That stands for Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies and the current issue contains tons of articles on the great novelist Abdel Rahman Munif.
Month: July 2007
Al-Masri al-Youm’s English edition
While I can only applaud the efforts made by al-Masri al-Youm to provide an English translation for its leading articles, I think I’ll stick to the Arabic edition. The quality of the translation is at times comical, such as when the name of the current American ambassador to Cairo, Francis Ricciardone, is translated as “Francis Richard Dooney” as in here.
Nouveaux philosophes, neo-conservateurs
This fine piece on that moment in French intellectual history, in 1977, that saw the birth of the “nouveaux philosophes” should have pointed out that many of these philosophers (a title undeserved by BHL at least) are now the French equivalent of neo-conservatives: BHL as “liberal interventionist” or Glucksmann as Sarkoziste.
Napoleon’s Egypt
Uber-blogger and Middle East historian Juan Cole has a new blog on Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the first modern invasion of the Middle East by a Western power. It’s called Napoleon’s Egypt and goes along with Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Cole is appears to be going through the invasion chronologically, quoting from memoirs and and biographies written at the time — in the excerpt below, from an eye-witness account of how Napoleon came decide on invasion:
‘In the month of August 1797 he [Bonaparte] wrote “that the time was not far distant when we should see that, to destroy the power of England effectually, it would be necessary to attack Egypt.”
In the same month he wrote to Talleyrand, who had just succeeded Charles de Lacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, “that it would be necessary to attack Egypt, which did not belong to the Grand Signior [Ottoman Emperor].” Talleyrand replied, “that his ideas respecting Egypt were certainly grand, and that their utility could not fail to be fully appreciated.”
More from that except here.
Lebanese brain drain
LEBANON: One in three Lebanese wants to leave:
BEIRUT, 10 June 2007 (IRIN) – Researchers warn that economic instability and persistent security threats are driving ever more young, educated Lebanese abroad, creating a brain drain that threatens the country’s economic and social future.
“We’re suffering a huge brain drain,” Kamal Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Centre of Research and Studies, told IRIN.
“Those who have the brains take their diplomas and leave. They are the young people who would go on to be middle executives and entrepreneurs. In the long term, their absence means we may face a serious shortage of policy developers and managers.”
Perhaps one of the worst consequences of last summer’s war — it repeated the brain drain caused by the civil war.
Giulani as the neo-con candidate
Rudy Giuliani apparently wants to be known as the neo-con candidate in the US presidential race. I was aghast enough that he chose pro-Israel agitator Martin Kramer as his Middle East advisor, but now he’s gone one step further and taken on grand-daddy of all neo-cons Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor:
WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) — Republican candidate for the presidency Rudy Giuliani, the leading hawk among presidential hopefuls, has appointed Norman Podhoretz senior adviser for foreign policy.
A founding member of the neo-con movement, Podhoretz, in the June issue of Commentary magazine, called for an immediate attack on Iran. Either we bomb Iran now, or “we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then.” The geopolitical label for the process is the “Islamization” of Europe, which neo-cons say is a rerun of Hitler’s conquest of Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
Giuliani’s eight-member foreign policy team also includes Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American expert on Shia Islam at Harvard and a fellow with both the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center (“for the development of Zionist thought”). Kramer once said the tendency by American Middle Eastern academics to neglect radical Islam as an issue was partly to blame for the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Well, at least we’ll know clearly where he stands. It’s rather alarming, though, considering that Giulani (despite being a well-known nutter) has the potential to appeal beyond the Republican mainstream and cross-over to some Democrats and swing voters because of his more liberal social views, has taken foreign policy advisors that only care about Israel. If he’s elected, we’re not likely to see the same drift on US foreign policy outside the Middle East that we saw during the Bush administration. With these people (and with neo-conservatives more generally) it’s Israel, Israel, Israel.
And here’s Podhoretz foaming-at-the-mouth piece in favor of bombing Iran, which is an interesting example of the paranoid delusional mindframe.
Moustache vendetta
Am in calm, clean Morocco for the summer, but this story made me miss Egypt:
When an elder was kidnapped in a clan dispute in conservative southern Egypt, the al-Arab family’s worst fears were soon realised — they received a package containing his moustache, local media reported on Sunday.
The man himself was returned uninjured, but the use of the new shaving tactic sent shockwaves through the town of Mahrusa, near Luxor, 650km south of Cairo, where a man’s honour is measured by the size of his moustache, the al-Gomhuria daily said.
Return to semi-regular blogging schedule soon.
WWII mines Egypt
I have this article on qantara.de on the WWII mines and other ammunition left behind on Egypt’s North coast. The Egyptian government wants to re-launch its efforts to clear the zones that are affected, but wants to have it all paid for by its international donors.
As Egypt has brought to perfection the art of donor-shopping probably more then any other nation, I guess in the end they’ll find someone stupid enough to pay the bills submitted by the Egyptian army.
In contrast to what appears to be common in other countries, the Egyptian army maintains its monopoly over mine-clearing. Which is why not much has happened until today and which is why most donors rightfully so are reluctant to contribute.
Excerpt from the English translation:
It was not until 1982 that the Egyptian government acknowledged the problem. “It was a question of costs and priorities,” Fathy El Shazly, director of the national northwest coast development program, frankly admits.
He refers to the history of his country, which after the Second World War was first busy gaining independence and then tied up in four wars against Israel. A bit more haste would have been advisable, though.
According to the NGO “Landmine Monitor,” there have been 8,313 mine-related casualties in this region since 1982, including 619 deaths. As can be observed again and again whenever natural disasters or accidents occur, however, the Egyptian government evidently does not place much importance on its own citizens. It has done little to help the victims to date.
The Egyptian army did clear some 3.5 million pieces of ammunition out of the desert between 1982 and 1999, but since then a lack of funds has slowed down their efforts – at least that’s the official line.
Since things are moving much too slowly for the private sector, which has great plans for the region, some hotels and oil companies have begun to remove buried ammunition at their own expense in order to build access roads to their projects.
Slow posting for a while
Alain Roussillon died yesterday
The French scholar Alain Roussillon, an expert on Egypt and the director of the CEDEJ in Cairo, passed away yesterday from a after suffering from a brain hemorrhage. He will be buried in Egypt, where his mother came from.
I last saw Roussillon on March 5, when we had a long chat about the constitutional amendments and current political situation in Egypt. I remember him being concerned about the rising social tensions in Egypt, seeing in them both an opportunity for the expression of genuine grievances and the return of la question sociale in Egyptian politics and a potential danger. He compared the present situation to the atmosphere of the year preceding the July 1952 coup — the Cairo fire and ensuing riot, the political intrigue, the massive social disaffection and rejection of the government. Some of the large-scale strikes we had seen at the time made him suspect that the legendary patience of long-suffering Egyptians was wearing thin.
“Street protests in Egypt are dangerous – you will have thousands of deaths in case of a riot. Neither the Muslim Brotherhood nor the regime really control the street,” he said. “The January 1952 model is reproducible.” We differed somewhat on that point, but agreed on one thing: the greatest threat to the regime is not the Muslim Brotherhood or some other political group, but popular attitudes towards it, and there are few countries where the state lacks as much legitimacy as Egypt.
He was very well versed in the debates in the Egyptian press and intellectual circles — the way positions are taken and framed, the coded references and intellectual antecedents of the idées reçues of Egyptian discourse. He was also alarmed, as someone who has spent most of his adult life chronicling Egyptian society, of the ascendancy of shallow conservative and materialistic ideas in Egyptian life — the entire ecosystem of ideas and practices that has largely taken over this country in the past 20-30 years, ideas he explored by examining the new Islamic writings that were came out of the globalization of Islam.
He was a fascinating conversation partner, I regret that we will not meet again.
The announcement of his death, information on the church service, and a note from the CEDEJ staff follows after the jump in French and Arabic.
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