Maurice Chammah

Thursday was World Press Freedom Day. On Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) published an article listing the arrests, injuries, and assaults of at least eighteen journalists covering recent clashes near the Egyptian Ministry of Defense. Some reporters were beaten, others shot at, a few...

Suddenly, two months ago, the news from Egypt was no longer in the streets. You couldn't look out the window at Tahrir Square, at Mohamed Mahmoud, at the sit-in outside Parliament. You had to do what political journalists and dinner party conversationalists do in most places -- interpret shrouded speeches...

I recently went to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for a Fulbright conference. It's a country often forgotten as we read the news of the last year from the Arab world.

Throughout this trip, however, I was fascinated by the pictures, hung in nearly every public space, of a...

The figures coming out in most of the press are saying that over 70 died and over 300 were injured in riots that broke out last night at a soccer match in Port Said between the most famous Cairo team, Al Ahly, and the home team Al Masry. Fans stormed...

At an International Press Gathering last week, foreign journalists came to hear remarks by a few Egyptian counterparts about what to expect on January 25th, the first anniversary of one of the most reported revolutions in recent history. The nervous joke passing between the crisply dressed Americans and Europeans was...

January 25th 2012, the first anniversary of the Egyptian uprisings that brought down Mubarak, is approaching quickly. When it comes, the news will arrive fast and fragmented from Tahrir, as it has every time big numbers return to the square. The ruling military council has called for an...

Under a pavilion at Al Azhar Park, an uncommonly clean swath of grass and palm trees overlooking the bustle of Islamic Cairo, a group of young beaded men and modestly dressed women were having a debate. "Just being on Facebook is not enough," one said. "We need a board of...

It began on Monday, December 5th, when English newspaper readers in Cairo learned that a new paper, the Egypt Independent, had disappeared from newsstands. They learned about the disappearance from the British press, in an article by Alistair Beach of The Independent. "A censorship row has broken out...

A little before 4 p.m. on Tuesday I sat on a ledge across the Nile from downtown and watched a steady trickle become a rush of protesters towards Tahrir Square. A constant remark among foreigners (though an unfazing reality to most Egyptians) is how close you can be to the...

Freedom House, the organization that rates the level of "freedom" in countries around the world and assigns scores, rated Egypt "not free" last year. America, was of course, rated "free." This year the verdict is still out, and more than ever the idea of rating such things seems farcical.

Because...

The majority of headlines about the Muslim Brotherhood these days describe the tensions accompanying their role in the political landscape as elections loom in late November; internal rifts, careful diplomacy, alliances broken and reformed.

But under the surface of this political positioning, something else is happening. Over the summer and...

The 24-hour news cycle quickened this week. There was so much to say, but no time to say it, because the events happened so fast. Newspapers were ready to publish follow-ups and commentary on the prisoner exchange between Hamas and Israel.

Everyone was still discussing the interview Gilad Shalit

On Sunday night around 8 p.m., I logged into Twitter and the reports started streaming in, fragmented but urgent. Violence had erupted near the Maspero building between a march of Coptic Christians coming from Shubra and a mixture of soldiers, police, and civilians. Gunshots were heard. Deaths were confirmed. We...

Even if you could not see the military jets flying over Cairo on October 6th, you could hear them. Throughout the day, in nearly every part of the city, the air would fill intermittently with a loud passing roar, as if a single sound effect from a war film had...