Since the end of March, the
Wall Street Journal's new
Middle East Real Time blog has written about
Turkey's "unstoppable" export boom in soap operas,
Saudi Arabia's "life after jihad" rehab program,
the persistence of obviously fraudulent bomb detectors across Iraq,
YouTube branding discussions among Syrian rebel factions,
a rising media star Sunni cleric in Lebanon,
a post-revolutionary Cairo arts festival, and attempts to
overcome conservative objections and change the Saudi Thursday-Friday weekend to match the rest of the business world. Previous non-paywalled
WSJ Real Time blogs include
Korea,
China,
Canada,
India,
Brussels,
Emerging Europe,
Japan.
posted by mediareport
on May 9, 2013 -
16 comments
I feel creatively emboldened to personally say something on the subjects that I am documenting. In terms of how it is produced, intellectually I am more excited than I have been in years. I am envisioning so many more possibilities for the work ... I feel for first time empowered on my own terms. We are calling our own shots and have created somewhat of our own institution.
An
interview with the six-woman Middle Eastern documentary photography collective
Rawiya, whose name means "female narrator" in Arabic.
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on Mar 13, 2013 -
2 comments
Since he became Egypt’s first democratically elected leader last June, Morsi has displayed both extraordinary political acumen and a tone-deafness that has plunged his country into deeper unrest. In November, he deftly helped negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, averting a bloody ground war in the Gaza Strip. Days later, he lost much of the goodwill he had earned by issuing an edict that awarded his office near-dictatorial powers.
Sometimes, Morsi can seem like the inspiring guardian of Egyptian democracy—such as when he courageously dismissed the military junta that had claimed the right to rule post–Hosni Mubarak Egypt. At other times, he can seem like a mouthpiece for the deeply conservative Muslim Brotherhood—declaring women unfit for high office and advocating for an international law to ban religious insults. (And sometimes he simply seems awkward, such as when he sat down for a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gilliard in September at the United Nations and proceeded, for several excruciating seconds, to publicly adjust his genitals.) So far, the only certainty about Morsi is that his ultimate intentions remain unknown. -
The New Republic, Understanding Mohamed Morsi: His journey from farm boy to most powerful man in the Middle East.
posted by beisny
on Dec 12, 2012 -
19 comments
After
a year without Mubarak, Egypt is about to get a much longer reprieve: the 84-year-old former president has been
sentenced to life in prison for his role in the deaths of protestors during last year's popular uprising. The former Interior Minister—though not his aides—will also be cooling his heels in a Cairo jail. The effects of this news on
national elections, with runoffs to be held in just a few weeks, remains to be seen.
posted by whitewall
on Jun 2, 2012 -
10 comments
78 78s - In Search Of Lost Time - is a streaming mix of beautiful 78s from around the world, collected and curated by Ian Nagoski. "I started sifting through boxes of junky old 78s that no one else wanted about 15 years ago, and almost right away, I made a rule: Anything that wasn't in English, buy it."
[more inside]
posted by carter
on Jan 29, 2012 -
15 comments
Egyptian army officer's diary of military life in a revolution --
It's ridiculous; at the height of the unrest reserve officer salaries doubled and everyone was getting huge bonuses all the time [...] Most full-time officers didn't really care what was happening politically on the streets, they were just happy with the extra money. Occasionally though you'd hear guilty jokes about how we were the only people who were benefiting from the revolution and the Egyptian people had been screwed over.
posted by philip-random
on Dec 28, 2011 -
7 comments
Libyan Desert Glass is strewn over an area of hundreds of square kilometers in the Great Sand Sea, a region desolate even by the high standards of the Sahara. As
one account of a recent trip to acquire Libyan Desert Glass puts it: "Out there, death sits on your shoulder like a vulture." While some would have you believe that Libyan Desert Glass is
evidence of ancient atomic warfare, it is probably evidence of a
massive meteorite or comet explosion nearly thirty million years ago, similar to Tunguska, but much bigger. The stone age Aterian peoples made
tools from it, but the remoteness and inhospitality of the Great Sand Sea has ensured that until recent times it has mostly been undisturbed. However, a
breast ornament buried in Tutankhamen's tomb has a scarab made from Libyan Desert Glass, the only piece made of the material to have been found by Egyptologists, and
how Tutankhamen's jewelers acquired it has remained a mystery. Until
now.
[Previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 8, 2011 -
38 comments
Protesters vs. Supreme Council of Armed Forces Tahrir Square: "For five straight days, nearly 120 continuous hours, thousands of protesters, most of them young men and women, did battle with security forces. Police used live ammunition, rubber bullets, shotgun cartridges, and an astonishing amount of
tear gas. Protesters fought back mostly with rocks and sometimes Molotov cocktails."
[more inside]
posted by jcrcarter
on Nov 29, 2011 -
39 comments
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of
film clips by Holmes and his associate,
André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at
Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926,
Lake Michigan in 20s,
Cairo in 1932 and
the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones.
[Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 26, 2011 -
5 comments
Mohamed Elshahed
writes in Jadaliyya about the many problems with the museums of Egypt, including their conflation of "Egyptian history" with "ancient Egypt", their tendency to address themselves to tourists rather than Egyptians, their recent domination by the influence Zahi Hawass (who has
resigned as Minister of Antiquities for the second time in five months, after having first left his post in March over
the looting of archaeological sites during the recent uprising), their poor organisation and shadowy finances and, not least, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities' use as a torture site during the protests in Tahrir Square.
posted by Dim Siawns
on Jul 20, 2011 -
12 comments
Tahrir Documents is an ongoing effort to archive, translate, and make available printed matter from the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath. We are not affiliated with the papers’ authors nor with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise. [more inside]
posted by jng
on Mar 28, 2011 -
6 comments
'Volcano of Rage.' Arab rulers had grown too isolated, too inflated with pretense and hypocrisy, and too complacently confident in the power of their police. Their overwhelmingly youthful populations suffered perpetual humiliation at the hands of government officials, faced dim work prospects, and had little means of influencing politics. They felt, in the famous words of the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous, that they were "sentenced to hope." More sophisticated and exposed to the world than the generation that ruled them, they had lost faith in the whole patriarchal construct that seemed to hem in their lives. Max Rodenbeck writes about the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments.
posted by russilwvong
on Feb 25, 2011 -
8 comments
Egypt's women face growing sexual harassment. 'Some women in Egypt say they suffer catcalls, groping and other sexual harassment daily. For a time it seemed the Tahrir Square protests might point to progress, but the attack on TV reporter Lara Logan and others showed otherwise.' 'In 2008 the
Egyptian Center for Women's Rights, a nongovernmental group that campaigns against such abuse group polled 2,020 Egyptians and 109 non-Egyptian women. The results:
83% of Egyptian women and 98% of foreign women surveyed said they had suffered sexual harassment. About half the women said they were harassed every day. The research showed that more than two-thirds of the women reporting abuse wore traditional Muslim head scarves or robes. Some even wore a flowing body-length black burka, with veil and gloves. Fewer than a third of the women wore Western attire.'
[more inside]
posted by VikingSword
on Feb 22, 2011 -
64 comments
What if the egyptian protesters were democrats? "In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people."
posted by Duug
on Feb 21, 2011 -
106 comments
How to Hack the Dictatorship. "Gene Sharp is an American intellectual whose ideas can be fatal to the world's despots. For decades, Mr. Sharp's practical
writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt." His fame is
spreading.
posted by storybored
on Feb 17, 2011 -
21 comments
"Sometimes the hardest part of a story is getting there. Sometimes it is getting around. Sometimes it is obstructive intelligence agencies and soldiers. Sometimes it is lawlessness, sometimes overattentive law enforcement. Sometimes it is lack of transport, poor communications, power blackouts, accreditation difficulties or a hostile local population." In Cairo it's been all of the above. Stephen Farrell learns to pack a smaller camera kit:
New York Times lens blog
posted by Mister Bijou
on Feb 9, 2011 -
3 comments
