Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul

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

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

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

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

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

Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth

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

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

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

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

Source: Daring Opinion, Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth

'Falafel, falafel - every day falafel!'

By Omar Chatriwala in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends relaxing by the Tigris

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

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

Food of necessity

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

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

A stuffed felafel

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

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

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

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

Almost two decades later, it seems that situation continues.

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

And then Cairo turned itself inside out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prism Magazine

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

Celebrate Mercy

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

Where religion and civil society meet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: The National: Where religion and civil society meet

Tabah Foundation

Arab society's crunch points

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

In a major speech in 2003, Bush said:

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

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

Continue reading al Bab: Arab society's crunch points

Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?

By Lina Sinjab
BBC News, Damascus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Crucial role'

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


Asma al-Assad

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

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

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

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

'Real change'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source BBC: Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?

Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

Eugene Rogan on The Arabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example?

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

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

So Jewish stereotypes played in Weizmann’s favour?

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

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

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

What insights does it offer into the conflict?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Sophie Roell

Source: The Browser Eugene Rogan on 'The Arabs'

Egypt starts building steel wall on Gaza Strip border

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

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

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

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

The wall will take 18 months to complete.

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

'Impenetrable'

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

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

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

Egypt's Gaza barrier: Your views

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dutch department store gives Arabic letters a sweet twist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes

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

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

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

Tekke architecture

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

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

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

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

Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes

Europe's waning liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration versus assimilation

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

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

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

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

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

European Muslim mosaic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dangerous precedent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Al Jazeera: Europe's waning liberalism

An Argumentative Arab Enlightener

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intellectual hauntings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disappointed nationalism

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

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

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

Continue reading: Qantara: An Argumentative Arab Enlightener

The Loves of others

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

The Others
Siba al Harez
Telegram Books
Dh68

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Reproduced from The National: The loves of others

Veils, gold, calligraphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading- The National: Veils, gold, calligraphy