al Maktaba

Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul

2010-08-14T09:45:00.000-04:00

The famous mosques and historical palaces lining the Bosphorus elicit little more than polite interest from the boat's passengers. But as a luxurious waterfront villa comes into view, crowds swarm to the side of the boat. Cameras appear suddenly from the enveloping folds of black chadors.

Forget Topkapi Palace, this is where the Turkish soap opera Noor was filmed.

With its glamorous cast and extreme plotlines, Noor has become a phenomenon across the Middle East, sparking a tourism boom to Turkey that drew 105,000 visitors from Arab countries in May alone this year – an increase of about 33% on last year. First airing on the Saudi MBC satellite channel in early 2008, its final episode was seen by nearly 80 million viewers from Palestine to Morocco.

Noor, starring Turkish actors Songül Öden and Kivanç Tatlitug (pictured), tells the story of a girl from the country who marries into a wealthy Istanbul family – a modern day Cinderella story of sorts, albeit one that includes a lot of foreplay, an illegitimate child and some prison time for Noor herself.

Continue reading: Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul

Valencia: what lies beneath

2010-08-01T21:15:00.000-04:00

It’s past midnight, and I’m in a street surrounded by a group of people chatting and laughing as the sharp smell of gunpowder from crackling fireworks wafts over us in the thick night air. A colourfully dressed woman with dark brown eyes is wandering in and out of the crowd holding a plate of delicious nut-based sweetmeats, which she offers around.

“I made them,” she says proudly.

All at once, the hubbub of guttural voices dies down as the sound of a beating drum reverberates from the pavement opposite.

Tak takka tak!

And a man nearby starts playing a high-pitched reed instrument, like a snake-charmer, with slow, whining notes. After a few moments, a woman at his side begins to sing. But this is no sweet melody; it sounds more like a chant or a cry, her voice rising and falling in strange, swooping intervals, almost like a muezzin’s call to prayer. When she finishes, everyone cheers and claps, the drum beats again, and the crowd moves on down the street for more music and sweetmeats.

Though the music, food and atmosphere might make me feel as though I’ve been transported to North Africa for a street festival, I am actually in Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast, a city that has been my home for the past 10 years. The sweetmeats – indistinguishable from halva – are known as turrón, and I’m witnessing a Nit d’Albaes – a common local fiesta where satirical songs are sung late into the night – but with an obvious Moorish flavour to them.

Valencia is not the first place you tend to think of when Moorish Spain is mentioned. Andalusia, to the south, has that honour, with its magnificent Alhambra Palace in Granada, the Great Mosque at Cordoba, and other picturesque sites. But historically, Valencia is as Moorish as any of these: it was ruled by Muslims for more than 500 years, until 1238, while the very last Moors in Spain, the Moriscos, were concentrated in the Valencia region when the order to expel all 300,000 of them to North Africa came in 1609. Under the Arabs, Valencia was at the centre of what was known as sharq al-andalus – the eastern region of Al-Andalus, while the city itself was known as hadiqat al-andalus – the garden of Moorish Spain, for its wonderful climate and extremely fertile soil.

Despite this heritage, however, you won’t find many mosques or ancient palaces to visit. Yet, although the region may be a less obvious tourist destination than its Andalusian counterpart, it is no less rewarding for it.

Today the city is the third-largest in Spain, a thriving Mediterranean seaport which recently hosted the America’s Cup and has staged two Formula One Grands Prix. From being an oft-overlooked corner of the country, it has arrived as a tourist destination in the past few years with the opening of the spectacularly modern City of Arts and Sciences – a space-age architectural delight comprising an opera house, museums, an aquarium and more – designed by local boy Santiago Calatrava.

Source: The National, Valencia: what lies beneath

Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth

2010-08-01T13:37:00.001-04:00

The Website ALL4SYRIA reported (in Arabic) on July 17, 2010 that private Islamist elementary schools have been proliferating in Syria. The title of the article: Secrets and Background Behind the Decision to Ban the Wearing of the Niqab in Syria’s Schools and Universities Taken by the Office of National Security.

A Summary of the ALL4SYRIA article
Islamist groups in Syria have succeeded in controlling most private elementary schools (up to sixth grade), estimated to be around 200 schools (presumably in Damascus) with approximately 25% to 30% of all elementary schools enrolment. The article revealed that teachers are all women, don the Niqab (black covering of face and body), and belong to Islamist proselytizing groups, typically led and controlled by women. ALL4SYRIA added that classroom teaching material contravenes Ministry of Education curriculum and textbooks, that young children are instructed to insist that their mothers must wear the Niqab so that they avoid burning in hell’s fire, that large amounts of money have been paid by Islamist organizers to purchase secular private schools from their owners; for example, Dar Al-Faraj, Dar Al-Na’eem, Omar bin Al-Khattab, The Arab Islamic College, Ummat Al-Majd, Al-Yaqzah…).

Significance of the article
Such a development is disconcerting. Syria must be vigilant. At the core of Islamist teaching, just like Wahhabi teaching, is indoctrination and brainwashing in fanaticism. Sunni Islamists, Syria’s included, embrace Wahhabi extremism with all their being. Their speech and actions are akin to being members of a religious cult.

It should be noted that the word "Islamist" refers only to the tiny minority among individual Muslims who are extremists in their religious fervor and beliefs; specifically, the Hanbalite Wahhabis. The word "Islamist" does not apply to the 95% of Sunnis who follow the other three schools of jurisprudence (Hanafites, Maliktes, and Shafiates). This great majority is moderate, enlightened, and tolerant. On a macro level, the word "Islamist" refers to extremist Islamic states, not to moderate Islamic countries. While Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, and Turkey, for example, are Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia is an Islamist country.

Source: Daring Opinion, Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth

Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself

2010-07-19T07:09:00.002-04:00

Far from the heated debates of Europe, Syria has banned the niqab in classrooms, adding another layer to this complex story

Quietly, away from the fanfare that accompanied the French vote on banning the niqab in public, and calls by Philip Hollobone to impose a ban in Britain, the Syrian government has instituted its own, more limited, ban, removing teachers who wear the full face veil from teaching in public schools.

At first glance, such a move might seem puzzling: Syria, with dozens of religious sects and a nominally secular government, has managed for decades to use a light touch, at least when it comes to personal faith.

But the rise of religion among the population has shaken the leadership: with overt displays of faith on the rise and a rare terrorist attack in Damascus two years ago attributed to Islamists, the government appears to be moving against hardline religious ideas.

The niqab ban in public schools is a fairly blunt instrument but, on such a small scale, it may be intended to send a message. Egypt, too, has instigated a similarly limited ban (for university exams), a move opposed by Islamists but upheld by the courts.

Continue reading Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself

Source: The Guardian

T E Lawrence: hero or mirage?

2010-05-23T21:20:00.001-04:00

The legacy of T E Lawrence, the British intelligence officer who fought alongside Arab irregulars and was immortalised in David Lean’s film, varies markedly between the West and the Middle East. Alasdair Soussi looks at the man and myth, 75 years after his death.

The arrival of the British-led Imperial Camel Corps into the Arab camp at Aqaba was always likely to cause friction. Despite fighting as allies against the might of the Ottoman Empire in the 1916-18 Arab campaign to drive the Turks out of the Middle East, the British troopers and the Arab irregulars never made comfortable bedfellows. This particular summer’s day in 1918, at the closing stages of the Great War, was to be no different.

The army encampment, in what is today Jordan’s southernmost city, reverberated to the sound of excited cries and musket fire as the 314-strong imperial troops galloped into town. Such was the greeting afforded them by the Arabs that many in the Camel Corps thought Aqaba itself was under attack.

By nightfall, tensions had reached breaking point. Unfamiliar with the ways of the Arab camp and convinced they had been shot at while bathing in the sea earlier that day, several troopers were about to take matters into their own hands with the aid of a few grenades when a figure in white appeared.

“He stood in the middle of the square, flung back his aba, showing his white undergarment, and illuminated by the countless fires, raised his hand,” one soldier recalled. “Immediately the firing ceased, the hubbub died down and we had a peaceful night.”

That figure was Thomas Edward Lawrence. T E Lawrence, who died 75 years ago this week, and who was pivotal in the success of the Arab revolt against the Turks, was the man the world would come to know as Lawrence of Arabia, and that anecdote – almost mythical in tone, yet a documented fact – is one of hundreds that have surrounded a life that continues to provoke the debate.

David Lean’s 1962 epic, starring Peter O’Toole, was based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s memoir of the two-year campaign. The film was a global sensation, but it was not the first time that the Lawrence myth had captured the popular imagination.

Forty-three years earlier, Lowell Thomas, a US journalist, toured the world with a highly romanticised film about Lawrence shot in the desert towards the end of the war. With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia was an immediate hit, not least in Great Britain where Lawrence was born in 1888. Consequently, Lawrence’s role in the Arab uprising, his pursuit of victory against the Ottomans, and his complete immersion in the Arab way of life as a British intelligence officer, all contrived to create a man more otherworldly than simply flesh and bone. Michael Asher, the English-born explorer and Arabist, and author of Lawrence: The Uncrowned King Of Arabia, is one of many who readily subscribes to this view.

“When I went to Lawrence’s cottage – now a museum – at Clouds Hill in Dorset [south-west England], it felt like a church. I realised that he was seen in Britain as a secular saint. If you think about it, Lawrence was really the only ‘hero’ to emerge from the First World War, a war in which millions died – he was the man who seemed to resurrect in his person the lost dead boys of a whole generation.”

Here, in the Middle East, the arena in which Lawrence gained his reputation, there are no such memorials.

So what is his legacy in this part of the world? Like many things concerning Lawrence, the answer is far from simple.

At only 1.65m tall and with a head that looked too big for his body, this shy Welsh-born son of an Anglo-Irish father and a Scottish mother was an unremarkable-looking man. Yet, he possessed a mind that was quite brilliant. After gaining a first-class degree in modern history from Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence became an archaeologist, and travelled across the Middle East honing his knowledge of its geography and language, both of which he would come to master.

At the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the British intelligence service in Cairo and soon became involved in negotiations to orchestrate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was sealed when Britain all but promised the Arabs a single unified nation should they triumph. But, while the revolt would be a major success, the European powers went back on their word. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact cooked up by Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom.

Continue reading T E Lawrence: hero or mirage? Source: The National, Abu Dhabi

An appetite for Aleppo

2010-03-16T07:28:00.000-04:00

At an indeterminate point in Aleppo’s main market street, the Souq al-Attarine, but most likely somewhere between observing a pair of goat testicles dangling off a skinned carcass, and running into a bloody, matted camel head hanging on a large metal hook, I lose my appetite. This is a shame, because we are due to lunch at Bazar al-Charq, a restaurant known for its myriad preparations of the ground-meat dish kibbeh, itself an Aleppan speciality.

I’m trailing Anissa Helou, the London-based, Syrian-Lebanese cookbook author and docent of delicacies, on a culinary tour through Syria.

A tall, elegant woman with an attention-grabbing puff of silvery hair (small children compare her, sotto voce, to Cruella de Vil), Helou gives regular cooking classes in London and, once or twice a year, steers small groups of hungry travellers to the region’s gastronomic epicentres – Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey – where they eat themselves to a standstill.

On this trip, the occasional cultural interludes, such as excursions to the Roman ruins of Palmyra and the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevaliers, feel like flickering film static interrupting a week-long highlight reel of Syrian cookery.

Syria has become a relatively popular tourist destination in the past five years, and not only for backpackers bouncing around the region on falafel-fuelled gap years.

A mandatory pit stop on both the Silk and the Spice Roads for hundreds of years, Aleppo’s residents (both welcome and unwelcome) have included Turkomen, French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Ottomans, Armenians and Kurds, all of whom bequeathed at least a trace of their cookery to the city.

Damascus, the capital, has many lovely courtyard restaurants, but it is best known for its spectacular variety of street food.

Aleppo, on the other hand, has evolved a tradition of more elegant, elaborate dining. Pierre Antaki, the co-founder and vice president of the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy, attributes this to economic factors: most Aleppans still go home for lunch, snooze a bit, then work again until evening, whereas Damascenes often work far from their homes and eat a quick bite in or near their shops or offices before finishing the day’s work.

“In Damascus, hardly anybody goes home for lunch,” says Pierre. “They work one shift, and live far outside of the city. Here, if the big fat boss doesn’t go home and eat and have his siesta, it’s not a day.”

Aleppo in particular is known for the quality of its raw ingredients; despite a brutal drought in the north-east of the country (and in neighbouring Jordan), the land surrounding the city is, and always has been, rich and green. The famous Aleppan pistachio, fistik halabi, for example, wears many hats in the local cuisine, appearing in both sweets and savouries.

We arrived just as the season kicked off, early October, and it’s difficult to turn a corner without encountering a mountain of fresh, unpeeled nuts, looking rather majestic for something the size of a nut, in their matte magenta robes.

The lush environs also nourish those higher up on the food chain; lambs are usually fed on an all-grass diet, resulting in top-quality meat that, know-how aside, sets Aleppo’s kibbeh apart. Florence Ollivry, the author of Les Secrets d’Alep: Une grande ville arabe révelée par sa cuisine, counts 58 different preparations, sculpted into various shapes, raw, baked, or fried, and served with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil, a few mint leaves and a green onion to savoury yoghurt or tomato sauces.

At Bazar al-Charq, just outside of the old city in a 300-year-old building, we taste at least half-a-dozen of these. While two travellers recline on cushions at an empty table, recuperating from the various stomach plagues that Syria visits upon foreigners, I try to banish the testicles and hanging camel head from my mind and focus on the kibbeh carnival unfolding before me.

Bazar al-Charq has been around since 2003 and, according to Anissa, is one of Aleppo’s most underrated restaurants.

The setting – a large, basement room with vaulted stone ceilings – is slightly heavy on the Orientalist kitsch, but the kibbeh are no joke. Among those we tried were a well-seasoned kibbeh sajiyyeh (cooked on the saj, or concave grill), which was relatively light (kibbeh is more frequently encountered fried), kibbeh bi-laban (fried balls swimming in yogurt sauce, with tender bits of lamb floating alongside), kibbeh with sumac and aubergine (in a sour, dark sauce whose colour contrasted with the light, lemoniness of the sumac) and the formidable kibbeh maajouqa, a kind of quesadilla that substitutes discs of greasy meat for tortillas, with a filling of cheese and red and green peppers.

If we put all the ground meat on our table together, we could probably have assembled a small lamb.

Several of the diners are avid home cooks. What makes a perfect kibbeh?, they want to know.

“The proportion of meat to bulgur is very important,” Anissa begins. “Heavier on the meat. It should be well-seasoned and fatty without being greasy. And it should be grilled or fried until it’s crispy.”

On our first evening, we ate at Yasmeen d’Alep, which opened in 1995 in the Christian-Armenian neighbourhood of Jdeideh. We sit down, a bit ragged after what seemed like endless hours on the bus from Damascus. And the mezze parade begins: eggplants stuffed with bulgur salad, nuts and potatoes, rice kibbeh, sausage casing stuffed with rice, ground meat and chickpeas, and several salads.

If you go

The flight Return flights to Damascus from Dubai on Emirates (www.emirates.com) cost from $325 (Dh1,195) including taxes

For more information on the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy and Pistache d’Alep, see www.gastrosyr.com and www.pistachedalep.com

Along with excellent grilled meats, Yasmine d’Alep serves a superb rendition of kebab kerez, or cherry kebab, lovely little balls of spiced, minced meat swimming merrily in a sauce of sour cherries, topped with toasted flatbread. According to Antaki, the sweet-and-sour combination (arguably a Persian influence) is in fact a Chinese contribution to Aleppan cuisine, although the dish is considered Armenian. In lesser hands, it can taste as though someone opened a can of cherry pie filling onto a plate of meatballs; here the chef shows admirable restraint in tempering the tartness of the cherries.

The newest and perhaps most successful restaurant in Aleppo is Zmorod. It opened around a year ago, and the owner, Dalal Touma, was dining at a table by the door when we walk in, and the large courtyard, warmed by golden-rose light, is filled with mostly Syrian patrons.

Anissa orders what sounded like two of everything on the menu, despite the fact that most of us were still wobbling from lunch. The service is excellent – Anissa barely glances at the menu, and instead embarks on a swift back-and-forth with the waiter in Arabic, who has a number of suggestions for what’s freshest and most interesting. The highlights include a cold dish of chicken morsels covered with the thickest, richest tahini sauce imaginable, tender fish with spicy tarator (a tahini sauce spiked with red pepper), and a grilled red pepper salad.

Through her cookbooks, such as Modern Mezze (Quadrille Publishing, 2007), her occasional columns in The Financial Times, and her blog (www.anissas.com) Helou does her bit to champion Syrian cuisine, which despite its similarity to Lebanese food, is considerably less well known. This is most likely, she thinks, because Syrians never experienced the famine and political turbulence that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, drove so many Lebanese into the diaspora, where they had to eat, of course.

“You can eat the same dishes in Syria and in Lebanon but they’ll taste totally different,” Helou says. “Kebab in Syria is actually kafteh (ground meat balls) whereas kebabs in Lebanon really means lahmeh meshoui (grilled chunks of marinated meat.)

The Syrian fattouche is different in that the bread is fried and it often has cheese in it, and it is dressed with pomegranate syrup whereas in the Lebanese fattouche, the bread is normally toasted and the dressing is mostly sumac.”

The two cuisines share many similarities – a mezze tradition, kibbeh worship, an emphasis on the fresh and the seasonal – but Syrian food has its particular charms. It also comes with an edge of danger. Judging from the number of travellers who fell ill on the tour (five out of seven, or everyone except Anissa and me), Syrians’ enthusiasm for hygiene is nowhere near as rigorous as their devotion to flavour.

One place where we are assured a higher degree of protection was at the home of Maria Gaspard Smara, a successful caterer known for her sure hand with Aleppan specialities (she also contributed many recipes to Ollivry’s book). She welcomes us with bowls of rosy, fresh pistachios and proceeds to demonstrate a series of classic Aleppan dishes, including muhammara, a dip made of red pepper paste, walnuts and pomegranate syrup, and a delicious snack of deep-fried aubergine slices dipped in egg batter and deep-fried again.

“There are four seasons in Aleppo, and each has its own cuisine,” explains Smara. Late summer, for example, is stuffed vegetable season. “Also, Aleppan cooks don’t waste anything,” she says, illustrating her point by using the insides of hollowed-out courgettes (to be stuffed with a rice mixture) to make a garlicky dip.

The main dish, frikeh, or toasted green wheat and lamb, she cooks in a meat broth flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and pepper, topped with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts fried in semneh, or clarified butter, and served with a thick, plain yogurt. For dessert, it’s all we could do to find room for a couple of large, juicy figs.

On our last morning in Aleppo, Anissa took a few of us to Hajj Abdo, the city’s authority on beans. His beans – foul, or fava beans– simmer overnight in large copper vessels that appear to be as old as he is (66), and their hearty, faintly bitter smell hangs in the air around the corner shop he has been working in since he was 21. Having lived for a year in Egypt, I was traumatised by foul. Egyptians tend to turn it into something resembling mud, which, although I have not yet found an archaeologist to back me up on this, I believe it was used to bind the bricks of the Great Pyramids. But Anissa assured me this was something utterly different.

Eating under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes can be faintly uncomfortable for women travellers, but these beans demand to be savoured. There is one major choice to be made: shall it be with tahini or lemon? After this hurdle, everything else – chilli paste, garlic, salt, cumin, olive oil – is a matter of degree. Anissa and I prefer the tahini version, which has a certain unctuousness amplified by a ladleful (yes) of oil on top, and she goes for extra chilli, while I enjoy a spoonful of cumin.

The Aleppan leg of the tour wound down at an old favourite, Wanes, a modern-looking, rather characterless, and staunchly local eatery that has been open since 1977.

“My mother and I used to come here in the 1980s for their grills,” Anissa tells us as we sit down. After a morning of foul, we were too full for grilled meat, but Anissa orders an abundant spread nonetheless. (It is customary – and Anissa never strays from this custom – to order enough mezze so as to eliminate any negative space on the tablecloth).

The standouts are the jibneh kurdiyyeh (Kurdish cheese), a salty white cheese between two pieces of flat bread, with small but potent minced hot green chillies and slices of tomato, all pan-fried like a quesadilla, and the basterma, an Armenian speciality of spiced, pressed dried meat often served with thin slices of raw garlic and eaten drizzled with olive oil and freshly cured green olives on the side. For dessert, I hand out some plump, sweet figs I had picked up in the giant market outside the old city, and the group piles back into the bus to head to Palmyra.

If there was anything fabulous left to eat in Aleppo, it would have to wait until the next trip.

travel@thenational.ae

Source: The National: An appetite for Aleppo

'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'

2010-03-09T21:03:00.000-05:00

By Omar Chatriwala in

Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least here in Baghdad.

Iraqis are proud and passionate about their food - at least in Baghdad. I’m told Anbaris (people from Anbar province) are less preoccupied with it.

Pacha, baterma (fatty sausage), qouzi, kebab to name a few – meat dishes feature heavily in the traditional Iraqi diet. Lamb, especially, is big.

Kibbeh is a traditional, meaty breakfast food. Other morning classics include dibis, a sweet date syrup, asal (honey) and qaimar, thick cream taken off the top of full-fat milk.

Once an occasional treat, qaimar can now easily be found pre-packaged in stores.

Black tea here is brewed with cardamom and served sugary. And samoon, a fluffy, diamond-shaped bread baked in brick ovens, is what ties it all together. (Great with sunny-side up eggs, my Iraqi editor tells me.)

At the Abu Nawas Beach restaurant a little past noon, we found the kitchen staff preparing for the lunch crowd, due in at half past one.

On the open flame outside, Baghdad’s famous masgouf – a fish caught from the Tigris River, and grilled spread open. Concerns over the river's pollution scared some off the renowned dish, but I'm told these are farm-raised carp.

Inside, two Bangladeshi men were at work alongside the Iraqi staff inside.

Twenty-year-old Sadek said he’s been in Iraq for 5 months, and has found the adjustment very hard. A food server here, he eats and sleeps in the kitchen.

Magid Ali San, the restaurant’s cashier, tells us that the restaurant was damaged three months back by a nearby blast, which hurt business. But it’s since been renovated, and looks good.

The park surrounding the restaurant is quiet in the middle of a working day. “Lovers” stroll the walkways, and old friends catch up.

Friends relaxing by the Tigris

Sitting with shisha, and inviting us to tea and lunch, Tha’ir Jaboori and his friends say they come out regularly (all day, every day is the claim), to sit and talk.

All three voted in Sunday’s election, and they say it went well. Jaboori says he voted for Allawi's Iraqiya Coalition – a secular mix-sect group, just like theirs, he points out. At the table are two Sunni Arabs and a Shia Kurd.

Food of necessity

In Baghdad’s trafficy Salhiya district, we step into a bustling falafel shop.

Here, bright yellow falafel balls are being shoved into loaves of samoon bread with some shredded lettuce. Customers than go down the buffet line and stuff the sandwich with whatever toppings they prefer. Cost: 1000 Iraqi dinars ($0.86)

A stuffed felafel

Back at the Baghdad bureau, our Iraqi companions decline to share in the fast food spoils.

“Falafel, falafel, every day [we have] falafel!” exclaims one of our guards.

It’s a daily street food staple now, but my colleague Omar al-Saleh tells me growing up in Baghdad, falafel was practically unheard of.

Faced with tough international sanction in the 1990s and a resulting failed economy, Iraqis had to find new ways to survive, and this cheap Egyptian fare was one of them.

Almost two decades later, it seems that situation continues.

Source: Al Jazeera: 'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'

And then Cairo turned itself inside out

2010-03-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

As the megacity brims with informal settlements, the upper classes are leapfrogging over the urban perimeter for an escapist paradise of luxury desert property. Ursula Lindsey reports.

To drive Cairo’s Ring Road – a 110-kilometre freeway that loops the city – is to sail through an endless sea of red brick. The brilliant green of the Nile Valley appears only in flashes through the expanse of cheap apartment blocks.

The buildings occupy what were once agricultural parcels; like those parcels, they are long and narrow, with only a hair’s breadth of space between them. They crowd right up to the freeway, so close that motorists may glance directly into their bare rooms. From their rooftops sprout unfinished supporting columns – ready for the addition of yet another floor. Their only decoration is bright, mismatched shutters; balconies enlivened by bold geometric patterns – pink and purple lozenges, green and orange stripes; and the bricks that spell, along the upper floors: “Allah.”

These are Cairo’s slums, what experts call its “informal” or “spontaneous” neighbourhoods. Egyptians call them ashwa’iyat – from the Arabic word for “random”, “haphazard”. They are the dense, sprawling answer to Cairo’s population explosion and its lack of affordable housing. Almost six in 10 Cairenes – at least 10 million people – live in informal neighbourhoods, often with limited access to water, electricity, schools, hospitals or refuse collection, and no real roads.

Hoda Hanin, 26, and her daughter Mariam stand in the Bashteel district of Imbaba, where Hoda grew up. "The people here are real," she says, "they're good country people." Dana Smillie for The National

Most capitals are magnets, but the speed with which the Egyptian one has grown in the last century is testament both to a remarkable centripetal power and to a surrounding vacuum of opportunity. Swelled by waves of rural migration, the population of greater Cairo has gone from less than one million at the beginning of the 20th century to about 18 million today – a megacity in the order of Mumbai or São Paulo, with more people than Lebanon, Jordan and Libya combined.

For centuries, Cairo’s expansion has been checked by geography: the city is bounded by a narrow strip of fertile, Nile-irrigated land, with nothing but desert beyond. The migrants who flocked to the city in the last century found there was nowhere to live: they built shacks on rooftops; they made homes out of covered alleys, inner courtyards, and stairwells. Priced out of the soaring formal real estate market, they started building illegally – on the agricultural land that surrounds the city and on the barren plateau that separates it from the desert.

The author Hamdi Abu Golayyel describes the slum in which he lived for six years as "a mongrel of a place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers". Dana Smillie for The National

Cairo has long been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The city teeters under the weight of its multitudes – its public services worn ragged; its air pollution among the worst in the world; its traffic barely managed by freeway overpasses and tunnels, clumsy last-minute bypass surgeries intended to repair its clogged and failing arteries.

Faced with the city’s barely contained chaos and alarmed by the growing slums, Cairo’s elites have begun to dream of escape. Along the Ring Road, billboards advertise exclusive new private developments, with names like country clubs or bad discos – Utopia, Le Reve, Dreamland, Qattamiya Heights, Palm Hills, Belle Ville – and slogans like ““The Egypt of My Desires.” One advertisement, overlooking dilapidated buildings in the centre of town, simply asks: “Why Are You Here?”

Cairo’s future, it seems, lies outside the city’s boundaries, in the desert – where it can be built from scratch. Today the outer edges of the city are one vast construction site, full of subdivisions where empty million-dollar villas stand among the sand dunes, and giant gated communities that promise a luxurious escape from Cairo’s pollution and friction.

What will be the effect of this flight on the city that’s left behind? If Cairo’s future is uncertain, its present is no easier to comprehend. “Perhaps today’s greatest riddle is not so much ‘Where is Cairo headed?’”, notes the writer Maria Golia, “as ‘Where is Cairo at all?’”

Somewhere between the dirt alleys of the slums and the golf courses of the gated suburbs; between the resourcefulness of millions of poor residents and the real estate speculation that has redefined the city’s edges; between the fears that Cairo is becoming one giant “slum” and the fantasy of starting over – the Egyptian capital is taking shape once again.

Hoda Hanin,a 26-year-old teaching assistant, balances her six-month-old daughter on her hip as she heads down a narrow dirt alley to her parents’ home in the slum of Bashteel. She grew up here, back when it was a village on the western bank of the Nile. “It was all farmland,” she says, “then people started clearing it out, selling the land, building homes for their kids.” Today, Bashteel and numerous other nearby villages have been absorbed into the crowded informal neighbourhood of Imbaba.

The average density in Cairo is 90,000 people per square mile; in Imbaba, it’s over 200,000, three times that of Manhattan. Imbaba’s side-streets are unpaved and no more than two metres wide: narrow, endless crevasses between the red-brick buildings. Three-wheel tuk-tuks, imported from India, are the only vehicles capable of navigating the bumpy, rubbish-strewn paths.

For decades, the Egyptian government willfully ignored the spread of the ashwa’iyat. The low-level officials who were supposed to enforce zoning and building laws took bribes to look the other way; on official maps of Cairo, these areas simply didn’t exist. Under this regime of collusion and neglect, the slums grew and grew, providing the masses much-needed cheap housing and allowing the authorities to forgo providing services.

The Talaat Mustafa Group's latest mega-development, located in the desert east of Cairo. Dana Smillie for The National

By the early 1990s, however, Cairo was forced to face its slums. The earthquake that struck the city in 1992 left thousands in the informal neighbourhoods homeless; since then fires and collapses have regularly put one slum or another on the front pages of local newspapers. At around the same time, the Islamist group Jama’a Islamiya took de facto control of Imbaba – creating what the foreign press quickly dubbed “the Islamic Republic of Imbaba”. The government dispatched more than 12,000 soldiers to carry out a six-week siege, round up the Islamists, and reimpose its authority.

After regaining control of Imbaba, the government announced it would spend hundreds of millions of Egyptian pounds to – as one newspaper put it – “Transform Centers of Terrorism into a Civilised Area”. The government set aside LE600 million (about $200m, or Dh402m) for slum upgrades, demolitions and relocations, and further plans for Imbaba are under way – to create more public housing, relocate thousands of street vendors, demolish some buildings and cut major new thoroughfares through the area.

Hoda thinks new, wider roads would be a great improvement. But like many residents here, her complaints about lack of services are tempered by her pride in how successfully, and civilly, Imbaba manages its own affairs. “The people here are real,” she says, “they’re good, country people.” When on our way home we become stuck in traffic in one of Imbaba’s many impassable intersections, she points to the neighbourhood men who are volunteering as impromptu traffic police: “See how they drop everything to help out.” When I ask Hoda where else she might like to live, her eyes grow wide and she says emphatically: “No, no, no! I never want to live outside Imbaba. I know the people here. We’re used to each other.”

“The people in my street let you take pictures there because they trust that I won’t let anyone give Imbaba a bad name,” Hoda tells me, after my visit. “What will you write about Imbaba? Will you write good things?”

Her anxiety over how her neighbourhood will be depicted by outsiders isn’t surprising, given the tenor of most discussions of the ashwa’iyat. Hand-wringing over Cairo’s slums has become a favourite habit of Egypt’s policymakers, artists and public intellectuals. The Egyptian and pan-Arab press abounds with horrified descriptions of these supposedly irredeemable hellholes. An article in Dar Al Hayat newspaper offers a description that is typical in its tone of Victorian shock: the ashwai’yat, the author writes, “are neighbourhoods with no laws and no values and no fixed sources of livelihood … They are neighbourhoods with no peace and security, where crime, selling and taking drugs, prostitution, wanton sex from a young age, take place. Relations are stamped with gangsterism, fighting, revenge, and violence. It’s a life without hope, vision, conviction, or the ability to change one’s destiny.”

More sympathetic depictions of the ashwa’iyat are often no less voyeuristic. A blockbuster 2007 film set in the slums, Hena Maysara, tells the melodramatic story of star-crossed lovers named Nahed and Adel; by the end of the film, Adel has become a gangster, Nahed a prostitute; their illegitimate child becomes a homeless teenage grifter. The slum they inhabit, taken over by extremists, is blown to smithereens in a fiery battle with the police.

The director, Khaled Youssef, called the film “a warning cry”, but in scene after titillating scene of sex, violence and drug use, it gives the impression that the ashwai’yat don’t contain a single law-abiding, gainfully employed resident. The Egyptian Ministry of Housing estimates there are 67 informal areas in Cairo. They range from truly dismal slums to lower-class neighbourhoods that are dense and under-serviced, but hardly dens of vice and desperation. Yet even as they use the ashwai’yat to mount a critique of the Mubarak government, many artists and intellectuals end up stigmatising these areas as dark, dangerous, and radically different places, which threaten the city’s supposed order and culture.

“It’s impossible to distinguish between what’s ashwa’i and what’s not, in Cairo,” says Hamdi Abu Golayyel. Abu Golayyel lived in the slum of Manshiyat Nasr for six years, and described it as “a mongrel place, part village and part unplanned city fringe, destination of squatters and incomers” in his 2006 novel Thieves in Retirement.

Abu Golayyel and I head there one night, in a taxi that speeds, for almost an hour and half, south along the Nile. Manshiyat Nasr (“Nasser’s New Town”) is in the industrial suburb of Helwan. It started as public housing for the workers in the nearby state-owned cement factories; but it soon overflowed into the surrounding countryside. A patch of palm trees, stranded between apartment buildings, conjures the fields that stood here just a few decades ago.

Abu Golayyel paid LE 100 a month (about $30, or Dh67 at the time) during his stay there, from 1995 to 2001. He waves towards the stocky little buildings, the small doors and cramped stairwells – these are “living spaces in the most basic sense,” he says. “Spaces to eat and sleep.”

Manshiyat Nasr is a new slum, and it lacks Imbaba’s self-confidence and cohesiveness. Abu Golayyel’s sly, satirical novel depicts a world in which every basis for community is frayed and unstable. But in his novel the slum isn’t the anti-city – it’s the essence of the city.

“I don’t understand what critics mean by the word ‘marginalised,’” says Abu Golayyel, as we leave Manshiyat Nasr. He gestures around him: “This neighbourhood isn’t any more marginalised than the rest of the city. People in Midan Tahrir,” he says, mentioning Cairo’s central square, “have no more power to make political decisions than people here. Mubarak is the core, and the rest of us are all marginalised.”

“It’s the future,” the salesman beside me says matter-of-factly, as we drive across a grey and empty desert plateau, 40km outside Cairo. We’ve finally reached the outer edge of the seemingly endless belt of construction that surrounds the city. Here lies Madinaty (“My city”), an enormous planned gated community, the brainchild of the disgraced tycoon Talaat Mustafa – once close to the Mubarak family, now appealing a death sentence for the hit he ordered on his Lebanese pop singer girlfriend. Madinaty is designed to house 500,000 people, as well as hospitals, universities, malls and a water park. The developer’s website calls it “the biggest all-inclusive enclosed city in the Middle East.” Renditions of the city feature palm-dotted lawns, man-made lagoons, glistening office towers, spotless shopping arcades.

The Egyptian government has long been convinced – since the early 1960s – that the solution to Cairo’s ills lie in expansion beyond its borders. Back then, however, it was the government that did the developing, erecting a series of self-sufficient blue-collar desert cities that drew disproportionate subsidies but attracted few residents. In line with Egypt’s latter-day rapprochement with capitalism, the Mubarak government has taken a drastically different approach, turning over the colonisation of the desert to the forces of private enterprise, selling off vast swaths of state land to developers.

Frenzied real-estate speculation has continued to drive development on Cairo’s outskirts: houses and apartments in the new cities are sold and resold many times over before they’re even built. My salesman, it turns out, lives in another new development called Dreamland, but he also bought an apartment in Madinaty “as an investment”; in the few years since his purchase, it has already doubled in value. So many people have purchased “investment” properties that, in a city with a severe housing shortage, an estimated million apartments sit empty.

We pass the security checkpoint and enter Madinaty’s endless, sweeping driveway. Its main gate is the size of the Arc de Triomphe. The architecture of the duplexes, town houses and apartment buildings inside is internationally bland and rigidly repetitive: red-tiled gables, sun patios, sliding glass doors. The two-bedroom apartments here will set you back Dh370,000; the grand and bland villas cost close to a Dh3.7m.

But what’s here so far is nothing compared to what is coming. I look out towards the horizon at a construction site the size of, well, a small city – row upon row of buildings, rising from the sand like a pastel mirage.

The salesman notes the clean, bracing breeze. Madinaty is on a desert plateau, almost 300 metres above Cairo. Water from the Nile will have to be pumped all the way up and out here – as to all the new cities – by state-built infrastructure. Electricity and roads – a second ring road is now being planned – will also be provided by the New Urban Communities Administration, which has just issued an LE 10bn (Dh6.7bn) bond to fund its efforts.

Relocating Cairo’s wealthier residents will not alleviate the crowding and poverty they leave behind. Though Imbaba has now been “pacified”, across enormous tranches of the city the state is still regarded as an unwelcome interloper, and anger is never far from the surface. When a cliff collapsed in the dismal slum of Duwaiqa, in 2008, killing 60 people and destroying 35 houses, emergency vehicles took hours to arrive. The authorities seemed more concerned with sealing off the area to journalists and aid workers than helping distraught residents who had been digging for their relatives with their bare hands. Then bulldozers arrived to demolish 1,000 homes at risk of collapse. Furious residents threw volleys of stones at the bulldozers and the governor’s convoy. They compared themselves to Palestinians under Israeli occupation. One columnist in an opposition newspaper wrote of “The Intifada of the ashwa’iyat”.

The new enclaves in the desert promise protection from such tensions. A friend knows a lady who bought a home in one of the new private developments. Her house was in the outer row, not far from a nearby public housing project. She decided to switch to a house nearer the centre – because, she said, “when those people rise up,” she didn’t want to be in the front line.

The slums are most often referred to as a “cancer” – and by that analogy, Cairo is already a terminal case. And the better off residents of this supposedly dying city have embraced the new developments as a sort of miracle cure.

I catch a glimpse of their enthusiasm at a five-star hotel overlooking the Nile, where a fashionable crowd – the men in suits, the women in slinky black dresses, not a headscarf in sight – nibbles on canapés while a jazz band plays in the background. I’m attending a reception organised by the real-estate developers SODIC and SOLIDERE to promote their new development, WestTown, located in the desert on the opposite side of Cairo from Madinaty.

I ask a salesman if business has slowed due to the global recession. He assures me that almost all the 175 units on sale – high-end apartments with whirlpools and teak floors, which can be customised in one of three styles: “Urban Chic,” “Natural Zen” and “Modern Islamic” – have been snapped up.

Guests take turns huddling around a maquette of the development. A projector has been mounted on the ceiling above, to create little virtual future residents, driving their cars down traffic-free, palm-lined streets, eating lunch in the cafes of the (closed-circuit-TV-monitored) plaza and diving into the rooftop pools. It is a projection of a perfect life, and it could be taking place anywhere.

Such pristine, self-sufficient communities are in fact a global phenomenon. But in a city where until recently everyone has been forced to endure close quarters, it is a new development. If, in the next few decades, the enclaves in the desert are populated by Cairo’s upper classes, this will represent what one expert on the Egyptian capital calls “a radical reformulation of Cairo’s urban landscape.”

Modern Cairo came into being, 150 years ago, with another “reformulation”, one that bears some striking resemblances to what’s going on today. In the 1860s, Egypt’s ruler, Khedive Ismail, grafted a European façade onto his capital, hoping to impress the foreign dignitaries invited to the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. A western downtown, complete with an opera house, public gardens, and wide Parisian-style avenues, was erected in the span of a few frantic years.

Ironically, the cost of these public works contributed to Egypt’s bankruptcy and led to the 70-year-long British occupation that would follow. Ismail showed off, then lost the country; but the district he established flourished, attracting the upper classes and the first modern government services. The nearby medieval core of the city, meanwhile, was increasingly seen as a dirty, disorderly relic of the past.

For most of the 20th century, the fault line between these two worlds – foreign and local, modern and “backward”, rich and poor – dominated the real and imaginative landscape of the city. What the anthropologist Janet Abu Lughod has called the “rent in the social fabric” of Cairo featured prominently in work of great Egyptian writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Youssef Idris.

But in 20th-century Cairo, the new and the old city were contiguous, and crossing from one to the other was a fraught but relatively common journey. Today, as spatial segregation and social inequality increase, a much greater chasm seems to be opening.

Or perhaps it would be better described as a vacuum, for Cairo risks becoming a city where no one belongs – a place where the lower classes are blamed for their own disenfranchisement, and from which the upper classes are eager to secede. The preoccupation with the slums shows the malaise most Cairenes feel over the way their city has drifted, seemingly rudderless, over the last half-century.

To stigmatise the ashwai’yat for their poverty and their supposed chaos is politically convenient, but to bemoan them as the apocalyptic end of Egypt’s urban civilisation is far-fetched. The slums of Cairo are the visible symptoms of the shortage and misdirection of Egypt’s resources, of the limits of public oversight, interest and authority. They’re the best that most of Cairo’s residents – left largely to their own devices – have been able to come up with.

The fantasy that leads into the desert and the hysteria over the slums are two sides of the same coin, each one the sign of a deep unease over Cairo’s future and a desire to avoid confronting its present. In the escapism of the gated cities and the horror over the ragged lower-class neighborhoods, after all, there is the same whiff of denial – of a city eager, at least for the time being, to stick its head in the sand.

Ursula Lindsey is a freelance journalist based in Cairo, and writes the culture blog The Arabist Review.

Source: The National: And then Cairo turned itself inside out

A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies

2010-02-27T10:12:00.001-05:00

With Zülfü Livaneli's Atatürk biopic 'Veda' (Farewell), along with another offering on the same subject, due out in the next few months, we look back at the history of Atatürk biopics in Turkish cinema - or, more accurately, at the lack of them
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.

A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.

Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.

This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).

Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”

From Olivier to DeMille

As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.

According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.

Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.

DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.

After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.

License to film Atatürk

Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.

The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.

Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.

The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.

Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).

Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?

The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.

As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.

Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.

From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?

Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.

The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.

Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies

Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel

2010-02-27T09:54:00.000-05:00

There is little doubt that the Arab novel has been on the rise in recent years. The volume of published works, the expansive themes and forms, the breaking of taboos, the new emerging prizes and the active translations into other languages all point to such a rise. Size of readership is also widening, though not at the same pace as other promising developments. In certain ways, part of the impetus of this rise could be accredited to the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz winning the Nobel Prize in 1988. Since then Arab novel writing and publishing have witnessed a remarkable leap.

This new contemporary wave of Arab novel has indeed moved the art of fiction writing in the Arab world into new territories: breaking more taboos and developing new aesthetics.

Socially and culturally, the Arab novel has come to the forefront, exposing and questioning many previously unquestionable traditional forms of sociality.

Aesthetically, creative forms and experimental structures and prose have also flourished, challenging classical traditions and reflecting more self-confidence and adventurous attitudes.

Key to understanding the rise and success of the recent surge of the Arab novel, which deserves to be underlined, is its relation to the suppressive socio-cultural and political conditions in the Arab world. The flourishing of Arab fiction is in fact linked and provoked by the continuation of these conditions, and is a sharp response against its coercions and an uncompromising denunciation of it.

This key linkage between the success of the Arab novel and the suppressive environment from which it is emerging merits further elaboration in more than one aspect.

In the first place, the sheer contradictions and interwoven sets of political, social and religious patriarchies of the Arab reality at home and/or abroad keep creating manifestations of suffering, longing and revolt at individual and group levels.

All this produces ripe themes waiting to be captured aesthetically and creatively, not only in novel writing but also in other forms of art. The Arab reality over the past two decades, in the 1990s and 2000s, has perhaps witnessed a trajectory of the sharpest changes: global wars fought on Arab land, deep rifts among and within many individual countries, a mushrooming of sectarianism, increases in religiosity and conservatism.

The recent Arab reality has also experienced both a continuing lack of justice and the heavy presence of authoritarianism, compounded with confusion over modernity and westernisation led by the globalisation of communication, satellite broadcasting and internet penetration.

Added to this has been the collapse of pan-Arab ideologies which has brought with it lack of meaning and purpose, and also the alienation of younger generations and general challenges to identity and belonging. For many Arabs, aspects and consequences of this vastly compounded surreal reality seem in fact unbelievably more fictitious than fiction.

Thus successful creative representations of these aspects and consequences, when cleverly formulated, have yielded astounding works, as has indeed been the case over the past two decades in the field of novel writing.

A second aspect worth noticing is the fact that the Arab novel has become one of the freest intellectual and yet public platforms of expression in the Arab sphere.

Apart from the internet and blogging, no other intellectual platform could accommodate the sensitivity, daring and provocation that the new Arab novel is addressing. While some relatively free media outlets that challenge the boundaries of political free expression shy away from touching traditional social taboos, representations in Arab fiction challenge exactly these religious, social and cultural boundaries.

Fanaticism in general and even religion itself is criticised, existential questions are posed, social norms and traditions are deconstructed, self-expression and longing for emancipation takes voice limitlessly, and so on and so forth.

But on top of all this and related to it is the incidence of both female writings and writers. A generation of female novelists, from the Maghreb countries to the Gulf countries, has strongly and confidently burst on to the literary scene. All prize short-lists have had on them successful female writers. It could be said that nowhere else in Arab writing or social platforms are women’s issues, including suppression, desire for rebellion against traditional constructs and emancipation, expressed and presented as they are in the Arab novel.

Intimately related to the above is a third aspect that is worth mentioning and that is the diverse background of the Arab novelists in general.

Because of the harsh Arab reality and the limited venues of free expression, we have witnessed ex-politicians, journalists, academics and activists, males and females, migrating to the field of fiction writing. Most of them have done so seeking a freer sphere for self-expression. Some of their production suffers, expectedly, from directness and emphasis on message-delivering at the expense of aesthetics. But a considerable part of the writing by these groups has nonetheless succeeded in impressing.

Many of these newcomers have discovered in fiction writing a new terrain. It is here and not in academic or serious journalistic writing where almost everything is allowed: subjectivity and self-expression, freedom from political correctness, wild articulation, naming things even with prejudice, nurturing metaphors that are decoded by all, and so on.

Notwithstanding all of the cultural considerations mentioned above, it must be said that it is not just cultural criticism that matters in fiction and creative writing. Literary forms, artistic presentations and imaginative approaches remain first and foremost. No compromise on the aesthetics of literary works should ever be accepted. And the guarding of the aesthetics of the new wave of Arab novel has evolved into the a motivating cause for a number of fiction prizes in the Arab world, chief among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, launched in 2007/2008.

In taking a quick or even a deeper look at the titles that have made it on to the long and short lists in the past three years, one could safely conclude that a combination of fine artistic writing and social and political taboo-breaking themes has lain at the heart of this plethora of Arab fiction writing. Taboo-breaking works are common in all cultures; most of them substitute lack of aesthetics with sensationalism. This type of work has little artistic value, if any. The same applies to Arab fiction writing. There have been many “works of fiction” that were produced exploiting a challenge to the three traditional taboos: politics, sex and religion. Hastiness and opportunism are clear in many cases where authors seek fame and publicity, claiming heroism because of the sensitive subjects they embark on, sometimes with risks. One could compile a long list of Arabic works over the past few years that belong to this taxonomy.

However, the carte blanche that used to be given to these works only on the basis of taboo-breaking has been revoked. The true contribution of the fiction and literary prizes comes exactly at this juncture – that is to shepherd all experimentation, cultural challenges and theme exploration within the boundaries of literary criticism as the main criteria for judging creative writing.

Dr Khaled Hroub is the Director of Cambridge Arab Media Project at the University of Cambridge. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is funded by the Emirates Foundation and is independently managed by its own board of trustees

Source: The National: Liberation and artistry have transformed the Arab novel

The Ottoman architect who linked East and West

2010-02-14T17:11:00.000-05:00

The extent to which the great Ottoman Empire influenced the rest of Europe can still be seen from the buildings it has left behind, explains architecture and design expert Jonathan Glancey.

Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.

Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.

Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.

And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.

Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west

Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?

Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.

But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.

Reconnecting Istanbul

If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?

Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.

He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.

In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.

In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.

A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.

This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.

Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.

From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.

Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.

Influential art

Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.

One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?

This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.

What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.

Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.

Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.

Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul

Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.

Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.

Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?

Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?

Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.

FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer

The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.

As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.

Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West

Prism Magazine

2010-02-14T17:08:00.002-05:00

A new magazine was launched recently by wrongly accussed and subsequently tortured Mahed Arar. The focus of the magazine is national security, obviously with an emphasis on Canada.
Prism Magazine

Celebrate Mercy

2010-02-14T17:06:00.001-05:00

Online event of interest entitled Celebrate Mercy. Many speakers.
Celebrate Mercy

Where religion and civil society meet

2010-02-14T17:04:00.001-05:00

The US-Islamic World Forum – held this weekend in Qatar – will once again explore the nature and possibilities of the power dynamics between these two entities, one a nation state, the other, ostensibly a religion.

However “Islamic”, or its place holder, “Muslim”, has come to mean more of a region than anything more meaningful.

As a region, “Islamic” would embrace the Christian, the atheist, the Jewish, the Marxist and the non-committed. Adding to the stickiness of the proposition is the prevalence of Islam in regions not designated “Islamic”. Albania and Bosnia are soundly European. Spain was a Muslim country for 700 years. And yes, the US itself has been witnessing its second wave of indigenisation since the turn of the 20th century; the US ambassador to the Philippines converted in 1888 and continued to advocate the Muslim faith among New York’s elite society until his death in 1916. Muslim “buffalo soldiers” fought with the Union army during the 1861-1865 American Civil War.

This weekend’s conference will explore among other things, possibilities for strengthening civil society and non-governmental efforts to fill the “human development” gaps left by beleaguered or otherwise distracted governments.

But what, if anything, has religion to do with this? Quality of life services are socially inclusive and universally perfected by international NGOs that transcend, in their technique, any religious affiliation. It is a shared knowledge, a common effort, and an inclusive pursuit.

So has the utility of religion in the equation been reduced to no more than one among several policy facilitators? Has religion been reduced to an opiate for steering masses with this particular fix?

Here is a case for an expanded consideration that may not have been lost on all the organisers. Barbiturates and intoxicants are forbidden in Islam because of their propensity to cloud the mind, whereas Islam unflinchingly calls for the enhancement and sharpening of the rational faculty.

The contribution that theological reasoning makes to civil society and human development initiatives is unique in its three dimensional approach.

Man is a whole as body, mind, and soul; not body alone. Being is material, spiritual and divine; not material alone.

The effective value-add of theological reasoning to human development initiatives turns upon five themes: First, it brings sense to the confusion stemming from the displacement of the human condition in an alienating modernity.

Second, it assesses the ordering of material and circumstantial priorities in light of an authentic Islamic worldview.

Third, it provides doctrinal grounding for fundamental human development objectives.

Fourth, it can facilitate, advocate and encourage helpful and constructive behaviours for good global citizenship and environmental consciousness.

Fifth, it can potentially contribute to the development of an integrated, engaged and participatory Muslim identity for the 21st century.

Returning to the motif of the opiate. The Muslim poet said: “Our wine is the wine of meaning; it is permissible and not unlawful.” The difference between the wine of the world is that it dulls the senses and shackles you to the ground. But the wine of paradise sharpens the mind and lifts you out of the petty, the mundane, and the unidimensional. It gives life to the life of the mind, to the life of the spirit, and not merely to the life of body alone. It is 360 degrees, in three dimensions, it is whole, and it is vibrant.

Jihad Hashim Brown is director of research at the Tabah Foundation. He delivers the Friday sermon at the Maryam bint Sultan Mosque in Abu Dhabi/

Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet

Tabah Foundation

Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather

2010-01-31T12:58:00.002-05:00

William Dalrymple applauds an exemplary study of the 16th-century Levant Company and England's dealings with the mighty Ottoman empire

For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.

1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press

By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.

Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.

There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."

James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.

Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".

Mather excels at portraying the everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".

Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".

It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.

One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.

Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.

William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)

Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather

Arab society's crunch points

2010-01-31T12:56:00.001-05:00

A talk by Brian Whitaker at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, 26 January 2010

ONE OF the things I have always tried to do as a journalist writing about the Middle East is to look at it from the inside rather than the outside. What I mean by that is that I try to focus as much as possible on issues that concern people actually living in the region rather than the issues that affect western governments.

It’s not always easy, because newspaper editors – and their readers too – tend to have rather fixed ideas about what constitutes news from the Middle East.

I didn’t fully appreciate how fixed their ideas are until I started writing full-time about the region for the Guardian. I would meet people at parties who asked what my job was, and they would immediately assume that I was either a war correspondent or some kind of terrorism expert.

Obviously journalists can’t ignore the big conflicts but readers can easily get the impression that the Middle East is a region of death and destruction and very little else.

It’s important to remember, though, that millions of Arabs go through their entire lives without ever seeing a shot fired in anger, let alone firing one themselves.

This brings me to the title of my book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East, where you see the word “really” highlighted in red.

The point I’m making here is that there’s a discrepancy – quite a large discrepancy in fact – between the problems of the Middle East as perceived from the west and its problems as perceived by Arabs themselves. The priorities are different.

Although the book is a critique of Arab society, and in some respects quite a stern one, I wanted it to reflect opinions from the inside rather than the outside. So I decided right from the start to use Arab sources as much as possible – which I have done, with only a few exceptions.

My research included about 20 formal interviews with Arabs in various countries, most of them lasting an hour or more, and my aim was to keep them as unstructured as possible – basically to sit back and let people talk.

So I looked on the internet and found 10 critical statements about the Middle East – about politics, oil, the media, corruption, and so on. I sent this list to the interviewees and asked them to choose the statements they wanted to talk about.

This was where the distinctively Arab priorities really started to show up. In fact, the issues that figure most prominently in western foreign policy seemed to be nowhere near the top of my interviewees’ agenda (or at least not in the way they are usually framed).

For example, democracy was hardly mentioned as such, though there was a lot of talk about the lack of transparency and accountability, the lack of good governance and the need to get rid of corruption.

There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”

The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world."

I’LL COME BACK to this issue of the family in a moment but there’s one more point I’d like to make about the book and its title.

Although it’s mainly a critique of Arab society it’s also, less directly, a critique of westerm policy. I wanted to make a case for change in the Arab countries that would not be based on neocon arguments.

Several people have asked if the title of my book alludes Bernard Lewis’s famous book, “What went wrong?” Lewis, of course, was Bush’s favourite historian and Bush often turned to him for advice. So my answer is yes, I did have Lewis in mind when thinking about the title, though the book itself doesn’t mention him or his work.

Before Bush’s arrival at the White House in 2001, American policy towards the Middle East – and British policy too, for that matter – had been primarily about maintaining stability.

Bush and the neocons changed that, largely in response to the September 11 attacks which opened the way to more a radically interventionist discourse – especially interventions of the military kind.

In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:

Sixty years of western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe – because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.

There were many things wrong with Bush’s policies but I think he was right to say we should not be “excusing and accommodating” a lack of freedom in the Middle East. I think he was also right to say that purchasing stability at the expense of liberty is a bad idea in the long term.

Continue reading al Bab: Arab society's crunch points

The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse

2010-01-30T19:55:00.000-05:00

Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city's Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey's last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse

Since no one knows exactly when coffee was first introduced, it’s not possible to celebrate an anniversary. But coffee lovers around the world don’t need a special day; for them, every day is coffee day.

The first records of coffee drinking come from the Yemen area, where the beans grew wild, although some say coffee initially came from Ethiopia. It was seen as a precious commodity to be protected before people realized they could sell the beans and get a good return on them.

Coffee drinking has had its ups and downs. It was viewed with suspicion as a powerful, addictive drug and attempts were made to stop people from drinking it. Religious mystics who belonged to one of the many Sufi lodges that sprang up are thought to have used coffee as a stimulant for their often strenuous religious services.

There were mixed feelings about coffee drinking from the beginning because of its effect on people. This is even less surprising since coffee was not drunk in the diluted fashion now favored by the Western world. It came hot and thick and if you weren’t careful, you would end up with some of the grounds in your mouth. Actually, the same holds true for Turkish coffee today. One researcher on coffee and coffeehouses cites a document dated to 1511 that he believes shows the first time that coffee was banned, an incident that happened in Mecca.

Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city’s Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. One source has suggested that was the case because there were Mamlukes, who were part of the rulers of Egypt’s army, found in Erzurum quite early on. Ottoman Sultan Selim I took Egypt in 1517 when there were already hundreds of coffeehouses in Cairo. In doing so, the coffeehouse became a center for men who, for one reason or another, weren’t working or didn’t want to go home directly after work.

Little coffeehouses sprang up all over the city and then spread out to towns and villages. By 1595, a foreign observer noted that there were some 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul, attracting men with time to spare. No food was served, although no one would object to a customer bringing food in. The coffeehouse became a center where information was exchanged about the local area and beyond. Those who couldn’t read could find help and advice there.

The coffeehouse also provided a place for different social groups to gather; some even boasted musicians, theatrical performances, storytellers or wandering minstrels. The mix that allowed for socializing also made coffeehouses venues for political talk and they were considered potential hotbeds for revolt. Attempts were made to stamp them out, without much success – with one exception. In 1623, Sultan Murat IV came to power and personally forbade the sale of coffee. Though edicts issued by religious authorities were regularly flouted, the coffee ban was one prohibition that was obeyed, at least as long as the sultan lived, because he had the force to back it up. The coffeehouses reopened in 1640, upon his death.

Architecturally, the Ottoman coffeehouse would usually be a one-story building with a very high ceiling and tables and chairs or benches covered with cushions around a large open space. It was not unusual to find a fountain in the middle of the main area, and there might be rooms off to the sides. In winter, heat would be provided by braziers, or metal fire boxes, while in summer, the favored coffeehouses were those that opened on a veranda or patio, preferably shaded by tall, old plane trees. If there was a view, so much the better.

Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey’s last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse. If another minstrel happened to be around, they might start a duet or – more likely – an improvised duel, with one starting off the stanza of a song and the music to go with it and the second having to respond. More formal competitions might be even organized to attract an audience.

Eventually coffee was accepted as a drink that did not violate the Muslim prohibition against alcoholic beverages. It became part of socializing, even for women, although they were never to be found in coffeehouses until modern times. Even today, a Turkish woman might feel uncomfortable entering such an establishment. Women in Ottoman times would drink coffee in harem settings or at a hamam (Turkish bath); a number of paintings showing such gatherings can still be seen today. The ceremonies were perhaps not as elaborate as those conducted as part of serving tea in Japan, but special cups and pots were used. Learning about them was part of a well-brought-up girl’s education and when a young man’s parents came to call on her family to ask her hand in marriage, she had to show off her ability to make coffee.

Once a man found a coffeehouse that he felt compatible with, he would usually continue to frequent that place. Because of this, it was possible to leave messages for people at coffeehouses, knowing that sooner or later, the intended recipient would get it. Coffeehouse ownership would traditionally pass from father to son, with the boys in the family waiting on tables and cleaning up. The spread of television and the broadcasting of football matches have kept the coffeehouse popular on special occasions. Men with time on their hands still frequent coffeehouses to play dominoes or other games with their friends, or simply to sit there with their horse-racing forms or crossword puzzles.

Coffee drinking in Turkey was eventually supplanted by tea drinking. In spite of experiments with coffee-growing, the country’s geography is not suitable for it, and so coffee has to be imported. It never lost its popularity, but simply became so expensive that it was beyond the reach of many households. In fact, its importation was banned in the 1970s because the foreign currency required to purchase it was far too scarce to be used for something as nonessential as coffee. People who had foreign friends visiting would ask them to bring coffee and even five-star hotels were reduced to finding circuitous routes for their supplies. Nescafe thus became the coffee of choice and coffeehouses became more like teahouses. Now that coffee is once again available, customers will be offered a choice of tea or coffee, but tea is mentioned first.

Most recently, Turks have fallen under the spell of “modern” international coffeehouse chains that appeal in spite of their higher prices, but are visited only occasionally for that same reason. Moreover, the traditional Turkish coffeehouse has all but disappeared from many neighborhoods in big cities and those that do exist are often too far out of the way to be conveniently visited.

That doesn’t mean the traditional Turkish coffeehouse isn’t respected as part of the country’s culture. It just isn’t there anymore to be used as a community social center and it doesn’t seem as if it will ever come back.

Source: Hurriyet: The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse

Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world

2010-01-30T14:58:00.002-05:00

London, England (CNN) -- Think of the origins of that staple of modern life, the cup of coffee, and Italy often springs to mind.

But in fact, Yemen is where the ubiquitous brew has its true origins.

Along with the first university, and even the toothbrush, it is among surprising Muslim inventions that have shaped the world we live in today.

The origins of these fundamental ideas and objects -- the basis of everything from the bicycle to musical scales -- are the focus of "1001 Inventions," a book celebrating "the forgotten" history of 1,000 years of Muslim heritage.

"There's a hole in our knowledge, we leap frog from the Renaissance to the Greeks," professor Salim al-Hassani, Chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation, and editor of the book told CNN.

"1001 Inventions" is now an exhibition at London's Science Museum. Hassani hopes the exhibition will highlight the contributions of non-Western cultures -- like the Muslim empire that once covered Spain and Portugal, Southern Italy and stretched as far as parts of China -- to present day civilization.
Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt

Here Hassani shares his top 10 outstanding Muslim inventions:

1. Surgery

Around the year 1,000, the celebrated doctor Al Zahrawi published a 1,500 page illustrated encyclopedia of surgery that was used in Europe as a medical reference for the next 500 years. Among his many inventions, Zahrawi discovered the use of dissolving cat gut to stitch wounds -- beforehand a second surgery had to be performed to remove sutures. He also reportedly performed the first caesarean operation and created the first pair of forceps.

2. Coffee

Now the Western world's drink du jour, coffee was first brewed in Yemen around the 9th century. In its earliest days, coffee helped Sufis stay up during late nights of devotion. Later brought to Cairo by a group of students, the coffee buzz soon caught on around the empire. By the 13th century it reached Turkey, but not until the 16th century did the beans start boiling in Europe, brought to Italy by a Venetian trader.

3. Flying machine

"Abbas ibn Firnas was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly," said Hassani. In the 9th century he designed a winged apparatus, roughly resembling a bird costume. In his most famous trial near Cordoba in Spain, Firnas flew upward for a few moments, before falling to the ground and partially breaking his back. His designs would undoubtedly have been an inspiration for famed Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci's hundreds of years later, said Hassani.

4. University

In 859 a young princess named Fatima al-Firhi founded the first degree-granting university in Fez, Morocco. Her sister Miriam founded an adjacent mosque and together the complex became the al-Qarawiyyin Mosque and University. Still operating almost 1,200 years later, Hassani says he hopes the center will remind people that learning is at the core of the Islamic tradition and that the story of the al-Firhi sisters will inspire young Muslim women around the world today.

5. Algebra

The word algebra comes from the title of a Persian mathematician's famous 9th century treatise "Kitab al-Jabr Wa l-Mugabala" which translates roughly as "The Book of Reasoning and Balancing." Built on the roots of Greek and Hindu systems, the new algebraic order was a unifying system for rational numbers, irrational numbers and geometrical magnitudes. The same mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi, was also the first to introduce the concept of raising a number to a power.

6. Optics

"Many of the most important advances in the study of optics come from the Muslim world," says Hassani. Around the year 1000 Ibn al-Haitham proved that humans see objects by light reflecting off of them and entering the eye, dismissing Euclid and Ptolemy's theories that light was emitted from the eye itself. This great Muslim physicist also discovered the camera obscura phenomenon, which explains how the eye sees images upright due to the connection between the optic nerve and the brain.

7. Music

Muslim musicians have had a profound impact on Europe, dating back to Charlemagne tried to compete with the music of Baghdad and Cordoba, according to Hassani. Among many instruments that arrived in Europe through the Middle East are the lute and the rahab, an ancestor of the violin. Modern musical scales are also said to derive from the Arabic alphabet.

8. Toothbrush

According to Hassani, the Prophet Mohammed popularized the use of the first toothbrush in around 600. Using a twig from the Meswak tree, he cleaned his teeth and freshened his breath. Substances similar to Meswak are used in modern toothpaste.

9. The crank

Many of the basics of modern automatics were first put to use in the Muslim world, including the revolutionary crank-connecting rod system. By converting rotary motion to linear motion, the crank enables the lifting of heavy objects with relative ease. This technology, discovered by Al-Jazari in the 12th century, exploded across the globe, leading to everything from the bicycle to the internal combustion engine.

10. Hospitals

"Hospitals as we know them today, with wards and teaching centers, come from 9th century Egypt," explained Hassani. The first such medical center was the Ahmad ibn Tulun Hospital, founded in 872 in Cairo. Tulun hospital provided free care for anyone who needed it -- a policy based on the Muslim tradition of caring for all who are sick. From Cairo, such hospitals spread around the Muslim world.

For more information on muslim inventions go to: muslimheritage.com. For more information about the exhibition at London's Science Museum go to: science museum.org.uk

Source: CNN: Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world

Camel fair’s trek into the past

2010-01-29T19:39:00.000-05:00

AL GHARBIA // The question that had to be asked was, “Why walk all that distance?” Hamad bin Ramis al Minhali had what should have been the obvious answer.

“Why would we truck the camels over here?” he asked. “It’s not the Bedouin way. Our grandfathers trekked across all the deserts of Arabia. Our journey lasted only 22 days but their journeys often lasted for months or simply never ended as they trekked from one oasis to another to trade and sell goods with other tribes.”

His answer was one that reflected the spirit of the Al Dhafra Camel Festival, meant to celebrate and preserve the culture, heritage and tradition of the Arab desert nomad.

For Mr al Minhali, 25, and his father, Ramis bin Saleh, an Emirati, the trek to the event in the Al Gharbia town saw them drive the 1,000km at camel speed from the Saudi city of Al Kharj.

Yesterday afternoon they, along with an entourage consisting of 50 Majaheem camels, family members, and dozens of members of their tribe, had only 3km to go to reach their encampment.

The scene was a spectacular one as the camels made their way from paved roads across rust-coloured sand dunes, followed by more than 30 4x4 vehicles and a dozen men and boys on foot.

Inside the vehicles traditional Arabian music was blaring over the stereo speakers as both men and young girls danced in their seats to it.

They were in a celebratory mood as they approached the normally sleepy town, which had once again come to life with the start of the third annual festival.

For the past week, camels have been the spectacle as they slowly strolled through the town’s central district, making their way to Madinat Zayed.

The 50 camels had cost the al Minhali family Dh11 million (US$3m) to purchase. With some pride, Mr al Minhali the younger said: “One of them my father bought for Dh5m. He is a stud and is worth so much because he is a purebred and has fathered several calves.

“He won’t be up for sale during the festival but we brought him to show him. But, then again, if someone makes an extremely generous offer, my father might consider it.”

Continue reading The National: Camel fair’s trek into the past

Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?

2010-01-24T11:39:00.001-05:00

By Lina Sinjab
BBC News, Damascus

A fruit juice seller reads a newspaper in Damascus. File photo
The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria

Syria has sent a strong signal that it is ready to engage with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development organisations in order to promote a more active civil society in the country.

At this weekend's pioneering conference in Damascus which drew many international delegates, Syria's First Lady, Asma al-Assad, called on Syrian citizens to become more engaged in addressing the country's social and economic challenges.

"The government is partnering with these organisations [NGOs] … to try and develop the best development strategy for the country. It is part of a broader approach to development, clearly based on the idea that one party cannot do it alone," she told the BBC.

The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria, where the government has long exerted tight controls over the involvement of NGOs in Syrian life.

The country has a small number of functioning NGOs in comparison to neighbouring nations: around 1,500 compared with 5,000 in Lebanon.

But their number is increasing, according to the Syrian government.

"This represents a political will. They wouldn't have increased, otherwise. They wouldn't have been involved or encouraged to be involved in sectors previously not encouraged," Mrs Assad says.

'Crucial role'

The keynote speaker at the conference, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who is a senior advisor to the World Economic Forum, says that the region as a whole faces a "gathering storm" of societal problems, with poor economic growth, high unemployment, and low levels of education.

Asma al-Assad

"Civil society should be a partner to the state and indispensible part of the development process," he says.

In 2007 under the chairmanship of Mrs Assad, the Syria Trust for Development was established to work on rural development, female empowerment, and the promotion of Syrian culture.

The first lady believes that such organisations are playing a crucial role in areas that were previously perceived as the role of the government alone.

"Most importantly is the role these organisations are playing and the change they are influencing on the ground," Mrs Assad says.

'Real change'

Some are sceptical that the Syrian government will genuinely allow independent organisations to develop within the country.

Rami Khouri, director of Isam Fares Institute for Pulic Policy in Beirut and a delegate at the conference, said that that though the event was an important signal, only time would tell whether real change would happen.

"This is a moment where civil society and private sector have to challenge [the government] in a positive way to see how far the government is willing to open up the space."

And some local organisations still find it hard to operate in Syria.

Mayya Rahabi, co-founder of a committee to defend women's issues, says she doesn't believe there is real civil society in Syria.

"We applied for the registration three years ago and we haven't heard an answer," Mrs Rahabi says.

The Syrian government is working on new legislation that - it claims - will make it easier for people like Mrs Rahabi to operate.

"I am hoping that this conference and this new law will allow us to operate freely - that real change will come, not just words," Mrs Rahabi says.

Source BBC: Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?

Feminism in the Arab world Is the region ready to embrace it?

2010-01-16T14:45:00.000-05:00

As the debate on feminism in the region gathers momentum, opinions on the matter are strongly divided. Some believe the so called Western concept of feminism has no place in the Arab world. Yet Arab women are still fighting for an equal place in society, academics and students argue.

Dr Monica Gallant, chair of the business department at Dubai Women's College, has been evaluating what form of feminism best fits the Arab context. Her paper titled The Application of Feminism in the Arab World: Research Perspectives, which won an Outstanding Paper award after it was published in the Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues journal, argues that it is possible for Arab women to create a "sustainable, emancipatory movement by gradually challenging patriarchal discourses while still maintaining a connection to key societal norms".

Discussions on Arab feminism must consider Islamic principles and any successful feminist movement should be gradual and must take into account cultural views so as not to alienate women from their societies, Gallant said. "Women don't want to vary too much from what society expects from them."

Having lived in the UAE for 14 years, her research reveals the importance placed on expectations of women in the Arab world. This in turn affects how women view themselves.

"Arab women wouldn't want to see themselves as feminists because it is too Western and anti-men," she said.

Instead she observed that Arab women work within societal expectations to gradually gain freedom of choice for themselves by working with what society expects of them.

"While being a mother and a wife she tries to be an entrepreneur or employee," Gallant said. "She fulfils her home duties and tries to live her dream, which is tough because she has to be a superwoman to be able to do everything."

Social expectations

Gallant said in the Arab world the expectations of women to be wives and mothers are still very strong. "Women can't voluntarily admit to not wanting to become a wife or mother," she said, because some social expectations are still difficult for women to overcome.

To illustrate her point Gallant used the example of an unmarried woman moving out of her family's home to live alone.

Dr Suad Zayed Al Oraim, professor of sociology at UAE University, however, argued that "if a single woman is comfortable in that role it's up to her".

She said individuals are responsible for creating change which then goes on to become a social phenomenon. "Someone has to pioneer it," she said.

Using the same example, Suad said there is no civil law or Sharia (Islamic) law in the UAE preventing a woman from living alone.

"These are cultural laws; if a woman is willing to bear the consequences it's up to her," she said. "[But] Islam is not responsible for those consequences because it is cultural and we need to differentiate between tradition and religion."

Feminism inappropriate

There is no place for Westernised feminism in the Arab world due to existing cultural and religious differences in societies, some academics and students said.

Arab women are fighting for an equal place in society but not under the umbrella of feminism because the term indicates a gender struggle which is primarily a Western ideal, they said.

"The ideology of feminism came from the US and Europe and you can't sell it to Arab culture," said Suad. "If women in the UAE and other Arab countries want to create something new for themselves, it's up to them to do it."

Declaring an existence

Suad attended the region's first conference on Arab feminism in Beirut, Lebanon, last year. She said the purpose was to establish if feminism exists in any of the 22 Arab nations.

"In the Arab world the expression is not clear because it doesn't exist in the culture," she said. "Some countries understand Arab feminism from an Arab point of view and others from a Western one."

Suad added: "Yet women don't want to talk about it because it's not clear in the minds of a majority of women in the Arab world."

For Iraqi pharmacy student Sura Sa'ad, studying at the Ras Al Khaimah Medical and Health Sciences University, Arab women need to decide what they want.

"It is our duty as women to first declare what rights we want and second it is our responsibility to show ... these rights don't cross our traditions or religion," she said.

Misconceptions

"Women make up half of any society and if half of society has no rights or education then how will society ever develop?" said Sa'ad.

She added that some women mistake feminism or liberation as a right to dress however they want and go wherever they want. "[Feminism] is about respecting us and treating us equally to men so we can help in the process of development."

Sa'ad said a major problem with many Arab governments is that "they talk about women's rights but in reality they don't exist".

Similarly, Hassan Al Hassany, an architecture student at the Canadian University of Dubai, said: "It is all about male domination. There is no Arab country in which a woman rules or leads as president or prime minister. This gives you a good impression that Arab feminism doesn't fit in the Arab world."

Pioneering change

Sa'ad has lived in Iraq, Jordan and now in the UAE, which she says is the most respectful of women's rights to education and work.

Yet working women in the Arab world is nothing new, Suad emphasised. "There have been women in the workplace since the 1940s in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon."

However, regarding Sa'ad's opinion about the UAE's social justice towards women, this could be in large part due to the initiatives of Her Highness Shaikha Fatima Bint Mubarak, Wife of the late Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan and Chairwoman of the UAE General Women's Union.

Shaikha Fatima pushed for Emirati women to excel in the development of their nation. Yet she does not regard herself as a feminist. She was once quoted as having said: "I see myself as being behind a great man and my role is limited to being a wife and mother to the sons of a great leader."

Islam and feminism

Continue reading: Gulf News: Feminism in the Arab world,Is the region ready to embrace it?

Arabic-language Internet is coming of age

2010-01-15T19:54:00.000-05:00

Yahoo's acquisition of Maktoob.com this year encourages start-ups and investors to work on online content and services for the world's 300 million Arabic speakers.
By Meris Lutz

Reporting from Beirut - When Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury started Maktoob.com as an Arabic e-mail service 10 years ago, they had a modest office in Amman, Jordan, and little support from friends and family who could not imagine anyone using the Internet in Arabic.

"We were a typical start-up; I remember the day we got air conditioning we had a party," Toukan recalled.

In August, Yahoo Inc. acquired Maktoob, now the largest Arabic portal, for a reported $80 million -- a milestone in the evolution of the Arabic Internet.

"When we started, there were barely a few thousand users," Toukan said. "Today we can say that the Internet has become a form of mass media with 50 to 60 million [Arabic speakers] online."

Though ubiquitous in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, the Internet has been slower to take hold in Arabic-speaking countries stymied by dictatorships, occupations and wars. Censorship, corruption, weak infrastructure and a scarcity of investors have also threatened to squash innovation and drive entrepreneurs away from the region.

Still, Arab start-ups are encouraged by the Yahoo-Maktoob deal. Investors seem to be taking notice as well, attracted by the relatively untapped market of some 300 million Arabic speakers who are increasingly logging on to the Internet but finding a dearth of content in their language.

The day after the Yahoo-Maktoob deal was announced, Habib Haddad, a Lebanese entrepreneur based in Boston, was contacted by four venture capital firms expressing interest in his transliterated Arabic search engine Yamli.

Yamli, which means "dictate" in Arabic, converts Latin letters into Arabic script. Queries can be entered in an alternative alphabet, made popular by mobile technology in the 1990s, of English letters with numbers and apostrophes standing in for Arabic letters that have no approximation in English. Search results include the keyword in Arabic or any possible English spelling.

For example, a search for Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum in Arabic using Google’s Arabic search engine returns only pages containing her name in Arabic characters.

The same search using Yamli yields results in Arabic and English, neatly divided into two columns, including alternative spellings such as "2om Klthoum." (The "2" represents the Arabic character hamza, which indicates a glottal stop.)

"This is an example of innovation based on local culture, local understanding and local language. It's not a variation of western technologies," Haddad said. Still, he added, "you can have the smartest search engine in the world, but if you don't have content, it's useless."

Content is growing -- in proportion to popular interest, in some cases. Wikeez, a gossip site in English and Arabic, saw a huge spike in traffic after the death of Michael Jackson. Although most users searched for the pop superstar's name in English, Herve Cuviliez, the French venture capitalist overseeing the site, saw a chance to corner the Arabic market.

"You had a huge number of people who were looking for information on him in Arabic, so we really worked to fill that gap," Cuviliez said.

In addition to running Wikeez, Cuviliez is coordinating with France-based Euratechnologies to open Beirut Media City in Lebanon. The venture would provide office space and a support network for emerging IT companies.

Many challenges still face Internet entrepreneurs in the Arabic-speaking world. Funding structures are weak, and foreign investors are wary. Many countries lack the basic infrastructure to support local e-commerce, including a reliable Internet connection for electronic payment systems and a functioning door-to-door postal service. Corruption is endemic, and most Arab governments censor not only content but also services -- such as Skype, a program for making calls online -- that threaten a state monopoly.

But some Arab entrepreneurs are adapting and even flourishing despite tight government controls.

Saleh Al-Ziad, a 24-year-old Saudi programmer, said he created the popular URL-conversion service Untiny after the Saudi government blocked URL-shrinking site TinyURL.com, reportedly for security reasons. When given a shrunken Web address, Untiny retrieves the original so users can access it.

This kind of resourcefulness piqued the interest of Web entrepreneur Joichi Ito, chief executive of Creative Commons. Ito, an early investor in Internet start-ups including the Flickr photo-sharing site, recently moved his base of operations from Japan to Dubai, an Arab emirate.

"There is a lot of ingenuity and creativity in a resource-constrained environment, and that . . . can be tapped," he said. "There are businesses that can be created here that people in the U.S. or Japan would never think of."

Lutz is a special correspondent.

Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo contributed to this report.

Source: LA Times: Arabic-language Internet is coming of age

Amira Bennison on Science and Islam

2010-01-12T07:29:00.001-05:00

Cambridge lecturer Dr Bennison says that the scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpinned a lot of things that happened in the European Renaissance, and that Muslim doctors were removing cataracts with hollow needles more than 1,000 years before Western physicians.

Your first choice is Ehsan Masood, Science and Islam.

This book dovetailed with a television programme of the same name last year and looks at different areas of science in which the Islamic world excelled. It uses the word ‘science’ in the medieval sense, including, for example, philosophy working from Aristotelian material. It all started in Baghdad, Iraq, with the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate in 750AD, and for about 200 years material was translated from Greek into Arabic. This was called The Translation Movement and it started slowly but was in full swing by about 800AD.

The Arabs particularly excelled at mathematics, and algebra is an Arab innovation from that time, created by the Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi (born in Baghdad in 780AD). He also developed the Hindu-Arabic numerical system which is used around the world today and includes the concept of zero which was unknown in Roman mathematics. Al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) in Baghdad. The House of Wisdom acquired and translated scientific and philosophic treatises, particularly Greek, as well as publishing original research.

They were also good at geography and astronomy. They weren’t just translating material and leaving it at that – they then had their own ideas, for example to prove Ptolemy wrong. They were brilliant at maps and calculated the circumference of the earth almost exactly in the 9th century – they knew it was a sphere.

Who did?

The Banu Musa brothers in 830AD. They were courtiers of the caliphate but also scientists and patrons themselves. There were three brothers: Jafar Muhammad ibn Musa ibn Shakir, Ahmad ibn Musa ibn Shakir and al-Hasan ibn Musa ibn Shakir. The Banu Musa brothers were among the first group of mathematicians to begin to carry forward the mathematical developments begun by the ancient Greeks.

Nearly 50 years before, in 786, not long after the father of the Banu Musa brothers, Musa ibn Shakir, was born, Harun al-Rashid became the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty. Harun ruled from his court in Baghdad over the whole Islamic empire, which stretched from the Mediterranean to India. He tried to establish the intellectual disciplines – an example of this change is seen in the life of Musa ibn Shakir, who was a robber in his youth but then turned to astronomy.

The next caliph, al-Ma’mun, continued the patronage of learning started by his father. Musa ibn Shakir had become a friend and when he died al-Ma’mun became guardian to his sons. The brothers were given the best education in Baghdad, studying geometry, mechanics, music, mathematics and astronomy. Al-Ma’mun built up a library of manuscripts, collecting important works from Byzantium. In addition to the House of Wisdom, he set up observatories in which Muslim astronomers could build on the knowledge acquired by earlier peoples.

In astronomy the brothers made many contributions. They were instructed by al-Ma’mun to measure a degree of latitude and they made their measurements in the desert in northern Mesopotamia. They also made many observations of the sun and the moon from Baghdad. Muhammad and Ahmad measured the length of the year, obtaining the value of 365 days and 6 hours. Observations of the star Regulus were made by the three brothers from their house on a bridge in Baghdad in 840-41, 847-48, and 850-51.

Then there was al-Sarabi, the first Arab philosopher who engaged with translated material, almost certainly Plato’s Republic. With the Translation Movement it’s often tempting to assume people were simply absorbing the translated material, but they were genuinely engaging with it, often disproving what came before.

The book includes a chapter entitled ‘Beyond The Abbasids’, demonstrating that science didn’t die a completely natural death at the end of the Abbasid era. The author does looks at the contemporary myth of Islam being backward and not promoting scientific thought or independent thought of any kind – the idea that Islam is very tradition-bound. People tend to extrapolate from that that there is a contradiction between Islam and science. This attitude is also a product of the enlightenment in Europe, a product of a Christian context not a Muslim one. In the enlightenment the idea did develop that there was this conflict between faith and reason and that you couldn’t really have the two side by side. Obviously that’s an ongoing debate – how do you reconcile faith and science? That kind of discussion is part of a product of the imperial age, where the Islamic world was seen as stagnant and backward.

What about your second book, George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance?

This again stresses that it’s not just that the Arabs were so nice for translating and preserving a lot of ancient Greek texts, but that there was a great deal of selectivity in the translations and a lot of building on what had been translated. The thriving scientific tradition in the Islamic world underpins a lot of things that happen in the European Renaissance.

So, all these Greek texts were translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries and then translated back into European languages again in the 12th century European Renaissance?

Continue reading The Browser: Amira Bennison on Science and Islam

Early Islamic Medicine by Jonathan Lyons

2010-01-10T13:12:00.001-05:00

When the Western European army of the cross brought the First Crusade to the Holy Land in 1096, the Arabs of the Near East were less impressed by the army’s religious zeal than they were appalled by its stench. The disease-ridden body of the Christian host included true believers and righteous folk but also, according to the report of the medieval chronicler Albert of Aix in his Historia Hierosolymita, “adulterers, homicides, thieves, perjurers, and robbers.” Few had any learning at all. Ignorant of even the rudiments of science, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and sanitation, they knew nothing of the workings of that prince of medieval scientific devices, the astrolabe, which captured the movements of the three-dimensional universe on its bronze faceplate; as a result, they could not even date their most important religious holiday, Easter, nor accurately tell the time of day.

Celestial phenomena—shooting stars, ball lightning, an eclipse of the sun—terrified them. Their forebears had long since lost the ability to read Greek, thus breaking off intellectual relations with the learning of antiquity. Education had all but collapsed, save for a handful of cathedral schools clinging to innovations introduced three hundred years earlier under Charlemagne. The scholar-monks at the West’s leading center of mathematical studies, the cathedral school of Laon, had no grasp of the meaning or use of zero.

Among the greatest affront to Arab sensibilities was the Crusaders’ complete disregard for personal hygiene. Their most noble knights boasted of bathing no more than four times a year; their diet consisted largely of monotonous rations of gruel and whatever else they could forage en route; medical care frequently involved exorcism or the amputation of afflicted limbs. When the Black Death struck Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, it unleashed social chaos. With no real notion of contagion or hygiene, one-third of the population died without knowing why. The mass casualties induced a frenzy of violence, typified by the burning of Jews suspected of having induced the disease through witchcraft.

The Book of Instruction, an informative memoir by the Syrian princeling Usama ibn Munqidh, who came to know the Crusaders in battle and in repose, records two instances in which a local physician’s sound advice was ignored in favor of Christian methodologies. In the first, the Franks simply lopped off a knight’s mildly infected leg with an axe; in the second, they carved a cross into an ill woman’s skull before rubbing it with salt. Both patients died on the spot, at which point the Arab doctor asked, “‘Do you need anything else from me?’ ‘No,’ they said. And so I left, having learned about their medicine things I had never known before.”

For six centuries the authoritative works of St. Augustine of Hippo had directed the Christian faithful to see only God’s mystery in an otherwise unknowable world.

Continue reading Lapham's Quarterly: Early Islamic Medicine

Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

2010-01-10T12:49:00.001-05:00

Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre and a Faculty Fellow and University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East at Oxford University. His research focuses on the social and economic history of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab states in the 20th century. His most recent book, The Arabs: A History, came out in 2009 to widespread media attention, not least because it offered historical insight into why US efforts to promote democracy in the region have been met with such suspicion.

You’ve started with a travel account from the early 19th century, John Lewis Burckhardt’s Travel in Syria and the Holy Land. Why this book?

Burckhardt really was the original Lawrence of Arabia, the Westerner who goes out to the Middle East, studies Arabic, dresses in the local fashion, and travels right through the Arab world. And he came away with a depth of understanding about the people among whom he travelled that was just unsurpassed in its day. Burckhardt was actually preparing himself not to be an Orientalist and Middle Eastern traveller, but to go and try to find the sources of various African rivers – he was fascinated by the origins of the Niger river. He was preparing himself to go into Central Africa but he never actually made it – he went up the Nile and made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and then came back to Cairo, where he got ill and died in 1817. So he never fulfilled the objective for which he was learning the language and travelling through the region. But in the process he left behind a couple of fantastic books. One was his travel book, Travel in Syria and the Holy Land, and the other one was a study of the Wahabis in Arabia, from the time of his pilgrimage to Mecca.

And of all the things he describes, what really sticks in your mind?

He is most famous for being the first Westerner to see the Nabatean ruins in Petra. He had discerned that the lost city of Petra might correspond to some places the Bedouin were talking about, and he finally persuaded some of them to lead him there. The Bedouin were very suspicious of anybody trying to visit ruins and old sites, thinking they were seeking gold or treasure or that they might be necromancers: Burckhardt was often suspected of raising the dead, because of his interest in travelling among ruins. And so his is a very quickly sketched description of Petra, because his guides took him to see it, showed him the place and then quickly frogmarched him out again. But I think that stands as one of the most famous passages in his travels. For me, what’s interesting are the reflections on the Arab societies in which he moved: this is someone who could talk to the people, who really came to grips with the politics of the local society. There’s a sophistication of knowledge and engagement that came from travelling, from living among people for a long time, from speaking their language, which makes him stand out above many of the other Western travellers of his generation.

So your next choice is al-Tahtawi’s An Imam in Paris, which was one of the most influential books in Arabic of the 19th century. What can you tell me about this book?

Al-Tahtawi was sent by the ruler of Egypt as the chaplain of an educational mission to France. The aim of the mission was to train young Egyptians in the languages and the arts and the sciences that had made Europe so strong in that first quarter of the 19th century. And he was a very insightful observer, who presents us with a pretty unique example of an Arab or Muslim traveller describing the manners and customs of an exotic people: in this case the French. He was very curious and he wasn’t particularly judgmental. So he went with an open mind and wide open eyes. He was fascinated by the relations between men and women, by how they dressed, by how they worked, by the way they decorated their homes and even how they set their tables. There are wonderfully vivid descriptions of all these things, which were so different from the way in which society worked in his native Egypt. He was also very interested in the way the politics of French society worked; he was fascinated by constitutional government, the idea that there could be rules that applied on rulers as well as on subjects. And he’s the first person to introduce the idea of a newspaper to the Arab world. At the time, in the 1820s, there were no newspapers in Arabic. He’s the first one to describe how they worked, how they allow accountability, how people’s actions can be put under scrutiny, and how anybody, whatever their standing in life, was able to write for these things called newspapers. The book was a bestseller from the moment it was published in Arabic. It was instantly translated into Turkish, so it reached the Ottoman world at large, and really is more responsible than any other book, in the first half of the 19th century, for setting reformist debates in Ottoman and Arab society. But it’s also just a great read – a fascinating, fantastic book, and there’s a wonderful new translation of it [by Daniel Newman].

On to One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate by Tom Segev. What does that mean, One Palestine, Complete?

It was a mock receipt for the handover between high commissioners in Palestine: the one handing on to his successor ‘one Palestine, complete’, in the same way someone handing over a battleship might give it into the hands of the next commander, itemising all aspects of the battleship. So it’s very much a reflection of a British notion of their responsibilities as commanders of this colony or ship. But the irony of it is, of course, that Palestine was made, by the British, into a twice-contested land: between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish Zionist immigrants. It was a country slated for partition. Arabs and Jews in Palestine were taking Palestine in the direction of a divided land, not ‘one Palestine, complete’. But, actually, Segev doesn’t dwell on that irony at any length. Instead, what he gives us is a very human history about the encounter between British imperial rulers, the indigenous Arab people and the Jewish immigrants in the inter-war years, when Palestine was created as a British mandate. The book is very richly peopled – these vivid characters from all three communities – and Segev tracks the way they didn’t live in isolation from one another, but interacted and were shaped by each other. It’s a book full of startling challenges to assumed wisdoms and borrowed wisdoms.

For example?

My favourite is his description of the Hebron Riots in 1929. This is an instance where growing tension between Arab and Jewish communities led to violence where Arabs attacked Jewish places of worship. They attacked the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and that set off a wave of attacks of other areas where there were Jewish communities in Hebron. As I recall, around 69 people were killed by Arab rioters, and it’s always portrayed as an instance of Arab intolerance towards the Jewish community in their midst, evidence of a genocidal streak. But what you get from reading Segev, is that what saved the Jewish community in Hebron from a much worse massacre was the fact that so many Arabs took in their Jewish neighbours to protect them. And, in this way, what could have been an elimination of the Jewish community in Hebron, led instead to two or three score people being killed rather than hundreds. I’d never read that anywhere else and I just think that this is a great example of how powerful a well-written book can be, for challenging people’s pre-conceptions.

Segev also gives us the very best portrait of Chaim Weizmann who was the Zionist diplomat responsible for the Balfour Declaration. He explains how Weizmann was able to leverage European misconceptions about international Jewry: he really played on their belief that he was the head of a kind of diaspora nation that he was in direct communication with, that they were organised and a force. The reality, as Segev points out, is that Weizmann was a guy in a small flat off Piccadilly, whose office was the suitcase of letters that he kept under his bed. There wasn’t more to him than that. But he was able to present himself and gain access to the very highest levels of British policymakers, and in this way shaped their views, so that they would come around to declaring British policy in favour of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.

So Jewish stereotypes played in Weizmann’s favour?

There was always this notion among anti-Semites in Europe that there was a kind of Jewish International. And for some, this meant Jews were in some way seeking to dominate or control the economy or world politics. And Weizmann never fought that. He let people continue to work on such false assumptions and then presented himself as the head of the world Zionist organisation, as someone who was almost of head of state status; somebody who represented the interests of a lot of powerful, wealthy, influential Jews around the world. And he really wasn’t that. So it’s a book full of very rich and cliché-overturning anecdotes, told in a very lively and engaging way.

Your next book is Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War.

Fisk writes the most compassionate and engaging prose about his own experiences in Lebanon. As a journalist he seems to get underneath the skin of that society better than just about anyone I know. And it’s a book I relate to very personally, having lived for five years in Lebanon and having been forced to leave the country because of the outbreak of the civil war. So I felt very close to his subject. Fisk, of course, stayed through the very worst days of the conflict, when any rat worth his skin was going to get on a ship and get out of Lebanon. And so he wrote the story of the horrors that he saw in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, and I think it probably stands as the best example of a book of political journalism of conflict in the Middle East that I can think of. He just writes like an angel.

What insights does it offer into the conflict?

The central dilemma for Fisk is the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in the fall of 1982. He begins the book by going to talk to Holocaust survivors, and he’s trying to come to grips with how it was possible for a Jewish state, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to be party to a massacre that was so exterminationist in its nature. The Israelis did not kill Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, but they surrounded the camps and allowed their Maronite allies into them. The book is not in any sense a gratuitous swipe against the Israelis, because the Israeli public was also deeply appalled by the violence done in the camps, and one-tenth of the population of Israel actually took to the streets to protest, and the Israeli Supreme Court convened a commission of inquiry that was to find a number of government officials responsible to different degrees for that mass murder.

He is also trying to understand how a society divided by its own feuds or – worse than feuds – by genocidal warfare, how the Maronites, the Palestinians and the different militias can get to that point of brutality.

The other story in Fisk’s book is the kidnapping of Westerners, part of the emergence of a new Shiite power called Hezbollah, which fought its war against outside domination with very unconventional means. That started with the advent of suicide bombing and then went through the taking of hostages as a political bargaining chip. His friend Terry Anderson, the AP journalist, was not released by the time this edition came out. That too is one of the big stories that sticks in your mind after you’ve read the book.

Given our broader topic is the Arabs, does Fisk’s book say anything that is relevant when you look at other countries in the region?

Lebanon was not unique in facing civil conflict. There was Algeria in the 1990s where the cancellation of a parliamentary election led to a massive civil war. The longest civil war in the region is in the Sudan, and if we think more recently to what’s been going on in Iraq since its 2003 invasion, there are a number of examples of internecine conflicts that reached the degree of violence that Lebanon knew, and much worse.

I think the other thing about the broader Arab story is how many Arab countries are playing out their inter-Arab rivalries through the Lebanese conflict. You see Syria had a very strong position there; Iraqis opposed Syria’s involvement in Lebanon and didn’t want to compromise, and the Saudis were backing some groups. In some sense Lebanon was going to become a microcosm of broader regional conflicts too. All that is very much captured in Fisk’s book.

A lot of your choices seem to focus on personal narratives – it’s very much about firsthand accounts, what people are going through, rather than broad impersonal histories…

I find that this human interaction in history is what really hooks me, and it makes history much more immediate to readers generally. Though my fifth book is going to be in some ways the most impersonal and broad-sweeping of the lot. There’s an exception to every rule.

This is Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples?

Yes. Though, actually, Hourani begins with a person too: Ibn Khaldun, the great Arab father of sociology, the 14th-century Arab intellectual. Khaldun wrote a very serious history about the rise and fall of empires which saw the driving energy of Arab history as coming from the desert. The power of the tribes from the desert conquers the towns and establishes itself as dominant power, and then, in the course of generations, loses its martial ardour, and becomes shaped by the refinement and culture of city life. So in the end it is no longer strong enough to defend itself against the next wave of ardour coming from the desert that will challenge the political order in the now effete city and impose a new political order. He sees the rise and fall of empires in Arab classical history as in a sense shaped by this cyclical pattern.

He also sees the loyalties of Arabs being shaped by a force called asabiya. This is the notion that your loyalties belong to those you know best. So it’ll be me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, us and our cousin against the next family over, us and our neighbours against the next town over, us and our villages against those in another province – this notion of social cohesion that grows more diffuse the larger the unit. Khaldun sees asabiya as being one of the driving forces of Arab history.

And Hourani picked up on Khaldun’s cyclical notion of the rise and fall of Arab empires, and these almost Weberian notions of loyalty, as the key themes with which to weave a history of the Arab peoples – critically he speaks in the plural. He sees the Arabs as being many peoples and one people at the same time, and his history traces the Arab world from the rise of Islam to modern times, and does so with an elegant conciseness that allows him to cover that huge sweep of 14 centuries in about 500-600 pages.

Hourani is in many ways the most respected modern historian of the Arab world. He made his career here in Oxford – he was the founding father of the Middle East centre where I work – and when I met him as a graduate student, the awe and reverence with which I approached the great man was, I’m sure, pretty funny to him. But he was a delightful man. When I came to take my appointment to Oxford in 1991 I had two years of seeing him before he died. I keep being described as disciple of Hourani, or a student of Hourani, and I was neither of those things. I never got a chance to study under Albert, though I would have loved to. But I always wanted to write a book like Albert Hourani did. I always felt very much in awe of his scholarship and his depth of knowledge and erudition. And, in a sense, all of those great qualities were brought to bear in his last great work, A History of the Arab Peoples.

Given how much has been written about Arabs, why did you decide to write your own book, The Arabs: A History?

After 9/11 there was a feeling that terrorism posed a threat to our way of life. And I wanted to give some insight into the fact that in the Arab world there was also a feeling that we posed a threat to their way of life. There is a long and deep history for that Arab perception of the West. So I wanted, in a way, to balance our understanding of a region which we are ever more engaged with – sending hundreds of thousands of troops and ruling these places.

I also wanted to present a modern history from modern Arab sources. I’m not an Arab, but I can introduce some of those sources that are less well known in the West. Hourani was at his briefest writing about the 19th and 20th centuries; he had only brief coverage of those centuries, whereas I am a modern historian.

Also, I thought a history was needed that integrated the end of the Cold War. Most Arab histories, like Albert’s, were written in the 1980s. But younger readers don’t relate to the Cold War; it’s ancient history to them. When you talk to students now about the Cold War, you might as well be talking about the English Civil War.

Interview conducted by Sophie Roell

Source: The Browser Eugene Rogan on 'The Arabs'

Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia

2010-01-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

Few collections of folk tales and folk poetry from medieval Anatolia have been translated into English. Thanks to Professor Talat Halman, a new book has recently been published that provides examples of both. According to Halman, the material came from books, anthologies, and special publications, as well as story-telling sessions in rural areas
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”

Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”

Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.

The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.

Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.

The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.

One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.

In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.

Folk tales in modern times

Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.

Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.

Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.

The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry

In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.

Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia

Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?

2010-01-09T11:30:00.000-05:00

The narrator of Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s largely autobiographical second novel moves from the countryside to Cairo in search of basic wages and literary accomplishment, Ursula Lindsay writes.

A Dog with No Tail
Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
American University in Cairo Press
Dh84

Migration from the countryside to the capital – leaving a traditional way of life behind and heading to the big city, lured by the promise of a slightly better life – is a common, fundamental experience for many in today’s Global South. So too is the dislocation and precariousness of life as a new member of the disregarded urban underclass. This is particularly true in Egypt, where in the last half-century rural migrants have helped quadruple Cairo’s population to its current 18 million mark. The city’s new residents jostle for space in its densely packed neighbourhoods, where despite a buzz of opportunity they struggle to find homes and jobs, and to make sense of their journeys.

In his darkly funny, deceptively casual and largely autobiographical second novel, the Egyptian author Hamdi Abu Golayyel writes of coming to the capital from one of the many villages where urban migration is a rite of passage, an expected step “once a man has developed the beginnings of a moustache and a sense of self-worth”. And yet, Abu Golayyel tells us, he and his friends “would walk the streets of Cairo but as sons of another, distant, country, to which we awaited the chance to return”.

The distant country is Abu Tahoun, a Bedouin village in the Fayoum oasis; Abu Golayyel’s ancestors were bribed and coerced into settling there sometime in the early nineteenth century by the ruler Muhammad Ali, who hoped to “bring to an end their peregrinations and interminable raids against the granaries and villages of the peasants”. Men like Abu Golayyel’s grandfather Aula – a brawler and a cattle thief who took an insouciant attitude to the officials and rules of the modern state – were the last of their generation. Today, Abu Golayyel tells us, his relatives are “nonentities almost to a man”, living in a village that is “wounded: poor and tiny, set far from the highway and the market and fresh water, and surrounded on every side by the desert.” And yet this village, he writes “is always on my mind”, “the only place where I move free from fear”.

In his first novel, the social satire Thieves in Retirement (2006), Abu Gollayel painted life in the vast, new Cairo slums as an unpredictable, apolitical, amoral free-for-all, a world of casual violence and consistent hypocrisy. A Dog with No Tail is another chronicle of the author’s double alienation – as a member of a community still at odds with the state, and as a new urban migrant. But it is more introspective than Abu Gollayel’s debut: concerned less with understanding others and more with coming to terms with one’s own origins and aspirations.

Starting when he was a teenager, Abu Golayyel began travelling regularly to Cairo to work with construction crews, tearing down, renovating or expanding the tottering residential buildings of the city’s more populous neighbourhoods. This manual labour was a source of both satisfaction – “a struggle between a man and his strength” – and shame, particularly since Abu Golayyel harboured the improbable ambition of becoming a writer. On his visits home, he writes: “I tried my best to convince people that I was, in fact, a pilot in Cairo. For the entire holiday I would assume the mantle of village intellectual. Rising late, towel slung over my shoulder, I would make my way down to the canal bank, with my toothbrush and toothpaste – the proofs of cultivation, culture, and an upwards social trajectory – borne aloft.”

Yet in the years spent lugging sacks of cement, smashing walls, pouring foundations and sleeping in empty buildings at night – building the residences of others without a home to call his own – Abu Golayyel found both material and metaphor. The novel’s resonant title in Arabic, Al Fa’il, is derived from the verb “to do”. It means “the doer”, “the actor” or, used as an adjective, “the efficacious, efficient”. In a grammatical sense, it means “the subject” – but in common parlance the world simply means “the labourer”. The English title is derived from a quip in the story, and works well enough. But the original Arabic title is particularly fitting for a book about the unstable edifice that is identity and the constant act of construction that is writing.

Abu Golayyel alternates his account of his life as a construction worker with stories from his years as an indifferent and intermittent university student, anecdotes about his friends and colleagues in Cairo, and lore from his grandfather’s seemingly more adventurous times. Along the way, he employs the whole bag of postmodern tricks, which have become widespread among contemporary Arab authors. The short stories are told out of chronological order, interrupted, revisited and retold with new details. They take off, midway, in unexpected directions; sometimes they end abruptly, like conversations cut short. There are unexplained gaps and contradictions; the self-referential narrator asserts in the opening pages that he’s no good with beginnings, interrupts his own story to chide himself for his digressions, and tells us in the end that things haven’t turned out the way he wanted.

Yet the reader doesn’t feel like the victim of a wry experiment. There is humour and action in almost every story. The spring behind Abu Golayyel’s writing, the author told an audience at the book’s recent launch in Cairo, is “amazement at what happens to me”, and arresting details are to be found in all his stories, even those about the mundane details of construction work. We learn that 50 Egyptian Pounds (Dh34, US$10) was a generous payment for a man to single-handedly carry 8,400 kilograms – that’s eight tons – of sand up a seven-storey building in one day; a feat the narrator considers “a miracle to this day”. Elsewhere, Abu Golayyel creates dramatic set pieces – an insurrection led by Islamist students at his university; his grandfather’s raids and tussles with the law – and highlights the bizarre: a college named after the bordello next door; an amateur prostitution ring run out of a parking garage; a landlord who eavesdrops so aggressively he falls into tenants’ rooms when they open their doors.

Continue reading The National: Book review: ‘Why did you leave the village?

The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world

2010-01-01T21:54:00.001-05:00

Like most ideas, this one did not have a single genesis. I’ve been thinking, and to some extent writing, about feminism for many years and in many guises.

The word itself is controversial, with some damning it as the force that destroyed the family and others defending it as the movement that freed a gender.

It is one of those terms that starts simply and rapidly gets tangled: if you look around the world and think there are inequalities between the genders, and that those inequalities are not biological and are unfair, you are probably a feminist. And that’s where the arguments begin.

But definitions are only useful for what they illuminate, and the language of feminism, like the languages of democracy or freedom, has often been used to obscure.

So much of the discourse around the West’s relationship with the Muslim world has been framed through the language of women.

It was around women that early Christian Europe framed its opposition to the pleasure palaces of the “Mohammedans”, the barely disguised yearning for the exoticism of the Orient. The role of women in Egyptian society was cited by Napoleon as a wedge through which to enter the country; was cited again as a justification for the Anglo-American invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and is regularly cited as apparent evidence of a lack of commitment to equal rights in Muslim communities.

Within the Muslim world, discourse around women’s roles and rights remains highly charged. As much as some point to the treatment of women in Europe as evidence of the vanishing of the West’s moral compass, it is also the case that, across much of the Muslim world, women’s dress has become a way to impose a religious vision upon the society, even as Muslim women use the veil to reclaim their own identities.

And, still, in too many countries, internal social and cultural wars are fought on the battleground of women’s bodies.

So the question of what counts as feminism, as liberation, in the Arab and Islamic worlds is complicated and intricate. To try and answer it, I am leaving London next week for Beirut, the first stop on a journey that will take me thousands of kilometres across Arab and Islamic lands, through Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and to the very edges of Indonesia.

Through interviews, experiences and research, I hope to come close to an answer, and I’ve been immensely privileged to be awarded a Churchill Fellowship, the living memorial to Britain’s wartime leader, to fund this exploration.

What do I hope to find? Not easy answers, for sure. Even the idea of what counts as liberation is mixed.

I have called the introductory chapter of the book I am writing about this journey “The caged and the saved”, reflecting the two ways people think of what the Muslim veil does.

In it, I tell an anecdote of encountering these contrasting attitudes in real life, when, walking around London with a friend, she asked me, of a woman wearing a Saudi abaya, “How can she think she is liberated when she dresses like that?” It occurred to me another woman might ask the same question about the women around her displaying acres of flesh.

Nor is there a clear dividing line between political and religious perspectives. Earlier this year in Morocco I interviewed Nadia Yassine, of the banned Islamist group Al Adl wal Ihsane. As much as she spoke the language of women’s rights and of female liberation, she was reluctant to be pigeonholed as a feminist in the western understanding of the term. Her perspective, she said, stemmed from her faith. The imam and the activist can sometimes reach the same conclusions.

Within the Muslim world, as within the West, the idea of what feminism is, where it comes from, how relevant it is, what form equality ought to take are real, live debates. They come to us in snatches: harassment of women on the streets of Cairo, the wearing of trousers in Sudan, unsegregated university campuses in Saudi Arabia, the burning of girls’ schools in Pakistan.

And threaded through these snatches are less-regular glimpses of clear successes: the leadership of women such as Queen Rania, Benazir Bhutto and Lubna Olayan. And there is the immense lived experience of millions of women, who assert their own independence daily through their work, relationships, devotion to their family and faith.

The Arab and Islamic worlds are going through a period of immense change and the ideology that holds nations and regions together is altering. The big –isms of the world – nationalism, capitalism, Islamism – affect women in each country differently.

The outward symbols of faith are obvious illustrations of this, but the framework of the society is equally important.

The professor in Tehran and the village-woman in Indonesia will not only dress differently, they may also have different conceptions of the relationship between men and women. I expect to meet those who espouse feminism from a purely secular perspective, and those who say that Islam has provided a clear manifesto for women’s rights.

So I am not setting out with preconceived notions. I don’t begin from the assumption that one way of living is better than another, nor do I go in with the assumption that what occurs to one person in one country is indicative of a nation or a faith. But I do think it is possible to delineate between ways of organising a society: that if you look closely enough at a society’s history and people, it is possible to make fine, sensitive judgements. Though I expect differences, I also hope for some common ground.

The Arab world is a complex place; nations of Arabic speakers who think they are one but act like they are many. It is a place that defies easy categorisation.

I have lived, travelled and reported across many Arab countries over many years, but there are still times when I come across something – an event, a conversation – that makes me think I have barely scratched the surface.

Such has been the case with my conversations about feminism: I’ve often understood the word in terms of equality of laws, education and employment. But it is astonishing how varied people’s perceptions are around the Middle East.

If that is the case with the Arab world, with all its many commonalities, imagine the complexity of the Islamic worlds that stretch across Asia and Africa. That’s the reason I have broadened the journey out to encompass the vast non-Arab Islamic world: the Shia customs of Iran, the South Asian experience in Pakistan and the newer Asian traditions in Indonesia.

The exploration of these places will be a key theme, because no idea lives in isolation; all are shaped by the experience of their societies. I want to go beyond a purely intellectual discussion to understand the lived experiences of women in these societies.

I admit there have been times these last few weeks, as I prepare to leave London and skim through old books on the subject, that I have wondered if it is perhaps an overwhelming one. I have been incredibly lucky so far to have friends and colleagues who have helped me get started – I know I will meet many more over the next few months. What I don’t know is if I will find any answers, or even if there are any: that’s why I am going.

Follow Faisal al Yafai’s journey at faisalalyafai.com. His book will be published by IB Tauris in 2011.

Source: The National 'The caged and the saved: finding feminism in the Islamic world'

Twelve months

2010-01-01T21:51:00.001-05:00

Elias Muhanna reviews a year of realignments in Middle Eastern politics.

The year 2009 began with the Middle East ablaze. On January 1, for the fifth day running, Israeli jets continued to pummel Gaza in advance of a ground invasion that produced over 1,000 Palestinian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. The war’s effects rippled across the region in an all too familiar way: suicide bombers in Iraq targeted groups of civilians protesting the Gaza invasion, while America’s allies in the region criticised Hamas for provoking the onslaught. Meanwhile, Iran castigated Egypt for collaborating with the enemy and Syria called off its peace negotiations with Israel. The region had slipped back into the trenches of its Cold War, in which a single Katyusha could trigger a massive military response and an international diplomatic crisis.

A year later, the atmosphere in the region is markedly different. Bitter rivals have visited each other’s capitals to mend fences and the media is full of reports about a new age of reconciliation and diplomatic engagement. Following the turmoil of the previous five years, which witnessed a series of proxy wars between the Western-supported Sunni Arab regimes and the axis consisting of Iran, Syria, and their non-state allies (Hamas and Hizbollah), the relative calm that prevailed in 2009 was just one of many signs that a realignment of interests had begun to take shape.

The reasons for this realignment stem from two basic uncertainties. On the one hand, there is a question mark about the effects of a new – and still seemingly undefined – American policy for the region. Indeed, as disruptive as the neoconservative experiment was to Arab power dynamics, the presence of a new administration in Washington with a different outlook and a different set of priorities has forced the region to reorganise itself once again. On the other hand, Iran’s growing influence and the concomitant challenges to its regime’s authority have further muddied the waters, as its allies and adversaries try to gauge the health and durability of the Islamic Republic on its 30th anniversary. When these two unknown variables are combined, in attempts to assess shifting American policy toward the volatile regional heavyweight, the tea leaves become all the more difficult to read.

While the entire world may have caught a whiff of the sense of optimism and renewal that swept through the United States in January, the Middle East surely felt its impact in an even bigger way. The Arabs heralded Obama’s election as though he were one of their own, laying claim to his Muslim ancestry and Arabic name, and holding out hope that his administration would bring about a major reorientation of America’s diplomatic posture in the Middle East. These hopes crested in early June, when Obama delivered his famous address to the Muslim world from Cairo. Following the speech, he was lionised for weeks by the Arab press, with some commentators going so far as to claim that it was Obama’s influence that led the March 14 coalition to victory in the Lebanese parliamentary elections and ushered the Iranian Green Movement into the streets of Tehran.

A gross overstatement, to be certain. But there was no mistaking the new American approach, from Obama’s much-discussed Persian New Year greetings, to his “Day One” strategy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli peace process, which had lain dormant for seven years under Bush. At the same time, however, the inchoate character of this new policy meant that while many of the old battle lines had been rubbed out, the new ones had yet to emerge. The result: a sea of uncertainty and bet-hedging, as the region’s political elite shifted their foreign policies into neutral – if not yet into reverse.

Nowhere was this sense of ambivalence more evident than in Lebanon, always a trusty barometer of regional political dynamics. A historic parliamentary election resulted in a repeat victory for the pro-American majority and a surprise defeat for the Iran and Syria-backed opposition. However, rather than leveraging the win into an effort to curtail Hezbollah’s military capabilities – once a central plank of the March 14 agenda – the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, spent four months putting together a national unity government that gave his former political opponents a large share of power.

This accommodation was virtually mandated by a larger rapprochement between Lebanon’s two principal foreign sponsors, Saudi Arabia and Syria, whose leaders also buried the hatchet in 2009 after four years of deep hostility and proxy warfare. As the Obama White House signalled its openness to re-establishing diplomatic relations with Syria, the Saudis silenced their media attacks on Damascus and began to explore ways in which to woo Bashar al Assad away from the encroaching influence of Iran.

Indeed, the “Iranian question” looms large in the new calculus of Arab reconciliation. As America has shifted its attention from the Gulf to Afghanistan, Iraq’s neighbours have found increased latitude to shape the occupation’s aftermath. Their main concern has been to check Iran’s influence over the Shiite-dominated government, empowering Sunni factions to provide a counterbalance thereto. Washington’s determination to deal with Tehran through engagement rather than coercion has fuelled Arab suspicion that Obama sees an expanded Iranian sphere of influence as an acceptable price to pay in the larger calculations about America’s global strategy.

Continue reading The National: Twelve months

Coming of age

2009-12-29T14:04:00.000-05:00

Hamas, which recently celebrated its 22nd birthday, has grown up quite quickly: what began as a clandestine group of activists determined to form an Islamic resistance movement out of a previously quiescent Muslim Brotherhood is now a governing party in Gaza and a major focus of international attention. But having achieved such success, the movement’s leaders now find themselves confronted with difficult choices about their priorities. Hamas’s leaders have promised their followers that they can resist Israel, govern Gaza and reform Palestinian society along Islamic lines. But those goals increasingly pull the movement in very different directions. Since its startling triumph in Palestine’s January 2006 elections and especially since its seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007, Hamas is showing signs of strain over which path to emphasise.

One set of goals emphasises the group’s Islamist agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood, since its founding in Egypt 80 years ago, has always emphasised reforming the individual and society according to Islamic dictates. For many years, Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood emphasised personal and social reform at the expense of politics and the national struggle; Palestine could be liberated, they held, only after it had become more thoroughly Islamic. Hamas was founded by Brotherhood activists frustrated with such passivity and tired of being taunted by secular Palestinian nationalists who accused the Islamists of contributing nothing to the liberation struggle. The founders of Hamas insisted that there was no need to postpone resistance: they could take direct action against the Israeli occupation while pursuing the Islamisation of Palestinian society.

Yet since it won the 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas has given mixed signals regarding its Islamic agenda. Religious issues were deliberately played down in the electoral campaign, and the group did not use its parliamentary majority to rush through any religiously-inspired education. It kept the existing school curriculum, moving only to modestly expand the classroom time devoted to religious instruction. But since its seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007, some movement activists have become impatient: they seek to use the movement’s dominant political position to bring Palestine’s legal framework and public life in line with Islamic values and teachings. Some of their efforts – such as the formation of a morality police – have received international attention, but much has taken place on a grass-roots level.

A second path for Hamas emphasises resistance – literally the movement’s middle name (Hamas is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement). Hamas was born in an effort to participate in what Palestinians term their “revolution”. While a latecomer to armed action, Hamas emerged from the Oslo process as the most prominent movement dedicated to continued resistance. Even during the second intifada, when other movements (including parts of Fatah) returned to violent activity, Hamas still stood at the vanguard of Palestinian resistance to Israel.

Yet as with its Islamist agenda, Hamas’s pursuit of resistance has been uneven for the past three years. From March 2006, when it formed the Palestinian Authority cabinet, until June 2007, when the Palestinian Authority split in two (with Hamas controlling only the Gaza half), Hamas came under enormous international pressure to renounce violence. It responded with a half-measure: while it completely rejected the international calls in theory, in practice it held its own activities to a minimum. Since June 2007, this pattern has actually become more pronounced. Hamas has generally sought a ceasefire with Israel while disavowing any intention of reaching a permanent settlement or disarming. It has, of course, fired rockets from Gaza – but with the declared aim of securing a ceasefire on more favourable terms. And when an indirectly negotiated ceasefire prevailed, Hamas largely observed it; not only that, the movement enforced other factions’ observance.

Continue reading The National: Coming of age

Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border

2009-12-10T09:39:00.002-05:00

Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned.

When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.

The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.

The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.

The wall will take 18 months to complete.

For weeks local farmers have noticed more activity at the border where trees were being cut down, but very few of them were aware that a barrier was being built.

'Impenetrable'

That is because the barrier, made of super-strength steel, has been hidden deep underground.

The BBC has been told that it was manufactured in the US, that it fits together in similar fashion to a jigsaw, and that it has been tested to ensure it is bomb proof.

When we get a political solution, there will be no need for tunnels. I don't think this new wall will affect the smuggling, we are talking about thousands of tunnels
Abed Elrahman al-Assouli, Khan Younis, Gaza

Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views

It cannot be cut or melted - in short it is impenetrable.

Intelligence sources in Egypt say the barrier is being sunk close to the perimeter wall that already exists.

They claim 4km of the wall has already been completed north of the Rafah crossing, with work now beginning to the south.

The land beneath Egypt and Gaza resembles a Swiss cheese, full of holes and tunnels through which the Palestinians smuggle the everyday items they are denied by the blockade.

But the Israelis say the tunnels are also used to smuggle people, weapons, and the components of the rockets that are fired at southern Israeli towns.

The wall is not expected to stop all the smuggling, but it will force the Palestinians to go deeper and it will likely cut the hundreds of superficial tunnels closer to the surface that are used to move the bulk of the goods.

Source: BBC: Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border

Bastion of Impunity, Mirage of Reform 2009 Report on Human Rights in the Arab Region

2009-12-10T09:08:00.002-05:00

Bastion of Impunity, Mirage of Reform
2009 Report on Human Rights in the Arab Region

Today the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies released its second annual report on the state of human rights in the Arab world for the year 2009. The report, entitled Bastion of Impunity, Mirage of Reform, concludes that the human rights situation in the Arab region has deteriorated throughout the region over the last year.

The report reviews the most significant developments in human rights during 2009 in 12 Arab countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen. It also devotes separate chapters to the Arab League and an analysis of the performance of Arab governments in UN human rights institutions. Another chapter addresses the stance of Arab governments concerning women’s rights, the limited progress made to advance gender equality, and how Arab governments use the issue of women’s rights to burnish their image before the international community while simultaneously evading democratic and human rights reform measures required to ensure dignity and equality for all of their citizens. .

The report observes the grave and ongoing Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, particularly the collective punishment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip through the ongoing blockade and the brutal invasion of Gaza at the beginning of 2009 which resulted in the killing of more than 1,400 Palestinians, 83 percent of them civilians not taking part in hostilities. The report notes that the plight of the Palestinian people has been exacerbated by the Fatah-Hamas conflict, which has turned universal rights and liberties into favors granted on the basis of political affiliation. Both parties have committed grave abuses against their opponents, including arbitrary detention, lethal torture, and extrajudicial killings.

The deterioration in Yemeni affairs may presage the collapse of what remains of the central state structure due to policies that give priority to the monopolization of power and wealth, corruption that runs rampant, and a regime that continues to deal with opponents using solely military and security means. As such, Yemen is now the site of a war in the northern region of Saada, a bloody crackdown in the south, and social and political unrest throughout the country. Moreover, independent press and human rights defenders who expose abuses in both the north and south are targets of increasingly harsh repression.

In its blatant contempt for justice, the Sudanese regime is the exemplar for impunity and the lack of accountability. President Bashir has refused to appear before the International Criminal Court in connection with war crimes in Darfur. Instead, his regime is hunting down anyone in the country who openly rejects impunity for war crimes, imprisoning and torturing them and shutting down rights organizations. Meanwhile the government’s policy of collective punishment against the population of Darfur continues, as well as its evasion of responsibilities under the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the north and south, making secession a more likely scenario, which may once again drag the country into a bloody civil war.

In Lebanon, the threat of civil war that loomed last year has receded, but the country still suffers from an entrenched two-tier power structure in which Hizbullah’s superior military capabilities give the opposition an effective veto. As a result, the state’s constitutional institutions have been paralyzed.

In this context it took several months for the clear winner in the parliamentary elections to form a government. Now, even after the formation of a government, the unequal military balance of power between the government and the opposition will prevent serious measures to guarantee all parties accountable before the law, and greatly undermine the possibility of delivering justice for the many crimes and abuses experienced by the Lebanese people over the last several years.

Although Iraq is still the largest arena of violence and civilian deaths, it witnessed a relative improvement in some areas, though these gains remain fragile. The death toll has dropped and threats against journalists are less frequent. In addition, some of the major warring factions have indicated they are prepared to renounce violence and engage in the political process.

In Egypt, as the state of emergency approaches the end of its third decade, the broad immunity given to the security apparatus has resulted in the killing of dozens of undocumented migrants, the use of lethal force in the pursuit of criminal suspects, and routine torture. Other signs of deterioration were visible in 2009: the emergency law was applied broadly to repress freedom of expression, including detaining or abducting bloggers. Moreover, the Egyptian police state is increasingly acquiring certain theocratic features, which have reduced some religious freedoms, and have lead to an unprecedented expansion of sectarian violence within the country.

In Tunisia, the authoritarian police state continued its unrestrained attacks on political activists, journalists, human rights defenders, trade unionists, and others involved in social protest. At the same time, the political stage was prepared for the reelection of President Ben Ali through the introduction of constitutional amendments that disqualified any serious contenders.

In Algeria, the emergency law, the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, and the application of counterterrorism measures entrenched policies of impunity, grave police abuses, and the undermining of accountability and freedom of expression. Constitutional amendments paved the way for the installment of President Bouteflika as president for life amid elections that were contested on many levels, despite the lack of real political competition.

Morocco, unfortunately, has seen a tangible erosion of the human rights gains achieved by Moroccans over the last decade. A fact most clearly seen in the failure if the government to adopt a set of institutional reforms within the security and judicial sectors intended to prevent impunity for crimes. Morocco’s relatively improved status was also undermined by the intolerance shown for freedom of expression, particularly for expression touching on the king or the royal family, or instances of institutional corruption. Protests against the status of the Moroccan-administered Western Sahara region were also repressed and several Sahrawi activists were referred to a military tribunal for the first time in 14 years.

As Syria entered its 47th year of emergency law, it continued to be distinguished by its readiness to destroy all manner of political opposition, even the most limited manifestations of independent expression. The Kurdish minority was kept in check by institutionalized discrimination, and human rights defenders were targets for successive attacks. Muhannad al-Hassani, the president of the Sawasiyah human rights organization, was arrested and tried, and his attorney, Haitham al-Maleh, the former chair of the Syrian Human Rights Association, was referred to a military tribunal. The offices of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression were shut down, and Syrian prisons still hold dozens of prisoners of conscience and democracy advocates.

In Bahrain, the systematic discrimination against the Shiite majority was accompanied by more repression of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. Human rights defenders increasingly became targets for arrest, trial, and smear campaigns. Some human rights defenders were even subjected by government agents to threats and intimidation while in Europe.

In Saudi Arabia, the report notes that the Monarch’s speeches urging religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue abroad have not been applied inside the Kingdom, where the religious police continue to clamp down on personal freedom. Indeed, repression of religious freedoms is endemic, and the Shiite minority continues to face systematic discrimination. Counterterrorism policies were used to justify long-term arbitrary detention, and political activists advocating reform were tortured. These policies also undermined judicial standards, as witnessed by the prosecution of hundreds of people in semi-secret trials over the last year.

In tandem with these grave abuses and the widespread lack of accountability for such crimes within Arab countries, the report notes that various Arab governments and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference have been working in concert within UN institutions to undermine international mechanisms and standards for the protection of human rights. On this level, Arab governments have sought to undercut provisions that bring governments to account or seriously assess and monitor human rights. This is most clearly illustrated by the broad attack on independent UN human rights experts and NGOs working within the UN, as well as attempts to legalize international restrictions on freedom of expression through the pretext of prohibiting “defamation of religions.”

In the same vein, the Arab League and its summit forums offered ongoing support for the Bashir regime in Sudan despite charges of war crimes, and members of the organization used the principle of national sovereignty as a pretext to remain silent about or even collaborate on grave violations in several Arab states. Little hope should be invested in the Arab League as a protector of human rights regionally. Indeed, the Arab Commission on Human Rights, created by the Arab Charter on Human Rights (a weak document compared to other regional charters), is partially composed of government officials, and the secretariat of the Arab League has begun to take measures to weaken the Commission, including obstructing the inclusion of NGOs in its work, intentionally undermining its ability to engage in independent action, even within the stifling constraints laid out by the charter.

Source: Cairo Center for Human Rights: Bastion of Impunity, Mirage of Reform
2009 Report on Human Rights in the Arab Region Click on link to read the report (English or Arabic in .pdf)

Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist

2009-12-06T21:05:00.003-05:00

In the Netherlands, the name day celebration of the children’s patron saint, Nicholas (Sinterklaas), on December 5, is more important than Christmas. It is thought that Santa Claus has his roots in Sinterklaas, who was known for his secret gift-giving. The theory is that it all started in the former Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam, currently known as New York City. Either way, Sinterklaas is an important national holiday for 16 million people in the north of Europe and has its own traditional candied goodies to go with it.

One of the must-have sweets for the Dutch is a chocolate version of their initial. Children will leave carrots and hay in their shoes next to the chimney when they go to bed, hoping Sinterklaas, who rides around the rooftops on a white stallion, will exchange them for a small present and some sweets – this is where the chocolate letter comes in.

This year for the first time, the Dutch department store HEMA has offered something special for children from Arabic backgrounds – Arabic chocolate letters. The store offered two milk chocolate letters: the “S” and the “M”. The design department picked the “M” because many first names start with it and the “S” for Sinterklaas. Both weigh 125g and cost €2.95 (Dh16) a piece.

The HEMA (an acronym for Hollandse Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam or Dutch Standard Prices Company Amsterdam) is well known for its contemporary design, decent products and ever-changing assortment. “Actually, our store is a small version of society,” Marianne Noordanus, a spokeswoman for the company, said. “Young and old, rich and poor, men and women. Our employees and our customers are a reflection of that. When our chocolate buyer suggested an Arabic chocolate letter, we decided to try it out.”

And it looks like it’s a hit. Although the company does not want to give out sales numbers, the HEMA website confirmed the “S” had sold out before December 5 and reactions were positive.

Strangely, it isn’t the first time that chocolate Arabic letters have been in the limelight in the small country, which has a population that includes nearly 20 per cent non-western immigrants. Two years ago, the cultural institution Mediamatic initiated a project with young local designers to fuel the public debate on mutual understanding between cultures.

They did this by creating an Arabic version of HEMA, said Willem Velthoven, a concept developer and project manager at Mediamatic. “We wanted to make an exhibition that would appeal to a wide audience and came up with the HEMA because it’s the temple of Dutch culture. It’s value for money, everything you need, clean, fresh, great design and very contemporary.”

El Hema, as the installation was named, whipped up a flurry of media attention. It sold the whole Arabic alphabet in chocolate, halal sausages, affordable high-quality headscarves, school notebooks with lining for Arabic from right to left and duvet covers with Arabic poetry. “The HEMA wasn’t very pleased that we went behind their backs,” Velthoven admitted. “But we managed to work things out, because it made a lot of people very happy.”

Source: The National: Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist

Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes

2009-12-06T09:09:00.001-05:00

Though few dervish lodges remain in Istanbul as meeting places for Sufi orders, a visit to any of their locations throughout the city can reveal much about the background of the various orders
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes

Though the 1925 ban against Sufi orders meant the closing of all their properties, recent efforts have seen the restoration of many orders’ tekkes, or dervish lodges, throughout Istanbul.

For centuries, the architecture of the sects’ lodges was often dictated by the practices of the sects themselves. The more elaborate the tekke, the wealthier the people who subscribed to that sect – even though many of these mystic sects called for the renunciation of worldly goods in order to become one with God or the ultimate Truth. The main lodge was usually built where the founder of the mystic sect was buried or vice versa.

Tekke architecture

Generally speaking, tekkes were made of wood and sometimes stone, depending on the amount of money and materials available. Even when quite large, they were not especially imposing buildings, yet all had a large room that formed the central portion of the lodge where the members would gather for various ceremonies. This large hall might be round, octagonal or even multi-sided to represent any of the numbers the group held holy.

There would be standing room or possibly sitting space to observe the participants. When a sect combined music with its ritual ceremonies, there would be space for the musicians. Leading off the main room would be a series of other rooms devoted to various practices, including a kitchen and a refractory, a library and rooms for the leader of the sect or the person in charge of that particular lodge and his family. In addition, there were often also rooms for those studying to become full members of the lodge, or for sect members who were traveling in the area.

Few of the tekke buildings were as elaborate as the one devoted to Rumi in Konya. Because of the veneration for Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi sect, the original mosque and school greatly expanded over the centuries to incorporate nearby buildings and cemeteries. A better example of a normal Mevlevi tekke is the one found in Istanbul’s Tünel neighborhood.

The building was closed with the banning of Sufi orders in 1925, but from time to time, permission was given for the upkeep of the building. The center in Konya became a museum, as did the one in Tünel. Eventually the Mevlevis were allowed to perform their whirling ritual as a theatrical performance in the Tünel tekke.

Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes

One and many

2009-12-06T09:07:00.000-05:00

The panoramic perspective of Eugene Rogan’s new 500-year history, Elias Muhanna writes, helps us look beyond the the increasingly dated idea of a single, common Arab identity

The Arabs: A History
Eugene Rogan
Allen Lane
Dh152

There is something almost old-fashioned about the idea of a book-length history of the Arabs. Broad, all-encompassing narratives of this kind were popular in the 20th century, when historiography frequently intersected with pan-Arab nationalist projects, and when the sense of a common Arab identity was vividly felt both by the region’s inhabitants and the foreigners who observed and engaged them.

Today, the Arabs are increasingly viewed (and seem to view themselves) either as a small subset of a larger civilisation – the Muslim world – or as a collection of disparate and fractious entities whose differences often overwhelm their commonalities. Indeed, the notion of “Arabness” as a shared and distinguishing element seems to have lost its currency as a prism through which to study the region, just as it has lost its charismatic appeal in the political culture of the contemporary Middle East.

It is therefore suggestive to re-encounter a panoramic perspective in Eugene Rogan’s excellent new book, which, if we are being frank, is not so much a history of the Arabs as it is a political history of the Middle East and North Africa during the last 500 years – with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. The narrative begins with the Mamluk army’s defeat by the Ottomans at the battle of Marj Dabiq (in northern Syria) in 1516, the event that “marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age in the Arab world”, and then flits through the main developments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries before slowing down the pace upon arrival at the period of European colonialism.

Telescoping deftly between bird’s-eye-view narratives of large spans of history and the curious little footnotes that make for fabulous storytelling, Rogan weaves together the tales of an enormous, riotous cast of characters. We learn, for example, about the Algerian dey Husayn Pasha’s attack on the French consul Pierre Deval with a fly whisk in 1827, and about the affair of Colonel Husni al-Za’im, the leader of a short-lived military government in Syria who offered Israel full normalisation of relations in 1949 (an offer that was rejected by David Ben-Gurion). Rogan’s use of contemporary Arab sources (newspapers, magazines, memoirs, novels, first-hand reports) allows him to bring the reader close to the action at pivotal scenes, lending the work a very different flavour from its twentieth-century predecessors, including that of Rogan’s mentor, the great Albert Hourani.

Conitnue reading: The National: One and many

Europe's waning liberalism

2009-12-06T09:05:00.001-05:00

Last year, at a European meeting of intelligence officials from the US and Europe, a Swiss participant commented on a proposed referendum on minarets. He was sure it would go nowhere since, as he said, Switzerland is a very pluralistic society; its Muslim population is relatively small and there are few mosques with minarets.

Enlightened Switzerland has now become part of an "Enlightened Liberal Europe" that is increasingly not all that liberal.

The stunning Swiss vote - 57 per cent - approving a referendum to ban minarets, should not have been all that surprising, considering the growing power of Islamophobia.

In both Europe and the US, right-wing politicians, political commentators, media personalities, and religious leaders continue to feed a growing suspicion of mainstream Muslims by fuelling a fear that Islam, and not just Muslim extremism, is a threat.

In the aftermath of attacks in the US and Europe, the relevance and viability of multiculturalism as a policy was challenged by those who charged that such an approach contributed to domestic terrorism.

They argued that such a policy helped in retarding Muslim assimilation and civic engagement, perpetuated foreign loyalties, and provided a space for militant radicals.

Integration versus assimilation

Anti-Muslim sentiment has grown in several European countries [AFP]
The process of integration, in which immigrant citizens and residents could retain their religious and ethnic differences, was rejected by many, in particular the far-right in Europe, who demand total assimilation.

Modern-day prophets of doom have predicted that Europe will be overrun by Islam - transformed by the end of the century into "Eurabia".

The media, political leaders, and commentators on the right warn of a "soft terrorism" plot to take over the US and Europe.

Bernard Lewis, a Middle East historian and adviser to the Bush administration on its failed Iraq policy, received widespread coverage when he chided Europeans for losing their loyalties, self-confidence, and respect for their own culture, charging that they have "surrendered" to Islam in a mood of "self-abasement," "political correctness," and "multi-culturalism".

Daniel Pipes, a columnist, political commentator and relentless Muslim critic who wrote an article called "The Muslims are coming. The Muslims are coming", also declared: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene ... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

European Muslim mosaic

Fortunately, many Muslim and Christian leaders, and major European politicians and human rights experts have condemned the minaret ban, and the Vatican has denounced it as an infringement of religious freedom.

However, the surprising gains made by Geert Wilders' Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Danish People's Party, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), Hungarian Jobbik, and the British National Party in the recent European parliament elections emboldened many of their leaders to applaud the Swiss vote and encourage similar prohibitions.

Wilders, the leader of the anti-Muslim Freedom Party in the Netherlands, who previously warned that mass deportation of millions of Muslims from Europe may be necessary, called for a vote to stem the "tide of Islamisation" in the Netherlands.

The far-right persistently refuses to face a 21st century reality - to acknowledge and accept the fact that Muslims are part of the mosaic of their nations.

Islam is now a European religion, and, in fact, the second largest religion in many European countries. No longer predominantly first generation immigrants, many are second and third generation citizens.

Despite the acts and continued threat from a very small but dangerous minority of extremists, the majority of Muslims, like their non-Muslim fellow compatriots, are loyal citizens.

The Swiss ban, like some other European countries' policies, highlights a failure of Western liberalism and raises fundamental questions about religious discrimination and freedom of religion.

While there are only four minarets in Switzerland, a country that is home to approximately 400,000 Muslims, supporters of the referendum mindlessly charge that the minaret is a political symbol of militant Islam.

This makes about as much sense as saying that church steeples symbolise militant Christianity.

Dangerous precedent

The Vatican has condemned the ban on minarets in Switzerland [AFP]
So, where do we go from here?

Western political and religious opinion-makers and the media will need to resolutely address the dangers of Islamophobia as aggressively as they do other forms of hate speech and hate crimes, ranging from racial discrimination to anti-Semitism.

European Muslims will need to continue to speak out publicly, demanding their rights as European citizens and residents and also denouncing religious discrimination and violence as well as limits placed on constructing churches in the Muslim world.

Globalisation and an increasingly multicultural and multi-religious West tests the mettle of cherished democratic principles and values.

Islamophobia, which is becoming a social cancer, must be recognised and be as unacceptable as anti-Semitism, a threat to the very fabric of our democratic, pluralistic way of life.

The continued threat and response to global terrorism coupled with the resurgence of xenophobia and cultural racism have contributed to threaten the fundamentals of liberal democracies in the West and their Muslim citizens in particular.

The fine line between distinguishing between the faith of Islam and those who commit violence and terror in the name of Islam, between the majority of mainstream Muslims and the acts of a minority of Muslim extremists and terrorists, must be maintained.

Blurring these distinctions risks the adoption of foreign and domestic policies that promote a clash rather than co-existence of cultures. They play into the hands of preachers of hate (Muslim and non-Muslim), religious and political leaders, and political commentators whose rhetoric incites and demonises, alienates and marginalises.

John L Esposito is a professor of Religion and International Affairs, professor of Islamic Studies and founding director of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

He is the editor-in-chief of the six-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, and has written more than 35 books including 'Who Speaks for Islam?', 'What a Billion Muslims Really Think', and 'The Future of Islam'.

Source: Al Jazeera: Europe's waning liberalism

An Argumentative Arab Enlightener

2009-12-04T09:11:00.001-05:00

The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al-Azm is one of the highest-profile and most strident critics of the Arab world. To this day, his ideas are between all fronts, making him enemies of both Islamist and secular dogmatists. Sadiq Al-Azm is soon to celebrate his 75th birthday.

The Six-Day War, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Iraq War and Islamist fundamentalism: Sadiq al-Azm has barely missed a chance to dive headfirst into a debate over the past 40 years | There are no doubt numerous advantages to coming from the upper echelons of Damascus society. One of these is dealing first and foremost with worldly realities, seeing the metaphysical as secondary.

This type of equation is an incredible relief – not only because it means the world can be measured and calculated, but also because it offers protection from intellectual neurosis. And neurosis, the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm tells us, was extremely widespread among would-be intellectuals in the 1940s and 50s.

It was easy enough to succumb; all it took was to have read religious literature – and then come across secular works from the West. The result was a culture shock to beat all culture shocks.

Whatever happens in our lives, the religious books taught, is dependent least of all on human influence. "This is how God wanted it" was the explanation for almost everything on earth: good and evil, positive and negative, in politics and society as in private life, among family and friends.

For many in his generation, the idea that this might not be the case was a huge impertinence.

Al-Azm tells us this in his recently published book Ces Interdits qui nous hantent ("The bans that haunt us"), a 2008 collection of essays and autobiographical writing.

Intellectual hauntings

He himself, however, was fortunate enough to grow up in an upper-class household, where there was no room for ideas of God's influence on the ways of the world.

You had to take things into your own hands, the young Al-Azm learned – and then take responsibility for them. Your mistakes have nothing to do with God; and don't listen if the priests tell you otherwise.

"Your mistakes have nothing to do with God; and don't listen if the priests tell you otherwise." Muslim Brotherhood activists in Cairo, Egypt | "These circumstances" he notes, "protected me from the spectres of psychological and spiritual crisis, which might have seized me when I began to develop an interest in pan-Arabism and nationalism, ideas that were very widespread during my early youth."

Others experienced the political and cultural upsurges of the 1940s and 50s with less composure. For them, these years meant an absolute breakaway from all they had learned, all they had considered self-evident to that date.

The new theses may have been convincing. But above all they were – at least initially – shocking. Many of his friends found themselves in deep existential crises, writes Al-Azm.

The new ideas were incompatible with the old ideas, the gulf between them so deep and wide that it was nigh impossible to build bridges between them. "I knew cases in which that led to nervous depression or complete renunciation of active life."

Some ideas were simply too radical not to prompt shudders in those that came across them. As foreign and strange as they were, it took time to digest them. At some point, however, people could follow them after a while. "Most people I knew overcame their crises, turning to more progressive ideas from then on."

Disappointed nationalism

The story that Al-Azm merely hints at in his book may give us a clue to the circumstances surrounding the birth of secular thought in the Arab world – circumstances that occasionally caused problems.

The fact that Al-Azm was not familiar with these problems from the outset may have led him to couch his critique of the Arab world in such drastic terms, stopping at nothing and no one, and encountering even the allegedly most progressive movements of his time with deep distrust.

What, for example, asks Al-Azm, was Arab nationalism? A reaction to European colonialism and an attempt to unite the Arab states? Absolutely. At least that was one aspect to the phenomenon.

Continue reading: Qantara: An Argumentative Arab Enlightener

The Loves of others

2009-11-13T19:47:00.001-05:00

Kaelen Wilson- Goldie reviews Arabic fiction’s latest succès de scandale.

The Others
Siba al Harez
Telegram Books
Dh68

“What is so frightening, from the start, about our being different?” asks the unnamed narrator of Siba al Harez’s debut novel, The Others. “Is it because we form a storm of question marks, moving fiercely through an undistinguished and previously unnoticed space in this nation, that never before experienced the essence or function of questioning, or of being in a state of difference? Is it because we release an intensity of presence that remains unacknowledged on the map of the world, or between the thighs of a recognised tribe?”

According to her publishers, Siba al Harez is the pseudonym of a 26-year-old woman from Al Qatif in Saudi Arabia. The Others was originally published in Arabic in 2006 and – thanks in part to its transgressive subject matter, including lesbian relationships and sadistic behaviour – quickly rode waves of controversy onto the bestseller lists. The English translation, published this month by Telegram Books in London, comes after a spate of similarly explicit novels, from the first two instalments of Turki al Hamad’s coming-of-age trilogy (also set in Saudi Arabia) to Nedjma’s The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman (another pseudonymous effort by a writer living in the Maghreb) and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. But while some of those books suffer self-congratulatory prurience or simply bad writing, The Others signals the arrival of a serious prose stylist.

The otherness announced in the novel’s name, and the difference about which the narrator speaks, has little to do with sexual orientation. The real condition of otherness and difference at stake is religious. Like the author, the narrator comes from Al Qatif, a coastal oasis in Saudi Arabia’s predominantly Shiite Eastern Province. In 1979, a violent rebellion broke out there, inspired in part by the revolution in Iran. Tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets, and the ensuing confrontation with the security services left close to 20 demonstrators dead, many of them young activists who had been demanding an end to their political and economic marginalisation.

The conflict in Al Qatif cuts across The Others like a scar. Among other things, it resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the narrator’s father, who had already been absent most of her life. She seeks refuge in the Hussainiyya, where she organises activities for Ramadan and Ashura. She writes for a religious magazine that is distributed in secret, her meetings with editors murmured, her articles coded on compact discs.

Siba al Harez writes of the body, and its architecture of desire, in a manner that recalls the work of the American novelist Nicole Krauss. The Others opens in the narrator’s voice: “And so there was a long line of them, and I admitted them all. I let them come in through my front door. It was the front door of me, and I, for my part, was about to become something new: an occasion for entertainment, a spectacle.” What follows is a vivid account of the narrator’s affair with her classmate Dai, beautiful, cryptic, violent.

But the relationship cracks under the weight of jealousy, betrayal and the narrator’s inexperience, combined with her mounting curiosity about other women, and men. Turning her back on Dai, she moves on to Dareen, and Rayyan, a young man with whom she pursues a virtual, online-only affair, and Umar, who provides the novel’s unexpectedly conventional endpoint.

In between these dalliances, the narrator peels back the many layers of her otherness: her identity, her age (those toxic teenage years), her illness (epilepsy, which drastically reduces her prospects for marriage and employment), the absence of her father, the mysterious death of her brother, the things mark her as a maskh, “this freak, this deformed creature, this monster”.

In Harez’s rumination on the theme, otherness runs deeper than membership of a social or political minority. It is the experience of being alienated from another, even from the intimacy of one’s partner, to the extent that one becomes a stranger to oneself.

The Others will inevitably be packaged and sold as a novel about sex, particularly in the West. But it should be read as more than that, for it is at its most radical not when the plot dives under the sheets but rather when the author calls attention to the delineation of difference, in the physical body, but moreover, in the body politic.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer at The Review.

Reproduced from The National: The loves of others

Déjà vu in Astana

2009-11-13T19:31:00.000-05:00

We were midway through our tour of Astana, the shiny new capital of Kazakhstan, and our guide was convinced we had taken leave of our senses.

Our group had just been to the top of the Bayterek Monument, a strikingly modern tower that offered views over the attractively designed new buildings aligned along the capital district’s Avenue of the Republic, and it was clear this was our cue to make admiring comments about this city created on the otherwise featureless and treeless plains of the Central Asian steppe.

But for anyone coming from the UAE, that scenario – of the lesser-known capital city of a young but tolerant Islamic nation using its oil wealth to create a modern metropolis in a bleak and unforgiving environment – was a little too familiar to be impressive.

“We’re from Abu Dhabi,” we told our guide. “We don’t want to see new buildings. We want to see nature. We want to see the essence of Central Asia!”

The guide looked at us with blank incomprehension. With the help of the translator, we were told: “There is no nature – only steppe.”

The Astana people we had met so far had all been inestimably proud of this modern new city, basking in the proof they were just like Europe or America and not the Central Asian backwater of popular imagination. It was no wonder the authorities hated the film Borat so much.

So it took a degree of duress to convince our guide to abandon her standard route through the city’s modern architectural marvels and drive us out into the steppe that makes up most of Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth biggest nation.

We eventually found a nondescript village, prompting her to look at us with disbelief, as if to say: “Why on earth would they want to come here?” Instead of mirrored glass, there were sod roofs that traditionally helped the residents cope with temperatures that range from up to 40°C in summer down to -40°C in the depths of winter. Some of the homes had no roofs at all, suggesting a slow depopulation over many years.

But there were also some brand new homes, hinting at an influx of wealth that dated from 12 years ago when the government announced it was moving the capital from the nation’s biggest city, Almaty, in the far south of Kazakhstan, to the outskirts of this hitherto little-known provincial town in the north.

Had we been coming from somewhere other than the UAE, we probably would have been more impressed by how much had been achieved since 1997.

Sited on what had been fields across the river from the historic downtown, nearly everything in the capital district was complete, ranging from the parliament, the presidential palace, government ministries and landmark buildings such as the 77m-high glass pyramid of the multidenominational Palace of Peace and Harmony.

Although there were many international architects brought in (Norman Foster designed three of the buildings) there had also been attempts to incorporate Kazakh themes into the mix, such as the design of the Bayterek Monument, which has a gold-hued transparent orb where the viewing platform is located that is inspired by the ancient Kazakh legend of the samruk bird laying a golden egg containing the secrets to human desires and happiness.

Continue reading: The National: Déjà vu in Astana

RAK’s sacking still reverberates

2009-11-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

RAS AL KHAIMAH // Two hundred years ago, Ras al Khaimah was burnt to the ground. Today, experts say, that sacking by a British fleet has directly affected the shape of the UAE.

Thirteen lithographs on a wall of the Sharjah Art Museum show each grisly scene of the British attack on Ras al Khaimah on November 13 1809. Black smoke rises about a town engulfed in flames as soldiers fight door-to-door through the streets of 19th-century RAK.

The battle was the beginning of a new era in the Gulf: that of British control. It led to the General Treaty of 1820 that brought 150 years of peace and trade to the Gulf under the British and ensured a maritime truce between independent emirates that later formed the UAE.

But so brutal was the massacre of 1809 that its violence is still remembered in song and story two centuries later. Mention of the battle still brings pain to those from the area.

Yet if it had not been for the battle of 1809 and the resulting treaty in 1820, most historians agree, the UAE of 2009 would be a very different place.

“Because of that treaty, we have independent emirates,” said Dr Hasan al Naboodha, a history professor at UAE University. “It was divide and rule. Just imagine if the British didn’t come and attack the Qawasim, would you hear today about the emirate of Ajman or Umm al Qaiwain?”

The cause of the battle between the British and the Qawasim, the seafaring tribe that ruled coastal areas on the Eastern, Persian and Arabian coasts, is still hotly disputed among historians today. “The British accused the Qawasim of being pirates and attacking ships but we don’t know exactly what went on because we don’t have local sources from this time,” said Dr al Naboodha.

Contemporary British accounts depicted the Qawasim tribe as an unruly and ruthless group of plunderers and pirates.

Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed, Ruler of Sharjah, challenged this in his 1986 book The Myth of Arab Piracy, which argued that the British were foreign intruders who sought to expand their power in the Gulf for the East India Company.

Until late in the 18th century, skirmishes between the Qawasim and British were rare. In 1797, however, the Viper, a British ship, was attacked by Qawasim dhows while anchored in Bushire an attack for which Sheikh Saqr bin Rashid, then of Ras al Khaimah, apologised and offered settlement.

In 1804 the British ships Trimmer and Shannon were attacked by Sheikh Qadhib al Qasimi of Lingeh.

In 1806, a treaty was agreed upon by the Qawasim, the British and the British-backed Omanis, long-standing rivals of the Qawasim. Within a few months, relations became strained between the Omanis and the Qawasim over territorial disputes at Qishm and the treaty fell apart.

In October 1808 the Qawasim were held responsible for an attack on the Sylph, an eight-gun British schooner, that killed 30.

The next May, the Qawasim seized the Minerva and took it to Ras al Khaimah with an officer’s wife on board. She was held for ransom. One survivor claimed that the Minerva was attacked by more than 50 dhows in a two-day battle that ended in the deaths of 45 of the 77 on board.

The event fuelled British anger against the Qawasim and a larger confrontation loomed.

Such events were popular in the British media, which, according to Dr Sheikh Sultan, exaggerated the numbers of those killed and vilified the Qawasim.

“It was the power of this saga to stir the imagination, as piracy still does, which ensured it would not be forgotten,” wrote Charles Davies in his 1997 book The Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy, 1797-1820. “Contemporary newspapers, travellers, officers and others all felt moved to write about the Qawasim and British measures taken against them.”

But even before the Minerva incident, the Supreme Government in Calcutta had already made a decision to attack Ras al Khaimah.

Reproduced from The National: RAK’s sacking still reverberates

The Rise and Rise of Turkey

2009-11-08T19:20:00.000-05:00

It is generally accepted that America’s destruction of Iraq overturned the balance of power in the Gulf, opening the way for the Islamic Republic of Iran to emerge as a major regional power, able to challenge the dominance of Sunni Arab states and pose as a rival to both Israel and the United States.

Its influence has spread to Iraq itself — now under Shiite leadership — and beyond to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and even perhaps to Zaidi rebels in northern Yemen fighting the central government in Sana‘a, a development that has aroused understandable anxiety in Saudi Arabia.

However, the Iraq war has had another important consequence that is also attracting serious notice. America’s failure in Iraq — and its equal failure to tame Israel’s excesses — has encouraged Turkey to emerge from its pro-American straitjacket and assert itself as a powerful independent actor at the heart of a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The Turks like to say that whereas Iran and Israel are revisionist powers, arousing anxiety and even fear by their expansionism and their challenge to existing power structures, Turkey is a stabilizing power, intent on spreading peace and security far and wide.

Turkey is extending its influence by diplomacy rather than force. It is also forging economic ties with its neighbors, and has offered to mediate in several persistent regional conflicts. It has, however, not hesitated to use force to quell the guerrillas of the PKK, a rebel movement fighting for Kurdish independence.

But even here, Turkey is now using a softer approach. The rebels have been offered an amnesty and Turkey’s influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has this past week paid a visit — the first of its kind — to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. There is even talk of Turkey opening a consulate in Erbil.

In recent years, Turkey’s diplomacy has scored many successes, winning great popularity in the Arab world and strengthening Turkey’s hand in its bid to join the European Union. Some people would go so far as to argue that there is no future for Turkey without the E.U., and no future for the E.U. without Turkey.

Turkey’s dynamic multi-directional foreign policy started to take shape when the Justice and Development party, or AKP, came to power in 2002 under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, now president of the Turkish Republic. These men are rightly considered to be conservative and moderately Islamic — their wives wear headscarves — but they are careful to stress that they have no ambition to create an Islamic state. Turkey’s population may be largely Muslim, but the state itself is secular, democratic, capitalist and close to both the West and the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, Turkey sees itself as a bridge, vital to both.

Ahmet Davutoglu is credited with providing the theoretical framework for Turkey’s new foreign policy. He was Mr. Erdogan’s principal adviser before being promoted foreign minister.

Two visits in October illustrate Turkey’s activisim. Prime Minister Erdogan, accompanied by nine ministers and an Airbus full of businessmen, visited Baghdad, where he held a session with the Iraq government and signed no fewer than 48 memoranda in the fields of commerce, energy, water, security, the environment and so forth.

At much the same time, Foreign Minister Davutoglu was in Aleppo, where he signed agreements with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, of which perhaps the most important was the removal of visas, allowing for a free flow of people across their common border.

Turkey also broke new ground in October by signing two protocols with Armenia, providing for the restoration of diplomatic relations and the opening of the border between them. Not surprisingly, Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan has strongly objected to this development, since it is locked in conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated pocket of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces.

Indeed, Turkey’s protocols with Armenia are unlikely to be fully implemented until Armenia withdraws from at least some of the districts surrounding Karabakh — but, at the very least, a historic start has been made toward Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.

From the Arab point of view, the most dramatic development has undoubtedly been the cooling of Turkey’s relations with Israel. The relationship has been damaged by the outrage felt by many Turks at Israel’s cruel oppression of the Palestinians, which reached its peak with the Gaza War.

Even before the assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Erdogan — a strong supporter of the Palestine cause — did not hesitate to describe some of Israel’s brutal actions as “state terrorism.” A total breach between the two countries is unlikely, but relations are unlikely to recover their earlier warmth so long as Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, remain in power.

Underpinning Turkey’s diplomacy is its central role as an energy hub linking oil and gas producers in Russia and Central Asia with energy-hungry markets in Europe.

One way and another, a resurgent Turkey is rewriting the rules of the power game in the Middle East in a positive and non-confrontational manner. This is one of the few bright spots in a turbulent and highly inflammable Middle East.

Patrick Seale is the author of “The Struggle for Syria,” “Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East” and “Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.” Agence Global

Reproduced from the NY Times: The Rise and Rise of Turkey

Palace of myths and legends

2009-10-30T08:48:00.001-04:00

The ruins stand atop a 200-metre hill above the village of Shamal in Ras al Khaimah, cloaked in myth and mystery.

“So many legends and stories are associated with this palace, with some people saying it is thousands of years old and others saying it is just a few hundreds years old,” says Dr Hamad bin Seray, an associate professor at the department of history and archaeology at UAE University.

From time to time he pauses on his climb one he has made several times for his studies picking up shards of pottery. By the time he reaches the remains of the building, he has a small collection of shards, which he says are between 400 and 500 years old.

They are tantalising clues about the history of the castle, which is reputed to be the oldest in the UAE.

“There is so much that we don’t know about this palace, except its name,” the historian says.

In fact, even that is debatable.

In English, it is known as Sheba’s Palace. The Queen of Sheba, mentioned in the Bible and the Quran, is said to have ruled the kingdom of Marib in Yemen around 1000BC, though her legend is also told in Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. The Bible dates Sheba’s reign to the 10th century BC. The Quran describes the queen as a sun-worshipper who lived in the Arabian peninsula and was converted to Islam.

“If you choose to believe it belongs to the Queen of Sheba, or Balqis as she is known to us, then it is thousands of years old,” Dr Seray says. “But I am less inclined to believe this as there is no archaeological evidence that the palace is in any way pre- Islamic.”

In Arabic, and among people who live in the area, the palace is better known as the Qasr al Zabba the palace of al Zabba or Queen Zenobia.

Zenobia, the warrior queen of the Roman colony of Palmyra, in what is now Syria, ruled from about 267 to 272AD. She conquered several of Rome’s eastern provinces before she was defeated by the emperor Aurelian.

“The term ‘Zabba’ refers to a masculinised woman, so perhaps there was a local woman ruler here who was tough like a man, and hence was nicknamed by the settlers here as al Zabba,” Dr Seray says. “Not the most flattering title to be crowned with.”

Given the archaeological evidence and his study of the palace, Dr Seray is adamant the site could not belong to either queen, since it is not pre- Islamic. Such was the fame of the two women in Arabia that their names would be linked to ruins built long after their time.

Dr Seray believes the palace most probably dates from the end of the Julfar period. The area of Julfar, now Ras al Khaimah, was a renowned and prosperous trading centre in the lower Gulf from the early Islamic times until around the late 17th century, when it fell into decline during the Portuguese presence in the Gulf.

Keep reading--The National:Palace of myths and legends

Veils, gold, calligraphy

2009-10-24T11:16:00.000-04:00

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie considers the mixed crop of new books surveying Middle Eastern art practices.

In early October, the Dow Jones news agency warned that the emerging market for Middle Eastern art was crashing, with prices falling by as much as 50 per cent. Matthew Girling, a chief executive with the auction house Bonhams, said the global financial crisis had hit the market particularly hard because it was still so new, and because its collector base was still so thin. A week later, Bonhams staged a sale of contemporary Arab, Iranian and South Asian art in Dubai; the results supported this prognosis. The auction fared reasonably well, raking in $1.8 million (Dh6.6m), but this was nowhere near the mark Bonhams made in early 2008, when its Dubai debut earned a thumping $13 million (Dh47.8m) and broke 33 world records in one go, charting some of the highest prices ever paid for Middle Eastern art.

It is too soon to tell whether this drop in prices signifies a market correction or a bubble bursting. But that probably isn’t the most interesting question. More to the point: How did the market for Middle Eastern art heat up so quickly, and why? Five years ago, it was a nonexistent category. Now it is a commodity. What changed, and to what effect?

September 11, 2001 is a convenient place to start the story of how interest in art from the Middle East developed. But in the 1980s and 1990s, artists such as Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer were gaining prominence in the art world by showing their work in powerhouse galleries and high-profile biennials. Later on, artists such as Walid Raad and Emily Jacir attracted considerable critical acclaim. Before 2001, all five of them were already stars on the merits of their work. Sure, there was noise about their biographies and backgrounds. But they were unknown to each other and working in very different ways.

Ghada Amer was primarily a painter layering muscular, abstract expressionist brush strokes over delicately tangled threads in a peek-a-boo routine with drawings of women in auto-erotic poses. Mona Hatoum, with her deep roots in performance art, was making sculptures and installations that commented on power, domesticity and the industrial prison complex. Shirin Neshat’s photographs and film work could be read, with some generosity, as an embellishment on Cindy Sherman-style role-playing and self-portraiture.

These artists were not clumped together as Middle Eastern artists until after 2001. This made sense: what they shared was incidental. In the near or distant past they had come from a part of the world that was vastly complicated, egregiously misunderstood, faintly exotic and – given a certain convergence of factors that had little or nothing to do with art – in the news all the time. In the 1980s and 1990s, that was not enough to create a curatorial area of interest, much less a sales category.

But that changed after September 11, the war in Iraq, and the so-called war on terror. These events and the discourses they engendered did not in and of themselves lead the international art world to the Middle East. But the mainstream media probably did, albeit indirectly. Against the fear-mongering of, say, Fox News, curators, critics and collectors began to seek out the more nuanced narratives afforded by contemporary art. For some, it was a search for balance and a more complex picture of current events. For others, it was about discovering art’s capacity to make sense of trauma . The experiences of artists from Beirut to Baghdad suddenly offered important lessons for the world.

Unfortunately, although the art world’s visitors to the region in the early years of this decade said they were looking for artists whose work would complicate or contradict stereotypical images of the Middle East, the artists whose work they found often conformed to those same stereotypes. Moreover, plenty of impresarios came to the region to pad sales catalogues and support what would soon be perceived as the nub of an emerging market. For them, the work needed to “look” like the Middle East, or at least some half-baked, abstract, neo-orientalist, harem fantasy of the Middle East – veils, calligraphy, embroidery and gold.

In the last seven years or so, disparate artists have been gathered into groups and presented as collective representations of the region. This has happened through sprawling exhibitions, from Catherine David’s Contemporary Arab Representations and Jack Persekian’s DisORIENTation to Without Boundary at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Arabise Me at the V&A and Unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The pioneering artists from the 1980s and 1990s have been piled onto the bandwagon of Middle Eastern art, and made exemplars of “the scene” at its best. In reality, there is no such thing as the Middle Eastern art scene. But for better or worse, the group shows – whether strong, thoughtful, crass or confused – created the illusion otherwise.

Continue reading- The National: Veils, gold, calligraphy

"Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectived'

2009-10-21T12:19:00.001-04:00

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE PRESS RELEASE

Tuesday, October 6 th, 2009.
"Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectived' report released

A report which explores the philosophical and theological perspectives on what it means to be a Muslim in Britain today has been published.

The study, entitled 'Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspectives', is being launched today (Tuesday, October 6th), and can be downloaded at (http://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/CIBP.html).

It marks the culmination of a nine month research project which was hosted by the University of Cambridge in association with the Universities of Exeter and Westminster.

A total of 26 Muslim scholars, academics and activists representing a diverse spectrum of views from Muslim communities in the UK took part in discussions about what it means to live as a Muslim in modern Britain. The report covers a wide range of issues including secularism, democracy, Shariah law, human rights and citisenship.

The report presents the group's conclusions and aims to act as the basis for a wider discussion with other Muslim leaders and communities around the UK. In time, it is hoped that this will lead to the development of a virtual "House of Wisdom", providing space for discussion among both Muslims and non-Muslims on how Islam should function in modern Britain and contribute to wider society.

Continue reading: "Contextualising Islam in Britain: Exploratory Perspective"

Also read an excellent article in Abu Dhabi's 'The National': Islam’s besieged moderates are making themselves heard

Fear and clothing in Egypt

2009-10-17T09:50:00.000-04:00

A quixotic resolution at the bottom of Cairo’s legislative docket would make the galabiyya the national dress. Maria Golia traces the Egyptian history of who wears what, and why.

When Egypt’s People’s Assembly is in session, the majority of its 454 members wear suits. But at least a third opt for the galabiyya, the same floor-length gown with bell-shaped sleeves worn by the voting males of their rural constituencies. This makes them anomalies among Egypt’s urban males. Many such men have at least one galabiyya in their wardrobes, and might even wear it around the house. You wouldn’t know it, though, from walking around Cairo or Alexandria, where the garment is distinctly out of vogue.

For most urban Egyptians, the galabiyya – long the unofficial uniform of Egypt’s fellahin (farmers) – is inseparable from connotations of poverty and backwardness. On city streets, the gown is mostly seen on building guardians and dispossessed farmers. And, like beards, the galabiyya is increasingly associated with fundamentalism, especially when worn in the ungainly shin-length Salafist fashion. Galabiyya-wearing citizens are refused entry to the city’s opera house (where ties and jackets are de rigueur) and likewise unappreciated in upscale officers’ clubs and five-star hotels – this despite the fact that Gulf Arab visitors are welcome everywhere in the national dress of their choice.

This February, Mostafa El-Gendy, a 48-year-old member of the People’s Assembly, introduced a resolution calling for the galabiyya’s instatement as the national costume. He argued that singling out Egypt’s traditional dress for discrimination not only smacks of self-loathing, but is also unconstitutional. He does not want to make the galabiyya obligatory, only to guarantee those who wear it the same degree of respect afforded men in suits. “If both galabiyyas and suits are appropriate for members of Parliament,” he said, “then the same should go for the man in the street.”

El-Gendy, a prominent tourism investor, won his assembly seat in 2005 on an independent ticket, a rare feat given how few aspiring politicians dare decline affiliation with the ruling National Democratic Party. “Why,” he asked when I visited him in September, “should we hide from our rural origins?” Moreover, in a galabiyya, “you can’t tell a George from a Mohammed” – ie a Coptic Christian from a Muslim – “or a rich man from a poor one”.

Egypt has a long history of clothing-related controversies, all of which reflect shifts in how Egyptians see themselves and wish to be seen by others. Recent consternation over the veil is but one example. Egyptian feminists (Muslim and Copt) cast off their veils in the 1920s, saying “we refuse to be confined to the harem”. In the last two decades, women have cited similar arguments to support their decisions to put the veil back on, giving them greater freedom of movement in a male-dominated society that still wishes they would stay home. Egypt is constantly renegotiating the boundaries of tradition – often, when practices change, it can be difficult to remember their underlying causes.

Indeed, it wasn’t long ago that the galabiyya was acceptable costume for both country folk and members of the up-and-coming urban middle class. Its golden days were the 1950s and 1960s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s policies attempted to empower workers and fellahin and close the abysmal gap between rich and poor. Nasser played to the rural masses, Egypt’s largest voting constituency, by boosting their image and self-confidence. Sturdy-looking, galabiyya-wearing fellahin were celebrated on postage stamps and nationally-distributed magazine covers. Traditionally-clad men performed their gracefully martial stick dance on the Opera House stage.

Continue reading-The National: Fear and clothing in Egypt

The Image of Women in Islam Ibn al-Jawzi's Mysoginist Writings

2009-10-16T14:43:00.003-04:00

There have been a number of interesting articles and debates taking place recently concerning women and Islam. Below is an article on Ibn al-Jawzi. You may also be interested to read this article from the BBC: Egypt anger over virginity faking

As well check out these videos via youtube: ابليــــــــس و الحجـــــــــــــــــاب * Satan VS Hijab If you check the right side bar of this youtube video you will find a plethora of Satan related videoes.

Qantara:

The religious scholar Ibn al-Jawzi's collection of the prophet's recalled comments on women in Islam, well known in conservative Islamic circles. Does the work confirm our image of Muslim misogyny or can we derive a different understanding of women from these sources? By Stefan Weidner

| Bild: Cover 'The Attributes of God' by Ibn al-Jawzi
Bild vergrössern "For most of you are firewood of hell": Ibn al-Jawzi's writings are extremely popular in conservative Islamic circles to this day | Commented collections of hadiths – oral traditions on the prophet's words – on the subject of women have been going around since the Middle Ages. The Book of Rules for Women, written by the Baghdad religious scholar Ibn al-Jawzi, who died in 1200, is one of the most read works of this type to this day. Hannelies Koloska, a young Arabist based in Berlin, recently translated the book into German.

The most interesting question is: Does the medieval scholar confirm our image of Muslim misogyny, or can we derive a different understanding of women from these sources?

Even a brief survey of the headings to the 110 short chapters is enough to raise scepticism. Chapter 60, for instance, bears the astonishing title: "On placing women in fear of sin and instructing them that they make up most inmates of hell". In it we find: "It is delivered from Jabir: 'God's envoy spoke to the women: "Give alms, as most of you are the firewood of hell." A woman with dark-dyed hands from among the women stood up and asked him: "Why, envoy of God?" He answered: "Because you multiply evil or are always cursing and ungrateful to your husbands."'"

Hopeless case?

No one would think badly of a reader if he – or especially she – slammed the book shut at this point and declared the image of women in Islam a hopeless case. They would merely be doing exactly what feminist Muslim researchers do with al-Jawzi – condemning him as an archetype of a patriarchal and misogynist thinker.

Continue reading-Qantara: The Image of Women in Islam Ibn al-Jawzi's Mysoginist Writings

Syria: Islam’s Most Important Library to Reopen in Aleppo

2009-10-15T17:28:00.001-04:00

After decades of neglect, one of Islam’s most important libraries is about to reopen in Aleppo, offering scholars access to some 70,000 books and rare works of art, and shining a light on a centuries-old tradition of learning.

Aleppo, Syria’s second city, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, outdone only by Damascus. It has also been a centre of scholarship for millennia, especially for the three Abrahamic faiths.

Islamic scholarship, in particular, thrived there during the Middle Ages.

Aleppo survived the Crusades under the protection of the Muslim armies of the Turkish Zengid dynasty, prompting scholars to flock there, seeking refuge and contributing to the intellectual life of the city.

Among the most renowned scholars was the Iraqi-born 10th-century poet Abu Tayyib al Mutanabi, arguably the most profound poet in the Arabic language.

Another was the polymath philosopher Abu Nasr Mohammed al Farabi, known in Latin as Alpharabius, whose work was known to the philosophers of the Italian Renaissance.

It was not until the Mongols sacked Aleppo in the mid-13th century that it started losing its allure as a centre of learning. For the remaining centuries, scholarship would ebb and flow depending on the state of the Islamic world. Perhaps this may have created the environment in which, 80 years ago, one of Islam’s most important libraries withered away almost unnoticed, closing its doors when its last keeper died.

Ignored but not forgotten, the Waqf Library of Aleppo will reopen on November 22 thanks to a renewed commitment by the religious authorities to preserve Islamic heritage. Aleppo was voted the Arab Capital of Islamic Culture for 2006 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

Covering 1,500 square metres, the library will house more than 70,000 books, many of them rare and hard to find, along with an electronic database that “has all the PDF documents of ancient Islamic books and manuscripts available today”, says Dr Mahmoud al Masri, who was chosen by the religious authorities to head the library restoration project in 2006. “We’re offering something that is not available elsewhere.”

Dr al Masri is a paediatrician, but also holds a doctorate in the history of science and medicine, as well as a masters degree in Sharia science.

“The library may not be that large,” he says, “but most of the books we have here cannot be found at any of the public libraries or the university libraries.”

The project is funded by Islamic endowments, or Waqf in Arabic. The collection includes ancient manuscripts and originals of rare books. Dr al Masri explains that because the library is so specialised, it will not be open to the public, only to students and researchers, though anyone who can show a link to research will be given access.

The Waqf Library is located under the Grand Mosque, in a space that operated as a car wash until the mid-Nineties, when a 10-year restoration project began on the mosque and its slightly leaning minaret. Crossing the outer courtyard of the mosque, visitors arrive at a small, elegant glasshouse. This is the part of the library that is open to the public, who can inspect the 100 or so books about Aleppo on display.

A staircase in the middle of the room leads down to the library proper. For the interior, Dr al Masri commissioned artisans to make furniture and archways. The chairs are made of carved wood with inlaid mother of pearl. The ceilings and doorways are decorated with carvings featuring Persian or Arabic designs, a specialty of Aleppo.

Continue reading-Source: Arab Detroit News: Syria: Islam’s Most Important Library to Reopen in Aleppo

Robert Fisk’s World: In a remote corner of China lies a tiny patch of Muslim freedom

2009-10-04T11:17:00.001-04:00

Some of the Arabic is misspelled. The "F" has sometimes been written as "R", the gravestones occasionally carrying adjectives in the wrong place. But it's Muslim, no doubt about it.

There are enough half-moons on the cracked concrete to tell you that this little corner of a foreign field owes its existence to a prophet in a far distant land – a desert so far away that when I asked a Chinese security guard for the nearest mosque, he directed me to a Sikh temple. Welcome to Hong Kong, People's Republic of China, home to almost a quarter of a million Muslims.

Yes, we know about the Uighurs – though there are precious few in Hong Kong – and this little democratic bit of the great communist nation boasts a hidden cathedral, an ancient pagoda and the skin of the last wild tiger shot on the island – a black ratty bit of fur, all that's left of the handiwork of Indian policeman Rur Singh who shot the 240lb, 73-inch long, 3ft-high beast after it padded up to the Stanley Police Station, under Japanese occupation in 1942.

But somehow the Muslims of Hong Kong remain even more alien to this unique place than the Brit financiers and brokers and the memorials to a lost empire. And when I ask to see the chief imam of Hong Kong – a title to reflect upon – he turns out to be a Pakistani from Multan, busy arranging residence cards for his flock, happy to extol the delights of his temporary multibillion-dollar homeland. "We are free," he announces. "We are independent. We have a good relationship with the police." When non-locals praise local policemen, I always look at them askance. But Mufti Mohamed Arshad – trained at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, frequenter of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar – insists there are several Muslims in the Hong Kong police force, though they have to speak Chinese.

The first Muslims to reach Hong Kong reportedly from Malaya arrived well over a century and a half ago – fishermen and traders who turned up for a few days and decided to stay, men for the most part whose families originally came from Yemen. After the British arrived on the "barren rock" – this was Palmerston's phrase – in 1841, they brought in their Indian regiments, which contained thousands of Muslims. The first mosque was built in 1896 near the Kowloon barracks.

Haj Mohamed has his own military background; he was religious affairs education officer in the Pakistan air force, serving in Islamabad and Quetta before arriving in Hong Kong in 2001. Indeed, Pakistani pilots used to travel to the People's Republic for training. So Mufti Mohamed is a safe pair of hands. No wonder he gets on with the security forces. But there are good relations between all religions – the mufti holds interfaith meetings – and when demonstrations were held on the island to protest at Israel's ferocious bombardment of Gaza almost 12 months ago, Muslims were outnumbered by non-Muslims. A non-Chinese Jewish businessman told me that many Chinese businessmen knew little about the Middle East "except for five minutes on CNN". He was very, very wrong.

About 100,000 of Hong Kong's Muslims have the right to work and hold residence papers; the same number are domestic helpers and there are a few hundred asylum-seekers from Somalia, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Thirty thousand are Chinese Muslims, refugees from the mainland during British days or born in Hong Kong to refugee parents. There's a Chinese Muslim imam at the Osman Ramju Sadick Islamic Centre, where I find a brace of outrageously polite children learning the Koran, reciting the "sura" while sitting on a high-pile rug, a weirdly Chinese script from the Koran – a mixture of Arabic characters with Chinese squiggles in the middle – on the wall above them.

"Mosque" doesn't really translate into Mandarin or Cantonese and the best version I got was "qing zhen si", or "pure truth temple" – I guess that's why I got misdirected to the Sikh temple in the first place. "Allah" comes out in translation from Chinese as "True God", "Islam" as "Pure Truth". As Imam Sulieman Wang pointed out to me, "When there are no words in Chinese for 'Koran' or 'Hadith', it was difficult for most Chinese to understand what we believed in."

Source: The Independent, Robert Fisk’s World: In a remote corner of China lies a tiny patch of Muslim freedom

Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions

2009-10-01T09:30:00.000-04:00

Naomi Sakr

My aim here – Naomi Sakr writes – is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists.

This paper was presented by the author at the Conference “The East and the West: Women in the eyes of the media”, organised by Resetdoc and held in Doha on April 19th 2009. It is based on the author’s much longer research article, ‘Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities’, published in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 35, No 3, pp 385-404.

The government of Saudi Arabia has introduced numerous internal economic and political reforms in recent years. Any account of these reforms should acknowledge that they started in the 1990s and therefore predated both the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the international pressure that the attacks triggered for Saudi Arabia to initiate social reforms. Although the changes discussed in this article took place in 2004-06, it is important to understand them in the context of a much longer history of change – one that goes back several decades. Since the focus here is on media, there may be no call to look back much further than the start of television in the kingdom in the 1960s. But, since the focus is also on women, it is relevant to note that Saudi Arabia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2000. The government placed multiple reservations on its adherence to the convention. The crucial factor, however, is that it signed the convention for reasons that seemed to be related to a bid for increased foreign investment and membership of the World Trade Organization and had nothing to do with external pressures experienced in the wake of 9/11.

It is also necessary to recognize that Saudi Arabian public discourse on the issue of women's status is full of contradictions. On one hand official rhetoric talks of 'women's nature' as if this 'nature' imposes self-explanatory restrictions on what women may do and where they may go. On the other, there have been some big changes in government policies on women's education, employment and legal standing. Professions and university courses that were once barred to women have been opened up. Women have been authorized to apply for identity cards without a male guardian's consent. In 2005, they were promised the vote in municipal elections that were due to take place in 2009 but were postponed. Contradictions are interesting because they indicate that there is intrinsic pressure for renegotiation. Several scholars have picked up on this point, showing how the contradictions between official discourse about women and practical realities have direct ramifications for Saudi women in their everyday lives. An extreme example was the fire at a girls’ school in Makkah in 2002. Fifteen girls died in that fire. Families of the victims blamed the religious police for obstructing evacuation because of rules about contact with uncovered females. After the deaths, responsibility for girls' education was transferred from religious clerics to the Ministry of Education.

My aim here is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists. This contradiction can help to account for pressures to renegotiate the status of female journalists. At the same time, the contradiction itself merits an explanation, which my presentation will attempt to give. However, before setting out the evidence, three background observations are in order. The first is that women’s visibility in the media does not necessarily tell us much about their status in other areas of public life. For example, Egypt - despite having a large number of female presenters in radio and television - has very few women in parliament.

The second is that public discourse in Saudi Arabia is based almost exclusively on references to Islam and such references are inevitably historically specific. That is to say: people in power interpret Islam differently in different times and places. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran reversed his position on women’s political rights. In 1962 he said it was against Islam for women to vote. In 1979 he said Muslim women had a duty to intervene in politics. Saudi Arabia has also seen revisions. In 1979 protestors laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Makkah, alleging moral degeneracy among the kingdom’s political leaders. The government responded with what Saudi women media veterans describe as a wave of ‘anti-women’ activity, which included removing women from many types of television programme and enforcing strict segregation in public places. This reaction conformed to what often occurs when certain interest groups need to put on a show of unity. They do so by pressurising the less powerful to abide by norms legitimized by reference to ‘tradition’. In this case 'tradition' is equated with Islam. Yet, as the scholar Hannah Papanek has noted, so-called traditions may be concocted by the already powerful from their own particular visions of the past and hopes for future power.

The third background observation relates to ways of evaluating change in media portrayals of women. The question of how to approach such an evaluation may appear very challenging when portrayals are highly contradictory. The 2005 edition of the Arab Human Development Report, subtitled The Rise of Women in the Arab World, concluded that: 'Contradiction is the outstanding characteristic of images of Arab women in the media as in society itself'. Widely differing images of women appear across all types of programmes on Saudi-owned television channels, including MBC, Rotana, Al-Risalah and Al-Majd. Because meanings are not fixed, no-one really knows how individual viewers interpret the diverse portrayals they see in the media. On the other hand, the more diverse the portrayals, the more scope there is for diverse interpretations. This implies that, instead of trying to evaluate portrayals in terms of whether they are ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ women, they can be evaluated in terms of the extent of diversity. When the diversity of characters and narratives increases, in both factual and fictional media content, the range of reference points also increases for discussion of issues relating to women’s status.

Moving now to evidence of women’s visibility in Saudi media over the period 2004-06, the choice of this three-year period is corroborated by an article published in the Saudi liberal online publication Elaph in June 2006. The author of that article declared that there had been a huge transformation of the Saudi media in the past two years. He wrote: ‘women are now appearing daily on the front pages of all eight official newspapers which had previously been monopolized by men’ and ‘official television channels, which had once minimized the presence of women in newscasts and other programmes have been turned into advocates for an invasion (iqtiham) of the media by Saudi women'. For many Saudis, the logical response to this alleged “transformation” was to point out that it was only a transformation in relation to the preceding quarter of a century. A comparison with the situation before 1979 might not have been so startling. For example, in the 1970s people used to watch open-air cinema in Saudi Arabia in mixed company. After the end of the 1970s they could not.

Source: ResetDoc, Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions

The Most Hated Name in News

2009-09-26T10:34:00.001-04:00

Can Al Jazeera English cure what ails North American journalism?
by Deborah Campbell

There are three forces shaping the world, an Arab reporter I met in the Gaza Strip once told me: money, women, and journalism.

On the first and third counts, he might have been thinking of Qatar, where I pass by luxury shopping malls, glittering real estate developments, and, in a spirit of reasonableness, traffic signs that advise caution when driving the wrong way down one-way streets. Over the past decade, this tiny desert emirate of a million and a half people — a bump on the rib cage of Saudi Arabia, directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran — has asserted itself on the world stage in large measure by pouring money into, of all things, journalism. Since 1996, it has been funding Al Jazeera (Arabic for “the island”), the network that revolutionized the Arab media and is poised to do the same for the English-speaking world.

Passing through the security gate, where a Yemeni guard gives my documents the once-over, I enter the air-conditioned headquarters of Al Jazeera English, the international news channel the network launched in November of 2006. Inside the sweeping high-tech production facility, cameras roll as a young Australian anchor opens a segment on the South African elections, then passes the baton to his co-anchors at the channel’s three other broadcast centres, in Washington, London, and Kuala Lumpur.

The managing director of this ambitious operation is on the second floor, above the fray. Tony Burman, the former news chief of CBC Television, has the sort of face that can appear to be scowling when in fact he is deep in thought. Most of the time, what he is thinking about is news — like today’s story by AJE’s Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan, who managed to gain entry to one of China’s secret “black jails,” where the government imprisons citizens who challenge its authority. It’s a classic AJE story: a local reporter familiar with the language and culture investigates a place where few foreign correspondents venture to any depth, focusing on the plight of ordinary people and putting the story into context for a global audience. This kind of intrepid field reporting is how Burman made his mark as a producer for Canada’s public broadcaster in the ’80s and early ’90s, when he covered conflict in South America, civil war in Sudan, Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa, and the famine in Ethiopia. His crew famously broke that last story for North American viewers, in the process discovering three-year-old Birhan Woldu, who became the face of international relief efforts like Live Aid.

From his spacious corner office, Burman keeps an eye on four television screens: Al Jazeera Arabic, Al Jazeera English, and AJE’s two main competitors in the global news game, BBC World and CNN International (neither of which is broadly available in North America). Fumbling with the remote, he misfires, landing on what might be considered his arch-nemesis. “I come all the way to Qatar to watch Fox?” he says, bemused.

By the time Burman resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2007 after thirty-five years, eight of them as editor-in-chief, he’d had enough of an upper management he thought was turning CBC into a “B-minus version of Global,” the network owned by ailing media giant Canwest. He had become, he says, “less and less happy” with cbc’s Americanized direction (though not nearly as unhappy as he might have been had he stayed for the savage staff and budget cuts of late). “It was really time to leave.” Yet neither he nor anyone else could have predicted that a year later he would decamp halfway across the world to take on the greatest challenge of his career, lured by a fascinating — and unlikely — development in international journalism.

In less than three years, Al Jazeera English has emerged as the dominant channel covering the developing world. As the first worldwide news station to be based in the “global South,” it has an audacious mandate: to reverse the information flow that has traditionally moved from the wealthy countries of the North to the poorer countries south of the equator, and to be the “voice of the voiceless,” delivering in-depth journalism from under-reported regions around the world. With more than seventy bureaus run by staff drawn from some fifty nations, a typical news day for AJE might include reports on a nomadic camel-herding tribe whose members are key rebel leaders in Darfur, a lawsuit against Chiquita (formerly the United Fruit Company) for financing paramilitary death squads in Colombia, the effects of the global financial crisis on Pakistani carpet weavers, and the recent massive spike in arms sales to the United Arab Emirates. AJE currently broadcasts to 150 million households in more than 100 countries — with the exception, until now, of North America.

Source: The Walrus, The Most Hated Name in News

How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime

2009-09-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

In Syria, the secret police is as omnipresent as traffic wardens are in the West. Every movement and every word are registered. Yet some writers see this as a creative challenge rather than a nuisance. They use their wit, humour and imagination to offer the world an insight into a society that at first glance seems closed off. Susanne Schanda reports

It is one of those days. The narrator Fathi Schin doesn't even want to get out of bed. The heat in his room is oppressive and he can hear the obtrusive noise of a major organised demonstration with chanting demonstrators and marching music through his closed window.

Nihad Siris's novel, which was published last year in Germany with the title Ali Hassans Intrige (Ali Hassan's Intrigue), is a dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship. It tells of a day in the life of Fathi Schin, a melancholy author who has been forbidden to write. The day in question is the twentieth anniversary of the day the "Great Leader" came to power.

The streets of the city are blocked by a sweating, slow-moving river of people; every second person holds aloft a placard bearing the image of the leader; people with megaphones bellow out cues that are answered by idiotic rhyming declarations of love and devotion to the leader chanted by a chorus of voices: "Two, four, six, eight … leader, you are truly great!"

Source: Qantara, How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime

'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul

2009-09-24T16:36:00.003-04:00

By Roger Hardy
Middle East analyst

Ertugrul Osman - the would-be sultan known in Turkey as the "last Ottoman" - has died in Istanbul at the age of 97.

Osman would have been sultan of the Ottoman Empire had Turkey's modern republic not been created in the 1920s.

As the last surviving grandson of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, he would have been known as his Imperial Highness Prince Shehzade Ertugrul Osman Effendi.

Born in Istanbul in 1912, Osman spent most of his years living modestly in New York.

Source: BBC News, 'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul

Qui sont les Arabes ?

2009-09-23T21:36:00.000-04:00

Si le terme est utilisé - à tort - pour désigner les fidèles de l'islam, il n'en a pas toujours été ainsi. À l'origine, il servait à qualifier les populations nomades. Explications.

Existe-t-il un peuple arabe qui vivrait des rives de l'Atlantique jusqu'aux rivages de l'océan Indien ? Non. Le mot « arabe » ne qualifie pas une race... sauf lorsque l'on se réfère aux chevaux ! Le monde contemporain compte vingt-deux pays arabes (lire Comprendre, page 48) , dans lesquels on rencontre toutes sortes de peuples, Noirs ou Berbères par exemple. Alors le vocable « arabe » désigne-t-il une religion ? L'islam par exemple... Non plus. Avant l'islam, les Arabes, de la péninsule Arabique, étaient massivement polythéistes. Mais on comptait aussi des juifs et des chrétiens. Les juifs arabes sont une réalité, au même titre que les chrétiens arabes. En dépit de statistiques démographiques proche-orientales peu fiables - les chiffres sont discutés -, tous les spécialistes reconnaissent qu'il y a plusieurs millions de chrétiens arabes. Ainsi, en Égypte, évalue-t-on la population chrétienne, la plus nombreuse du Proche-Orient, à 6 ou 7 millions. Alors, arabe ça veut dire quoi ? Selon un célèbre hadith (parole ou acte du prophète Mahomet), est Arabe celui dont la langue est l'arabe. De nos jours, cette définition est la norme. C'est ainsi que la Ligue arabe inclut le Liban, un État non musulman. Cet organisme international se fait fort de se distinguer de la Ligue des États islamiques, qui sont au nombre de cinquante-sept. Parmi ses membres arabes, on trouve l'Égypte, la Syrie, le Liban, la Palestine, l'Irak où des chrétiens et des juifs sont présents. Le mot apparaît dans un texte de 853 av. J.-C. Comment,...

Source: Historia, Qui sont les Arabes?

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

2009-09-23T11:01:00.002-04:00

A new and enticing survey was conducted on Twitter use among peoples of the Middle East & North Africa. The survery, much like the Harvard Mapping of the Arabic Blogosphere earlier this year provides some interesting information.

Summary of the report: Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

The report: Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

'Imported values' fail Afghan women

2009-09-21T18:08:00.000-04:00

Fatima Gailani was 27 years old when she was thrust into the limelight as a spokesperson for the Afghan mujahideen during their 'jihad' against the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.

Beautiful and articulate, the Afghan aristocrat played a vital role in drawing the world's attention to the events taking place in her country.

This was, of course, long before the Taliban usurped the rights of women and relegated them to life in obscurity.

Gailani's father, Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, was the founder of the Mahaz-i-Milli Islami (National Islamic Front) party, and one of the leaders of the 'holy war' against the Soviets.

She says that it was her father who urged her to get involved: "He told me that the door for women would soon close and it would need a strong foot to keep it ajar."

As the only Afghan woman at the time to assume a very visible political role, Gailani was vilified by some conservative elements in society, but nothing would dissuade her from supporting Afghan liberation and serving as an example to fellow Afghan women.

Clock 'turned backward'

Following the defeat of the Soviets, civil war broke out among the mujahideen, paving the way for a takeover by the Taliban movement.

During 20 years of exile in London, Gailani watched from afar as decades of homespun social progress unraveled in her home country.

"During the reign of Zahir Shah [the former king], it didn't occur to me that I should be aware of my gender at all," recalls Gailani, sitting in the garden of her home in a well-guarded residential area of Kabul.

"I knew that in the villages and other provinces it wasn't the same, but in Kabul, whether you were a man or a woman, if you achieved well in your education, there was a place for you in government. It was during the war that I became aware of gender disparities."

Helena Malikyar, an Afghan historian and an expert on Afghan state-building, points out that the downturn in the fate of Afghan women did not begin with the advent of the Taliban and claims that it was certain extremist groups among the mujahideen who "systematically turned the clock backward on the women of Afghanistan".

"In Bonn [where the post US-led invasion government was formed in 2001] and through subsequent political formulations sponsored by the UN and the US, the same groups and leaders became part of the power structure. So, how could one hope for the pro-women rhetoric to become visible in practice?" she asks.

While post-Taliban Afghanistan did bring some improvements to the lot of women, these changes may not have taken root in Afghan society.

Gailani concedes that there are "lots of women in parliament and the ministries", but wonders whether this is a genuine mark of progress or simply a condition of the government that was formed in Bonn.

'Imported' values

"As much as it was the will of the women within Afghanistan, these changes also came from our donors. It was a condition," explains Gailani, who holds a masters degree in Islamic Jurisprudence from London's Muslim College.

"That's why we must now reconcile these two eras and help the women bring these changes in an Afghan way rather than an imported way."

Hossan Banu Ghazanfar, Afghanistan's fourth minister for women's affairs since the fall of the Taliban, agrees that change must begin "at the cultural level".

According to the ministry's own statistics, the average Afghan woman has a lifespan of 44 years, which is 20 years short of the global average.

Their low life expectancy is attributed to the high rate of underage marriages and frequent births, which contribute to an extremely high incidence of maternal mortality.

There is also widespread violence against women, notably so-called 'honor killings', an issue that is not properly addressed mainly because it is viewed by some as an aspect of Afghan 'tradition'.

Ghazanfar, who holds a PhD in linguistics and served as dean of the literature faculty at Kabul University, cites two main reasons for violence against women in Afghanistan.

"First, the [poor] economic condition of the family. Second, some cultural and traditional [customs] that are neither legal nor religious but people practice it," she says.

Source: Al Jazeera, 'Imported values' fail Afghan women
By Tanya Goudsouzian and Fatima Rabbani in Kabul

Border not a barrier into Iraq

2009-09-21T18:06:00.000-04:00

NINEWAH PROVINCE // Efforts to control Iraq’s border with Syria are being undermined by a shortage of manpower and money as well as police collaboration with insurgents, according to officers in the Iraqi security forces.

A critical 400km section of the desert frontier in Ninewah province, northern Iraq, near Mosul, is currently being guarded by a 3,600-man detachment of the Iraqi Border Patrol (IBP). Despite long-running concerns about Islamic militants crossing into Iraq and an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Baghdad and Damascus over claims of Syrian support for insurgents, Iraqi commanders in the area say they remain significantly under resourced.

“We have a shortage of soldiers in the border patrol. We need an extra 700 to 1,000 to be able to do our job properly and they probably need better pay. At the moment a basic border patrol officer earns about US$420 [Dh1,500] a month. It’s not enough,” said Lt Col Rashid Hassan al Raskani, a battalion commander in the IBP in Ninewah.

Corruption is rife in Iraq, with security officials complaining that insurgents routinely bribe their way through checkpoints or out of police custody. Low salaries are partly to blame and reduced Iraqi government budgets, a result of oil prices that have tumbled from just over US$145 (Dh533) a barrel last July to just under $70 now, have done nothing to help the situation.

Lt Col al Raskani, who has served on the Iraq-Syria frontier since 2004, said while the security situation had improved in recent years, foreign Islamic militants were still entering Iraq and carrying out high-casualty attacks.

“No border in the world is totally secure and Iraq’s border with Syria is no different,” he said in an interview. “Every day we conduct patrols and operations and we catch smugglers and terrorists.”

Source: The National, Border not a barrier into Iraq

Not even a civil war could stop the old bookbinder of Beirut

2009-09-15T11:41:00.000-04:00

Riyad is a man who gives context to this city in which I have lived these 33 years

They call him "Sheikh Tijlid" – Sheikh Binder – because he is the oldest and the most honoured bookbinder in Beirut.

There are only five left in Lebanon, repairing old newspapers, handwritten 17th-century Korans, ministry archives, cutting and pasting and then modelling fine leather covers and impressing on that wonderful soft leather the title of each volume in gold leaf. Riyad Shaker al-Khabbaz lives for his bunker of an office with its ancient iron presses, its century-old steel Arabic typeface from Germany, France and England. Some of his presses come from the homes of priests – who were the bookbinders of Beirut in centuries past.

He hands me a Koran, written in black and red ink, the margins adorned with yet more handwriting, interpretations of the sura – 300, 400 years old? – and he tells me about his client. "He is a man who greatly loves a Lebanese woman and he wants to give this to her as a gift. It is worth $100,000."

Fisk picks up the hundreds of ancient pages, so light that they move like feathers, radiating age and a world we shall never recover, unless, I suppose, we believe the words of the holy book. Its original leather covers are coloured crimson and green and gold and they rest in my hands like parchment. "Sheikh Tijlid" will have to repair them – he prefers the word "reconstitute" – just as he does the protective leather of the Bibles which churches still bring to him.

Bookbinding is an ancient art – The Independent's Beirut archives are being steadily bound in leather in Riyad's shop next to the old Turkish Serail, once a Turkish army stables, now the office of the prime minister (which, currently, alas, Lebanon does not have). Riyad is a man who gives context to the city in which I have lived these past 33 years, an institution older than the constitution of his own country, which may be why ministers and MPs and clergymen and wise men and – of course – criminals seek his help.

He stayed in this little two-roomed office and in his home nearby throughout the 15-year civil war. "The rockets exploded around me here but I was always honest and neither I nor my family were ever hurt."

He has a surprising smile, this little 74-year-old man, his big, bespectacled eyes giving him the appearance of a friendly mole, talking of duty to God and the importance of personal integrity. He sometimes makes me believe in that rarest of animals, an honest Lebanese businessman.

"During the war, a Palestinian came to me and he said he had 100,000 Lebanese passports. He wanted me to print names in them. If I did, he said, he would give me $100,000. This was during the war; there was no business, no money. So I asked my wife for her advice. She said: 'What are you waiting for?' I told her the Syrians (their 40,000 soldiers were installed in Lebanon at the time) would kill me. I said to my wife: 'So you would sacrifice me for $100,000?' This Palestinian man bought an apartment for each of his children – and then he died. So who was the idiot? Me! In those days, $100,000 could have bought me a mountain!"

But Riyad has always stood by his honesty. Which is why the great and the good of Lebanese society have flocked to his ill-painted double doors. Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Lebanese Druze and my favourite nihilist (and dinner host), often calls. So did Kamel Asaad, former speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Bahij Tabbara, a former minister, the Hariri family. On a high shelf is a curled sheaf of white leather, a dark reminder of murder and chaos. "Bashir Gemayel sent this leather to me and I used to frame his photo albums for him. Always in white."

Source: The Independent, Not even a civil war could stop the old bookbinder of Beirut

Two intriguing and interesting articles on Muslim women covering

2009-09-14T20:01:00.003-04:00

The politics of the veil

Robert Fulford, National Post

In the 21st century, the Islamic burka, the full-face-and-body veil, adopted by more women every day, has become the most potent human symbol on earth. But what exactly does it symbolize? Many say it stands for piety. No, that's wrong, says Marnia Lazreg, an Algerian-born professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Piety has little to do with it; the Koran doesn't even mention the veil. In truth, the veil stands for political ideology and male power.

It also establishes the wearer's extreme distance from the rest of us. We recognize people by seeing their faces and we acknowledge their humanity by reading what their faces tell us. Without that information humans cannot come alive to each other. A woman wearing a mask is a woman declining to be human. Unable to look anyone in the eyes, lacking peripheral vision, her hearing muffled, she becomes an abstraction. Encouraging a woman to wear the burka is like offering her a portable isolation cell.

In Europe the burka stirs public anger. President Nicolas Sarkozy says it's unwelcome in France: "We cannot have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity." Sarkozy understands that he speaks for much of the electorate. Could France actually ban the burka from its streets? That would infringe on individual rights but now begins to seem possible.

Lazreg's fascinating book, Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton University Press), tells us that the veil comes and goes, according to the rise and fall of ideologies and the change in male perceptions of women and women's beliefs about themselves. Algeria illustrates the point. After women helped achieve independence from France in 1962, many ceased to wear the veil. It lost its political force as a form of rebellion and became an archaic custom of an older generation. Lazreg remembers her mother discarding it.

The revival of the veil among Algerians in recent years coincides with economic failure, a regional cultural identity movement and the war between Islamists and the Algerian government. Today's Islamists often coerce women to wear the veil. (Surprisingly, Lazreg doesn't mention the physical harm involved: Women who hide every inch of their skin from the sun often suffer from a Vitamin D deficiency and develop early osteoporosis, a syndrome noted by doctors in several countries.)

Source: The National Post, The Politics of the Veil

The chador and feminism don't always fit

Sudanese woman sent to jail for wearing pants is freed Sudanese woman sent to jail for wearing pants is freed

Some romanticize Islamic women's dress as liberating; the case of Lubna Hussein is a reminder of the dark side of the veil.
By Meghan Daum

September 10, 2009

On Monday in Sudan, Lubna Hussein, a 34-year-old journalist, was convicted and jailed for wearing pants (long, loose ones) on the streets of Khartoum. Though she was released the next day and, moreover, avoided the 40 lashes with a plastic whip that is considered a standard sentence under Sudanese law for wearing "indecent clothing," her case made international headlines and attracted protesters outside the courthouse, many of whom were women who wore trousers in solidarity (and some of whom were arrested).

Hussein, who was entitled to immunity because she worked for the United Nations, quit her job and used the arrest as an opportunity to spotlight the punishment for dress code violations in Sudan. Having refused to pay the $200 fine, Hussein said she was glad to go to jail and seemed disappointed when she was released after a journalists union paid her fine. "I am not happy," she told Reuters. "I told all my friends and family not to pay the fine. ... [T]here are more than 700 women still in the prison who have got no one to pay for them."

Hussein isn't the only rabble-rousing feminist journalist who has made waves in sartorial politics. In a column that was published a year ago but has grabbed widespread interest on the Internet in recent days, America's own Naomi Wolf had a revelation. Islamic dress protocol, she says, can be empowering and is infused with feminist dimensions that Westerners, in their Islamaphobia, are too quick to deny. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2008, Wolf talked about visiting Muslim countries and meeting with women in their homes and realizing that "Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband."

Noting (with apparent surprise) that in the privacy of their homes Muslim women avail themselves of body lotions, attractive clothing and Victoria's Secret lingerie, Wolf wonders if Western sexual liberation, at least when it comes to how women are expected to look and dress, offers its own kind of tyranny. In fact, when she donned full-body covering and a chador and visited a Moroccan bazaar, she had something of an epiphany. "As I moved about the market -- the curve of my breasts covered, the shape of my legs obscured, my long hair not flying about me -- I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity," Wolf wrote. "I felt, yes, in certain ways, free."

Clearly, Wolf, who is nothing if not a master of taking obvious, not- exactly-original ideas and disguising them as radical inquiry (her name-making and "groundbreaking" book, "The Beauty Myth," offered up the ostensibly novel idea that obsession with physical appearance was damaging to women's progress in other areas) must never have dressed up as a ghost (or a nun or a cereal box for that matter) for Halloween. If she had, she could have saved herself the plane fare to Morocco and figured out what I thought most women -- actually, most human beings -- already know: Invisibility (or at least plainness) has its good points. Sure, it can be fun to get attention -- sometimes for showing skin, if that's your thing -- but it also can be tremendously liberating to bow out of the whole "am I hot?" enterprise altogether.

Source: LA Times, The Chador and Feminism don't always fit.

Why I Love Al Jazeera

2009-09-14T17:23:00.001-04:00

The Arab TV channel is visually stunning, exudes hustle, and covers the globe like no one else. Just beware of its insidious despotism. by Robert D. Kaplan

Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

Over just a few days in late May, when I actively monitored Al Jazeera (although I watched it almost every evening during a month in Sri Lanka), I was treated to penetrating portraits of Eritrean and Ethiopian involvement in the Somali war, of the struggle of Niger River rebels against the Nigerian government in the oil-rich south of the country, of the floods in Bangladesh, of problems with the South African economy, of the danger that desertification poses to Bedouin life in northern Sudan, of the environmental devastation around the Aral Sea, of Sikh violence in India after an attack on a temple in Austria, of foreign Islamic fighters in the southern Philippines, of microfinancing programs in Kenya, of rigged elections in South Ossetia, of human-rights demonstrations in Guatemala, and of much more. Al Jazeera covered the election campaigns in Lebanon and Iran in more detail than anyone else, as well as the Somali war and the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley. There was, too, an unbiased one-hour documentary about the Gemayel family of Christian politicians and warlords in Lebanon, and a half-hour-long investigation of the displacement of the poor from India’s new economic zones.

The fact that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is not the headquarters of a great power liberates Al Jazeera to focus equally on the four corners of the Earth rather than on just the flash points of any imperial or post-imperial interest. Outlets such as CNN and the BBC don’t cover foreign news so much as they cover the foreign extensions of Washington’s or London’s collective obsessions. And Al Jazeera, rather than spotlighting people who are loaded with credentials but often have little to say, has the knack of getting people on air who have interesting things to say, like the brilliant, no-name Russian analyst I heard explaining why both Russia and China need the current North Korean regime because it provides a buffer state against free and democratic South Korea.

Al Jazeera is also endearing because it exudes hustle. It constantly gets scoops. It has had gritty, hands-on coverage across the greater Middle East, from Gaza to Beirut to Iraq, that other channels haven’t matched. Its camera crew, for example, was the first to beam pictures from Mingora, the main town of Swat, enabling Al Jazeera to confirm that the Pakistani military had, in fact, prevailed there over the Taliban.

And Al Jazeera also excels at opening your mind. I have spent the past two years reporting from the Indian Ocean region, dealing predominantly with Muslims and indigenous nongovernmental organizations; watching Al Jazeera is the vicarious equivalent of engaging in the kinds of conversations I have been having. One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others. Watching Fox, you have to wonder whether many of its commentators have ever had a conversation with a real live Muslim abroad.

Of course, Al Jazeera has some overt prejudices. In covering the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, for example, it is clearly on the Palestinian side. Tear-jerking features about the sufferings of the Palestinians are not matched with equal coverage of the Israeli human terrain. What you get from Al Jazeera is the developing-world point of view, or, more specifically, that of the emerging developing-world bourgeoisie; and that outlook is inherently pro-Palestinian, as well as deeply hostile to American military power. You can actually measure President Barack Obama’s partial success in already changing America’s image abroad by the positive coverage he has been getting lately from Al Jazeera.

Overlying Al Jazeera’s pro-Palestinian and anti-Bush sentiment is a breezy, pacifist-trending internationalism. In too many of its reports, the subliminal message appears to be that compromise should be the order of the day. According to Al Jazeera, the politically weak, merely by being so, are automatically in the right. A certain kind of moral equivalency is Al Jazeera’s lifeblood. The history of human suffering seemingly begins and ends with that of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and that of the Iraqis under erstwhile American occupation.

Source: The Atlantic, Why I Love Al Jazeera

The A to Z of Islam

2009-09-09T13:00:00.000-04:00

Scholars in Istanbul have been toiling for more than two decades to compile the definitive encyclopaedia of Islam. The 40-volume set will contain 17,000 subject headings based on three to four million documents. Hamida Ghafour reports.

It seems old-fashioned, almost an anachronism in an era of news-driven publishing and carefully orchestrated controversies timed to coincide with glossy book launches.

But for the past 21 years, a small centre in Istanbul has been slowly but methodically publishing one volume after another of the Encyclopaedia of Islam which, when completed in the next five years, is expected to become the definitive source to turn to for all matters of the faith.

Indeed, it is the first time in history that Muslim scholars have embarked upon such a project: a 40-volume set covering all aspects of the religion such as history, philosophy, geography, culture, civilisation, literature, languages of Muslim-majority countries and, of course, theology.

“Today there are conflicting interpretations about Islam,” says professor Recep Senturk, an editor of the encyclopaedia at the Centre for Islamic Studies, a purpose-built block with an open courtyard in the Turkish metropolis. Here, away from the noise and hub of the city, on the Asian side of the Bosphorous, Turkish and western scholars are putting the finishing touches to volume 36.

“We need to provide authentic and reliable knowledge about Islam,” he continues. “This is a service to Muslim countries and the world. There are conflicting claims about what Islam says and so this is the answer.”

Since 1983, when the project was launched by the Turkish Religious Foundation, a semi-governmental organisation which is providing the funding, the Islamic world has seen many moments of turmoil: the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, two wars in the Gulf, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Lebanese civil war and the September 11 attacks on the United States, which led to the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions.

Following these events, publishers have rushed books out to capitalise on the piqued interest about the catastrophes. For example, since the September 11 attacks in 2001, 4,470 books have been published concerning Islam in the English-speaking world and are available on Amazon.com.

Yet there is an unhurried air about the guardians of the Turkish encyclopaedia. It is as if a subject as ancient and timeless as Islam need not be in any hurry to answer to the whims of the 24-hour news cycle.

It took four years to collect documents, literature, books and other materials and list all the subject titles before the first volume was even published in 1988. Since then more than 2,000 scholars from around the world, each a specialist in his or her area, have contributed articles which are vetted by a board of academics and sent back to the writers for amendments and corrections. They are translated into Turkish before they are published.

There are 17,000 subject headings – from Allah to Zaydism – and, in total, three to four million documents will be used, says Nuri Tinaz, research fellow in social sciences at the centre, rifling through a sheaf of papers about the spread of Islam in Afghanistan in the 8th century that is tucked away in one of the countless rows of filing cabinets in a room of the library.

“It is a long process,” he says. “But this is almost the last phase.”

Source: The National, continue reading 'The A to Z of Islam'

The first Islamic search engine?

2009-09-02T14:22:00.001-04:00

I just read a short piece on the Jerusalem Post's Web site about I'm Halal, apparently the world's first Muslim-friendly search engine. I can't decide whether to be alarmed by this news.

I'm Halal uses a three-tiered ranking system to filter out offending haram Web sites, according to the article. If a site is "level one haram" or "level two haram," a user can still click through. Level three sites simply don't show up on the browser.

I tested out I'm Halal with a search for "playboy" (click on the picture to see.) Perhaps I had the engine on the "Saudi sheikh on vacation" setting, because I'm Halal returned some results that appeared haram to my untrained eye.
I'm Halal

I'm Halal was developed by the Amsterdam-based AZS Media Group, led by CEO Reza Sardeha. Sardeha says he came up with the idea after he and his friends kept "bumping into explicit content" on search engines like Yahoo and Google. I'm a believer in the free market and the value of choice, so I don't say I think the option of a halal search engine is inherently bad, but I worry whether I'm Halal might ever begin to screen out foreign Web sites for reasons more political than religious, thus depriving Muslims of diverse points of view. I'd like to know more about the technology behind I'm Halal's search engine - I'll post again after I have a chance to e-mail with Sardeha.

Source: The Majlis, The first Islamic search engine?

More, from the National: Searching the internet the halal way

Sharmila Devi

Reza Sardeha, the man behind ImHalal.com, says “his search engine was not intended to be a political censor”. Maaike Hermes for The National

Most people know that the internet, which is populated not only by websites that offer information, inspiration and wonder, but also thousands that serve up hefty doses of bawdy content, can be a minefield.

This can be especially tricky for Muslims, for whom such sites are haram, or forbidden. With this in mind, an Iranian-Kuwaiti student living in the Netherlands has launched a search engine aimed specifically at ensuring that Muslims do not stumble across such sites.

Unlike Google or other search engines, ImHalal.com will fetch only web pages considered halal, or permitted under Islamic law.

Websites not shown directly are given a “haram” ranking, going up to three stars for the most offensive. “First of all, we have blocked all sexually explicit content,” said its creator, Reza Sardeha. “We are also in talks with imams to determine what might be considered haram and therefore be blocked.”

He stressed that his search engine was not intended to be a political censor, with only extremist websites, such as those of far-right or Nazi groups being blocked.

“Our goal is to create a safe environment for Muslims to search the worldwide web, but we have absolutely no intention of being a dictatorial search engine,” he said.

“So people can freely get informed about other religions if they want.”

Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

2009-08-31T21:18:00.002-04:00

Book Review: Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

By Samer Abboud

The premise of this collection of essays edited by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg is a simple one: indigenous Gulf[1] culture remains peripheralized in the broader study of popular culture in the Arab World. Indeed, this is not merely an academic bias, but one that is reflected in the relative lack of Gulf cultural penetration of the region. This marginalization of Gulf culture tends to be reinforced by two contradictory stereotypes of the region. First, that it is a backwards region defined by tribalism, and second, that cosmopolitanism has undermined traditional culture (9-10). This collection of essays aims at confronting these stereotypes and engaging key questions of identity and culture in the contemporary Gulf. To do so, the contributions are framed by four overarching themes: the historicization of contemporary Gulf identity that links the region with its pre-oil past; how states foster collective memories of shared pasts; contemporary cultural expressions; and, finally, the implications of a dynamic regional popular culture on political cohesion, identity and authority.

Lawson and Naboodah begin the collection with an engaging chapter on the attempts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government to preserve and display its cultural heritage. The authors detail a series of exhibits, symposiums and historical projects that they claim reflects a nascent nationalism in the UAE. Nadia Rahman discusses an oral history project, which is a part of these government efforts. Her contribution offers personal stories of elderly citizens of the UAE. The narratives of this older generation suggest both nostalgia for the simplicity of the past, and a pride in contemporary realities, including rapid economic development, growth and modernization.

Similarly, Khalaf’s contribution on Kuwait’s pearl diving heritage details Kuwaiti government attempts to (re)construct and (re)invent Kuwaiti identity through the annual Festival for the Commemoration of Pearl Diving and the celebration of the Kuwaiti Seaman’s Day. Through illustrations and personal narratives, Khalaf argues for the importance of these events in constructing a contemporary Kuwaiti identity. Mohammed Alkhozai provides another example of government led efforts at fostering collective identity. His chapter focuses on the cultural restoration efforts of the Bahraini government. Alkhozai uses before and after images to describe the restoration projects of five monuments: the Portugese Fort, Arad Faort, Riffa’ Forty, Sheikh Isa’s House and Aljasra House. These projects, he argues, have been central to Bahraini cultural development. Rich with visual aids, these three contributions are highly successful in demonstrating how government sponsored projects attempt to wed past and present, and in turn, how these are used to construct a contemporary national identity.

While the previous chapters stress the importance of the past in the construction of modern Gulf identities, the next grouping of essays deal with indigenous Gulf cultural expressions. An attempt is made by the authors to ground these expressions in a specific Gulf vernacular and identity. We find here excellent contributions on the centrality of football to forging cultural identities, and on the role of media in projecting a uniquely Gulf identity and culture to the rest of the world. These two chapters are slightly overshadowed by the excellent chapter on Gulf poetry by Nimah Ismail Nawwah. In this chapter, Nawwah introduces readers to a series of personal poems that deal with major social, political and cultural issues, including Palestine, the role of women, marriage and divorce, and freedom. These poems are used to convey to the reader the array of issues that shape contemporary Gulf poetry. Nawwah’s poems are powerful, insightful, and a wonderful addition to the book.

Source: Arab Media & Society, Book Review: Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States by Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (eds). London: Saqi, 2008.

Blogosphere of influence

2009-08-31T13:52:00.000-04:00

Ed Lake

The Emirati blogger Ali Gargash, the author of Dubai Nights, says he sees no place "destrcutive criticism" in the blogosphere. Randi Sokoloff / The National

The internet has thrown up a lot of ugly coinages since it emerged 20 years ago, but for sheer gruesomeness, few can rival the colloquial name for online diaries, the “blog”. “Blogosphere”, admittedly, runs it a tight race and its other derivatives – blogger”, “vlog” (a blog on video) and so forth – aren’t much better. Yet the thing itself is a marvel: a literary form and public medium unrivalled in history for flexibility and ease of access. User-friendly writing platforms such as Wordpress and Blogspot have made pundits out of everyone with an internet connection and two thoughts to rub together, a fact that has changed the shape of news media, political discourse, academic research and a good deal else. The rise of the blogger was a watershed moment in the internet age. And yet... “blog”.

Lucky Arabic speakers, then, who get all the medium’s reverberating power and not too much of its naffness. Online diaries are known in Arabic by the rather graceful word moudawanat, and you can expect to hear a lot more about them as the moudawanosphere continues its rapid expansion. A recent study undertaken by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University identified 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, plus several thousand more in a mixture of Arabic and other languages. Bloggers from across the Arabic-speaking world offer anecdotal evidence for the explosion in blogging’s popularity over the past few years. “When I started five years ago we were like a bunch of 10 or 15 people blogging from Saudi Arabia about Saudi Arabia,” one interviewee told me. “Today we have more than 10,000 Saudi blogs, so it’s quite different now.”

Who are the Arabic bloggers? According to the Berkman report Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent, they are mainly male, mainly young and mainly Egyptian or Saudi.

Moreover, to judge from the paper, the biggest surprise for the researchers was that the Arabic blogosphere doesn’t really see itself as a Pan-Arabic phenomenon at all. “Those that write about politics tend to focus on issues within their own country,” it claims. “Domestic news is more popular than international news...” It notes, however, that the situation in Gaza is a major topic of interest across the Arab world. And there was one discovery that must have reassured its American readers: to appearances, the bloggers aren’t, for the most part, terrorists. “Across the map,” the authors explain, “Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of violent extremists... We consider this a positive finding”. Alas, the flies in the ointment for potential terror targets include the plausible thought that those with violent inclinations might prefer not to announce themselves on Livejournal, and the old quibble about who qualifies as a terrorist as opposed to a freedom fighter. As the report suggests: “This complex issue merits additional research.”

Source: The National, Blogosphere of influence

Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands

2009-08-30T19:18:00.000-04:00

Judy Bachrach
Every time I despair of the way women are treated in Muslim countries—and the few syllables Western leaders and op-ed columnists expend on their humiliations, mutilations, harassments, and, yes, murders—I turn to the Web site of Mona Eltahawy. Eltahawy spent her formative years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia:

A couple of years after I stopped visiting, a horrific fire broke out in a school in Mecca, home to the Muslim world’s holiest site. Fifteen girls burned to death because morality police standing outside the school wouldn’t let them out of the burning building. Why? Because they weren’t wearing headscarves and abayas, the black cloaks that girls and women must wear in public in Saudi Arabia.

And here is Eltahawy on a girl’s lot in Egypt:

When I was only four years old and still living in Cairo, a man exposed himself to me as I stood on a balcony at my family’s, and gestured for me to come down. At 15, I was groped as I was performing the rites of the hajj pilgrimage at Mecca, the holiest site for Muslims. Every part of my body was covered except for my face and hands. I’d never been groped before and burst into tears, but I was too ashamed to explain to my family what had happened.

To anyone who, like me, has lived in a Muslim nation, none of this behavior is either singular or surprising. It is the way men in most Islamic nations prefer things to be. We can talk forever about the nature of culture versus faith: how ancient rites and practices like the circumcision of girls (85 percent of all Egyptian girls have endured this procedure), or the tradition of keeping women ignorant and housebound, can corrupt a religion that never intended for these things to happen.

But it is no coincidence that women who must submit to Sharia law find themselves in a very bad place, wherever those women and those places happen to be. This includes France, where only last year a court in Lille upheld the right of a Muslim man to hold fast to his faith and annul his marriage when he discovered his bride was not a virgin. And it includes Germany, where in Berlin in 2005 there were eight murders of young women of Turkish origin, executed by members of their own families. And Australia, where, after a group of unveiled Muslim women were raped, the succinct Mufti Taj al-Din al-Hilali explained away the crime as an attack on “uncovered meat.” And it includes the United Kingdom, where Scotland Yard has probed 109 suspicious deaths of women, also likely slaughtered by relatives. Islam is an easy rider: it travels everywhere and often brings with it a lot of baggage.

Bet let’s start with Islam as it affects women in their home countries. Last year, in a poll of 2,000 Egyptian men, 62 percent admitted harassing women: an activity most of those interviewed insisted was not really their fault as their advances, however intemperate and offensive to their victims, had after all been provoked by the women themselves.

Nor is this sort of harassment confined to Islamic women in Islamic nations. Western women who find themselves in the Middle East come in for their own fair share of daily insults, owing to their double deficit as women and foreigners. Every step outside the home or hotel is an invitation to a carefully directed barrage of verbal assaults, their components familiar and unvarying: vulgar and offensive remarks, leers and snickers, the occasional shove, all accompanied by grins of triumph. When I lived in Egypt, everyone in Cairo avidly watched the television series Dallas, and as a result became expert on the sexual habits of American women. And not simply expert, but unrepentantly predatory. After all, these were women whose husbands and brothers would not reflexively massacre those who insulted them.

Thus it was that my Egyptian experience marked the only time in my life when the acquisition of the rudiments of a foreign language, far from making life more comfortable, actually ignited rage. The more Arabic we learned, the more xenophobic and sexually explicit trash talk we understood. There was a lot of it around (except, significantly, when we were escorted by our husbands).

Source: World Affairs Journal, 'Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands'

‘The veil should not be a barrier between women’

2009-08-30T19:12:00.001-04:00

The writer and campaigner Rabina Khan talks to Charlotte Kemp about her drive to dispel the myths and stereotypes about the hijab, and how her latest project, which documents the views of Muslim and non-Muslim women on the subject, is helping to promote a new understanding.

With her beautiful face framed by a dusky pink headscarf, Rabina Khan arrives at our rendezvous in east London a slight and seemingly shy figure who looks no more than 20 years old. But as if to prove her mission to challenge people’s perceptions of each other, all is not quite as it seems. For in fact, not only is Khan 37, and married with two daughters, aged 15 and nine, she is far from shy, exuding a calm confidence which pervades her work as a novelist, editor, campaigner and general champion for Muslim women’s rights both in Britain and around the world.

There are more surprises. Though she now thrives in the ethnic diversity of London’s East End, she was born in Bangladesh but grew up in the predominantly white town of Rochester, Kent, in the south-east of England, less than 10 miles from my own childhood home.

“I made the decision to wear the hijab when I moved to London in my early 20s,” she tells me. “I felt the time was right. It was part of my faith – a gift. It enhances me but it doesn’t change who I am, and that is the point. The only identity we should bear is our human identity.”

Hence Khan’s latest projects, an anthology of thought-provoking essays, poems and short stories written by Muslim and non-Muslim women which tackle the contentious issues now surrounding the wearing of the veil.

Entitled Behind The Hijab, the book attempts to unravel the complex politics of the headscarf post-September 11, as well as broaching some uncomfortable questions. Is the veil a symbol of liberation or suppression? Does it free women from sexual harassment and objectification or denigrate them to second-class citizens?

Source: The National, 'The veil should not be a barrier between women.'

The exorcist who saves marriages

2009-08-29T15:07:00.001-04:00

CAIRO // Throughout the world, every married couple faces a typical set of challenges. Boredom, disagreement, infidelity and lack of sexual interest can all imperil, if not destroy, an otherwise happy coupling.

But for Samaa Shaaban, 24, the problem was as obvious as it was atypical. She believes she is possessed by a demon, or jinn, that prevents her from consummating her two-month-old marriage with her husband, Ayman Salah, 31.

“I’m still a virgin and when my husband approaches me, I see and hear strange things, like snakes or people talking to me. In many instances, I lose consciousness,” said Ms Shaaban, speaking from the small apartment she shares with her husband in Shubra Al Khaima, one of Cairo’s poorest neighbourhoods. “Once, the people who appear and speak to me told me that it’s a magic spell and that only the woman who cast it can break it.”

But Ms Shaaban insists she knows of no one who would try to hurt her otherwise happy marriage, and after several trips to local sheikhs failed to quell the demons, she decided to bridge Egypt’s sometimes tense communal gulf. Two weeks ago, she visited the St Samaan Coptic Orthodox Church in the Cairo suburb of Manshiyet Naser, where Father Samaan Ibrahim performs mass exorcisms every Thursday evening in front of a crowd of hundreds of worshippers.

One one level, Ms Shaaban’s experience belies reports of a growing rift here between Egypt’s Coptic Christians and its Muslim majority, and reveals the tolerance inherent in Egypt’s unique religious sensibilities.

But it also shows a pervasive reality of sexual life here. For many of Egypt’s poorest, the corporeal questions of sex and marriage are as vivid and mysterious as the supernatural world of spirits and demons.

“The Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian, have, between quotes, a deep spiritual life. Every group in its way,” said Joseph Faltas, a Coptic theologian and researcher at Cairo’s Orthodox Patristic Centre.

“As a society here, not in Egypt but in the Middle East, sex and relations between man and woman are the most difficult thing to discuss. We don’t have sexual education in our schools, even in our churches. That is the darkest area in our lives, especially in the lower levels” of society.

To hear Ms Shaaban and her husband describe it, the decision to seek religious intervention outside their Muslim community was an easy one, borne out of obvious necessity and permitted by a universal God.

“We have a lot of Christian friends. We eat in each other’s houses,” said Mr Salah. “Entering a church is exactly like entering a mosque. It’s a house of God.”

While several churches in Cairo offer such exorcisms, Ms Shaaban chose to enter what is certainly the most dramatic. The St Samaan Church is located in a natural cave in the Moqattam Hill outside of Cairo. It sits atop a mostly Christian community of rubbish collectors who live in the shadow of the hill among the rubbish they collect.

At one such session, Father Samaan began with an admonishment to the hundreds of Christians and Muslims who had gathered to witness and benefit from his “healings”.

“I will heal all of you who are possessed by Satan,” he said into a microphone. “Those who are coming to chat, and not to pray, should leave.”

Then, turning his back to the assembly, Father Samaan blessed a few dozen bottles of spring water. “Whoever has a drop of water touch him or her can be certain that Jesus will heal them,” he said. With that, he proceeded into the audience and began to toss water at the crowd.

Source: The National
Continue reading The exorcist who saves marriages

U.S. war against Iraq: Destruction of a civilization

2009-08-26T17:15:00.000-04:00

By James Petras

The U.S. seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent U.S. occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department.

These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a U.S. war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-U.S. puppet regime.

If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Source: al Jazeera Magazine 'Destruction of a civilization'

Author of 'Cartoons That Shook the World' Grudgingly Agreed With Yale Press Decision

2009-08-24T14:29:00.000-04:00

Jytte Klausen, the Brandeis political scientist whose book about the violence that followed a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad will be published this fall -- minus the cartoons -- by Yale University Press, told The Boston Globe that she understood Yale's decision to cut the illustrations. The book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, will be published in November with an author's note from Ms. Klausen, who told the Globe, "If I was an administrator at the university, I would have pulled the cartoons." The press feared inciting more violence; the removal of the cartoons was condemned by the American Association of University Professors.

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Author-of-Cartoons-That-Shook/7775/

Arabic and friendship studies in Syria

2009-08-23T18:40:00.000-04:00

The Syrian capital, Damascus, is becoming a popular destination for foreigners who want to learn Arabic. The BBC's Paul Moss, who spent time there earlier this year, was inspired to study hard by his encounters with the city's people.

Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.

Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, "attack by snake" must rate as one of the more implausible.

But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.

He would be absent, he said, from the final test for "Arabic level one" as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.

I doubt whether Alex's story will put many people off coming here.

Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.

For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.

Continue reading: BBC-Arabic and friendship studies in Syria

Holy month is not all fasting for Egyptians

2009-08-23T03:28:00.000-04:00

CAIRO // Cairo’s streets, bridges, newspapers and television channels are overflowing with advertisements for soap operas, talks shows and, to a lesser degree, religious programmes that will air during Ramadan. Anticipation for the Ramadan-only series has become such a common feature of popular culture here that it is difficult to imagine what the holy month was like before the advent of satellite television.

More than 500 Arabic satellite channels and scores of local channels are competing for the surge in viewers, and advertising dollars, with new programmes ranging from soap operas to social, historical and religious fare.

Advertisements for new shows in the run-up to Ramadan have replaced the ads for oil and other food products that traditionally dominate broadcasts before and during the month.

Many conservative Egyptians point to the irony of an increase in the promotion of entertainment and consumption during a time that is meant to be dedicated to prayer, introspection, fasting and the poor.

“For many, Ramadan doesn’t mean more than abstaining from eating, drinking and sexual desires during the day, which is accompanied by short tempers and traffic violations, then excessive food and staying late at night at Ramadan tents, which contradicts the month of rituals,” wrote Moustafa el-Bassiyouni in the ruling party weekly al-Watany al-Youm on Tuesday.

“I won’t let despair prevent me from saying that the month of benevolence is not a month of TV series and violations, excessive spending and attrition,” he added.
“OK, Ramadan is at the door, and Egypt will be filled with the appearance of religiosity, which doesn’t mean at all that we’re religious people,” said Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the opposition daily al-Destour.

Yaser Ayoub, an Egyptian writer and TV presenter who has been writing a series about Egyptians’ ethics, disagrees.

He argued in the independent weekly al-Osbou on Tuesday that Egyptians are religious despite some saying otherwise.

A cartoon in the state owned Rose el-Youssef daily on Wednesday showed a family looking very serious and distressed, gathering around what looks like a war map, with one of the sons telling someone on the telephone: “I’m busy right now, we’re planning our Ramadan TV watching plan.”

Foreign satellite channels are also competing for Egyptian viewers.

Continue reading: The National

In Ramadan, the best dates in Egypt are 'Obama'

2009-08-21T20:07:00.001-04:00

By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP) – 7 hours ago

CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.

Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.

In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.

Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.

"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.

Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."

Continue reading Associate Press: By HADEEL AL-SHALCHI (AP) – 7 hours ago

CAIRO — For the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.

Dates are a traditional food for Ramadan — which begins Saturday in most of the Islamic world — since the Prophet Muhammad is said to have used them to break the month's sunrise-to-sunset fast each evening.

In Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales — giving a little reflection of the political mood.

Obama's vault to the top of the Egyptian date-scale comes after he delivered a landmark address in Cairo in June, saying he wants to improve American ties with Muslims around the world. Those ties were deeply strained under his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the Arab world — and whose name was given to the worst quality dates in Egypt in past Ramadans.

"We love Obama and so we named our best dates for him," said Atif Hashim at his busy shop in downtown Cairo.

Huge barrels in his shop were piled with "Obama" dates, selling for just under $2.50 a pound ($5 a kilogram). For an additional dollar, there is an even better date, labeled on a sign as "Super Obama."

"We put a sweet date in Mr. Obama's mouth and a message in his ear," Hashim said. "Please help to bring peace to the world. We have a lot of hope in you."

Hashim named his poorer dates after Israeli Foreign Minister Avidgor Lieberman, a hard-liner who is particularly disliked in Egypt for once saying its president, Hosni Mubarak, can "go to hell."

Other low-quality dates were named after Lieberman's predecessor, Tzipi Livni, and after Bush. They all go for about 17 cents a pound (36 cents a kilogram).

In 2006, many sellers in Egypt named their best dates after the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, whose popularity soared among Arabs because his militants battled Israel in a devastating war that summer.

During the lunar month of Ramadan, observant Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, smoking and sex from sunrise to sunset. It is believed that God began revealing the Quran to Muhammad during Ramadan, and the faithful are supposed to spend the month in religious reflection, prayer and remembrance of the poor.

It's also a time of celebrations, late nights out with friends and family and elaborate meals for "iftar," the sunset dinner that breaks the fast.

This year, Ramadan starts in August for the first time in 33 years — meaning a long, hot day for those fasting. In a bid to bring up the time for iftar, Egypt went off daylight savings time on Friday.

The fast begins Saturday for most of the Mideast and Asia, although Libya, Turkey, and some Lebanese Shiites began fasting Friday. The month begins when each Muslim country's Islamic authorities sight the crescent moon that marks the beginning of the lunar month — sometimes using only the naked eye, leading to some discrepancies in the timing.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinians decorated their houses with lights in the shape of crescents and stars and shops began preparing special pastries and traditional Ramadan drinks like kharoub, made of carobs. The Israeli military said it would keep checkpoints open longer hours to allow more people to cross.

In Hamas-controlled Gaza City, officials hung signs reading "Welcome Ramadan" and provided mosques with large carpets to accommodate the increased number of worshippers.

Associate Press: In Ramadan, the best dates in Egypt are 'Obama'

Shops sold little electric lamps, a traditional children's toy during Ramadan — made in China and brought through smuggling tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border to circumvent the blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt after Hamas seized power two years ago.

In Turkey, the mosques were jam-packed and municipalities set up soup kitchens to serve iftar to the poor. Holiday-makers began deserting beach resorts to return home. Newspapers carried recommendations from dietitians and Mehmet Emin Ozafsar, the deputy head of Turkey's department for religious affairs, urged people observing the fast not to use it as an excuse for "aggressive behavior" or abstinence from work.

"Fasting is patience and tolerance," Ozafsar said.

Xinjiang Crackdown and Changing Perceptions of China in the Islamic World?

2009-08-21T00:05:00.001-04:00

Publication: China Brief Volume: 9 Issue: 16
August 5, 2009 03:51 PM Age: 15 days
Category: China Brief, Home Page, Foreign Policy, Domestic/Social, China and the Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, Middle East, Turkey, Featured
By: Chris Zambelis

The outbreak of ethno-sectarian unrest in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XAR) between members of the local Uighur community, an ethnic Turkic population that is predominantly Sunni Muslim, and ethnic Han Chinese, China’s majority ethnic group, has largely subsided on the surface. The hostilities began on July 5 during a public demonstration by Uighur college students and others in the provincial capital of Urumqi to protest the deaths of two Uighur factory workers in a brawl in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province. The demonstration eventually spiraled into a riot against local Han Chinese citizens (See "The Xinjiang Crisis: A Test for Beijing's Carrot-and-Stick Strategy," China Brief, July 23). Approximately 200 Han Chinese and Uighurs have been killed and over 1000 injured. Thousands of rioters from both sides have also reportedly been detained. Most estimates of damage to public and private property hover around $15 million (Xinhua News Agency, July 8).

Given the extent of the violence, the residual domestic impact of the riots on ethno-sectarian relations and stability in Xinjiang is cause for serious concern in Beijing. Also, because of global media coverage of the hostilities, Beijing is wary about once again becoming the target of scrutiny by international human rights groups and major powers over its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and political dissidents. The widespread comparisons of the crisis in Xinjiang with the uprisings in Tibet in 2008 and Tiananmen Square in 1989 in media and activist circles, for instance, are not sitting well in Beijing (ISN Security Watch, July 23). In addition, because of the political sensitivities surrounding China’s treatment of its Muslim community, China is also worried that the recent crisis will tarnish its reputation in the Middle East and the greater Islamic world.

Views from the Muslim World

In light of the recent events in Xinjiang, observers of China’s increasingly expanding and multifaceted relationship with the Middle East and the greater Islamic world are asking whether the crisis in Xinjiang will affect how key Muslim countries view China. In spite of scenes of unrest and a heightened awareness of the Uighur predicament, the official reaction of most Muslim countries to the crisis, particularly that of Arab countries in the Middle East with a vital stake in maintaining friendly relations with China, has been muted (al-Jazeera [Doha], July 7). Similarly, despite being home to sizeable ethnic Uighur communities of their own that maintain close links to their kin in Xinjiang, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, along with Pakistan and Afghanistan, have followed suit by keeping silent. The fact that the Uighur predicament is largely overlooked internationally outside of narrow activist circles has also contributed to the overall silence regarding the recent hostilities, making it easier for governments to avoid the issue. Unlike the plight of the Palestinians, who live under Israeli military occupation—an issue that resonates deeply across the Middle East and the greater Islamic world as well as in human rights circles—the Uighurs are generally ignored (The Associated Press, July 14; al-Jazeera, July 7). In fact, the extent to which key Muslim countries, including Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state, tried to distance themselves from any association with the Uighur cause in China is striking. A July 12 statement by Indonesian Ambassador to China H.E. Sudrajat illustrates this trend: "What happened in Xinjiang is China’s internal affair. We respect China’s sovereignty over the region and will never meddle in the problem." He also provided insight into at least one of the reason’s underlying Jakarta’s position: “The two countries have agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty and refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs" (Kompas [Jakarta], July 13) [1].

In contrast, the official reactions of major Muslim countries following the controversial publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed in a negative light in European newspapers in 2005 prompted an outpour of condemnations by key Muslim leaders and religious figures. The storm over the publication of the cartoons also provoked a series of diplomatic crises, economic and cultural boycotts, and public demonstrations in autocratic countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Pakistan where mass expressions of any form of organized dissent are typically suppressed by authorities. Remarkably, only Turkey and Iran have issued strong rebukes over China’s handling of the recent crisis and its treatment of the Uighur community (Financial Times [London], July 14; Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 15; Tehran Times, July 15).

The official silence from major players in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world reflects the importance of China as a key regional and global actor. In spite of Beijing’s record of repressing its own Muslim community, perceptions of China tend to be highly positive on both the state and popular levels among Muslims in the Middle East and beyond [2]. Spurred on initially by its drive to secure sources of energy and new markets for its goods, China has made tremendous political, economic and cultural inroads in the Middle East in recent years. For many Muslim countries, China is a crucial source for investment and a reliable customer for oil and gas and other natural resources. In spite of their close ties to the United States, autocratic regimes in the Middle East, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, also look toward China for diplomatic cover and to serve as a check on what they often see as Washington’s overbearing influence in regional affairs [3]. Similarly, Cairo and Riyadh, among other autocratic regimes in the region, see strong ties to Beijing as a way to offset widespread domestic opposition to their relations with Washington and to counter the popular perception among Arab and Muslim publics that they exist to further U.S. (and Israeli) imperial interests [4]. This support is crucial considering the widespread popular opposition to U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. In addition to the value they assign to strong trade relations with Beijing, Muslim countries such as Indonesia with a history of ethno-sectarian strife also look to China for support in repelling criticism from the United States and international institutions and activists regarding their approach to dealing with politically sensitive domestic issues such as minority rights. In this regard, Jakarta’s support for Beijing during the Xinjiang crisis is logical (Kompas [Jakarta], July 13).

Moreover, predominantly Muslim countries in Central Asia, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan with significant Uighur populations of their own and a history of ethnic and sectarian tensions see the crisis in Xinjiang as a serious threat to their own domestic stability. Kazakhstan, for instance, is home to at least 300,000 ethnic Uighurs, representing the largest ethnic Uighur community outside of China. Kyrgyzstan is home to another 60,000 ethnic Uighurs while approximately 6,000 ethnic Uighurs live in Tajikistan (The Associated Press, July 14). Cultural and economic ties between Chinese Uighurs and their ethnic kin in neighboring countries help maintain a strong sense of Uighur identity. The trade volume of Xinjiang with neighboring countries topped $14 billion dollars in 2008, helping make Urumqi the most prosperous city in the region (Xinhua News Agency, July 15). In addition to prioritizing their growing economic and diplomatic relations with China, the Central Asian republics fear that their own Uighur citizens may one day follow in the footsteps of their kin in China and agitate for more rights. Evidence of widespread outrage among the Uighur diaspora in Central Asia is a case in point. While refraining from mobilizing public protests out of fear of provoking the ruling regimes into a violence crackdown, ethnic Uighur groups in Central Asia have issued letters to international bodies such as the United Nations (U.N.) condemning China’s actions (The Associated Press, July 14). Prominent Uighur activists have also gone so far as to single out the Central Asian republics for actively colluding with China to suppress Uighur identity and culture in the region (al-Jazeera, July 7). Like their counterparts in the Arab Middle East and other major Muslim countries such as Indonesia, the Central Asian republics are firm in their support for China amid the crisis.

A strong rebuke by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a July 10 press conference, where he labeled China’s actions in Xinjiang a “near genocide,” broke the official silence among key Muslim countries regarding the events in Xinjiang (See "Ankara's Reaction to Xinjiang Crisis Raises Bilateral Tension," Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 15). In spite of burgeoning Sino-Turkish trade ties, Turkish Industry Minister Nihat Ergun went as far as to call for a boycott of Chinese products in a sign of solidarity with the Uighurs, although he later retreated from that position. Ankara also threatened to raise the issue of Xinjiang at the United Nations (Financial Times, July 14). Turkey’s reaction to the crisis is rooted in a complex set of factors. In addition to sharing the Islamic faith, Turkey shares ethnic, linguistic, and cultural ties with the Uighurs. Turkey’s reaction to the crisis was also prompted by the de facto leadership role it assumed among ethnic Turkic peoples in the Caucasus and Central Asia after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In this regard, Turkey sees itself as a sort of guardian of Turkic rights. Unlike in other countries, where Uighurs and their supporters have been banned from staging public demonstrations, members of the Uighur diaspora and other supporters have staged a number of protests in Turkey in front of Chinese diplomatic missions (Today’s Zaman [Istanbul] July 26; Christian Science Monitor, July 14; The Associated Press, July 14). The rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), an Islamist-oriented party, in Turkish politics also shaped Ankara’s approach to its dealings with issues affecting Muslims outside of its borders, prompting a more activist approach to the crisis in Xinjiang by Ankara. Turkey also probably sees the crisis in Xinjiang as an opportunity to showcase its growing international profile. The tensions stemming from the Xinjiang crisis in Sino-Turkish relations may go as far as to impact Beijing’s efforts to sell Ankara its HQ-9 high-altitude air defense system and further cooperation in the defense sector between China and Turkey. China’s HQ-9 system is currently competing with systems offered by both the United States and Russia (Defense News, July 20).

While Turkey’s reaction to the crisis in Xinjiang may be at least partially explained by cultural, historical and geopolitical reasons, many observers were surprised when Iran’s clerical establishment issued its own condemnation of China’s actions. On July 14, Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani called for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and other international institutions to intervene on behalf of the Uighurs. He also added: “We just thought that only the bullying West violates Muslims’ rights and deprive them of their basic rights but reports from China indicate that in that part of the world the unprotected Muslims are being mercilessly suppressed by yesterday’s communist China and today’s capitalist China” (Tehran Times, July 15). Other prominent Iranian clerics made similar comments (Press TV [Tehran], July 13).

Significantly, official criticism of China out of Iran has been coming from the clerical establishment. Nevertheless, the timing of the criticism, given the ongoing post-election turmoil, is also curious, since China has refrained from criticizing Tehran’s suppression of opposition elements. In contrast, statements from diplomatic and elected officials about the crisis in Xinjiang have tended to be more measured. While expressing concern for the plight of Muslims in China and calling for peace and calm during a July 12 telephone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi, for instance, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki also added that the meddling of “Western governments” was to blame for the crisis (Press TV, July 12). Iranian government officials also had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticism from influential clerics who accuse the state of failing to do enough for the Uighurs. Among other things, a number of senior clerics have suggested that the Iranian state is operating a doubled-standard in its approach to the crisis in Xinjiang and relations with China compared to its actions related to Palestine and other issues important to Muslims (Press TV, July 27).

The apparent disconnect between certain key members of the clerical establishment and the state appears to represent a major dilemma for Tehran. Both Iran and China maintain close diplomatic, economic and military ties. Moreover, as Iran continues to face increasing pressure from the United States and Israel regarding its nuclear program, it likely sees China as a deterrent to any potential U.S. or Israeli military action due to Beijing’s major stake in Iranian energy resources. The decision by key clerics to speak out against China may represent an effort on their part to reach out to Muslims across the globe by showcasing Iran’s credentials as an advocate for Muslim rights during a period where the Islamic Republic appears to be under siege from hostile forces operating within and outside of its borders. The official stance of the political establishment, however, while keen on showcasing Iran’s religious credentials, also likely calculates the importance of maintaining strong Sino-Iranian ties during this crucial period in the Islamic Republic’s history. Going out of its way to lambast China over the crisis in Xinjiang is not in Iran’s interest.

Continue reading: The Jamestown Foundation Xinjiang

What Egyptians want from Washington

2009-08-19T01:17:00.000-04:00

Egypt is set to use its president's visit to Washington to trumpet its position as a key US ally and major regional player.

Hosni Mubarak and Barack Obama, the US president, are expected to discuss a number of regional issues including the pivotal Palestinian-Israeli peace process, Iran's nuclear programme, stabilising Iraq, and fighting armed Islamist groups throughout the Middle East.

But many ordinary Egyptians, who once cared about their country's foreign policy, may no longer be interested in such talks.

Abdullah al-Ashaal, a professor of international relations and law at the American University in Cairo, says Egyptians will tune out because they believe the meetings in Washington on Tuesday will follow "an elitist agenda that has no direct link to the ordinary Egyptian citizen".

Al-Ashal, a critic of Egyptian foreign policy who describes himself as an independent political intellectual, said: "The most important item on Mubarak's agenda in Washington is to visit the White House. The man has in the past lost hope in visiting the White House and he has been dreaming about this visit."

Five-year absence

Mubarak has not visited the US since 2004, when the administration of George Bush, Obama's predecessor, pressed the Egyptian government on political plurality and democratisation.

Bush, left, visited Cairo often, but Mubarak has not been to the US since 2004 [AFP]

At that time, Bush pressed some of Washington's traditional Arab allies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to create multi-party political systems and hold free elections.

But he quickly backed away from this once it became clear that such elections had led to the rise of Islamist groups in Iraq, Egypt, and the occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Obama administration has applied a more realistic approach towards the region.

It has been seeking the help of Arab governments in securing Iraq and pushing forward the peace process with Israel in return for turning a blind eye to political repression and media crackdowns.

Obama's strategy is a boon to Cairo which shares Washington's interest in minimising the influence of Iran and Islamist groups in the region.

In the meantime, Egypt continues to reject domestic and foreign pressure to democratise.

To Keep reading click on Al Jazeera: What Egyptians want from Washington

Arabic explained (for Arabic speakers)

2009-08-17T14:40:00.001-04:00

ABU DHABI // Arabic has 16 words for the different levels of love between two people, according to The Knowledge of Language, an Arabic book by Abu Mansoor al Tha’albi dating back to the 11th century.

With so much flexibility, no wonder someone from Oman may struggle to understand a visitor from the Maghreb, although each would say he was speaking Arabic. And in the UAE, a melting pot for dialects from across the region and beyond, the differences can be even more frustrating.

One man who was fed up with constantly asking or hearing “wait, what does that mean?” is Abdullah Arif, a 23-year-old Saudi Arabian graduate living in Dubai, who decided to do something about it.

That was last summer. In March he set about making things a little more clear for others like him and two weeks ago he launched Mo3jam.com, one of the web’s most comprehensive user-generated compendiums of slang and colloquial Arabic.

On the first day, it had 20,000 page views, 2,000 unique visitors and 300 uploaded definitions.

After a fortnight, Mo3jam – pronounced mo’jum, the Arabic word for lexicon – has just over 900 definitions, 10 per cent of which are in English, with plans to expand the English section to include every word that has been uploaded.

Colloquial language in the UAE, and the Arabian Peninsula in general, is steeped in tradition and among the closest dialects to classical Arabic, said Dr Fatma al Sayegh, professor of UAE and Gulf history at UAE University.

“The birthplace of Arabic was in the Peninsula. The further we are from the centre, changes begin coming in.”

Media outlets were contributing to an erosion of classical Arabic, also called modern standard Arabic, she said. “The media affect us to a great extent. We now use a mix of Emirati, English and Levantine.”

She illustrated her point with a sentence used by a student, who had said: “Ana rayeh adarrap el course” – a mish-mash of Arabic and English that meant the student was going to drop a college class.

This language creep was an affirmation that Arabic was, like other languages, simply organic. “Language is like a living being,” she said. “It’s only a problem if it obscures our way of life and traditions.” Almost 10,000 words were added to the Arabic language every year, she added.

Mo3jam allows internet users to upload words in one of eight major dialects that include Egyptian, Saudi, Gulf, Levant and Maghrebi, with sub-dialects that include Emirati, Lebanese and Moroccan.

Users upload a definition in classical Arabic and, if they wish, English or French. They can also add pronunciations and example sentences.

The dearth of comparable online resources gave Mr Arif the idea for his website. “You had to dig really deep within the web or ask people on forums for this kind of information,” he said.

A graduate in business administration from the American University of Sharjah, he wanted to fill a communication void that he saw amid the multiculturalism of Dubai compared with his home town of Jeddah.

“In Dubai especially, you come across the entire spectrum of Arabs,” he said. Back home, his exposure was limited to local dialects, mainly Hijazi with hints of Egyptian and Levantine from school teachers and television.

The English section of the website currently defaults to the English definition if it is available. Audio versions of words can be uploaded and phrases are spelt out phonetically to help non-Arabs with pronunciation.

Mr Arif said foreigners were very much part of his audience. “I’m an Arab and I need this kind of service. So you could imagine the case for learners of Arabic or expats.”

In Dubai especially, with its “eclectic mix of Arabs and other non-Arab expatriates”, he believed a service like Mo3jam could prove useful.

“The higher the incidence of misunderstanding, the higher the need for clarifications,” he said.

At first glance, the website offers a simple, inviting aesthetic. This informality is evident in the name, which is written in “Arabish”, an English transliteration that uses numerals to convey Arabic letters that have no equivalents in the Latin alphabet.

Mr Arif said the experience had reinvigorated his connection with the language and culture.

“I rarely used standard Arabic on the web, but now with Mo3jam, I’m seeing myself typing and using Arabic increasingly.”

But Dr al Sayegh worries that Arabic usage might become increasingly fragmented.

“This promotes tribalism,” she said, arguing that classical Arabic should be dominant. With dialects taking over pop culture, she felt that classical Arabic, which was common to citizens of the Arab world, should be given more prominence. “Dialects have taken hold to the extent that we need a dictionary to speak with each other,” she said.

But Mr Arif feels the dual nature of the Arabic language, with its colloquial and classical components, is itself a staple of the culture. “Arabic has forever been diglossic,” he said.

He added that while he banned offensive words of a profane or racist nature, he had been criticised for accepting some vulgar expressions.

“They’re part of language,” he said.

Check it out: Mo3jam : معجم