The trouble with Asharq al-Awsat, beyond its disturbing acquiescence to Arab regimes, is that it claimed a liberalism that was patently false.
Before my ban, Asharq al-Awsat launched a Web site in English. Designed to show Western readers how liberal it was, the site suffered from Yasser Arafat syndrome. Just as the late Palestinian leader’s statements in Arabic and in English were sometimes contradictory, the newspaper in Arabic would abide by the red lines that govern criticism of Arab leaders while in English it ran roughshod over those very same lines.
A column I wrote tearing into the Egyptian regime for allowing its security forces to beat peaceful protesters and to sexually assault female journalists and demonstrators was spiked from the Arabic newspaper and Web site but appeared in its entirety on the English Web site.
Every journalist working in the Middle East has had to pull punches, no matter who they work for — Arab papers, American papers, British papers. When it’s not the Saudi royal family, it’s a Hariri or an Emad Eddin Adib or a Rupert Murdoch or a Conrad Black, or indeed a Sulzberger. Of course with the Saudis it’s chronic and non-negotiable. But hey, come on Mona Al Tahawy, they gave you a place to start and now I’m sure you’ll do fine in the IHT and elsewhere. I look forward to reading your devastating columns on Saudi Arabia, perhaps?
One good question in the column though: how do your reach Arabs with a liberal message (if you are a liberal columnist/thinker/broadcaster etc.) when the press has so many red lines? Since these regimes are not changing their ways anytime soon, I suspect the answer will be partly TV (as Al Jazeera has already done) and, for a smaller but quickly growing audience, the internet, which is capable of being much more transgressive than TV.
To be honest, I was never a fan of Asharq Al-Awsat. It’s so right-wing and conservative, and don’t know how they developed this “liberal” reputation. I prefer Al-Hayat more.
What happened to Mona is so disgusting indeed.
.It is a time to rethink what it means to be an Arab liberal. So far liberalism in Arab world is a regime (royal in most cases) friendly phenomenon! To be acceptable liberal you need a lot of energy in attacking the Arab nationalism dream, Islamic fundamentalism and the lift. Do not make much noise about Palestine. Appreciate pragmatism. Try to liberate women in Iran not in Saudi Arabia. When you are faced with authoritarian practices, attribute them to the ignorant public cultural heritage of the mass not the hard working reformist in intellectual regime circles. This is the manual of the good accepted liberal. If you misread it you will face Mona Altahayi’s fate with the “liberal� Arab and International media.
Sorry if this is a dumb/obvious question, but why has there not to date been a pan-Arab equivalent of a Masri al-Youm or a newspaper that is not owned by some sort of Saudi family? And how would you compare the punch-pulling required by American or Brit or French papers with that required by Arabi papers?
Issandr
Firstly, Asharq al-Awsat did not give me “a place to start”. Maybe you’re too young or you don’t read the western press, but they found me through opeds I’d been publishing in The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune in 2002/2003.
As for my “devastating columns on Saudi Arabia” I refer you to just two examples of said columns, that I wrote while a weekly columnist for Asharq al-Awsat. One is from The Washington Post:
The Wahhabi threat to Islam, June 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17037-2004Jun4.html
And the other is from the IHT:
Saudi Arabia : For women, votes are keys to the kingdom , Dec. 6, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/06/edeltahawy_ed3_.php
While I appreciate the blogspace you’ve given my latest IHT piece on being banned, I suggest you get your info straight next time.
salamaat
Mona
إساندر معلم
I would also like to know what YOU are doing to reach an audience that doesn’t read English. Your blog is in English, you edited an English-language magazine …
I knew this post would come back to bite me. Such are the risk of blogging in a bad mood.
Mona,
While I do read the Western press every now and them, I did not see your colums a few years ago. I stand corrected. I appreciate your desire to reach an Arab audience. I do still think that entering into a long-term relationship with the Saudi-owned media is a dangerous Faustian pact, and that while your column may have been written to explain the situation to American readers, it is not exactly surprising that Al Sharq Al Awsat can succumb to the pressures of the Egyptian or other governments.
On another note, may I suggest that you try some of the newer Egyptian newspapers like Al Masri Al Youm or Nahdet Misr? And the independent press elsewhere in the region (Assahifa or Awdeth Al Maghribiya in Morocco, Al Destour in Jordan, etc…) In any case, best of luck with your future columns, and I hope, no grudges held.
Suleiman, my Arabic is far from being good enough to write it fluently. I have had several pieces translated, though, and quite a few just stolen outright, translated and then someone else’s name was put on it (you owe me, Rose Al Youssef.) But then again I’m rarely a columnist, I tend to do either news or reportage.
Actually Mona is a favorite of the neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz. I believe this is why she was hired to write for those various papers in the US. I found her writing to be poor and pandering to the perceptions and prejudices of an audience interested only in simplistic and machivellian stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims..