December 2004 – Page 4

The Hitler-Stalin pact of our times?

More on the unusual alliance Issandr mentioned between leftists and Islamists in this month’s Commentary. It’s the “Hitler-Stalin pact of our times” says David Horowitzâ€™s in his new book, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.”

The fact that radical Islamists hold social and cultural values diametrically opposed to those of American leftists is not, Horowitz maintains, as big a problem for either party as it might appear. As in a previous era, when the hard Left dealt with Stalinâ€™s widely acknowledged crimes by turning its attention to more attractive proxies of the cause like Vietnam and Cuba, todayâ€™s radicals tend to pay tribute not to al Qaeda but to groups like Hamas, whose extensive social-service network can be invoked to soften the horrors perpetrated by its terror cells.

Al Jazeera on Arab elections

Here is Faisal al Kassem’s framing of the debate on Arab elections in the introduction to his weekly program on Al Jazeera “Al Itagah Al Muakas” or “The Opposite Direction.” I’ve translated it here, though surely without the eloquence it deserves. It’s not a precise translation, so don’t quote it. An ellipsis (…) indicates that a word or two is missing from the translation. I’ve linked to the original Arabic transcript if anybody is interested.

Reducing margins of victory by two or three percent, this is how Arab elections and referendums are developing. Do Arab leaders think that they can trick their people with small reductions in their margins of victory in elections, by reducing their official vote rigging from 99.99 percent to 97 or 95 percent? When will they stop this farce and this cheap theater? Do any of these leaders wonder why the Arab world is crying out about the leadersâ€™ double-talk about elections, saying one thing here, and another elsewhere? Has anything changed after hundreds of referendums and elections have been fabricated in the cellars of Arab intelligence agencies? When will the people tell these regimes that have no shame that enough is enough? The young and the old in Ukraine turned out to protest elections in which incidents of fraud did not exceed one percent. Meanwhile Arab votes are robbed year after year and no one has the courage to so much as speak up about these violations. When will [Arab leaders] realize that if they had true elections they would get negative 99.99 percent of the vote?

To what extent are [Arab leaders] wasting millions of dollars on election charades (…)? Is it not better to use those millions to fix some of the Arab hospitals that are not suitable for wild animals, much less domesticated animals? Is it not preferable that, instead of using millions of meters of cloth [as signs] for empty election slogans, we give that cloth to the poor and the destitute to cover their naked bodies?

Does one of the [the Arab leaders] wonder if we are in need of elections and referendums after all of that? However, from the other side, why do we not consider the reductions in the margins of victory to just 95% of the popular vote a positive step that indicates that Arab leaders have begun to feel a little bit of shame? Why do we not say that the Arab elections, in spite of their weaknesses, are a necessary exercise needed to achieve a true democracy? Should we not encourage the changes that have begun to occur with respect to Arab elections instead of denouncing them? Should we not work on the principle that just because one canâ€™t have everything, doesnâ€™t mean you can ignore the matter in its entirety? And is it not unfair to lump all Arab elections in one basket? Did the Algerian president not win by just 85 percent of the vote? Didnâ€™t the Mauritanian president win one time by 60 percent? And didnâ€™t the Tunisian president allow the opposition to participate in the elections?

Hopefully this helps illustrate why Al Jazeera is a welcome addition to the Arab and global media.

Massad on anti-Semitism

In a fine piece, Joseph Massad debunks anti-Semitism. It’s worth reading in full and certain enlightened on some aspects of the history of anti-Semitism and how it might have influenced Western perceptions of the Arab world.

Follow up on Coptic-Muslim tensions

Al Hayat reported today that 34 Copts have been detained by Egyptian authorities in connection with the demonstrations that followed the conversion of a vice-bishop’s wife to Islam. Among the seven charges against them: inciting unrest, exploiting religion to incite ethnic discord, resisting authorities, and using force and violence. Also, implications or accusations that the woman’s conversion was less than voluntary appear to be unfounded. Al Hayat reports that church officials have spent the past two days trying to convince the woman to renounce her conversion– but in vain.

Naguib Mahfouz turns 93

Today is Naguib Mahfouz’s 93rd birthday. Mahfouz won the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature, the first and only Egyptian to do so.

Religious discourse in Egypt

This is the key paragraph in Maria Golia’s Daily Star column:

That [popular preacher Amr] Khaled and others like him have found scores of followers suggests less the emergence of a new breed of religious guides than proof of the lack thereof. Imaginative leadership – secular or religious – is not the forte of paternalist autocracies like Egypt. The job of eliminating competitors and ensuring the populace’s dependency has been so thoroughly done that individuals capable of mobilizing energies and talents, or providing constructive outlets for their expression, are rare indeed.

This is the crux of the issue. Religious discourse and debate here is dominated by a conservative elite, Al Azhar being the most obvious and influential bastion for this elite (in Egypt at least). The permissible scope of religious debate here is kept within narrow confines, where opposing views are aggressively silenced. No where has this silencing been more visible than in the case of Nasser Hamed Abu Zeid, the Cairo University Islamic thinker who fled Egypt in the mid-1990s after Islamist lawyers forced him to divorce his wife on the grounds that he was not a true Muslim. (The outrageous ideas he had the gaul to propogate: that the Koran should be interpreted in the context of place and time.) For more on this issue see Tunisian journalist Kamel Labidi’s recent column in the Daily Star. Of course it’s also evident in Al Azhar’s continuing efforts to ban books (80 in the past decade, according to Labidi).

The absence of true debate on religious issues, and the muffling of those thinkers whose views extend beyond the acceptable confines of debate is a significant factor in the increasing visibility of public religiosity in Cairo and elsewhere. Take for instance the example of the hijab, one of the more frequently cited indications of this increasing public religiosity. An average Egyptian Muslim girl who is considering whether or not to start wearing the hijab (head scarf) has few, if any, public religious figures to turn to in Egypt who will tell her that the hijab is NOT a religious obligation. There are simply no voices (that I know of) in Al Azhar or elsewhere in the religious establishment here that argue that the hijab is not a religious duty. This despite the fact that a very reasonable, and in my opinion convincing, argument exists that the Koran and the sunna do not require women to veil. Of course, disagreement in interpretations of the text are a fundamental part of any religion, but those differences should be debated publicly. That is not happening here. The Egyptian girl debating whether or not to wear the veil has no one telling her she can remain an obedient Muslim, and also remain unveiled.

The Islamic reform debate

Neil MacFarquhar of the NYT has a story about the debate on interpretation of the Quran that Charles mentioned in his recent post:

The long-simmering internal debate over political violence in Islamic cultures is swelling, with seminars like that one and a raft of newspaper columns breaking previous taboos by suggesting that the problem lies in the way Islam is being interpreted. On Saturday in Morocco, a major conference, attended by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, will focus on increasing democracy and liberal principles in the Muslim world.

On one side of the discussion sit mostly secular intellectuals horrified by the gore joined by those ordinary Muslims dismayed by the ever more bloody image of Islam around the world. They are determined to find a way to wrestle the faith back from extremists. Basically the liberals seek to dilute what they criticize as the clerical monopoly on disseminating interpretations of the sacred texts.

Arrayed against them are powerful religious institutions like Al Azhar University, prominent clerics and a whole different class of scholars who argue that Islam is under assault by the West. Fighting back with any means possible is the sole defense available to a weaker victim, they say.

The debate, which can be heard in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, is driven primarily by carnage in Iraq. The hellish stream of images of American soldiers attacking mosques and other targets are juxtaposed with those of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi beheading civilian victims on his home videos as a Koranic verse including the line “Smite at their necks” scrolls underneath.

I don’t think that this debate is essentially about the Iraq war or provoked by it — that’s just a subset of it, and perhaps a distracting one considering that from an Arab (and international) standpoint the war was after illegal. There are, for instance, organizations in Italy (old-style communists mostly) who are encouraging the Iraqi insurgency as legitimate resistance.

But the problem to a deeper rethinking about the liturgy of Islam has more to do with a fossilized and increasingly irrelevant institutionalized Islam such as that of Al Azhar.

Month: December 2004