Tag: egypt

US envoy meets opposition leader

The Egyptian regime has always been weary of opposition forces consulting with foreign powers, especially if that foreign power is the US. The history of the last fifty years in the Middle East, after all, is of Arab states trying to influence each other, infiltrate parties and gain a foothold to spread their particular take on what the Arab nation should look like. Regimes like Saddam Hussein’s and Hafez Al Assad’s spent generously on cultivating opposition groups in other countries, and the Egyptians and Saudis went through a period of fomenting coups against each other. When it came to the US — after all the current regime’s main patron along with a few Gulf princes — they are particularly sensitive: after all they stand to lose their livelihood. For this reason, the government has always cracked down very hard on any attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood to hold contacts with American diplomats, as was attempted about a year ago (and this is one occasion about which we know about because it also involved European diplomats.)

Which is why the indignation at the meeting between US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch and the head of the irrelevant left-wing party Tagammu is pretty silly. Take a look at this:

Other opposition circles, and especially the Nasserist Party, were furious about the meeting. Nasserist leader Diaaeddin Dawoud said his party strongly condemned El-Said’s decision to sit and speak with Welch on behalf of the opposition alliance. “This meeting would have been all right if it had only concerned the Tagammu Party,” Dawoud said. He questioned, however, El-Said’s decision to agree to the meeting on behalf of the opposition alliance, considering “Welch’s tendency to always act like a new High Commissioner in Egypt,” and in light of his being “the ambassador of a country whose soldiers are killing Iraqis”.

According to Dawoud, “El-Said’s meeting with Welch has definitely tarnished the opposition’s image.”

Nasserist Party Secretary-General Ahmed Hassan even threatened to withdraw from the alliance, and condemned El-Said for choosing not to inform the bloc before agreeing to the meeting with Welch.

Even the NDP was upset. Its Secretary-General Safwat El-Sherif told the independent Al-Osbou newspaper that it was unacceptable that coordination among local opposition parties become coordination with “external forces”. El-Sherif described El-Said’s meeting with Welch as being “dangerous and negative, not only for partisan life, but also for the parties in the opposition alliance”.

The NDP secretary-general said that Welch should not act like a high commissioner. “He is just a representative of a foreign country, and must not exceed that limit.”

I can understand the other opposition being jealous or even genuinely indignant, since they generally have a strong stance against American policy in the region. But for the head of the regime’s own party to object is laughable. The regime is itself America’s biggest client! And his veiled threats about the meeting being “dangerous and negative, not only for partisan life, but also for the parties in the opposition alliance” is distasteful. All it shows is the insecurity Egyptians feel, across political lines, about being an American client state — the fact that the US ambassador really does have an influence akin to the British High Commissioner. Most of the time, they deny that reality.

(I should clarify that I don’t think the US directly controls Egypt, but simply that it is a if not the major player in Egypt, in a macro sense. The reality is one of negotiation, maneuvering and opportunism.)

More on the Coptic conversion to Islam

It appears that the conversion to Islam of Wafaa Kostantin, wife of a Coptic vice Bishop in Egypt, is a done deal. According to today’s Al Hayat, the woman responded to attempts to convince her to return to the Coptic fold by reciting aloud half of the Koran. She has also taken to wearing the hijab, Al Hayat reports. It appears that Church officials are now concerned that she will become a spokesperson of sorts for Islam. Coptic officials are requesting that she not appear in the media or work to spread the call to Islam, “so as not to provoke the feelings of Copts.”

Follow up on Coptic-Muslim tensions

Al Hayat reported today that 34 Copts have been detained by Egyptian authorities in connection with the demonstrations that followed the conversion of a vice-bishop’s wife to Islam. Among the seven charges against them: inciting unrest, exploiting religion to incite ethnic discord, resisting authorities, and using force and violence. Also, implications or accusations that the woman’s conversion was less than voluntary appear to be unfounded. Al Hayat reports that church officials have spent the past two days trying to convince the woman to renounce her conversion– but in vain.

Religious discourse in Egypt

This is the key paragraph in Maria Golia’s Daily Star column:

That [popular preacher Amr] Khaled and others like him have found scores of followers suggests less the emergence of a new breed of religious guides than proof of the lack thereof. Imaginative leadership – secular or religious – is not the forte of paternalist autocracies like Egypt. The job of eliminating competitors and ensuring the populace’s dependency has been so thoroughly done that individuals capable of mobilizing energies and talents, or providing constructive outlets for their expression, are rare indeed.

This is the crux of the issue. Religious discourse and debate here is dominated by a conservative elite, Al Azhar being the most obvious and influential bastion for this elite (in Egypt at least). The permissible scope of religious debate here is kept within narrow confines, where opposing views are aggressively silenced. No where has this silencing been more visible than in the case of Nasser Hamed Abu Zeid, the Cairo University Islamic thinker who fled Egypt in the mid-1990s after Islamist lawyers forced him to divorce his wife on the grounds that he was not a true Muslim. (The outrageous ideas he had the gaul to propogate: that the Koran should be interpreted in the context of place and time.) For more on this issue see Tunisian journalist Kamel Labidi’s recent column in the Daily Star. Of course it’s also evident in Al Azhar’s continuing efforts to ban books (80 in the past decade, according to Labidi).

The absence of true debate on religious issues, and the muffling of those thinkers whose views extend beyond the acceptable confines of debate is a significant factor in the increasing visibility of public religiosity in Cairo and elsewhere. Take for instance the example of the hijab, one of the more frequently cited indications of this increasing public religiosity. An average Egyptian Muslim girl who is considering whether or not to start wearing the hijab (head scarf) has few, if any, public religious figures to turn to in Egypt who will tell her that the hijab is NOT a religious obligation. There are simply no voices (that I know of) in Al Azhar or elsewhere in the religious establishment here that argue that the hijab is not a religious duty. This despite the fact that a very reasonable, and in my opinion convincing, argument exists that the Koran and the sunna do not require women to veil. Of course, disagreement in interpretations of the text are a fundamental part of any religion, but those differences should be debated publicly. That is not happening here. The Egyptian girl debating whether or not to wear the veil has no one telling her she can remain an obedient Muslim, and also remain unveiled.

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

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.

Sharm wrap-up

The conference on Iraq in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is over. Yesterday was a flurry of press conferences, with everybody finally wanting to talk, and with several interesting things being said. For some of the offiicial highlights, you can check out my story for VOA.

Basically, the final statement was identical to the draft, with the countries at the conference expressing their support for Iraq and for the electoral process there (the date for the election has now been set as January 30). There was a call for neighboring countries to control borders and to prevent terrorists and weapons and funding from passing. There was a call for a conference in Iraq to include all Iraqi groups, even ones that oppose the US presence and the interim government, as long as they don’t engage in violent action. And there the statement that the US-led forces’ mandate is “not open-endedâ€�–not quite the wtihdrawal date that France and many Arab countries wanted, but a step in that direction. Various forms of economic and logistical support were promised, although there was a notable absence of commitment to send troops to be part of the so-called UN Protection Force (to protect UN election advisors and monitors). All in all, although it’s unclear whether violence will really be under control in time for the elections, I think the conference was a real boost for the Iraqi interim government. As the French Foreign Minister said, the elections in January are “difficult, and possible.â€�

One thing I noticed was that the Arab media at the conference was focused on entirely different issues from the Western media. They asked again and again about Fallujah, and were quite confrontational with the Iraqi officials. While the Iraqi officials insist on the (ridiculous) claim that “no� civilians have been killed, the Arab media has leaped to the conclusions that thousands have, and Falluja has become shorthand for “atrocity.� It would be good to actually get to the bottom of this. One thing I don’t understand is why humanitarian agencies weren’t allowed into the city when they wanted to go there.

What I find disturbing is the way both the Western and the Arab media approaches Iraq not as a real place lived in by a real people but as a symbolic battlefield in which to inscribe different ideas of terrorism, colonialism, democratization, Western interference, Islamic extremism, good and evil. Everything that happens there gets reconfigured on each side to match its own ideological grid. The Arab media, with its anti-Americanism and pan-Arabism, has painted itself into a corner where it is almost rooting for more chaos and instability in Iraq rather than peaceful elections and transition. However much you may be dissatisfied or suspicous of the interim governments, this is a bankrupt position. (Western media that doesn’t make the distinction between armed resistance against an occupying army and terrorism against civilians–in the Occupied Territories and in Iraq–is just as blinkered).

I also caught the press conference of the very dour Iranian Foreign Minister Kharrazi. The Iranians were super organized. They took everyone’s name and employer down and called on them in order (it was funny to hear the names of major US news institutions slowly pronounced as if for the first time). They staid for exactly half an hour. Kharrazi said Iran would continue its suspension of uranium enrichment as long at felt it was getting somewhere with the negotiations. He also said Iran would not deal directly with the US being there was no “mutual respect� between the two countries. He called the claims that Iran has been making nuclear warheads “nonsense.� And he said he and Colin Powell, who sat at the same table at a dinner the night before, talked about “nothing.�