Egyptian Court Research Articles

الاتجاهات الحديثة للتخلي عن الاختصاص القضائي الدولي في ضوء حكم محكمةالنقض المصرية الصادر بتاريخ 24/3/2014 دراسة تأصيلية تحليلية مقارنة –

This article comments on the recent decision of Egyptian Court of Cassation, issued on 24/3/2014, which adopted a stand in favor of abandoning international jurisdiction for the benefit of a foreign court, as opposed to the traditional decisions of the Egyptian judiciary, stable since the fifties of the last century, to reject all forms of abandonment of international jurisdiction. This article discusses this decision from a philosophical perspective, dividing the development of private international law into two stages. The first stage is coordination between legal systems, which originated in the sixties of the last century as a reaction to, and to alleviate, adherence to the radical idea of territorial sovereignty in the field of international jurisdiction. The second stage concerns the development of the global legal system, which began its inception in the nineties with the growth of ideas of globalization, which are contrary to the idea of independent sovereign States. Finally, the article’s analysis reveals that the decision of the Egyptian Court of Cassation was influenced by the developmental stage of global legal system and the framework of contemporary private international law within which it was decided.

Hymenoplasty, Virginity Testing, and the Simulacrum of Female Respectability

AbstractThis article situates Egyptian political protesters’ battles over the state’s “virginity testing” in the ethnographic context of cultural beliefs about the hymen and women’s moral purity, based on ethnographic research, formal interviews with laypeople and physicians, and an examination of Egyptian court rulings and revolutionary graffiti. The use of hymens in social and political theater can only be understood by appreciating that a woman’s hymen, her sexual purity, and thus her social respectability are all simulacra, in the Baudrillardian sense: a substitution of the signs of the real for the real, and which are thus more real than real. This article analyzes hymens and graffiti as memory objects that construct idealized moral histories and that open up possibilities for creative maneuvers in the social construction of women’s moral identities, drawing on the sensory registers of blood and hymens at the same time that they reveal these to be simulacra.

Traits of Negative and Positive Discrimination in the Relationships between Coptic Community and Muslim Authorities of Medieval Egypt

In the course of the Middle ages, the Copts experienced a variety of drastic changes in the attitude of Muslim rulers towards them, from confidence to disgrace. The latter included not only the increasingly rigorous tax policies, but also social and domestic constraints, which can be surely defined as religious discrimination. Though the Copts managed to regain the trust of the authorities by their profound skills in administrative and courtly functions and, of course, compromise in terms of religion, which allowed them to enjoy high ranks and other benefits of their proximity to the Egyptian court. This, in its turn, made them an outstanding social group and can be considered “positive discrimination” in contrast with the definitely negative discrimination based on confessional conditions. The question of the balance between positive and negative discrimination as an instrument of regulating intrastate social cooperation can be crucial for understanding the specific of these relationships during the described period. So, the main goal of this work is to trace historical precedents which can be considered either negative or positive discrimination, and their suppositional influence on the Copts’ turning into a minority.

The prohibition of wearing veil in public schools in Egypt: an analysis of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court jurisprudence

Case No.8 of 1996 is a landmark decision of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court (“SCC”) and represents one of the most significant judicial rulings of a structural remedy for the interpretation of Article 2 of Egypt 2014 Constitution. The jurisprudence of the SCC is essential to advance a moderate (liberal), rights-protecting interpretation of Sharie‘a. In this case, the SCC held that a rule on face-veiling in public schools is compatible not only with Islamic law, but with certain human rights guaranteed by the Constitution:, as freedom of expression and freedom of religion. This decision dealt with the SCC’s view on Islamic ijtihad (legal reasoning), and, gives insight into the Court’s views on civil and political rights context.

A New Interpretation of a Rare Old Kingdom Dual Title: The King’s Chief Librarian and Guardian of the Royal Archives of <i>Mehit</i>

To date, no unequivocal textual reference to the Great Sphinx has been identified prior to Egypt’s New Kingdom. Here, we present evidence that the monument we now know as the Great Sphinx was called Mehit and that this name was part of an exclusive title held only by the highest officials of the royal Egyptian court going back to at least early dynastic times, i.e. prior to the time of the Great Sphinx’s generally presumed construction during the 4th Dynasty. Furthermore, the symbolic origins of this title precede the 4th Dynasty by at least five centuries, going back to the very cradle of writing during the earliest dynastic era of the early Nile civilization. Based on this philological evidence corroborating geological and archeo-astronomical evidence previously published, we conclude that a lion-like stone monument existed on the Giza Plateau long before the Great Sphinx is generally believed to have been made and that early dynastic Egyptians referred to it in writing.

Significant Impacts on Egyptian Legal System Caused by Egyptian Investment Legislation

The Egyptian government and its legislators have been putting forth legislative amendments to its domestic laws that are controversial in relation to investment, tenders, bids, and investment guarantee as top priority.On one hand, they are doing this in order to encourage and reassure the foreign investors in Egypt, and on the other hand, they are likely facing psychological fears of international massive litigations.However, these legislative investment amendments could threaten and undermine the stability of inherited Egyptian jurisdiction systems and integrity. These amendments include providing avenues of escape of corruption and financial crimes through the reconciliations with the foreign investors who have been damaging the Egyptian economy and its citizens’ livelihoods.As the role, size, and impact of foreign investment grow worldwide. The mechanisms holding such entities accountable are actively diminishing. Unfortunately, the legal framework of foreign investment is aggressively shrinking the state’s role in regulating these foreign investment enterprises in Egypt, while challenging the very sovereignty and jurisdiction of the Egyptian court system to investigate allegations of violations committed by foreign investors.In effect, this results in absolute impunity by foreign investors in Egypt. Moreover, this trend of more legal privileges and the loose accountability to the foreign investors create a negative impact on Egyptian public interests and then on the Egyptian legal system as well as on the Egyptian Constitution.The aim of this paper, therefore, is to highlight the lawful deficiencies of the amended investment laws as well as its patterns trespass to the Egyptian Constitution. In addition, this paper brings out the implications of these violations on the inherited Egyptian legal system.

KNOSSIAN GIFTS? TWO LATE MINOAN IIIA1 CUPS FROM TEL BETH-SHEMESH, ISRAEL

Two Late Minoan IIIA1 cups were recently found in the excavations at Tel Beth-Shemesh, Israel. They were part of a larger assemblage of local Late Bronze IIA (first half of the fourteenth centurybc) drinking and eating vessels sealed under a destruction layer in one room of a large edifice, presumably a ‘palace’. A commemorative scarab bearing the name of Amenhotep III and related to the first Jubilee (Sedfestival) in his thirtieth regnal year was found alongside the cups, providing further chronological evidence. This article examines the Late Minoan IIIA1 cups from Beth-Shemesh within their Aegean context and emphasises their close affinity with comparable cups from the palace of Knossos, catalogued and republished here. The Tel Beth-Shemesh cups are the second occurrence – after Sellopoulo Tomb 4 – of Knossian Late Minoan IIIA1 pottery found together with Amenhotep III's scarab. This new evidence strengthens the likelihood of some chronological overlap between Late Minoan IIIA1 and the reign of this Pharaoh. The article also considers the biography of the two Minoan cups, as social agents within the intricate network of the Late Bronze Age palatial gift exchange in the eastern Mediterranean. While it is possible that the cups came to Beth-Shemesh directly from Knossos, another viable option is that they arrived as a gift from the Egyptian court. The two rare Late Minoan IIIA1 Knossian cups could have reached Egypt on the occasion of Amenhotep III's much-discussed official embassy to the Aegean – including Knossos – and then been sent as royal gifts to the ruler of Beth-Shemesh.

Designing antiquity: Owen Jones, ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace

In the 19th century, designers became involved in the public presentation of the past, focusing specifically on the decoration of historical monuments. By exploring ornamental designs and the way they represented the cultural concerns of distant civilizations, and in addressing how color may have originally been applied to exteriors and interiors, designers animated the past and incited a new passion for the ancient world. A crucial figure in this movement was the designer and architect Owen Jones (1809–1874), who from the 1830s until his death pioneered the study of ancient ornament and its central role in historical traditions of art. Particularly significant were the series of Fine Arts Courts that Jones designed in 1854 for the Crystal Palace's relocation to Sydenham. The ten displays on the great cultures of the ancient world featured detailed re-creations of palaces and courts. Designing Antiquity focuses on Jones's Egyptian Court, which produced a fundamental shift in the way Egyptian art was understood in the second half of the 19th century.

Court grants students access to disputed campus

Egyptian court rules in favour of Nile University in its dispute with Zewail City over Sheikh Zayed campus.

Searching for the “Voices” of the Fallāhīn in a File from Egyptian Court Archives

À travers l’étude du dossier de Mikhīmar, un jeune fallāh (paysan égyptien) condamné à mort pour meurtre en 1893, cet article montre qu’une approche des archives centrée sur les traces matérielles laissées par le processus de composition et de recomposition du dossier permet de restituer en partie la performance des différents acteurs du processus judiciaire, et contribue par là même à jeter une lumière nouvelle sur le système de justice colonial au tournant du xxe siècle. Plus précisément, l’analyse des traces — citations entre parenthèses et pétitions en annexes — laissées par la négociation, qui se déroule tout au long de la procédure entre la famille de la victime et les autorités judiciaires autour de la nature commanditée du meurtre et des poursuites à engager contre les responsables, révèle à la fois la dimension conflictuelle et éminemment politique du processus de décision des magistrats et une capacité d’expression et de contestation du système tout à fait insoupçonnée de la part des fallāhīn.

Antony and Cleopatra (review)

Reviewed by: Antony and Cleopatra Horacio Sierra Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Tina Landau. The Hartford Stage, Hartford, CT. 13 October 2010. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is a spatially and temporally jarring drama as it skips across the Mediterranean and spans ten years with its unwieldy forty-two scenes. Productions of this tragedy can only benefit from the incorporation of as many unifying performance elements as possible. Ironically, what fused the Hartford Stage's production into a cohesive unit was crass cultural contrast. Director Tina Landau exploited Shakespeare's dichotomous presentation of a Roman-versus-Egyptian showdown to full effect, even if her approach risked playing into orientalist tropes. The payoff was a production that helped the audience comprehend the drama's geopolitical complexities, even as it reified stereotypes. The production was a guilty pleasure due to its gratuitous accentuation of the text's superficial attractions: gender-defying characters, sexual provocations, and cultural otherness. The Hartford Stage's Antony and Cleopatra was thus in line with recent productions of Shakespeare's works that have laid bare what made and continues to make his dramas popular. For example, the Washington, D.C.-based Synetic Theater presented a wordless production of the play in February 2010, stripping down the most thrilling scenes to physically striking and sensually engaging dance movements. The Hartford production employed spartan though striking sets, obvious though bold costuming, and sexually charged though emotionally engaged acting. The combination of these elements allowed the audience to be drawn in by the play's visceral joys before being invited to contemplate its political and philosophical conundrums. While the production exploited Shakespeare's othering and bawdiness, it did so in a progressive manner, with race-blind casting. Scholarship on the casting of Cleopatra has often discussed the appropriate race of the actress portraying the pharaoh. Because black actors performed the roles of Romans, from Antony (John Douglas Thompson) to Menas, the whiteness of Cleopatra (Kate Mulgrew) became a moot point. The aesthetics of the production provided the audience with clear visual cues for how to interpret the dynamics between the two cultures. For example, Anita Yavich's costume design contrasted Rome's tight-fisted approach to world domination with Egypt's languorous and opulent carelessness. While the militant Romans were showcased in an austere [End Page 267] black-and-white mash-up of 1930s-era fascist-like uniforms and punk-grunge trench coats, the hedonistic Egyptians were decked out in free-flowing robes with earthy tones that displayed the men's muscular torsos and the women's ample cleavage. Click for larger view View full resolution Tony Yazbeck (Alexas), Kate Mulgrew (Cleopatra), and John Douglas Thompson (Antony) in Antony and Cleopatra. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.) Cultural differences were also highlighted by Blythe R. D. Quinlan's deceptively stark set design. The upstage corners were devoted to separate bars for the Egyptian and Roman entourages. Landau shrewdly peopled these lounges with nonspeaking characters so that their presence could be felt when their allies and adversaries were engaged in dialogue downstage. Given the cataclysmic nature of the confluence of these two empires, continually reminding the audience of the impact each culture had on the other was one of this production's most invigorating decisions. Buttressed by clichéd costumes, the Egyptian court that swirled around the title lovers' Lady Gaga-esque "bad romance" further emphasized the erotic decadence of the pair's decline. Cleopatra's Egyptian retinue of bare-chested men and scantily clad women delivered the sex factor promised by the Hartford Stage's hilariously tawdry "Too-Hot-for-TV!" online viral marketing. The titillation factor was introduced when Cleopatra's entourage burst onto the stage with kicks, caterwauls, and gyrations. The Egyptians immersed themselves in a freestyle mix of sensual dancing set to hypnotic, percussion-heavy music. Paralleling Rome's concern with Cleopatra's emasculation of Antony, the male members of her entourage were portrayed as passive boy-toys. In contrast, Roman eroticism was exposed as cold and calculated. Antony's arranged marriage to Caesar's sister Octavia (Kendra Underwood) was bereft of any passion. Underwood's somber facial expressions and slouched posture matched her role as a...

Law versus Medical Science: Competition between Legal and Biological Paternity in an Egyptian Civil Court

AbstractThe 1942 lawsuit that is translated, annotated and analyzed in this article raises questions about the judicial acceptability of new types of evidence developed by modern science. A husband who suspected that his wife was carrying the child of her lover asked the ahlī court of summary justice in Alexandria to determine the identity of the child's biological father by means of a blood-group test. The judge's refusal to comply with the request, on the grounds that he lacked jurisdiction, reflects a decision by Egyptian legislators and judges to leave the establishment of paternity to evidentiary rules that are shaped by cultural values about marriage, legitimacy and morality. These values do not always favor decision-making based on the full range of scientifically available facts.

Morality on Trial: Structure and Intelligibility System of a Court Sentence Concerning Homosexuality

This article analyses the structural organization of a ruling issued by an Egyptian court in the trial known as the “Queen Boat case”, where several people were arrested on the ground of their alleged homosexuality. With the text, and only the text, as data, it aims at making explicit the possibilities open to potential readers of the ruling. The praxiological study of texts constitutes a relatively new domain of inquiry in which texts are considered as produced objects whose intelligibility is structured and organized in a way that provides instructions for the texts’ reading and accounts for their author’s worldview and purposes. The article briefly presents the Egyptian legal and judicial system. Then, through close observation of each of the constitutive elements and organizational features of the ruling, it shows how this text serves as a vehicle for a limited number of possible logical options. In other words, it describes aspects of the practical grammar of written legal adjudication. Finally, in conclusion, some remarks are formulated concerning rulings as instructed reading of cases submitted to judicial review.

Bowing and Scraping in the Ancient Near East: An Investigation into Obsequiousness in the Amarna Letters

The single most valuable source of information for understanding Egypt’s administration of its northern empire during the Amarna period is a corpus of roughly 350 cuneiform tablets, known collectively as the “Amarna letters.” These documents, which come mostly from an archive found at Tell el-Amarna in the 1880s, were exchanged between the Egyptian court and Near Eastern rulers of polities both large and small. Although the chronology is still debated, the letters are thought to span a period of at most three decades in the latter half of the fourteenth century b.c.—between the 32nd year of Amenhotep III and the 4th year of Tutankhamun.1 While certain aspects of these letters have been extensively studied, their potential to illuminate the internal structure of the empire at this time has by no means been exhausted. As I hope to demonstrate herein, the results of a systematic study of the greeting formulas used by Egypt’s vassals when addressing the pharaoh can reveal a great deal about the varying degrees of political control within the Egyptian empire. After a brief description of the methodology employed in this study, I will discuss the clustering in social rank that I believe is discernible among the different geographic areas of Egypt’s northern empire. Whether these proposed rankings may potentially shed light on the preparation of individual treaties between the Egyptian state and particular vassals is the subject of the concluding section of this article.

Sexual Tensions of Post-Empire

In this essay Katherine Franke examines two contemporary cites in which state efforts to eradicate the traces of empire and to resurrect an authentic post-colonial nation have produced sexual subjects that serve as a kind of existential residue and reminder of a demonized colonial past and absence. Looking first at post-colonial Zimbabwe, Franke argues that President Mugabe's aggressively homophobic policies have played a key role in fortifying his leadership as authentically African and post-colonial. Franke then turns to current efforts by the Mubarak government in Egypt to publically prosecute men for having sex with men. The Mubarak government has used homosexual show trials, first in security courts, and then in civilian courts, as a dry run for the reorganization of the Egyptian court system's jurisdiction over dissenters and outcasts.

Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgments

THE court judgments in the recent apostasy trials in the Arab world have brought about fundamental changes in the control of belief and religious affiliation that are directly related to the transformation Islamic law underwent when it became integrated into the legislative codes of the new nation-states. From the eighth to the nineteenth century, the norms of Islamic law were the result of learned debates among independent jurists and their schools of law. Islamic law was a jurist’s law. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was integrated into the codes enacted by the competent institutions of the nationstates and lost its normative authority in most spheres of modern state law. It remained dominant only in personal statute law (that is, the rules concerning marriage and divorce, family and succession ). The Muslim jurists of the premodern period had assigned ethical norms an important place and had clearly distinguished purely ethical from enforceable legal norms. The notion of the individual believer as someone who takes ethical responsibility for his acts independently from the decisions of the judiciary and the political institutions found its expression in the concept of the individual’s own interior forum (batin). This holds especially true for questions of belief and unbelief. In the last instance, these questions were considered a matter of religious conscience, even SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Fall 2003) Apostasy as Objective and Depersonalized Fact: Two Recent Egyptian Court Judgments BABER JOHANSEN if judicial decisions against apostates were legitimized for political reasons. When the modern nation-states’ codification of the law reduced Islamic law to personal statute law, the state’s written law abandoned the purely ethical norms of that tradition and with them the concept of the individual’s own forum (batin). The opposition against the neglect of religious norms in modern state law grew from the early 1970s of the twentieth century. But it was centered on the demand for the “codification of Islamic law” (taqnin al-shari’a). In other words, it did not mobilize religious opposition for a return to a jurists’ law. The reason is that its leaders were jurists trained in modern law faculties to interpret and apply codified state law. These jurists wanted to insert the norms of classical Islamic law into the codes of the nation-state with which they were familiar. The ethical debates of classical Islamic law obviously did not lend themselves easily to this approach. The jurists’ movement for the “codification of Islamic law” gained in momentum during the 1980s when, in a number of states, it succeeded in assuring a place in the modern criminal codes for classical apostasy rules. In other states, such as Egypt, the highest courts opened the way for apostasy trials. The analysis of one apostasy judgment of the highest Egyptian court shows that the court understands belief and apostasy as objective facts that can be separated from the person who professes or denies them. The court effectively claims the role of the highest instance in questions of belief and unbelief. Apostasy thus becomes a depersonalized objective fact without any relation to the intentions of the individuals concerned. The court’s sentence presents a radicalized version of the opposition between the individual’s interior forum and the courts’ exterior forum: the first loses its connection with the second. The court’s definition of apostasy serves to control the ideas that can legitimately be discussed in the public sphere. It denies bold reinterpretations of Islam, but implicitly also a number of political persuasions and theories, the right of access to the public space and assigns them the private sphere as their legitimate abode. The concept of private and pub688 SOCIAL RESEARCH lic that results from this approach is developed in the detailed reasoning by which the court justifies its judgment. I The Cairo appeals court in 1995 and then, in 1996, Egypt’s highest judicial authority, the Court of Cassation, found Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, an Egyptian professor of Islamic studies and Arabic rhetoric at the University of Cairo, guilty of apostasy—that is, of forsaking the Islamic religion and community. Apostasy trials against professors, intellectuals, artists, and writers were by no means rare in the...

Ambiguous Identities

A fourteenth century BC alabaster vase found at Ugarit on the coast of Syria bears a representation of a man and a woman often interpreted as husband and wife. The man is identified as Syrian both in an inscription stating he is Niqmaddu, ruler of Ugarit, and in his physical rendering. The identity of the lady, dressed in Egyptian court fashion, remains uncertain. The image has been used both to support and refute a claim made in a contemporary international letter that Egypt never gave its princesses in marriage to foreign rulers. This article examines how the image deploys the indeterminate identity of the woman within an explicitly identified scene of royal representation. The rationale for such intentional ambiguity lies in Ugarit's role in the political relations of the Late Bronze Age, a world of diplomacy in which the Ugaritic king operated on both the foreign and domestic levels. The element of ambiguity serves as a critical component in status negotiations, and images present an ideal vehicle for coding flexible messages in diplomatic maneuvers.

The Egyptian Court and Victorian Appropriations of Ancient History

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Egyptian Court and Victorian Appropriations of Ancient HistoryElizabeth FayElizabeth Fay Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 32, Number 1Winter 2001Romanticism and Interdisciplinarity: "Centers and Peripheries": Selected Papers from the 15th Annual Conference of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044936 Views: 5Total views on this site © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Arab Democracy: Dismal Prospects

institutions. Unhappily symptomatic was the sentencing this past spring by an Egyptian state security court of a 62-year-old scholar, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, to seven years in prison. Ibrahim faced charges of treason and embezzlement when his highly regarded Ibn Khaldun Center published studies on voter registration and the persecution of Coptic Christians, and worse, for accepting independent funding from several European foundations. Given the abundance of such incidents, one can reasonably wonder whether Arab democracy is an impossible dream. Fifteen years ago, well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bombing of Iraq in the Gulf War, and the signing of the Oslo peace accords, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington expressed the conventional wisdom about the prospects for democratization around the world in his es-

Islam and Public Law: Classical and Contemporary Studies

Part 1 Classical perspectives: consultation and the political process in the Islamic Middle East of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries legal literature and problem of change - the case of Egypt appellate review of judicial independence in Islamic law the law and the Mufti - evidence from 15th-century Morocco. Part 2 Contemporary dimensions: the role of 'urf in shaping the traditional Islamic city Islamic law and state legislation on religious conversion in India Islam and public law in Malaysia - some reflections in the aftermath of Susie Teoh's case Majlis al-Dawla - the administrative courts of Egypt and administrative law the jurisprudence of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court contemporary reinterpretations of Islamic law.