Month: September 2004

Blogging the NDP convention

For the past two days and until tomorrow, Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party has been holding its annual convention, putting a strong emphasis on what it calls “New Thinking” and the need for reform. And there have indeed been some important reforms introduced over the past two days, for instance the complete overhaul of the tax system — corporate tax for instance has been reduced by more than half. But the political reforms have been lagging and those introduced were mostly cosmetic.

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Al Banna book ban

Gamal Al Banna is one of Egypt’s most prominent thinkers on Islam, although you wouldn’t think so from the treatment he gets from the “official” Islam of Al Azhar, the oldest Islamic university which is based in Cairo but influences all Sunni Muslims. Al Azhar has decided to ban a new book by Al Banna which continues his calls for a radical re-interpretation of Islamic law. As my friend Paul Schemm reports in the Christian Science Monitor:

In the now blacklisted book, “The Responsibility for the Failure of the Islamic State,” author Gamal al-Banna suggests ways for Muslim minorities in Europe and elsewhere to integrate into non-Islamic societies. He argues that it would be permissible for women to cover their hair with a hat, rather than a head scarf, and recommends men use an early Islamic tradition of temporary marriages, legal in the Shiite sect, to avoid intercourse outside of wedlock.

. . .

This is not the first time Banna has raised the ire of Al Azhar. Only a few years ago, he published a three volume work entitled “Towards a New Jurisprudence” that called for total reevaluation of Islamic law. He is also the brother of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood from which most present day militant Islamic movements take their inspiration. Gamal al-Banna, however, has much more moderate views of the religion than his sibling.

“We must open the doors for the freedom of thought without any restrictions at all,” Banna says. “Even if one wants to deny the existence of God.”

Al Banna, of course, is the brother of Hassan Al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1920s. The Muslim Brotherhood is the first modern Islamist movement, and has been for most of the past hundred years one of the leading political forces in Egypt. Its influence has also extended to elsewhere in the Arab world, from benign Islamist parties such as Jordan’s to more militaristic movements like Hamas in Palestine. Generally, it shuns terrorism, but supports it in Palestine where it sees it as a war of national liberation. The Brotherhood is much further to the right than Gamal Al Banna’s thinking, who is often grouped with a few other reformist thinkers as “leftist Islamists” because of his moderation and emphasis on social issues. In a sense, Al Banna’s precursors were the early Islamic reformers like Jamal Al Din Af Afghani and Muhammad Abdou who were, on the whole, much more moderate than the Muslim Brothers.

One of the tragedies of the political situation in most Arab countries in that these people have had little opportunity to make their voice heard, as they tend to be squeezed out of the political discourse between secular regime parties and organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, which is on the right -wing of a much broader tendency to look for Islam for political guidance. People like Al Banna, who in the past has felt comfortable supporting both leftist and liberal figures (he is for instance a supporter of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who is interviewed in the CSM article and is a leading pro-US liberal in Egypt), are being silenced by fundamentalist Islamists, the stale official Islam of Al Azhar theologians and the decaying Arab regimes. This is why providing them a platform in the West — like Tariq Ramadan — is important if their works are to spread.

Loonies

Via Talking Points Memo:

Surprise, surprise …

“A year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.”

Richard Perle
AEI Keynote speech

September 22, 2003

From the same guy who memorably brought us:

“This is total war. If we just let our vision of the world go forth… our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

The American Brotherhood

The Chicago Tribune ran this interesting article on the Muslim Brotherhood’s US chapter a few days ago. It’s worth reading, if only to see the reach of one of the oldest modern political movements in the Middle East — one that continues to have much influence in its birthplace, Egypt, and far beyond:

Many Muslims believe that the Brotherhood is a noble international movement that supports the true teachings of Islam and unwaveringly defends Muslims who have come under attack around the world, from Chechens to Palestinians to Iraqis. But others view it as an extreme organization that breeds intolerance and militancy.

“They have this idea that Muslims come first, not that humans come first,” says Mustafa Saied, 32, a Floridian who left the U.S. Brotherhood in 1998.

While separation of church and state is a bedrock principle of American democracy, the international Brotherhood preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic. The group also champions martyrdom and jihad, or holy war, as a means of self-defense and has provided the philosophical underpinnings for Muslim militants worldwide.

Many moderate Muslims in America are uncomfortable with the views preached at mosques influenced by the Brotherhood, scholars say. Those experts point to a 2001 study sponsored by four Muslim advocacy and religious groups that found that only a third of U.S. Muslims attend mosques.

Just a reminder

It’s seems that now it’s official: Iraq had no WMD.

Actually, it’s about the third time someone reports this — I think the last time was the Kay report presented to Congress. It may not be that important in the face of the fait accompli that is the occupation of Iraq, but it’s worth remembering that this war was brought about by either mind-numbing incompetence or dishonesty. It’s also worth remembering that many “apolitical” Middle Eastern experts were flogging this in the run-up to the war. The neo-cons and their allies may have been doing it for their own ends (i.e. they were dishonest) but how about the “liberal hawks,” people like Ken Pollack (remember this?) Should we ignore these people next time they say something? That the Iraq war was fought on false pretexts may not be a big deal to politicians or even voters in the upcoming US election, but it should be a big deal to those people whose job it is to know about the Arab world and countries like Iraq — the academics, the intelligence officers and the others who should have known better.

Egyptian culture in crisis?

Whatever else happened to the Egyptians?The Beirut Review (a literary supplement to the Daily Star) just ran a review I wrote of Galal Amin’s sequel to “Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?” (entitled, creatively, “Whatever Else Happened to the Egyptians?”). Amin is an economics professor at the American University in Cairo, and he analyzes changes in Egyptian society and culture over the last 50 years or so using concepts of social mobility, productivity and globalization. This second book focuses at some length on what Amin considers Egypt’s cultural decline. As you’ll see from the review, I don’t agree that culture in Egypt is in such dire straits as Amin does (I just saw Ahmed El Attar’s play “Mother I want to be a Millionaire” the other night–a dynamic, original piece that comments on almost every aspect of contemporary Arab culture in a series of fluid, visually captivating, overlapping vignettes–and was very impressed), but he makes some valid points about the mediocrity of mass culture and the negative effects of state-subsidized venues for expression.

An announcement and a review

As you can see in the post below, there is a new poster on arabist.net. This website was never meant to be a personal blog, and Ursula Lindsey, who has written about Egypt for various newspapers and magazines, is the first of hopefully many other contributors you will see as the site matures. It is a labor of love and obviously a work in progress that depends largely on how much spare time I have. In the meantime, enjoy Ursula’s posts and do check out her other work, notably over at popmatters.com, where she will be soon be starting a regular column on Cairo. We’ll keep you informed.

Getting back to her review of Galal Amin’s Whatever else happened to the Egyptians, I thought it may interest readers to take a look at my own review of Whatever happened to the Egyptians, Amin’s first book in this series, which was published in the Cairo Times in December 2000. It’s not online, so click below to view the full post.

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