A Blog by the Editor of The Middle East Journal

Putting Middle Eastern Events in Cultural and Historical Context

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

A Roundup of Egypt Links

Thursday and Friday I was pretty much hors de combat with a virus of some sort, so I'm playing catch-up a bit. Here's a quick few links on Egypt:
  • Don't miss Joshua Stacher's "Can a Myth Rule a Nation?" at Foreign Affairs. Josh fully recognizes the apparent inevitability of General (excuse me, Field Marshal) Sisi, but he also sees the narrowness of the base and the shallowness of the program. When the man on the white horse dismounts, how does he solve Egypt's problems?
  •  Amid rumors that Mohamed Heikal may advise the Sisi campaign, Zeinobia unearths a piece by Heikal about an interview he had in 1967 with Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein about Abdel Hakim Amer and "political" Field Marshals, on the eve of Amer's disgrace and suicide: "The political Marshal is about the naked Emperor."
  • A little lighter: "Lexicon of a Revolution's Insults." (MadaMasr). "Insults" is the wrong word here, since some are compliments: more like the vocabulary or jargon of the Revolution, from the obvious Fallul to "lime-squeezers" (عاصري الليمون) for secularists who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood. (Really a citron more than a true lime, but let that go for now.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How could you overlook the candidacy of Sama Al Masry?

Michael Collins Dunn said...

Because that will need its own, separate post.