Madman Walking. The image of the mad in the Egyptian press
Résumé
The Egyptian criminal law holds the judge as the “supreme expert” in all fields. The judge is thus the only authority capable of pronouncing a man “mad”. Though it is customary to consult a professional psychiatrist, the law does not compel the judge to accept the conclusions of the professional psychiatrist. Furthermore, only the judge has the power of referral to psychiatric evaluation, expressing thus a doubt he has, regarding the mental capacities of the accused. In the light of the previous, this paper poses the questions : how and why a man can be seen or doubted to be mad in Egypt ? To answer this question, the paper is concerned with two aspects of the issue : how and why a judgement of “madness” is passed, and how “madness” is defined. While broaching these two aspects, the paper is intending to perform a comparative analysis of incidents, where the press pronounced a man or a woman as mad, during the last decade. And to trace the cases where the judiciary decided to refer a man or a woman for “evaluation of his/her mental capacities”, expressing thus a doubt of the “supreme expert” regarding the mental capacities of a man or a woman. While analyzing such data, the paper aims at discovering a certain repetitive pattern/s, which can help us in understanding when, why and how the society decides to “accuse a man of madness”.
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Référence électronique
Ahmad Ragab, « Madman Walking. The image of the mad in the Egyptian press », Égypte/Monde arabe, Troisième série, 4 | 2007, [En ligne], mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2008. URL : http://ema.revues.org/index1773.html. Consulté le 03 décembre 2008.
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