Issandr El Amrani
is a writer living
in Cairo [...]

Contact him here

Recent articles

Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union...

For Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic...

All hell breaks loose in Cairo

Demonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years...

Mirror of a movement

The word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom...

Arab League faces uncertain future

Officials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.

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Reading

~ My name is red
by Orhan Pamuk

~ Warda
by Sonallah Ibrahim

~ A history of Iraq
by Charles Tripp

~ HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide
by Musciano & Kennedy

Shelved

~ Apres l'empire
by Emmanuel Todd

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by Evelyn Waugh

Sat, 10 May 2003

Beslusconi’s delusions of grandeur

Poor Silvio. Those nasty communists are trying to put him in jail and he doesn’t get to use his yacht very often. For the full hilarious interview see here, but in the meantime here are some choice morsels.

“It’s a great sacrifice to do what I’m doing,” Mr. Berlusconi, who is also Italy’s richest man, said over a nearly two-hour dinner that went past midnight in Palazzo Chigi, the prime minister’s official residence. “I’m not having fun at all.”

“I have a sailboat, but in two years, I’ve only been on it one day,” he said, speaking in Italian and striking a stoic tone. “And I haven’t been to my house in Bermuda for two or three years. And the same goes for my house in Portofino. I’ve been there for only one day in the last nine months.”

“Do you understand?” he asked. “My life has changed. The quality has become terrible. What a brutal job.” He added that he worked constantly and was “always alone, always alone here.”

Asked why he endures it, he said that he entered politics in 1993 and remains in politics today to keep Communists and other leftists from undermining Italian democracy. “Otherwise,” he said, “there would be no freedom in Italy.”

“If I left political life right now, Italy would fall into the hands of Communists,” he added later, resurrecting a specter that long defined Italian politics, although not in the last few years.

He said he alone had the ability to prevent that.

“There is no one else in Italy today,” he said, as two aides, flanking him at the dinner table, chimed in simultaneously: “Who else? Who else?”

“It’s a question I ask myself,” the 66-year-old prime minister said. “How much longer do I have to keep living this life of sacrifices?

posted at 09:08 | / politics | #

From the hearts-and-minds dept.

The coalition line of winning Iraqi hearts and minds aims to bring about permanent behavioural change. Yet this is unlikely to occur, since the Iraqis — of all Arabs — have long experience of propaganda.

This somewhat winding article also has some interesting notes about the role of Arab poetry in forming public opinion during the recent war.

posted at 09:07 | / iraq | #

Thu, 08 May 2003

From the “what, me, kafr?” dept.

Roger Pol-Droit’s column in today’s Le Monde asks the fascinating question, in which language was the Quran written? It seems that it’s a question worth asking, as recent philological research suggests that it might not be plain old Arabic, but a Syriac version of it. Meaning that some verses would have different meanings — e.g. the hourias awaiting the faithful in heaven may actually be tasty fruit. Oh yes, and that it might all be an attempt to explain the Bible rather than divine revelation. Sounds unlikely, but certainly something that would be worth investigating. Of course, doing that in most of the Islamic world would probably just result in a Nasr Abou Zeid scenario…

posted at 11:24 | / islam | #

Leo-conservatives?

An interesting James Atlas article in the NYT — and a few days later by the New Yorker’s inimitable Seymour Hersh — points out the common intellectual heritage of many neo-cons: Leo Strauss, a political philosopher from the University of Chicago who seems to essentially be a kind of hardcore Platonist. His ideas seem sophisticated — if sinister and elitist — and may go a long way to explain the neo-conservatives intellectual dexterity and cohesion. My question is, where are the Aristotelians?

posted at 09:14 | / politics | #