Wednesday 29 August 2012

Regarding The Guide To Egypt's Challenges

A few weeks back I had planned to write a small piece on the problems facing Egypt, given that now it had its first democratically elected president. After one day of thinking and researching, I finally set out to write the piece when I come across a fantastic post by Juan Cole that resembled largely what I had in mind, and took it a step or two further. My first impulse was: "oh, okay. That's it then."

Then, a few hours later I think: what if I develop something that could become a long term reference? Something that pretty much aggregates and analyses information on where does Egypt stand now, hopefully breaking down some of the problems into components that could be separately addressed. A couple of weeks later of on and off work, and the guide was born.

I plan to continue working on the guide. New sections might be added, information might be updated based on progress, and some are suggesting revisiting after one year to see where things stand in comparison.

For now, I would like to thank a few people.

First, the incredible Fouad Mansour of Ahram Online who has helped me tremendously throughout this project. It's just every writer's dream to work with an editor like that. I would also like to thank Dina Samak, Ahmed Feteha and Zeinab Mohammed, among others, from the Ahram Online team.

I also want to thank some of the people who checked our and critiqued my earlier drafts and have been generally helpful with all of my writing. In no particular order: Dalia Ezzat, Carina Kamel, Abeer Allam, Sara Labib, Hany Rasma, Islam Hussein, Tamer Fouad, Koert DeBeuf and others! Thank you so much.

Here's a link to the guide.

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