15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
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Leap of faith
Having been silenced on the ground by a ban, the suspended Al-Shaab opposition newspaper has moved its operations to the more friendly domain of the World Wide Web -- a move that the paper's editors hope its readers will make with it. Still a "weekly" and still a mouthpiece for the frozen pro-Islamist Labour Party, elshaab.com is a pared down, low-cost alternative to what the organisation had after the government shut down its operations: nothing at all.
Highly opinionated and incendiary in tone, elshaab.com is comfortably at home among multitudes of polemic sites online and a natural response to being snuffed out for what it claims was no less than "defending the nation and its religion." If the language seems rather loud, it isn't too loud by the standards of the Internet, or, for that matter, the fiery newspaper that has landed its chief editor in jail several times for libel and slander.
The online edition isn't exactly taking the Net by storm, but elshaab.com is making a political statement simply by existing. "Our Web site is one of the tools of our continuation," Al-Shaab Editor-in-Chief Magdi Hussein told Al-Ahram Weekly. "We're also making it clear that suspending a newspaper in these modern times -- when there are so many channels through which to express something -- is nothing more than a joke."
The strong impression the print version has made over the past decade may not be reproduced by the electronic edition, but elshaab.com is certainly attracting visitors. According to the elshaab.com Webmaster Amer Abdel-Moneim, the newspaper's site has been getting approximately 70,000 hits and 3,000 visitors daily since its appearance three weeks ago -- an impressive figure by Arabic-language Web site standards.
In August 1999, Hussein and two Al-Shaab journalists were fined LE20,000 and sentenced to the maximum penalty of two years in jail for slandering Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture Minister Youssef Wali. The newspaper had for months accused Wali, who is also secretary-general of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP), of "treason" for supporting normalisation of relations with Israel.
The rulings were thrown out four months later by the Court of Cassation, Egypt's highest tribunal, and a re-trial was ordered. The defendants were released, but in April, another court confirmed the two-year jail term against Hussein. During his confinement, Al-Shaab resumed its heated campaigns against top government officials. The target this time was Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. The newspaper demanded Hosni's resignation after the ministry reprinted the controversial novel A Banquet for Seaweed, by Syrian writer Haydar Haydar, which the newspaper slammed as "blasphemous" and insulting to Islam. The situation deteriorated further when the newspaper campaign provoked students at Al-Azhar University to stage violent demonstrations.
Citing internal splits in the Labour Party's leadership, the government-controlled Political Parties Committee, which is in charge of licensing political parties, ordered the suspension of Al-Shaab in May. The committee also ordered the investigation of alleged irregularities committed by the party's leadership, including the allegation that the party had become a front for the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Two months later, the same committee asked the Political Parties Tribunal to dissolve the Labour Party and it remains frozen until the tribunal takes a decision.
Hussein, benefiting from an annual presidential pardon on the occasion of Eid Al-Fitr, was released last December. Although Al-Shaab won a court ruling lifting the paper's suspension, the Supreme Press Council has yet to take action in this direction. Hussein responded by filing a lawsuit against the council's chairman, Mustafa Kamal Helmi.
The legal and political battles left behind a penniless and almost staff-less newspaper. Lacking these vital resources, the leadership turned to the paper's neglected Web site for a solution. Though the site has been around for some time, it wasn't taken seriously and was updated only sporadically. The new elshaab.com is very much the centre of attention, but it is only a shadow of what the old one claimed to be. Previously, the site carried all the content that went into the newspaper, including news, features, interviews and reviews. The current edition offers nine opinion articles only and has no archive or search facility. The site is also not particularly user-friendly, since articles appear as images, not text, which means they take much longer to load. The site is updated every Friday.
Articles are authored mainly by the newspaper's principal writers, such as Hussein; his uncle, Adel Hussein; Salah Bedeiwi, who was imprisoned along with Hussein; Talaat Rumeih, the newspaper's managing editor; and Mohamed Abbas, leader of the anti-Haydar campaign.
Not surprisingly, Hussein's latest article lashes out at Wali for using the same language as American writer Thomas Friedman, who is viewed by many Arabs as strongly pro-Israeli. "Is a person who adopts the thoughts of the Zionist Friedman fit for the post of secretary-general of the ruling party?" asked Hussein. Other articles touch on issues like the current debate on freedom of expression, torture in prisons, the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine and the economic recession.
Hussein concedes that the content currently on elshaab.com is not enough, "but we're determined to improve it. A special board has been established for this purpose." Although most of the site's material is published in Al-Qarar newspaper -- the mouthpiece of the Pan-Arab, anti-Israel Al-Wefaq Al-Qawmi (National Accord) party -- Hussein expects that elshaab.com will attract a wider range of readers. "We know that there are 200,000 Internet subscribers in Egypt alone, and we know that the online edition will reach other readers across the globe that no print edition can reach."
The Internet, a venue for unfettered freedom of expression, is the perfect soil for an outspoken newspaper like Al-Shaab, but Hussein is quick to point out that shifting gears was a necessary choice, not an ideological one. "We don't need the Internet in order to be brave. Our discourse will remain the same, with or without censorship, and I'm willing to write what [got me imprisoned] again and again, because I believe in every word I published."
Related stories:
Editor out of jail 4 - 10 January 2001
Islamist mouthpiece remains closed 14 - 20 September 2000
A risky business 20 - 26 July 2000Related links:
Al-Shaab
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