Some rights reserved Why do people put so much energy in blaming and trying to find who is responsible for a certain problem instead of thinking for a minute to find a way to fix it?!

Black Out from Mayye Zayed on Vimeo. Khaled Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian from the coastal city of Alexandria, was allegedly tortured to death at the hands of two officers who wanted to search him under the emergency law. The story began on 7th June 2010 when Khaled Said went to his usual Internet cafe in Sidigaber … Then two wild detective cops (Mahmoud Alfallah and Awaad Elmokhber) ambushed that cafe asking people for their IDs which is totally out of their authority and without legal permission. Khaled did reject that way of inhumane treatment and consequently was attacked so viciously , was kicked in his chest and belly severely, and…

I never saw such a critic of US way of living Leonard Cohen – Democracy: It's coming through a hole in the air, from those nights in Tiananmen Square. It's coming from the feel that this ain't exactly real, or it's real, but it ain't exactly there. From the wars against disorder, from the sirens night and day, from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay: Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. It's coming through a crack in the wall on a visionary flood of alcohol; from the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount which I don't pretend to understand at all. It's coming…

I wonder how can people claim that they know a story by just listening to their friends’ side of it, and not even caring about listening to the other side.

This post is for mourning Khalid Said who was brutally murdered by the Egyptian police.  

After I went to Chile, I’m trying to expose myself to the music of different languages. Spanish and French mainly. From time to time I find songs with English version. After listening to the English version, I still don’t find the beauty I feel in my heart when I listen to the original language. I may not understand every word, but the original language always reaches my heart, which is usually not the case with translated English versions. If you don’t know, I’m the editor of the Arabic version of Global Voices Online. I edit translations from the English version to the Arabic one. I do this mainly for my…

This video (via dear Rasha) is from the musical Notre Dame De Paris based on the novel by the same name by Victor Hugo. The story, along with the music of course, always strikes me deeply. Seeing what westerners accuse Arabs or Easterners with based deeply in the western soul since the Middle Ages. How pure beauty can be seen as pure impurity. How all what matters is being a virgin. How can a corrupted person have all the authority to destroy this beauty as long as it didn’t obey his lustful needs. How are some people are just driven by their sexual needs. How can all the people obey…

As many westerners call for Arab/Eastern accepting “the other”, what do they mean by accepting? Do you mean accepting their mere existence? Do you mean discovering them? Do you mean discussing the deep cultural / religious details? Do you mean mingling between the cultures? Do you mean absorbing one culture in the other? Let me explain 2 sides of a coin in the Egyptian society, the 2 extremes. We have extremely religious people who require some rituals to be strictly done so that you are in the “righteous” side, like having a long beard with a short galabeyya or whatever. We have extremely non-religious people who think religious people are…

In the past days I was enjoying the company of some Danish and Egyptian artists. Artists of different kinds, music, food, photography, you can summarize it as just Art. We kept talking about Egypt and Denmark, the Egyptians and the Danes. We kept exploring each other, from different aspects. And in the same time, we mingled with average people, who might not always share the same views, or the same perspectives. And as time kept passing by, I began to think. We always notice people talking about “the other”, accepting “the other”, communicating with “the other”, discovering “the other”. Is that expression really right? Should this expression exist in the…

This is the 4th Day of “Streets In Cairo” event by the Danish Egyptian Dialogue Institute This day was a special day, Danish and Egyptian chefs spent hours in the Town House Factory preparing Egyptian food components while the DJs were preparing themselves for a major performance! They brought different kinds of food and fruits. Apricot, water melons, okra, green salads, Egyptian beans, mint, even some yogurt. The idea was preparing Egyptian food in the Danish way.     For me this was like presenting a new perspective of things. Showing the same everyday usual from a different angle. We know the food, we know its usual taste, we know…

Third part of the “Streets In Cairo” event. We spent day 3 with the Danish and Egyptian DJs and photographers around Sayeda Zeinab area, in a small neighborhood beside Ibn Tulun Mosque, in Al Khalifa area. The Egyptian artist Aalam Wassef introduced us to his workshop He was telling us how was the people in the neighborhood were open-minded and didn’t impose the, what we called, Shakespearean right or wrong. How they just understood what is the real meaning for freedom towards his arts, towards cultural events as long as he didn’t “provoke” the normal people. For example, the example he mentioned, not kissing his girlfriend in public. The path…

Please click here for Day 1, and please follow DEDI twitter account for more news. In Day 2 we spent most of the day in the Viennoise talking with the Danish photographers and artists. Had a great talk with Charlotte Haslund from Copenhagen. Her main activity is documentaries and art photography in several countries. We talked about how photography exhibitions can expose details which are not noticed generally, giving feelings should be noticed more by people. Charlotte Haslund the explorer. In one of her projects, Natives: the Danes, she tried to reverse the colonial point of view by displaying the Danes as if they are colonized natives.   I was…