Homepage Feature

Egypt’s “most reliable news source”

Audio: Play | Download

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3
What happens when you take rice, macaroni, lentils, and chickpeas, and mix it all together with fried onions and tomato sauce? You get koshary, one of Egypt’s national dishes. Koshary is also the name of Egypt’s newest satirical online newspaper, El Koshary Today. Reporter Julia Simon went out for koshary in downtown Cairo with the paper’s staff and she sent this report.

• El Koshary Today
• America’s “finest news source”

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  The Middle East would seem like the wrong place for a satirical newspaper, but that didn’t stop the creators of el Koshary Today.  That’s Egypt’s newest satirical online newspaper.  It’s named after one of the country’s national dishes.  Koshary is made with rice, macaroni, lentils, chick peas, friend onions and tomato sauce.  Reporter Julia Simon went out for koshary in downtown Cairo with the paper’s staff and sent us this report.

JULIA SIMON:  I met the three writers of El Koshary Today, also known as Egypt’s most reliable news source, at Egypt’s most reliable and most famous koshary restaurant, Abou Tarek.

MAKARONA:  The one and only branch in all of Egypt.  On this side of the universe.

WARD ZEYADA:  As it clearly says, we do not have any other branches.

SIMON: Great, so shall we order?

SUBAR LOX:  Yes, let’s do it.

SIMON: Great.  We went upstairs and sat down and immediately the waiter came to take our order.  What did you just ask him?

ZEYADA:  To bring us extra fried onions, my personal favorite and what I represent.

SIMON: That’s Ward Zeyada, but that isn’t his real name.  The writers of El Koshary Today keep their identities hidden using pseudonyms based on different parts of koshary, a dish that includes macaroni, rice, lentils, chick peas, tomato sauce and friend onions.

ZEYADA:  I’m Ward Zeyada, which literally means extra flowers.  That’s what you say when you’re referring to extra fried onions when you order any koshary.

LOX:  I’m Subar Lox.  Subar Lox is super luxury or super deluxe, which is the largest size that you can get in a koshary shop.

MAKARONA:  I’m Makarona, which is pretty self explanatory.  It just refers to the macaroni inside a koshary meal.

SIMON: Less than two minutes after we order our heaping plates of koshary arrived.  Makarona takes a bit.  How is it?

MAKARONA:  Mm.  Sometimes it’s amazing and sometimes it’s unbelievable.

SIMON: Mm, it is good.

MAKARONA:  Today it’s unbelievable.

SIMON: Ward Zeyada, Subar Lox and Makarona are in their mid-twenties.  They met in fourth grade in their private school in Cairo and they each attended college overseas.  When they founded their online satirical paper in October 2009 they decided to call it El Koshary Today, both because koshary is their favorite dish and because, as Subar Lox explains, there’s a deeper significance to the name.

LOX:  Yeah, just a great mix of ingredients and filling and satisfying in a way that other foods are not.  There’s a mix of different articles.  It’s sort of something that satisfied our need to laugh and our need for humor.

SIMON: At the website design company where Ward Zeyada works, they all have day jobs; I asked them why they write in English.  Makarona says it’s partly for the same reason they keep their identities hidden.

MAKARONA:  In Egypt things can be generally quite unpredictable and we felt that at least starting with English you tend to be sort of below the government radar in terms of censorship or whatnot.

SIMON: But writing in English also significantly reduces El Koshary Today’s audience.  In a country where over 20% of the population is illiterate, the only people who read English are Egypt’s small upper class.  Ward Zeyada says that the choice to write for this elite intelligencia was deliberate, as they hold much of the country’s power.

ZEYADA: I’m hopeful the working class would take us forward.  It is still important to have the elite on our side and make them think about things and that will help us also facilitate the revolution one way or the other.

SIMON: The staff of El Koshary Today has a mission.  They use satire to raise awareness of key issues plaguing Egypt, including political tyranny, women’s rights, class divisions, and the horrendous traffic.  Makarona gave me an example of a story he wrote titled “New Law: Egyptian Brides without Hymens to be Returned for a Refund”.

MAKARONA: Because in Egyptian society, the hymen is highly valued, I suppose, in the sense of when you get married you know if your wife is not a virgin.  It’s like uh oh, there’s trouble.  And that article was basically poking fun at that obsession with an organ that really has nothing to do with what a person is.

SIMON: Readers have expressed mixed reviews about articles like that, but with more than 3,200 Facebook fans and up to 1,500 visits a day, the El Koshary Today team feels that their pet project is filling a critical niche in the Egyptian media market.  Entertaining news that knows no boundaries.  Well, except maybe the military.

MAKARONA: You are not allowed by law to talk about the military and so it’s not worth it.

SIMON: Why is it not worth it?

MAKARONA: Because we will be in jail.

LOX: We also hope to continue with the project so we don’t.

ZEYADA: There’s very limited internet access from jail.  So we don’t want to go to jail.

LOX: We don’t know if they have wi-fi there.

ZEYADA: Yeah, I don’t think they have wi-fi, they’re probably still on dial up.  I don’t want to do this.

SIMON: So long as Makarona, Ward Zeyada and Subar Lox have an internet connection, they’ll keep publishing their satirical stories.  And if they get hungry, they have a go to meal.  For The World, I’m Julia Simon, Cairo.

WERMAN: We have a link to the latest issue of El Koshary Today at the world dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.