South Asia Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Barbara Slavin writes for Al-Monitor on a new book by Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany:
As the fourth anniversary of the Tahrir Square demonstrations that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak approaches, it is hard to be optimistic about Egypt’s political trajectory.
Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany’s new book “Democracy is the Answer” underlines the reasons for this pessimism even as it argues that a real democratic transformation is Egypt’s only long-term hope.
A compendium of columns Aswany wrote for the newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm from early 2011 to June 2014, it traces the arc of the country’s political upheaval from Mubarak’s ouster to the reversion under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to a system of sycophancy, injustice and brutality that rivals the worst abuses of the Mubarak regime.