This was published a while ago by Arab Media & Society, but it’s another one of Mona Eltahawy’s interesting articles related to the blogosphere in the Middle East: Arab blogs: Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love Middle East dictators.

Below is an excerpt on the Egyptian blogosphere:

[T]he blogs have a miniscule audience, their detractors say. Not enough eyes and ears, they complain. To those detractors, to those old men on the rug still trying to figure out who’ll be left standing and to those who are still wading through the bog of stagnation, covered in self-defeat, I say “so what?”

And in defense of my “so what?” is the recent hat-trick, a triple whammy, scored by Egyptian bloggers.

One: the exposure by bloggers of the sexual assaults of women in downtown Cairo by gangs of men during a religious holiday in Cairo in October 2006 (for more see Sharon Otterman). Bloggers forced the issue onto the national agenda. Egyptian authorities studiously maintain the blogs were trying to make Egypt look bad but the flood of comments left by women attesting to their daily versions of the downtown sexual assaults showed otherwise.

Back to those electronic pamphleteers for a minute, because it is they who complete the circle between the October sexual assaults and May 25, 2005. Alaa and his mother were not the only targets of state-sanctioned violence that day. Many female protestors and journalists were sexually assaulted by security forces and pro-government thugs. Several bloggers who wrote about the October sexual assaults had previously witnessed those sexual assaults in May 2005 and so were more than ready to hold the State accountable for the security forces’ failure to bring offenders to justice.

Two: the detention in December of a police officer accused of sexually assaulting a prisoner. A month earlier Egyptian blogs had circulated a video showing the prisoner, Imad El Kabir, with hands bound behind his back and his legs held in the air, being sodomised with a stick as those around him taunt him. His lawyer has said the torture took place in January 2006 in a police station after Kabir was detained and beaten for trying to stop an argument between the police and his brother.

Three: the second detention in 18-months of 22-year-old blogger Abdul Kareem Nabil—also known as Kareem Amer—after he posted articles critical of Islam on his blog. When the security services of President Hosni Mubarak, the man who has dominated Egypt for a quarter of a century, arrest a blogger then the phrase “David and Goliath” cannot even begin to explain it (for more see Rania Al Malky).

On Tunisia, we learn the value of ten minutes to a blogger:

Whenever I think of Tunisia and the Internet I always think of 10 minutes. That’s how much time journalist and human rights campaigner Sihem Bensedrine (interviewed by Arab Media & Society) has to type out her latest news before security apparatus track down the Internet café she is filing from. Then she slips out to another café to begin another round of 10 minutes. I’ll never forget hearing her describe this at a conference in Copenhagen we spoke at last year that was organized by the Danish chapter of the writers’ organization PEN on freedom of expression in the Arab world.

How many rounds of 10 minutes do we spend surfing the net, mindlessly? She has 10 minutes to tell the world about the latest horrors of the police state otherwise known as the torture fiefdom of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali aka Tunisia.

Read it all. She discusses and lauds bloggers from all over the Middle East. Indeed, these bloggers are part of a large movement, a metamorphosis of sorts in civilian journalism.

Previously posted article by Eltahawy: Mona Eltahawy: Mubarak does not own Egypt and he does not own Islam.

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