Month: September 2006

The Friday rant: Martin Amis

I have been reading and talking with (British) friends about this Observer piece by Martin Amis for almost a week now. Amis is one of the rather predictable enfant terrible of British letters. His books tend to be well-written, comedic send-ups of barely disguised celebrities and public intellectuals very much from his own London circles. In this three-page (long, web pages mind you) Amis makes rather impressive rhetorical acrobatics on why Prophet Muhammad was such a great, important historic figure yet Islam is such a terrible religion. While there are numerous problems with the piece — some of which I’ll be happy to give a pass considering the writer is, after all, a satirist — one of the basic flaws with it is his rather broad definition of Islamism. Amis uses the term as a catch-all that includes Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, showing absolutely no concern for the fact that these groups not only have rather different ideologies and intellectual underpinnings, but also very different track records in terms of how conservative/reactionary they are and in how they have used violence. In an anniversary piece written for 9/11, this is perhaps the biggest disservice Amis does to his readers — although perhaps the editor of the Observer should have showcased a more relevant writer, one actually knowledgeable about this region and its ideologies, rather than yet another literary celebrity for the River Café crowd to enjoy over a Tuscan brunch.

I do actually find some of what Amis wrote funny — his idea for a novel about an Al Qaeda planner who decides to converge 500 rapists to Greeley, Colorado (which famously hosted Sayyid Qutb), is mildly amusing. Qutb certainly deserves to be lampooned, and I have absolutely no problem with anyone poking fun at Islam. In fact, I positively long for the day that a Muslim Life of Brian is made with violent repercussions for its creators. But Amis’ piece is infused with anti-religious sentiment:

Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief – unless we think that ignorance, reaction and sentimentality are good excuses.

This kind of statement, which I personally sympathize with, is not really helpful in understanding a thoroughly religious society — and, in case Amis hadn’t noticed, there are still plenty of religious people in the West too.

Where the essay really falls apart is at the third part, which is so full of bad arguments and mangled facts that it barely makes any sense. We learn, for instance, that:

Like fundamentalist Judaism and medieval Christianity, Islam is totalist. That is to say, it makes a total claim on the individual. Indeed, there is no individual; there is only the umma – the community of believers.

Because there is no concept of individuality in the Muslim world, nor many varied interpretations of what Islam is, how it is practiced, or the degree to which it informs everyday life.

We also get the obligatory reference to the number of books the Islamic world publishes or translates and an approving reference to Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong. This is then followed by comparisons between Islamism (again, with no notion of nuance and what a broad label that term is) and Nazism and Bolshevism.

The worst is kept for last:

First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule – for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it. Did no one whisper the words, in the Situation Room – did no one say what the scholars have been saying for years? The ‘electoral policy’ of the fundamentalists, writes Lewis, ‘has been classically summarised as “One man (men only), one vote, once.”‘

Rather strange, considering that democratically elected Islamist parties in Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Turkey (among others) have reiterated many times their commitment to democratic processes. In Turkey, they are actually in power. The track record of Islamist governments that reached power by force may not be great, but thus far the ones who have come through a democratic process have not proved a threat to that process.

Also:

Second, Iraq is not a real country. It was cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early Twenties; it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces, Sunni, Shia, Kurd – a disposition which looks set to resume.

I’m not sure what country is “real.” I suggest that Amis should prepare himself for the inevitable dissolution of his own England, which surely will return to its Anglo and Saxon components anytime now.

I could go on — just after this comes a great line about the fall of Baghdad being particularly painful for Muslims because it is the seat of the Caliphate (actually many Arab and non-Arab Muslims recognized the Caliphate in Istanbul until 1921) — but it all gets rather tiresome. Yes, Martin Amis, some Islamists are repellent, reactionary people with a bankrupt philosophy. But we hardly needed an examination of Islamism that reads like a hastily-researched essay of an Oxford undergraduate (i.e. wittily written, smug with borrowed moral authority trying-to-please-his-tutor-a-little-too-hard but ultimately utterly mediocre) when, five years after 9/11, newspapers should be educating their audience about the many fascinating, occasionally worrying but also often positive, trends in contemporary Islamism.

Mubarak impression

It looks very much as if Hosni Mubarak has started to prepare himself for his new life, after handing over presidency to whomever.

Out of his many options, he picked driving around DHL cars. No surprise actually, as he told the media in spring 2005 how much he has to sacrifice for serving his country, such as simply strolling Cairo’s streets.

I think we should understand that he is still very much into his old job, as you can see on this video clip, that has now been youtubed.

9/11 in New York

I missed the much-debated debut of the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11,” but I did go down to Ground Zero this morning to see what was going on there today.

It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny New York morning (unfortunately I didn’t have my camera). There were a lot of people walking around the perimeter of the area, and a lot of flowers and pictures had been stuck in the wire fences around it. The area itself is still nothing but a construction site, and looks little different from two years ago, last time I saw it. (Today’s New York Times has an article on the increasingly embarrassing saga of the reconstruction of the site). Loudspeakers were playing the voices of relatives reading the names and short message to those who died on 9/11. The majority of the voices were those of wives and girlfriends, often wavering and choking with emotion.

The first thing I saw as I came out of the subway station was a big banner that said “The USA DID 9/11.” Another banner said “PLEASE HELP US. The government has been hijacked by a group of ruthless criminals. 9/11 was just the beginning. Stop them now.” At the other end of the spectrum was a banner that read: “When the Left Says Peace, They Mean Surrender.”

I had come in part out of professional curiosity with the “9/11 truth” groups–groups that believe that 9/11 was a government conspiracy, carried out to give the administration a free hand to increase its powers and go to war around the world. I was told about 500 people had come to New York. There were certainly a few hundred walking around today, mostly wearing black t-shirts that read “Investigate 9/11.” I witnessed quite a few heated arguments between these people and others. Often the conversations would start out calmly, with people asking the demonstrators what they meant and trying to convince them that they were wrong. But gradually they would generally escalate into arguments. The 9/11 Truth people talked about things like Building 7 (which apparently collapsed on 9/11 without being hit by a plane), the fact that the steel in the WTC couldn’t have melted, the fact that no photos of the plane that hit the Pentagon are supposedly available.

People seemed both curious and troubled by what the demonstrators were saying. But they recoiled at the idea that 9/11 was a massive conspiracy. One man got upset when a 9/11 Truth organizer implied that there were actually no planes that day. “What about the people who died?” he wanted to know. “What about their relatives?” His interlocutor had no good answer, and could only repeat “I don’t know. It’s classified. They should unclassify it.” Finally New York police broke the argument up and told people to keep moving. Other 9/11 Truth people were more confrontational, telling people that questioned them that they were “talking nonsense” and unspooling a whole series of rapid-fire, pretty non-sequitur statements: “Did you know Bob Graham wrote the Patriot Act? Have you heard of the Reichstag fire? Or Operation Northwoods?”

While I was standing next to some very young 9/11 Truth demonstrators, a woman walked by and said: “Nazis! You don’t go to someone’s funeral and do this bullshit! Nazis!” “Please don’t say that,” said a young female demonstrator in a sad little voice.

As I left, a man walked quickly past me on his cellphone and said “It’s worse than a damn three-ring circus here.”

Rust and paint (17)

September 11, 2006

It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, sat there like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line.

There weren’t just tanks either, massive artillery pieces, trucks, strange amphibious vehicles that looked half boat – an automotive mating ritual gone horribly wrong, and all covered in the graffiti of their conquerors.

Beneath the layers of black spray paint could be seen the original unit designations of these shattered old Iraqi tanks left to rust in a field at the edge of Taji base, somewhere north of Baghdad.

“God, Nation, the Leader”, read words arranged around a stenciled profile of Saddam Hussein in his once trademark military beret. Years later, even amidst the wreckage of his ambitions, the word “leader” still has chilling “führer” like echoes.

It was a interesting to compare to hillsides in Morocco where “God, Nation and King” would be picked out in white stones. Somehow it sounds better with a king.

On other tanks though, the font for the Arabic seemed wrong, different, till I realized it was Farsi, and could only puzzle out the words “Iran” and “Azad”, free Iran, I think. So this is what the Americans did with the tanks belonging to the People’s Mojahedin, an extremely creepy cult-like group of Iranians opposed to the Islamic Republic, once supported by Saddam.

I hear they are out there still (minus the tanks) on a camp near the Iranian border, guarded by American soldiers who don’t really know what to make of them – they were friends with Saddam, but they don’t like the Iranian mullahs, our enemy as well. What do we do with them?

The ground around the tanks at first was the typical hard packed sand of the rest of the base, baked dry by the merciless summer sun. As I moved deeper into the rows of wrecked vehicles, though, it became strange, with a crust, almost like old snow.

Then my foot broke through the crust into a greasy, muddy ooze that shouldn’t exist in a such a hot dry place. God knows what’s leaked out of these machines into the ground but I hurriedly squelched out of there before it dissolved by army-issue boots.

It was actually a pretty depressing place. All this metal, all this wasted money on military machinery, now rusting away useless in a poisoned field on the edge of some remote base, while outside the whole place is rending itself to pieces so badly that not even the occupying army can do anything about it.

In that sense, the graffiti scribbled across these tanks, some of it dating back to 2004, (“John’s tank”, “Size does matter”, “I love you Sarah” or more worrisome “I love Sarah and Maggie”) was oddly joyful. You could almost imagine the soldiers going out to this field with a can of spray paint and a digital camera to create something to send a far distant wife or girlfriend.

I never realized how many soldiers seem to be married, but as moved around with various US army units in Baghdad and talked to men, it seemed everyone had a wife, far away, that they missed terribly.

Near the tank grave yard, I was living with the 172nd Stryker brigade – a unit known, ironically enough, for its massive armored vehicles. I wondered if their sleek, state of the art machines flinched just a bit, every day, as they drove by those vandalized hulks.

After year of running around Mosul, doing their thing, this brigade had been extended four more months and sent down to Baghdad a week before they were to return to their home in Alaska(!) to help pacify the still turbulent capital city.

I tagged along on their missions through the city. Searching houses, confiscating weapons, talking to people – I could see why they had been kept here, instead of bringing in a brand new unit. They were relaxed with the Iraqis, took the odd thrown stone in their stride, no one was shouted at, put into flex cuffs or otherwise humiliated.

We were in a Shiite neighborhood, so people weren’t quite as over-the-moon to see them as in the Sunni neighborhoods. A number people said they though the police and army were doing a fine job – why were you still here?

One guy asked the American company commander if the US was holding back the Iraqi police and army so that they wouldn’t have to leave Iraq. Shiites especially these days are grumbling that the Americans will never go home.

The captain just looked at him, and then pulled a picture of a woman with an infant. “This is my 13th month here in Iraq, this is a picture of my wife and son, I haven’t seen them in a year. I get little video clips of my son and I don’t even recognize him anymore. Trust me when I say most of us just want to go.”

Listening to soldiers, you hear some say how they hate Iraq or Iraqis, but not all. Some really do believe in their ability to make a difference here, somehow make it better – otherwise how can they justify the last year of their lives spent here?

Bit naïve, really.

The Americans are going through the capital block by block, searching them for weapons, promising protection, and the militias and the death squads just stay out of their way and wait for them to leave.

As I’m writing this back home in my room Baghdad, I’m turning up the volume of my music to drown out the gunfire coming from across the river in Fadel neighborhood, where last night at 3am explosions tore me from sleep.

Only weeks earlier, the Strykers had supposedly been through the neighborhood to make it safe. Yet people tell us that the mostly Sunni neighborhood is now subjected to nightly assaults from Shiite militia men in nearby Sadr City – a place the Strykers haven’t been to.

We contacted the US military after listening to several days of fighting. “Our initial reports don’t show anything out of the ordinary in the Fadel neighborhood,” they said.

But then one neighborhood massacring another has become rather ordinary in Baghdad.

Software Arabization

Researcher Rashad Mahmood has written a well-researched article on the Arabization of software for the current issue of Business Monthly. It gives an informative overview on the history of attempts to bring software to the Middle East, and explains the main obstacles. Excerpts:

Despite the huge potential for Arabization, companies face several hurdles in adapting western software for Arabic users, says Maged Makram, localization project manager at Microsoft Egypt. “Arabization is much more challenging than converting to another western language. For example, if converting to French, a company simply has to replace the English text with French text, then do a quick check on the interfaces, and then they’re done. For Arabic, it is completely different. All screens need to be mirrored (switched to read right to left), icons and arrows need to be flipped, and menus need to be reversed.�

Another difficulty is the lack of agreement over PC-related terminology. “Some companies use one Arabic word, while others use another,� Makram says. For example, some software companies translate the word “disk drive� as “sawaq al-aqras,� literally “driver of the disk.� Microsoft, however, prefers “muharrik al-aqras,� literally “disk engine,� which is closer to the original English meaning. Such discrepancies can confuse users when switching between programs, especially those unfamiliar with computers.

….and on the English characters domain name system:

Perhaps the last major barrier to a fully Arabic Internet is the domain name system – traditionally the realm of English characters. As it stands, at least a basic familiarity with English characters is necessary to browse websites. However, the latest versions of web browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 beta and Firefox 1.5 make it possible to type in website addresses in non-English scripts including Arabic, Cyrillic and Chinese. These browsers have a built-in conversion tool that changes the non-English characters of so-called internationalized domain names (IDNs) into Punycode, an encoding system that lets browsers visually represent domain names in multilingual script.

The NDP’s electricity bill

Last week, Al Masry Al Youm summarized a report issued by the South Cairo Company for the distribution of electricity, that put the outstanding electricity bill’s by the NDP as well as ten government-owned newspapers at LE22 millions.

The NDP economic reformers in cabinet can talk about attracting foreign investment forever, it will never take off as they desire if they don’t get these hidden subsidies and irregularities inside the state economy fixed.

(The fact that this report gets public probably indicates that the Nazif cabinet is serious about putting the state press on a sounder economic basis and cut corruption and mismanagement there.)

To pay the bills of their own party would be a good start, too. It’s LE 59258.

Muslim Brother’s political songs album banned

Rather amusing story from Fustat:

The former member of parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood, Mukhtar Nouh was planning on releasing his first CD with political songs, when reaching a dead end, in form of the entertainment cencorship committee.

The committee, refused to comment on why they decided not to give Nouh´s CD the license and the go ahead, but judging from this following quote, the critical lyrics is behind the decision.

“One song in the album talks about a ruler who tours his country every year. In one province, one of the citizens stops the ruler to ask why food, medicines and jobs have become so scarce,” recounts the bearded Nouh.

“The next year, another citizen asks the ruler the same question, but adds where has the first citizen gone!”

As Fustat points Nour is a middle-generation Brother. A lawyer and former treasurer at the Bar Association, he was arrested in 1999 and put on military trial at Huckstep army base over a long period before being sentenced in 2001. In the early 1990s, Nouh was instrumental — some say the key strategist — in the Brotherhood’s push in syndicate elections. He was released, I believe, in 2002.

If anyone has Muslim Brotherhood political songs, or any other interesting political songs, do let me know. I’d love to create an archive of Egyptian political songs (I have a pretty big Sheikh Imam collection, but would like Islamist stuff too.)

Good and bad media news from Sudan

The recent beheading of a newspaper editor in Sudan is horrible news — but really what do you expect from a regime that has perpetuated one of Africa’s longest and bloodiest civil war and continues to engage in ethnic cleansing in Darfur?

Masked gunmen bundled Mohammed Taha Mohammed Ahmed, editor-in-chief of the private daily Al-Wifaq, into a car outside his home in east Khartoum late Tuesday. Police found his severed head next to his body today in the south of the capital. His hands and feet were bound, according to a CPJ source and news reports.

Mohammed Taha had previously angered Islamists by running an article about the Prophet Muhammad. He had also written critically about the political opposition and armed groups in Sudan’s western Darfur region, according to press reports. No group has claimed responsibility for the killing, Reuters reported.

Mohammed Taha, 50, was an Islamist and former member of the National Islamic Front. But in May last year, he was detained for several days, his paper was closed for three months, and fined 8 million Sudanese pounds (US$3,200), after he offended the country’s powerful Islamists by republishing an article from the Internet that questioned the ancestry of the Prophet Muhammad. Demonstrators outside the courthouse demanded he be sentenced to death for blasphemy. Sudan is religiously conservative and penalizes blasphemy and insulting Islam with the death penalty.

A crackdown on the press seems to have intensified over the past year, although Sudan had until then a lively and diverse press (even if it was mostly not free.)

On the bright side, Chicago Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek, who had been charged with espionage, has been released thanks to the efforts of New Mexico’s governor:

EL FASHER, Sudan, Sept. 8 — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek said from a Sudanese prison Friday night that the government would soon release him and two Chadian colleagues after a 34-day confinement on charges of espionage and producing “false news.”

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir agreed to release Salopek after meeting with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital. The three men are expected to be freed Saturday, Richardson’s office said in a statement.

Salopek, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, was arrested Aug. 6 while working on a story for National Geographic magazine about the Sahel region that runs along the southern edge of the Sahara.

Baghdad’s traffic cops

Weirdest story from Baghdad yet:

BAGHDAD — Death squads move with impunity after curfew. Abductions are rampant, but kidnappers are rarely caught. Corruption has poisoned every layer of government, yet few have faced criminal charges.

Double-park a car on a Baghdad street, however, and you can be sure of this: The law will hunt you down.

Abdel Nasser, a 32-year-old traffic officer, describes himself as a “mujahid,” or holy warrior, battling evildoers in a city without signs, traffic lights or speed limits. In this pandemonium of sputtering wrecks and speeding U.S. military Humvees, directing the flow of traffic is a religious duty, he said.

Nasser and his colleagues are beacons of civility in the choppy waters of Baghdad traffic, where the term “riding shotgun” is taken quite literally. Until recently, they valiantly defended deadly intersections with only a whistle. Now they have a handgun too.

The writer got a little carried away with that lead…

(Thanks, E.H.)