Category Archives: Obituaries

Obituaries of personalities related to subjects covered

Egypt’s Mubarak left a mixed legacy, mostly negative.

Hosny Mubarak who was fourth president of Egypt for thirty years left a mixed legacy. He opened the door for changing the personality cult of a president and improved economy; regionally he played a major role in 1990 in building Egypt lead regional coalition forces to liberate Kuwait and was one of several architects who helped the Palestinians and Israelis to reach a peace agreement in 1993.

Interviewing President Mubarak, Qubbah Palace, Cairo 1988. But he was responsible for wide corruption and ending 160 years of modernity paving the way for the islamisation of Egypt and ending secular liberalism. I met him several times and this is my personal view as a historian .

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The Sheikh who Perfected TV Evangelism To Islamise Egyptian Society

First Published in JUne 1998, when I wrote it then, it was three years before 9/11 and seven years before Islamists terrorist bombed London Transport System, 14 years before Muslim Brotherhood took control of Egypt and 15 years before the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant ISIL was declared a caliphate. But when I revisited this Obituary of Egypt Best known Islamic TV Evangelist, it was events foretold. The seeds of jihadism were sown by intellectual means, by changing the way of thinking and the collective mind. It was and still going on, the Islamisation of a Society by stealth.
Egypt best Known Islamic  cleric Mohammed Metawali Sharawi, who died at the age of 87 on 17th June 1998, got his chance of stardom at the age of 59, in the last year of the late autocratic President Nasser’s rule, when he took part in the country’s first ever televised Islamic religious discussion programme , nour ala nour ” Light upon Light” presented by Ahmed Farrag  a handsome news-anchor but a failed cinema actor who had gone to make a career in television religious programme.
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The late Scribe of Cairo, remembered on his 12th Anniversary

On the 12th  anniversary of the Nobel Laureate “Scribe of Cairo” death – his obituary revisited, first penned as obituary on 30 August 2006 

The death on 29 August 2006  of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz generated a quarrel between historians, literary critics and Egyptians on one side, and Arab journalists on the other. It was a re-run of the 1988 controversy, when Mafouz won the world’s most prestigious award–the Nobel Prize for literature–to the outrage of Arab nationalists who had condemned the author for his support of the late President Anwar Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel.

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Egypt’s Iconic Songstress and Actress Shadia Dies

Egypt iconic golden age of entertainment songstress and actress Shadia died aged 86 in Cairo hospital Tuesday 28 November closing a chapter of an unmatched history of culture, art, music, theatre and film that the Nile banks are unlikely to witness in our life time, Adel Darwish writes.

The star, once a pinup girl for Egypt post-war years (until the late 1970s) school boys, acted in over 100 films at a time when Egypt film industry was not only on par with world great cinema product   churning  centres like India, Soviet Cinema and Hollywood, but also secured Egyptian cultural dominance all over the Arabic speaking nations, making Egyptian language (although rich with Arabic words, it is a distinctively different from Arabic with rich mixed vocabulary from her  old pharaonic, Coptic-which is Afro-Asiatic Nilotic-, Greek and later many Mediterranean words from Latin, French, Turkish and Jewish-ladino) the dominant language of popular entertainment, popular culture and performing arts of the area extending between the Atlas Mountains in North West Africa to the straits of Hormuz.

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Understanding the Escalating Saudi Iranian Row

Our media led by BBC try to simplify the latest diplomatic crisis in the Middle East – which led to severing of diplomatic relations between Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran ( with two other countries following the Saudis action)- into Shia-Sunni sectarian rivalry resulting from the execution of Iran backed Shia cleric. This is a load of nonsense which leads to misunderstanding and misleading public opinion. It is far more complicated as many forces who adhere to the Shia faith (Morocco shia sects and those in North Africa nd Sudan) back KSA, while trends and forces who are devote Sunnis are backing Iran against the Saudis (Turkey for example is Sunni, so are Hamas and many Palestinian factions as well as the Muslim Brotherhood are all Sunni hardliners but are against Saudi Arabia especially in Yemen but are also against Assad in Syria.
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Farewell and RIP Richard Beeston, Fleet Street Brave Soul

It is with aching heart and weeping soul that I started hacking this piece to remember my dear old friend and colleague Richard Beeston ( Feb 18, 1963, May 19, 2013) a son of great journalist by the same name – who, alongside his late wife- reported, and became part of a body of extraordinary people  contributing to  an important chapter of Britain’s post Imperial history in the Middle East- and in his footsteps Richard followed.

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