Lina Attalah
Chief Editor
Lina studied journalism at the American University in Cairo. Before joining Al-Masry Al-Youm English Edition, she wrote for Reuters, Cairo Times, the Daily Star, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. In 2005, she worked as radio producer and campaign coordinator with the BBC World Service Trust in Darfur, Sudan. She also worked as project manager for a number of research-based projects with multi-media outputs around the themes of space, mobility, and intellectual history. Lina is particularly drawn to border areas, where human geography issues of conflict and desire are rampant.
Contributions
News
In the late summer of 2002, at a small office of the ground floor of what is today the exhibition space of the Townhouse gallery, a group of artists, curators and volunteers were working around the clock. Some were debating the translation of...
“Of the martyrs of the revolution we lost before we even thought of a revolution,” wrote a tweep on her timeline the evening of 30 October. She specifically mentioned a woman who died in the village of Sarando in 2005, during a police...
The third day of Eid sees the usual holiday headlines about the hajj pilgrimage, sexual harassment cases in the festive streets of Egypt and a just a dash of politics.
But when politics is right into your court, you might as well see the mix. The...
RAFAH — On a gloomy Saturday at dusk, Magdi Sayed and his wife load carpets and electrical appliances from their shop into a truck. As they move slowly, the vanquished family displays a visible bitterness, being forced into packing their whole...
ARISH — As President Mohamed Morsy met with community leaders in the capital of North Sinai, residents of the neighborhood where the meeting was held congregated after they were prevented by security from joining the meet-up. Many of them...
Walking into Syria after an inconspicuous crossing, I met a smiling Abu Tamim waiting past the border. On the way back to his village, we travel through a landscape of destruction and deserted streets in the hinterlands of Aleppo. Then, Abu Tamim...
It takes all sorts to make a revolution, even just to win a war. The four fighters of the Free Syrian Army profiled here each have their own stories, and their own hopes for the future. They worry, variously, about their children, about the...
Yasser al-Najjar is a member of the Syrian National Council, and also part of the Free Syrian Army. When he is not in Syria coordinating between different battalions, he is a nomad between Egypt, Turkey and Qatar, raising support for the Syrian...
As protests erupted in the vicinity of the US Embassy in Cairo last week over an anti-Islam film, Egypt Independent had reporters on the ground every day. Their assignment was to come back at the end of the day and write an account of what they saw...
The same Eid celebrations, sermons and accidents make up the headlines on Egypt's dailys' front pages this morning. Where the newspapers differ greatly, is in their approach of covering these events.
For the Muslim Brotherhood’s...
Opinion articles
I don’t expect the state to be creative, because power is an end in many ways, and only a threat to power is conducive to the state going outside of its comfort zone.
I don’t expect the state to be creative, because creativity is put...
I spent days grappling with the difficulty of identifying ways of remembering 25 January — and we’re only down to the second anniversary. Every possible story seems to have been told and retold. Barracks have been cast on both...
During the painful Ettehadiya battle earlier this month between Brotherhood supporters and youthful opposition, the violence was not just physical. The scene was also a battlefield of chants. We chanted, “horriya” (freedom). They...
Bashing the Egyptian state for its utter failure in Sinai is no longer news. But some microcosmic incidents still illustrate the state’s impotence in dealing with the tumultuous border area.
Indeed, Sinai can serve as a laboratory in which one...
Amid Egypt's troubled transition, news from Sinai is emerging again, albeit in its old familiar form. Lawlessness is the story of the arid peninsula, which is home to an intricate set of historic, political, social and economic conditions that...
I was recently sipping a cup of tea in Café Riche, Downtown Cairo’s 100-year-old café. I sat next to one of its windows, fenced with interlocking iron wires to close it off from the hurling sounds of the busy heart of town. As I was gazing at the...
