Month: June 2006

Dawa in Amreeka

Interesting NYT article on American converts to Islam who become imams:

Most American mosques import their clerics from overseas — some who preach extremism, some who cannot speak English, and most who cannot begin to speak to young American Muslims growing up on hip-hop and in mixed-sex chat rooms. Mr. Yusuf, 48, and Mr. Shakir, 50, are using their clout to create the first Islamic seminary in the United States, where they hope to train a new generation of imams and scholars who can reconcile Islam and American culture.

The seminary is still in its fledgling stages, but Mr. Yusuf and Mr. Shakir have gained a large following by being equally at home in Islamic tradition and modern American culture. Mr. Yusuf dazzles his audiences by weaving into one of his typical half-hour talks quotations from St. Augustine, Patton, Eric Erikson, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Auden, Robert Bly, Gen. William C. Westmoreland and the Bible. He is the host of a TV reality show that is popular in the Middle East, in which he takes a vanload of Arabs on a road trip across the United States to visit people who might challenge Arab stereotypes about Americans, like the antiwar protesters demonstrating outside the Republican National Convention.

Mr. Shakir mixes passages from the Koran with a few lines of rap, and channels accents from ghetto to Valley Girl. Some of his students call him the next Malcolm X — out of his earshot, because he so often preaches the importance of humility.

Both men draw overflow crowds in theaters, mosques and university auditoriums that seat thousands. Their books and CD’s are pored over by young Muslims in study groups. As scholars and proselytizers of the faith, they have a much higher profile than most imams, as Muslim clerics who are usually in charge of mosques are known. Their message is that both Islam and America have gone seriously astray, and that American Muslims have a responsibility to harness their growing numbers and economic power to help set them straight.

They sound like American Amr Khaleds.

Ahmad Nabil el-Hilaly passes away

Veteran Marxist lawyer Ahmad Nabil el-Hilaly, died this morning of kidney failure in El-Salam Hospital, in Ma3adi, Cairo, only 11 days after his life-long friend and comrade Youssef Darwish passed away.
Born in 1928, the son of a landowning pasha who was the last Prime Minister of Egypt before the 1952 coup, Hilaly, a.k.a. Comrade Beshir, gave up his wealth and land, living instead a poor humble life, dedicating his career to defending peasants, workers, and the poor in Egypt and the Arab World. After helping revive the Egyptian Communist Party in 1975, Hilaly led a split in the late 1980s, cofounding with Darwish, the People’s Socialist Party.
Hilaly headed the legal defense team during the Revolutionary Socialists’ trial in 2004. Here’s his opening statement in court.
Hilaly’s funeral will take place tomorrow Monday noon, in front of 3omar Makram mosque in Tahrir Sq. His family and friends will mourn his death and receive condolences, Tuesday evening, at el-Hamdiya el-Shazliya mosque in Giza. Continue reading Ahmad Nabil el-Hilaly passes away

More on al Masri al Youm

There’s a profile of Hisham Kassem, the CEO of the independent Egyptian daily al Masri al Youm, in Business Today this month. Unfortunately the article stays clear from politics and therefore fails to explain why al Masri is a critically important newspaper in Egypt’s current political environment. Without al Masri al Youm, chances are the way Egyptian newspapers perceive recent events such as the parliamentary elections and the judges’ rebellion in a very different way. Continue reading More on al Masri al Youm

“Free trade” and human trafficking in Jordan

Modern slavery in Jordan:

Tens of Thousands of Foreign Guest workers Stripped of their passports, trapped in involuntary servitude, sewing clothing for Wal-Mart, Gloria Vanderbilt, Target, Kohl’s, Thalia Sodi for Kmart, Victoria’s Secret, L.L.Bean and others.

In the Western factory, which was producing for Wal-Mart, four young women, including a 16-year old girl, were raped by plant managers. Despite being forced to work 109 hours a week, including 20-hour shifts, the workers received no wages for six months. Workers who fell asleep from exhaustion were struck with a ruler to wake them up.

At the Al Shahaed factory, also producing for Wal-Mart, there were 24, 38 and even 72-hour shifts. The workers were paid an average wage of two cents an hour. Workers were slapped, kicked, punched and hit with sticks and belts.

In a factory called Al Safa, which was sewing garments for Gloria Vanderbilt, a young woman hung herself after being raped by a manager.

All across Jordan, tens of thousands of foreign guest workers, mostly from Bangladesh, China, India and Sri Lanka, are routinely forced to work 100-plus hours a week while being cheated of upwards of half the wages legally owed them. Any worker asking for their proper wages can be imprisoned.

Factory bathrooms lack toilet paper, soap and towels. Dorm conditions are primitive, often lacking running water three or four days a week. Any worker speaking one word of truth about the abusive factory conditions will be attacked and forcibly deported without any of the back wages due them.

Jordan’s apparel exports to the U.S. are up 2000 percent between 2000 and 2005, reaching $1.1 billion, and these garments enter the U.S. duty-free. (Garments from Jordan go to Europe as well as the U.S.)

It’s incredible how this sweatshop model of manufacturing is spreading into new countries. Clearly the US companies commissioning this need to be held accountable, especially as I doubt the Jordanian legal system would be of any use. Prison terms for senior management and key shareholders come to mind.

And this of course in Jordan, which is meant to be a “model” for economic development and to have benefited so much from the Israeli-Jordanian-US QIZ agreement. But of course King Abdullah is “wise” and “moderate” — not a short, fat Quisling.

Three detainees released

State Security prosecutor ordered today the release of three pro-democracy detainees: Ahmad Maher, 3adel Fawzi Tawfeeq el-Gazzar, and Yasser Isma3il Zakki.
Also, following a protest by activists in front of the Public Prosecutor’s office last Thursday, General Isma3il el-Sha3er, the Cairo Security Director, reportedly sent an enquiry to the prison authorities about Mohamed el-Sharqawi‘s critical health condition. Sharqawi was transferred today to the Luman Tora Prison hospital at 9am, where he was told that his X-rays, taken on May 28, were “lost” (sic). The doctor took new X-rays of him, and sent Sharqawi, still complaining from chest pains, back to his cell, without treatment or medication.

Dubai’s “imagineered urbanism”

It’s become rather fashionable to write about Dubai. This piece from Mother Jones at least does not indulge in contemplative wonder of “Sheikh Mo’s Vision”:

Under the enlightened despotism of its Crown Prince and CEO, 56-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the Rhode-Island-sized Emirate of Dubai has become the new global icon of imagineered urbanism. Although often compared to Las Vegas, Orlando, Hong Kong or Singapore, the sheikhdom is more like their collective summation: a pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly. It is not just a hybrid but a chimera: the offspring of the lascivious coupling of the cyclopean fantasies of Barnum, Eiffel, Disney, Spielberg, Jerde, Wynn, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

Multibillionaire Sheik Mo — as he’s affectionately known to Dubai’s expats — not only collects thoroughbreds (the world’s largest stable) and super-yachts (the 525-foot-long Project Platinum which has its own submarine and flight deck), but also seems to have imprinted Robert Venturi’s cult Learning from Las Vegas in the same way that more pious Moslems have memorized The Quran. (One of the Sheik’s proudest achievements, by the way, is to have introduced gated communities to Arabia.)

Under his leadership, the coastal desert has become a huge circuit board into which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, “cities within cities” — whatever is the latest fad in urban capitalism. The same phantasmagoric but generic Lego blocks, of course, can be found in dozens of aspiring cities these days, but Sheik Mo has a distinctive and inviolable criterion: Everything must be “world class,” by which he means number one in The Guinness Book of Records. Thus Dubai is building the world’s largest theme park, the biggest mall, the highest building, and the first sunken hotel among other firsts.

Here’s an idea for a site for anyone who lives in Dubai: how about collecting pictures of the Dubai of South Asian workers, crass commercialism, backwards and lazy part of the local population, etc… and publishing them as a pastiche of the “cutting edge of the world” PR seen everywhere?

Questions for Egyptian capitalists

For the economically minded, Business Today editor Patrick Fitzpatrick’s introduction to their “bt100” issue, which provides rankings of the top 100 companies in Egypt, is an interesting read. The picture it shows, as Patrick explains, is one of tremendous growth for corporate Egypt. Particularly notable is the growth in the petrochemical, construction and tourism sectors, which is indicative of more long-term wealth creation.

Yet this is also a growth that by far and large is not shared by the average Egyptian. No doubt there will be some trickle down effect from the growth seen above, and official (notoriously unreliable) unemployment statistics are down. For a while they cruised steadily at 9.9%, as if the government was afraid to breach some symbolic point. Real unemployment, for all we know, is around 20% or more, depending how you count the problem of under-employment. And then there’s the problem about whether the jobs that are created are as attractive as previous types of jobs, the strength of labor welfare in an increasingly competitive world (but one in which labor, not management, gets downsized), and a million other questions.

All of this is of political interest. How will the growth in the income gap will affect politics in a country with, despite its social stratification, a strong egalitarian fiber? (Egyptians, you might not realize this, but take it from a Moroccan: Nasser made you more egalitarian than many, many Arab countries.) What role will an increasingly powerful capitalist class will play in politics, from which it was until recently excluded? What market transparency do you have, as a serious capitalist, in a country where finance and investment banking is dominated by one firm (EFG-Hermes) that has strong ties to the government? What of individuals whose business acumen and personal wealth make them, to a certain extent, untouchable by the state (Naguib Sawiris, perhaps?) And how long will capitalists make do with a corrupt system (some have benefited from it, of course, but at a certain point corruption becomes an obstacle to business) or accept that economic fiefdoms are formed only due to proximity to the presidency? In the future, will it be tolerable that a Gamal or Alaa Mubarak should be able to become a partner in a venture simply by bullying his way in?

As Patrick says, it is true that there is more corporate governance in Egypt today than there was five years ago. But where do corporations and capitalists position themselves on the day’s political questions? Thus far, they don’t. In the future, we’ll see. I once asked a prominent Egyptian businessman who has played a not unimportant role in promoting corporate governance (hint: he’s mentioned by Patrick) in the country how he felt about Gamal Mubarak’s possible inheritance to the presidency. “Well, it would mean we’re not a democracy,” he said, before shrugging: “that would be too bad.”