July 5, 2013

Egypt Girds for Muslim Brotherhood Protests

But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops ("dealing on the free marked," it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things such as shoelaces and razor blades which it was impossible to get hold of i any other way. He had given a quick glance up and down the street and then had slipped inside and bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he was not conscious of wanting it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his brief case. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

CAIRO----Egypt's army declared a state of emergency in Suez and southern Sinai on Friday ahead of mass protests to be staged by the Muslim Brotherhood, with the powerful organization's supporters set to demonstrate against the military's overthrow of President Mohammed Morsi and the arrests of its leaders.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was no illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp. Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off, The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite, which was of course impossible and then faltered for just a second. A tremore had gone through this bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

The Brotherhood has urged its supporters to protest peacefully. But seething anger within the Islamist movement's ranks and a sense that it faces the most serious threat to its survival in more than half a century have raised fears that the protests could turn violent. The Brotherhood has called the demonstrations "Rejection Friday."

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

The National Salvation front, a main opposition movement to Mr. Morsi also called for protests across Egypt to protect the revolution's demands, said their spokesman Khaled Dawoud.