Author: issandr

Rethinking Cleopatra

According to new research from medieval Arab sources, Cleopatra may not be quite the femme fatale we imagine her to be. Okasha El Daly, an Egyptian Egyptologist working in the UK, says that she may have been one of the great scientific luminaries of her age:

Elisabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

“Cleopatra is a scientist, a medical doctor, a woman who had invented a theory of mathematics and, above all, a well-known philosopher,” Dr El Daly recalls from the many medieval texts he’s read, which talked of how she “used to hold courtly seminars almost every week in which she sat with fellow scientists and philosophers and would discuss with them, on the same level, all sorts of philosophical and scientific issues.” He adds that whenever they refer to Cleopatra, the medieval Arab scholars “always refer to her as a great eminent scholar and philosopher” and says they “thought very highly of that famous queen”.

Perhaps it’s time for a remake of the Liz Taylor movie most of us think of when talking about her.

Saad’s back

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian democracy activist who spent nearly two years in prison because of his activities before being finally acquitted, has published a courageous editorial that is making the rounds in the regional press: Egypt needs a president, not a latter-day pharaoh

First of all, it’s worth noting that this is perhaps one of the most strongly-worded editorials on the Mubarak regime to ever be published, and that it comes from one of the most prominent Egyptian intellectuals (even if he is marginalized in Egypt because of his pro-American views.) Secondly, remember that Ibrahim was arrested in 2000 on the day that Al Hayat published his article on “republicarchy” (goumloukiya) and the phenomenon in Arab states of hereditary republics. The article centered on Gamal Mubarak and the possibility that he was being groomed for succession, when that still seemed improbable (it doesn’t now.)

Ibrahim’s new article focuses on the need for constitutional reform to provide more checks and balances to counter the powers of the presidency, introduce direct presidential elections with a real contest, and implicitly rejects another term for Mubarak. It would be great to see a real campaign asking that Mubarak step down — petitions such as the one I mentioned recently are a step in the right direction, but this movement needs to gather momentum in the next few months, which the security services won’t like. And we’ve seen what they’re capable of doing to people who talk too much…

Fisking Arafat

When Fisk is good, he’s good:

Sitting like an old and dying owl in his Ramallah headquarters, it must have struck Arafat that he had one unique distinction. Some “terrorists” — Khomeini, for example — die of old age. Some — Gaddafi comes to mind — become statesmen courtesy of mendacious folk like Tony Blair. Others — Abu Nidal is an obvious candidate — get murdered, often by their own side. But Arafat is perhaps the only man who started off as a “super-terrorist”, was turned overnight by the Oslo agreement into a “super-statesman” and then went back to being a “super-terrorist” again. No wonder he often seems to be losing attention, making factual errors, falling ill.

Like all dictators, he made sure that there was no succession. It might have been Abu Jihad, but he was murdered by the Israelis in Tunis. It might have been one of the militant leaders whom the Israelis have been executing by air attack over the past two years. It could still be, just, the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti. And, if the Israelis decide that he should be the leader — be sure the Palestinians won’t get any choice in the matter — then the prison doors may open for Barghouti.

Yes, Arafat might die. The funeral would be the usual excruciating rhetoric bath. But the truth, I fear, is that Arafat died years ago.

Librarian diplomacy

James Billington, the librarian of Congress,visited Iran last week in what was the highest-level official trip by any US official since 1980, meeting with President Khatami (formerly the head of Iran’s national library) and other top officials:

Billington said the goal of his trip was to discuss acquiring Iranian publications.

“We have a large collection on the Middle East and Islamic world, and we want to expand our collection,” he said. “We’re a world library, but our collection is not what it should be. The trip seemed important given our collection deficit and because the amount of material Iran has published” since relations were severed.

Billington said he also met with top officials at Tehran’s parliamentary library, toured the national archives and had talks with experts on topics including Iranian films, Sanskrit and Russian architectural influences in Iran. He discussed sonnets with Simin Behbahani, one of Iran’s most famous female poets. And he consulted with architects about a new facility to house Iran’s national library and archives, similar to talks in other foreign capitals. He also spent two days touring Isfahan, about 200 miles south of Tehran.”

Good to see cultural exchange can still take place with the axis of evil.

Arafat: “We are not Red Indians”

The last few lines of this interview with Yasser Arafat, apparently the last before he was hospitalized, seem to capture his character well. He stubbornly refuses to accept any mistakes whatsoever, yet does make the moving point that by opting for active resistance the Palestinians avoided politicide:

He uncoiled a little, sagging back in his chair. He drank his soup from the lip of the bowl, Arab-style.

Did he make any mistakes?

“No.”

Did he make any tactical mistakes?

He peered through the steam of his soup.

“No.”

What did he achieve?

“We have made the Palestinian case the biggest problem in the world,” he said, with a grin. “Look at the Hague ruling on the wall. One hundred and thirty countries supported us at the General Assembly. One hundred and seven years after the [founding Zionist] Basel Conference, 90 years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them. We are not red Indians.”

Obama’s flip-flops

Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American whose work I greatly admire (and whose daily press round-up on Palestine, Iraq and the Middle East is a must-read), has written a great editorial on the implications for the Middle East that Bush’s victory has. While I encourage you to read the whole thing, one of the most interesting parts of the article is about Barack Obama, the new superstar of Democrat politics, and how he has (like so many others before him) abandoned a nuanced stance on the peace process to endorse the Israeli position:

Against this background, Bush has shifted the goal posts of the Palestine-Israel debate such that Likudist thinking is now viewed as centrist. This was demonstrated by Kerry’s campaign which warmly endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies. But the bankruptcy of the discourse was brought home in a most personally disappointing way.

Illinois swept Barack Obama, a rising star in the Democratic party, into the United States Senate with a stunning 70 percent of the vote – a rare Democratic gain. Obama, whom I’ve met many times, has served as my local state senator in the Illinois legislature. I found him to be an inspiring politician, not least because he appeared to understand Middle East issues and take progressive views supporting Palestinian rights and opposing militarism. He participated in many events in the Chicago-area Arab community including a 1998 fundraiser with Edward Said as the keynote speaker. I even made contributions to his campaigns.

But following Obama’s nationally-televised address at the Democratic National Convention everything seemed to change. In the campaign’s final weeks, Obama proclaimed his support for tough sanctions and military strikes against Iran if it refused U.S. demands to give up its nuclear programs. According to the Chicago Tribune, Obama now says that the onus of peace in the Middle East “is on the Palestinian leadership, which … must cease violence against Israelis and work ‘to end the incitement against Israel in the Arab world.” The unique fact about Obama’s campaign is that he did not need to parrot the pro-Israel lobby’s standard line to get elected. He ran effectively unopposed. Such a capable and ambitious man must have calculated that any hope of higher office requires that he not offend when it comes to Israel and its interests. This begs the question: If a man like Obama will not speak frankly when it comes to Israel, what hope is there for a change in U.S. policy coming from within the establishment?

As they say in right-wing blogs, indeed.

Levine: We’re all Israelis now

Mark Levine, a historian of the Middle East and noted leftist activist, writes that we’re all Israelis now:

As I watch George W. Bush celebrate his reelection I realize I never could have imagined just how much like Israelis we would become. Think about it: in Israel, the majority of Jewish citizens support the policies of Ariel Sharon despite the large-scale, systematic (and according to international law, criminal) violence his government deploys against Palestinian society, despite the worsening economic situation for the lower middle class religious voters who constitute his main base of support, despite rising international opprobrium and isolation. Sound familiar?

As for the country’s “liberal” opposition, it’s in a shambles, politically and morally bankrupt because in fact it was a willing participant in creating and preserving the system that is now eating away at the heart of Israeli society. Aside from occasional plaintive oped pieces by members of its progressive wing, the Labor Party can and will do nothing fundamentally to challenge Sharon’s policies. Why? Because they reflect an impulse, nurtured by the Labor movement during its decades in power, that is buried deep in the heart of Zionism: to build an exclusively Jewish society on as much of the ancient homeland as possible, with little regard for the fate of the country’s native inhabitants.

(Via Juan Cole.)

Opposition writer roughed up

A prominent columnist for the Egyptian opposition weekly Al Arabi (an organ of the Nasserist party) was kidnapped by security services, taken to the desert outside Cairo, stripped and beaten. Abdel Halim Kandil, who is a prominent columnist writing in one of the most vocal anti-regime publication in Egypt, told: reporters of his ordeal today at the Press Syndicate:

Abdelhalim Kandil’s newspaper, the weekly al-Arabi, condemned the attack and said it suspected the government of being behind the assault and a wider campaign of intimidation.

Kandil said he was nabbed in his Cairo neighbourhood in the middle of the night as he was returning from the traditional meal taken by Muslims during Ramadan before fasting for the day.

He was gagged and blindfolded, beaten up and stripped before being dumped on the main motorway between Cairo and Suez, he said, adding that his attackers told him to “stop talking about important people”.

Although that story does not make it clear, I heard from a reporter who was at the press conference and it’s certain this was not just a random kidnapping but probably involved state security goons.And if that’s so, press freedom and democracy in general just took a nose-dive in Egypt. Kandil, who wrote inflammatory pieces about the regime his Al Arabi — making him one of the most-read writers in the country — was also a signotory to the recent petition asking Mubarak not to run again. This could be a signal to all journalists to quiet down as next year’s elections and presidential referendum approach.

Update: Here is another, better article on what happened.

Libération: el-Baradeï accused of helping cover up Egyptian nuclear program

The respected left-wing French daily Libération published a story implying that Mohammed el-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is protecting his native country Egypt from investigation of a secret nuclear program. The article makes clear that this is speculation that is currently discreetly making the rounds at the IAEA and that is being pushed mostly by US diplomats, not that it has any tangible proof of this. It notes in particular that the US has been dissatisfied with the “moderate” approach to confronting Iran that el-Baradei favors (as do France and the UK).

Reste à savoir si la polémique, qui demeure très feutrée et ne s’est pas encore exprimée sur la place publique, est fondée. Elle prend sa source dans le programme nucléaire libyen que le très versatile colonel Kadhafi a brutalement abandonné le 19 décembre 2003, permettant à l’AIEA de plonger son nez dans ses dossiers secrets. C’est ainsi, indiquent des sources diplomatiques occidentales travaillant sur ce sujet, qu’il a pu être établi que le programme clandestin avait des implications égyptiennes. Le programme lybien a consisté notamment à importer ­ pour quelque 500 millions de dollars ­ de l’uranium et des équipements de centrifugation, dont 10 000 centrifugeuses P (Pakistan) 2. Un programme important sur lequel, semble-t-il, Tripoli ne faisait pas que travailler pour son propre compte mais aussi, secrètement, pour les Egyptiens. Depuis, une certaine tension existe entre des pays membres de l’AIEA et l’Egypte, les premiers reprochant au Caire de n’avoir pas joué franc jeu. L’affaire est à ce point sensible, à cause des répercussions qu’elle pourrait avoir dans toute la région, qu’elle est traitée avec une grande discrétion, selon les mêmes sources diplomatiques.

Translation: It remains to be seen whether this polemic, which remains low-key and has yet to be expressed in a public forum, is founded. It originates from the Libyan nuclear program that the very versatile Colonel Kadhafi suddenly abandoned on 19 December 2003, allowing the IAEA to stick its nose in its secret files. That is how, point out Western diplomatic sources working on the case, that it has been established that the clandestine program had Egyptian involvement. The Libyan program notably involved importing some $500 million of uranium and centrifuge equipment, including 10,000 P (Pakistan) 2 centrifuges. An important program on which, it seems, Tripoli was not only working for itself but also, secretly, for the Egyptians. Since then, a certain tension exists between member states of the IAEA and Egypt, with the former accusing Egypt of being dishonest. The affair is so sensitive that, because of the repercussions it could have across the region, it is treated with the utmost secrecy, according the same diplomatic sources.

The Egyptian ambassador to the IAEA has already denied the allegations, but the spokesman for the IAEA itself has refused to comment, according to this AFP story.

I’ll have a second post later on this, after the elections, which provides background and digs up previous references to an Egyptian-Libyan nuclear program.