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This chapter is a tale of women reaching the height of political activism and the pit of their political representation all in one year (January 2011-January 2012). It is a year that began with women and men rising in revolt against the thirty year dictatorship of President Mubarak and ended with the parliamentary elections a year later that brought an Islamist-majority bloc to the Egyptian parliament. …

The aim of this paper is to introduce and analyse the “Stories/Storytelling for Change” Project by the “I am the Story” Group that was held under the auspices of the Pathways of Women's Empowerment Project. The paper describes the methodologies used in holding two re/writing workshops using social and anthropological research as raw material for the writing. Another aim of this methodology paper is to propose that creative writing and storytelling can be effectively used as advocacy tools in gender training workshops. Works of art are maintained to help participants in gender training workshops to acquire gender knowledge and to write gender sensitive stories in the most subtle of ways. …

This paper examines the nature of the political struggle over the status, role and identity of women in Egypt in between the two revolutions (January 2011 and June 2013). …

Dr Mulki Al Sharmani from the Middle East Hub attended the 106th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC from 28 to 30 November 2007. Her paper was part of a panel entitled ‘Negotiating Conceptions of Family, Intimacy, and Marriage’. The panel was reviewed by the Association for Feminist Anthropology. There were five presentations in the panel. …

On 30 and 31 January 2008, the Social Research Center (SRC) in Cairo hosted a workshop aimed at gathering insights and experiences for the design and implementation of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) pilot in Egypt. Both local and foreign experts (from Latin America and the UK) discussed current CCT programmes and how they could be adapted to suit the Egyptian social, political and economic landscape. …

The Social Research Center at the American University Cairo recently ran and were involved with hosting two back to back workshops on Family Law. The first one on ‘Reforming Family Laws in the Middle East’ aimed to disseminate the findings of the research that the SRC team has been conducting on the reforms in Egyptian family laws. The second, which ran from 9-11 January 2009, was hosted by The Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief on ‘Guidelines for Islamic Family Law: Women’s Equality, Male Guardianship, and Legal Objectives’. …

Cairo has been blessed by an effervescence of protest and openness since Hosni Mubarak resigned and on 8 March 2011 a variety of demonstrations took place in the city. March 8 also marked the centenary of International Women’s Day, but sadly, despite the new optimism for reform since the revolution, the women’s peaceful commemoration of the day was the only group which was attacked, ridiculed, shouted down and chased from the square. …

This morning I ran into some of my oldest friends. We chatted as old friends do, hugged, commented on new looks, graying hair, weight gained and lost as friends always do. We met on the steps of Egypt’s State Council (Majgis el Dawla)*; a grand building in a very busy part of greater Cairo. Upon these steps stood a hundred or so men and women who, like myself, had been alerted by text and e-mail messages to the decision by feminist advocacy groups to stage a protest against the near unanimous decision taken by the general assembly of the highest level of state council judges to ban women from entering the administrative judiciary as judges. …

The “Ana el-Hekkeya” (I am the Story) project based at Pathways Middle East selected 20 trainees with varied backgrounds in journalism, short story writing, literary criticism and others, to be trained on gender issues. …

The Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research programme promoted academic exchange among the Consortium’s partners by supporting a limited number of internships of IDS MA students at partners’ offices. Sara Callegari, an IDS student reading for a MA in Gender and Development, was awarded a grant to conduct research at the Social Research Centre of the American University in Cairo in July 2007. Thanks to the grant, Sara spent a month in Cairo, researching on gender myths which influence the development practice of microcredit in Egypt. …

Politically Motivated Sexual Assault and the Law in Violent Transitions: A Case Study from Egypt is a new evidence report from Mariz Tadros about the use of sexual violence against women and men in order to deter the opposition from engaging in protests and demonstrations in a context of a country in transition, Egypt. …

Shaming the Shameless - The Politics of Sexual Assault in Post-Mubarak’s Egypt Exposed In preparation for the 30th of June millioniyya [one million person protest] against the current Muslim Brotherhood-led regime, youth coalitions, women’s organizations and human rights activists are bracing themselves for a wave of politically motivated sexual assaults. Groups like ShoftTa7rosh are co-ordinating monitoring, ensuring women are equipped with self-defence measures and that volunteer men are well prepared to pull women targets of assault out from the crowds. These collective actors have not mobilised in a vacuum, but in response to the organised operations of sexual violence targeting them in public spaces over the last two years. A pattern has emerged which suggests that these were politically motivated assaults, aimed at discouraging women from participating in protest action against the powers that be. …

In this BBC article Hania Sholkamy comments on the ‘marriage crisis’ in Egypt which pervades around religious expectations and the affordability of marriage. Hania believes that the harassment and rape women suffer which has reached unprecedented levels in Egypt is not necessarily linked to the fact that men are single and sexually frustrated. …

On 4 and 5 January 2008, the Pathways Middle East Hub had their first Talking Empowerment in Arabic workshop in Cairo. This was a meeting of editors and translators working on gender readers in Arabic. Also present were some translation theory academics. …

The eruption of protests, violence and civil disobedience in Egypt this month is a replay of the scene in 2011 before the status quo was ruptured, but the Muslim Brotherhood regime’s attacks on women and religious minorities in order to quell opposition is more pervasive than anything seen before, argues Mariz Tadros in this article for Open Democracy. …