Hossam el-Hamalawy

Hossam el-Hamalawy (حسام الحملاوى, ; AKA 3arabawy عرباوى, ; born 14 July 1977) is an Egyptian journalist, blogger, photographer and socialist activist.

He is a member of the Revolutionary Socialists and the Center for Socialist Studies.

Afterward, he pursued an MA in political science at the same university, writing his dissertation on the 1977 Egyptian "Bread Uprising".

He belongs to the second generation of the organization which joined the movement in the second half of the 1990s.

This particular group of activists were credited with reviving the political left on university campuses, after two decades where the Islamists held the upper hand.

While still an undergraduate student at the AUC, el-Hamalawy joined the Revolutionary Socialists in 1998.

El-Hamalawy attended the American University in Cairo (AUC) where he graduated with a BA in economics in 1999.

El-Hamalawy was detained and tortured by deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's State Security Investigations Service (SSI) in 2000, allegedly with the institution's complicity.

Because of his student activism, the Egyptian government maintained a security file on el-Hamalawy.

El-Hamalawy was involved in a series of demonstrations in Cairo in 2000 expressing solidarity with the Palestinian al-Aqsa Intifada.

According to el-Hamalawy, that particular protest served as the precursor to further anti-Mubarak protests which occurred in later years.

He was picked up after one week from the start of the protests by the (SSI).

El-Hamalawy started working as a journalist in 2002 for the English language Cairo Times, where he covered protests, trials of dissidents and police torture news.

He later joined the Los Angeles Times as a correspondent in Cairo.

El-Hamalawy also freelanced for a broad array of local and foreign news organizations, including Bloomberg News and the BBC, and worked as a researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW).

He also worked as a managing editor for the leftist daily El-Badeel and was the founding managing editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm's English Edition as well as being one of founding editorial team of Ahram Online.

As a result, he was refused employment as a professor by Egyptian universities and he was banned from entering the AUC campus for a year after he finished his MA in 2002.

A picture of him was also left with the AUC security guards for several years later with instructions not to be let into campus if there were any ongoing protests.

He was later an invited as guest speaker at lectures at AUC nonetheless.

In May 2002, he was detained and held at the local Nasr City SS office, during a crackdown on leftist activists prior to planned pro-Palestine protests on the Nakba anniversary.

On 20 March 2003, he attended a demonstration in Tahrir Square protesting the US invasion of Iraq and was allegedly beaten by Egyptian security forces dispersing the rally.

On 22 March, el-Hamalawy was arrested by four plainclothes security officers while leaving a restaurant in Cairo.

He was detained with other youth activists at al-Gamaliyya Police Station and was released shortly afterward.

Hamalawy was a core member of Kefaya, a grassroots Egyptian movement founded in 2004 that organized demonstrations against the Mubarak government in the years preceding the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

El-Hamalawy was involved in the el-Mahalla strikes of 2006.

Through using his ability to spread the news of the strike through his blog, he was able to give the strikes wider attention which was ultimately one of the key factors that led to their success.

Since May 2006, el-Hamalawy maintained a blog on the website The Arabist.

The Arabic and English-language blog covered various topics mostly related to Egypt, but also the Arab world, focused particularly on workers strikes, police abuse, corruption and global revolutionary movements.

In 2006, he left The Arabist to set up his own website named "3arabawy" ("the Bedouin") which has since been one of Egypt's most popular blogs.

El-Hamalawy was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism in UC Berkeley, in 2007.

In 2008 he made a speech over viewing the events that occurred on the ground in el-Mahalla during the strikes, noting that the women of el-Mahalla were the essential and initial figures who lead the demonstrations and ignited them to the point that they chanted "Where are the men? Here we are, the women!"

Even though el-Hamalawy comes from a middle-class family, the workers were pleased with his passion and help, even calling him the "strike's foreign minister."

El-Hamalawi also helped the workers organize and mobilize, which made the strike very effective and was another reason why the workers were able to have their demands fulfilled.

Demanding a higher minimum wage, in February 2008 left-wing activists such as Kamal el-Fayoumi who worked in the state-run textile industry in el-Mahalla organized one of the largest anti-Mubarak labor protests since Mubarak became president in 1981, with around 10,000 factory workers protesting in the streets.

Meanwhile, the doctors union voted to go on a national strike on 15 March and university professors launched a national strike on 23 March.

On 6 April 2008, thousands of policemen occupied el-Mahalla and took control of many of the factories in an attempt to obstruct the strike.

Thousands of residents including the urban poor, unemployed youth, and other workers joined the street demonstrations, protesting Mubarak, suspected corruption in his government, and price inflation.

El-Hamalawy stated that "The demonstrators were met with police tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition," and at least two men were killed.

The protest continued for two more days with demonstrators hurling stones at security forces and armored vehicles.

Bloggers and citizen journalists (including el-Hamalawi, Wael Abbas, Alaa Abd El-Fattah and others) used Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other social media tools to report on the strike, alert their networks about police activity, organize legal protection and draw attention to their efforts.