Month: November 2004

Call to Iraqi sunnis to boycott vote because of Falluja

This is bad:

“The clerics call on honorable Iraqis to boycott the upcoming election that is to be held over the bodies of the dead and the blood of the wounded in cities like Falluja,” said Harith al-Dhari, director of the Muslim Scholars Association, a group of Sunni clerics that says it represents 3,000 mosques.

Hours earlier, the group issued a religious edict ordering Iraqi security forces not to take part in the siege. Of course, there is always a chance that clerics could rescind their call for a boycott, but the group has until now been fairly uncompromising in its dealings with the Americans and the interim Iraqi government.

Just as ominous was the withdrawal of the Iraqi Islamic Party from the interim government. The party was a member of the Iraqi Governing Council set up by the Americans during the occupation and has been held up by American and Iraqi officials as a model of Sunni participation in the political future of the country. In recent weeks, its leader, Mohsen Abdul Hameed, had been saying he intended to take part in the elections.

“After the attack on Falluja, we decided to withdraw from the government because our presence in the government will be judged by history,” Mr. Abdul Hameed, an interim National Assembly member, said Tuesday in a telephone interview.

The move so alarmed Prime Minister Ayad Allawi that he met privately with Mr. Abdul Hameed hours later. But the party stuck to its position, and an aide said in the afternoon that it was not clear that the group would take part in the elections.

“We haven’t decided to withdraw from the elections; we’re still going forward with the process,” the aide, Ayad al-Samarrai, said. “But it will all depend on the general situation in Iraq.”

See also Juan Cole for more on the Iraqi political reaction to the current military operation in Falluja.

Neo-cons vs. realists

I have been working on this post on the future of US policy in the Middle East on and off since before the elections, but now that Bush has won it seems more useful. My feeling is that the neo-cons kept a low profile during the past six months to help with the Bush campaign, but will be back in force once the president decides who gets what job. So here’s a round-up of articles I’ve read that discuss the forthcoming reshuffle of Bush’s cabinet and White House staff below. It’s long so you can only see the whole thing by clicking “more” below.

Continue reading Neo-cons vs. realists

Some people have all the historical luck

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins on the European rediscovery of the Greeks that led to the Renaissance:

What else can one say about it, except that some people have all the historical luck? When Europeans invent their traditions — with the Turks at the gates — it is a genuine cultural rebirth, the beginnings of a progressive future. When other peoples do it, it is a sign of cultural decadence, a factitious recuperation, which can only bring forth the simulacra of a dead past.

From Waiting for Foucault, Still [PDF].

Arab dictators’ wives club

I find the way that Suha Arafat has emerged suddenly as a potential rival in the Palestinian leadership struggle rather amusing — if you ignore that it’s yet another slap in the face of the Palestinian people’s quest for for dignity and decent leadership:

In a one-minute telephone call to the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, she set off a political storm Monday, accusing her husband’s top aides of conspiring to replace the 75-year-old leader in a behind-the-scenes power grab.

The 41-year-old Mrs. Arafat, who until now remained largely outside the political scene, said top officials aimed to “bury” her husband “alive.” A Christian convert to Islam, she ended the phone call with “God is Great” — often used as a Muslim war cry.

While the idea of Suha Arafat really being a contender in the leadership struggle is proposterous (and the AP and other press outlets should know better than to propagate this notion) it made me think of the roles that Arab dictator’s wives have had from country to country. In Palestine’s case, she had played a negligible role apart from serving as a conduit for Arafat’s stash taken from PA funds.

But if we turn to Egypt, Suzanne Mubarak plays in important role in the country, with some people even saying that she has a lot of influence on domestic politics (particularly health and education), the composition of the cabinet, and that she may even be behind the rise of her son Gamal as a possible heir. I don’t know how much credence to give all this, but it is certainly true that she is a woman of great influence. Try to set up a NGO that deals with women, literacy, children, or education, and you’ll probably be made an offer you can’t refuse and be absorbed by “Mama Suzanne” and her National Council for Women, at which point virtually every activity you undertake will be subject to constant bureaucratic hassle and the whims of the first lady. While her endorsements do bring advantages, they can often also constrain the activities of a NGO (which will have to vet everything with her people to make sure they don’t embarrass her). In other words, it’s a poisoned chalice.

In Tunisia, Leila Ben Ali owns a variety of businesses that her position had, of course, no influence in creating. For instance, she owns the country’s near-monopoly ISP, which has milked the emerging internet market while complying with the state’s need to have what is probably the most invasive monitoring of the internet in the region.

Saddam Hussein’s wife Sadija (who was also his first cousin) was the symbol of feminism in her country, as well as the leading public figure promoting education. Can’t say she set that good of an example with her two boys, though. According to a widespread rumor reproduced in Said Aburish’s biography of Saddam and elsewhere, Uday Hussein went to great extent to protect his mother’s honor:

In 1998, Uday killed Hanna Jajo, Saddam’s most trusted food-taster and procurer of women. Jajo had acted as the go-between for Saddam and Samira, who became his second wife and the mother of now-teenage Ali. (Saddam remained married to Sajida, despite at least two other known marriages.) It was reported that Uday, said to be closer to his mother than to his father, arranged a party for Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, on the banks of the Tigris in downtown Baghdad. Across the river, on the Island of Pigs, Jajo was also entertaining. He and his rather rowdy bunch were shooting salvos in the air. Uday crossed the Tigris and asked Jajo to stop. Some time later Jajo fired again. Uday returned and clubbed Jajo to death.

According to Aburish, Saddam was furious at Uday not only because Jajo was a “trusted” procurer of women and food-taster, but also because Jajo’s father was his cook, which provided an added precaution against being poisoned since the father would not have wanted to poison his own son.

Come to think of it, it seems that infamous Arab leaders’ wives tend to come mostly from republics, not monarchies. Whenever there is some kind of regional meeting (usually on women’s issues or some pageantry event) I kind of wonder what these women talk about, how much rivalry there is between them (are they all jealous of the young and beautiful Queen Rania of Jordan, or perhaps King Muhammad VI’s wife?) and so on. Does anyone have good gossip on Arab first ladies?

Omar Sherif back on Arab screens

Omar Sherif, the great Egyptian actor, has announced he will be returning to Arab cinema after a long absence. Sherif was one of the defining actors of golden age of Arab cinema in the 1960s, when he played doe-eyed heartthrobs in films by luminaries like Youssef Chahine (when he still produced good movies). But after the mid-1960s (when he starred in Dr. Zhivago), he mostly starred in Western movies, acting in a bunch of fairly poor or unknown movies until he made his comeback in the French film Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran and Hidalgo.

According to the UAE based daily, Al Bayan, the first film Sherif plays the role of a Palestinian man who is shocked when he hears his son’s voice on the radio vowing to sacrifice his life for the sake of his land. The film holds the title “Al Manfi” (The Vanished). In the second film, Omar plays the role of a lawyer who defends a Palestinian child and tries to return him back to his family after Israeli soldiers kidnapped him and changed his name into a Jewish one.

The third film Omar will star in is Egyptian under the title of “Ain Baba” (Where is Father), in which the actor plays the role of an immigrated businessman who discovers he has a daughter in Egypt. He returns to Egypt and goes on a quest in the hope of finding her and through the process more then ten different girls claim that they are his daughters.

Rethinking Cleopatra

According to new research from medieval Arab sources, Cleopatra may not be quite the femme fatale we imagine her to be. Okasha El Daly, an Egyptian Egyptologist working in the UK, says that she may have been one of the great scientific luminaries of her age:

Elisabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

“Cleopatra is a scientist, a medical doctor, a woman who had invented a theory of mathematics and, above all, a well-known philosopher,” Dr El Daly recalls from the many medieval texts he’s read, which talked of how she “used to hold courtly seminars almost every week in which she sat with fellow scientists and philosophers and would discuss with them, on the same level, all sorts of philosophical and scientific issues.” He adds that whenever they refer to Cleopatra, the medieval Arab scholars “always refer to her as a great eminent scholar and philosopher” and says they “thought very highly of that famous queen”.

Perhaps it’s time for a remake of the Liz Taylor movie most of us think of when talking about her.

Saad’s back

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian democracy activist who spent nearly two years in prison because of his activities before being finally acquitted, has published a courageous editorial that is making the rounds in the regional press: Egypt needs a president, not a latter-day pharaoh

First of all, it’s worth noting that this is perhaps one of the most strongly-worded editorials on the Mubarak regime to ever be published, and that it comes from one of the most prominent Egyptian intellectuals (even if he is marginalized in Egypt because of his pro-American views.) Secondly, remember that Ibrahim was arrested in 2000 on the day that Al Hayat published his article on “republicarchy” (goumloukiya) and the phenomenon in Arab states of hereditary republics. The article centered on Gamal Mubarak and the possibility that he was being groomed for succession, when that still seemed improbable (it doesn’t now.)

Ibrahim’s new article focuses on the need for constitutional reform to provide more checks and balances to counter the powers of the presidency, introduce direct presidential elections with a real contest, and implicitly rejects another term for Mubarak. It would be great to see a real campaign asking that Mubarak step down — petitions such as the one I mentioned recently are a step in the right direction, but this movement needs to gather momentum in the next few months, which the security services won’t like. And we’ve seen what they’re capable of doing to people who talk too much…