ABSTRACT
On 16 June 2005 Egyptian writers, artists, journalists and other pro-reform and democracy advocates gathered at the Journalists’ Syndicate in downtown Cairo to commemorate the death of Sheikh Imam Issa, the blind composer and singer who put to music the political protest poems by leading vernacular poet Ahmad Fuad Nigm, and who, as part of the duo Imam-Nigm, had become the icon of political dissident during the 1970s. On this politically charged occasion, on the eve of the Egyptian presidential elections of September 2005, Nigm read the founding statement of the Writers and Artists for Change movement that, only two weeks earlier, had joined the ranks of a host of pro-reform groups and movements that had mushroomed in Egypt to protest against yet another sixyear mandate for President Mubarak. The text of the statement began by reaffirming the historic role and responsibility of Egypt’s writers and artists, as the spearhead for change in the country, since the nineteenth-century nahda (cultural renaissance). The signatories of the statement declared their solidarity with other democracy groups and activists such as the popular political movement Kifaya (Enough), the Popular Campaign for Change that was constituted through a coalition of judges, journalists, university professors and professional syndicates, the Youth for Change movement, human rights activists and others, all primarily demanding the end of Mubarak’s rule and opposed to the possible succession of his son Gamal.
