What Four Photos Can Tell Us About the Egyptian Referendum

This widely circulated image juxtaposing actress Ilham Shaheen with a salafi Sheykh is a fake–but that’s all the more reason for analyzing it.

My previous post described and (loosely) analyzed four recent editorials from Arabic newspapers to get a sense of the possible meanings of the referendum.

There’s a similar effort to describe attitudes toward the referendum by Maged Afifi using four photographs.

In “Four Pictures to describe the Egyptian Referendum” he unpacks pictures of

1. Gen. As-Sisi visiting a polling place,
2. a Muslim Brotherhood member gesturing in a sign that’s come to refer to the Raabiya al-Adawiya Massacre,
3. a girl dancing in front of a polling place, and
4. a widely-circulated fake photo of the actress Ilham Shaheen photoshopped next to salafist leader Sheikh Yasser al-Brahimi

It’s a great piece, short, and well worth the read.

You can read it in English on Fikra Forum, or in the original Arabic at Raseef22