Two CMU professors affected by rallies while in Egypt

• Tweet
• 

Unconfirmed reports that an associate political science professor from CMU was attacked with a group of protesters in Egypt have recently circulated among faculty.

Moataz Fattah is in Egypt on research leave, said Orlando Perez, political science department chairman. Fattah’s condition, additionally, is unknown and he could not be reached for comment.

“He has been active with his students at Cairo University and the protest,” Perez said, “but beyond that, I would rather ask him before divulging any additional information to the newspaper.”

Protests began Jan. 25 in Egypt to end President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year reign.

Fattah teaches Middle Eastern politics and Islamic studies at Cairo University. He, however, is not the only individual close to CMU affected by the conflict.

Dave London, a former CMU professor of advertising, teaches at the American University in Cairo. He is flying back to Egypt Saturday after evacuating when the political riots began.

London was advised to postpone his teaching position in Cairo and fly back. He arrived in the U.S. from Egypt Feb. 1.

“I was torn,” he said. “I thought of my background in journalism and that, if something important happened, I wanted to be there.”

London was in the U.S. until Jan. 26, which he said was why he did not understand what began happening in Egypt the day before.

London said social networking sites allowed news to leak even though the government controls the media.

“I knew something significant was happening when I arrived back in Cairo,” London said. “The taxi took us to my apartment, but since it’s a gated community, the security would not let us in.”

When he finally gained entry, phones and Internet were not working and there was no form of transportation.

Signs of a problem

London walked a mile and a half to the bank and supermarket, but everything was either closed or running short on supplies.  He said banks were running out of money, stores were running out of food and gas stations had fuel shortages.

It was obvious the economic infrastructure was beginning to collapse and most Western media did not understand that, London said.

Print media is heavily regulated as well as broadcast, he said, but online media is more difficult for the government to control. News of organized rallies spread across the networks in hours rather than days or even weeks.

London was 20 to 30 miles outside of Cairo, and since he could only speak about 30 words in Arabic, all he heard were rumors.

“We would hear screams at night from outside my apartment,” London said. “It was mostly mobs of people running around, but nothing violent was ever really happening.”

London said he never felt fear. He said in his several years experience living in Egypt the country’s people are some of the most welcoming he ever met.

He described the media description of the rallies as misleading and blames Western media partly for the misinterpretation of events

They have been peaceful, he said, and especially when considering the composition of the people protesting, it is easy to see this was not meant to be violent.

If a reporter goes into the action and are perhaps attacked, he said they focus the story on their personal violence, spurring them to potentially lose sight of what’s truly remarkable in the news.

“They are fighting for more freedom,” London said. “There needs to be more free speech and a rewrite of the constitution, and more monitored elections. It could be a very healthy move for the Middle East.”

-Senior Reporter Maria Amante contributed to this report