This week, Maikel Nabil will have been on hunger strike for more than 80 days. Nabil, a blogger and activist who achieved the uncertain distinction of becoming the first blogger convicted under Egypt’s new military junta, is starving himself in protest at his sentencing by military tribunal. In April, Nabil was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on charges of insulting the army. Now, he refuses to appear before a court that he and many others consider intrinsically unjust and lacking even the basic elements of a fair trial. In a recent blog post from prison, Nabil wrote: ‘I am a civilian person, I refuse to be tried before a military judicature or any other exceptional judicature, even any judicature lacking independence.’ In October, Nabil was transferred to Abbassiyah mental hospital, allegedly to ‘check his mental capacity’. Thus the Military Council displayed tactics not seen since Nasser’s era – locking up dissidents in mental hospitals on the pretence of concern for their health. Dr. Basma Abdelaziz, a psychiatrist who issued a statement on behalf of the General Medical Secretariat denouncing the treatment of Nabil, is now facing investigation.

In another prison, in another part of Cairo, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has just had his ‘emergency’ detention order renewed, keeping him in prison for another fifteen days. Outside, friends, supporters, and family, including his heavily pregnant wife, campaign for his freedom. Abd el-Fattah is one of Egypt’s most prominent activists and this is not his first time behind bars; a recent letter, smuggled out from prison, eloquently describes his ‘return to Mubarak’s jails’, alluding to his previous imprisonment under Hosny Mubarak: ‘The memories come back to me, all the details of imprisonment; the skills of sleeping on the floor, nine men in a six-by-12-foot (two-by-four-metre) cell, the songs of prison, the conversations.’ The lack of fair trials is one of the many continuities between the former dictatorship and the current junta. The military tribunals in particular have become a major focus of campaigning by activists who see little change since the ‘revolution’ of the 25th January. According to the group No Military Trials for Civilians, 12,000 have been subjected to military trials since the junta took over in January, of which over 8,000 have been sentenced, 8 of which to death. So much for ‘the people and the army with one hand’. These are stories of families torn apart, futures ruined, children left without parents, by a body which claims to be the ‘defender of the revolution’.

The military tribunal system lacks justice, transparency, and fairness. Military trials are composed of military officers, not judges – as Maikel Nabil wrote recently, ‘you are an officer, not a judge no matter what names, titles or descriptions you were called.’ There is no right of appeal, except to a military Court of Cassation, but that too is made up of army officers. Defendants in military tribunals have a very short time to prepare their defence, without the chance to examine evidence and prepare witnesses, and their defence lawyer is often appointed for them – sometimes he, too, is an army officer. Military tribunals can reach a decision without consulting expert witnesses or forensic evidence. Leaving aside the systematic problems of the military trials, it must be borne in mind that the army itself stands accused of killing and injuring protesters in several incidents since the uprising, most notoriously the Maspero massacre of the 9th October. The fundamental injustice of this is clear in Abd el-Fattah’s case. Accused of incitement, assault, and vandalism in connection with Maspero, he is being tried by the very institution which all evidence suggests mowed down demonstrators with armed personnel carriers and killed them with live fire.

In campaigning against military trials, rights groups and activists face uncertainty in how far they can push the army. Under Egypt’s new military regime, the red lines are not yet clear, and criticising the junta carries with it a certain amount of risk. Nevertheless, the campaign is gaining momentum and support from within Egypt and internationally. Legal and human rights groups such as the one I work for, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, have been closely monitoring cases, sending lawyers to attend hearings and advocating for an end to such trials. The group No Military Trials for Civilians has been putting constant pressure on the military junta, including organising international solidarity demonstrations in alliance with the Occupy movement. On the 12th November, people in 23 cities worldwide, including London, New York, Budapest, Oakland, and Montreal took part in an international day of solidarity to protest military trials in Egypt and call for an end to international aid to the military junta (the Egyptian regime is the second biggest recipient of US aid, after only Israel).

Military trials – the court-marshalling of civilians – are contrary not just to the spirit of the ongoing Egyptian revolution but also contrary to fundamental human rights, including the right to a fair trial. They are clear evidence, as if more were needed, of the Egyptian military council’s lack of commitment to the rights and dignity of its people. Nabil, Abd El Fattah, and all other prisoners must be freed – but more than that, what is needed is an end to the injustice of the military trials which put them behind bars in the first place.

The following article is heavily indebted to Khaled Fahmy’s 1999 article in Die Welt des Islams, ‘The Police and the People in 19th Century Egypt’. If you have JSTOR access you should look it up, it’s edutaining. 

If you were a dishonest market trader in early 19th-century Egypt, you would have good reason to fear the muhtasib, or market inspector. In 1817 Mehmed Ali was reportedly so fed up with the ‘rabble of Cairo’ that he appointed a new muhtasib, who was not shy of handing down harsh and frequently spectacular punishments. Fahmy tells us that kunafa (a kind of vermicelli-based pastry) merchants found to be cheating on prices were forced to sit on their own kunafa pans while still on fire; a counterfeiter of currency was hung from Bab Zuweila with a coin hanging from his nose; and the muhtasib himself slit the noses of butchers caught selling meat at prices higher than those set by Muhammad Ali’s government.

Drawing heavily on Foucauldian theory, Fahmy goes on to outline the limitations of the body as a locus of punishment. These kind of ‘spectacular’ punishments, in which the ravaged body was made the place of retribution and then held up as a physical deterrent to others, were gradually superseded by a more insidious and subtle concept of justice in which the abstract ideal of the Law was the deterrent, rather than the mangled and mutilated bodies of criminals. After all, the body can only withstand so much pain, and the crowd who observe the punishment can only be so big, and thus the spectacle has its limits. The rulers of Egypt, therefore, ‘targeted…the minds of the populace and not their gazes.’

In 1878 a cook named Khayr accused a woman named Zarifa of stealing 1,195 piasters from him. The way in which the case was dealt with shows the effects of this shift, from a system based on physical punishment to one based on abstract ideas of the Law and the inevitable correlation between crime and punishment (which was, increasingly, imprisonment rather than the kinds of physical punishment seen at the beginning of the century). Drawing on material from the National Archives in Cairo – and, as someone who has only just begun to navigate said institution, I credit his persistence – Fahmy tells the story of what happened to Zarifa. On the basis of witness testimony, the Cairo Police Commissioner found her guilty, and sent the case to the courts. After passing through several courts and losing her appeal, Zarifa was sent to the Iplikhane, a textile factory in Bulaq which was used as a women’s prison.

The case is a good example of how a ‘detailed and stratified system of justice’ had developed in Egypt by the latter half of the 19th century. This was based on a close relationship between a complex and sophisticated legal system incorporating shari’a, European, and Ottoman law, and an equally sophisticated police force which played a key role in preventing crime, investigating cases, and bringing them to court, in what Fahmy describes as an early form of the public prosecutor’s office. The police had a wide array of techniques and forces at their disposal. A large network of spies, informants, and other unofficial agents played a key role in solving crimes. The new science of forensic medicine (every police station had to have several doctors on staff, including a female doctor), and the new institution of criminal records (some going back 15 years) also made a big difference to the process of detecting crimes and bringing them to court.

In 1858 a woman called Mahbuba was beaten to death in a village in Upper Egypt by the sheikh of the local village, Sheikh Sha’rawi. Mahbuba’s mother and brother went to both the local qadi (representing the shari’a tradition) and the local police station (representing siyasa law) to accuse Sha’rawi of murder. They seem to have understood the importance of forensic medicine, for they were adamant that Mahbuba should have an autopsy – going so far as to put her body on a camel and travel to the nearest town so that they could find a doctor. After the local shari’a court dismissed the case, the local siyasa tribunal found Sha’rawi guilty and sentenced him to five years imprisonment in Alexandria.

These changes in the police force also represented a fundamental change in the relationship between state and subject. The creation of an efficient police state necessarily implied a wider diffusion of power and a greater intrusion into people’s lives. Forensic medicine, criminal records, and networks of informants were effective precisely because they were mechanisms of state control over the bodies of its populace; but more significantly the ideas of law and justice represented by the new police force were mechanisms of control over their minds.

Thus the site of control and punishment shifted during the 19th century, and it remains the same today. Whatever the brutalities of the Egyptian police force today, they happen behind closed doors, only revealed by clandestine YouTube footage or snatched camera-phone pictures. The Egyptian security services do not go in for the spectacular, as indeed you would expect from a modern police state. The minds of the populace are still targeted, not their gaze. The serried ranks of anonymous policemen, their inexplicable powers of arrest and referral to military tribunal, the very obscurity and lack of accountability of the Ministry of the Interior; it is a faceless, vicious bureaucracy which ravages the mind as much as Mehmed Ali’s muhtasib ravaged the bodies of his unfortunate victims.

Yet, of course, the body is still the locus of punishment. From a recent EIPR press release: ’The family of the deceased had said that their son was being beaten and tortured over last Tuesday and Wednesday. Essam had told them over the telephone that an officer named ‘Nour’ had inserted water hoses into his mouth and anus and forced him to drink water mixed with washing powder, on suspicion that he had ingested a narcotic substance.’ Essam Atta died two days later. The subtleties of the Egyptian state’s abstraction of punishment, its removal from the public to the private and from the spectacular to the secretive, does not mean that bodies are not still suffering and dying.

What is needed is a re-claiming of the body by the subject. We can put faces to names, these days; thus Khaled Said, Mina Daniel, Essam Atta, and detainees like Alaa Abd el-Fattah adorn Cairo’s streets. The people, in a small way, claim back the bodies which have been appropriated by the state. Hence also the public funerals in Tahrir Square for Atta and Daniel, in which the people literally reclaimed the bodies for their own. The pictures and footage of victims of Maspero, and of every other victim of state brutality in Egypt, are no doubt ghoulish and shocking, but they serve a vital purpose. For we need to re-embody punishment, to make it absolutely clear that this state apparatus operating behind closed doors is, on the most visceral and immediate level, killing people in horrific ways. Mahbuba’s story, in which her family were determined to get an autopsy so that justice could be served, in reminiscent of the fight to secure autopsies for the victims of Maspero. The same struggle for control is still going on and will go on as long as the state believes it has this inviolable right over its subject’s bodies. In stories of torture and detention, the body is the site of truth. Reclaiming it means reclaiming that truth.

Fahmy’s article traces the expansion of police control and its correlation, the expansion of state control. Yet he also argues for a re-reading of the 19th century state to make room for the agency of the people: ‘The modern state lends itself to manipulation and control at the same time as it seeks to monitor and control its population, and its numerous sites of power where the population were supposed to be counted, registered, monitored and controlled, proved to be the sites where the very diffuse power of the state was contested and challenged.’ The terrain of the body is where this contest will be fought. Reclaiming the physical bodies the state has abstracted, and thus re-embodying punishment, is the first step of that contest.

A much less publicised event than this latest cyber attack was the interruption of international landline, mobile phone and internet connection in the Gaza Strip this past August which occurred when an Israeli military bulldozer digging near the Nahal Oz checkpoint severed one of the fibre-optic lines connecting Gaza to the rest of the world. The ability to shutdown telecommunications whether by dictatorial regimes – as we witnessed in Egypt in January 2011 – or occupying regimes, is incumbent on an infrastructure being managed and controlled in particular ways. In other words, the establishment, building, and ownership of a communications infrastructure is in and of itself a deeply political decision…

Finally, what the events of last week also highlight is not ‘hacking’. Hacking in its historical roots refers to the breaking into computers, accessing administrative controls and other similar practices, under the ideological-political umbrella of the liberalist ideals of freedom of speech, the pursuit of technological beauty, of the desire to ‘free’ and keep code ‘open’. The shutdown of the Palestinian network is instead reflective of an act of cyber terrorism – whose intent of undermining the security of a digital network is explicitly malicious and destructive. In the case of Palestine, the mal-intent was not simply the purposeful target of the digital network, but the right to sovereignty as well.’

Read the rest here.

‘We established our credibility with the Egyptian people through years of hard work resisting the dictatorship and addressing practices which violated human rights. Regardless of the military council and government’s position towards us, we will not participate in discussions which, ten months after the fall of Mubarak, begin to look less and less serious. It is out of question to discuss a constituent assembly to draft the constitution with the government and military council. Their prisons are packed with hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens. Their people have paid the price for a society which respects the rights and dignity of humans with the blood of their children. And members of this government and council continue to evade punishment for their crimes, falsehoods, and incitement against the Egyptian people.’

Read the whole thing, translated into English to the highest standards of unpaid professionalism, here. (Ignore the typo above, seriously. I need a better copy editor.)

In a now-notorious New York Times op-ed of the 1^st March, the columnist Thomas Friedman attempted to explain the Egyptian revolution as the result of several factors that included the Beijing Olympics, Google Maps, and the rape trial (now conviction) of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav. While Friedman’s article was a particularly egregious example of wild explanations for this year’s uprisings – and he was duly mocked far and wide on the internet, including one writer who suggested Friedman might like to include his own moustache as a potential revolutionary catalyst – it was symptomatic of a wider issue. This all came as something of a surprise, and we are still casting around for answers. Yet if we look at the history of the region, we can trace patterns of dissent and revolution stretching back past the creation of the modern Middle East.

Many metro stations in Cairo are named after famous Egyptian leaders, and a metro ride is a trip through the past century or more of the country’s history. Saad Zaghloul station, a ten-minute walk from Tahrir Square, is named for the man who came to power through a mass revolution in Egypt almost exactly 100 years ago, which ultimately led to the independence of Egypt from British rule. Looking at the TV images from Egypt of veiled women flashing the V-sign from atop tanks, or of demonstrators waving signs showing both the crescent and the cross, there are striking parallels in imagery between the 25^th January revolution and the 1919 revolution.

Unlike Nasser’s coup in 1952 or the earlier coup by Ahmed ‘Urabi in 1881 (both with their own metro stations, of course) the 1919 revolution was a mass popular uprising that involved a broad demographic. A New York Times article from 1919 reports ’800 natives dead in Egypt’s rising’ and tells us that they attacked British Government property as well as telegraph wires and train lines. Zaghloul became the first prime minister of Egypt, and while the 1919 constitutional experiment failed – the British still held huge influence over Zaghloul and the Egyptian King Farouq – the parallels with today are a vivid reminder of the history of revolution in Egypt. (Mubarak metro station, incidentally, was at one stage in February renamed ’25^th January Martyrs’ station by some enterprising young Egyptians armed with large stickers.)

Today’s Arab autocrats are aware of and have an uneasy relationship with their country’s revolutionary pasts. When Muammar Qadhafi became leader of Libya in 1969, he paid a visit to the tomb of Omar Mukhtar, which used to be situated in Benghazi, now the centre of the Libyan uprising. Mukhtar was a Libyan nationalist hero who led an eight year rebellion against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya in the early 20^th century until he was captured and executed in 1931. In putting down this rebellion, the Italian air force bombed civilians from the air, the first time this had been done in history, setting a precedent that today Qadhafi is following with with horrific results.

No sooner had Qadhafi visited Mukhtar’s tomb than he had it moved out into the depths of the Libyan desert where it is much harder to get to; yet he continued to exploit Mukhtar’s memory, attending a conference in Italy with his picture pinned to his chest and even bringing Mukhtar’s ageing son along. Mukhtar’s son, Muhammad Omar, has recently made statements in support of the Libyan rebels, who in turn have been observed chanting the slogan ‘We will win or die’, the chant of Mukhtar’s rebels in the 1920s.

This uneasy consciousness of the region’s revolutionary past shows the importance of the history of places like Libya and Egypt when considering today’s uprisings. Syria, for instance, has taken the world particularly by surprise, rising against one of the region’s most repressive regimes; yet less than a century ago a mass rebellion broke out against French rule which drove the French from Damascus. A Time magazine article from 1926 reads: ‘The French are policing and mopping up Syria but at a cost in gold and blood which France can ill afford.’ Souq Hamidiyah is a covered market in the old city of Damascus; if you go there today you can still see the bullet holes in the roof where the French strafed the city with gunfire from the air.

Some have argued that the key difference between today’s uprisings and those of the early 20^th century is that the latter were primarily directed against external imperial powers. It is true that the demand heard on Al Jazeera again and again is ‘isqaat an-nidhaam’, the downfall of the regime, and that those regimes are modern-day independent Arab rulers. Yet to claim that they are purely internal affairs is a convenient distortion that ignores the extent of modern-day imperialism in the Middle East.

Today’s imperialism is more insidious; it involves, for instance, $300 million of aid to the Yemeni autocrat Ali Abdullah Salih in 2010 so that he can fight Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on behalf of the US. It involves Barack Obama’s glaring silence over the Saudi-assisted suppression of protests in Bahrain. It is clear in the arms trade between Britain and Muammar Qadhafi, and in the billions of dollars of aid to former president Hosny Mubarak each year in exchange for, amongst other things, his cooperation in the blockade of Gaza, or former French foreign minister Michele Alliot-Marie’s visit to Tunisia and her offer to help Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to ‘quell’ the rebellion, or the recent statement by Hilary Clinton in which she described Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as a ‘reformer’.

Any hint of a non-Western power trying to assert regional influence (apart from key allies of the West, such as Saudi Arabia or Israel) is deeply disquieting to today’s imperialists, who have ditched their pith helmets for Predator drones and military aid. When Turkey threatened to cut off relations with Israel following the attack on the Gaza flotilla in May 2010, there was condemnation from the West for what they claimed was Turkey ‘turning east’, ‘creating an Islamist bloc’, or even ‘trying to recreate the Ottoman Empire’. Though Western powers are only currently directly occupying one Middle Eastern country (two, if you count Afghanistan), their influence in the region is far-reaching and deeply entrenched, and any hint of a change to the status quo is enough to send Western diplomats and politicians scrambling for their vaguely-worded statements on the need for ‘restraint’. The West’s support for autocratic Arab regimes means that this year’s uprisings are as anti-imperialist as Omar Mukhtar’s.

The Middle East has become intimately tied to the West through economic reform and restructuring, which itself cannot be discounted as a cause behind this year’s uprisings. Many countries have undergone structural adjustment programmes, following a neo-liberal economic model laid out by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In places like Egypt and Tunisia, this has led to a widening gap between rich and poor, a concentration of wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller elite, and a disintegration of mechanisms of support which helped the poorest in hard times. In Egypt, for example, which has been heralded as a success story of structural adjustment, GDP grew 4.6% in 2009 even as most of the world experienced a downturn in growth; yet poverty also increased from 20% to 23.4%. As industry was privatised in the 1990s, a handful of huge companies grew to dominate most sectors in Egypt, while working conditions and living standards deteriorated for the majority of Egyptians.

The global financial crisis worsened the impact of these reforms – Egypt is dependent on exports to Europe, demand for which fell during the downturn, and also depends on remittances from migrant workers in the Gulf, which shrank greatly during the financial crisis. Protests against rising commodity prices and for an increase in wages and workers’ rights have been common over the last decade, and this economic protest has played a role in the most recent unrest. Yet this year has not just been about the price of bread – it also came out of a long tradition of political activism and dissent.

Egypt, for instance, has been frequently portrayed as politically stagnant – the land of the Pharaohs, its ancient history invoked to characterise the dictatorships of today, the country ruled by Hosny Mubarak’s paternal, guiding hand or rod of iron, depending on which way you looked at it. Yet a few instances from the last decade of Egyptian political life give the lie to this. There’s the last time Tahrir Square was occupied, when protesters held it for ten hours in March 2003 in protest at the US invasion of Iraq. Or the thousands of protesters who took to the streets during the 2005 elections, protesting at the fraudulent election process and intimidation of voters. Or the massive uprising in Mahalla el-Kubra, an industrial town outside of Cairo, on April 6^th 2008, when police violently suppressed a planned strike and street protest (the April 6^th movement, who were prominent in organising the January 25^th revolution, were named after the date of the Mahalla rising).

In fact, the (very) modern history of protest in Egypt can be traced back to 2000 at least, when mass protests involving tens of thousands of people broke out in Cairo in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada. (Israel still remains a concern of Tahrir Square; during the revolution, demonstrators chanted ‘Leave, leave, you traitor [Mubarak], you sold your country to Israel’ and ‘Hosny Mubarak, you agent, you sold the gas and only the Nile is left’, referring to a gas deal between Egypt and Israel which has played a major part in the grievances of the Egyptian people.)

There is, in fact, and has been for some time a vibrant public political sphere in Egypt which has seen workers, opposition newspapers, human rights organisations, women, political parties, youth, Sinai bedu, bloggers, Islamists, secularists, Nobel-Prize winning former IAEA chiefs, university students, and even riot police (in a 1986 mutiny) challenge the prevailing political system for a long time and in a multitude of ways. A lot of these challenges have been small on the scale of world politics; some even had the audacity to take place before the advent of Facebook. (There was a strike in Mahalla el-Kubra in 1948, too; by the next day, newspapers were reporting on solidarity strikes in other industrial towns in Egypt. The Egyptian government, when cutting off the internet and mobile networks in January, should have known better.)

Perhaps surprisingly, some of these challenges have even been successful. For example: in 2001, workers at a hospital in Suez held a sit-in, protesting the suspension of their entitlement pay. After the intervention of state security and local officials, the pay was reinstated and the director of the hospital fired. Suez, too, was where workers in 1947 boycotted Dutch ships passing through the canal in solidarity with Indonesia’s struggle against colonialism. These are relatively small incidents in a long catalogue of similar small incidents; but put together, such things make up the society which on the 25^th January marched on Tahrir Square. When you look at this this way, the Beijing Olympics suddenly don’t seem as important. If we want to begin to understand the revolutions of today, we could start by looking at the revolutions of the past.

As a vignette, this story sums up quite succinctly the mixture of petty humiliations, bureaucratic obstructionism, and sporadic violence faced by the Copts as a matter of course in Egypt – to say nothing of the official complicity in all of this. These types of stories, while not uncommon and certainly not unnoticed, are not front page news in Egypt. I only knew the intricate details of Al-Marinab – the village in question – because I spent a day translating a detailed report on it, in a slightly bad mood as it was Armed Forces Day and I was supposed to have the day off work. At the end of the report, my colleague had written: ‘With the confrontation continuing, and demonstrations escalating…it is not unlikely that matters will flare up again.’

They did, and the next part of story was front page news. On the 9^th October, a demonstration against the Al-Marinab affair turned into nothing short of a massacre in the heart of Cairo. Outside Maspero, the Egyptian state television and radio building, the criminals in the army mowed down demonstrators with machine guns and crushed their skulls under armoured personnel carriers, while the criminals inside the building spouted poison on the airwaves. Sitting in my flat, I listened to an Egyptian state TV anchor reporting that Coptic demonstrators had seized weapons and turned them on troops, and urging ordinary Egyptians to go to Maspero and defend the army. I switched to Twitter and read that my boss was in the Coptic Hospital and had just personally counted 17 corpses, some without facial features or heads from being run over by APCs. In the most traumatic and horrifying event since the uprising in January, Egypt’s armed forces had done what they claimed they would never do, and killed their own people in the most brutal and indiscriminate of ways.

Al-Marinab is evidence that there is still a ‘sectarian’ problem in Egypt, to the extent that the religious majority in Egypt still imposes humiliating and oppressive conditions on the religious freedoms of the country’s minorities (not just Christians, but Shi’a, Ahmadis, Baha’is, and Jews as well). At their worst, the ever-present tensions erupt in incidents of horrific violence, such the Nag Hammadi massacre in 2010 or the Alexandria church bombing at the beginning of this year. The problem is perpetuated, exacerbated, and exploited by Egypt’s government and security forces; indeed, the Alexandria bombing is now widely believed to have been the work of the Egyptian security services themselves. The Copts who marched on Sunday, and the many Muslims and others who joined them, were demonstrating against a state which systematically and relentlessly discriminates against them and, worse, exploits prejudices and inter-religious tensions to make them feel like second-class citizens, aliens in their own country.

Maspero, however, was different. One of the most blood-boiling things that I read on Sunday night was one of the most trivial: a Facebook status posted by an acquaintance in Alexandria complaining that her planned ‘relaxing weekend’ in Cairo was now coinciding with ‘Muslim-Christian riots’. Leaving aside the sheer noxiousness of such a remark, the assumptions it makes about what happened on Sunday night are both ignorant and damaging. The events outside Maspero were not riots, but a massacre. They were not a crime committed by one religious group against another, but a crime committed by the state against its own citizens. There is a line which can, and should, be drawn between Marinab and Maspero. Yet to characterise this as the latest outbreak of sectarian violence in Egypt is to swallow hook, line, and sinker the excuses peddled by the generals themselves, who in an Orwellian press conference on Wednesday claimed that they had been drawn into clashes between Muslims and Christians and had never opened fire on anyone, despite all evidence to the contrary.

What happened at Maspero was more proof, as if any were ever needed, of the hollowness of the army’s pretensions towards being the ‘defenders of the revolution’. The more conciliatory argument says that SCAF are just inept; that they have little experience of policing demonstrations, much less running the country; that on Sunday they lost control of a volatile situation. The less conciliatory and far more accurate argument says that SCAF had ample time to prepare for Sunday’s march; that they deliberately chose to terrorise peaceful demonstrators; and that they must take full responsibility for the bloodshed that ensued. They are not the defenders of the revolution, but the protectors of the ancien régime. On Sunday they showed that they had inherited not just its authoritarianism and political stagnation, but its brutality, too.

You can read the report here. An English translation should be up soon. And here is an ONTV programme based on the report:

It features an interview with the sister of General Mohamed al-Batran, Chief of the Prison Authority’s Intelligence Unit, who was killed by prison guards inside al-Qatta prison on the 29th January.

There used to be a huge picture of al-Batran hanging up in the Tahrir Square sit-in. I first heard about the al-Batran story from a friend of mine, MS, who lives in Fayoum. We were walking past the poster one day and he told me that it was a general from his town and that he was a decent man who had been killed for trying to treat prisoners like human beings. I asked what happened and he told me the story of how al-Batran went to al-Qatta to talk to the prisoners and to try to calm unrest and that he was shot by other prison guards.

There is a large prison in Fayoum, innovatively named al-Fayoum prison, and MS also told me that during the revolution he used to see prisoners occasionally walking through the streets of the town, wrapped in blankets, lost and disoriented. Once, he said, he went up and talked to one of them. The prisoner told him that there was no security and he had escaped. He said he was from Fayoum but he had been in prison so long that he didn’t recognise the streets any more. He asked MS to tell him the way to the main street. Then he walked away, his blanket trailing along the floor behind him.

[1] The looters/rioters are not mindless. They wanted things and they went for exactly the things they wanted because that’s what the prevailing capitalist system has drilled into them from day one. All this stuff about ‘looters with blackberries can’t be that poor’, yes, ok, these people are not starving. However I would say the problem is not poverty but injustice (just like in Egypt – you often hear people saying that it is not being poor that bothers them but inequality, injustice, rampant corruption, etc.) The left and right are both judging them for what they chose to steal but are missing the central point that the fact they chose to steal trainers and TVs is in some ways a more savage indictment of our society than if they were starving families stealing bread or politically-motivated revolutionaries smashing up RBS. These people feel like they are not getting their due in modern Britain and see no other way than to ‘get paid’, i.e. go out and get their due for themselves when the opportunity arises. Note that their ‘due’ is material goods because that’s all we have been conditioned to aspire to.

 [2] Let’s stop the class snobbery about the rioters/looters as well, and let’s especially stop the racial tinge to this. There were university graduates out there stealing shit. Greed and opportunism is pretty universal. It’s become kind of a lefty canard to equate bankers and looters in a pointless ‘this is like that’ exercise but there is a grain of truth to it, which is to say that in general if human beings face the opportunity to enrich themselves for free then a certain proportion of them are always going to. (Apart from us socialists, we would never do such a thing.) It’s easy to condescend towards a group seen as an underclass (‘they left all the bookshops alone, didn’t they! chortle chortle!’) but the last I heard, Cormac McCarthy novels didn’t have much of a street value and all this is going to do in the long run is further perpetuate this immense gulf in understanding between Britain’s haves and have-nots. I don’t even know what to say about David Starkey and his arse-licking cheerleaders (‘right on, Dave! wield your truth sword!’) because the man is so obviously a big ol’ racist. This is not ‘black culture in excelsis’, it is aspirational-capitalist culture in excelsis.

[3] Obviously punish the looters. This stuff doesn’t even need to be said. If you catch them, put them on trial (a proper trial, not some half-asleep 24hr magistrate handing down wacky sentences for stealing some water), and then give them an appropriate punishment. |To be honest I can’t think of a crime more suitable for ‘community service’ afterwards. I’d like to see a scheme whereby rioters/looters are set to work cleaning up the homes and livelihoods they destroyed, ending with heartwarming scenes as small business owners and yoot’ embrace and promise to fight together to bring down Cameron’s government. But hey, I’m a dreamer.

 [4] This was not a working-class uprising. You can fiddle with semantics but any misty-eyed lefties seeking revolution in the leaping flames of Allied Carpets need to take a deep breath and calm down. However, although the riots were not political in form or tone, they quite evidently stemmed from political and economic roots. Gary Younge puts it quite well when he says that ‘ when a group of people join forces to flout both law and social convention, they are acting politically.’ A friend of mine here in Egypt also drew an interesting parallel, not with the revolution, but with the months preceding it which saw similar ‘mindless’ violence on the part of disaffected Coptic youth. The socioeconomic ills of Britain have been so well rehearsed in the past few weeks, most notably and movingly by Camilla Batmanghelidjh, so I won’t bother to go through them again here. Comparing London to Cairo at the moment is another pointless exercise in broad-brushstroke ‘this is like this’ analysis. Thomas Friedman is probably penning the hand-wringing article at this very moment, not neglecting to mention the fact that opposition to Israel was nowhere to be seen on the streets of either city. Yes, Egyptians, you didn’t steal trainers from the Adidas on Talaat Harb, well done, and your smug tweets to that effect are kind of justified. Yet both January 25^th and whatever we’re calling this stuff in England (I suggest the ‘Midsummer Commotion’) came from injustice and inequality.

 [5] Warning: personal recollections. Skip if you dislike political analysis based on anecdote. Like many people, I grew up in London. Specifically, I grew up in Tottenham and I know that former classmates or people they are connected to have been involved in these events, mainly through their charming habit of posting trophy pictures on Facebook. I was privileged enough to make growing up in Tottenham safe, comfortable and even fun. I was also the kind of dreamy, disconnected kid who preferred books to human company and thus wasn’t at the cutting edge of documenting social inequality. However, watching what has happened to my home town has brought back a few specific memories. I remember at primary school a friend of mine, A., was excluded for carrying a knife to school. Afterwards he spent his days circling the neighbourhood on his bike, riding up and down outside the school gates taunting us because we were still in school whereas he was free. We all thought he was cool as fuck and how much we wanted to get the hell out too. There’s nothing abnormal about kids wanting to skip school but there is something wrong when kids feel so little connection to the state institutions that are allegedly trying to help them that they do not give a shit enough to bring a knife to school. (This is like aged 10, by the way.) The point of all this is: this generation, my generation, have felt alienated and fobbed off by the state for a long time. Middle-class kids of my age are only just starting to wake up to the fact that the state doesn’t give much of a shit about them, either.

[6] The aftermath of this has been equally depressing as the riots themselves. It’s basically been an excuse for the right to start waving their authoritarian phalluses around and bleating about law and order. Some of the measures taken have been repugnant, I’m looking at you, Wandsworth Council. As Gary Younge wrote (man that was a good article) the riots may have not been particularly wise, politically speaking. But at the least it has shoved problems in our face which now cannot be ignored. Hopefully Cameron’s shiny US gang experts (having come to power thinking he was in the West Wing, our Dear Leader now thinks he’s in the Wire) will lay down some Real Talk on the folly of leaving disaffected youth to stew in their own disaffectedness. Hopefully Ed Miliband will say something inspirational and statesman-like, thereby sealing the fate of the Conservative government. (Ha! Sorry, I think I fell asleep there for a second.)

Hopefully the family of Mark Duggan will receive justice, and the families of Haroon Jahan, Shazad Ali, and Abdul Musavir, and all those who lost their homes and businesses.

Hopefully so will everyone who is fucked over by the state in Britain – a group which, like it or not, includes many of those hoodie-wearing petrol-bomb-chucking plasma-TV-looting low-lives you saw on your TV screens and who are not a million miles away from you or your kids, literally or metaphorically.

*not my joke, unfortunately.

‘If someone should say to you, this is politics, say: This is Islam, and we do not recognise such divisions.’ (Hasan al-Banna, ‘Between Yesterday and Today’)

I opened the window this morning and looked out onto Hoda Shaarawy to see four girls, about ten years old, holding an Egyptian flag and chanting Islamiyya, islamiyya, masr dawla islamiyya as passers-by stopped to film them on camera phones. Outside the mosque, clusters of dudes lay around on green mats in the shade. Snowdrifts of white robes had mounted in the side streets. The great beard march was beginning! AMW came out on the balcony beside me. ‘They’re everywhere,’ he said, in hushed tones.

I put on my least seductive outfit, ending up looking vaguely Amish, and we set off to talk to some Islamismists. As we headed down Talaat Harb, we played ‘scariest Salafi’. AMW won with a guy wearing a tea towel on his head. (That’s not racist, you know. He was actually wearing a tea towel. Just a practical attitude to sun protection.) The street was full of box fresh white robes and sensible sandals. It was a bit like a mirror image of this. ‘I’M HERE…TO PROTEST.’ Somewhere, Thomas Friedman was weeping at the sight of Muslims doing something he’d rather they didn’t. The crowd was incredibly thick in Tahrir Square and I could feel rivers of sweat running down my back and legs. There were many of those awkward moments when a Salafi jostled me in a crowd thinking I was a man (short back and sides, you see) before realising I’m a woman and pulling away as if they’d just accidentally touched a hot plate. There were chants that I hadn’t heard for a long time. The people and the army with one hand? So Jan25, guys.

I wondered where all the people in the tent city had gone. The central reservation was surrounded by a phalanx of bearded guys and there was no way of getting in to see what was left. I heard that secularists were still running the stage by the Mogamma but it was impossible to push through the crowd to see. Later I read that most of the groups making up the coalition for the 29th July had pulled out. The day was set for a particularly obnoxious show of strength by Egypt’s least lovable political grouping. (Although I guess ex-NDPians could give them a run for their money.) (I should point out, to any of you who are foolish enough to take this blog as your main source on Egyptian politics, that Tahrir Square has been occupied for the past couple of weeks by a large and shifting group of people from many different political parties or groups. The character of it has been largely secular. This was a pretty unusual display of Islamist force. This probably puts it best.)

AMW and I got talking to a man carrying a picture of the Dome of the Rock. This turned out to be a bad idea as he was an egregious example of what Jerry Seinfeld would call a close talker. AMW was accosted by some guys in white robes while I was left to dodge spittle as Dome of the Rock barracked me about Western support for Israel. I rehashed the usual arguments about the difference between government policy and personal opinion. He made the eminently fair point that we voted these cretins into office. I jokingly said that maybe the solution was no government at all and earned myself a slightly cold stare. A man standing next to him told me that he appreciated my support for the Palestinians. (About time someone gave me the recognition I deserve! Jesus! I’ve been sweating it out supporting the Palestinians for years without a word of thanks from an Arab!) He then proceeded to list for me the achievements of Arab civilisation and the ways in which it had contributed to science, literature, art, undsoweiter. He looked at me somewhat expectantly. I was conscious of a large sweat patch developing on my stomach. ‘Um, thanks,’ I said.

A young guy in a white t-shirt started telling me the life story of Muhammad. His accent was almost impenetrable and the only word I could work out was rusuul (messenger) which obviously came up a lot. I’m pretty sure it was the life story of Muhammad but couldn’t really be sure. Whatever he was saying, he really, really wanted me to take it in. Dome of the Rock kept interrupting but White T-shirt would brush him aside and fix me with his burning gaze, say Shouf ya ukhti, and carry on with his interminable tale. He then told me that every ruler in the history of Islam has been both political and religious. I asked him what the difference between politics and religion was. There is no difference, he said. Dome of the Rock at this point converted his sign into a makeshift awning to shade me and my rapidly growing crowd of interlocutors. A smartly-dressed young duktuur type asked if I had any questions for them. I asked him what their aims were. He told me that they wanted a civil state but with Islamic ‘concepts’ (mafahiim). I asked him to clarify and he said that a civil state meant civilian rule, democracy, a parliament, the rule of law, but based on Islamic concepts such as justice, social equality, gender equality. I gave up at that point and went to grab a guava juice. As we left we got talking to a man who named us Mohamed and Fatima and asked AMW for my hand in marriage. ‘My sister is far too young for you,’ said AMW with convincing disapproval and we turned on our heel towards the juice shop on Midan Falaki. ‘Good bye Fatima,’ said the man.

Cruising back towards Talaat Harb, we spotted a bunch of Hizb al-Noor (recently formed Salafi party) activists sitting in the ahwa at the foot of our apartment building and sat down to talk to them for a bit. They gave us the same line: a civil state with Islamic ‘concepts’. They also told us that the Qur’an comes down hard on litterers. One of them asked us if Britain had a constitution. We decided that ‘it’s more of a mutually understood, unwritten constitution, based on years of legal precedent’ was a bit beyond our language skillz so nodded assent. He then told us that everything in our constitution was borrowed from Islam. There wasn’t really a reply to that. Their rhetoric was a lot like the early Muslim Brotherhood: studious denials of any ‘political’ aims, and an assertion of total political and financial independence. The Egyptian Salafis remind me a lot of the Tea Party movement, in some ways. The idea that you can somehow affect politics by determinedly existing outside it, and the constant assertion that this is not politics, what we are doing, this is not politics.

It felt like a show of muscle. Supporters were bussed in from around the country and filled the square until any dissenting voice or even appearance was pushed out. The space was starkly coded in white and black, but mainly white, because there were very few women around. It was a marked contrast to the cooperation between groups which has been ongoing and developing for months: this wholesale, aggressive assertion of one point of view. Cooperation between different groups in Tahrir has not always been harmonious, by any means, but it has at least been attempted. But this was different: this was saying, look at us, look how powerful we can be, and be afraid.

Living so close to Tahrir brings with it the feeling of verges and edges. The liminal public space (and shit). Every building around the square seems to face inwards like plants growing towards the light. Last night a couple of hundred people marched past my street, up Talaat Harb, and it was like some kind of fourth wall being breached. Sometimes, like yesterday evening at about 6pm, I find myself hearing events in the square and simultaneously following them on Twitter in my flat. It makes me think of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation about becoming a gigantic eyeball. (Or something like that.) Piecing together sensory perception is disconcerting. Was that a cheer from a football match or a roar as a fight breaks out in the middle of Tahrir between protesters and street vendors who were allegedly paid 50 LE (about £5) to start a fight in the square?

The space has been elevated to a suitably worthy place in the world’s collection of symbols. Even David Cameron went to Tahrir Square; my hopes for a Tamer Hosny-style ass-whuppin were unfortunately not to be realised. When the space becomes more important than the cause, that is when problems start. That’s what ended up happening in the Cambridge occupation. Holding a space for no reason other than, as George Mallory said, because it’s there, is deeply flawed. The stasis of it will fracture your movement and weaken your forces.

That’s not, I hasten to add, what Tahrir is like. It runs the risk, like any symbol, of becoming worth more than its actual meaning, but in Egypt, in this place, this time, this week even, that’s clearly balls. The thing worth remembering, though – and no-one in Egypt forgets this, but many people reading the news in London or New York might – is that the fight doesn’t stop at the edge of the square, even though it can feel like that. My first encounter with CS gas took place on Tuesday night; I retreated up Talaat Harb, availing myself of a baby wipe some dude had given to me, and within five minutes I was back in the wast il-balad that first smacked me around the retinas a year ago when the idea of a protest camp in Tahrir Square was just someone on the Siesta again. (CS gas was as unpleasant as you might imagine. I left soon afterwards because I was alone and it was past midnight.) The most surreal thing about it is the atomisation of the city. Overflow out of the square doesn’t have the forces to sustain itself. Whatever you think about the merits of attacking the Interior Ministry, even the hardiest of would-be occupiers has to realise that such an undertaking requires more manpower than they currently have, especially when the boys in blue hole themselves up inside the ministry and start lobbing rocks, displaying a subtlety of policing tactics I haven’t seen since, well, since the London Met horse-charged a bunch of sixth formers a few months ago. But I digress.

The fight doesn’t stop at the edge of the square. It continues into the neighbourhoods all around the country where policemen facing charges for violence against demonstrators are continuing in their normal duties. It continues into the hospitals in al-Arish and Minya facing armed attacks due to lack of security. It continues into the rural villages where women are injecting cleaning products into their vaginas because they can’t get a safe, legal abortion. (Those are just three particular press releases I translated at work this week.)

It’s been a strange, scrappy few days, with a lot of confusing and obscure events. Full, satisfying explanations have yet to be found for yesterday or Tuesday, although this comes close. It’s very hot in Cairo; sometimes unbearably so. The attempts of SCAF to cool things down are having little effect. The postponement of the Adly trial, although apparently (according to my colleagues in Cairo) following the letter of the law and justified under the circumstances, looks hella bad. The persistent patrician attitude of the Egyptian elites renders them seemingly incapable of explaining their actions. Don’t trouble yourselves, they seem to be saying. The (martial) law works in mysterious ways. This fundamental communication problem between the state and the people only makes this more tense. And the temperature rises. The SCAF Facebook page is a joke. Justin Bieber has a more sophisticated public relations operation than this. الشعب يريد رفع الاخفاء. WordArt on riot police shields doesn’t make your military state more transparent and welcoming, it just makes it look well ’90s.

But the problem lies deeper than the lack of explanation. For as much as I’d love to see Adly with stripes around his shoulders, these high-level prosecutions are quite obviously sops to keep people happy. Offering compensation to the families of the martyrs means little if the killers of their children are still on duty in Free Egypt. And while due process should be observed and no-one’s trial should be compromised, no matter how odious they are, no matter if they wear suits with pinstripes made up of their own name, it needs to be made clear that this is due process, and that no-one is above (or below) the law. And making that clear, not just clear but true, will take more than rapping senior NDP blowhards on the knuckles. It will take more, even, than justice for the families of the martyrs. It will take a comprehensive reform of security and policing in Egypt, which in itself will involve a fundamental re-evaluation of how the state relates to its citizens. Then maybe the temperature will cool, just a little.

*worst post title ever, apologies. it’s hard thinking them up, you know.