What a Novel Can Say About the Egyptian Revolution
Excerpt: In 2016, five years after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government decided to alter public mentions of the 2011 revolution. It omitted names of activists from grade-school textbooks, and downplayed the mass protests in some high-school texts. “It’s like the revolution didn’t happen,” Kamal Mougheeth, a researcher at Egypt’s National Council for Education, told the Washington Post at the time. Last month, the Ministry of Education announced it would strike mentions of the uprisings in January, 2011, and June, 2013, from history textbooks for the upcoming academic term. It turned out that an exam question this past year had been too controversial: “How would things be if al-Sisi had never given the June 30th speech?”