Significant .... is the recent award by Egypt’s culture ministry of a prize to one of the country’s most combative secularist writers, Sayed al-Qimani. The Egyptian authorities would hardly have dared to offer such a prize a decade ago. Beleaguered then by Islamists and a tide of public piety, the ostensibly secular government was prone to posing as a defender of orthodoxy.
Book bannings, charges of blasphemy, and death threats against secularists (one of which, against the writer Farag Foda, was carried out by Islamist militants in 1992) all served to silence criticism of the conservative line. [The Economist] Read more
