Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer and editor. She works with Mada Masr in Cairo, and is a co-producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. She is completing her first book, a history of an extraordinary feminist resistance group within the Egyptian revolution. This website is a collection of her writings.
Selected Essays
Editors' note: This piece is part of a series on gender and labor. If you would like to pitch for this series, please write to A few alarming headlines in recent years have described this as medical butchery, suggesting that it is due to doctors' economic interests, or to women (and, interestingly, their seemingly ever-present mothers) electing for c-section births.
I have to start this piece by discarding an old one. I had written something, just a few days ago, in response to the news that Alaa Abdel Fattah was beaten in jail.
I'm sitting in my office in New York, lingering over the draft of an email I need to send to the staff. It explains my complicated trip through Saudi Arabia and Germany and Egypt, finally to Palestine for the festival.
Full list
Anas, 7 years old: I don't think I will get the virus ... I'll get it if I don't wash my hands and brush my teeth and if I touch my face or if I touch something with the virus. I do the things that keep the virus away.
People remember the mob attacks, but they mostly do not know about the women who resisted them.
It is June 3, and evening is falling on a rainy Paris. I have learned about the Festival Cine-Palestine, which has a screening of Al-Lail (The Night) by Syrian director Mohamed Malas. I watch with utmost attention the account of Quneitra, the Syrian town located in the Golan Heights and captured by Israel during the 1967 war.
I have spent time in Palestine over the last five years as an organizer of the annual Palestine Festival of Literature , which just took place this May. *** Houses in Jerusalem's old city are small and built on top of one another, sharing courtyards and terraces.
There is a scene filled with terrifying suspense in the 1995 French film La Haine. Police have detained two young men, having found them to be in possession of a small piece of hashish. They sit handcuffed to their chairs, side by side, as two cops beat and harass them.
Waves of people have disappeared, been killed, too many count, too many to mourn properly. But Giulio’s death makes us confront the effect of this violence, of witnessing it, on our understanding of the world.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in its latest report that Egypt is second to China as the world's worst jailer of journalists...
I was part of Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault (OpAntiSH), one of several groups that fought mob attacks against women in Tahrir from 2012 onward. This piece is about my efforts to write about the group and its work. ---I thought it would be easier from the distance of New York.
I am writing this in the car on the way from Haifa to Ramallah. Cell phones beep as we cross between Israeli and West Bank coverage. The view out the window has changed from the dark green mountains and manicured landscapes of northern Israel to the rocky textures of the West Bank mountains.
I walked through downtown Cairo on a quiet Friday morning in March 2015, late to a conference I had helped organize and a little bit anxious. The conference was about the political importance of translation - of language and concepts - in connecting protest movements to one another and allowing them to be narrated from ...
As 2014 drew to a close, the Egyptian economy was making international headlines. The Financial Times called Egypt the world's best destination for stock market investment.[1] Meanwhile, the Egyptian press documented a flurry of visits by delegations of businessmen from various economic superpowers.
Yesterday they shot and killed a woman on Talaat Harb Street. She was walking, along with other members of the Socialist Alliance Party, through downtown to commemorate those killed since all of this started four years ago. Many of them were carrying flowers, wreaths to lay in Tahrir.
Image from Flickr via (flicts) By Yasmin El-Rifae A year ago I woke up in Cairo to the news of a massacre, the second of the summer. I was subletting a friend's apartment downtown, a beautiful place that gave me solitude above the blazing, dense insanity below while keeping me close to the small geography of my social life.
A few days ago, heavy court sentences were imposed on seven men who were convicted of attempted rape, attempted murder, and torture, in a ruling seen by many as unprecedented in Egypt.
I am sitting in Ramallah reading this article about the controversy surrounding the deaths of two Palestinian teenagers, shot by Israeli bullets (one through the back) last week at a protest commemorating the Nakba. CCTV footage of the incident has been circulated over the past week; meanwhile the media quotes Israeli army sources claiming the...
All this sickness has to go somewhere, and it seems it has gone directly to my stomach. In my belly is a rock of congealing violence; of fractured time and place; of the anxiety of powerlessness.I am at the border crossing from Jordan into Israel, in order to reach the West Bank.
The last few months rendered me mute for a while. Trying to take in all that has been happening in Egypt - the attacks, the killings, the arrests, the abuse of justice on every level possible - and do what little I could to work against it somehow crippled my mind and tied my tongue....
In 2006, a group of judges agitated to demand an investigation of the 2005 elections fraud, opening up the tumultuous question of the judiciary's independence. The movement had a loud media presence at the time.
The black market for currency serves as an apt illustration of the allure of Egypt's informal economy, generally defined as enterprises that do not pay taxes and are not licensed by the government. Even for a trade as closely regulated by the government as currency exchange, a mirror market with looser rules that is often more advantageous for both buyers and sellers can develop.
I find myself craving the cinema these days. Something about the idea of images arranged into a purposeful narrative, characters with distinct conflicts to be either resolved or at least reflected on, is particularly appealing today. Or maybe the appeal is that of a clear arc, a moment of transformation, and maybe a message.
The struggle for bodily integrity-a right broadly defined as the inviolability of the human body and the self-determination of humans over their bodies-has been at the center of revolutionary aspirations in Egypt.
I recently moved from downtown to Zamalek, which feels increasingly like an island playground/food court. Running errands, I elbow my way through crowds of preppy young people standing around in brightly colored shorts, waiting for a table at a café or a burger from one of the half dozen new burger places.
This is the third time I've tried to write something about these nightmarish days in Egypt. The words that come out have been too hollow and disconnected to share, but I'm trying again. I don't have a laser-sharp analysis to provide, and I'm certainly not going to take a wild stab at predicting what will...
Egypt at the moment feels like a series of battles and struggles, separated by geography but all ultimately linked together, hurtling towards some unknown destiny. People are dying, politicians are floundering. This post is about one fight: the one against sexual assault. The fight to free people's bodies from sexual violence is a global one.
Egypt at the moment feels like a series of battles and struggles, separated by geography but all ultimately linked together, hurtling towards some unknown destiny. People are dying, politicians are floundering. This post is about one fight: the one against sexual assault. The fight to free people's bodies from sexual violence is a global one.
On returning to Cairo I felt myself, while struggling with the physical difficulties of the city, brimming with positivity for it. There are a lot of interesting people doing interesting things in what is now an undeniably tremendous space for collective projects, campaigns, and interventions. After decades of living with the state's failure to address...
We recently visited the area of Cairo known as the "City of the Dead," or "el-Ma'aber" (the graves) in Arabic. For decades, people have lived on the grounds of this cemetery, in rows of cardboard shacks, facing a high fence marking the edge of the cemetery. Behind them are thousands of graves.
Nearly two months after Hosny Mubarak stepped down, the revolution that ousted him has turned into a battle ground. The January 25 Revolution, as it is called, carried the nation to a euphoric high - in its aftermath, people talked of rebuilding Egypt, of changing the political landscape, of a national rebirth.