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21 lines
5.0 KiB
Plaintext
In a week like this exactly one year ago, I walked in a small coffee shop in Mohandesin on the Western end of Cairo. The trendy but not-too-loud place had open WiFi, which is about the only interesting thing in Cairo's trendy coffee shops. I recognised my table right away as I first saw Alaa with his hair and laptop. Naturally. This was the a time when you could put all the Egyptian bloggers in one room. Back then, at the time of that first blogger get-together (the tradition now in Egypt is to call every blogger meeting the first), we were still commenting on the news. In just a few weeks from then, we will be the news.
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<a href="http://www.manalaa.net/propaganda" title="Propaganda"><img src="http://www.manalaa.net/files/image/propaganda-169.thumbnail.png" \></a>
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Manal, Alaa's wife and co-keeper of their <a href="http://manalaa.net">Bit Bucket</a>, and I spent a part of the get-together preaching the gospel: trying to talk other bloggers into moving out of Blogger to the free world of Open Source platforms like <a href="drupal.org">Drupal</a> and <a href="http://wordpress.org">WordPress</a>. I wondered then how I instantly gave Alaa my Blogger password to look into the technicalities of importing blogposts from <a href="http://blogger.com">Blogger</a>--Sorry, mate. We are <a href="http://freealaa.blogspot.com" title"Free Alaa">back to Blogger</a> to try to get you out. That is how it worked!
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I thought it would end there, but it turned to be one eventful year, May to May.
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A few days later, on 25.05.2005, <a href="http://manalaa.net/never_forget">Alaa got beaten</a> as he was trying to protect his mother, Dr Laila Soueif from police-guided thugs as she protested a referendum on changing the Constitution. His laptop was stolen, and it's gotten him livid. We often joked after all the headache Alaa had caused to the authorities that it was their mistake. They picked on the wrong blogger. They still are, except harder this time.
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<a href="http://www.manalaa.net/im_furious_yellow" title="I'm Furious Yellow"><img src="http://www.manalaa.net/files/image/dont_mess-172.thumbnail.png" \></a>
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In the summer of 2005, I witnessed Manal and Alaa chnaging from techies who get activists to publish on the web and get organized using content management systems (They host and maintain websites for the <a href="http://harakamasria.org/" title="The Egyptian Movement for Change">Kifaya</a>, the <a href="http://ageg.net/">Anti-Globalization Egypt Group - AGEG</a>, the <a href="http://e-socialists.org">Socialist Studies Center</a>, other organizations, in addition to a number of Blogs. Manal and Alaa are also founding members of the <a href="http://eglug.org">Egypt Linux User Group - EGLUG</a>--into influencial bloggers. Their posts, now in Arabic as much as in English, are only beginning of discussions that would go online, but also elsewhere, and on a great variety of topics. Alaa's intelligence lies not in his theoretical, abstract thinking or fresh ideas, rather in his capacity to synthesize, to realize meanings to whatever that is happening around him. It is simple, open, and dedicated sense of community and public life; and in many an occasion, it helped keep discussions going, and also to bring ideas to the streets. I wonder if this dedication is partly because of him, at times, being unable to refrain from saying.
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One week after 25 May last year, and as we were standing on the stairs of the Journalists Syndicate, Alaa and I wondered what are we doing here: protesting in place very central in Cairo, but also not close from where people live, almost as if the protest was reassuring the 2000 activists that everything is still alright, Alaa gave me an idea: This is pathetic, we could also ask Sayyida Zainab for help, couldn't we? Sayyida Zainab is the grand daughter of the prophet of Islam, her shrine lies in one of the most densely populated places in Cairo, and she is a central figure in Egyptian popular Islam: she is the Judge of all Judges, and the last resort of anyone seeking help, exactly a second Isis. And we did: the demonstration-announcement-in-a-poem and the banner I did made its way to the papers and internet radios prior to the protest, Alaa called me to tell me the Popular Campaign for Change (Freedom Now) was inspired and will join. Through <a href="">Nora Younis</a>, we were also able to talk Ayman Nour, the later presidential candidate and current political prisoner into joining. On the day of the protest, we got as many reporters as protesters, and from as far as South Korea. Egyptian intellectuals thought it was backward. Alaa's mother thought, "yes, backward, but at least they are pro change. The circle of bloggers and young activist around "Backward for Change" would keep dragging the opposition into innovative ways of protesting down to the sit-in in front of the Judges Club.
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<img src="http://img481.imageshack.us/img481/8895/dsc050141oe.jpg" title="The last photo taken for Alaa on the day of his detention. The woman at the center is his mother" alt="The last photo taken for Alaa on the day of his detention. The woman at the center is his mother" \>
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