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
Showing posts with label Maghreb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maghreb. Show all posts
Wednesday, 23 September 2009
Saturday, 21 March 2009
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Tunisia’s bloggers defy state censors
TUNIS // Thirteen years ago, Tunisian authorities barred Zied el Heni from launching an independent radio station. Later, he tried to start a magazine, but they barred him again. Last year, he finally found his platform – blogging.
“I wanted a space where I could express myself without the constraints imposed on my profession,” said el Heni, a journalist and human rights activist in the capital, Tunis. “I’ve tried to transform my sense of injustice and rage into energy.”
Foreign tourists know Tunisia for its sunny beaches, ancient ruins and one of the Arab world’s most liberal societies. But for Tunisians, life is a daily tiptoe through a minefield of political taboos enforced by a vast security apparatus and heavily censored media. Now the country’s drive to embrace the internet is giving Tunisians an unexpected new outlet to challenge authority.
“The government policy is to encourage the use of the internet by all sectors of society, and ensure access,” said Oussama Romdhani, a senior Tunisian official. The president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, has vowed to get the country online as part of a drive towards a knowledge-based economy.
The government has poured cash into underwater and fibre-optic cables, and made computer use part of the school curriculum. That has paid off, with official statistics showing that internet use has more than doubled since 2007 to 2.8 million people – nearly one-third of the population.
That gives Tunisians an alternative source of news and commentary to the mainstream press, which largely avoids tough issues and lionises Mr Ben Ali.
They are tapping into an explosion of blogs in North Africa, said Rachid Jankari, a blogger and IT company director in Casablanca, who is working with the Solidarity Center, a US-based workers’ rights organisation, to build an internet-driven network of journalists across the region.
“It’s the emergence of individual expression,” Mr Jankari said. “And we see the diversity of the points of view.”
In Tunisia, that is where trouble can start.
For journalists and activists such as el Heni, the internet is a platform for criticising the state. Government censors have shut down his website eight times since he started blogging last year, he said, forcing him to shift to a new address each time.
Authorities say that only websites threatening public order or promoting hatred are blocked.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed in Tunisia,” said Mr Romdhani, the senior official. “But freedom of expression comes obviously with a sense of responsibility and accountability.”
But many journalists say that in practice, restrictions often go beyond media that push a violent message. “The law is like an unsigned cheque,” el Heni said. “They promise lots of rights, but the reality is different.”
According to a report last year by Amnesty International, journalists in Tunisia who have criticised the government have had their websites blocked, been subjected to smear campaigns and prosecuted for libel.
A separate investigation last year by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international media watchdog, found that reporters and rights activists in Tunisia have had their phone lines cut, been placed under police surveillance and been barred from travelling abroad.
A few had been attacked violently or imprisoned in recent years, the investigation said.
Authorities have tried to shut down a few outlets entirely, human rights groups said. A case in point is Radio Kalima, an independent station launched in January, said Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights. Police have ordered some reporters for the station to stop working, and a few not to leave their homes, he said.
The station bypassed normal restrictions on transmitting by broadcasting over the internet, and by satellite via Italy. That angered authorities “because it’s something they can’t control”, Mr Trifi said.
That is increasingly true of the internet, too. But thanks to key economic and education policies, Tunisia is wedded to the web.
Tunisia lacks the big oil of neighbouring Algeria and Libya, and is banking instead on serving as a hub for business and industry. Since independence from its coloniser, France, in 1956, the country has followed a modernising ideology that makes learning a priority.
“Our education is oriented towards computer use,” said an internet cafe manager in Tunis. “Every day I have more customers.”
On a weekday lunchtime, peak hours at the internet cafe, students and businessmen who depend increasingly on the web are hunched intently over the banks of computers along the walls.
Computers had become a habit, said the manager. “And that’s happening – I have customers who spend three hours here every day.”
The government has brought the internet to all universities and secondary schools, and to over two thirds of primary schools, according to official statistics.
Trends like that are the reason some bloggers say the future belongs to them, as new technology makes websites more secure. “The more citizens are informed,” el Heni said, “the more they have power.”
“I wanted a space where I could express myself without the constraints imposed on my profession,” said el Heni, a journalist and human rights activist in the capital, Tunis. “I’ve tried to transform my sense of injustice and rage into energy.”
Foreign tourists know Tunisia for its sunny beaches, ancient ruins and one of the Arab world’s most liberal societies. But for Tunisians, life is a daily tiptoe through a minefield of political taboos enforced by a vast security apparatus and heavily censored media. Now the country’s drive to embrace the internet is giving Tunisians an unexpected new outlet to challenge authority.
“The government policy is to encourage the use of the internet by all sectors of society, and ensure access,” said Oussama Romdhani, a senior Tunisian official. The president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, has vowed to get the country online as part of a drive towards a knowledge-based economy.
The government has poured cash into underwater and fibre-optic cables, and made computer use part of the school curriculum. That has paid off, with official statistics showing that internet use has more than doubled since 2007 to 2.8 million people – nearly one-third of the population.
That gives Tunisians an alternative source of news and commentary to the mainstream press, which largely avoids tough issues and lionises Mr Ben Ali.
They are tapping into an explosion of blogs in North Africa, said Rachid Jankari, a blogger and IT company director in Casablanca, who is working with the Solidarity Center, a US-based workers’ rights organisation, to build an internet-driven network of journalists across the region.
“It’s the emergence of individual expression,” Mr Jankari said. “And we see the diversity of the points of view.”
In Tunisia, that is where trouble can start.
For journalists and activists such as el Heni, the internet is a platform for criticising the state. Government censors have shut down his website eight times since he started blogging last year, he said, forcing him to shift to a new address each time.
Authorities say that only websites threatening public order or promoting hatred are blocked.
“Freedom of the press is guaranteed in Tunisia,” said Mr Romdhani, the senior official. “But freedom of expression comes obviously with a sense of responsibility and accountability.”
But many journalists say that in practice, restrictions often go beyond media that push a violent message. “The law is like an unsigned cheque,” el Heni said. “They promise lots of rights, but the reality is different.”
According to a report last year by Amnesty International, journalists in Tunisia who have criticised the government have had their websites blocked, been subjected to smear campaigns and prosecuted for libel.
A separate investigation last year by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international media watchdog, found that reporters and rights activists in Tunisia have had their phone lines cut, been placed under police surveillance and been barred from travelling abroad.
A few had been attacked violently or imprisoned in recent years, the investigation said.
Authorities have tried to shut down a few outlets entirely, human rights groups said. A case in point is Radio Kalima, an independent station launched in January, said Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights. Police have ordered some reporters for the station to stop working, and a few not to leave their homes, he said.
The station bypassed normal restrictions on transmitting by broadcasting over the internet, and by satellite via Italy. That angered authorities “because it’s something they can’t control”, Mr Trifi said.
That is increasingly true of the internet, too. But thanks to key economic and education policies, Tunisia is wedded to the web.
Tunisia lacks the big oil of neighbouring Algeria and Libya, and is banking instead on serving as a hub for business and industry. Since independence from its coloniser, France, in 1956, the country has followed a modernising ideology that makes learning a priority.
“Our education is oriented towards computer use,” said an internet cafe manager in Tunis. “Every day I have more customers.”
On a weekday lunchtime, peak hours at the internet cafe, students and businessmen who depend increasingly on the web are hunched intently over the banks of computers along the walls.
Computers had become a habit, said the manager. “And that’s happening – I have customers who spend three hours here every day.”
The government has brought the internet to all universities and secondary schools, and to over two thirds of primary schools, according to official statistics.
Trends like that are the reason some bloggers say the future belongs to them, as new technology makes websites more secure. “The more citizens are informed,” el Heni said, “the more they have power.”
Sunday, 15 February 2009
Desert rules
On a timeless trek under a harsh sun and radiant stars, the beauty of the Sahara and its people is revealed
By Joe Ray, Globe Correspondent | February 15, 2009
TAMANRASSET - In the city of nomads, a brief encounter with a half-blind nun leaves us with words to live by on a trek into the Sahara: "We only see well with our hearts."
Swallowed by the desert the following day, its foreign silence, beauty, and endlessness force me inward. I stare out from the ridge of a mountainous dune. The big issues that have not found firm homes in my heart and mind are cast onto the sand like items from a drawer flung empty.
I was looking forward to the desert void, but had no idea what to expect. A small group of friends who had been several times before organized a trip into the southern Algerian Sahara and Hoggar Mountains with a local agency. They promised we would sleep under the stars, climb dunes to their tops, and see mountains that would have made the late Western movie director John Ford green with envy.
There were a few downsides: They talked so much about the stringy camel meat we would be eating that I brought extra floss. A false alarm. There were the hygiene stories: "Showering" is a moist towelette rubdown. Asked where the restrooms are, your guide may simply grin and make a sweeping gesture across the landscape.
Desert silence is disconcerting, melting time and perspective, leaving you listening to the blood swish through your veins as Polaris and the Southern Cross play cat and mouse across the night sky. Later, the sense of time dissolves and the silence becomes addictive: literal quiet comfort that allows the beauty of the desert and the people who live here to reveal themselves.
"We don't follow time," says guide Abdou Zounga as we share a pungent lamb, barley, and vegetable stew called chorba. "No one here ever asks what time it is."
Zounga, 30, is a Touareg, desert nomads descended from Berbers who have roamed the northwest African desert for millennia. Though he earned a degree in computer programming and had a desk job in the city of Tamanrasset, the call of the desert was too strong.
"I told my father, 'I'm sorry. I can't do this,' " he says of life connected to a keyboard. "I want to be physically tired at the end of the day. . . . In [the 9-to-5] life, my eyes were red, I trembled, I couldn't sleep," he says, taking up the hunched-over form of a programmer as he talks.
"Sometimes the Touareg are hard people and the Sahara can be a hard place," says Zounga, "but even when life is hard, it is beautiful."
This is understatement. Even in the age of satellite phones and GPS tracking, the desert quickly hobbles or kills the unprepared. The traditional Touareg headscarf known as a cheche (or tagelmoust) that seemed so awkward to wear on the first day eventually becomes soothing, protecting from wind, sand, and sun. As we drive, I ask about the hundreds of car-sized mounds of rock that line the trans-Saharan nomadic trails. "Those are burial mounds that predate Islam and Christ," says Zounga.
Even with expert guides, there are moments when a visitor wonders whether they will have their own trailside tomb: Tires can blow several times a day, rims warp, wells run dry.
These situations lead to a set of survival rules. If you find water, top off your cans. If you find firewood, take it. If someone needs a hand, help him. These are not suggestions - this is the desert.
Over the course of a few days, fear of the unknown is replaced by a heightened sense of surroundings. Our first night out, we sleep beneath a freestanding rock arch hundreds of feet high. With no light pollution, the stars are so bright that picking out the principal constellations becomes tricky. Orion has a bow-shaped string of stars to his side that I've never seen and all seven sisters of Pleiades are visible. One moonless night, I take a 10-minute walk to the top of a dune and, once there, realize I've done it by starlight.
In some spots, rock formations bubble out of the ground like inverted mud pots - testament that the desert was the seabed millions of years ago. Elsewhere, top-heavy rock formations rise hundreds and thousands of feet into the air, their bases literally sandblasted by time. In one spot, heat and humidity have taken a tall column of rock and cleaved it in two, leaving it looking like a couple standing in the sand, locked in an embrace.
This beauty is the backdrop for life as a Touareg, and while nomadic life may be losing ground to the modern world, there's a romance to it that makes you believe it will hold on for a few more generations.
"One of the first things I learned as a child was respect for my elders," says Zounga, explaining a system where the final say always goes to the oldest in a group. As part of a team of guides, this might mean he calls the shots on one trip and washes dishes on the next, all depending on the ages of the others.
Aside from an old-fashioned respect for elders, one of the most important traits that Zounga explains is solidarity among Touaregs, no matter which country they are from. Another is sharing whatever you have, whether it's with someone who needs it more or as a way to express gratitude.
Salah Kberat, our lead-footed Touareg driver and guide, loses his sunglasses on one of the first days into the trip. A few days later, he hits the brakes in the middle of nowhere, makes a U-turn, and drives back a few hundred feet to where he's spotted a pair of shades in the sand that fit him perfectly. He flashes a million-dollar grin and gives a yelp of joy. Five minutes farther on, we come across a herd of goats followed by a young shepherd holding a newborn kid. Our guides stop to talk with him and, saying goodbye, load him up with oranges while Kberat puts his new sunglasses on the shepherd. Easy come, easy go - a louder yelp, a bigger smile.
These lessons become even clearer later in a wadi (dried riverbed) garden in the desert. Fearing the ethnic and religious violence in their native Nigeria, Touareg farmer and shepherd Mohamed Ali, his wife, Salaam, and their infant daughter, Zarnat, joined the thousands of refugees who have fled their country in the past year.
"Before, I was a shepherd, but my sheep were being stolen and I had to flee with my wife and child," Ali says. "Eight of us came in a clandestine taxi from Nigeria. We've had no news from our family who stayed behind."
Sitting across from Ali, it's hard to imagine - let alone digest - his story, yet some of the problems he could face here are alleviated by his Touareg roots. He has found work as a gardener in this tiny cooperative, selling vegetables to passersby and to the farm owner who sells in the markets of Tamanrasset.
At the end of our talk, he asks me to take a few photos of him and his daughter and I show them to him on the camera screen. He smiles, takes a ring from his finger and hands it to me. It's not an exchange or a veiled attempt to ask for money, but like Kberat's sunglasses, a gift.
I look to Kberat, who has been translating, on how to return the ring without insulting his friend. He says a few words to Ali, nods, and I hand it back.
"What did you say?" I ask.
"I told him that the gift was ours in meeting him."
Friday, 24 October 2008
Mayfair to Makkah
I watch the train to Cairo disappear and I feel I have indeed cut myself off from my friends and everyone I know. I love Egypt, but now it is Arabia that calls me. —Port Said, February 22, 1933
Mayfair to Makkah - Written by William Facey, Photographs courtesy of Angus Sladen
This portrait of Lady Evelyn was made a few years before her visit to Saudi Arabia.
Lady Evelyn Cobbold achieved celebrity at age 65, in 1933, when she became the first British-born Muslim woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. She was a Scottish aristocrat, a grandmother and a Mayfair socialite, and an accomplished deerstalker, angler and gardener, and, uniquely, she was both a Muslim and an Arabic-speaker. Yet the story of her colorful career has been overlooked, as has her contribution to the literature of the Hajj. Nor has she been studied for what her life has to say about being a Muslim in a western society. On her 1933 pilgrimage, she became the first international traveler to record the buses that had recently begun service in Makkah.
She was not born into a Muslim family, yet Lady Evelyn claimed to have been a Muslim from as early as she could remember. She disclaimed any moment of conversion, and there is no record of her having formally converted before an imam. She wrote:
“As a child, I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers…. There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…. Some years went by and I happened to be in Rome staying with some Italian friends when my host asked if I would like to visit the Pope. Of course I was thrilled…. When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith.”
Evelyn was born in Edinburgh in 1867, the eldest child of Charles Adolphus Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Permanently short of money, and with an incurable wanderlust, Lord Dunmore found it both cheap and congenial to take his family to North Africa every winter. Evelyn and her siblings, as they arrived, thus grew up in the company of Algerian and Egyptian nurses and household staff. The impact on young Evelyn was profound. Steeped in the culture and language of everyday life in the Arab Muslim world, she came to feel completely at ease and at home there.
For a relatively poor aristocrat, Evelyn married rather late, at age 24, to John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of a wealthy brewing family in eastern England. They met in Cairo and were married there in April 1891. At her new home in East Anglia, she faced a future of domesticity, relieved by the frequent travels at home and abroad typical of her wealthy contemporaries. Three children arrived between 1893 and 1900, but it is fairly clear that Lady Evelyn found it hard to settle. And the clues to her restlessness have to do with Islam and the Arab world.
Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, shown here during one of the visits to England (probably 1935) by HRH Prince Sa’ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Wahba stands on the left and slightly behind the prince; Wahba wrote the original introduction to Lady Evelyn’s Pilgrimage to Mecca. Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba.
An untitled poem she wrote in Cairo in 1889 already evinces a spiritual longing for meaning in life and an affinity with Islam. In it, she wrote:
… The vague longings that filled my soul, Took the form of a prayer I upward sped, To Him, the One, The Essence of All….
And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh….
By 1900, Lady Evelyn was journeying without her husband. She was back in North Africa in 1911, at the age of 43, traveling in Egypt with a female companion. Her book about the trip—Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert, published in 1912 —is a revealing diary, forthright in its admiration for Islam.
From this point on, it becomes increasingly plain that she regarded herself as a Muslim. She was making regular winter visits to Egypt, and a series of letters in Arabic survives from 1914 and 1915, from Arab friends there and in Syria. Some address her as “Our sister in Islam, Lady Zainab,” using her adopted Muslim name. Her friendship from 1915 with the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, who produced one of the most respected renderings of the Qur’an into English, provides further testimony.
By the 1920’s, anecdotal information suggests that Lady Evelyn’s attachment to Islam had become a cause of estrangement from the Cobbold family, and in 1922, she and her husband formally separated. She received a generous financial settlement, including the deer forest of Glencarron in the Highlands, making her a very wealthy woman in her own right. For much of the 1920’s, she was occupied by a cavalcade of grandchildren and by the field sports at which she excelled. But in 1929 her husband died, and it seems that she now began seriously to contemplate performing the pilgrimage to Makkah.
Lady Evelyn announced her intention to perform the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s minister in London, Hafiz Wahba, who wrote to King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Riyadh requesting formal permission. But, typically for her, she did not wait for a reply, relying instead on a social contact in London to send a letter of introduction to Harry St. John (‘Abd Allah) Philby in Jiddah. Philby had became a Muslim in 1930, and he and his wife, Dora, duly received their unsolicited guest. They introduced her to Jiddah’s small expatriate social circle and even invited the prince (and future king) Faisal to tea to meet the prospective pilgrim. While awaiting permission from the king for Lady Evelyn to go Makkah, Philby arranged for her to travel by car to Madinah, organizing accommodation with a family there.
February 28, 1933 The King is away at Riyadh, his capital in Nejd, sixteen days’ camel ride from here, so I fear he will not get the letter his Minister in London wrote him for some time…. Till that letter reaches the King, I must possess my soul in patience, and my time is pleasantly spent bathing in the warm sea within the coral reefs, for fear of sharks, or in motor drives in the desert….
March 2 How I envy the pilgrims we meet on their way to Mecca, while we return to the social life of Jeddah, which would be very pleasant if one were not aware of the mysterious City of Islam hidden in the hills only a few miles from us. Why do we always long for the unattainable, for the Blue Bird which hovers just beyond our reach?
March 9 The Emir Faisal arrived punctually at five o’clock…. It was impressive to see his tall figure enter the doorway clad in a brown and gold Abba over a flowing white robe and the picturesque headdress of Nejd, the Koffeya of diaphanous white bound round his head by black and gold chords—called the Aghal…. The Emir is slender and exceedingly graceful in his movements and, like most Nejd Arabs, has an air of distinction and good breeding….
March 15 Two hundred and fifty miles [400 km] from Jeddah to Medina took us fifteen hours to accomplish and I take off my hat to the little Ford that gallantly carried us through those sandy wastes…. Besides the pilgrims on camels, we met many on foot, toiling slowly through the scorching desert with water jugs in their hands clad in their Ihram (or two towels), and, as they were bare headed, many carried umbrellas. Ten days is the usual time it takes a camel to accomplish the journey between Medina and Jeddah and three weeks for the pilgrim on foot….
As a visiting notable, Lady Evelyn found conditions were not nearly as hard as they were for ordinary pilgrims. The Saudis treated her with extreme courtesy, as befitted her status. And once permission arrived, she would be allowed to go to Makkah—some 70 kilometers (45 mi) away—by car, Philby once again providing her with a vehicle, guide and driver.
March 12 Today the news has come through that I am permitted to do the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Medina. I had for so long lived in alternate fits of hope and despair, that I can scarcely credit that my great wish is at last to be fulfilled. Preparations for my journey are in the hands of my host…; while I prepare…my pilgrim dress which consists of a black crepe skirt, very full, and a cape and hood in one, to be worn over ordinary dress when I visit Medina, also a black crepe veil entirely obscuring my features; but for Mecca I shall be entirely in white, no colour is allowed in any garment….
Lady Evelyn arrived in the Hijaz at a historic juncture in Saudi Arabian history. Only just before her arrival, in September 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been proclaimed. Oil had not yet been discovered, and the world economy was mired in the Great Depression. The country had no source of income apart from pilgrimage receipts, and in 1933 pilgrims from abroad would slump to an all-time low of just 20,000—down from around 100,000 in the late 1920’s. But economic salvation was in the offing. Lady Evelyn’s visit to Jiddah coincided with the presence of American and British oil company negotiators, and in May 1933 King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would sign the key concession agreement with the Americans that heralded the end of hard times for the Saudi economy.
March 2 We return to Jeddah and dine at the New Hotel, which was where the American engineers, who have come to try to obtain the oil concessions from the King, are now staying. Their wives, Mrs. [Lloyd] Hamilton and Mrs. [Karl] Twitchell, welcome us and give us an excellent dinner, and the party includes Mr. [Stephen] Longrigg, the English representative of the Iraq Oil Company, who is also here trying to get the concession. Rivalry does not appear to spoil the friendly relations existing between all parties….
The fact that her son-in-law was a director of the Bank of England may also have played a role in winning permission for Lady Evelyn to make her pioneering Hajj, according to Sir Andrew Ryan, then Britain’s minister to Saudi Arabia, who cast a somewhat jaundiced eye on her visit. “Lady Evelyn Cobbold…has been even more successful than anticipated,” he reported. “…If [King] Ibn Saud receives her, her cup of blessing will be overflowing.” In the event, Lady Evelyn did not meet the king, although she saw him when he arrived by car on the day of the Standing at ‘Arafat, a key ritual of the Hajj.
March 26 I am in the Mosque of Mecca, and for a few seconds I am lost to my surroundings because of the wonder of it. We are walking on white marble through a great vault whose ceiling is a full fifty feet above us, and enter pillared cloisters holding the arched roof and surrounding an immense quadrangle…. I had never imagined anything so stupendous…. We walk on to the Holy of Holies, the house of Allah [the Ka’bah] rising in simple majesty. It would require a master pen to describe the scene, poignant in its intensity of the great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm…. I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation….
Pilgrimage to Mecca, published in 1934, is Lady Evelyn’s fascinating account of her journey to the holy cities. As much a record of an interior experience of faith as a conventional travelogue, the book is remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. It takes the form of a diary, punctuated with lengthy digressions intended to help her readers understand Islam. They address topics such as the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, Islamic history and science, the position of women, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s achievements and Islamic principles relating to warfare and tolerance.
March 21 Having discoursed on the subject of tolerance, we pass on to discuss the crisis the world is now facing, and the emancipation of women. The sheikhs show some amusement, tempered with admiration at the methods adopted by the Western woman to win herself a place in the sun; their sympathy is all on the side of the ladies. Though I occasionally caught a twinkle in the eye of Sid Ahmed, and both the sheikhs often smiled, I never heard them give way to loud laughter….
Most remarkable about her book, however, is that as a lone female Muslim, she was able to witness something veiled from every western traveler before her: the female side of domestic life in the two holy cities. This, and her religious commitment, set the account apart from all other English-language descriptions of the Hijaz that had gone before.
March 27 My hostess had already initiated me into the secrets of the harem or women’s quarters; the bakehouse where the bread is baked to supply the needs of the large company at present inhabiting the house; the great kitchen where she, the ladies and slaves all help in cooking and preparing the food; the laundry where more slaves are busy washing; while the three pretty nieces are ironing and folding away the household linen; the work-room where they sit sewing and gossiping….
April 1 As I have been granted the great privilege of being received as a guest in this Mecca household I feel it is up to me to refute the false impressions that still exist in the West about the harem. Not only in this house, but in every harem I have visited in Arabia I have found my host with only one wife. Far from being a sensuous life of ease these ladies are busy with their household duties; at the same time living a happy, even a gay life, entertaining their friends and having their own amusements and festive occasions.
Uplifted but thoroughly exhausted by the rituals of the Hajj, Lady Evelyn received special dispensation from the king to end her pilgrimage before the usual culmination at the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, ‘Id al-Adha. Though she extols the egalitarianism of Islam and the way in which the Hajj symbolically makes all people equals before God, she was not averse to taking advantage of her social status. Her host at Makkah generously made available to her the entire roof of his rented house at Mina, where otherwise all his womenfolk would have slept for the sake of the cool night air. At the Standing at ‘Arafat, the same host invited her to share his tent, with its view of Jabal al-Rahmah, with his male guests. She readily accepted, not least because it was cooler, the women being consigned to a hot bell-shaped tent behind, where they could neither see nor be seen. When challenged by a pious passerby suspicious of her reading matter in the car on the way to ‘Arafat (it was Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta), her response was to declare robustly: “This is an English book, and I am an English Moslem and I am here on pilgrimage by permission of the King!” A lesser mortal might not have got away with it so easily. During her return voyage by sea, officials spared her the rigors of the full quarantine, giving her special quarters at Port Sudan and allowing her to leave after three days instead of the regulation five.
However, she revealed her fundamental sincerity while waiting to depart from Makkah on April 7 when, on her final return through the city, she found that she could not after all stomach Doughty because of his inability to fathom Islam. Instead, she took up the only other book she had brought with her, an Arabic Qur’an, and was “soon immersed in the beautiful sura ‘Light,’” she noted. She had found that, after all, the suspicious passerby might have had a point.
Even before she returned to London, the newspapers made her an instant celebrity. The popular press viewed her pilgrimage as something out of the Arabian Nights while, in 1934, the more serious papers gave Pilgrimage to Mecca a favorable reception.
But what sort of Muslim was Lady Evelyn, and how should we regard her today? Though clearly firm in her faith, there is no record, during her life at home, of strict performance of the five daily prayers, or of charity to the poor and needy. No doubt she had uttered the shahadah, or declaration of faith, on various occasions, and there is some anecdotal evidence of fasting during Ramadan. But, of the Five Pillars of Islam, going on the Hajj seems to have been the one to which that she paid the most attention.
There is a long history of British converts to Islam before her time, going back at least to the Crusades. But Lady Evelyn belongs in a later category: that of educated converts in Britain itself in the late 19th century. She was contemporary with various other eminent Muslims of this type—Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lord Hothfield and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, to name but a few.
Although Lady Evelyn lectured extensively in Britain about her book, there is no sign that she saw her faith as having special public and social implications. She apparently regarded Islam as a matter of private conviction and subscribed to it on her own terms. But there is no doubting that her faith was deeply held during her very long life. She lived for 30 years after her pilgrimage, dying in January 1963, one of the coldest months of the century in Britain. She was buried in arctic conditions but according to the precepts of Islam and, as she had stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.
Her interment symbolized her two worlds: A piper, so frozen that he was hardly able to walk, let alone perform, played “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the equally refrigerated imam of the Woking Mosque in London declaimed in Arabic the surah “Light,” which she had found so moving in Makkah. A verse from the same surah adorns the flat slab on her grave, over which the deer undoubtedly wander, just as she had wished.
William Facey (william.facey@arabia.uk.com) has spent his career as a museum consultant, writer and publisher on the Arabian Peninsula. He worked and traveled widely there during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and since then his books have established him as a well-known author on the region. He is currently director of Arabian Publishing Ltd., London.
Mayfair to Makkah - Written by William Facey, Photographs courtesy of Angus Sladen
This portrait of Lady Evelyn was made a few years before her visit to Saudi Arabia.
Lady Evelyn Cobbold achieved celebrity at age 65, in 1933, when she became the first British-born Muslim woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. She was a Scottish aristocrat, a grandmother and a Mayfair socialite, and an accomplished deerstalker, angler and gardener, and, uniquely, she was both a Muslim and an Arabic-speaker. Yet the story of her colorful career has been overlooked, as has her contribution to the literature of the Hajj. Nor has she been studied for what her life has to say about being a Muslim in a western society. On her 1933 pilgrimage, she became the first international traveler to record the buses that had recently begun service in Makkah.
She was not born into a Muslim family, yet Lady Evelyn claimed to have been a Muslim from as early as she could remember. She disclaimed any moment of conversion, and there is no record of her having formally converted before an imam. She wrote:
“As a child, I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers…. There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…. Some years went by and I happened to be in Rome staying with some Italian friends when my host asked if I would like to visit the Pope. Of course I was thrilled…. When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith.”
Evelyn was born in Edinburgh in 1867, the eldest child of Charles Adolphus Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Permanently short of money, and with an incurable wanderlust, Lord Dunmore found it both cheap and congenial to take his family to North Africa every winter. Evelyn and her siblings, as they arrived, thus grew up in the company of Algerian and Egyptian nurses and household staff. The impact on young Evelyn was profound. Steeped in the culture and language of everyday life in the Arab Muslim world, she came to feel completely at ease and at home there.
For a relatively poor aristocrat, Evelyn married rather late, at age 24, to John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of a wealthy brewing family in eastern England. They met in Cairo and were married there in April 1891. At her new home in East Anglia, she faced a future of domesticity, relieved by the frequent travels at home and abroad typical of her wealthy contemporaries. Three children arrived between 1893 and 1900, but it is fairly clear that Lady Evelyn found it hard to settle. And the clues to her restlessness have to do with Islam and the Arab world.
Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, shown here during one of the visits to England (probably 1935) by HRH Prince Sa’ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Wahba stands on the left and slightly behind the prince; Wahba wrote the original introduction to Lady Evelyn’s Pilgrimage to Mecca. Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba.
An untitled poem she wrote in Cairo in 1889 already evinces a spiritual longing for meaning in life and an affinity with Islam. In it, she wrote:
… The vague longings that filled my soul, Took the form of a prayer I upward sped, To Him, the One, The Essence of All….
And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh….
By 1900, Lady Evelyn was journeying without her husband. She was back in North Africa in 1911, at the age of 43, traveling in Egypt with a female companion. Her book about the trip—Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert, published in 1912 —is a revealing diary, forthright in its admiration for Islam.
From this point on, it becomes increasingly plain that she regarded herself as a Muslim. She was making regular winter visits to Egypt, and a series of letters in Arabic survives from 1914 and 1915, from Arab friends there and in Syria. Some address her as “Our sister in Islam, Lady Zainab,” using her adopted Muslim name. Her friendship from 1915 with the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, who produced one of the most respected renderings of the Qur’an into English, provides further testimony.
By the 1920’s, anecdotal information suggests that Lady Evelyn’s attachment to Islam had become a cause of estrangement from the Cobbold family, and in 1922, she and her husband formally separated. She received a generous financial settlement, including the deer forest of Glencarron in the Highlands, making her a very wealthy woman in her own right. For much of the 1920’s, she was occupied by a cavalcade of grandchildren and by the field sports at which she excelled. But in 1929 her husband died, and it seems that she now began seriously to contemplate performing the pilgrimage to Makkah.
Lady Evelyn announced her intention to perform the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s minister in London, Hafiz Wahba, who wrote to King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Riyadh requesting formal permission. But, typically for her, she did not wait for a reply, relying instead on a social contact in London to send a letter of introduction to Harry St. John (‘Abd Allah) Philby in Jiddah. Philby had became a Muslim in 1930, and he and his wife, Dora, duly received their unsolicited guest. They introduced her to Jiddah’s small expatriate social circle and even invited the prince (and future king) Faisal to tea to meet the prospective pilgrim. While awaiting permission from the king for Lady Evelyn to go Makkah, Philby arranged for her to travel by car to Madinah, organizing accommodation with a family there.
February 28, 1933 The King is away at Riyadh, his capital in Nejd, sixteen days’ camel ride from here, so I fear he will not get the letter his Minister in London wrote him for some time…. Till that letter reaches the King, I must possess my soul in patience, and my time is pleasantly spent bathing in the warm sea within the coral reefs, for fear of sharks, or in motor drives in the desert….
March 2 How I envy the pilgrims we meet on their way to Mecca, while we return to the social life of Jeddah, which would be very pleasant if one were not aware of the mysterious City of Islam hidden in the hills only a few miles from us. Why do we always long for the unattainable, for the Blue Bird which hovers just beyond our reach?
March 9 The Emir Faisal arrived punctually at five o’clock…. It was impressive to see his tall figure enter the doorway clad in a brown and gold Abba over a flowing white robe and the picturesque headdress of Nejd, the Koffeya of diaphanous white bound round his head by black and gold chords—called the Aghal…. The Emir is slender and exceedingly graceful in his movements and, like most Nejd Arabs, has an air of distinction and good breeding….
March 15 Two hundred and fifty miles [400 km] from Jeddah to Medina took us fifteen hours to accomplish and I take off my hat to the little Ford that gallantly carried us through those sandy wastes…. Besides the pilgrims on camels, we met many on foot, toiling slowly through the scorching desert with water jugs in their hands clad in their Ihram (or two towels), and, as they were bare headed, many carried umbrellas. Ten days is the usual time it takes a camel to accomplish the journey between Medina and Jeddah and three weeks for the pilgrim on foot….
As a visiting notable, Lady Evelyn found conditions were not nearly as hard as they were for ordinary pilgrims. The Saudis treated her with extreme courtesy, as befitted her status. And once permission arrived, she would be allowed to go to Makkah—some 70 kilometers (45 mi) away—by car, Philby once again providing her with a vehicle, guide and driver.
March 12 Today the news has come through that I am permitted to do the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Medina. I had for so long lived in alternate fits of hope and despair, that I can scarcely credit that my great wish is at last to be fulfilled. Preparations for my journey are in the hands of my host…; while I prepare…my pilgrim dress which consists of a black crepe skirt, very full, and a cape and hood in one, to be worn over ordinary dress when I visit Medina, also a black crepe veil entirely obscuring my features; but for Mecca I shall be entirely in white, no colour is allowed in any garment….
Lady Evelyn arrived in the Hijaz at a historic juncture in Saudi Arabian history. Only just before her arrival, in September 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been proclaimed. Oil had not yet been discovered, and the world economy was mired in the Great Depression. The country had no source of income apart from pilgrimage receipts, and in 1933 pilgrims from abroad would slump to an all-time low of just 20,000—down from around 100,000 in the late 1920’s. But economic salvation was in the offing. Lady Evelyn’s visit to Jiddah coincided with the presence of American and British oil company negotiators, and in May 1933 King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would sign the key concession agreement with the Americans that heralded the end of hard times for the Saudi economy.
March 2 We return to Jeddah and dine at the New Hotel, which was where the American engineers, who have come to try to obtain the oil concessions from the King, are now staying. Their wives, Mrs. [Lloyd] Hamilton and Mrs. [Karl] Twitchell, welcome us and give us an excellent dinner, and the party includes Mr. [Stephen] Longrigg, the English representative of the Iraq Oil Company, who is also here trying to get the concession. Rivalry does not appear to spoil the friendly relations existing between all parties….
The fact that her son-in-law was a director of the Bank of England may also have played a role in winning permission for Lady Evelyn to make her pioneering Hajj, according to Sir Andrew Ryan, then Britain’s minister to Saudi Arabia, who cast a somewhat jaundiced eye on her visit. “Lady Evelyn Cobbold…has been even more successful than anticipated,” he reported. “…If [King] Ibn Saud receives her, her cup of blessing will be overflowing.” In the event, Lady Evelyn did not meet the king, although she saw him when he arrived by car on the day of the Standing at ‘Arafat, a key ritual of the Hajj.
March 26 I am in the Mosque of Mecca, and for a few seconds I am lost to my surroundings because of the wonder of it. We are walking on white marble through a great vault whose ceiling is a full fifty feet above us, and enter pillared cloisters holding the arched roof and surrounding an immense quadrangle…. I had never imagined anything so stupendous…. We walk on to the Holy of Holies, the house of Allah [the Ka’bah] rising in simple majesty. It would require a master pen to describe the scene, poignant in its intensity of the great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm…. I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation….
Pilgrimage to Mecca, published in 1934, is Lady Evelyn’s fascinating account of her journey to the holy cities. As much a record of an interior experience of faith as a conventional travelogue, the book is remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. It takes the form of a diary, punctuated with lengthy digressions intended to help her readers understand Islam. They address topics such as the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, Islamic history and science, the position of women, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s achievements and Islamic principles relating to warfare and tolerance.
March 21 Having discoursed on the subject of tolerance, we pass on to discuss the crisis the world is now facing, and the emancipation of women. The sheikhs show some amusement, tempered with admiration at the methods adopted by the Western woman to win herself a place in the sun; their sympathy is all on the side of the ladies. Though I occasionally caught a twinkle in the eye of Sid Ahmed, and both the sheikhs often smiled, I never heard them give way to loud laughter….
Most remarkable about her book, however, is that as a lone female Muslim, she was able to witness something veiled from every western traveler before her: the female side of domestic life in the two holy cities. This, and her religious commitment, set the account apart from all other English-language descriptions of the Hijaz that had gone before.
March 27 My hostess had already initiated me into the secrets of the harem or women’s quarters; the bakehouse where the bread is baked to supply the needs of the large company at present inhabiting the house; the great kitchen where she, the ladies and slaves all help in cooking and preparing the food; the laundry where more slaves are busy washing; while the three pretty nieces are ironing and folding away the household linen; the work-room where they sit sewing and gossiping….
April 1 As I have been granted the great privilege of being received as a guest in this Mecca household I feel it is up to me to refute the false impressions that still exist in the West about the harem. Not only in this house, but in every harem I have visited in Arabia I have found my host with only one wife. Far from being a sensuous life of ease these ladies are busy with their household duties; at the same time living a happy, even a gay life, entertaining their friends and having their own amusements and festive occasions.
Uplifted but thoroughly exhausted by the rituals of the Hajj, Lady Evelyn received special dispensation from the king to end her pilgrimage before the usual culmination at the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, ‘Id al-Adha. Though she extols the egalitarianism of Islam and the way in which the Hajj symbolically makes all people equals before God, she was not averse to taking advantage of her social status. Her host at Makkah generously made available to her the entire roof of his rented house at Mina, where otherwise all his womenfolk would have slept for the sake of the cool night air. At the Standing at ‘Arafat, the same host invited her to share his tent, with its view of Jabal al-Rahmah, with his male guests. She readily accepted, not least because it was cooler, the women being consigned to a hot bell-shaped tent behind, where they could neither see nor be seen. When challenged by a pious passerby suspicious of her reading matter in the car on the way to ‘Arafat (it was Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta), her response was to declare robustly: “This is an English book, and I am an English Moslem and I am here on pilgrimage by permission of the King!” A lesser mortal might not have got away with it so easily. During her return voyage by sea, officials spared her the rigors of the full quarantine, giving her special quarters at Port Sudan and allowing her to leave after three days instead of the regulation five.
However, she revealed her fundamental sincerity while waiting to depart from Makkah on April 7 when, on her final return through the city, she found that she could not after all stomach Doughty because of his inability to fathom Islam. Instead, she took up the only other book she had brought with her, an Arabic Qur’an, and was “soon immersed in the beautiful sura ‘Light,’” she noted. She had found that, after all, the suspicious passerby might have had a point.
Even before she returned to London, the newspapers made her an instant celebrity. The popular press viewed her pilgrimage as something out of the Arabian Nights while, in 1934, the more serious papers gave Pilgrimage to Mecca a favorable reception.
But what sort of Muslim was Lady Evelyn, and how should we regard her today? Though clearly firm in her faith, there is no record, during her life at home, of strict performance of the five daily prayers, or of charity to the poor and needy. No doubt she had uttered the shahadah, or declaration of faith, on various occasions, and there is some anecdotal evidence of fasting during Ramadan. But, of the Five Pillars of Islam, going on the Hajj seems to have been the one to which that she paid the most attention.
There is a long history of British converts to Islam before her time, going back at least to the Crusades. But Lady Evelyn belongs in a later category: that of educated converts in Britain itself in the late 19th century. She was contemporary with various other eminent Muslims of this type—Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lord Hothfield and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, to name but a few.
Although Lady Evelyn lectured extensively in Britain about her book, there is no sign that she saw her faith as having special public and social implications. She apparently regarded Islam as a matter of private conviction and subscribed to it on her own terms. But there is no doubting that her faith was deeply held during her very long life. She lived for 30 years after her pilgrimage, dying in January 1963, one of the coldest months of the century in Britain. She was buried in arctic conditions but according to the precepts of Islam and, as she had stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.
Her interment symbolized her two worlds: A piper, so frozen that he was hardly able to walk, let alone perform, played “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the equally refrigerated imam of the Woking Mosque in London declaimed in Arabic the surah “Light,” which she had found so moving in Makkah. A verse from the same surah adorns the flat slab on her grave, over which the deer undoubtedly wander, just as she had wished.
William Facey (william.facey@arabia.uk.com) has spent his career as a museum consultant, writer and publisher on the Arabian Peninsula. He worked and traveled widely there during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and since then his books have established him as a well-known author on the region. He is currently director of Arabian Publishing Ltd., London.
Monday, 6 October 2008
Morocco: ANHRI Concerned Over Alleged Targeting of University Students for Peacefully Expressing Their Opinions
On 24 September 2008, ANHRI reported that Moroccan students are being targeted by the authorities for criticising the discriminative educational policies that some of the faculties and universities use against politically active students. Meanwhile, student Jadda Boubkar who was arrested on 21 July in Taza city remains in prison.
Authorities at Meknes University recently expelled four students. Three students are facing a temporary expulsion of three years while the studies of eight other students have been suspended for one year.
The Meknes University students are apparently facing these measures for peacefully expressing their opinions. Some were charged for posting a banner which stated, "Saharawi Nation's Right to Self-Determination", while others are accused of obstructing the work of the academic institution.
Boubkar, a student at Taza University, was detained on 21 July for criticising educational policies and the police's suppression of students.
"The practice of these Moroccan universities is . . . a serious transformation in the universities' role, whereby the Moroccan universities act in collusion with security apparatuses and repress their students instead of supporting them and their right to express their opinions," said ANHRI.
Under the so-called "War on Terrorism", the Moroccan government has at times repressed those who criticise its practices. Activist students who do not belong to any radical groups and are known only for their secularism and advocacy of their right to express their opinions have been targeted, as have students with a leftist background.
ANHRI called on the Moroccan government to withdraw recent decisions that threaten the future of the university students, and to fulfill its commitments as regards guaranteeing the right to express opinions, in accordance with the Moroccan Constitution.
Authorities at Meknes University recently expelled four students. Three students are facing a temporary expulsion of three years while the studies of eight other students have been suspended for one year.
The Meknes University students are apparently facing these measures for peacefully expressing their opinions. Some were charged for posting a banner which stated, "Saharawi Nation's Right to Self-Determination", while others are accused of obstructing the work of the academic institution.
Boubkar, a student at Taza University, was detained on 21 July for criticising educational policies and the police's suppression of students.
"The practice of these Moroccan universities is . . . a serious transformation in the universities' role, whereby the Moroccan universities act in collusion with security apparatuses and repress their students instead of supporting them and their right to express their opinions," said ANHRI.
Under the so-called "War on Terrorism", the Moroccan government has at times repressed those who criticise its practices. Activist students who do not belong to any radical groups and are known only for their secularism and advocacy of their right to express their opinions have been targeted, as have students with a leftist background.
ANHRI called on the Moroccan government to withdraw recent decisions that threaten the future of the university students, and to fulfill its commitments as regards guaranteeing the right to express opinions, in accordance with the Moroccan Constitution.
Sunday, 7 September 2008
The envy and hope of the Arabs
The borders between Algeria and Morocco have been closed since the early nineties. Every time I cross into the Schengen area I cannot hide my envy as I pass from one country to another without having to show any document at all. Why have Arabs failed in creating an Arab Union, whilst our European neighbours managed to create the EU out of the extremely tough aftermath of the Second World War? Founded in 1945, the Arab League is still an ineffective organisation. The essence of the problem is not the people but their leaders and the fact that we always revert back to the same issue: a lack of democracy in the Arab world.
“It’s only fourteen kilometres away”, laughs my Moroccan friend Rachid, “and instead of seeing the light on the other side in wonderful Europe, I was born in Tangier, the port of Africa!” Rachid’s frustration or disappointment is not unique, it’s a feeling experienced by millions of Arabs, especially those who live on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Today there really is a collective depression, where everyone wants to take the risky and dangerous journey and leave, knowing that they can say goodbye to their lives in the Mare Nostrum.
If reaching the fortress of Europe is full of obstacles, even moving from one Arab country to another is not easy. More often than not you need a visa, taking into account the very tight controls and sometimes humiliating treatment. Perhaps the most grotesque and dramatic case is that of families who live near the border: between Algeria and Morocco for example, the borders have been closed since the early nineties. A Moroccan or Algerian citizen from Oujda or Maghnia is forced to travel to the international airports of Casablanca or Algiers and then take other means of transport to visit a relative on the other side only a few metres away. It is a crazy and expensive journey.
Every time I travel through the Schengen area I cannot hide my envy as I pass from one country to another without having to showing any document at all. The borders between France and Italy or France and Germany no longer exist. The question which immediately comes to mind is why have Arabs failed in creating an Arab Union, whilst our European neighbours managed to create the EU out of the extremely tough aftermath of the Second World War? One needs to remember that the only experience of a union was the one between Nasser’s Egypt and Syria in 1958, although this only lasted three years. The Arab League, founded back in 1945, is still an organisation which is ineffective not only in solving the larger political problems (such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or the events in Western Sahara), but also with regards to the strengthening of commercial exchange between its very few members.
Given the strong similarities between Arab people, it really is difficult to digest this very serious delay. Besides having the same language, belonging to Islam (mainly Sunnite), sharing memories of colonialism (the French in the Maghreb and the English in the Mashreq) and a common fate, there are important man-made and natural resources such as oil which could be exploited to create strategic and thriving projects. Today, Arab governments do not intend to remove or even open national borders to their neighbours; if anything they strengthen diplomatic contacts to establish certain borders. In recent years we have witnessed celebrations in Syria and Jordan after a bilateral agreement was signed which put an end to claims on land, and the same thing occurred between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The essence of the problem is not the Arab people, but their leaders. Here we need psychology rather than political sociology to understand that the wills and interests of the leaders are at the root of foreign politics, such as with Libyan leader Gaddafi. Meanwhile the interests of the people have no importance, and so we are always reverting back to the same issue: a lack of democracy in the Arab world. Arab leaders, many of whom came to power in tanks or thanks to rigged elections, feel like landlords rather than citizens serving the collective need, viewing their own countries as property. They are not subject to any controls because they own all the legislative, executive, judicial and media power. In waiting for the Arab Union’s moment, Arab people continue to observe the EU with a bit of envy and a lot of hope.
Amara Lakhous is an Italian-Algerian writer and anthropologist living in Rome.
Translation by Helen Waghorn
“It’s only fourteen kilometres away”, laughs my Moroccan friend Rachid, “and instead of seeing the light on the other side in wonderful Europe, I was born in Tangier, the port of Africa!” Rachid’s frustration or disappointment is not unique, it’s a feeling experienced by millions of Arabs, especially those who live on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Today there really is a collective depression, where everyone wants to take the risky and dangerous journey and leave, knowing that they can say goodbye to their lives in the Mare Nostrum.
If reaching the fortress of Europe is full of obstacles, even moving from one Arab country to another is not easy. More often than not you need a visa, taking into account the very tight controls and sometimes humiliating treatment. Perhaps the most grotesque and dramatic case is that of families who live near the border: between Algeria and Morocco for example, the borders have been closed since the early nineties. A Moroccan or Algerian citizen from Oujda or Maghnia is forced to travel to the international airports of Casablanca or Algiers and then take other means of transport to visit a relative on the other side only a few metres away. It is a crazy and expensive journey.
Every time I travel through the Schengen area I cannot hide my envy as I pass from one country to another without having to showing any document at all. The borders between France and Italy or France and Germany no longer exist. The question which immediately comes to mind is why have Arabs failed in creating an Arab Union, whilst our European neighbours managed to create the EU out of the extremely tough aftermath of the Second World War? One needs to remember that the only experience of a union was the one between Nasser’s Egypt and Syria in 1958, although this only lasted three years. The Arab League, founded back in 1945, is still an organisation which is ineffective not only in solving the larger political problems (such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or the events in Western Sahara), but also with regards to the strengthening of commercial exchange between its very few members.
Given the strong similarities between Arab people, it really is difficult to digest this very serious delay. Besides having the same language, belonging to Islam (mainly Sunnite), sharing memories of colonialism (the French in the Maghreb and the English in the Mashreq) and a common fate, there are important man-made and natural resources such as oil which could be exploited to create strategic and thriving projects. Today, Arab governments do not intend to remove or even open national borders to their neighbours; if anything they strengthen diplomatic contacts to establish certain borders. In recent years we have witnessed celebrations in Syria and Jordan after a bilateral agreement was signed which put an end to claims on land, and the same thing occurred between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The essence of the problem is not the Arab people, but their leaders. Here we need psychology rather than political sociology to understand that the wills and interests of the leaders are at the root of foreign politics, such as with Libyan leader Gaddafi. Meanwhile the interests of the people have no importance, and so we are always reverting back to the same issue: a lack of democracy in the Arab world. Arab leaders, many of whom came to power in tanks or thanks to rigged elections, feel like landlords rather than citizens serving the collective need, viewing their own countries as property. They are not subject to any controls because they own all the legislative, executive, judicial and media power. In waiting for the Arab Union’s moment, Arab people continue to observe the EU with a bit of envy and a lot of hope.
Amara Lakhous is an Italian-Algerian writer and anthropologist living in Rome.
Translation by Helen Waghorn
Saturday, 6 September 2008
From Cairo to Capadoccia, the muezzin has moved me
I am a non-Muslim who wakes before sunrise for the predawn call to prayer. You might think the call wakes me, but this is not so.
Like clockwork each morning, I open my eyes to the palest gloaming, two to five minutes before the muezzin starts his recitation, as if in anticipation.
I might say my cat wakes me, which would be closer to reality. She certainly would if I failed to wake on my own. But in truth, I believe that she, with her fine-tuned circadian sense, simply knows the exact time I will be available for a few quiet cuddling moments. So the cat and I together listen to the muezzein’s cry, and one of us at least is captivated.
This is not the first time a haunting call from a minaret has captured my attention and briefly laid claim to my spirit.
In Istanbul, surveying the tiered city and sun-flecked Bosphorus from a rooftop, the midmorning call seemed as achingly beautiful as the landscape. One afternoon in Cairo the muezzin’s clarion pierced the din of massed humanity, suspending it in momentary stillness.
Most magically in Capadoccia, as I rested by a trail above a canyon filled with fairy-tale rock formations, the evening call commenced from a distant mosque, then from a second and a third, echoing in canonical harmony that surrounded me and swept up my senses.
I would have thought the reverberations unending, but they faded as the low autumn sun bathed the canyon in amber glory.
But this predawn fascination is new for me, and special to Abu Dhabi. In other lands, I have woken with the sun or later, even in the depth of northern winter when the sun rises late. Planned day-trips to the mountains for skiing required a whole series of preset alarms to rouse me from my slumber.
Here in Abu Dhabi, however, I wake in near darkness, awaiting the muezzein’s voice. Soon it begins, clear and sure, gaining in authority and articulation as the call progresses. His words trap my senses in translucent honey, every tonal embellishment a delectable flavour, and I feel my heart growing lighter and starting to soar.
Not only does the voice possess extravagant beauty and purity of tone, but it is also matched by lungs of awesome power whose owner has superb breath-control.
Frequently, since coming here, I have wondered why the call to prayer sounds somehow more polished and satisfying to my ear than it sometimes has in other Muslim countries I have visited. Part of it may be that the Arabic language flows better, with more intrinsic music, when voiced by those for whom it is a native tongue. But the rest comes down to the voice, this particular voice that reaches me each morning in the predawn stillness.
The lady tour guide at Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque may have solved the mystery for me. In the UAE, she said, the call to prayer disseminated from the nation’s mosques is transmitted live from the Royal Palace. Knowing the Royal Family’s proclivity for quality, I feel I may be listening to an Arab Pavarotti. Little wonder he grabs my attention!
This still leaves me with unanswered questions: Is my heart moved by a fleeting encounter with the divine, or by a talented human’s brilliant rendition of a timeless masterpiece? Does it matter? Could they be one and the same?
I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced many such delightful surprises: the irresistible polyphonic shifts and soaring melodic lines of a Palestrina motet have left me breathless; the unbridled joy of a swinging gospel choir in the American deep south has swept me off my feet; I have sat for hours absorbed in the ethereal simplicity of a few raked grooves drawn in white gravel around black rocks in the garden of a Japanese shrine; I have lingered gratefully in the spacious alabaster calm of the courtyard of Al Azhar mosque, a world apart from the ceaseless throb of the teeming Cairo streets.
Contemplating such mysteries could take a lifetime. But for the moment, as the voice completes its final flawless flourish before dissipating into the night’s remains, I simply sigh and turn over. The cat, ensconced on my pillow, her warm belly brushing the crown of my head, extends a paw and rumbles her appreciation.
Then we both settle thankfully for two more hours of blessed, untroubled sleep.
tcarlisle@thenational.ae
Like clockwork each morning, I open my eyes to the palest gloaming, two to five minutes before the muezzin starts his recitation, as if in anticipation.
I might say my cat wakes me, which would be closer to reality. She certainly would if I failed to wake on my own. But in truth, I believe that she, with her fine-tuned circadian sense, simply knows the exact time I will be available for a few quiet cuddling moments. So the cat and I together listen to the muezzein’s cry, and one of us at least is captivated.
This is not the first time a haunting call from a minaret has captured my attention and briefly laid claim to my spirit.
In Istanbul, surveying the tiered city and sun-flecked Bosphorus from a rooftop, the midmorning call seemed as achingly beautiful as the landscape. One afternoon in Cairo the muezzin’s clarion pierced the din of massed humanity, suspending it in momentary stillness.
Most magically in Capadoccia, as I rested by a trail above a canyon filled with fairy-tale rock formations, the evening call commenced from a distant mosque, then from a second and a third, echoing in canonical harmony that surrounded me and swept up my senses.
I would have thought the reverberations unending, but they faded as the low autumn sun bathed the canyon in amber glory.
But this predawn fascination is new for me, and special to Abu Dhabi. In other lands, I have woken with the sun or later, even in the depth of northern winter when the sun rises late. Planned day-trips to the mountains for skiing required a whole series of preset alarms to rouse me from my slumber.
Here in Abu Dhabi, however, I wake in near darkness, awaiting the muezzein’s voice. Soon it begins, clear and sure, gaining in authority and articulation as the call progresses. His words trap my senses in translucent honey, every tonal embellishment a delectable flavour, and I feel my heart growing lighter and starting to soar.
Not only does the voice possess extravagant beauty and purity of tone, but it is also matched by lungs of awesome power whose owner has superb breath-control.
Frequently, since coming here, I have wondered why the call to prayer sounds somehow more polished and satisfying to my ear than it sometimes has in other Muslim countries I have visited. Part of it may be that the Arabic language flows better, with more intrinsic music, when voiced by those for whom it is a native tongue. But the rest comes down to the voice, this particular voice that reaches me each morning in the predawn stillness.
The lady tour guide at Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque may have solved the mystery for me. In the UAE, she said, the call to prayer disseminated from the nation’s mosques is transmitted live from the Royal Palace. Knowing the Royal Family’s proclivity for quality, I feel I may be listening to an Arab Pavarotti. Little wonder he grabs my attention!
This still leaves me with unanswered questions: Is my heart moved by a fleeting encounter with the divine, or by a talented human’s brilliant rendition of a timeless masterpiece? Does it matter? Could they be one and the same?
I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced many such delightful surprises: the irresistible polyphonic shifts and soaring melodic lines of a Palestrina motet have left me breathless; the unbridled joy of a swinging gospel choir in the American deep south has swept me off my feet; I have sat for hours absorbed in the ethereal simplicity of a few raked grooves drawn in white gravel around black rocks in the garden of a Japanese shrine; I have lingered gratefully in the spacious alabaster calm of the courtyard of Al Azhar mosque, a world apart from the ceaseless throb of the teeming Cairo streets.
Contemplating such mysteries could take a lifetime. But for the moment, as the voice completes its final flawless flourish before dissipating into the night’s remains, I simply sigh and turn over. The cat, ensconced on my pillow, her warm belly brushing the crown of my head, extends a paw and rumbles her appreciation.
Then we both settle thankfully for two more hours of blessed, untroubled sleep.
tcarlisle@thenational.ae
Friday, 22 August 2008
Gadhafi's son says he's leaving politics
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) - Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's son announced he will no longer be involved in politics, calling for democratic reforms and denying he would succeed his father, as many have expected.
Seif al-Islam Gadhafi addressed thousands of young Libyans in the southern city of Sabha on Wednesday in a lengthy speech broadcast on state-run television.
"I have decided not to intervene in state affairs," said the younger Gadhafi, dressed in a dark business suit. "In the past, I used to intervene (in politics) due to the absence of institutions," he added.
He gave no explanation for his decision, and in Libya's extremely opaque politics it could not immediately be determined if it will seriously be carried out. Seif al-Islam acknowledged the move could raise speculation of a rift between him and his father, but denied that was the case. There have been no public signs of any dispute between the two.
"I don't have any problem" with the elder Gadhafi, he said. "I just met with him before I came here."
The younger Gadhafi holds no official post but has grown in prominence in recent years, directing economic reforms and playing a major role in negotiations with the West that restoring Libya's ties after decades of isolation. That fueled speculation he was being groomed to take power after his 66-year-old father steps down or dies, although Seif al-Islam has denied it in the past.
Libya has been ruled without a constitution since a 1969 coup led by the elder Gadhafi, who has run Libya with an iron fist under a so-called "Jamahiriya." The word, invented by Gadhafi from an Arabic word for "the masses," claims to hand direct rule to the people, but has led to an unusual system where lines of government power are unclear and Gadhafi's word holds sway.
In his speech, Seif al-Islam called for restoring Libya's constitution and for the establishment of "a strong civil society." He described Arab nations as ruled by authoritarian regimes and called for a democratic transformation for Libya.
"The Middle East and North Africa's peoples are living in a forest of dictatorships, political systems that violate human rights despite the presence of parliaments and constitutions, but they are all fictitious," the younger Gadhafi said.
His father also often denounces other regimes in the region as dictatorial, though he has dismissed the need for major changes in the Jamahiriya system even as he backs economic reform.
In his speech, the younger Gadhafi again ruled out intentions to succeed his father.
"This is not a farm to inherit. ... Don't tell me that I am the son of Gadhafi and therefore I am going to take over power," he said.
Educated in Europe and fluent in English, German and French, Seif al-Islam heads the Gadhafi International Association for Charitable Organizations, a network concerned with issues like human rights and education. It is officially not governmental but has been a platform for drawing up ambitious plans for economic liberalization in Libya.
Seif al-Islam Gadhafi addressed thousands of young Libyans in the southern city of Sabha on Wednesday in a lengthy speech broadcast on state-run television.
"I have decided not to intervene in state affairs," said the younger Gadhafi, dressed in a dark business suit. "In the past, I used to intervene (in politics) due to the absence of institutions," he added.
He gave no explanation for his decision, and in Libya's extremely opaque politics it could not immediately be determined if it will seriously be carried out. Seif al-Islam acknowledged the move could raise speculation of a rift between him and his father, but denied that was the case. There have been no public signs of any dispute between the two.
"I don't have any problem" with the elder Gadhafi, he said. "I just met with him before I came here."
The younger Gadhafi holds no official post but has grown in prominence in recent years, directing economic reforms and playing a major role in negotiations with the West that restoring Libya's ties after decades of isolation. That fueled speculation he was being groomed to take power after his 66-year-old father steps down or dies, although Seif al-Islam has denied it in the past.
Libya has been ruled without a constitution since a 1969 coup led by the elder Gadhafi, who has run Libya with an iron fist under a so-called "Jamahiriya." The word, invented by Gadhafi from an Arabic word for "the masses," claims to hand direct rule to the people, but has led to an unusual system where lines of government power are unclear and Gadhafi's word holds sway.
In his speech, Seif al-Islam called for restoring Libya's constitution and for the establishment of "a strong civil society." He described Arab nations as ruled by authoritarian regimes and called for a democratic transformation for Libya.
"The Middle East and North Africa's peoples are living in a forest of dictatorships, political systems that violate human rights despite the presence of parliaments and constitutions, but they are all fictitious," the younger Gadhafi said.
His father also often denounces other regimes in the region as dictatorial, though he has dismissed the need for major changes in the Jamahiriya system even as he backs economic reform.
In his speech, the younger Gadhafi again ruled out intentions to succeed his father.
"This is not a farm to inherit. ... Don't tell me that I am the son of Gadhafi and therefore I am going to take over power," he said.
Educated in Europe and fluent in English, German and French, Seif al-Islam heads the Gadhafi International Association for Charitable Organizations, a network concerned with issues like human rights and education. It is officially not governmental but has been a platform for drawing up ambitious plans for economic liberalization in Libya.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
Kadhafi son says quitting politics
Veteran Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi's son and heir apparent Seif al-Islam has announced his withdrawal from politics in what analysts said was a sign of his frustration with the slow pace of the reforms he has championed.
"I have decided no longer to intervene in state affairs," the 36-year-old told thousands of young supporters in the town of Sebha 800 kilometres (500 miles) south of the capital Tripoli late on Wednesday.
Seif al-Islam said he had been "obliged to intervene" in politics in the past despite his lack of any official position because of the lack of political institutions and a civil service but said he now saw no need to carry on.
"It's true that I have intervened in all fields, in foreign affairs and in domestic Libyan matters like development, housing, urban planning and so on," he said.
He cited the settlement of the claims of the families of the 270 dead in the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie Scotland and the release last year of six Bulgarian medics held for more than eight years on widely criticised charges of infecting children with the AIDS virus.
"I have achieved my programme," he said. "The train is currently on the rails."
"I have no more big battles to fight and my position is becoming embarrassing," Seif al-Islam said. "The situation has changed. If I carry on, there will be a problem."
In a series of speeches in August last year in the run-up to the regime's 38th anniversary, Seif al-Islam set out a series of proposed changes to the state-led system of people's committees that has held sway since the 1970s.
They included a major privatisation campaign, an 80 billion euro investment programme, and a new constitution that would protect independent media as a bulwark against corruption.
Mahmud Boussifi, the editor of the independent Oya and Qurina newspapers set up at Seif al-Islam's initiative, said he felt the announcement by Kadhafi's son was a sign of his "frustration with the Libyan bureaucracy which has slowed down the pace of his reforms."
"He is young and was hoping rapidly to make major progress but he ran into bureaucratic obstacles that he had not expected," Boussifi said.
Another Libyan analyst said he felt Seif al-Islam's announcement would have no long-term impact on the succession to the veteran Kadhafi, who has been in power since 1969.
"I think that this is only a short-term withdrawal that will pave the way for a new phase aimed at recasting his role in public life and giving it a legitimacy grounded in civil society," he said, asking not be identified.
Seif al-Islam insisted the reforms he had championed had never been in conflict with the "people power" ideology his father had set out in his "Green Book" and which led to the country being renamed the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah.
He said his proposals for a new de facto constitution would protect Kadhafi's political thinking and reiterated that any questioning of his father's role remained a "red line".
He said the proposed "social contract" would contain a "special Moamer Kadhafi law" stipulating that the powers and prerogatives of the "guide", as Kadhafi is styled, were "could neither be passed on nor inherited."
Seif al-Islam hit out at the "sea of dictatorships" across the Middle East and North Africa in which "parliaments are mere shams" and leaders routinely trample on constitutions and said he hoped Libya could provide an alternative model for the region.
"I have decided no longer to intervene in state affairs," the 36-year-old told thousands of young supporters in the town of Sebha 800 kilometres (500 miles) south of the capital Tripoli late on Wednesday.
Seif al-Islam said he had been "obliged to intervene" in politics in the past despite his lack of any official position because of the lack of political institutions and a civil service but said he now saw no need to carry on.
"It's true that I have intervened in all fields, in foreign affairs and in domestic Libyan matters like development, housing, urban planning and so on," he said.
He cited the settlement of the claims of the families of the 270 dead in the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie Scotland and the release last year of six Bulgarian medics held for more than eight years on widely criticised charges of infecting children with the AIDS virus.
"I have achieved my programme," he said. "The train is currently on the rails."
"I have no more big battles to fight and my position is becoming embarrassing," Seif al-Islam said. "The situation has changed. If I carry on, there will be a problem."
In a series of speeches in August last year in the run-up to the regime's 38th anniversary, Seif al-Islam set out a series of proposed changes to the state-led system of people's committees that has held sway since the 1970s.
They included a major privatisation campaign, an 80 billion euro investment programme, and a new constitution that would protect independent media as a bulwark against corruption.
Mahmud Boussifi, the editor of the independent Oya and Qurina newspapers set up at Seif al-Islam's initiative, said he felt the announcement by Kadhafi's son was a sign of his "frustration with the Libyan bureaucracy which has slowed down the pace of his reforms."
"He is young and was hoping rapidly to make major progress but he ran into bureaucratic obstacles that he had not expected," Boussifi said.
Another Libyan analyst said he felt Seif al-Islam's announcement would have no long-term impact on the succession to the veteran Kadhafi, who has been in power since 1969.
"I think that this is only a short-term withdrawal that will pave the way for a new phase aimed at recasting his role in public life and giving it a legitimacy grounded in civil society," he said, asking not be identified.
Seif al-Islam insisted the reforms he had championed had never been in conflict with the "people power" ideology his father had set out in his "Green Book" and which led to the country being renamed the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah.
He said his proposals for a new de facto constitution would protect Kadhafi's political thinking and reiterated that any questioning of his father's role remained a "red line".
He said the proposed "social contract" would contain a "special Moamer Kadhafi law" stipulating that the powers and prerogatives of the "guide", as Kadhafi is styled, were "could neither be passed on nor inherited."
Seif al-Islam hit out at the "sea of dictatorships" across the Middle East and North Africa in which "parliaments are mere shams" and leaders routinely trample on constitutions and said he hoped Libya could provide an alternative model for the region.
Monday, 18 August 2008
Yemeni writer accuses Saudi Arabia of engineering Mauritanian coup
There we go again! It just seems that the Arabs have the worst misconception about what men in uniform, military or just even those who are on guard duty should really be doing, which has nothing to do with taking the helms of authority in their homelands to satisfy their immature lust for power. In the poorest of the poor countries, the military brass and the security muggers seem to think that they have an open mandate to keep their people under repression and deprivation, while they exercise the worst examples of governance anyone has come up with.
Needless to say, it is not an inescapable secret that what prompted the generals of Mauritania to come wrest their people of their God given and hard won freedom and democracy is that bastion of anti-democratic maturity, were the Bedouins who have been the enemies of all oppressed people in the region from the Atlantic to the Gulf (Persian that is, according to the standard definition of "Gulf", as much as it is to the dislike of our Northern neighbours). Yes, from Yemen to the Sudan and now to Mauritania, there is no doubt in the observer's intuition that our beloved northern neighbours have a hobby of pouring their dough on the barracks of deprived soldiers, who are all of a sudden awash with hundred dollar bills, which they could never in the past dream of seeing with their very eyes, let alone holding in their very hands! Time and again, the Saudi penchant for overthrowing democratic regimes, before they have a chance to get off the ground has sprung up again in the far corner of the Maghreb Al-Arabi to ensure that the model democracy initiated by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who took over at Nouakchott to free Mauritania from a previous oppressive military regime to herald his country onto the path of righteous government: for the people, by the people and for the eternal welfare of the people -a distant cry from the idea of governance as the Saudis understand it.
Surely the middle level ousted officers, who now make up the ruling Junta in Nouakchott had an agenda in their minds long before their ouster by the rightfully elected legitimate President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and there is very little to convince the observer otherwise than that this is indeed a coup that was planned in the plush meeting rooms of the scheming luxurious Government buildings of the House of Saud, who wish to be known as the "Servants of the Two Sanctified Homes of Allah (Mecca and Medina)". They may have also been assisted elsewhere, at the covert operations rooms of their Western Masters.
Really now, it has come time to call a spade a spade in this region and for all intents and purposes there is very little to go on to try to free the Saudis from the havoc in governance that has plagued this region. We can even understand how the Saudis might be nervous about any democratic developments knocking at the gates of Riyadh. But, for Heaven's sake can't our Saudi brothers mind their own business when it comes to the running of affairs in other Arab states? It is bad enough that the regime in Riyadh is on the "watch list" of every advocacy group in the world for their notorious contempt for human rights and even religious freedom (including the intolerance against their fellow Moslems!) at home and abroad. If the people of Saudi Arabians are content with this facade of do-goodness that characterizes the Saudi regime, all is well and dandy.
But why should the regime in Riyadh find it appetizing to meddle in the affairs of sovereign states by taking advantage of their power hungry and formerly food hungry generals, who take it upon themselves to despoil the scanty resources of their own countries after having been tempted by the scanty bag loads of dollar bills delivered to them for their cooperation with the Saudi regime in removing this hated phenomenon in their vocabulary called democratic government.
Surely, the Saudis have proven that they are not capable of managing this vast wealth that has been given to them as a burden from the Lord t o further make them eligible for hell. After all, aren't they responsible for their wasteful plunder of the resources of their people and all Moslems of the world? They could have made a good name for themselves in more attractive ways by investing these resources to help harness the energies of the people of Yemen, the Sudan, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, Pakistan and elsewhere where the Saudi penchant for evil has been allowed to instil suffering and agony, just so Moslems and Arabs should forget about the idea of democratic rule. The problem with the Saudis, like the Israelis and all other oppressive regimes, is that democracy is their worst enemy. It was democracy that produced Hezbollah and it was democracy that was going to wrest the Sudan, Mauritania and Yemen, and many other states that had great potential if they had their house in order.
But alas, the Saudi monarchy saw any such developments as feeding grounds for unrest in their own turf, or simply playgrounds, where they could threw a few pennies to some eager half naked soldiers to take on the job of bringing pain and distress to their very own people while being operated on by remote control keys from Riyadh. Look at how pathetic all these states are and one can see why the observer is not at all delighted by the turn of events in Mauritania.
To help the reader get prepared, Saudi Arabia saw no qualms in assuring the death of Benazir Bhutto to make way for the re-rise of Nawaz Sharif, who brought on the Taleban and all the mess that Central Asia is going through now. Just wait and see!
- Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.
Source: Yemen Times Online website, Sanaa, in English 14 Aug 08
Needless to say, it is not an inescapable secret that what prompted the generals of Mauritania to come wrest their people of their God given and hard won freedom and democracy is that bastion of anti-democratic maturity, were the Bedouins who have been the enemies of all oppressed people in the region from the Atlantic to the Gulf (Persian that is, according to the standard definition of "Gulf", as much as it is to the dislike of our Northern neighbours). Yes, from Yemen to the Sudan and now to Mauritania, there is no doubt in the observer's intuition that our beloved northern neighbours have a hobby of pouring their dough on the barracks of deprived soldiers, who are all of a sudden awash with hundred dollar bills, which they could never in the past dream of seeing with their very eyes, let alone holding in their very hands! Time and again, the Saudi penchant for overthrowing democratic regimes, before they have a chance to get off the ground has sprung up again in the far corner of the Maghreb Al-Arabi to ensure that the model democracy initiated by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who took over at Nouakchott to free Mauritania from a previous oppressive military regime to herald his country onto the path of righteous government: for the people, by the people and for the eternal welfare of the people -a distant cry from the idea of governance as the Saudis understand it.
Surely the middle level ousted officers, who now make up the ruling Junta in Nouakchott had an agenda in their minds long before their ouster by the rightfully elected legitimate President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, and there is very little to convince the observer otherwise than that this is indeed a coup that was planned in the plush meeting rooms of the scheming luxurious Government buildings of the House of Saud, who wish to be known as the "Servants of the Two Sanctified Homes of Allah (Mecca and Medina)". They may have also been assisted elsewhere, at the covert operations rooms of their Western Masters.
Really now, it has come time to call a spade a spade in this region and for all intents and purposes there is very little to go on to try to free the Saudis from the havoc in governance that has plagued this region. We can even understand how the Saudis might be nervous about any democratic developments knocking at the gates of Riyadh. But, for Heaven's sake can't our Saudi brothers mind their own business when it comes to the running of affairs in other Arab states? It is bad enough that the regime in Riyadh is on the "watch list" of every advocacy group in the world for their notorious contempt for human rights and even religious freedom (including the intolerance against their fellow Moslems!) at home and abroad. If the people of Saudi Arabians are content with this facade of do-goodness that characterizes the Saudi regime, all is well and dandy.
But why should the regime in Riyadh find it appetizing to meddle in the affairs of sovereign states by taking advantage of their power hungry and formerly food hungry generals, who take it upon themselves to despoil the scanty resources of their own countries after having been tempted by the scanty bag loads of dollar bills delivered to them for their cooperation with the Saudi regime in removing this hated phenomenon in their vocabulary called democratic government.
Surely, the Saudis have proven that they are not capable of managing this vast wealth that has been given to them as a burden from the Lord t o further make them eligible for hell. After all, aren't they responsible for their wasteful plunder of the resources of their people and all Moslems of the world? They could have made a good name for themselves in more attractive ways by investing these resources to help harness the energies of the people of Yemen, the Sudan, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Lebanon, Pakistan and elsewhere where the Saudi penchant for evil has been allowed to instil suffering and agony, just so Moslems and Arabs should forget about the idea of democratic rule. The problem with the Saudis, like the Israelis and all other oppressive regimes, is that democracy is their worst enemy. It was democracy that produced Hezbollah and it was democracy that was going to wrest the Sudan, Mauritania and Yemen, and many other states that had great potential if they had their house in order.
But alas, the Saudi monarchy saw any such developments as feeding grounds for unrest in their own turf, or simply playgrounds, where they could threw a few pennies to some eager half naked soldiers to take on the job of bringing pain and distress to their very own people while being operated on by remote control keys from Riyadh. Look at how pathetic all these states are and one can see why the observer is not at all delighted by the turn of events in Mauritania.
To help the reader get prepared, Saudi Arabia saw no qualms in assuring the death of Benazir Bhutto to make way for the re-rise of Nawaz Sharif, who brought on the Taleban and all the mess that Central Asia is going through now. Just wait and see!
- Hassan Al-Haifi has been a Yemeni political economist and journalist for more than 20 years.
Source: Yemen Times Online website, Sanaa, in English 14 Aug 08
Friday, 1 August 2008
Abbas salue la décision de Ben Ali de se porter candidat à l'élection présidentielle de 2009
Aug 01, 2008 (La Presse/AllAfrica Global Media via COMTEX) -- Le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne, M. Mahmoud Abbas, a réitéré hier, peu avant son départ de Tunis, sa considération au Président Ben Ali et a salué sa décision de se porter candidat à l'élection présidentielle de 2009, qui «cadre parfaitement avec les aspirations et des appels répétés du peuple tunisien».
Abou Mazen, qui s'exprimait lors d'un point de presse organisé au pavillon présidentiel à l'aéroport Tunis-Carthage, avant de s'envoler en direction de Ramallah avec une étape à Amman, a exprimé sa joie d'avoir assisté aux travaux du Ve congrès du RCD placé sous le signe du «Défi».
Cette manifestation politique «nous a donné l'occasion de parler aux militants constitutionnels démocrates», a-t-il indiqué. Le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne, qui a souhaité plein succès au Président Ben Ali dans la direction réussie du pays et progrès et essor à la Tunisie sous sa direction, a indiqué avoir saisi l'opportunité pour se concerter et échanger les points de vue avec le Chef de l'Etat à propos des problèmes palestiniens urgents et de quelques sujets de l'actualité mondiale, malgré le peu de temps dont il disposait.
Le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne, qui a révélé aux médias lors de ce point de presse la teneur de la visite qu'il a effectuée en Egypte sur son chemin à Tunis, lequel pays se propose d'accueillir les secrétaires généraux des factions palestiniennes sur la base de l'initiative arabe en vue de relancer le dialogue interpalestinien, a mis en exergue le nouvel esprit positif qui entoure cette tentative et a mis en exergue son attachement à la restauration de l'unité palestinienne et de la cohésion de tous les Palestiniens de mettre fin aux divisions et a plaidé en faveur d'un retour à la situation qui prévalait à Gaza.
Le Président Abbas, qui a mis en avant son souci d'unité, a affirmé que le dialogue national interpalestinien serait bientôt lancé et a formé le voeu de voir rétablir la cohésion nationale des Palestiniens, et ce, après la division qui les a frappés suite à la prise du pouvoir à Gaza par le biais d'un coup d'état perpétré par le mouvement Hamas en juin 2007.
Le Président Abbas a déploré les graves incidents qui ont secoué récemment la bande de Gaza et au cours desquels a été victime un bon nombre de palestiniens. Il a rappelé qu'il avait tout de suite fait part de sa dénonciation de ces incidents et qu'il a appelé la communauté internationale à une enquête impartiale et dont «nous sommes prêts à en accepter au préalable les résultats», a-t-il assuré.
Les négociations au point mort?
Evoquant les dernières évolutions des négociations de paix bilatérales et trilatérales que mène actuellement la délégation palestinienne aux Etats-Unis, Abou Mazen a signalé que les six dossiers sur la table de négociations qui forment l'essentiel de l'étape finale du processus de paix, à savoir la question des réfugiés, les frontières, l'établissement de l'Etat palestinien, les colonies, le problème de l'eau et l'épineuse question du statut d'Al Qods, sont à l'étude et font l'objet d'une réflexion sérieuse et profonde. Toutefois, le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne a précisé que les négociations, bien qu'elles avancent, n'ont pu aboutir au règlement définitif d'un seul de ces dossiers.
Revenant sur la situation qui prévaut en Palestine, le Président Abbas a rassuré les journalistes du climat de sécurité et de stabilité qui règne en Cisjordanie, précisant dans le même sillage que la situation économique évolue positivement.
Cependant, le Chef de l'Autorité palestinienne a montré du doigt les écueils qui entravent toujours, sur le terrain, la paix et font planer un climat de tension, à l'instar de la poursuite de la colonisation des territoires palestiniens et surtout à Al Qods, les invasions qui ont lieu de temps à autre dans quelques villes palestiniennes et les 640 barrages ou chek-point qui déchirent le territoire palestinien. Tous ces facteurs représentent «des entraves sur le chemin des négociations», a-t-il indiqué.
S'exprimant sur la récente déclaration du Premier ministre israélien Ehud Olmert de ne pas se présenter aux primaires de Kadima, Mahmoud Abbas a clairement expliqué qu'il n'entend pas s'ingérer dans les affaires politiques internes d'Israël et qu'il a l'intention de continuer à traiter avec le Premier ministre jusqu'à son départ, mais qu'il traitera aussi avec son successeur qui sera élu par les Israéliens.
Interrogé sur un éventuel «blocage» du processus de réconciliation nationale entre le Hamas et le mouvement Fatah, le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne a déclaré qu'il ne permettrait à personne de s'ériger contre la réconciliation, signalant par là même que les Palestiniens sont maîtres de leurs décisions et libres dans leurs actes et qu'ils sont tous très attachés à rétablir l'unité nationale.
Concernant les engagements des pays donateurs après la conférence de Paris où il a été décidé d'allouer à l'Autorité palestinienne un budget de 7,4 milliards de dollars, le Président Abbas a noté qu'une partie de ces fonds a déjà été virée, ce qui a permis à l'Autorité de continuer à fonctionner et exhortant par la même occasion les pays qui se sont engagés à accélérer le transfert des fonds.
Abou Mazen, qui s'exprimait lors d'un point de presse organisé au pavillon présidentiel à l'aéroport Tunis-Carthage, avant de s'envoler en direction de Ramallah avec une étape à Amman, a exprimé sa joie d'avoir assisté aux travaux du Ve congrès du RCD placé sous le signe du «Défi».
Cette manifestation politique «nous a donné l'occasion de parler aux militants constitutionnels démocrates», a-t-il indiqué. Le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne, qui a souhaité plein succès au Président Ben Ali dans la direction réussie du pays et progrès et essor à la Tunisie sous sa direction, a indiqué avoir saisi l'opportunité pour se concerter et échanger les points de vue avec le Chef de l'Etat à propos des problèmes palestiniens urgents et de quelques sujets de l'actualité mondiale, malgré le peu de temps dont il disposait.
Le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne, qui a révélé aux médias lors de ce point de presse la teneur de la visite qu'il a effectuée en Egypte sur son chemin à Tunis, lequel pays se propose d'accueillir les secrétaires généraux des factions palestiniennes sur la base de l'initiative arabe en vue de relancer le dialogue interpalestinien, a mis en exergue le nouvel esprit positif qui entoure cette tentative et a mis en exergue son attachement à la restauration de l'unité palestinienne et de la cohésion de tous les Palestiniens de mettre fin aux divisions et a plaidé en faveur d'un retour à la situation qui prévalait à Gaza.
Le Président Abbas, qui a mis en avant son souci d'unité, a affirmé que le dialogue national interpalestinien serait bientôt lancé et a formé le voeu de voir rétablir la cohésion nationale des Palestiniens, et ce, après la division qui les a frappés suite à la prise du pouvoir à Gaza par le biais d'un coup d'état perpétré par le mouvement Hamas en juin 2007.
Le Président Abbas a déploré les graves incidents qui ont secoué récemment la bande de Gaza et au cours desquels a été victime un bon nombre de palestiniens. Il a rappelé qu'il avait tout de suite fait part de sa dénonciation de ces incidents et qu'il a appelé la communauté internationale à une enquête impartiale et dont «nous sommes prêts à en accepter au préalable les résultats», a-t-il assuré.
Les négociations au point mort?
Evoquant les dernières évolutions des négociations de paix bilatérales et trilatérales que mène actuellement la délégation palestinienne aux Etats-Unis, Abou Mazen a signalé que les six dossiers sur la table de négociations qui forment l'essentiel de l'étape finale du processus de paix, à savoir la question des réfugiés, les frontières, l'établissement de l'Etat palestinien, les colonies, le problème de l'eau et l'épineuse question du statut d'Al Qods, sont à l'étude et font l'objet d'une réflexion sérieuse et profonde. Toutefois, le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne a précisé que les négociations, bien qu'elles avancent, n'ont pu aboutir au règlement définitif d'un seul de ces dossiers.
Revenant sur la situation qui prévaut en Palestine, le Président Abbas a rassuré les journalistes du climat de sécurité et de stabilité qui règne en Cisjordanie, précisant dans le même sillage que la situation économique évolue positivement.
Cependant, le Chef de l'Autorité palestinienne a montré du doigt les écueils qui entravent toujours, sur le terrain, la paix et font planer un climat de tension, à l'instar de la poursuite de la colonisation des territoires palestiniens et surtout à Al Qods, les invasions qui ont lieu de temps à autre dans quelques villes palestiniennes et les 640 barrages ou chek-point qui déchirent le territoire palestinien. Tous ces facteurs représentent «des entraves sur le chemin des négociations», a-t-il indiqué.
S'exprimant sur la récente déclaration du Premier ministre israélien Ehud Olmert de ne pas se présenter aux primaires de Kadima, Mahmoud Abbas a clairement expliqué qu'il n'entend pas s'ingérer dans les affaires politiques internes d'Israël et qu'il a l'intention de continuer à traiter avec le Premier ministre jusqu'à son départ, mais qu'il traitera aussi avec son successeur qui sera élu par les Israéliens.
Interrogé sur un éventuel «blocage» du processus de réconciliation nationale entre le Hamas et le mouvement Fatah, le Président de l'Autorité palestinienne a déclaré qu'il ne permettrait à personne de s'ériger contre la réconciliation, signalant par là même que les Palestiniens sont maîtres de leurs décisions et libres dans leurs actes et qu'ils sont tous très attachés à rétablir l'unité nationale.
Concernant les engagements des pays donateurs après la conférence de Paris où il a été décidé d'allouer à l'Autorité palestinienne un budget de 7,4 milliards de dollars, le Président Abbas a noté qu'une partie de ces fonds a déjà été virée, ce qui a permis à l'Autorité de continuer à fonctionner et exhortant par la même occasion les pays qui se sont engagés à accélérer le transfert des fonds.
Friday, 11 July 2008
Morocco court fines Al-Jazeera bureau chief, rights activist, for spreading false information
RABAT, Morocco (AP) - A court fined the Al-Jazeera bureau chief in Morocco and a human rights campaigner the equivalent of US$6,945 (euro4,385) each on Friday on charges of conspiracy and spreading false information.
Hassan Rachidi and Ibrahim Sbai Ellail, an activist from the Moroccan Center for Human Rights, were charged following June 7 clashes between security forces and demonstrators in the southwestern port city of Sidi Ifni who protested poverty and unemployment.
Moroccan authorities rejected as "false" and "absurd" Al-Jazeera reports of deaths in Sidi Ifni at the time. Authorities said 48 people were injured, including 28 police officers, but that there were no deaths. Although Al-Jazeera reported the government's denial, the chief prosecutor's office in Rabat, the capital, ordered a probe to determine the origin of the report of deaths.
Rachidi was interrogated by the judiciary police for four hours and he was charged on June 14 with publishing false information and conspiracy. The Moroccan Information Ministry withdrew his media accreditation.
In May, Morocco suspended Al-Jazeera's daily television bulletin covering the Maghreb countries, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, from its studios in the Moroccan capital.
The decision, according to Khalid Naciri, the Moroccan information minister and spokesman for the government, was due to "technical and legal issues."
Hassan Rachidi and Ibrahim Sbai Ellail, an activist from the Moroccan Center for Human Rights, were charged following June 7 clashes between security forces and demonstrators in the southwestern port city of Sidi Ifni who protested poverty and unemployment.
Moroccan authorities rejected as "false" and "absurd" Al-Jazeera reports of deaths in Sidi Ifni at the time. Authorities said 48 people were injured, including 28 police officers, but that there were no deaths. Although Al-Jazeera reported the government's denial, the chief prosecutor's office in Rabat, the capital, ordered a probe to determine the origin of the report of deaths.
Rachidi was interrogated by the judiciary police for four hours and he was charged on June 14 with publishing false information and conspiracy. The Moroccan Information Ministry withdrew his media accreditation.
In May, Morocco suspended Al-Jazeera's daily television bulletin covering the Maghreb countries, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, from its studios in the Moroccan capital.
The decision, according to Khalid Naciri, the Moroccan information minister and spokesman for the government, was due to "technical and legal issues."
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