Book review: Sherif Younis, The Sacred March
[English version of the text published in Spanish.1] Sherif Younis, الزحف المقدس: مظاهرات التنهي وتشكل عبادة ناصر [The Sacred March: The Demonstrations Against Nasser’s Resignation and the Formation of His Cult], 1st edition, Cairo, Dar Mirit, 2005. 2nd revised edition, Beirut and Cairo, Dar al-Tanwir, 2012, 196 pages. In June 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s military dictatorship in Egypt suffered a crushing defeat in the Six-Day War against Israel, Nasser immediately announced his resignation. Shortly afterwards, crowds demonstrated for two days across Egypt to beg him to change his mind, and Nasser responded to the outcry by remaining in office. In The Sacred March, the Egyptian historian Sherif Younis asks what led the Egyptian people to call for Nasser to remain in power. How did an authoritarian regime that was ruthless towards the population, and enforced political passivity by means of imprisonment and torture, manage to inspire such fervour? Some historians of Nasserism believe that these demonstrations were a response to the sincere emotions of the demonstrators, while others argue that they were organised by the regime. Taking an original approach to the study of Nasserism, Younis departs from these two interpretations. For him, the demonstrations in support of the leader, which were most likely spontaneous, were also a product of the ideology that the regime had put in place after the military coup of 1952.
How to make Arabic PDFs with Markdown and pandoc
Here’s one way to write Arabic articles in Markdown format and typeset them as PDF files, as I’ve done for كوكبنا.شبكة. This assumes you’re using Linux or a similar environment, and are comfortable with the command line. The basic idea is to to use pandoc to convert the Markown to $\mathrm{\LaTeX}$ markup, and tell pandoc to run LuaTeX to generate the PDF. You’ll need: A Markdown editor that handles Arabic text well. I recommend Obsidian, which is user-friendly and has good built-in right-to-left text support. You can add the Obsidian RTL Plugin to get a few improvements. A good Arabic font that’s convenient for text editing, such as Noto Naskh Arabic. Some good Arabic fonts for your PDFs, such as Amiri for body text and Cairo for headings. The LuaTeX typesetter, which you can get by installing TeXlive. If you’re not sure what you need, just install the whole TeXlive distribution. pandoc GNU Make An ordinary text editor for writing Makefiles and the like, such as Visual Studio Code. Top-level directory # Obsidian expects you to put Markdown files in a directory tree that it configures as a “vault”. You can have multiple vaults, but it stores its own configuration and plugins separately in each vault.
accicalc
In 2023 I wrote a program that makes spreadsheets of data about traffic accidents in France: accicalc. The data is available online, but difficult to work with. This little program is useful if, for example, you want details of all accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists in a given municipality, including the address or geographical coordinates.
كوكبنا
My occasional Arabic-language podcast (since 2021) on ecology, migration, and inequality: كوكبنا.شبكة.
Tondauer
In 2020 I started a project called Tondauer, to make Creative Commons licensed editions of sheet music. It happened because of the Covid-19 lockdown that year: I was learning to play Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude Op. 104a, No. 2 (MWV U 123), because it suited my mood of restless frustration at the time. I started with a 19th-century edition that could be downloaded for free. Then I bought an edition with fingerings, and wondered why it had different notes. I looked in vain for the composer’s manuscript, but found only an earlier draft. I had been reading R. Larry Todd’s biography of Mendelssohn, so I emailed him to ask if he knew where the manuscript of the final version was, and he replied that it hadn’t been found. This meant that the only sources were the first editions, which were published after the composer’s death.