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Over at MERIP, an interesting piece by Mustapha Bayoumi just appeared, in which he takes a look at race in a post 9/11, post Obama era America. The piece starts off with an amusing quote from this Dean Obeidallah skit, but then starts to dig deeper into recent pop culture representations of Arabs in American media. At the heart of the piece is the question of how African Americans and Arab American/Muslims are being represented in mainstream American culture and what work these racial identities are doing when performed in front of a white audience. Very interesting piece, and as always, would love to know what any of you think.
Well, it looks like people out there are reading the blog. I was recently contacted by Matt Trevithick, who runs the Middle East Alliance out of the American University in Iraq. The website provides an overview on the Middle Eastern blogosphere, with updates on stories that Matt thinks are especially interesting. The portal of the website contains a nice interface that allows you on to click on individual countries to see what bloggers there have been posting recently. While Matt noted in his email to me that target audience is largely the foreign policy crowd in DC, the site is definitely useful for the rest of us as well. Thanks Matt! Looks like a great site. My only suggestion would be to add blogs in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish, but maybe that will come in time . .
I am enjoying reading the conversation between Ali and Sam about Syria, but don’t have anything to add to it myself. I would, however, like to point to this recent interview in Haaretz with cultural theorist and philosopher Judith Butler. Butler, whose work I am not personally familiar with though I know its reputation and influence, has written foundational works on gender and society in the past decades (her work was very influential on Saba Mahmood, for those of you who have read Politics of Piety). She is also a liberal American Jew who teaches at Berkeley. What is of interest here are especially her comments on how she understands the BDS movement in America, and her take on the one-state, two-state debate. If anyone has time to read the whole piece, I’d be interested to know what they think.
My computer died this week, so I’m operating from backup and scrambling to keep up. But this story did grab my attention. The English typing Egyptian blogosphere (here’s looking at you Arabist and Beheyya) have both been paying close attention to the return of Muhammad ElBaradei to Egypt and to his nascent campaign for presidency. I’ll leave it to those of you who actually know something about Egyptian politics to explain the details of why this is interesting, but a few things strike even me right off the bat: Egyptian politics has been caught in a rather stale face-off between Mubarak’s military absolutist rule and the (un)official opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood. But Mubarak is getting on and while there is speculation about him trying to get his son to get the president gig, last I checked there was also simply a great amount of uncertainty about what is going to happen when he leaves the stage. Until now, he has been quite adept at undermining potential opposition movements and candidates (after all, Egypt is nominally a democracy) but ElBaradei presents a special challenge for the Mubarak regime. ElBaradei has street cred not only in Egypt but also internationally due to his 12 year tenure heading the IAEA, during which he and the organization won the Nobel Peace Prize (for Wikipedia’s take on the man see here), and did a pretty good job of not letting himself be used politically in the case of Iran and its nuclear aspirations. Of course, the US, especially under Bush, was not happy with ElBaradei as he didn’t give them what they wanted in terms of isolating Iran, and so I’m not sure what Obama’s administration is going to do, if anything, in terms of working behind the scenes to help ensure that Egyptians actually get a reasonably fair election in 2011.
Ok, I admit that after a long day of reading about Islam in the seventh century, or developments in Christology in eighth century Christian Iberia, a little Hollywood eye-candy begins to look attractive to me. What can I say? After all, I enjoyed The Kingdom when I watched it, even though it wasn’t a very good film at all. More recently, I watched and really liked The Hurt Locker—the Oscar buzz is much deserved in my book, despite the accusations, probably justified, that it is inaccurate in many of its details.
So, I was tickled to see over at Ted Swedenborg’s blog (for those of you who don’t know his work, he has written important pieces on the social and cultural politics of music in the Middle East, as well as on Palestine in the 1930s) that Paul Greengrass has made a fictional version of Imperial Life in the Emerald City entitled Green Zone, starring Matt Damon. Guilty Pleasure indeed. Note that Swedenborg is primarily interested in the fashion statement Damon is making by sporting a kufiya.
Ok, I’ll stop after this post for the next while, but this is just too crazy. There are some times when reality seems to move beyond irony into the grotesque. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is currently moving forth with building a Museum of Tolerance on a 12th century Palestinian cemetery in Jerusalem. For an interview with Rashid Khalidi, acclaimed professor at Columbia, who has ancestors buried in this cemetery see Democracy Now here. The story has been ongoing since 2004, and most recently has been in the press in several sources, including at the Guardian, here.
One of the less told stories regarding the effects of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was that a great deal of Palestinian material culture and artistic production, including early Palestinian films, was lost when the IDF drove the PLO from Beirut (background on this can be found here). Only a few copies of some of these early Palestinian films remain today. I stumbled upon one of them: Mustafa Abu Ali’s Laysa lahum Wujud, which took its title from Golda Meir’s infamous remark that the Palestinians didn’t exist. The entire film, or what is left of it, is online and can be found here. It is striking to watch, a mixture of documentary and what I take to be (though I could be wrong) somewhat staged sequences surrounding quite real footage of Israel’s bombing of the Nabatiya refugee camp in 1974.
Over at Tabsir there’s a fascinating interview with Ziba Mir-Hosseini on the current state of Islamic feminism and some of the developments that are currently taking place at what she calls the periphery of the Muslim world (specifically Indonesia and Malaysia, but her remarks are relevant for movements in Iran and the Arab world). A couple of things struck me here, but what I found most valuable was how she discusses the contingent nature of advances in gaining for rights for women in the Muslims world. As Mir-Hosseini puts it, it’s not about whether Sunni or Shi’a Islam is more favorable to reinterpreting legal and theological tenets as it is about the interest of individual political regimes in supporting incremental change. In any case, for those of you who have seen her films or read her work, an interesting piece to read. Btw, Mir-Hosseini has been involved in the past few years in creating the group Musawa that is putting forth an actual platform of action to achieve the kinds of aspirational goals she is arguing for here.
I sat out J-term in terms of blogging, being bogged down in teaching my course on Orientalism, but as the Spring term begins I have convinced myself that I have time to procrastinate creatively again. In the last few days I have run across two different blogs that have taken issue with the Times’ coverage of the Middle East. The first comes off a new blog on Yemen (itself replacing the lamented Waq al-Waq, Gregory Johnsen has decided that he should probably finish his PhD instead of educating the rest about Yemen, but his co-blogger Brian O’Neill has struck out on his own). Here Brian O’Neill rips into Thomas Friedman’s recent op-ed on Yemen, not in itself a difficult task, but being a journalist himself, Brian pays close attention to Friedman’s rhetoric.
A different affair is that of the debate surrounding Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Times. Over at The Angry Arab, Asad Abukhalil’s blog (a Lebanese Anarchist/secularist who teaches at UC Stanislaus, and a bitter critic of Israel) there was an interesting exchange between him and Ethan Bronner a while back about the lack of Arabic speaking reporters at the Times. See here.
More recently (in the last few days), however the story of Ethan Bronner’s son serving in the IDF has surfaced, and this has occasioned commentary in the blogosphere by Abukhalil, Abunimah who also has a post over at Mondoweiss.
I’m just reading up on all this myself, but think that the whole debate raises important questions about the presuppositions that US journalists bring with them when they report on the Middle East.
Ayatollah Montazeri, one of Iran’s most respected religious scholars, passed away on Saturday. This is big news for several reasons. Montazeri was a fierce critic of the current Iranian government and had disagreed with Khomeini during the latter’s lifetime. His funeral may well kick off a new round of protests. See here for BBC coverage and here for Fatemeh Keshavarz’s overview of the significance of his passing (with clips of demonstrations from inside Iran).
A Palestinian “terrorist” interviewed by Sacha Baron Cohen is suing him for defamation. Depending on how this case works out, this could actually be a relatively interesting case, especially if it leads to a debate over the definition of terrorism. I haven’t seen “Bruno,” but would not be surprised if Cohen had taken some liberties with the interview.
With so much else going on in the Middle East, and Morocco in general having the reputation in America and Europe, the fate of the Western Sahara fails to attract much attention. Ever since the Green March, launched by Hasan II (father of the current ruler of Morocco, Muhammad VI) in 1975, Morocco has occupied/controlled the former Spanish colony to its south. While not internationally recognized as part of Morocco, de facto it is, though travel there for foreigners (and many Moroccans) is difficult at best. The Green March, in which Hasan II called upon Moroccans to march en masse into the Western Sahara and claim it for Morocco, was one of the diplomatic masterstrokes of the previous Moroccan monarch, who often ruled his country with a rather heavy hand (to say the least). It garnered him a great deal of internal popularity (for a while), even as it engendered a long running low level war with an armed group known as the Polisario, who advocated for the independence of the Western Sahara. The Polisario were in turn backed by Algeria, one of the many reasons why relations between Morocco and its eastern neighbor have long been chilly. With so much ink spilled over the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it is worth remembering that other relatively new nation states in the Middle East are also perceived by minorities within their borders as engaging in occupation (Kurds in Iraq/Turkey/Iran, Berbers throughout North Africa, Nubians in Egypt, Soqotris and Mahris in Yemen, etc.). The Western Sahara for its part has been in the news in the last few days after a longtime activist for Western Saharan independence was refused entry to Morocco by Moroccan authorities. See here for one account.
The situation in Iraq (for those still watching, it has become the “other war” to Afghanistan) has been of some interest in the past few days. Over at historiae, Reidar Visser has a good overview of the passing of the election law, which should now open the path to elections in the coming year.
Visser’s piece needs to be read against Adam Silverman’s take on the same situation, posted over at Informed Comment. Silverman was involved with the US military’s Human Terrain System program in Iraq, and while I’m not a fan of the program, shows a good understanding of the situation on the ground.
While Afghanistan has been dominating the US media, a lot has been going on in other parts of the Middle East. Today was National Student Day in Iran and a new wave of protests rolled across Iran (for an overview of the last big protests, November 4, al-Quds Day see Fatemeh Keshavarz’s blog here and here). Over at Scott Lucas’ blog Enduring America, Josh Shahryar has an overview of the days events. A few things are striking here. First of all, the protests continue, as does government repression. It’s unclear to me how things will play out in the long run in Iran, but it does seem that despite the government’s initial ability to face down the opposition after the botched election of Ahmadinejad, and to jail and torture its opponents, the protests continue. Who would have thought a year ago that Khamenei would face such public protests and be addressed with the same chants that the Shah faced 30 years ago?
In a sobering but fascinating story, David Ignatius reports on the outcome of a role playing session where foreign policy experts took on the roles of the main countries involved in order to see how successful the US will be at containing Iran’s atomic ambitions (at Gary Sick’s blog here (Sick got to play Iran)). Spoiler: not very.
[While I realize that Afghanistan is technically not part of the Middle East, the US involvement in Afghanistan is currently influencing both our presence in Iraq as well as our larger Middle East policy. Discussing the present quandary regarding how to proceed in Afghanistan is thus of relevance here.]
William Polk, veteran US diplomat and Middle East specialist, has written an insightful letter arguing for the US to pull out of Afghanistan. Unlike much of the commentary that I’ve seen elsewhere, he plays through the potential aftermath in detail. I find his arguments persuasive, and hope that Obama will at least address them in whatever decision he comes to.
Good piece in the Times on the opposition of Ayatollah Montazeri to Khamenei. After the elections this past summer, there was a flurry of writing on Iran and a little earlier in the year MERIP put together a excellent (print, unfortunately, but see here) issue looking at the past 30 years since the revolution. Of late, however, interest in Iran has flagged somewhat as the crisis in Afghanistan has become more prominent and as Ahmadinejad’s “win” in the elections has become fact, despite the ongoing (if muted) protests. If the political/religious framework that is going to continue to define Iran’s future is that of vilayet al-faqih, then Montazeri’s take on the question—he was one of the original architects—will be of some interest.
Over at altmuslim.com Raouf Ebeid has an interesting piece on the changing social status of women in the Arab Middle East. In many ways though, while it would be hard to disagree with the fact that Egypt hasn’t been investing enough in education in the past thirty years or so, this article raises more questions than it answers, and seems to continue to define women’s rights according to a secular, liberal model, disregarding alternate forms of agency that women might achieve through becoming active within an Islamic movement (for example). Despite this shortcoming—forgivable in part when one considers the brevity of the article—there are some interesting tidbits in this piece, including the example of two female Kuwaiti parlamentarians who, after refusing to wear a headscarf, faced down a ‘alim who called for them to resign from the parliament, and the construction of a massive new university in Saudi Arabia where men and women will study together.
In the past few months political scientists and historians (I’m thinking of Mark Lynch and Juan Cole, but the point has been made be many others) have argued that the window for a two state solution in Israel/Palestine is rapidly closing if not already gone. In brief, Israel has succeeded so well in colonizing the West Bank with settlements since 1967 that it is hard to envision—especially with the growing power of the religious right in Israel—that the Palestinians would ever have a contiguous area of land in which to base a state, even if they ever achieved any kind of sovereignty over this land. A visual depiction of the dilemma might help:
With the likelihood of a two state solution rapidly decreasing, it is interesting to consider one vision of what a one state solution would look like. Here, Ali Abunimah, one of the founders of the site Electronic Intifada argues that a one state solution will come, if Palestinians can articulate what a democratic one state solution would look like and stick to that vision. His rationale for this is based on a close reading of how the South African white minority continued to reject ending apartheid right up until the moment it ended. While the parallel with apartheid may be a controversial one for some, from the point of view of political comparisons in recent history to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, there aren’t many more accurate ones that come to mind. It is, in any case, an interesting piece to read. For my part, I continue to hope against hope that a two state solution would be possible, but fear that the facts on the ground have changed so much since ’67 that it won’t be possible.
One of the troubling aspects of blogging for me, as an academic who studies events and intellectual
developments in the pre-modern period, is that by its very nature blogging tends to take up current events and tends to neglect more purely historical subjects. As an attempt to buck this trend I would like to draw attention to a recent interview with George Saliba, professor at Columbia in which he talks about his book Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance.
It’s an engaging and easily accessible overview of Saliba’s exploration of why certain societies take up supporting the sciences at a specific moment. More precisely, he talks about why the sciences experienced such a boom in Abbasid Baghdad on the one hand, and towards the end of the interview addresses why he thinks that modern science emerged in Europe when it did. Fascinating stuff for me, especially as it’s informing my own current work on how jurists, theologians, and Sufis considered the natural sciences in the early modern period.
For those of you who want to watch Saliba debate Toby Huff, who wrote a widely read book on why modern science
emerged in Europe and not in China or the Middle East, see here, here, and here. Who doesn’t love a good academic tiff?
A few years back when reality TV first really began edging into the ridiculous, someone in LA must have said:
“Hey, why don’t we have a show where Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists compete for atheists to
join their faith. That would be really cool.” A silence may have followed and then someone may have said:
“Nah, let’s do another season of Survivor instead.” Meanwhile in Turkey, they’ve gone ahead with live
religious competition for the souls of atheists. That the show’s founder is a transsexual pop star named Sisi
just makes this story perfect.
In recent days more and more stories have been appearing linking the Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan to a radical Yemeni scholar who used to live in Virginia. The Post had an interesting interview with the scholar yesterday, who, most interestingly, maintains that did not urge Hasan to carry out these acts (though he appears to approve of them).
Robin Creswell, grad student in comp lit at NYU, has an excellent overview of recent translations of the great Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish.
Insightful interview with Gary Sick on Iran (as well as some interesting remarks on Iraq). Sick served in Carter’s administration during the Iranian revolution.
The situation in Yemen, which I have been posting about intermittently over the past few weeks,
continues to go downhill. There’s a piece on today’s Times about how Saudi Arabia has now gotten involved in the action, with my friend Toby Jones getting quoted about how this does not bode well for anyone.
The folks over at Waq Waq are following this closely and have links to actual video of Saudi Arabia carrying out the bombings.
I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in IS101 this past week on Sunni-Shi’a relations in Iraq and when it came to talking about recent events (the last year or so), I suddenly realized I hadn’t the faintest. After all, Iraq has drifted off the national news scene and Afghanistan has come to take its place. Luckily for me, Reidar Visser had my back. Here is a great series of posts on the recent creation of inter-confessional political alliances in the run up to the coming January elections(on the UIA,
on the State of Law list and on INA). Most recently, he has an informative post on what’s going on with
the revised election law and the status of Kirkuk.
In the coming months, as Obama makes up his mind about a way forward in Afghanistan, Iraq is likely is continue to be conspicuously absent in the US media. Sad, when the US continues to have so many troops there and when Iraq’s ultimate stability remains of central importance to US foreign policy objectives.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whatever one may think of him, is one of the most important and independent legal minds in the Muslim world. He recently published a much anticipated work on jihad. Considering his controversial statements (controversial in differing quarters) justifying American Muslims fighting against the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11 and the legitimacy of martyrdom operations in occupied Palestine, many will be interested in what he has to say in this much more extensive treatment of the issue. Over at Jihadica they have an initial review. See also Part Two and Three.
I continue to do a blog round-up for today: First, here’s a firsthand account of the situation in Sa’dah, in northern Yemen, where the government continues to carry out an extensive anti-insurgency campaign.
Second, an inspirational story about an Iranian student confronting the country’s spiritual leader at a public Q&A, and—so-far—not being arrested for it.
Insightful post on qat use and water in Yemen by Dan Varisco, who will be coming to Middlebury in January to lecture on his recent book on Orientalism.
I’ve been blogging too much today, but there are so many fascinating pieces out there. This one
was recently published in MERIP and outlines how Israel’s ultra-orthodox population is coming
to dominate both Israeli politics and the IDF.
Striking if dismaying pictures from Yemen, which now has an internal refugee problem due to the fighting in the North, and is dealing with refugees from Somalia who are landing on its southern coast.
While the trial is taking place in Germany, it is receiving a good deal of attention in the Middle East as well,
so I thought it was worthy mentioning here. See the BBC coverage for an overview if you missed it when it actually happened. I still find
the whole affair quite mystifying, not to mention unspeakably tragic.
Here’s today coverage in al-Hayat,
and a good piece in the (English version) of Spiegel online.
The Maghrib generally gets short shrift in MENA discussions, and as someone whose work is deeply
rooted in North Africa, it is easy to feel left out. Recently I’ve stumbled upon two blogs that
take a look at current affairs in Morocco and Algeria, and here they are (unfortunately though
understandably they are in French, though the first has an English portal as well):
But one is continually pulled back to the East (easy for an Orientalist, no?), and here’s a blog on
Lebanon that might be of interest to some:
What with Hamas generally been depicted as political Islamists, it’s interesting to think about how they are facing internal problems within Gaza with an important although still small opposition from representatives of a more global jihadism. The good folks over at Jihadica are on the case:
One of the main reasons I think that it is interesting to think about this situation as it should help discourage us from lumping all political islamists together (I know, I know, we have been told countless times not to do this, but the ongoing media representations of political islamist movements isn’t helping).
Just ran across this a few days ago. An intriguing view of what will be happening in the next century in the Middle East by one of the region’s most prominent American historians: