Friday, March 04, 2005

Nora Boustany of the Washington Post has yet another fluff piece, here on Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Here he claims that he was an opponent of Nasser's regime from the beginning. Ibrahim did not know that there are some people who read his writings from those times, and some of his writings from the 1960s and even 1970s clash with this claim. It is important for people to be consistent, and if you want to reinvent your past, you cannot erase your paper trail. (Read for example Ibrahim's articles in Dirasat `Arabiyyah from those years). (I have known Ibrahim over the years, and served on panels with him, and never had a personal problem with him. In fact, just before his arrest in Egypt, in one conference at Georgetown he briefly suggested that we do a study of Arab public opinion toward Arab unity (he did one earlier study in 1970s). But politically, we do not agree, at all.)