Month: November 2006

Regarding death threats to “infidels”

Why aren’t people who issue death threats not more frequently taken to court? From the EOHR:

EOHR is very concerned about the aggressive campaign being waged against Dr. Souad Saleh, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the Azhar University, following her publicly stating her opinion on the Niquab (the Islamic full body veil), saying it is not compulsory in Islam. Her statement angered many fundamentalists, some of whom have called for the “shedding of her blood”.

Saleh, a former dean at Azhar University, stated her opinion in late October 2006 on a television programme called “Amma Yatasa’loon” (“What are they asking about?”), aired on the channel Dream TV. Saleh stated that the Niquab is not compulsory for Muslim women, and she supported her point by citing the Prophet and Islamic customs.

Also:

EOHR is deeply worried about the increasing tendency to accuse individuals of being “infidels”, and the accompanying calls to “shed the blood” of such individuals, when they express critical views, whether ideological or political.

Accordingly, EOHR denounces the calls by Member of Parliament Ali Laban for the execution of the prime minister, the endowment minister and the investment minister, on the charges of “attacking Islam openly”, which came as a reaction to their issuing an administrative decision to demolish a mosque and privatize a public company.

RAM bans praying

While feeling a little bad about it, I am secretly pleased about Royal Air Maroc’s decision — as reported by the BBC — to ban its employees from praying on company time. On the one hand, it’s obviously rather insensitive to people’s religious beliefs and stigmatizes religion as something suspicious and preferable to avoid. It’s also very much at odds with the trend towards conservatism in the country, both socially and politically (the moderate Islamist PJD looks set to win next year’s parliamentary elections with a margin of about 30%). On the other hand, I am constantly irritated by people praying in offices, especially when they do it in public. I find ostentatious piety (of the kind that is grotesquely abundant in Egypt among both Muslims and Christians) distasteful, especially when it’s shoved in your face constantly and people suddenly start rolling out carpets in the middle of an office, interrupting their (and others’) work and contributing to the already very palpable social pressure to become more outwardly religious. I know many people who pray but do it in prayer rooms or mosques and avoid making a display of themselves while doing it — which seems to me to be the socially and religiously correct way to do things.

All this being said, this kind of action (rather than, say, imposing strict guidelines on when and where people can pray in public offices) will play straight into the hands of Moroccan’s populist Islamists who love to campaign on the secularist conspiracy that’s everywhere. And it creates this false dichotomy between Islamists, who want to wear their religion on their sleeves and think invasive forms of public piety are a type of dawa, and perhaps equally religious Muslims who think that their faith is a private thing and have the good taste not be ostentatious about it.

This episode reminds me a bit of Tunisia’s recent statement that it would ban the niqab. In principle, I find the niqab abhorrent. But do you really want to have a state that legislates what people can and can’t wear, or for that matter endorse the Tunisian regime, one of the vilest in the region?

RSF: Egypt on internet blacklist

Who says things in Egypt aren’t actually getting worse?

“(Egyptian) President Hosni Mubarak, in power since 1981, has shown a particularly worrying authoritarianism as concerns the Internet,” RSF said in a statement.

Internet use is one of the freedoms monitored by the rights group surveying civil liberties around the world.

RSF said three bloggers were arrested in Egypt in June and detained for two months for saying they were in favour of democratic reform, while others had been harassed.

It also expressed concern at an Egyptian court ruling that said an Internet site could be shut down if it posed a threat to national security.

Aside from confusing bloggers who get arrested for taking part in protests with ones who get arrested for blogging, this part of a wider worrying trends — as seen by the security interference in this month’s student and labor elections, the revanchisme against the Judges’ Club (more on that later), and dimming prospects of meaningful constitutional reform.

Irwin vs. Said

Confession: I am a huge fan of Robert Irwin, the very erudite Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Not because I know him or have worked for him (I wish!), although in this small word of Middle East journalism and commentariat I obviously know plenty of people who do. (They say he’s nice.)

I like Irwin mostly because of two books of his that I count, in their respective categories, as some of the best I’ve ever read. The Arabian Nightmare is dark, trippy fantasy written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe (if he had been an arabist and on acid), while his The Arabian Nights: A Companion is an indispensable guide to any serious lover of the Nights. Both are written in a rather difficult prose, and the second can be especially tough in parts, but they are very rewarding if you put the time and effort into them.

His latest work, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, appears to be more in line with the second. It is a basically academic text on the Orientalist tradition in Western letters, focusing mostly on the British, French and German in the fields. As anyone who has done Middle Eastern Studies or dabled in the field at all, these early Orientalists, who were often wonderfully eccentric characters who produced very serious scholarship, are now mostly known for their reputation as agents of empire than their work. Irwin apparently attempts to restore their reputation and refute the idea that these men are inherently suspicious because of their (possible) association with colonialism in the last three or four centuries.

From what I’ve been able to put together from the three reviews that I’ve seen so far — one new but predictably second-rate in the NYT, an excellent one from May by the ubiquitous Christopher de Bellaigue in the Times Literary Supplement and an equally excellent and more critical one in the London Review of Books back in June — the book tells the story of the Orientalists, their lives, their manias, their unusual lifestyle choices. But the big controversy about the book is that it takes on Edward Said’s Orientalism in one of its final chapters, attacking its many mistakes and, more generally, Said’s (alleged) unfounded political agenda in giving the orientalists a bad name. The reviews argue Irwin makes a convincing case that Said was at least partly wrong, but doesn’t really address the links between imperialism and colonialism or quite deliver the fatal blow to the theoretical behemoth that Orientalism has become.

I won’t say anymore until I get hold of a copy of the book (and re-read the relevant passages of Orientalism — by the way, while I admired Said’s advocacy work, I was never a big fan of his most of his (sometimes stultifying) writing style or the amount of political bile he could work up against people who didn’t really deserve it. But I know I would look forward to any book by Irwin, and can’t wait to read this one.

Buy it from the link below (or any of the links above) and arabist.net gets a cut!

“Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents” (Robert Irwin)

So long, Saddam

Well, there’s at least one item of good news from Iraq: Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death. Not that the court that tried him can be taken that seriously, or that the offenses he was tried for are particularly important compared the full extent of his crimes, and it is a shame that we won’t have a long look at the document trail of, say, the Western and Arab countries that collaborated with him or armed his regime throughout his reign.

And perhaps there is something to learn from Iraq after all: they will be dispensing of his person by good old fashioned hanging, in my opinion a much more humane way to kill people than the electric chair or gas chamber.