From Khaled Fahmy’s article, “Women, Revolution, and Army” in the Egyptian Independent:

Ibrahim [Samira Ibrahim, Egyptian woman who successfully sued the army for "subjecting her to a 'virginity test'"] may not be aware that the humiliating virginity test she was subjected to last March in the Hykestep military prison was not the first of its kind in Egypt’s modern history. In 1832, a “School of Midwives” was established in the Azbakeya district to teach a select number of girls the basics of medical science. Graduates of that school were appointed as paramedics in police stations to do what we now call “forensic” work. In addition to identifying causes of deaths, they also conducted virginity tests on girls whose male relatives had brought them to the police stations to ascertain their virginity.

Police records of hundreds of such tests are kept in the Egyptian National Archives. They contain menial statements such as “found not a virgin,” “her hymen has been removed completely” and “she has been used before.”

(h/t Marilyn Young)

Ashley Baxstrom: What’s up with France?  President Nicolas Sarkozy of France joined President Barack Obama here in New York last week to celebrate the 125th anniversary of France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the US. The statue was originally dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886 in recognition of the French-American friendship established during the Revolutionary War.

Both leaders hailed the statue as a symbol of freedom. “It is not simply a statue,” Sarkozy said through a translator. “It is a notion, an idea, an emblem. It is for all people of the world.” But while the French were proud to offer America “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (full titles, please), they seem to be having more trouble balancing the values of la liberté and l’éclaircissement in their own country.

Stephane Lacroix writes for Foreign Policy that the same types of unrest that are taking place across the Middle East have bypassed Saudi Arabia for two reasons, one “material” and the other “symbolic.”  The first is most obviously Saudi Arabia’s immense oil reserves and subsequent national wealth.  The second is what Lacroix calls the government’s co-option of “the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.”  From the article:

Like the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sahwa in Saudi Arabia is by far the largest and best organized non-state group, with arguably hundreds of thousands of members. Its mobilizing capacity is huge, far ahead of any other group, including the tribes which have for the last few decades lost a lot of their political relevance. An illustration of this were the 2005 municipal elections, which provided observers with an unprecedented opportunity to measure the ability of Saudi political actors to mobilize their supporters. In most districts of the major cities, Sahwa-backed candidates won with impressive scores.

From a new post at Footnotes Since the Wilderness about the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and it’s conscription by George Washington as a hospital during the Revolution:

Cynics might point out that Ephrata became a hospital because George Washington said it must and, indeed, he did. He offered Peter Miller, Ephrata’s spiritual leader, no true choice. The cloister was commandeered. Community members, riled, objected; some of them had been hermits but, when the topic turned to religion or government, they proved tenacious and argumentative. Intellectually, they were neither meek nor mild. They debated. Passively resisting the war machine, they insisted that the army take what it needed by force. They knew they would suffer severe material loss, and sacrifice the routines of their spiritual lives to tend to the immediate physical needs of others. They knew such service might kill them. In the end, the commune embraced its role. What looked from outside the commune like a seizure of property and the conscription of a hospital staff was transformed by the adepts of Ephrata into the work of the spirit, until it became, from within, an offering and a devotion to holy service.

Yasmin Moll, a Ph.D. student in socio-cultural anthropology at NYU, has been our woman in Cairo, reporting what she saw during and after the protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s 30 year reign.  I asked Yasmin last week what she thought of George Friedman’s analysis of the events.  Friedman, editor and CEO of Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a Texas-based global intelligence service, writes in “Egypt: The Distance Between Enthusiasm and Reality“:

What we see is that while Mubarak is gone, the military regime in which he served has dramatically increased its power.

by Yasmin Moll

Many commentators both inside and outside Egypt have focused on the anticipated role of the Muslim Brotherhood in a post-Mubarak Egypt. In many of these analyses, the Brotherhood is used as a metonym for the projected role of Islam in the public sphere. However, while the Brotherhood will certainly play a formative role in post-revolutionary politics and governance in Egypt, it does not have a monopoly on Islamic discourse in the country.

Indeed, self-described moderate Islamic televangelists (al-duaa al-mutawasitoon) – figures such as Amr Khaled, Mustafa Hosni and Moez Masoud – enjoy a popularity and credibility with ordinary Muslim youth in Egypt that is hard to match. While the official religious establishment of Al-Azhar shied away from supporting protesters in Tahrir and elsewhere on the eve of the January 25th Revolution, many of Egypt’s most prominent televangelists were vocal in their support of thawrat al-shabab (the youth revolution).And throughout the uprising and after, their catchwords have been religious tolerance (tasamuh) and religious co-existence (ta’ayush).

In Mubarak’s Egypt, these televangelists’ credibility and authority with their primarily youthful publics derived not from a mastery of the authoritative textual canon of the Islamic tradition a la Azharite scholars, but rather from their projected status as “ordinary Muslims” struggling to lead an Islamically-correct life in a world where it is manifestly difficult to do so.

by Yasmin Moll

There are tens of thousands of Egyptians in Tahrir today. And there are millions of Egyptians who are not.

If we believe some international media outlets and domestic opposition papers, these groups make up two distinct camps: those for democracy and those for Mubarak. And if we believe the state press, the dividing line is between trouble-making youths allied with “foreign agents” and law-abiding citizens.

From the vantage point of those of us in Cairo, however, the picture is much more complex, fluid and messy. And simplifying it for the sake of a sexy story or a catchy headline risks marginalizing the many Egyptians from all classes and backgrounds whose political stances don’t fit neatly into one or the other of these categories.

Take my friend Mansour.* On January 28th he and I attended the protest downtown after Friday prayer. Marching peacefully along with hundreds of others up Kasr Al-Aini street, we were met with a volley of tear-gas fired by the central security police blocking access to Tahrir Square.