Ursula Lindsey

The street lamps on the Kasr El Nil bridge are out. The Semiramis hotel is battered and shuttered: during the latest round of clashes the hotel was looted by a well-armed mob that showed up one night at 2 a.m. The staff called the army and the police, in vain. As our taxi turns the corner by the Semiramis – on the edge of Tahrir Square, a few minutes from the American Embassy – there’s a crowd of young men in the street in front of us. A boy with a keffiyeh wrapped around his mouth winds up his arm and lets loose, aiming squarely at our windscreen – but his hand is empty, he’s just joking. Another boy waves us through. The first boy comes running over and, hanging on the open window, yells at the driver. I’m too flustered to catch what he says, but it’s clear we won’t be let through. We head back to the bridge, back across the Nile, up the other side and home by a different bridge.

One of the winners of the Abraaj Group Art Prize unveiled at the Art Dubai fair this week is Vartan Avakian. A Very Short History of Tall Men is a collection of portraits of would-be dictators, not-so-strong men who lasted only a few days or weeks and were quickly forgotten. He has cast detailed miniature gold statues of the men and suspended them in globes of synthetic glass, like insects in amber.

I prefer to see what happened as a great fire, which many shared in starting, some out of negligence and stupidity, some out of revenge, some of out greed and some out of inattention. Everyone thought his own actions explained the fire's outbreak, but the truth, God knows, is they all joined in starting it... And what matters is that they started it, and the army came to power claiming to put it out. I underlined this passage, earlier this summer, in Ezzedine Choukri Fishere’s novel Bab El Khoroug, ('The Way Out'). Choukri Fishere is a former Egyptian diplomat, a professor of political science and the author of several previous novels. He published Bab El Khoroug in instalments in the Egyptian newspaper El Tahrir last year. The novel, set in the year 2020, looks back on a military takeover, a complete breakdown of government and security, the rise of an unlikely dictator and the massacres he oversees, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president, and yet another military coup.

This morning Mohammad Morsi went on trial in the police academy on the outskirts of Cairo where Hosni Mubarak was tried two years ago. The charges against Morsi seem even more difficult to prove than those brought against his predecessor. Morsi and 14 other Muslim Brotherhood leaders are accused of inciting and abetting violence by his supporters against protesters outside the presidential palace last December, which left seven dead. (He also faces other charges, such as conspiring with Hamas.)

Mohamed Mahmoud is a small street that branches from Tahrir Square; the American University in Cairo stands on the corner. Two years ago, the police violently dispersed a dwindling sit-in there by a few dozen relatives of people killed during the uprising against Mubarak. The policemen were caught on cell phones dragging dead bodies to the curb like bags of garbage. Young people poured back into Tahrir Square and spent four days fighting the police, who fell back along Mohamed Mahmoud, protecting one of the avenues to the Ministry of Interior. (The Muslim Brotherhood, concerned that the violence would derail the upcoming parliamentary elections, prohibited its members from taking part.) For perhaps the last time, street protests by groups that identified as revolutionary had an impact on the political process. They demanded that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces set a date for presidential elections and for stepping down from power. The SCAF agreed.