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Naama Katiee, 42, remembers hearing about Rabbi Meshulam as a teenager. She asked her Yemenite father about what happened, but he said he didn’t want to discuss it. She met Shlomi Hatuka, 40, on Facebook through Mizrahi activist groups and together they founded AMRAM, a nonprofit organization that has cataloged over 800 testimonies of families on its website.

a movement among the younger generation of Israelis of Yemenite descent — and activists from the broader Mizrahi community — who are building public pressure in demanding explanations for the disappearances and acknowledgment of systematic abductions.

“They really thought they had to raise a new generation, which was separate from the old ‘primitive’ community,” Ms. Katiee said about the early state of Israel. During the years soon after the country’s founding, Jews in Israel emigrated from over 80 countries and from several ethnic groups, part of a national project focused on forging a common new Israeli identity. Recently arrived Yemenite and other Mizrahi Jews tended to be poor, more religious and less formally educated than the Ashkenazi establishment in Israel, who looked down on them and wanted them to conform to their idea of a modern Israel.

For years, families were told they were wrong to accuse the Israeli government of such malice. Mr. Hatuka said that many of the mothers interviewed by AMRAM, including his own grandmother who lost a child, were often conflicted about whom to hold responsible. “They love this country,” he said. “My grandmother knew that something was wrong, but at the same time she couldn’t believe that someone who is Jewish would do this to her.”

The issue continues to resurface because of sporadic cases of family members, who were said to have died as infants, being reunited through DNA testing, as well as a number of testimonies from nurses working at the time who corroborated that babies were taken.

deep mistrust between the state and the families.

In 1949, Mrs. Ronen arrived in Israel from Iran while 8 months pregnant with twin girls. After she gave birth, the hospital released her, advising that she rest in the transit camp for a few days before taking the girls home. When she called the hospital to tell them she was coming for her babies, she recalled that the staff informed her: “One died in the morning and one before noon. There is nothing for you to come for anymore.”

Gil Grunbaum, 62, became aware of his adoption at age 38, when a family friend told his wife, Ilana, that he was adopted. Mr. Grunbaum tracked down his biological mother, an immigrant from Tunisia, who was told her son died during her sedated birth in 1956. Mr. Grunbaum’s adoptive parents were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He didn’t want to add more trauma to their lives, so he kept the discovery to himself.

Ms. Aharoni said that she then went to consult her father, a respected rabbi in the community, who dismissed her suspicions. “You are not allowed to think that about Israel; they wouldn’t take a daughter from you,”

“Jews doing this to other Jews? I don’t know,”

This is Lebanon caseworkers studied the files of both Meskerem and Meseret for most of 2019. A few weeks after Al Jazeera visited the Emebet’s home, the group called Meseret’s Lebanese employer, Dr May Saadeh, a single mother of three daughters. This is Lebanon activists told Saadeh they would post Meseret’s story to the group’s Facebook page if she did not release the Ethiopian woman. Saadeh gave Meseret some cash and booked her a flight back to Ethiopia. Within days, Meseret was free. By September 2019, Meseret arrived back home.

Local traffickers in Ethiopia work in tandem with recruitment agencies in Beirut. Ethiopian traffickers are known to have charged up to $500 to facilitate the travel of recruits to Lebanon, where domestic workers make on average $150 a month.

Some Lebanese employers force their domestic workers to put in extremely long hours, deny them days off, withhold pay, confiscate their passports to prevent them from leaving, and severely restrict their movement and communication

Following reports of abuse, Ethiopia, in 2008, banned its citizens from travelling to Lebanon for work. But the ban has never been properly enforced and the numbers of women migrating to Lebanon for work swelled in subsequent years.

“I kept asking ‘when are you going to pay my sister?’ She would say that after six months, Meskerem would receive the accumulated pay,” Tsedale told Al Jazeera by phone from Beirut. In March of 2015, with Meskerem yet to see a penny for more than two years of work, an exasperated Tsedale reached an agreement with her sister’s employer: Meskerem would be paid by the end of the month or she’d be permitted to leave. But when Tsedale went to visit her sister towards the end of March, she found an empty apartment.

Meseret started working for a Lebanese family as a domestic worker shortly after arriving in the city of Jounieh in February 2011. Things started off well, Emebet said. Her daughter received her salary and sent money home. But a little over a year after departing Ethiopia, she was suddenly unable to reach Meseret by phone and the monthly remittances stopped coming in. “I don’t know why she suddenly stopped calling,” Emebet said. “She just vanished.” Meseret’s parents made the trip to Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, a two-hour bus ride away in Addis Ababa on at least two occasions to plead for help in locating their daughter. “They took our names and opened a file for her. We hoped they might provide answers.” But none came

“This is Lebanon”, a Canada-based domestic worker rights organisation that works to locate and free women who have been abused under the kafala system

“Since 2017, we’ve looked into over 6,000 complaints of various types of abuse,” Uprety told Al Jazeera. “Many are resolved through negotiations, in particular when it’s cases related to unpaid salaries. We escalate things only when abusers refuse to cooperate.”

The group helped free Filipina domestic worker Halima Ubpah. According to This is Lebanon, Ubpah was confined without pay in the home of a family with close connections to Lebanon’s political elite for 10 years.

Oula Keyrouz admits Aster is still owed six years of wages, but denies her family mistreated Aster, saying she has pictures she took of Aster enjoying herself in the family home. “I saw her like a daughter to me, like another one of my children.”

In Lebanon, where as many as 400,000 Ethiopians live, migrant workers are also excluded from the protections of the country’s labour laws – putting their lives and livelihood at risk of abuse and exploitation.

Meseret boarded a late-night flight back to her homeland, with nothing but the clothes on her back and the cash she was handed. She had no luggage and was still owed seven years worth of pay, more than $12,000.

When she was taken by her employer to renew her residency papers, Meseret pleaded with officers at the Ethiopian consulate in Beirut for help. But they turned her away, she said. Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, as well as an official Meseret said she spoke to at the consulate did not respond to requests for comment. Saadeh also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s repeated requests for comment.

Meskerem boarded a plane and returned to Ethiopia as part of a group of formerly imprisoned domestic workers whose one-way tickets were covered by donations from members of the large Ethiopian community in Lebanon. Meskerem was a free woman again, but returned to Ethiopia last June, terribly scarred by her ordeal. Emaciated, drained, Meskerem had also lost most of her teeth.

After months of recuperating, Meskerem gradually opened up about her time in Lebanon, and spoke of the physical and mental abuse endured, the lack of food and how she was locked in at all times and forbidden contact with the outside world

“Aster is happy in our home, she is like one of my daughters,” Oula Keyrouz told Al Jazeera by phone. “I don’t understand what the family in Ethiopia wants because we don’t speak their language. But we treat her well.” But Aster told Al Jazeera that she has endured years of abuse, in particular at the hands of Oula’s husband Michel, allegations Oula denied. Aster explained that years ago Michel nearly strangled her with a belt, as punishment for an ill-fated escape attempt.

Oula Keyrouz admitted that Aster was owed six years worth of pay, totalling thousands of dollars. “We keep her money for her in a safe. She will take all of it when she returns to her country one day.” When asked when that might be, Oula Keyrouz said that “because of the dollar crisis in Lebanon,” the family couldn’t afford to send Aster home.

On June 17, 2020, a taxi pulled up to the Keyrouz family home. Aster, who had made coffee for Oula Keyrouz, walked outside, pretending to be taking out the trash. Instead, she stepped into the waiting vehicle, never to be seen again by the family that had stripped her of her dignity for six years. She was dropped outside the Ethiopian consulate, where members of a community group who had called the taxi, paid the fare and took her in. “It was like being freed from prison,” Aster later said.

Aster was part of a group of 90 Ethiopian domestic workers who were repatriated in September, with the help of Egna Legna Besidet, a Beirut-based nonprofit organisation.

Aster successfully escaped the Keyrouz home, but like Meseret and Meskerem, she returned from Lebanon empty-handed after years of toiling without pay.

“Out of nowhere, she suddenly told me that I would be going home. I wasn’t allowed to use a phone for seven years. That day, she handed me the phone and said, ‘call your mother, tell her you will see her soon’.”

When asked about the three women’s cases, Lebanese Labour Ministry official Marlene Atallah said her office was aware of such cases and was working on preventive measures. “We have set up a committee at the ministry tasked with dealing with complaints from domestic workers,” Atallah explained. “There is now an emergency hotline number workers can call in case of violations. We have also begun giving orientation sessions for domestic workers to learn how to bring their cases to Lebanese courts.” But Lebanese courts have rarely sentenced abusive employers to jail time, and any kind of justice is often out of reach for migrant workers.

authorities estimate that at least two domestic workers die weekly on average. These are mainly deaths by suicide or from botched escape attempts.

the deaths of most migrant workers in Lebanon are rarely looked into.

Unlike Qaboos, who was childless and without a male sibling, Haitham has close male relatives. These include two half-brothers, Assad and Shihab bin Tariq, both once viewed as potential successors to Qaboos. Assad’s eldest son, Taimur, has been touted as a leading figure in the next generation of royals. And Haitham himself has two sons: The eldest, Theyazin – who studied at Oxford, joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2013, and has served at the Omani Embassy in London since 2018 – has returned to Muscat and has been attending key diplomatic functions since his father’s assumption.

In other Gulf ruling families, competition among family members has fueled the expansion of royal control over government, as family demands are accommodated through government sinecures. Even if this competitive dynamic does not take hold in Oman, the royal presence may be felt in other ways. In recent years members of the Al Said family, including the new sultan and his siblings, have been increasing their involvement in business. How this is managed – or not – will affect the critical issue of Oman’s economic growth.

Qaboos incorporated many minorities into the ruling structures, within a strong narrative of interfaith and interethnic tolerance. Yet one clearly favored group emerged from within the leadership: Oman’s merchant families.

political reliance on merchants offered both advantages and risks. Bringing in this class offered a powerful constituency in support of the government and its extensive national development ambitions. But in times of economic downturn, it also left the government susceptible to accusations of conflicts of interests and self-dealing. This is indeed what played out in 2011 as protesters based in the industrial port of Sohar demanded reform of the government with complaints centered on corruption

He nearly doubled the private sector minimum wage and created 50,000 new government jobs, mostly in the security services. He also further developed Oman’s participatory institutions through the establishment of elected municipal councils and granting more powers to the elected Shura Council. A number of the most publicly criticized ministers were removed from office amid a broader campaign of corruption prosecutions that resulted in convictions of some government officials and businessmen over the next few years.

In 2019, the Omani deficit rose to $50 billion contributing to a steep rise in public debt from below 5% of gross domestic product to nearly 50% in just four years. This limits the new sultan’s ability to curry more favor through a repetition of government spending and populist solutions. There is a desperate need to create more jobs for young Omanis. But there is also the need to create conditions favorable to business to attract Omani capital back into the country

Oman has created a means of formal public input through elections for municipal councils and the lower house of Parliament, the Shura Council. While the role of the municipal councils is advisory, the Shura Council can propose and amend legislation drafted by the Council of Ministers and interpolate service ministers regarding violations of the law; this privilege does not extend to the ministers of defense and foreign affairs

these institutions have not demonstrated the ability to impose meaningful accountability

voting participation has been uneven and declining since the very high turnout of 76% in 2011

the status quo – especially regarding the economy – is not sustainable and will press the new leadership to make immediate changes

MAM’s deference to expertise and social capital was also evident in its reliance on individuals with prior NDP credentials; that is, people who had the knowledge and connections to run a political machine. While some of the cofounders of MAM fit that bill, All-MAM was in some ways an NDP reunion.

Nothing symbolized Sisi’s embrace of Mubarak’s political machine more than All-MAM’s pick for secretary general, Mohamed Heiba, the former NDP Secretary of Youth. Under the leadership of Gamal Mubarak, Heiba was once at the forefront of the NDP’s youth mobilization efforts

Besides leaning on the seasoned political organizers of the NDP, All-MAM was also relying on the former ruling party’s big business politicians who brought to the table not only experience, but also money. The most emblematic example was mogul and former NDP lawmaker Mohamed Aboul Enein, an icon of the business clique that dominated politics during Mubarak’s final decade. Up until that point, the Sisi regime kept a largely cordial orientation toward the likes of Aboul Enein. Certainly, Sisi may have worked to politically disempower such oligarchs, but he steered clear of expropriating their assets, as Amr Adly notes. Thus, high-profile business NDPers such as Aboul Enein survived, and may have even thrived to some degree, but they were not encouraged to play politics.[4] For Aboul Enein specifically, the tide began to turn in 2018 in the lead-up to the presidential election, as he became a visible figure in the marketing of the Sisi campaign. The regime was not simply tolerating the former NDPer, as was previously the case. It was awarding him a political role, while proudly showcasing his support for the president. On a deeper level, Sisi was essentially indulging the NDP’s deep pockets, hoping they could bankroll the big campaigns the regime was about to embark upon. Sisi may hold a grudge or two against the Mubarakists, but he will always hold a place for those who pay.

the regime’s aggression had surpassed those rejecting the post-2013 political order and that the security apparatus was just as predatory in targeting opposition actors who have accepted the political system and agreed to work from within it

by early 2021, MWP looked much less like the youth-led party of 2014 and much more like MAM, with many of the association’s founders, including Mandhour, holding senior posts inside the party. Likewise, the NDPers made themselves quite comfortable inside MWP, as exemplified by Mohamed Aboul Enein, who became vice president of the party, not to mention deputy speaker of the House of Representatives following his return to parliament after the 2020 election.

their entry into MWP captures Sisi’s post-2018 rapprochement with the interests and clientelistic networks that once occupied the Mubarak regime, as distinct from the cadre of younger politicians Sisi had been trying to cultivate through the NYP

the NYP (or, at least, the “wisdom” behind it) was essential in facilitating Sisi’s accommodation with NDP-tied families. Many such families capitalized on the president’s NYP discourse, prodding their own younger members to enter the political stage under the guise of youth empowerment. It may be hard to believe, but longtime political families managed to gaslight Sisi right back: “You want youth? We’ll give you youth.” This strategy was evident in MWP to the extent that it featured young affiliates of NDP families. But it was more than just MWP. By the time the 2020 elections were over, the phenomenon of relatives of former lawmakers entering parliament became more visible across parties and regions, as Amr Hashem Rabee noted. Outside legislative chambers and Mustaqbal Watan, other parties jumped on the same bandwagon, recruiting and showing off young figures from politically prominent families. In other words, every establishment party is now cutting two carrots with one knife: get on Sisi’s good graces by checking off the youth empowerment box, and, at the same time, solidify alliances with politically distinguished families

Whereas between 2014 and 2018, the regime’s principal aim was keeping civilian politics weak, fragmented, and inconducive to collective action, its approach became more interventionist beginning 2018. This is because the president now had a clearer vision for political outcomes he needed to generate, majorities he wanted to manufacture, and allies he needed to coopt and reward.

MAM proved to be a useful instrument for coopting NDPers and deploying their resources and expertise on behalf of Sisi. Also, it kept these Mubarakists loyal to the president and away from the likes of Shafik and other presidential hopefuls eyeing the Mubarakist networks.

as Sisi began reorganizing his own political apparatus and putting his own ducks in a row, he embarked on an effort to sabotage his competitors and wreak havoc on their organizations and networks at an unusually broad scale

In contrast to 2015 when it sought to engineer a fragmented parliament, this time around, the regime wanted a majority for its own political arm and was adamant to stack the cards in favor of that outcome. Not only that, but the regime was also keen on dictating the candidate rosters of other independent parties participating on its own list, “The National List for the Sake of Egypt.” Indeed, Sisi was that determined not to leave anything to chance.

the 2020 election marked the reintroduction of parliament’s upper chamber. As a body devoid of any meaningful legislative powers, the Senate provided Sisi with a low-cost method of rewarding political allies with “certificates of prestige.” Certainly, this was not unique to Sisi’s reign. This same tradition was prevalent under previous rulers. But that Sisi is now conforming to this same template shows that he has finally succumbed into resurrecting his predecessors’ cooptation and clientelistic practices after years of eschewing them in his dealing with civilian politics. The details might differ, but the overall story is a familiar one: the initially timid officers instinctively avoid getting their hands dirty by civilian politics, until the imperative for survival draws them into the same “swamp” they once swore to drain

Today, MWP controls parliament and serves as a vehicle for advancing Sisi’s political agenda. Yet, the president holds no affiliation with it and neither do most senior members of the government and the state apparatus. There has been no clear effort to encourage officials to affiliate with the party either. In other words, the president has kept MWP in this ambiguous space akin to a political “friendzone.”

Sisi’s refusal to grant MWP (or any party for that matter) the status (and privileges) of a ruling party arguably speaks to the persistence of his populist instincts and his own belief that he is in fact capable of ruling without the mediation of any political class.

for Sisi, turning MWP into an actual ruling party would be ceding power and access to the very political forces he has been trying to contain. If the NDP (along with all its missteps) was the reason for Mubarak’s demise, why give its descendants the chance to grow and gain more influence through MWP? Therein lies the source of the paradox: Sisi needs the NDPers’ expertise and resources, but he is aware their support cannot take for granted. Thus, despite Sisi’s accommodation with the Mubarak regime’s networks and their presence in MWP, the president’s propaganda machine remains discursively hostile to NDP remnants, especially more recently with growing chatter about a Gamal Mubarak presidential bid.

The president may believe that his investment in this project will someday bear fruit, contributing to a new reality actualizing his vision for the ideal civilian politician—that is, the politician who will blindly defer to the men in the uniform, accept their supremacy, and respect their economic privileges (with all the corrupt practices they entail).

The regime’s continued inability to assert its hegemony over the formal political sphere, its dependency on political intermediaries it does not trust, and the shutting out of credible competitors from politics, have all limited Sisi’s political options for managing the ongoing economic crisis

the realm of formal politics has become so discredited that the regime itself is aware that it will not provide its international audiences a sufficiently persuasive façade of democratic politics

Sisi’s long struggle to invent the politics he dreams of through his political grooming projects, while evading the politics he actually faces by gaslighting his allies and critics, alike

the Oman 2020 plan, launched in 1995. With the goal of diversifing the economy away from hydrocarbons and increasing the ratio of nationals in public and private employment to 95 per cent, from 68 per cent in 1996. However, these two goals have proven somewhat contradictory. The high rate of foreign labour in both the public and private sectors has increased since 2009 when a Free Trade Agreement with the US came into force– more than doubling the 2005 figure. High rates of unemployment, low wages and the concentration of wealth among elites aligned to the government were contributing factors to the popular unrest of 2011-12.

Under a 1996 constitutional provision a council comprising members of the ruling family and senior officials is granted three days from the Sultan's death to choose a successor. If this process fails to provide a clear transition, then a contingency plan would be activated. This, as Qaboos himself told Foreign Affairs in a 1997 interview, would mean that: "As for a successor, the process, always known to us, has now been publicised in the Basic Law. When I die, my family will meet. If they cannot agree on a candidate, the Defence Council will decide, based on a name or names submitted by the previous sultan. I have already written down two names, in descending order, and put them in sealed envelopes in two different regions."

if we follow the categorisation of the region's regimes discussed by Henry and Springborg in Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East, we can see that Qaboos' Oman represents an almost completely different approach to government from most other regimes in the region. Indeed, it reflects neither the kind of practices of a bunker state – associated with rule "through military/security/party structures that are in turn controlled by alliances of these leaders' families and tribes", such as was the case in Salah's Yemen, Assad's Syria or Gaddafi's Libya – nor the kind of "bully praetorianism" which characterised the kleptocratic regimes of Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt or the PLO/PA under Arafat. Moreover, it also differs from the strife riddled monarchies in Riyadh and Manama particularly in as much as the ruling family has not gone out of its way to ostracise, exclude and oppress particular sections of the population. Instead, according to Henry and Springborg, "being the sole GCC ruler without a solid family and tribal base ... [Qaboos' Oman has] been the most assiduous in seeking to build an identity that simultaneously glorifies the Sultan himself".

Oman faces a number of pressing, and distinctly Omani-challenges in the immediate and mid-term

49 per cent of residents under the age of 20

some dissatisfaction arose during the height of the uprisings across the region in 2011-12. Though initially it appeared that Qaboos had handled popular protests deftly – through increased public sector spending, and some political reorganisation and an anti-corruption campaign – frustration at the slow pace of reform contributed to strikes by workers at Petroleum Development Oman and protests elsewhere. Authorities countered with arrests and a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech including hacking the social media accounts of intellectuals involved in the protest

His case has become a central topic at COP27 — especially after an Egyptian lawmaker confronted his younger sister, Sanaa Seif, at a news conference discussing his case.

a lawyer in Cairo has since filed a case against Seif, accusing her of “conspiring with foreign agencies hostile to the Egyptian state” and “spreading false news,” among other allegations. The filing alone does not ensure the case will be pursued, but the family said it amounts to an intimidation tactic after Seif’s outspoken support of her brother at the international conference, where Egypt hoped human rights issues would not take center stage.

the message #FreeAlaa has spread throughout the conference, garnering support from climate activists. On Thursday, some attendees dressed in white — the color of prison uniforms in Egypt — and gathered for a protest over climate justice and to express solidarity with political prisoners here.

The protests would be unthinkable anywhere in Egypt outside the U.N.-controlled zone at COP27 due to tight restrictions on public gatherings.

On Thursday, the siblings’ mother — who has waited outside each day this week for a letter from her son — was asked to leave the area of the Wadi el-Natrun prison complex outside Cairo where he is being held.The family’s lawyer, Khaled Ali, then announced on social media that he has been approved to visit Abdel Fattah and was on his way to the facility — his first visit since early 2020. When he arrived, he said, prison officials refused him entrance to the facility — saying the permission letter he received that morning was dated the day before.

The family, who last heard from him in a letter last week that he would stop drinking water on Sunday, has repeatedly warned that he could die before the conference ends next week. Seif said Wednesday that she does not know if he is still alive.

Several world leaders, including British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, raised his case directly with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi. Under the terms of his sentencing, the presidency is the only office with the authority to pardon him. But despite days of demands, his family has still not had proof of life or seen any indication he may be released.

U.N. Human Rights High Commissioner Volker Türk called on Egypt to immediately release Abdel Fattah. “No one should be detained for exercising their basic human rights or defending those of others,” he said. “I also encourage the authorities to revise all laws that restrict civic space and curtail the rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association.”

As the host of COP27, Egypt has vowed to champion African concerns, which include how rapid population growth may heighten countries’ vulnerability to climate change. Africa is already severely impacted by climate change despite being responsible for only around 3 percent of global CO2 emissions.

The effects of Egypt’s soaring population are felt in its traffic jams and crowded malls, its overflowing classrooms and packed apartment buildings. But residents of urban areas remain somewhat sheltered from the environmental stresses on rural communities and agriculture, which is vital to the country’s economy.

The country “is nearing ‘absolute water scarcity,’” according to a recent report published by UNICEF and the American University in Cairo. The government has sought to restrict the amount of farmland that is used for growing water-intensive crops such as bananas.

In agricultural areas, the “policy of just having two children is totally out of touch,” Khamis said. When the government aggressively pushes for families to have fewer children, it can come off as “simply using the people as a scapegoat for the government’s shortcomings on economic growth.”

According to Egypt’s 2021 family health survey, around 65 percent of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 were using modern family planning — an increase of 8 percentage points from 2014. Around 63 percent of those using contraceptives said they obtained them from government-run facilities.

Only popular resistance from below and the reformists’ electoral victories could curb the hard-liners’ drive for total subjugation of the state, society, and culture.

The Green revolt and the subsequent nationwide uprisings in 2017 and 2019 against socioeconomic ills and authoritarian rule profoundly challenged the Islamist regime but failed to alter it. The uprisings caused not a revolution but the fear of revolution—a fear that was compounded by the revolutionary uprisings against the allied regimes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, which Iran helped to quell.

once they took over the presidency in 2021 and the parliament in 2022 through rigged elections—specifically, through the arbitrary vetoing of credible rival candidates—the hard-liners moved to subjugate a defiant people once again. Extending the “morality police” into the streets and institutions to enforce the “proper hijab” has been only one measure—but it was the one that unleashed a nationwide uprising in which women came to occupy a central place.

the culmination of years of steady struggles against a systemic misogyny that the postrevolution regime established

With the emergence of the “people,” a super-collective in which differences of class, gender, ethnicity, and religion temporarily disappear in favor of a greater good, the uprising has assumed a revolutionary character. The abolition of the morality police and the mandatory hijab will no longer suffice. For the first time, a nationwide protest movement has called for a regime change and structural socioeconomic transformation.

Over the years, headscarves gradually inched back further and further until finally they fell to the shoulders. Officials felt, time and again, paralyzed by this steady spread of bad-hijabi among millions of women who had to endure daily humiliation and punishment. With the initial jail penalty between ten days and two months, showing inches of hair had ignited decades of daily street battles between defiant women and multiple morality enforcers such as Sarallah (wrath of Allah), Amre beh Ma’ruf va Nahye az Monker (command good and forbid wrong), and EdarehAmaken (management of public places). According to a police report during the crackdown on bad-hijabis in 2013, some 3.6 million women were stopped and humiliated in the streets and issued formal citations. Of these, 180,000 were detained.

This is the story of women’s “non-movement”—the collective and connective actions of non-collective actors who pursue not a politics of protest but of redress, through direct actions.

the uprising is no longer limited to the mandatory hijab and women’s rights. It has grown to include wider concerns and constituencies—young people, students and teachers, middle-class families and workers, residents of some rural and poor communities, and those religious and ethnic minorities (Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, and Baluchis) who, like women, feel like second-class citizens and seem to identify with “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

The thousands of tweets describing why people are protesting point time and again to the longing for a humble normal life denied to them by a regime of clerical and military patriarchs. For these dissenters, the regime appears like a colonial entity—with its alien thinking, feeling, and ruling—that has little to do with the lives and worldviews of the majority.

The feminism of the movement, rather, is antisystem; it challenges the systemic control of everyday life and the women at its core. It is precisely this antisystemic feminism that promises to liberate not only women but also the oppressed men—the marginalized, the minorities, and those who are demeaned and emasculated by their failure to provide for their families due to economic misfortune.

A segment of Muslim women did support the Islamic state, but others fought back. They took to the streets to protest the mandatory hijab, organized collective campaigns, and lobbied “liberal clerics” to secure a women-centered reinterpretation of religious texts. But when the regime extended its repression, women resorted to the “art of presence”—by which I mean the ability to assert collective will in spite of all odds, by circumventing constraints, utilizing what exists, and discovering new spaces within which to make themselves heard, seen, felt, and realized. Simply, women refused to exit public life, not through collective protests but through such ordinary things as pursuing higher education, working outside the home, engaging in the arts, music, and filmmaking, or practicing sports.

At this point in time, Iran is far from a “revolutionary situation,” meaning a condition of “dual power” where an organized revolutionary force backed by millions would come to confront a crumbling government and divided security forces. What we are witnessing today, however, is the rise of a revolutionary movement—with its own protest repertoires, language, and identity—that may open Iranian society to a “revolutionary course.”

The disproportionate presence of the young—women and men, university and high school students—in the streets of the uprising has led some to interpret it as the revolt of generation-Z against a regime that is woefully out of touch. But this view overlooks the dissidence of older generations, the parents and families that have raised, if not politicized, these children and mostly share their sentiments. A leaked government survey from November 2022 found that 84 percent of Iranians expressed a positive view of the uprising. If the regime allowed peaceful public protests, we would likely see more older people on the streets.

Although some workers have joined the protests through demonstrations and labor strikes, a widespread labor showdown has yet to materialize. This may not be easy, because the neoliberal restructuring of the 2000s has fragmented the working class, undermined workers’ job security (including the oil sector), and diminished much of their collective power. In their place, teachers have emerged as a potentially powerful dissenting force with a good degree of organization and protest experience.

Shopkeepers and bazaar merchants have also joined the opposition. In fact, they surprised the authorities when at least 70 percent of them, according to a leaked official report, went on strike in Tehran and 21 provinces on 15 November 2022 to mark the 2019 uprising. Not surprisingly, security forces have increasingly been threatening to shut down their businesses.

Protesters in the Arab Spring fully utilized existing cultural resources, such as religious rituals and funeral processions, to sustain mass protests. Most critical were the Friday prayers, with their fixed times and places, from which the largest rallies and demonstrations originated. But Friday prayer is not part of the current culture of Iran’s Shia Muslims (unlike the Sunni Baluchies). Most Iranian Muslims rarely even pray at noon, whether on Fridays or any day. In Iran, the Friday prayer sermons are the invented ritual of the Islamist regime and thus the theater of the regime’s power. Consequently, protesters would have to turn to other cultural and religious spaces such as funerals and mourning ceremonies or the Shia rituals of Moharram and Ramadan.

During the Green revolt of 2009, the ruling hard-liners banned funerals and prevented families from holding mourning ceremonies for their loved ones

the hard-line parliament passed an emergency bill on 9 October 2022 “adjusting” the salaries of civil servants, including 700,000 pensioners who in late 2017 had turned out in force during a wave of protests. Newly employed teachers were to receive more secure contracts, sugarcane workers their unpaid wages, and poor families a 50 percent increase in the basic-needs subsidy.

beating, killing, mass detention, torture, execution, drone surveillance, and marking the businesses and homes of dissenters. The regime’s clampdown has reportedly left 525 dead, including 71 minors, 1,100 on trial, and some 30,000 detained. The security forces and Basij militia have lost 68 members in the unrest.

The regime’s suppression and the protesters’ pause are likely to diminish the protests. But this does not mean the end of the movement. It means the end of a cycle of protest before a trigger ignites a new one. We have seen these cycles at least since 2017. What is distinct about this time is that it has set Iranian society on a “revolutionary course,” meaning that a large part of society continues to think, imagine, talk, and act in terms of a different future. Here, people’s judgment about public matters is often shaped by a lingering echo of “revolution” and a brewing belief that “they [the regime] will go.” So, any trouble or crisis—for instance, a water shortage— is considered a failure of the regime, and any show of discontent—say, over delayed wages—a revolutionary act. In such a mindset, the status quo is temporary and change only a matter of time.

There are, of course, local leaders and ad hoc collectives that communicate ideas and coordinate actions in the neighborhoods, workplaces, and universities. Thanks to their horizontal, networked, and fluid character, their operations are less prone to police repression than a conventional movement organization would be. This kind of decentralized networked activism is also more versatile, allows for multiple voices and ideas, and can use digital media to mobilize larger crowds in less time. But networked movements can also suffer from weaker commitment, unruly decisionmaking, and tenuous structure and sustainability. For instance, who will address a wrongdoing, such as violence, committed in the name of the movement? As a result, movements tend to deploy a hybrid structure by linking the decentralized and fluid activism to a central body. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement has yet to take up this consideration.

a leadership organization—in the vein of Polish Solidarity, South Africa’s ANC, or Sudan’s Forces of Freedom and Change—is not just about articulating a strategic vision and coordinating actions. It also signals responsibility, representation, popular trust, and tactical unity.

if the revolutionary movement is unwilling or unable to pick up the power, others will. This, in fact, is the story of most of the Arab Spring uprisings—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, for instance. In these experiences, the protagonists, those who had initiated and carried the uprisings forward, remained mostly marginal to the process of critical decisionmaking while the free-riders, counterrevolutionaries, and custodians of the status quo moved to the center.

Things are unlikely to go back to where they were before the uprising. A paradigm shift has occurred in the Iranian subjectivity, expressed most vividly in the recognition of women as transformative actors and the “woman question” as a strategic focus of struggle.

Those who expect quick results will likely be dispirited. But the country seems to be on a new course.

“If you want to protect yourself and your family, you join a militia,” remarked a middle-aged man in the Jazmati neighborhood. “The area is infested with crime associated with the National Defense militias. Each group has control over a certain quarter, and they sometimes fight each other over the distribution of spoils. Shop owners must pay these militias protection. One owner refused, and they torched his store.”

Another resident of the same area explained that he and his family could scrape by thanks to his two sons’ positioning in the Iran-backed Baqir Brigade—which provides not only monthly salaries, but also opportunities to procure household items through looting.

Syrians also dip into precious resources to pay officials for information, for instance on disappeared relatives or their own status on Syria’s sprawling lists of “wanted” individuals. For those wishing to confirm that they won’t be detained upon crossing the border to Lebanon, the going rate is about 10 dollars—most often paid to an employee in the Department of Migration and Passports.

An industrialist in Aleppo put it simply: “I talk with factory owners and they say they want to reopen their factories, but they can’t find male workers. When they do find them, security services or militiamen come and arrest those workers and extort money from the owners for having hired them in the first place.” With no large scale returns on the horizon for local industries, this economic impasse will take years to resolve.

Although virtually every problem that sparked Syria’s 2011 uprising has been exacerbated, society has been beaten down to the point of almost ensuring that no broad-based reformist movement will be able to coalesce for a generation to come

the unraveling of Syria’s productive economy, and its replacement by an economy of systematic cannibalization in which impoverished segments of Syrian society increasingly survive by preying upon one another

a new term—taafeesh—to describe a practice that goes far beyond stealing furniture to include extremes such as stripping houses, streets and factories of plumbing and electrical wiring

“I watched uniformed soldiers using a Syrian army tank to rip out electrical cables from six meters underground,” remarked a fighter with a loyalist Palestinian faction, who was scrambling to retrieve belongings from his apartment before it could be pillaged. “I saw soldiers from elite units looting private hospitals and government offices. This isn’t just looting—it’s sabotage of essential infrastructure.”

I returned to my apartment just to retrieve official documents and some hidden pieces of gold. I did so, and then destroyed my own furniture and appliances because I don’t want these people making money at my expense. I was ready to burn down my own apartment, but my wife stopped me—she didn’t want me to cause harm to other apartments in the building.

micro-economies in their own right—from the recycling of rubble to the proliferation of taafeesh markets, where people buy second-hand goods stolen from fellow Syrians. Many have no choice but to use these markets in order to replace their own stolen belongings

This cannibalistic economy, which encompasses all those who have come to rely on extortion for their own livelihoods, extends to the cohort of lawyers, security officials and civil servants who have positioned themselves as “brokers” in the market for official documents such as birth, marriage and death certificates

Just as Syrians are forced to be more self-reliant, they have also come to depend evermore on vital social support structures. Indeed, extreme circumstances have created a paradox: Even as society has splintered in countless ways, the scale of deprivation arguably renders Syrians more closely interdependent than ever before.

Today, even the most senior lawyers in our practice are working as document brokers. A well-connected broker makes 30 to 40,000 pounds [60 to 80 dollars] per day; this roughly equals the monthly salary of a university-educated civil servant. As a result, many government employees resign and work as brokers to make more money.And this truly is a business, not a charity: Every broker takes money, even from his own brothers and sisters. Last week a colleague brought me his brother-in-law. I asked him why he needed me, when he could make all the papers himself. He explained that he can’t take money from his own brother-in-law, but I can do so and then give him half.

Multiplying forms of predation have accelerated the outflow of Syria’s financial and human capital, leaving behind a country largely populated by an underclass that can aspire to little more than subsistence

Syria’s predatory wartime economy is slowly but surely turning into a predatory economy of peace

As some Syrians put it, Damascus has been particularly effective in reconstructing one thing amidst the immeasurable destruction: the “wall of fear” which characterized the regime before 2011 and which momentarily broke down at the outset of the uprising

active surveillance, intimidation and repression are not the only contributors to this leaden atmosphere. A pervasive exhaustion has settled over Syrians ground down and immiserated by war, disillusioned with all those who purport to lead or protect them, and largely reduced to striving for day-to-day subsistence

At one level, the war has wrenched open social and economic fractures that existed long before the conflict. The city of Homs stands as perhaps the starkest microcosm of this trend. A Sunni majority city with sizable Christian and Alawi minorities, Homs was the first major urban center to rise up and the first to devolve into bitter sectarian bloodletting

While vast swathes of Syria’s Sunni population feel silenced and brutalized, Alawi communities often carry their own narrative of victimhood, which blends legitimate grievances with vindictive impulses vis-à-vis Sunnis whom they regard as having betrayed the country

crude divisions based on sect or class fail to describe a complex and fluid landscape. Some fault lines are less dramatic, all but imperceptible except to those who experience them first-hand. Neighbors, colleagues, friends and kin may have come down on opposing sides, despite having every social marker in common. Each part of the country has its own web of tragic events to untangle.

Many Islamic State fighters swapped clothes and joined the [Kurdish-led] Syrian Democratic Forces to protect themselves and their families. But they haven’t changed; those people are bad, and will always be bad. There will be vengeance. Not now, while everyone is busy putting their lives together. But eventually, everyone who suffered under ISIS, whose brother was killed by ISIS, will take revenge.

A native of a Damascus suburb remarked: “Charities typically want to help those who fled from elsewhere. So, when I go to a charity, I say I’m displaced.”

The divide between conservative and more secular Sunnis has calcified, manifesting itself even in differential treatment at checkpoints. “I have an easier time driving around because I don’t wear the hijab,” remarked a woman from the Damascus suburbs. “If you veil, security assumes you’re with the opposition.”

While dialogue is sorely needed, some Syrians warn against emphasising dialogue for its own sake—even at the cost of burying the most substantive issues at stake. A businessman from Damascus described his own abortive experience with talks proposing to link disparate elements of Syria’s private sector: “There’s this whole industry around ‘mediation,’ including between sides that don’t actually disagree on anything. Meanwhile, all the problems that caused the uprising have gotten worse.”

Most who can afford to leave the country do so; others benefit from an exemption afforded to university students, while another subset enjoys a reprieve due to their status as the sole male of their generation in their nuclear family. Others may pay exorbitant bribes to skirt the draft, or confine themselves within their homes to avoid being detected—making them invisible both to the army and to broader society. Some endure multiple such ordeals, only to remain in an indefinite state of limbo due to the contingent and precarious nature of these solutions

remittances from relatives who live abroad

The country’s middle and upper classes have long extended vital forms of solidarity to their needier compatriots, with Syria’s merchant and religious networks playing a leading role. What is unique, today, is the scale of hardship across the country, which is so vast as to have changed the way that Syrians conceptualize the act of receiving charity. A businessman from central Syria noted the extent to which dependency, which once demanded some degree of discretion, has become a straightforward fact of life. “People used to hide it when they were reliant on charity. Not anymore. Today you might hear workers in a factory wondering, ‘Where is the manager?’ And someone will say that he’s out waiting for his food basket. The whole country is living on handouts.”

People still do charity the Islamic way, based on the premise that you must assist those closest to you. If there’s someone you should help—say, a neighbor—but you’re unable, then it’s your responsibility to find someone else who can. These circles remain very much intact, and the entire society lives on this. Seven years of war didn’t destroy that aspect of Syrian culture, and that’s something Syrians are proud of.

There will be no nationwide recovery, no serious reform, no meaningful reconciliation for the foreseeable future.

young Africans are living in waithood

a growing number of young men and women must improvise livelihoods and conduct their personal relations outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks

there is scepticism among youth that growth alone, without equity, will bring the solution to their problems

recent protest movements, led mainly by young people, stem directly from the economic and social pressures they suffer, and from their pervasive political marginalisation

Young activists appear to be struggling to translate the political grievances of the protest movement into a broader political agenda. Clearly, they seem to be more united in defining what they don’t want and fighting it, and much less so in articulating what they collectively want

interviews I conducted with young people in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia, between 2008 and 2012, which resulted in my two most recent books: The Time of Youth: Work Social Change and Politics in Africa (published in August 2012 by Kumarian Press in the USA), and Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (published in June 2013 by Zed Books in the UK)

their sense of being “˜trapped’ in a prolonged state of youth

In Dakar in June 2011, rallying around the movement Y’en a Marre! (Enough is enough!), Senegalese youth came out to the streets, clashed with police, and managed to stop the approval of constitutional amendments that would benefit former president Wade. Galvanized by this victory, and using the slogan “Ma Carte d’Electeur, Mon Arme“ (my voting card, my weapon), the young Senegalese helped to remove Abdoulaye Wade from office in February 2012.

Young Africans constitute a disenfranchised majority

Liggey, which means work in Wolof, the national language of Senegal, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a person’s self-worth and position in the family and in the community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa are unable to attain the sense of dignity embedded in the notion of liggey.

African societies do not offer reliable pathways to adulthood; traditional ways of making this transition have broken down, and new ways of attaining adult status are yet to be developed

a liminal space in which they are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults

Waithood also evidences the multifaceted realities of young Africans’ difficult transition to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and extends to aspects of their social and political life

Ibrahim Abdullah (1998) and Abubakar Momoh (2000) have pointed to the use of the vernacular term youthman, in many West African countries, to describe those who are stuck in this liminal position

youth as a socially constructed category defined by societal expectations and responsibilities (Honwana and De Boeck 2005)

While Singerman’s usage of waithood suggests a sense of passivity, my research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create new forms of being and interacting with society. Waithood involves a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial independence; it represents the contradictions of a modernity, in which young people’s expectations are simultaneously raised by the new technologies of information and communication that connect them to global cultures, and constrained by the limited prospects and opportunities in their daily lives

Although women are becoming better educated and have always engaged in productive labour alongside household chores, marriage and motherhood are still the most important markers of adulthood. While giving birth may provide girls an entry into adulthood, their ability to attain full adult status often depends on men moving beyond waithood (Calví¨s et al. 2007)

Although growing numbers of young people are completing secondary school and even attending university, the mismatch between educational systems and the labour markets leaves many unemployed or underemployed; they are pushed into the oversaturated informal economy or become informal workers in the formal sector (Chen 2006

Young Senegalese and Tunisians employ the French term débrouillage, making do

in the realm of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” and entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009)

young women and men in waithood develop their own spaces where they subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their own. These youth spaces foster possibilities for creativity; and as Henrietta Moore puts it, for self-stylization, “an obstinate search for a style of existence, [and] a way of being” (Moore 2011: 2). The process of self-styling is made easier by cyber social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

these new “˜youthscapes’ (Maira and Soep 2005) resemble Michel Maffesoli’s notion of “urban tribes,” understood as groupings that share common interests but whose association is largely informal and marked by greater “fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (1996: 98)

Waithood constitutes a twilight zone, or an interstitial space, where the boundaries between legal and illegal, proper and improper, and right and wrong are often blurred. It is precisely at this juncture that young people are forced to make choices. Their decisions help to define their relationships towards work, family, and intimacy, as well as the type of citizens they will become. Rather than being a short interruption in their transition to adulthood, waithood is gradually replacing conventional adulthood itself (Honwana 2012).

growth alone, without equity, will not guarantee social inclusion and better lives for the majority of the population. Indeed, young people rebel against the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the rampant corruption that they observe as elites enrich themselves at others’ expense

Young Africans today are generally better educated and more closely connected with the rest of the world than their parents. The young people I interviewed did not seem like a “˜lost generation’ nor did they appear apathetic about what is happening in the societies surrounding them. They are acutely conscious of their marginal structural position, and no longer trust the state’s willingness and ability to find solutions to their problems. In their shared marginalisation, young people develop a sense of common identity and a critical consciousness that leads them to challenge the established order (Honwana 2012, 2013).

Asef Bayat calls these dispersed actions “˜non-movements,’ which he describes as “quiet and unassuming daily struggles” outside formal institutional channels in which everyday social activities blend with political activism (2010: 5)

Young activists find themselves more divided; the broad unity forged during street protests dissipates as they struggle to articulate a new common purpose and to define a new political role for themselves

In the aftermath of street protests, young people appear to be retreating back to the periphery of formal politics, into their “˜non-movements.’

Today, the divorce of power from politics is deepening because power is being seized by supranational finance and trade corporations and by transnational organised crime syndicates. Devoid of power, politics remains localised in the nation state and responds to the interests of supranational powers rather than to the will of the people. In this sense, “˜sovereignty is outsourced’ and democracy becomes a charade, as politics has no power but instead serves power.

Aditya Nigam points to the current crisis of the “˜political’ and suggests that in the wake of the North African revolutions, these societies are “living in an interregnum when the old forms of politics have become moribund and obsolete but new ones have not yet emerged … Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of the political” by the younger generation (2012: 175).

In Tunisia, young activists are enjoying the freedom of independent civic and political engagement following the revolution, as these were banned under the old regime. But at the same time, their disappointment with party politics makes some young people turn to politicized forms of Islam. For example, the famous rapper of the revolution, “˜El General,’ is today an advocate for the instauration of Sharia law, and the lyrics of his latest song, titled “I Wish,” call for Tunisia to become an Islamic state. Indeed, young Islamists who joined radical Salafist groups believe that Sharia will be the solution to their problems because, as some of them put it: “Sharia is not politics, but a whole way of life, with its laws and its science.”

In Senegal, the Y’en a Marre activists pride themselves on being non-partisan and vow to work towards making politicians accountable to those who elected them

a “˜New Type of Senegalese’ described as: one that is more socially and politically conscious, assumes her/his responsibilities as a citizen, and fights for the well-being of the Senegalese people

my young interlocutors seem to believe that it is possible to achieve fundamental change outside of dominant political structures, even if they have not yet fully articulated how to do so

Agricultural cooperatives have also remained active. These provide necessary food, lessening reliance on imports. Northern Syria was the country’s breadbasket prior to the civil war — though centralized governance meant that its people were not able to benefit equitably. The creation of agricultural cooperatives has democratized some of these resources. In total, cooperatives make up an estimated 7% of the economy of Jazira region — with women’s cooperatives contributing to nearly half of that figure.

the presence of existing facilities, materials, and workers has clearly enabled North and East Syria to produce more goods faster than equivalent goods could be imported — and to do so without the need for dangerous international travel.

cooperatives are more attuned to the needs of the communities their members live in, and thus more likely to make decisions based on need than profit.

Recently, the communes have become essential for ensuring that the lockdown can be maintained without undue stress on everyday people. One ANHA report described how the process of food distribution implemented by the Autonomous Administration relies on the local knowledge and small scale of these structures. Communes are responsible for registering lists of names of those who need food assistance — primarily the poor and unemployed. The Social Affairs Commission then supplies food items, which are distributed by the communes.

In Fafin district, for example, food was distributed to about 2,000 families, with commune members going from family to family to distribute aid in order to prevent large groups from congregating. About half of these families are displaced Efrîn residents.

Like cooperatives, communes allow relief efforts to be both centrally coordinated and based on community needs. Commune members do not need to travel beyond their neighborhoods to distribute aid, lessening the number of people traveling from city to city. Reliable, organized distribution also lessens the likelihood that large groups of people will gather in shops out of fear that they may not get the items they need.

democratic confederalist structures with strong popular support have undoubtedly played a key role in helping North and East Syria implement preventative measures

Revolutions in other countries of the MENA region have also shown clear indications of strong feminist expression. Sudan, Algeria, and more recently Iraq, have witnessed a significant mobilization of young feminists, often calling for women demonstrating against oppression and violence and always framing their demands within a call for change and transformation towards the rule of law, justice, equality, and dignity for all.

The main characteristics of what we are observing during the ongoing revolution is certainly a feminist movement that is intersectional, that emphasizes agency and bodily rights, has a critical and deep understanding of linkages and connections, and uses different modern and creative strategies for mobilization and communication including social media. But critically, the movement is not limited to or bound by geographical or thematic confines, but rather moves away from defining gender as a binary, and employs an all-inclusive and an uncompromising approach to its understanding of human rights

how do we collect the significant indigenous knowledge produced every day by young feminists who, for the first time, have reclaimed both space and voice from the older generation of feminists, as well as from Northern-based feminists?

In neighborhoods like this one, with winding roads and haphazard rows of buildings, the elevated highway provides a watchtower for the state.

Rather than connecting informal districts to utilities and providing funds to upgrade housing, the government prefers to relocate residents to satellite cities on the outskirts. As residents of these areas grow poorer and more desperate under crushing austerity measures, the government would rather see them housed in isolated contingents in the desert, thus eliminating the prospect that they could participate in a mass mobilization, as happened a decade ago.

Building or repairing roads offers a relatively quick and easy way for a government to demonstrate progress, something the young regime would have been eager to do to establish some semblance of legitimacy.

the megaprojects. Work began on a $4.2 billion expansion of the Suez Canal in August 2014. The crews responsible for the canal expansion had not yet set down their shovels when construction began on the world’s widest cable-stayed bridge, which now stretches across the Nile in central Cairo. Its six lanes in each direction are inaccessible to most commuters who cannot afford to pay the 20 Egyptian pound ($1.27) toll. But those who tuned in to public television on New Year’s Eve were treated to a spectacle of fireworks choreographed to nationalist music above its towering pylons and a floating portrait of the president.

Located some 45 kilometers (28 miles) east of Cairo, the New Administrative Capital is Al Sisi’s crown jewel. Contractors began work on the project in 2015. When finished, the luxe megacity will be almost as large as Singapore and boast a series of artificial lakes, an amusement park four times the size of Disneyland, and the tallest skyscraper on the continent. But the first phase alone, slated for completion in 2022 (although engineers working on the project say that construction is far behind schedule), will cost $45 billion — an unfathomable sum to anyone, perhaps, but more dissonant still for the more than 60 million Egyptians who depend on shrinking subsidies for their daily bread.

Television commercials starring Egyptian celebrities and billboards stationed along every road in the nation depict imagined lives in lush, gated communities backdropped by gleaming glass towers and bluer skies than dust-choked Cairo has ever seen. They are part of what architect Adham Selim describes as a practice of “ruling through drawing,” in which the government produces images of the future as a means of exerting greater control over the present and the past. “The continuous act of drawing the world-to-be is the way in which authority sustains a stable worldview, in which it places itself as an external to the world it intends to change, and rule,”

Al Sisi longs to be remembered as the ruler who snatched Egypt from the mouth of the Muslim Brotherhood and built a new Cairo in its wake. To this end, he is curating an archive that will be taught in the future.

Ismail borrowed so excessively from foreign lenders to realize his vision that when a collapse in the price of cotton left Egypt unable to repay its debts, European powers had him deposed. Then Britain invaded Egypt to protect its interests, starting a decadeslong occupation.

Successive Egyptian administrations have tried to decentralize Cairo, building generation after generation of satellite cities meant to entice upper- and middle-class Cairenes out of the urban core. The cities 10th of Ramadan and 6th of October, located east and west of Cairo, respectively, built under Sadat, and Madinaty and New Cairo (not to be confused with the New Administrative Capital), scattered to the east and started under Mubarak, sit half-empty, having never reached their target populations — or anything close.

Yahia Shawkat, author of “Egypt’s Housing Crisis: The Shaping of Urban Space,” estimates that 33,000 families were victims of forced eviction under Mubarak between 1997 and 2012. Under Al Sisi, the Ministry of Housing now boasts that it has relocated 60,000 families between 2018 and 2020 alone

When the government wanted to demolish informal housing on Warraq Island, located in the center of the Nile river in Cairo and home to 90,000 people, it sent security forces with bulldozers in the predawn hours of July 16, 2017, while most residents were still asleep. Heba Nagaa Otmorsi, a resident of the island, told The Guardian that her house had been demolished while she was at work. “It was our neighbors who rescued the children,” she said. Clashes on the island left one resident dead and dozens injured.

“People living in these semi-autonomous neighborhoods are always blamed for some sort of social urban ill,”

In January 2021, several high-level government officials laid the cornerstone of the Cairo Eye in Zamalek, one of Cairo’s wealthiest neighborhoods. One-third of Al Masallah Garden, a 15,000-square-meter (16,500-square-yard) historic park, will be destroyed to make way for the 120-meter-tall (132-yards) observation wheel, surrounded by shops, entertainment, restaurants, and a two-story parking garage.

Recent projects have disrupted Khedival Cairo and Mamluk-era tombs in the City of the Dead. A recent announcement that graves around Imam Al Shafi’i Mosque will be moved to make way for a bridge project has left Hussein Omar heartbroken at the prospect of losing his family mausoleum, where generations have been laid to rest since his great-great-grandfather bought the plot in 1924. It feels like a “concerted assault on the fundamental relationship that Egyptians have with their past,” he says. A plot that has belonged to his maternal grandmother’s family since the 19th century is even nearer to the site of the scheduled bridge project. There is no way of knowing if either plot will survive the new construction.

“If you have a guy who is playing poker and he starts with two aces, better not to play against him,” says a foreign executive with years of experience in Abu Dhabi. “You can’t compete against the royal family when all the big business is generated by the state.”

The blurring of lines between the state and royal interests has long been a characteristic of Gulf states. But it has become more pronounced, particularly in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, at a time when leaders of the two countries have become more autocratic, security conscious and determined to develop new sectors, often related to technological advances.

A younger generation of royals is also at the helm in Qatar, where Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani became emir aged just 33. Under his watch, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, a 40-year-old distant relative of the emir, has become a rising star. He has been promoted through the ranks to become the wealthy state’s foreign minister and most powerful investor as the hands-on chair of the Qatar Investment Authority.

A son of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the UAE’s founding father, Sheikh Tahnoon is one of a group of six powerful full-brothers, headed by Sheikh Mohammed, who are known as the “Bani Fatima six” in reference to their mother. Others include Sheikh Mansour, the billionaire owner of Manchester City football club. Another is Sheikh Abdullah, the foreign minister.

Foreign officials describe Sheikh Tahnoon as pragmatic, probing and analytical. The former US diplomat says he was the first senior Emirati to raise the prospect of the UAE pulling out of the war in Yemen, realising it could not be won, in 2016. That was three years before the Gulf state began withdrawing troops after Abu Dhabi and Riyadh had attracted widespread criticism for their role in the conflict.

UN experts have repeatedly accused the UAE of violating an arms embargo on Libya.

The US Defense Intelligence Agency “assessed” that the UAE “may provide some financing” for the Libya operations of Russia’s Wagner Group, which has deployed about 2,000 mercenaries to back Gen Haftar

The creation of companies such as G42 is viewed by knowledgeable observers as an extension of the emirate’s national strategic goals as it relies heavily on technology in sectors ranging from security to health. Its relationship with Israel is expected to focus on these and other areas such as agritech, with entities linked to the state and the ruling family likely to take the lead.

two-thirds of Egypt's informal workers have already lost their jobs due to the policies and public fear around the virus

Built only as a burial site in the 7th century, the City of the Dead has transformed into one of the country's largest slums, home to more than 1.5 million people

Ibrahim Radwan, 33, a street vendor who sells bread to people visiting the cemeteries at Sayeda Nafisa mosque, a five-minute walk from the City of the Dead, used to get between 15 and 30 customers a day. Now, he says, he is lucky if he gets four customers over a whole weekend.

Some 1.6 billion informal workers around the world, representing nearly half of the global labour force, are in immediate danger of losing their livelihoods due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ILO said last week.

Haq said he and other workers in the cemetery have been given no guidance on how to protect themselves from contagion while they do their jobs. "We do not know how to bury people who die of coronavirus," he said as he washed down one of the tomb markers. Traditionally, the deceased's close family members clean the body themselves, before simply wrapping it in a white cloth. The family then performs the funeral prayer, and male family members, with the help of cemetery workers, bury the body. All of this happens within 24 hours of death. But in the midst of the outbreak, Egyptians who die after having developed COVID-19 must be buried under the supervision of the country's health ministry, said Mona Mina, general coordinator of Doctors Without Rights, a lobby group.

Long committed to a free media, Mustafa Amin was imprisoned for six months in 1939 for an article in Akher sa‘a (Last Hour) magazine deemed critical of King Faruq. An advocate of democracy and Western liberalism, he was arrested in 1965, tried secretly in 1966, and convicted of being a spy for America and smuggling funds. Sentenced to a life sentence, he spent nine years in prison before being pardoned by Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat. Ali Amin, accused by Heikal of working for British and Saudi intelligence, went into exile in 1965.

Room for expression existed mainly in the literary pages of al-Ahram, where writers under Heikal’s wings, like Naguib Mahfouz, could publish works of fiction that could be read as challenges to the status quo.[5] As far as the press was concerned, censorship was directed at politically oriented news and commentary rather than the literary sections

During the conflict, as the Egyptian army, under Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer’s command, was hastily retreating from Sinai, broadcast outlets aired invented reports of fabulous victories against the Zionist foe. At no other moment did the state media prove so woefully deficient, contributing to a deep sense of public betrayal.

The speech was written for him by prominent journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and tactfully framed a romp of Arab armies as a “setback,” displaying Heikal’s knack for being both a propagandist and political powerbroker.   It was a moment that brilliantly served to shore up Nasser’s support. Egyptians took to the streets demanding that their leader stay in power. “The People Say ‘No,’” declared Akhbar al-youm (News of the Day) in large red writing. In smaller black lettering the headline read, “The Leader Discloses the Whole Truth to the People.” It is difficult to say how populist and genuine the appeal was and how much of the public display of support for Nasser was behind-the-scenes political machinations of the regime and its media. While Nasser did stay in power, it was only later that Egyptians could comprehend the true extent of the defeat—especially in light of official propaganda—and the institutional failures that placed the whole of Sinai under Israeli control.

slogans shouted and scrawled on building walls that demanded: “Stop the Rule of the Intelligence,” “Down with the Police State,” and “Down with Heikal’s Lying Press.”

Heikal blurred the line between the role of a journalist and that of a politician. “He introduced a model in Egypt and the Arab world about what your ambitions should be as a journalist. In the West or Europe, you gain your reputation from your independence as a journalist,” explained Dawoud. “When I am the president’s consultant and I attend his close meetings and I write his speeches, there is definitely a lot of information that I would have to keep secret. That goes contrary to my job as a journalist, which is to find as much information as I can.”

“A centralized editorial secretariat, called the Desk, was founded, as well as the Center for Strategic Studies and the Information Division. To his detractors, these innovations appeared to be spying sessions of an extensive empire dedicated to intelligence gathering

Nasser appointed Heikal to the post of minister of information and national guidance, a role he assumed for six months in 1970 until Nasser’s death. Yet the self-described journalist confided his frustration of being assigned a ministerial post, perhaps intended to distance him from the publishing empire he built, to a colleague, the leftist writer Lutfi al-Khouli, at his home. The encounter was surreptitiously recorded by the secret police, leading to the arrest and brief imprisonment of al-Khouli, and Heikal’s secretary and her husband, who were also present. “Now, Nasser’s regime had two aspects: it had great achievements to its credit but also it had a repressive side. I do not myself believe that the achievements . . . could have been carried out without some degree of enforcement,” Heikal wrote in The Road to Ramadan. “But after the 1967 defeat the positive achievements came to an end, because all resources were geared to the coming battle, while repression became more obvious. When Nasser died the executants of repression took it on themselves to be the ideologues of the new regime as well. They held almost all the key posts in the country. The people resented this and came to hate what they saw as their oppressors.”

after his increasing criticism of Sadat’s handling of the October 1973 War and appeals to the United States to address the impasse, Heikal was removed from al-Ahram in 1974. He remained a prolific author. In May 1978, Heikal was one of dozens of writers accused by the state prosecutor of defaming Egypt and weakening social peace and was subject to an interrogation that extended three months

Sadat attempted to bring the dissident cacophony into line through the mass arrest in September 1981 of more than 1,500 intellectuals, writers, journalists, and opposition elements of every stripe. Among those arrested were leading members of the Journalists’ Syndicate and prominent figures like the political writer Muhammad Hassanein Heikal and novelist Nawal El Saadawi. Sadat’s crackdown against his opponents culminated in his assassination by Islamic militants on October 6, 1981 during a military parade to commemorate the start of the 1973 War. Soon after Hosni Mubarak assumed power, Heikal was released from prison

When Dream aired the lecture Heikal gave at the American University in Cairo, direct pressure was placed on the owner’s business interests, and the veteran journalist found a new forum on pan-Arab satellite broadcasting. The influential writer has made opposition to Gamal Mubarak’s succession a staple of his newspaper columns.

With the rise of satellite television, Qatar’s Al Jazeera commanded audiences not only with news but with popular discussion programmed, like Ma‘ Heikal (With Heikal), a program by Heikal that began the year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and which was watched by the Arab public with eager interest. Seated behind a desk and looking into the camera, Heikal gave his narrative of historical events and commentary on Middle Eastern and world affairs, exposing the intrigues of regional and global powers from his perch, having privileged access to leaders, diplomats, and decision makers. He has been a critic of Saudi diplomacy, its ballooning regional influence given the power of petrodollars, and its confrontation with Iran. Saudi pundits have consistently taken potshots at Heikal.

A couple of months before Morsi’s ouster on July 3, 2013, Heikal was contacted by Morsi’s defense minister Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi for a meeting, which had led to speculation that the Heikal devised the behind-the-scenes scenarios for an elected president’s removal as the dominant political player, the Muslim Brotherhood, was sinking in popularity. After Morsi was expelled from office, Heikal suggested to the military leader that he seek a popular mandate to lead the country, mirroring Nasser-style populism. Attired in full military regalia, al-Sisi at a July 24, 2013 graduation ceremony of the naval and air defence academies, broadcast live, warned that national security was in peril and summoned nationwide rallies two days later. Heikal supported al-Sisi’s bid for the presidency viewing him as the candidate born of necessity.