Interviews with Mahmoud Salem

In 2006, nearing Eid, right after Ramadan, there was a very strange incident that took place in the streets of downtown Cairo. A swarm of hundreds of young men started running around the street and grabbing and tearing the clothes off and attacking, sexually assaulting every woman that was walking on the street. We´re talking women who are covered, who are not covered, who are pregnant, who are in a cab; anything that moved, they went after.

So when that happened, the media tried to cover it up. Very much so. ´Cause they didn´t want– Egyptian society, they always infantilized us. Like, if we don´t admit to the problems, you know, that somehow, they´ll just go away, or they won´t exist or whatever. And I was so mad that we started pushing for this story to come out. And, you know, once it made it to the media, the government denied it, but did not deny it very well. And you know, it broke everywhere. And I decided that something needs to be done about this. This has become an epidemic. You know, I have a sister; I have girlfriends; I have female friends, and they all suffer from the same thing, sexual harassment on the street, and nobody does anything to stop it.

So I coordinated with Nora Younis and a bunch of other people to start a demonstration against sexual harassment, you know, at the Press Syndicate. And I tried as much as possible to have them be in the forefront of it, because I didn´t want a man to be the one who starts anti-sexual harassment, you know, demonstration. I wanted very much so that women, Egyptian women actually be the ones who are standing up and saying, “We´re not going to take this anymore.” And I think it was hilarious that once you got all those people to stand at that demonstration, that the men walking down the street started whistling at them and sexually harassing them. But that´s that story.

Mahmoud Salem is a blogger, activist, writer and a business development consultant. His blog is the most prominent English-language Egyptian blog, entitled: “Rantings of a Sandmonkey” it won the best Middle East and Africa blog awards in 2006 and 2007, and Best English Blog in the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs award in 2011 and has over 6 million unique views and his Twitter account has over 87,000 followers. His human rights activism areas have been in freedom of speech, human rights, religious rights, and women’s’ rights.

In 2005, he started the first anti-terrorism demonstration in Cairo, and participated in monitoring the Egyptian parliamentary and presidential elections.

In 2006, he was the principal organizer of the first Egyptian anti-sexual harassment demonstration and marsh after the Eid sexual harassment incidents. Incensed by Police torturing Egyptian people on videos and sparing them, he and friends collected the videos, posted them online and pushed for a public persecution of the police officers who committed those acts, leading to the unprecedented convictions of two police officers.

In 2007, he was a stage speaker at the Atlas Foundation’s 25th anniversary conference, head of the new media panel in the Qatar Foundation democracy conference and started the Tafkir project, an Arabic language blogging website to facilitate and promote ideas and online dialogue.

In 2008, he was an organizer and a team leader of 8 Egyptian bloggers for the “Egypt blogs America” project, which monitored the US elections and created a documentary film about it.

In 2009, he was picked for the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow conference and the US Islamic Forum conference, and started the IRIS social campaign company.

In 2011, he was one of the leading voices of the January 25 revolution that brought down Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ran for Egyptian Parliament, started the Tweetback initiative which developed two impoverished communities in Egypt with a population over 700,000 and raised millions of pounds for social entrepreneurship projects. He also initiated the “Egyptian Bill of Rights Project,” which was later on sponsored by Mohamed El Baradei.

He co-authored two books – “Tweets from Tahrir” and “18 Days” and founded “7etan,” the first Graffiti School in Egypt. His writings have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Guardian and various online websites.