Issandr El Amrani
Opinion columnist
Issandr El Amrani is a writer on Middle Eastern affairs. He blogs at www.arabist.net. His column appears every Tuesday.
Contributions
Opinion articles
Back in 2004, a year after the US invasion of Iraq, accounts and photographs of murder, rape and torture at Abu Ghraib prison by American forces and private contractors sent a shudder throughout the world. The scandal revealed that not only were US...
There’s an unusually virulent strand of political surrealism surging through Egypt at the moment. I stress “unusually” because there is always some degree of surrealism to the politics of most countries, and especially those like...
It’s been instructive to watch how China has reacted to the Nobel Committee’s decision to award Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo with its Peace Prize. Xiaobo is an academic, a public intellectual and an activist who backed a 2008 call for...
Political openings in Egypt over the last 30 years have come in waves. Swelling and then retreating, they have had little permanence. Periods of limited liberalization have often been followed by a tightening of the noose. Showing lenience, even...
I have a soft spot for contrarians. There is something endearing about people who take a perverse pleasure in going against the grain: they are necessary, not least because they challenge the rest of us to revisit ideas we hold as gospel truths and...
A few weeks ago I wrote that the current crisis over Park51 (also known as Cordoba House, and to its detractors, the “Ground Zero Mosque”) is America’s Danish cartoon crisis. I meant that in the sense that a wide segment of public...
After a short vacation last week spent blissfully disconnected from the internet, I logged on again this week to find a series of dumbfounding news from around the world.
Barack Obama was hosting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that no one believes...
I am spending this Ramadan outside of Egypt, in cooler climes. I suppose I should be grateful to have avoided both the blistering August heat and the power cuts that have plagued the country in the last few weeks.
For the first time in about 30...
How strange Egyptian politics are becoming. The launch of a “popular campaign” in the last few weeks to encourage Gamal Mubarak to run for presidency appears to have begun the presidential succession process in earnest, after years of...
Over a year ago, when US President Barack Obama addressed the Muslim world from Cairo, the response from the region was generally optimistic. Many appreciated the American president’s gesture of respect towards Islam, as well as his...