Month: December 2004

Golia on religiosity

My friend Maria Golia, who lately has been contributing a series of columns on Cairo to the Beirut Daily Star, has a new piece on religiosity in Cairo. It’s a topic I’ve written about in the past and find fascinating. While the world is busy talking about Al Qaeda and other Islamists who are relatively marginal to Arab society, all these transformation are happening that are mostly going unnoticed.

Golia also recently published a book on Cairo, City of Sand, which is fantastic. I’ve been meaning to post a full review, but suffice it to say that it is the best impressionistic book on contemporary Cairo that I’ve, by a true lover of the city.

Protestors against Sinai torture arrested

Just got this in my inbox:

Egyptian State Security Intelligence Stops Solidarity March and Arrests Human Rights Activists in Arish

The international solidarity March, leaving Cairo today, 10th of December, heading for Rafah to express solidarity with the struggles of the Palestinian people, has been stopped at the gates of the North Sinai governorate, some 170 km to the south of Arish. At the same time organizers of the march learned that Ashraf Ayoub, Ashraf Gouaidar, Ashraf Hofni, Mhamed Khatabiu, Alaa El Kashef and Aytman Roufeili, founders of the Committee for Citizens’ rights in the North of Sinai have been arrested an hour ago by SSI police and are, at the time of writing this release, held at the SSI headquarters of Arish, where hundreds of Arish citizens have been subject to the most brutal forms of torture for the past two months.

Participants in the solidarity march are Egyptian antiwar and human rights activists and members of the press, joined by 35 international antiwar activist among whom are 19 from France, 6 from the UK, 2 from Spain, 4 from Greece, one from Turkey and one from Austria.

We call upon you to urgently send letters of protest to Egyptian officials demanding the immediate release of the activists who have played a crucial role in exposing the crimes of torture taking place in Arish and who have provided an urgently needed help to torture survivors.

The international solidarity March planning to head for Rafah today was organized in agreement with the resolutions of the antiwar conference organized Sept. 17-19 at Le Bristol Hotel in Beirut

Click “more” below for details on how to appeal to the authorities for their release.

Continue reading Protestors against Sinai torture arrested

Non-news

When I first saw this, I rushed to post about it but then thought better of it. Consider the story, reproduced here in its entirety:

CAIRO (AFP) – Key players in the search for Middle East peace have reached understanding on a plan that could lead to a comprehensive settlement.

“An important understanding, that could constitute an agreement in principle, has been reached by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinians and the significant international parties — the United States and the European Union — on a comprehensive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the official news agency MENA quoted senior Egyptian sources as saying Tuesday.

As we can plainly see, it contains actually nothing. Not only are there no on-the-record sources, but basically it talks about an “understanding.” Pretty vague. Subsequent stories based on the MENA report (do a Google News search on Egypt and you’ll see at least twenty of them) all started with an optimistic tone about the impending breakthrough and then actually saw that no one else knew about this. Still, they kept pretending that something had actually happened. It finally took someone getting an Israeli official saying that there was nothing happening for people to die. In other words, MENA managed to manufacture a story when there was actually nothing there and got the world’s major news outlets to play along with it. And no one along the way thought it might be a little strange that an “understanding” had been agreed to so soon after Arafat’s death and while Sharon is facing a political crisis.

Syria released Muslim Brothers

A presidential pardon has been granted to 112 Syrian political detainees, the BBC reports:

It is reported to be the biggest single amnesty for three years. The official Sana news agency said it was part of an “open and tolerant policy”.

Those freed are thought be Islamist activists from the Muslim Brotherhood.

The head of the Syria’s Human Rights Association welcomed the move, but said President Bashar al-Assad should have freed all political detainees.

Haitham al-Maleh said some of those set free had been held for more than 10 years.

The question, as always, is why now? The Brotherhood was long considered the regime’s greatest threat; it appeals to the Sunni majority and was the only social force to show any real opposition to Alawi-dominated the military regime. At its peak between 1978 and 1982, it was quite a formidable force. So much that the regime sent out squads of “socialist women” to rip the veils off conservative women. That all ended with the Hama massacre in 1982, when between 15,000 and 40,000 people died after the army bombed the town of Hama when the Brothers took control of it.

In other Syria news, a new English-language publication has come out there, Syria Today. Several of the founders are friends of mine, and I wish them good luck. But expect this to be a mostly economic publication (as the first issue is), as I doubt there is the margin of movement for the press to deal with substantial political questions. Still, it’s a beginning and should provide interesting information about the business elite in that untransparent country.

Also, the Washington Post has a story quoting US military intelligence saying that the Iraqi insurgency may be directed from Syria by Baathists who found refuge there. However, not everyone is buying that:

Some U.S. officials in Baghdad resented the briefing, which they saw not only as a form of long-distance micromanagement but also as misguided in its recommendations. For example, some fear that it could lead to a resumption of the tough tactics used sometimes last year as the insurgency emerged, such as taking families hostage to compel an insurgent leader to turn himself in. Subsequent internal Army reviews have criticized such tactics as counterproductive.

One person familiar with the situation said that Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top U.S. general in the region, was sent a copy of the briefing and responded by sending a classified cable politely dismissing it and stating that he believes that U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq have the situation in hand. A spokesman at Abizaid’s headquarters, the U.S. Central Command, declined to comment on that exchange.

Neither Lawrence T. Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, nor Navy Capt. Frank Thorp, the spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had any comment for this article.

Pentagon Kremlinologists will have a field day with this. Also, I wasn’t aware that the US army was using tactics like “taking families hostage to compel an insurgent leader to turn himself in.”

Quote of the day

From the Wall Street’s Journal alerts:

U.S. soldiers grilled Rumsfeld about the lack of armor for their vehicles and long deployments, drawing a blunt response. “You go to war with the Army you have,” the Pentagon chief said.

The full story is here but requires subscription.

I hope someone said, “No sir, we go to war with the army you give us.”

On Van Gogh’s murder

I haven’t commented on the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland last month, partly because I thought the incident was blown out of proportion by many on the blogosphere and elsewhere, particularly on the right but also on the left. I also did not feel that sorry for Van Gogh, who was after all a racist, and did not think he deserved the martyr status that many have now bestowed upon him. It’s rather strange that Americans, who live in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of homicides (and inter-racial gang violence), are so passionate about this one. Obviously he did not deserve to die and I am horrified at the religious fundamentalist motives that seem to have driven his murderer. But let’s keep things in perspective here.

One person who did just that this week in Salama Ahmed Salama, an Al Ahram columnist. I don’t particularly agree with Salama generally, but he hit the nail in a recent piece translated and published by the Al Ahram Weekly:

Antagonistic approaches to religion are not helpful to women, either inside or outside Europe. And Van Gogh was an extremely controversial figure, a member of an extreme rightwing party that Muslims see as a threat to Dutch society, a party that calls Muslims a fifth column of “sheep-buggers”. Since the murder mosques and Muslim schools have been attacked in the Netherlands while the Dutch government has cracked down on those it calls a terrorist threat, closing down meeting places and deporting many. [sic]

It may well be the right of the Dutch director to express his opinion. But incitement to hatred can easily backfire, particularly when xenophobia is the order of the day. Most European governments have done little to help minorities fit in. Discrimination is common when ethnic minorities seek jobs, housing, schooling and other social services. As a result entire districts have been turned into Muslim ghettos, into breeding places for extremism.

Immigrants went to Europe as cheap labour. There are 15 million immigrants in Europe, including five million in France, three million in Germany and one million in the Netherlands. These minorities needed help from the state, which they did not receive. More than three decades have passed since the first wave of immigration began during which the governments concerned did little to help the immigrants integrate. And now a number of emerging rightwing parties want the immigrants thrown out.

The immigrants are not entirely blameless. They should have done more to integrate. But the governments’ fault is worse, for it is the responsibility of the state to promote cultural and social harmony.

With Islamophobia on the rise Europe wants Islam to adapt to European values, rather than for Muslims to fit in. Recent statements made by a Belgian archbishop are a case in point. No one is calling on the Jews to alter their religion. No one wants Christians of various denominations to change their beliefs. But Muslims are asked to rethink their tenets. A European, or American, Islam is the solution, we are told. And several Arab intellectuals and writers seem to agree.

So Van Gogh, who’s become something to a hero in the West, was a racist. People are comparing him to Salman Rushdie, a great author whose critique of his own religion is much more subtle than Van Gogh’s shock-flicks. To me it seems he hardly deserves our compassion. He didn’t deserve to die, and if he hadn’t he would have remained a marginal filmmaker with a following among Dutch racists if some Moroccan idiot hadn’t decided to kill him. Instead, because of his act of insanity, his name is a rallying cry for racism. I can understand European intellectuals being worried about the rise of Islamist extremism among Arab immigrants — so am I — but Arab intellectuals, as Salama points out, don’t need to go about taking every opportunity to talk about a crisis in Islam or some other vague conceit every time a hate crime takes place. There are enough real problems about.

Iran hands over Islamist to Egypt

According to some news reports — basing their stories on the London-based Islamist cabal — Iran has handed over Mustafa Hamza, a former member of the Gamaa Islamiya who was involved in the 1995 attempt on Hosni Mubarak’s life in Addis Abeba. This story says it was confirmed by an Egyptian security official, but this one says Iran is denying the reports.

Hani el-Sibaie, a former leader of the outlawed Egyptian group Islamic Jihad who now runs an Islamic affairs research center in London, said by telephone that he’d been informed by people he trusts within al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya that Hamza was handed over to Egypt by Iran “a few weeks ago.”

El-Sibaei, of the research center in London, claimed Iran had handed over Hamza in exchange for security information about Iranian opposition members in Egypt.

“Iran now is not like Khomeini’s Iran,” el-Sibaei said, referring to the late Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Now, Iran is like any secular country. It’s just using Islam as a slogan. This is a low deal,” he said.

Egyptian authorities first arrested Hamza in 1981. He served three years in prison in the case of the assassination of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. On his release, he went to Afghanistan. He’s believed to be the alleged mastermind of a 1995 assassination attempt on Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, Hamza has agreed along with most if not all Gamaa Islamiya leaders to renounced violence. That process, begun in 1997 and continuing today, had led the group’s leadership to apologize to the Egyptian people for their campaign of terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s and publish a series of books explaining their decision. Only a few former members who are now exiled in Europe have dissented from that decision. It’s not clear what the Egyptians would want with Hamza at this stage if only to punish him for the assassination attempt.

Secondly, it marks yet another small rapprochement between Egypt and Iran, a pattern that emerged since December 2003 when the leaders of both countries agreed to renew relations. There have been some steps taken, and bilateral investment is growing, but after an early enthusiasm in 2004 full relations are still restored. One would assume that the US is ambivalent on this one, if not dead against. But it could be a useful back channel to Tehran. In any case, it would only make sense for two of the most powerful regimes in the region to talk to each other. It also shows Iranian pragmatism in agreeing to renew relations to one of the Arab governments that is closest to the US and Israel.

Finally, there have been stories that have made the appalling mistake of calling Hamza a Muslim Brotherhood leader rather than a Gamaa Islamiya leader. This Jerusalem Post story is particularly bad, saying the Brotherhood was responsible for all kinds of terrorist attacks and so on. They also call him the head of the Brotherhood, which he is not (and he isn’t the head of the Gamaa Islamiya, either). The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist movement in Egypt that renounced violence in the mid-1970s and whose history of violence in Egypt is, I believe, limited to a few political assassinations in the late 1940s. Its leader is quite free and works from their headquarters in Cairo. They are banned but tolerated. I know one shouldn’t expect too much out of a Conrad Black publication, but still…

Christian-Muslim tensions

An interesting news item that most probably won’t make the Egyptian press: Al Jazeera reported yesterday [arabic] that there had been a demonstration inside Cairo’s Abbassiya cathedral, a key church in the capital. According to their report, the demonstration took place during the funeral of Said Sonbol, an important columnist, which many prominent personalities attended. The demonstrators, who were Christians, were protesting the conversion of a Christian woman (and possibly a priest’s wife) in the province of Beheira in the Delta. They said that she had been kidnapped and forcibly converted and that the local police had ignored their pleas for help. One of the dignitaries who was there, presidential advisor Osama Al Baz, reportedly pacified the crowd by telling them that the authorities would look into it.

At the same time, they were Muslim-Christian riots in a village in the Minya region in Middle Egypt after a Christian community center was built, which Muslims in the village feared would become a mosque. These tensions can be explosive in the south of Egypt, where there are many mixed communities and the politics of church and mosque construction are very delicate.

Egyptian state media doesn’t like to report these things because of the importance it puts in maintaining the image of good sectarian relations. And while these tensions are not nearly as bad as some Coptic activists (notably the rather loony Copts.com), who see every zoning regulation as a conspiracy against church-building, but there is no denying that at a local level there can be discrimination. The Egyptian authorities tend to complicate matters by taking a rather heavy-handed approach to sectarian tensions, cracking down with paramilitary troops and closing off entire villages.

I just noticed that Copts.com has a story on this, including an appear by its president, the neo-con Michael Meunier: “Only President Bush’s personal intervention can help prevent the escalation of these hate crimes into full-fledged cultural genocide.” Talk about hyperbole.