Ayman Nour
@AymanNour · Gulf & Arab world
Ayman Nour is an Egyptian politician.
Faces That Do Not Fade: A human book that restores recognition to the symbols of Egypt and the nation | London interview via @YouTube
Translated from ArabicWhy is justice crying in Egypt? Shocking testimonies about injustice and torture | London Dialogue via @YouTube
Translated from ArabicThe Possible Egypt: After 70 Years of Sabotage... Is It Too Late? | London Dialogue via @YouTube
Translated from ArabicA required condolence. Dr. Ayman Nour, Chairman of the Board of Al Sharq Channel, on his own behalf and on behalf of all colleagues at Al Sharq Channel and the „Akhbar Al-Ghad“ website, extends his deepest condolences and sincere sympathy to dear colleague and friend, journalist Mohamed Nasser, on the death of his brother, Mr. Alaa al-Din, inside Minya Maximum Security Prison. Journalist Mohamed Nasser had mourned his brother, who passed away at the age of nearly sixty-four, after about eight years in pretrial detention, since 2018, according to human-rights accounts. Nasser wrote in a painful message on his Facebook page: „You lived like a man, Alaa ... and died like a man ... wait for me, boy, in the fields as in the old days.“ May God have abundant mercy on the deceased, grant him a spacious place in Paradise, strengthen the heart of his brother, his family, and his loved ones, and inspire them with patience and solace. Indeed, we belong to God, and to Him we shall return.
Translated from ArabicToday, 21 Years Later: Me and September — The Final Article — by Dr. Ayman Nour. I write this final article like someone placing a period at the end of a sentence that lasted twenty-one years, then discovering that the period is not an ending but a door to another sentence. September was not a passing month in my life. It was an open book on prison, revolution, and exile. It bore witness to a homeland that tried to emerge from the pharaoh’s robe, only to be surrounded by closed rooms, have the lights around it extinguished, and be left with its memory to resist. The battle of September 7, 2005, was not merely a contest between a candidate and a president. It was a confrontation between two possibilities for Egypt: one that opened the way to change, and one that closed it in favor of a hereditary succession project. I knew I was not competing with an ordinary president; I was approaching a sphere whose occupants were accustomed to treating power as a family inheritance and seeing competition with the ruler as a crime that neither the law forgave nor the family forgot. Mubarak was not alone in the scene. There was a black political room led by Suzanne Mubarak, with her eye on preparing Gamal Mubarak for succession. The aim was to ensure that I would not remain a difficult number in the son’s way if the father disappeared. Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Mubarak’s foreign minister, wrote in his memoirs that my arrest was intended to prevent me from competing with Gamal Mubarak. It was testimony that emerged late from the heart of the regime, after we had paid the price of truth outside it. The other blow was that some opposition figures accused me of being part of a deal with the authorities. When the facts exposed the foolishness of the accusation, many lacked the courage to apologize. They chose silence, perhaps waiting for crumbs from the regime’s tables in the next legislative elections. Thus I found myself facing an authority afraid of my competition and an opposition some of whose members doubted anyone daring to do what they had been unable to do. They brought Noman Gomaa into the arena to serve as a nominal runner-up, spending millions on the promise that he would come second. But he came third, then emerged from the contest shattered. My path, meanwhile, had been drawn between courts, defamation, and prison. The case over forged authorizations for the Tomorrow Party was born dead, but it was designed to distract me from the campaign and trap me between court hearings in the morning and election conferences in the evening. They thought the cage would break my image, but people saw inside it a candidate being tried because he dared to compete with the president. They would take me out of court and people would carry me on their shoulders, moving me from the defendant’s cage to the platforms of hope. At one hearing, inside the deliberation room, Judge Adel Abdel Salam Gomaa told me, in effect: relieve us of our embarrassment. One phone call, a simple undertaking, and we close the file. The offer was clear: your freedom in exchange for your silence. I received the same message from Mahmoud Wagdy, head of the Prisons Authority, when he visited me in my cell. It also came in letters bearing the names of Kamal al-Shazly, Safwat el-Sherif, and Fathi Sorour. They wanted me to be the opposition leader in the picture, on condition that I not be present in the real equation. I chose to remain free inside, even if I was a prisoner behind the door. To me, it was easier to lose a seat than to lose the meaning. At the heart of this trial, the name Ayman Ismail al-Refai appeared. He was a simple man who could neither read nor write. They wanted him to say that he had forged the Tomorrow Party authorizations in his own handwriting and on my orders. Under threat, he said what they wanted. But the prosecution made him write, revealing that he was illiterate and could not write at all. Ayman Ismail stood before the court and said he had never known me, and that the officer Adel Yassin tortured him until he signed a false report. The scene became confused, the hearing was suspended, and the man was sent to the Appeals Prison with a promise that he would later be heard. But they did not hear him. The next day came the news that he had been found hanged in his cell. According to the papers and testimony I witnessed, Brigadier General and physician Tarek Mounir wrote that the death was not hanging but strangulation, citing blueness on the back and a fracture in the laryngeal cartilage. Then another report appeared, written by Colonel and physician Ayman Khalil, in the form the authorities wanted, after a call attributed to Major General Omar al-Farmawy. Thus the only witness was silenced, and they tried to bury the truth with him. My arrest was not punishment for a crime, but an attempt to arrest the possibility of an alternative. I went from runner-up in the first multiparty presidential election to a prisoner in Tora, sentenced to five years. In the cell, hope did not die; it became more stubborn. I wrote on the walls with my memory and told myself: they imprisoned your body, but the jailer does not possess the key to the dream. After twenty-one years, I still say that I did not defeat Mubarak, but he did not defeat me. He did not defeat me because I left prison alive and the idea remained alive. Nor did I defeat him because his shadow continued to stretch through the structure of power even after his departure. The man fell, but the system he built outlived him. Then came the revolution. In January 2011, I returned to Tahrir Square, where I had said during my campaign that one day we would return to celebrate freedom. Five years and a few months later, I saw the old promise fulfilled, and I saw the president who had seemed impossible to bring down leave under the pressure of a people that had recovered its voice. The revolution was not the child of a single day. It was an extension of a path that had begun years earlier with the Kifaya movement, the founding of the Tomorrow Party, and the decision to enter the presidential election. It was an embryo we carried for a long time, carried along with thousands of Egyptians, and then born in the square six years later. It was a real revolution, but it was not completed. It brought down the head of the regime without bringing down its structure. It broke the barrier of fear, but it did not yet build a state of freedom. It opened the doors of hope, then the forces of the past slipped through them, along with the mistakes of the present, until the homeland returned to a harsher circle. Even so, I will not accept the claim that the revolution was an illusion. Dreams may be defeated, but they do not become lies merely because the road to them stumbled. In exile I learned that estrangement is not only a distant country, but an inner distance between a person and his homeland. The body may be exiled, but the voice can cross the seas. A person may be deprived of a street that knew his footsteps, a home that carried its scent, and farewells to loved ones who have departed, yet he remains close to his cause to the point of pain. Exile is an incomplete homeland, and longing there is a residence whose validity never expires. I did not choose this trilogy: prison, then revolution, then exile. But it remade my choices and my identity. A person who leaves prison, passes through revolution, and endures in exile does not return the same person. He loses many things, but sees the human being, the homeland, and power with an eye that ornament cannot easily deceive. Twenty-one years did not defeat the dream. Fifteen years since the revolution have not erased the meaning for which people took to the streets. Peoples may stumble, their path may be stolen, and they may be defeated in one round or several, but they do not die and they do not forget forever. I wrote this seven-part series to say that our battle was not merely an election, but a revolution that preceded the revolution; that prison was not a political ending, but a birth certificate for an idea; and that exile was not merely distance from the land, but a bridge that carried the voice beyond the borders. This is not the story of one individual alone, but the testimony of a nation: testimony that freedom may be imprisoned but cannot be killed; that a revolution may be stolen but cannot be erased from the memory of those who made it; and that exile may last, but cannot erase the road home. September returns every year to knock on my door and ask me: Has the story ended? I answer: stories that begin with freedom end only with freedom. This is the final article in “Me and September.” But it is not the final page in the book of a lifetime. As long as Egypt has a prisoner of conscience, a frightened voice, or a citizen waiting for the right to choose, the story will remain open, September will remain a witness, and freedom will remain the chapter we have not yet written in full.
Translated from ArabicMe and September (7/4) — 21 years since the first presidential election: The Train of Hope… the assassination of my father… and loved ones in memory. By Dr. Ayman Nour. In September 2005, the election campaign was not merely tours between cities and villages. It was a long journey on a train of dreams, moving from station to station, carrying not only a candidate but everyone who boarded with him in the hope that Egypt might have another beginning. I had neither the state’s money nor its media, nor armies of employees and instruments of power behind me. Before and around me were ordinary people: young men running beside the car, women waving from balconies, workers stopping their machines for minutes to chant, and students writing my name on walls as though writing a new promise to Egypt. I was forty and a few months old. I removed my tie, left the formal suit, and chose an appearance closer to the young people I wanted to address—not from above a platform, but from inside their generation. The message was simple: I am one of you. The late President Mubarak, nearing eighty, tried to imitate the same image, and the scene looked confused; a man from the past cannot be made into a face of the future by colors. During the eighteen days of official campaigning, I visited nearly twenty governorates and passed through hundreds of villages and centers. My eyes knew little sleep. I moved among people day and night, while Mubarak’s and the other candidates’ campaigns did not possess the physical and political fitness that distinguished ours, by God’s grace first and then through the effort of companions who believed that the road to the people is not traveled from behind desks. I remember among them the late Nagi al-Ghatrifi, former assistant foreign minister, who took over the party leadership immediately after my arrest, on my authorization; the creative engineer Wael Nawara, the party’s secretary-general; party vice president Hisham Kassem, journalist and publisher; my twin and lifelong companion Ihab al-Khouly; the honorable Gamila Ismail; Dr. Mona Makram Ebeid; fighter Ayman Barakat; Ahmed Ghoneim; Israa Abdel Fattah; respected engineer Yasser Abdel Hamid; Mohamed Ehab; engineer Hossam Ali; journalist Essam El-Sharif; Shady El-Adl; Ahmed Maher; Tamer Abu al-Leil; Amr Ezz; Basel Adel; and others. The foremost place always remains for the dear parents—may God prolong their lives and grant them health—the late? [sic] Member of Parliament Abdel Moneim al-Tounsi, representative of Dayrout, and MP Abdel Fattah al-Shafie, representative of Zefta, and others. In Alexandria, I had support from my lifelong friend Moamen Rashad, engineer Sayed Bassiouny, Naglaa Fawzi, Shahinaz, Mohamed Mamadou, and a thousand wonderful young people. In Beheira I remember Ahmed Milad, Bilal Habib, Sayed Esmat, and al-Titi, and hundreds of the most sincere and pure young people I met in my life. In Minya, dear Tamer Abu al-Leil; and in Aswan and Nubia, MP Mohamed al-Omda, the late kind-hearted Ahmed Kajoug, my friend Hany Youssef, dear Abdel Sabour Abdel Sabour, and hundreds of shining faces in Kom Ombo, Ballana, and Nasr al-Nuba. From Al-Ghad Radio I remember the great late broadcaster Malak Ismail, the great broadcaster Gidaa Belbaa, Haitham Imam, Mohamed Kotb, Mohamed Abdel Hay, and engineer Ahmed Badawy. From Al-Ghad newspaper, I will never forget the role of my dear friend Ibrahim Eissa, who founded the paper and was removed as editor-in-chief immediately after my arrest at the request of the security authorities. He was succeeded in supervising the editorial work during the three months of my penultimate detention by Mohamed al-Baz; then during the presidential election battle, my dear friend and thinker Mohamed al-Qadousi became editor-in-chief of the daily edition. I also will not forget journalist Salim Azzouz’s support through his articles in Al-Ghad. Its staff included patriotic Egyptian youth such as Ahmed Fikri, Ihab al-Badawi, Essam El-Sharif, Haitham al-Ghitawy, Ali al-Feel, Hossam al-Din Shehata, and Karim al-Shaer. Every name has a share in the campaign’s memory, and every face has a story too large for these lines. I will not forget the Bab al-Shaaria conference, honored by the attendance of the late brave MP Talaat al-Sadat. Speaking of Bab al-Shaaria, I remember names that have an indelible place in my heart and memory, foremost my dear friend Dr. Adel al-Rakeeb, beloved brother Yahya al-Talyawi, and late MP Abdo Gaber; and how could I forget Ferial, Enshirah, Ahmed al-Saharti, Mahmoud and Nabil al-Nahhas, Hajj Fouad and his son Mohamed Fouad, Mohamed Shaaban, Nasr Matar, Sanaa Hassan, my son Mohamed Bortaqala, Hajjah Nahed, and many others. I also remember the respected engineer Mazen Mostafa and his family, Walid Riyad, and dear Mahmoud Mousa. In Assiut and Manfalut stood MP Abdel Moneim al-Tounsi and all his supporters and friends. In Port Said, the young people’s voices rose, including Hossam Ali and Mohamed Ehab. In Suez, its heroes were present: MP Talaat Khalil, Dr. Ezza Dawoud, and Sheikh Hafez Salama, who accompanied me to Al-Azhar alongside former Grand Mufti of Egypt Dr. Nasr Farid Wasel. The conferences were full of spirit, but the streets themselves became a wider platform. Markets, fields, and train stations became theaters of freedom. I felt that the people’s voice was stronger than loudspeakers, and that the distance between dream and homeland could be shortened by one sincere step in an open street. The regime watched, and Mubarak’s face no longer hid its anxiety. He realized that the competition had moved from television screens into the streets, and that the game was no longer numbers written in advance on paper. When politics leaves the studio for the people, fraud may steal a ballot box, but it cannot erase an image settled in memory. Security tried to stop the Train of Hope. It pursued us, closed halls, and cut electricity to the loudspeakers. But the people were the real microphone. Every word I said gave birth to dozens of chants from them, and every closed door opened a new street before us. In Mahalla, I was on the platform beside Abdel Fattah al-Shafie and Ahmed Ghoneim, facing thousands of workers. They tried to bring the platform down on us, but it did not fall. The voices rose with it, and the prestige of a regime that thought that if the wood broke, what stood above it would break too fell. It was a resounding scene broadcast on screens around the world and commented on by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal. That day the regime appeared morally and politically fallen, years before it fell onto the platforms. In Nabaruh, the scene was greater than words. In Alexandria, my birthplace, and in Damanhur, Kom Ombo, Manfalut, Minya, Port Said, Suez, Bab al-Shaaria, and al-Mouski, the district I was honored to represent, every conference was new testimony that Egypt was not still and that beneath the surface of silence a nation was moving. In Tahrir Square, where my friend Hisham Kassem succeeded in securing approval for our conference, I saw all of Egypt in one square. The square was filled not with iron or soldiers but with hope. There I said: one day we will return to this square to celebrate freedom. Five years and some months later I actually returned, during the January Revolution, on that same platform, celebrating the fall of the same president. The sentence was once a promise that seemed distant; it then became a reality closer than all the calculations of power. Official propaganda called us adventurers. But the real adventure would have been to remain silent and leave Egypt to more decades of stagnation and hereditary succession. Our daring was not merely entering an election with unequal balances; it was treating Egyptians’ right to choose as a fact while the authorities treated it as decoration. Because time was short, we rented a train and called it the Train of Hope and Change. At every station where it stopped, we held a brief conference attended by thousands. The train left behind an indelible trace: a hand reaching for a handshake, a tear running down a man’s face, a child lifting a sign larger than his body, and a mother praying for us as if sending her children into battle, not an election. The campaign was not numbers in ledgers but blood running through a nation’s veins. Supporters were not merely voters but witnesses to a moment of transformation. In women’s eyes I saw strength, in young people’s chants courage, and in the faces of the poor the dream that justice is not a word in books but a right that must be seized on the ground. The authorities were terrified by every photograph taken by a journalist’s lens, every article in an Arab or foreign newspaper, and every chant that departed from the prescribed scripts. When they could not prevent the image, they tried to soil it. In governorates with large Coptic populations, they said I was an Islamic extremist. In governorates with a Salafist mood, they said I was of Christian origin. Across the country they claimed I was an envoy of the United States and held its citizenship, although I had never visited it. The lies were not coherent; it was enough that they were numerous and that the authorities owned the screens repeating them. But the lie that truly killed was broadcast by Anas al-Fiqi, then the ruling family’s information minister, on the first channel: a false report that I had been arrested in a bribery case. When my father read the report on the television ticker, his heart fell before his body and he entered the hospital. Days later he died. They assassinated him with lies, not bullets; the weapon was a cold news ticker passing beneath the screen as though nothing had happened. I called Anas al-Fiqi on the day the report was broadcast. He did not deny it; with unforgettable insolence, he said he knew it was untrue and would later remove it from the news ticker. He did not. That day I learned, not metaphorically but through pain, that when media loses its conscience it becomes a killer, and that a word can kill as a bullet kills, perhaps passing after its crime without a report or witness. He was also the man who received the value of my campaign advertisement, voiced by Osama Mounir, sung by Mohamed Mounir, and composed by Hany Shenouda, then refused to broadcast the advertisement or return its value. It was not merely a blocked advertisement, but a miniature image of a system that takes your right and then prevents you even from objecting to its theft. Yet my heart remained full of faith in the people. I learned that platforms are not wood erected but hearts opened, and that elections are not a race between names but a confrontation between fear and hope. It was only eighteen days, but in memory it expanded to the age of years and wrote a new chapter in Egypt’s book. The conferences were not speeches I delivered but messages people wrote in their eyes. I was not addressing them as much as they were addressing me: Stand firm… we are with you. That is why the campaign was not merely an electoral step but a national awakening, an early declaration that Egypt was not hostage to official numbers and had a spirit that could not be falsified. Today, after twenty-one years, I still hear Mahalla’s chant, see Tahrir Square, and feel the authorities’ confusion as if the moment had not passed. Some days end on the calendar but remain open in a lifetime. September, in my life, is one of those eras that do not pass; each year they return to ask me: what remains of the dream, and what remains in us for it? This fourth paper is not only about election conferences. It is about hope embodied as a train traveling from station to station, about a homeland that discovered its voice before it was allowed to choose, and about a tender father whom the media assassinated without blood or conscience. In the fifth paper, I will leave the uproar of the conferences and enter the silence of prison cells, where the people’s voices outside became walls and chains inside. There the story begins anew: cells after the ballot, when the authorities sent the competing candidate to prison and thought that by arresting the body they could arrest the truth.
Translated from ArabicA Story in a Photograph [{From “Everything” to “Faces That Do Not Fade”}] 🔸 I stood before this old cover for a long time, not only because of the faces it bears, but because of the meaning it carries in itself. It is the cover of an Egyptian magazine called “Everything,” published on November 14, 1927. Most of us may know nothing about this magazine, but a single cover is enough to tell us about a serious Egyptian press that saw its mission as not merely chasing the event, but creating awareness, honoring symbols, and raising the banner of #النهضة. The magazine brought together Muhammad Ali, Ibrahim Pasha, Khedive Ismail, al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Qasim Amin, Mustafa Kamel, Muhammad Farid, and Saad Zaghloul. The times and ideas differed, but the cover brought them together under a title greater than their differences: Egypt trying to rise. 🔸 Nearly a century later, I found in this image something close to the message of that wonderful #بورتريه program presented for ١٠ years on Al Sharq TV by my friend Dr. #ماجد_عبد_الله. It is also the same idea behind the #متحف_الشرق museum of Egyptian figures, which currently contains statues and models of more than ٢٠٠ figures who contributed to enriching Egyptian life, as well as the #أثر program presented on #الشرق TV by our colleague #هدير_علي. It is also what I tried to do in my book series #وجوه_لا_تغيب, in its first and second parts: to summon from #الذاكرة faces that shaped thought, politics, art, and freedom, and to restore to them some of what they are owed in an age of rapid forgetting. As if between the cover of “#كل_شيء” in ١٩٢٧ and the cover of “Faces That Do Not Fade” nearly a century later, there were a single thread that never broke: nations do not build their renaissance only through those who live in their present, but through their ability not to forget those who made the road to it.
Translated from Arabic**Me and September** (7/1) 45... years… imprisonment By Dr. Ayman Nour I am writing these lines at seven in the morning on September 1, 2026. It is the very hour when, forty-five years ago, I received my first harsh message from the authorities. It did not arrive in an envelope bearing a postage stamp, but in a large security vehicle, and an iron door closed behind me for the first time. That was in September 1981. I had not yet turned 17, and I was president of the Republic-wide Union of Secondary Schools and Teachers’ and Women Teachers’ Institutes. A young man at the beginning of his life, I knew nothing of politics except the passion of words, the innocence of dreams, and the belief that the homeland had room for the voices of its children. My only crime was believing that young people had the right to speak, that students had a role in their homeland, and that truth had a place among the people. The security vehicles came with the first light. The daylight sun had not yet fully risen, but the shadows of fear were longer than the trees of Mansoura. It seemed to me that the city was waking to the screech of iron doors before it woke to the dawn call to prayer. That day I realized that an entire state might fear a word coming from a boy’s mouth more than it feared a bullet coming from a rifle. Prison was not merely a wall and a lock. It was an early announcement that September would become my destiny, my book, and my recurring examination. I entered the cell as a child carrying simple dreams, and left it a man carrying a wound, a promise, a testament, and a cause. I did not leave as I had entered. I left part of the shock behind the iron door, and carried with me the certainty that no one knows the full value of freedom except the person who has heard the sound of the key turning in the door of his cell. By the walls, I used to hear my mother’s voice in prayer. It reached me purer than every other voice, and stronger than the screech of the locks: Stand firm… the homeland is worth it. And you deserve not to cry or collapse. Her voice still lives within me and gives me a strength that speeches and books never gave me. My mother was freer and stronger than my jailer, and her prayer was my window to the sky. In the cells I saw faces from every current: liberals and Islamists and leftists, intellectuals and journalists, and young people who shared no single idea but were united by a single injustice. There I realized early that freedom knows neither party nor sect, and that when tyranny closes its door on those who differ, it gives them, against its will, a lesson in the unity of fate. The cell does not ask its occupant about his political orientation, the shackle does not distinguish between right and left, and when injustice becomes widespread, resisting it becomes a shared homeland. That day I wrote on the cell wall: Do not make the prison a graveyard… make it a school. The wall was silent, but my heart kept repeating the phrase as though it were a prayer. There I learned that silence is death and betrayal, and that a word, even when born an orphan, can light a long night. I learned that prison is not measured by the number of bars, but by the number of lessons that remain in the soul after the doors are opened. That day I learned that freedom is not a political luxury, nor an article in a constitution, nor a slogan above a platform. Freedom is the soul’s breath. If it is cut off, a person dies standing, even if his body continues moving among people. I also learned that the most dangerous prisons are not the ones we see, but the prisons we build inside ourselves when we become accustomed to fear, justify silence, or accept living with half a voice, half a position, and half a dignity. From that hour on, every September became an echo of that morning. After it came the September 2005 presidential election, fraud, trials and new arrests, then a revolution and a distant exile. Faces changed and covenants changed, but the question remained one: Does a person own his voice, or does the authority borrow it from him and then return it to him faint or distorted? Every prison I left made me stronger in mind and voice, and more certain and courageous. Today, after forty-five years, I do not say only that early imprisonment ended my childhood and devoured my youth; I say that it gave my life its most difficult meaning. September did not break me, but it taught me how to weather every storm so that I would not break, and how to remain standing within myself, no matter how heavily the shackles weighed on my feet. Whenever the month returns, I return in memory to my first cell. I place my palm on its cold wall and hear the homeland whispering to me from afar: Do not retreat. Prison was a wound, but it also became a mirror that revealed to me the finest in the human being: the ability to endure, the stubbornness to protect hope, and the insistence on leaving a small window for tomorrow, even when every door is closed in his face. They wanted to extinguish hope inside me, so they planted a seed that did not go out. They wanted to make fear the end of the road, and suddenly it became its beginning. Today I write with the same hand that was shackled on that distant morning, to say: I am still alive… the word is still possible… songs are still possible… and the homeland, despite everything that happened, still deserves us to dream for it, to suffer for it, and not to retreat from its right to freedom. This is the first paper in the seven-part series “Me and September.” The following papers tell of a constitution tailored to the heir’s measure, a candidacy whose papers were not submitted before me, an electoral symbol that was stolen, a train that carried hope to the cities and villages of Egypt, a father killed by false news, a truth arrested along with its owner, a witness who left the courthouse for death, and then the trilogy of prison, revolution, and exile. This is the beginning of my story with September. But it is not the story of one individual alone; it is the testimony of an entire era. An era in which fear tried to write our ending, so we, from inside the cells and outside them, wrote another beginning whose chapters have not yet been completed.
Translated from ArabicPicture story In 2010, the doors to reform had been closed one after another, and the paths of peaceful change had narrowed until they had nearly disappeared. It was then that #الجمعية_الوطنية_للتغيير was formed under the umbrella of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei—not as a formal gathering, nor as a passing political banner, but as a genuine national space that brought together the components of civil society, intermediary institutions, and the pillars of Egypt’s national community across its various political, intellectual, and ideological currents, from the far right to the far left. It was genuine rather than manufactured representation, a substantive rather than symbolic presence, and a consensus that had not been created by the authorities, funded by social-media campaigns, or built on exclusion or forced alignment. At that moment, the association expressed a broad and mature peaceful current that understood the homeland to be greater than the disagreements among political currents, and that reform is not made by a single political color, but by a national will spacious enough for differences and protective of everyone’s right to participate. This picture takes me back to a time when coming together around the minimum shared dream was possible, when disagreement did not prevent partnership, and when politics, despite its harshness, still understood the meaning of a genuine national front. After sixteen years, the value of that moment seems greater than it did at the time. It proved that the path to change does not begin by eliminating those who differ, but by having the ability to stand with them when the homeland is the cause. In the end, the picture preserves more than faces. It preserves a moment when hope was collective, and difference was part of strength rather than a cause of division.
Translated from ArabicEgypt Faces a New Nile System By Dr. Ayman Nour In the final days of August 2026, the Nile file appeared to be moving in two opposite directions. In Stockholm, Egypt and Sudan took part in the strategic dialogue of the Nile Basin Initiative, and participants endorsed continuing joint planning beyond 2027, while keeping consultation open on the framework agreement and the transition to a permanent Nile Basin commission. At the same time, Ethiopian rhetoric about building new dams on the Blue Nile intensified, and a former Ethiopian water minister went so far as to demand compensation from Egypt for its use of the river’s water. It is true that this latest statement does not represent a binding official decision, but it cannot be allowed to pass as merely a passing remark. It reveals a new political climate in which the issue is no longer confined to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, but has expanded into an attempt to redefine ownership of the river, the rules for using it, and each country’s position in the regional system taking shape around its waters. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam itself is no longer a project under construction that can be halted or have its design modified; it has become an operational reality. It was officially opened in September 2025, and its declared capacity reached 5,150 megawatts, while its reservoir holds about 74 billion cubic meters. Yet its completion was not accompanied by a binding legal agreement regulating operations during drought years, guaranteeing data exchange, defining release rules, or establishing a clear mechanism for settling disputes when harm occurs. For this reason, the crisis did not end when the dam was completed; its most dangerous phase began. The question shifted from Ethiopia’s right to build to the limits of its authority to operate. From the reservoir’s size to the rules governing its use. From one dam to the possibility of a complete system of successive dams that, if managed separately, could redraw the movement of the Blue Nile from source to mouth. Addis Ababa says the new dams will be intended primarily to generate electricity, and that water will move from one dam to another without significant consumption. This argument should be examined scientifically, not rejected with slogans. A hydroelectric dam does not necessarily swallow the river, but the danger lies in the filling years, evaporation losses, the simultaneous operation of several reservoirs, and what might happen during prolonged drought, malfunctions, or sudden releases. The problem is not always the dam structure itself, but the hand that operates it, the rule that binds it, and the information it keeps to itself. Cairo issued more than one warning during August, affirming that it would not allow control over Nile flows to be imposed as a fait accompli. I fully understand the need for the state to have a firm voice on an issue that touches its existence. But over more than four decades in public life, and fifteen years in parliament, I have learned that the strength of a national position is not measured by the volume of a statement, but by the legal papers, regional alliances, technical information, and actionable options behind it. Angry words may reassure people for hours, but they do not restore a drop of water or write a binding operating rule. The institutional transformation in the Nile Basin is the quieter front, and perhaps the more influential one. The Cooperative Framework Agreement entered into force in October 2024 and began paving the way for a permanent Nile Basin commission. Egypt and Sudan are not legally bound by an agreement they did not sign, but remaining outside the new institution, if its construction is completed, could leave them in the position of having the power to object without taking part in making the rules. Therefore, Egypt’s participation in the Stockholm dialogue is not a concession but a window that should be widened. It was decided to continue consultations with Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, and the Congo, and there was discussion of data exchange, dam safety, updating basin studies, and creating a digital model to simulate water movement. These are not marginal technical details but real instruments of influence, provided that Egypt attends with its scientists and experts, and with its initiatives and shared interests, rather than with seasonal delegations and memorized speeches. Above the political dispute stands nature, which negotiates with no one. The official hydrological outlook for the Nile Basin for the June-to-September 2026 season forecasts below-normal or near-normal rainfall across broad areas, along with higher temperatures, increased evaporation losses, and a possible decline in flows of the Blue and White Nile and the Atbara River. The report places Egypt and Sudan among the countries that may bear the cumulative impact of water deficits at the headwaters. What can be endured in a rainy year may become a direct danger if drought years follow one another without a binding agreement. At home, the government should not hide behind the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to justify every shortfall, just as the opposition should not treat every water project as empty propaganda. Egypt has expanded its reuse of agricultural drainage water, and the Ministry of Irrigation says three major projects have added capacity approaching 4.8 billion cubic meters annually. At the same time, however, international reports confirm that per-capita water availability continues to decline and that Egypt is nearing absolute scarcity, while agriculture consumes about 80 percent of freshwater. The requirement, then, is not to deny what has been achieved, but to measure its cost, return, fairness, and ability to continue. Without arrogance or any claim to possess a magic formula, I believe Egypt needs a permanent national forum on water security bringing together state institutions, experts, universities, political forces, and civil society. It needs a publicly announced annual water balance separating facts from propaganda. It also needs to turn its presence inside basin institutions into a strategy aimed at an agreement on data exchange, clear operating rules for drought years, a system for handling emergency releases, and a cumulative assessment of any new series of dams, instead of studying each dam in isolation. Domestically as well, agricultural expansion should be tied to the real water budget, desalination should be directed primarily to coastal cities, networks should be repaired, less water-intensive crops should be encouraged, waste rather than poverty should be priced, and private-sector participation must not become privatization of the human right to water. The close relationship with Sudan must also be restored, not treating it as merely a negotiating ally, but as a genuine partner in managing one watercourse and a shared destiny. This is not a cause of a regime that we defend, nor an opposition cause with which to spite the regime. It is a national cause that will remain after us all. We may disagree over government, the constitution, the economy, and politics, but the Nile knows neither loyalty nor opposition, and it does not distinguish between a supporter’s home and an opponent’s home. Egyptian water security is an existential issue, and patriotism in it is neither silence about mistakes nor one-upmanship over them, but the courage to tell the truth, the wisdom to manage power, and the determination to turn the remaining open doors into an agreement that protects Egypt’s right to life.
Translated from Arabic**A Photo Story** The story of this photo probably goes back sixteen years. I do not remember the exact place or the occasion, but I never forget who was with me in it. In this photo, to my right sits the elder statesman of Egyptian politicians, the noble, sweet, gentle engineer #سمير_عليش, and to my left, the leftist, Professor #صلاح_عدلي, head of the #الشيوعي_المصري Party. Two men who brought generations and currents together, and built, brick by brick, over decades, with patience and honesty, bridges between #الليبراليين, #اليساريين, #الناصريين, and #المستقلين. The “#السكر” man, engineer and expert in industry and economics Samir Alish, had such a large share of his interests devoted to sugar production that it became a major part of his sweet, gentle character: a calm mind, a pure civil heart, and a conscience refined like pure sugar; he remained committed to the democratic civil state, citizenship, and reform. As for Salah Adly, he is not merely a name in my record of politics, but a stance that time cannot erase. On the day of #معركة_الجمل, when groups of thugs from the former regime surrounded us and we were one step away from certain death, he refused to leave me alone. I was the target, and he could have turned his back and walked away, but he stayed behind me, steadfast-hearted, until together we passed through that moment that could have been the last. That is how I knew him: noble, brave, calm, rational, and balanced. He does not raise his voice above his conscience, and he does not leave a companion in the middle of danger. Between my right and left in this picture stands a history of human nobility, and disagreement that never harmed the homeland.
Translated from ArabicA photo story: Egypt Building, which Egyptians do not see. Thousands of Egyptians pass every day along Independence Street leading to Taksim Square in the heart of Istanbul. They walk among its old facades, shops, and cafés, and perhaps an old building bearing a name that seems to awaken longing does not stop them: “Egypt Building.” Today I stopped in front of it, then entered it with my wife. It was not so much a visit to a building as a small crossing into another time—a time when Cairo and Istanbul were closer than the maps suggest, and culture was a bridge between the two cities before politics sometimes became a wall between them. In the first picture, we stand beneath a portrait of Prince Abbas Halim Pasha, the Egyptian born in Cairo in 1866, grandson of Muhammad Ali Pasha, who commissioned the Armenian architect Hovsep Aznavourian in 1910 to build it as his residence. But Abbas Halim was not merely a prince who owned a palace in Istanbul. He was a broad-minded intellectual, fond of literature, painting, and music, and a patron of artists and talented people. One of the most beautiful chapters of his story was his deep friendship with Muhammad Akif Ersoy, the famous Turkish poet who wrote the words of the Turkish national anthem. It was a friendship that transcended differences in wealth and status. Akif summed it up jokingly, in the sense of his words, by saying that the difference between them was that one was a poor poet and the other a wealthy prince as rich as Qarun. The third picture is the one I wanted to linger over for a long time. Here, on the fourth floor of Egypt Building, there was a spacious fourteen-room apartment that Abbas Halim set aside for the man of letters Mithat Cemal Kuntay to live in. But it was not merely a home. In the 1920s, it was a literary salon suspended above Independence Street, where figures from poetry, literature, and thought met, and conversations about books, poetry, politics, and life took place around its table. The two historical pictures hanging on the wall preserve something of that era. One documents a banquet held in 1924 to celebrate the book “Asım,” around which Muhammad Akif and a number of the leading writers of his time gathered. In that same apartment, Muhammad Akif spent some of his final days before his death in December 1936. Thus the building becomes more than stone, balconies, and windows. It becomes a memory. In the final picture, my wife and I sit on the building’s roof, with Istanbul behind us stretching toward the Bosphorus. Between four pictures taken today and pictures hanging on walls more than a century old, I felt that cities preserve their history not only in museums. Sometimes they hide it in a building thousands pass without lifting their heads. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about Egypt Building is that it tells another side of the relationship between Egypt and Turkey. A relationship that did not begin with a political agreement and was not created by two governments, but woven by people. An Egyptian prince patronizes a Turkish poet. An Armenian architect builds a home for a prince from the family of Muhammad Ali. Poets and writers gather around one table. And Egypt inhabits, in some way, a building in the heart of Istanbul. I left the building thinking that history does not ask much of us. Only that we see it before we pass by it. And that sometimes we raise our heads above the noise of the street to discover that Egypt may be closer to us than we think, even as we walk through the heart of Istanbul. Dr. Ayman Nour
Translated from ArabicOn the sidelines of the Prophet’s birthday celebration: The debts in the president’s pajama pocket! By Dr. Ayman Nour. I watched President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s meeting at the celebration of the Noble Prophet’s birthday more than once. I watched it trying to form an objective position, not a preconceived one, and to read between the lines of the president’s speech, especially its improvised sections. There is no doubt that his words to the actress Heba Magdy had a deeply human effect on me. I was also struck by the written speech delivered by the minister of endowments, in which one can notice more than one meaning, foremost among them the call for mercy even toward those we hate. I believe this is a phrase that deserves to leave the celebration hall and enter the spaces of politics, society, prisons, and exile. There is no doubt that the president’s remarks contained other positive indications that a fair-minded opponent should not ignore. These included his talk about an accounting, and about the need for specialists and thinkers to discuss what happened during the past years, and his acknowledgment that some things had been achieved while in others we had not succeeded, and that people have the right to know, discuss, and ask questions. I was also positively struck by the president’s use of the expression “hostile channels” when referring to opposition channels. The matter may appear linguistically minor, but in political discourse it is not. There is a major difference between describing opposition media as “hostile” and the language we have grown accustomed to hearing for years, which places those who differ and oppose in categories of conspiracy, hostility, and treason. An opponent disagrees with and opposes you, but remains a participant in the public sphere. As for the conspirator or enemy, the relationship with him is not a political disagreement, but confrontation and exclusion. I hope the word was not a passing choice, but the beginning of a broader shift in how opposition itself is viewed. Disagreement is not a conspiracy. Criticism is not hostility. Peaceful opposition is not a danger to the state, but one of the safeguards for correcting its mistakes before those mistakes become crises that are difficult to repair. But amid these positive signals, one phrase astonished me. The president said that months ago he had asked the government to provide him with the size of Egypt’s domestic and external debt, and then asked it to compare that with the amount of support the state had provided to citizens over fifty years! My first source of astonishment is that debt is not a figure that suddenly appeared in the government’s ledger. It has been one of Egypt’s largest economic files for many years. The figures here speak more eloquently. Egypt’s external debt stood at around fifty billion dollars in 2015, then exceeded 161 billion dollars at the end of June 2025. In other words, it became more than three times its level ten years earlier, an increase of more than 110 billion dollars. More serious than the bare figure is the burden of servicing it. In the 2025–2026 fiscal-year budget, interest on the debt alone approaches 2.3 trillion pounds, while allocations for support, grants, and social benefits amount to about 743 billion pounds. Thus debt interest alone approaches three times the entirety of this social budget item. Here the question becomes legitimate: if debt has doubled to this extent over ten years, is it reasonable that the request for a comprehensive briefing on it came only a few months ago?! To be fair, the intention may have been to update data or prepare a specific study, and that is a possible interpretation. But the wording as it appeared in the speech suggests to some that attention to a file that should be a daily concern for whoever holds economic decision-making authority was delayed, because someone who borrows today does not spend ownerless money; he signs an obligation that tomorrow’s citizen will repay. Perhaps my astonishment was heightened by the fact that, 26 years ago, I witnessed an old incident that gave me a different impression of the place the debt file occupied in the mind of the head of state. In 2000, I traveled aboard the late President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak’s plane to the Toshka region. Among a large number of attendees, he chose me to be among the small number who boarded a helicopter with him and landed directly in Toshka, while the rest of the attendees traveled by civilian plane to Abu Simbel and then continued by car. During the journey, Mubarak was speaking, as was his habit at the time, about his dispute with Saddam Hussein, who occupied a large place in his thoughts and comments. Suddenly he moved on to speak about the cancellation of a huge portion of Egypt’s debts after the war to liberate Kuwait. He suddenly asked me, “Do you know, Nour, what I did when I received the letter canceling the debts?” I shook my head to indicate that I did not know. He said he put the letter in his suit pocket and kept taking it out from time to time and reading it again. When he returned home, took off his suit, and put on his pajamas, he moved the letter from the suit pocket to the pajama pocket and kept taking it out and rereading it. The next day he put it back in his suit pocket, as if the man feared that he would wake up and discover that the good news had not been real. The debts were, literally and figuratively, in the president’s pajama pocket and under his pillow. Of course, I am not telling the story out of nostalgia for a former president, nor to draw a comparison between two presidents. What matters to me is not Mubarak’s joy at Egypt’s debt relief, but that the debt file was present in the head of state’s mind to this degree. Following the Gulf War, Egypt received a broad package of debt relief and restructuring, including billions of dollars in relief from the United States and Gulf states, as well as the treatment of nearly twenty billion dollars in debt through the Paris Club. My second source of astonishment is the comparison the president requested between the public debt and what the state had spent on support over fifty years. Here I ask: what is the direct economic relationship between the two figures? Is the implication that support is what created the debt? If that is the conclusion, where are the other categories of spending and borrowing? Where is the cost of public projects and investments? Where is the interest on old debts? Where are the effects of currency depreciation? Where is the efficiency of using the loans and the return they generated? There is a simpler and deeper question: Support from whom to whom? The state is not the government’s state. State funds are not the authorities’ funds. Egyptians are not subjects living on the gifts of their governments. What is called state support is, in essence, the redistribution of part of public resources to their owners, especially since taxes have become the largest source of budget revenue and represent about 85 percent of estimated public revenue in the current budget. In other words, the citizen pays the state before the state pays him. One of the most important functions of any state is to provide its citizens with a social-security umbrella, finance education, health, transportation, and basic services, and protect the poor and those unable to meet the costs of living. This is not a favor from the government; it is a citizen’s right and the state’s duty. The state is not a company whose goal is to maximize profits. The government is not a group of tax collectors who put their hands in people’s pockets and then, when they return part of what they collected from them, stand before them and say, “Look how much we have spent on you.” If we are going to open the books for fifty years, and I welcome that, let us open all the books, not only the support ledger. Let us ask: How much did we borrow? From whom did we borrow? At what interest? Where did we spend it? What was the economic and social return of every project for which we borrowed? How many jobs did it create? How much did it add to production and exports? How much foreign currency did it save? And, most importantly, how will it be repaid and from where? Let us also ask transparently about the major projects: the administrative capital, El Alamein, the roads, bridges, new cities, and others. Not from a position of presumption of guilt, nor from a position of presumption of innocence, but from the standpoint of the citizen’s right to know where every pound borrowed in his name went, and which he and his children will help repay. If the decision were mine, I would welcome the president’s idea of an accounting, but I would change the question. Instead of asking Egyptians how much the state spent on them over fifty years, let us ask the state how much Egyptians paid it over fifty years. How much did it borrow in their name? Where did it spend what it borrowed? What remains of it for future generations? I would add a political accounting to the economic accounting as well. If describing opposition media as “hostile” is the beginning of a new language, let us complete it by considering opposition part of the nation, not its enemy. Let us open the space for criticism as we open the debt ledgers. Both are paths to knowing the truth, and both cost less than discovering mistakes after they turn into political and economic debts paid by generations that did not participate in creating them in the first place. Citizens’ rights are not a burden on the government. Support is not a debt around the poor person’s neck. The government is not a creditor to the people. The people own the money. They own the state. They own the right to ask questions and demand an accounting. Authority, in the end, is only an agent. And an agent gives an account to the owner of the money. He does not hold it over him that he spent his money.
Translated from ArabicDo you have no one but me?! After years of virtually putting an end to this systematic farce, the shameful and foolish media henchmen have returned this month, years backward, in a manner closer to “turn back.” They have returned, not like the return of the prodigal son, nor like an old man returning to his youth, but like the return of a lack of reason, logic, wisdom, and decency to people whom we thought, even if only for a moment, had become more mature and better able to understand that opening fronts and inflaming conflicts involves calculations of timing, place, and objective. I do not think the perpetrator is ignorant of what he is doing. He knows, and intends more than he fails to know, deliberately and intentionally. Suddenly, in a single month, these oblivious people discovered an astonishing series of “facts” about myself that, apparently, I did not know! For example: 1. That I was the one who financed the #Rabaa sit-in, even though I did not participate in it at all and was outside Egypt! 2. That my maternal cousin, whom I do not know, and whose mother I do not know because she does not exist in the family tree, was dealing drugs to finance #Rabaa! 3. That I planned and directed the attack on the #embassies, despite my condemnation of those attacks! 4. That I planned and financed #Qaa_AlHammour! 5. That I am plotting what they call the #shadow_government, a government that casts no shadow for me! 6. That I manage the files of all the channels for the Muslim Brotherhood, and pull the strings from behind the curtains! 7. And perhaps, if their excesses continue at this speed, they will soon discover that I launched the Damietta march, or that I had a hand in Sadat’s assassination! Whenever the world closes in on them, the area of lies hung on a coat hook called #Ayman_Nour grows wider. One time I finance the sit-ins. Another time I run all the channels for the Brotherhood. Another time I arrange the attack on the embassies. Another time I buy companies on islands whose location on the map I do not know. At this rate, it is no longer unlikely that I will wake up tomorrow and discover that I financed the construction of the pyramids, helped de Lesseps obtain the concessions, and perhaps was behind the #Ethiopian_Dam crisis and the strained relations with #Europe, #SaudiArabia, and the #UAE! Gentlemen, you are planting mines, fueling crises under the pretext of confronting them, and opening doors through which winds of legitimate and deserved anger can blow. You are hurt when we tell some of the truth about you, yet you do not care when your mouthpieces tell lies about us every day. The irony is that I have known this kind of campaign for decades; I never batted an eyelid or trembled. During the time of the late President #Hosni_Mubarak, there was a department in State Security tasked with directing rumors against me. Yet, despite everything, it was a quasi-institutional operation, managed with some measure of reason and logic, or at least with a minimum of respect for the public’s intelligence. When some people, through their own zeal or ignorance, broke loose into fabricating lies that went beyond even the bounds of reason, there was someone who would tell them: Stop ... enough. I remember, for example, the late Professor Mohamed Ali Ibrahim, editor-in-chief of #AlGomhuria, when he adopted absurd stories about an illicit relationship between me and U.S. Secretary of #State #Condoleezza_Rice, which, according to the story’s imagination, produced a “child of sin”! Then came the even stranger story: that I had taken part in the #Vietnam War in the #American army, a war that had ended while I was still in my second year of life, before I even knew where Vietnam was on the map! How could I fight in a country I have not visited to this day, against a country I have not and will not visit afterward! But back then there were sensible people in the system who told the man: Stop this nonsense. And he stopped. Here the question becomes more serious than all this sarcastic absurdity: Where are the sensible people in the system today? And where are they in the face of a campaign escalating in this way, within a single month, as though someone suddenly decided to remake old, poor-quality films, with the same actors and the same script, adding a few cheap effects? Political disagreement is understandable. Criticism is legitimate. Disputes have rules. But lying, when it becomes an industry, and sick fantasy when it dresses up as news, is neither politics nor media; it is an insult to people’s intelligence before it is an insult to any particular person. As the “Lady” Umm Kulthum once said ... patience has its limits. And as I have said, asked, and repeated: Do you have no one but me?!
Translated from ArabicDr. Ayman Nour, head of the liberal Tomorrow Revolution Party, extended his congratulations to the Egyptian people and the entire Muslim ummah on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of the Noble Prophet, affirming that this anniversary is an occasion to recall the tolerant values brought by Islam: tolerance, love, and peace. Dr. Nour said in his statement: “We extend our highest congratulations and blessings to the great Egyptian people and to Muslims everywhere on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of our master Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, asking Almighty God to bring this anniversary back to Egypt and the whole world with goodness, good fortune, and blessings.” The head of the Tomorrow Revolution Party added that the anniversary of the Noble Prophet’s birth represents an annual opportunity to draw inspiration from the human and ethical values carried by the Muhammadan message, including justice, equality, and social solidarity, stressing the importance of these values being present in the political and social life of Egyptians amid the current challenges. Dr. Nour also called for strengthening the values of tolerance and rejecting extremism and violence, affirming that Islam is, in essence, a religion of moderation and balance, and that celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet’s birth should be an occasion to unite the ranks of the people of one nation despite their differing religious and intellectual affiliations. The head of the Tomorrow Revolution Party concluded his statement with a prayer that security and stability would prevail throughout Egypt and the Arab region, wishing everyone a happy Mawlid.
Translated from ArabicSaad Zaghlul and Mustafa al-Nahhas.. the two Wafd leaders whom struggle and the time of departure brought together
Translated from Arabic