a few more points gleaned from al-Ahram Weekly

Unfortunately, all the copies of Thursday’s edition are sold out wherever I look: not surprisingly, given the richness of this special revolutionary edition. So I had to go back to the coffee shop where I saw it on the rack to read some more.

Two further points struck me during this second reading.

1. There’s a certain conspiracy theory floating around Egypt now, which I heard yesterday from an American faculty member who believes it. From al-Ahram Weekly it seems that a number of Egyptians are already convinced it’s solid fact. That theory is that the Alexandria church bombing on January 1 was done by the Interior Ministry. (A corollary of the rumor seems to be that Mubarak didn’t know, and that now-arrested former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly was a rogue actor in that case. I’ll leave it to Egyptians to sort out how plausible that is.)

I have no way of knowing whether the theory is true. But I can say that my eyebrows were raised more than a bit by the official conclusion, which was that the bombing was done by extremists from Gaza. That would be unprecedented, and it’s also a bit too convenient.

However, if there’s a trial for Habib al-Adly, which seems more and more likely, this ought to be one of the issues that comes up. Let’s keep an eye on this rumor.

2. Some of my Western friends who were at first suspicious of the forces behind the Egyptian revolution had their minds changed by seeing the photos of those killed. Perhaps they were expecting to see al-Qaeda’ish-looking agitators, and what they saw instead were hopeful young kids cut down without having had a chance to live, looking just like any of us at that age except that they happen to be Egyptian. The photos of the dead were impossible to resist for everyone I knew, and that’s the main reason I posted them: to help dispel misconceptions in the West about who was doing the protesting.

The point being, from al-Ahram Weekly it looks as though even many Egyptians had the same reaction. There are Egyptians, that is, who also opposed the revolution at first, thinking it was a Muslim Brotherhood plot, but who flipped 180 degrees after seeing the photos of the dead in al-Masry al-Yaum.

That newspaper has been pretty tough on our university at times, running one or more fairly ridiculous stories about us. But they did a nice job covering the revolution, for sure.