Sarah Carr

[President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and government officials at the funeral of Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat who was killed in a car bomb attack on 29 June 2015. Source: Official Facebook Page of the Spokesperson of the Egyptian Armed Forces.]by Sarah Carr 2 July 2015, Jadaliyya The prevailing characteristic of the time before the revolution, all those moons ago, was Egypt’s political moribundity. There were elections of sorts, or at least votes went in ballot boxes but their provenance was not always from voters.

WIAM EL-TAMAMI 28 JANUARY 2015 I left Cairo on 19 April 2014. I was so glad to have left, so relieved and slightly disbelieving that I had finally loosened myself from the grip of Al-Qaahira – in Arabic the name, quite fittingly, means ‘The Oppressor’, ‘The Crusher’, ‘The Vanquisheress’. I knew that I could not be there then, but that I was inextricably bound to her: I could, I would, always come back.