As Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected President of Egypt, entered the courtroom in Cairo last Monday, the streets were filled with the now familiar sounds of protest. Even inside the courtroom, as Peter Hessler wrote in his dispatch from the first day of the trail, “when Morsi finally arrived … the room erupted. He waved to his supporters. They erupted in a soccer-style chant that had been common during the days of his campaign: ‘Morsi-i-i-i-i-i! Morsi, Morsi!’ … A number of journalists responded by chanting: ‘E’adam, e’adam! Death penalty, death penalty!’ ”Morsi, along with fourteen other members of the Muslim Brotherhood, face charges for the death, last December, of ten Egyptian citizens. And last week, on _The New Yorker’s Instagram feed, the photographer Laura El-Tantawy provided a different view of Cairo, away from the riotous scenes in and outside of the courtroom; as she wrote, a glimpse of “the beauty amid the chaos.”
The daughter of two Egyptians, El-Tantawy, who now splits her time between England and Cairo, is no stranger to the violence in Egypt. And yet she remains undiscouraged: “It is important for me to rediscover Cairo outside the circle of blood and violence I saw while covering the events of the past months …. This is a tough city, by all means, which makes it challenging to find beauty in the middle of the noise, pollution, and aggression on the streets. But I believe that we see what we are looking for,” she said.
