Amro Ali

What if Malcolm X met novelist Naguib Mahfouz on his visit to Egypt in 1964? In this short story, Amro Ali fleshes out Malcolm's worldviews, exploring how they might be challenged if confronted with different Egyptian realities that may have escaped him during his seminal travels to Cairo and Alexandria. This story is the first of several stories that will be published in an upcoming anthology book that explores Egypt through themes of justice, power, identity, faith, and mortality.

The modern history and contemporary nature of Alexandria is a brew of different identities that give off (or once gave) a distinct resonance: Mediterranean, Egyptian, Arab, African, Middle Eastern, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Levantine, among others. But the one profile that emerges as rooted in Alexandria's existential survival is the Mediterranean identity. Within a few decades, rising sea levels will inundate parts of Alexandria in what could be the start of history's closing curtains on the 2300-year-old city. Along with political and institutional will, it is imperative that Alexandria's relationship to the Mediterranean shifts its face from past and present towards the future and pushed further into a wider regional narrative. Ask an Alexandrian what makes up their identity and the first word you will most likely hear is the sea. The sea is central to the popular imagination, literature, films, theatre, escapism, growing up, families, wedding shoots, and a street art that reflects the bond with the sea and its history and myths: mermaids, citadel, centurions, Alexander the Great, and lots of ship-themed graffiti. Right down to the common line "If I leave Alexandria, I will feel like a fish out of water."

Hearing the word “Mediterranean” can elicit metaphors of cruises, golden beaches, lush hills, and succulent cuisines. In fact, follow up Mediterranean by appending the words diet, sunset, and villa, among others, and you have already produced the mental image of a semi paradise on earth. Yet the so-called “Mediterranean lifestyle” is often a highly-charged romanticised product of western consumption habits, holiday brochures, and diaspora musings – with a heavy focus on Greece, Italy, and Spain with the rest of the other Mediterranean countries at times acting as background furniture. The lifestyle is habitually treated as a given – it evacuates economics, class, and gender, and presumes that geography is all that counts. I want to visit this idea of the Mediterranean lifestyle and broaden its meaning, to look at how modern alienation ails the notion of the Mediterranean lifestyle and how we can think of it beyond its olive oil coat of arms.

Alexandria's connection to the Maghreb is often overlooked. But the cosmopolitan port city developed through centuries of migration and influence from the western side of the Mediterranean, up until the colonial era and the building of self-centered nation states. This essay was originally published in Mashallah Magazine as part of the Mediterranean Routes series.

This paper focuses on the concept of techno-fundamentalism which side sidesteps politics in favor of taking on social problems and translating them into technical solutions. The article provides an analysis of the opportunities and backlashes that can emanate from the use of modern digital technology as a political tool in the context of the Mediterranean basin. Based on its historical and philosophical legacy, the Mediterranean, seen as a spatial geographical entity, has the potential to become a hub for the development of a new political imagination. This paper examines how Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, among others, have engaged with the problem of techno-fundamentalism and why there is a need to draw on politics and the humanities to imagine a better future, a new Mediterranean social contract.

A long essay on why the Arab intellectual community in Berlin needs to acquire a name, shape, and a mandate of sorts. This may include a school of thought,  political philosophy, or even an ideational movement – all cross-fertilized through a deeper engagement with the Arab world.

The protest cries of karama (dignity) in 2011 saw the emergence of a new subjectivity in the Arab world that birthed a new citizenship paradigm and elevated the citizenry as a compelling sovereign collective. Karama developed not only as a form of bottom-up universal humanism but also independently outside the confines of academia, religious-secular debates, and even human rights organizations. For many decades, karama had been reserved for the loftiness of the nation and liberation struggles, whereas karama for the individual meant a moral virtue that constituted an apolitical being. In 2011, however, the understanding of karama made a phenomenal leap from the moral into the political realm and thus became a political force in its own right. Karama developed into a self-contained movement, a philosophy that people yearned to develop, encapsulating a story that expands the moral imagination and asks its protagonists to imbibe the rhythm of life with a higher temporal calling. It is the citizen’s inherent worthiness and inalienable right to make the social contract.

Amro Ali, “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif, (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2021) pp. 41-67.

The iconic Egyptian and Liverpool footballer Mohamed Salah is perceived as a redemption of something lost, a substitute in an era devoid of real Muslim leaders. But for the rest of the world, particularly Europe, he is the disrupter of the secular realm and obstacle to bigotry who can jam the wires of Islamophobia. Salah encodes the somebodiness that restores a sense of dignity to the Egyptian at home, and to Arabs and Muslims abroad, while delivering a reckoning for which the West has to deal. What Salah brings to the world is not simply the stunning athletic beauty he displays in the soccer pitch but, despite the occasional falls from grace, an extraordinary humanity, decency, empathy, and integrity that is missing in today’s world of sports. He even exhibits a deep empathy for teams that lose by his wins. In short, Salah’s globality lies in displaying the kind of moral code, beauty, charity, and humility that transcend culture, religion, and national boundaries.

Amro Ali, "Mo Salah, A Moral Somebody?" in Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century. ed. Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 90-102.