What else is going on in Egypt?
0 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Saturday, November 4 at Saturday, November 04, 2006.
Apart from the craziness of the Eid sex assaults story, is anything else interesting going on in Egypt?
Well, the police just found 2 tonnes of TNT being stored in Sinai. Looking at this story by Hossam at Arabist.net, it seems like there is some fairly bad blood right now between the Egyptian security services and Sinai Bedouins and Islamists.
Talaat Sadat, Egyptian Member of Parliament and nephew of Anwar Sadat, the assasinated former president of Egypt, has been sent to prison for "Insulting the military and the republican guard" after the alleged, in many different settings, that there was a conspiracy in Egypt and internationally, to kill Anwar Sadat.
And after a productive series of meetings, the Egyptian government is considering to buy a bunch of advanced MIG-29 fighter jets from Russia.
In lighter news, I went to the Souk El Gomaa market on Friday morning. Madness, although not as crazy as the experience Kent had last time they went there (that link is a great read, by the way). Still, the Souk El Gomaa is an awesome place, a hectic street market in the City of the Dead (the Cairo slum where people live in graveyards) where the goods on offer range from piles of garbage organised into categories (whole piles of broken cassette tapes, stacks of empty disposable cigarette lighters), all the way through to a weird and wonderful assortment of live birds, fish and reptiles of every kind imaginable - and thats just the animal market.
In other places you can score military surplus, antiques, old soviet union banknotes, coins, medals and random memorabilia, and my personal favourite area - a market of old, old Egyptian printed newspapers, magazines and advertising. I bought a sweet old-timey Egyptian newspaper, 1917 edition. Given the date of publication, the majority of the newspaper was concerned with the War, with plenty of features on the goings on of Ottoman empire troops and officers, and a front page photo of the Russian Defence Chief, who was visiting Cairo at the time.
I'll try to scan some pages and get them translated - its just golden stuff. It is written in old, old fashioned Arabic, in a style that had Yasser and Luly in in awe. The first sentence of the "International News" section was "According to the telegraph station at Muqattam, the empires of Germany and Austria met in......" and even better, an advertisement for hair treatment advertised a product that would help keep your hair in style through a long night of ballroom dancing. Those were the days.
Anyhow, I'll try to get some good bits up and online this week. In other old-timey Egyptian publication related news, check out Sandmonkey's post featuring a beautiful 1950's Egyptian advertisement for Stella beer, complete with a really Arab, Umm Kulthum style piece of romantic poetry.
Well, the police just found 2 tonnes of TNT being stored in Sinai. Looking at this story by Hossam at Arabist.net, it seems like there is some fairly bad blood right now between the Egyptian security services and Sinai Bedouins and Islamists.
Talaat Sadat, Egyptian Member of Parliament and nephew of Anwar Sadat, the assasinated former president of Egypt, has been sent to prison for "Insulting the military and the republican guard" after the alleged, in many different settings, that there was a conspiracy in Egypt and internationally, to kill Anwar Sadat.
And after a productive series of meetings, the Egyptian government is considering to buy a bunch of advanced MIG-29 fighter jets from Russia.
In lighter news, I went to the Souk El Gomaa market on Friday morning. Madness, although not as crazy as the experience Kent had last time they went there (that link is a great read, by the way). Still, the Souk El Gomaa is an awesome place, a hectic street market in the City of the Dead (the Cairo slum where people live in graveyards) where the goods on offer range from piles of garbage organised into categories (whole piles of broken cassette tapes, stacks of empty disposable cigarette lighters), all the way through to a weird and wonderful assortment of live birds, fish and reptiles of every kind imaginable - and thats just the animal market.
In other places you can score military surplus, antiques, old soviet union banknotes, coins, medals and random memorabilia, and my personal favourite area - a market of old, old Egyptian printed newspapers, magazines and advertising. I bought a sweet old-timey Egyptian newspaper, 1917 edition. Given the date of publication, the majority of the newspaper was concerned with the War, with plenty of features on the goings on of Ottoman empire troops and officers, and a front page photo of the Russian Defence Chief, who was visiting Cairo at the time.
I'll try to scan some pages and get them translated - its just golden stuff. It is written in old, old fashioned Arabic, in a style that had Yasser and Luly in in awe. The first sentence of the "International News" section was "According to the telegraph station at Muqattam, the empires of Germany and Austria met in......" and even better, an advertisement for hair treatment advertised a product that would help keep your hair in style through a long night of ballroom dancing. Those were the days.
Anyhow, I'll try to get some good bits up and online this week. In other old-timey Egyptian publication related news, check out Sandmonkey's post featuring a beautiful 1950's Egyptian advertisement for Stella beer, complete with a really Arab, Umm Kulthum style piece of romantic poetry.
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