to his pigeon coop in the working-class district of Sayeda Zeinab. “It’s a passion.” Once inside the coop, the labyrinthine streets and megalith apartment blocks of the old city disappear from view. If you jump […]
CAIRO — The Egyptian government has blocked access to a total of 21 news and information websites since last Wednesday, including the original publisher of this article, Cairo-based Mada Masr. A security source cited by MENA, the country’s official state news agency, said that the blocked websites were disseminating “content that supports terrorism and extremism […]
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Delivering Amazon To The Middle East
CAIRO — Amazon announced this week that it had acquired Souq.com, the major e-commerce website in the Middle East, in a deal that has long been speculated over and whose final value came in at $650 million. While Amazon described both companies as “sharing the same DNA,” the question remains as to how the company’s […]
Restrictive and sometimes contradictory rules continue to govern issues of marriage and — heaven forbid — divorce for Egyptian Christians.