January 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Abdullah II: The 5-State Solution
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
In February 2002, I traveled to Saudi Arabia and interviewed the then crown prince, now king, Abdullah, at his Riyadh horse farm. I asked him why the next Arab summit wouldn’t just propose to Israel full peace and normalization of relations, by all 22 Arab states, for full withdrawal from all occupied lands and creation of a Palestinian state. Abdullah said that I had read his mind (“Have you broken into my desk?” he asked me) and that he was about to propose just that, which he later did, giving birth to the “Abdullah peace plan.”
Unfortunately, neither the Bush team nor Israel ever built upon the Abdullah plan. And the Saudi leader always stopped short of presenting his ideas directly to the Israeli people. Since then, everything has deteriorated.
So, I’ve wondered lately what King Abdullah would propose if asked to update his plan. I’ve even probed whether he’d like to do another interview, but he is apparently reticent. Not one to be deterred, I’ve decided to do the next best thing: read his mind again. Here is my guess at the memo King Abdullah has in his drawer for President Obama. I’d call it: “Abdullah II: The Five-State Solution for Arab-Israeli peace.”
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on your inauguration and for quickly dispatching your new envoy, George Mitchell, a good man, to the Middle East. I wish Mitchell could resume where he left off eight years ago, but the death of Arafat, the decline of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war in Lebanon, the 2009 Hamas-Israel war in Gaza, the continued expansion of colonial Israeli settlements and the deepening involvement of Iran with Hamas and Hezbollah have all created a new reality.
Specifically, the Palestinian Authority is in no position today to assume control of the West Bank, Hamas is incapable of managing Gaza and the introduction of rockets provided by Iran to Hamas has created a situation whereby Israel won’t turn over the West Bank to any Palestinians now because it fears Hamas would use it to launch rockets on Israel’s international airport. But if we do nothing, Zionist settlers would devour the rest of the West Bank and holy Jerusalem. What can be done?
I am proposing what I would call a five-state solution:
1. Israel agrees in principle to withdraw from every inch of the West Bank and Arab districts of East Jerusalem, as it has from Gaza. Any territories Israel might retain in the West Bank for its settlers would have to be swapped — inch for inch — with land from Israel proper.
2. The Palestinians — Hamas and Fatah — agree to form a national unity government. This government then agrees to accept a limited number of Egyptian troops and police to help Palestinians secure Gaza and monitor its borders, as well as Jordanian troops and police to do the same in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority would agree to five-year “security assistance programs” with Egypt in Gaza and with Jordan in the West Bank.
With Egypt and Jordan helping to maintain order, Palestinians could focus on building their own credible security and political institutions to support their full independence at the end of five years.
3. Israel would engage in a phased withdrawal over these five years from all of its settlements in the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem — except those agreed to be granted to Israel as part of land swaps — at the same pace that the Palestinians meet the security and governance metrics agreed to in advance by all the parties. The U.S. would be the sole arbiter of whether the metrics have been met by both sides.
4. Saudi Arabia would pay all the costs of the Egyptian and Jordanian trustees, plus a $1 billion a year service fee to each country — as well as all the budgetary needs of the Palestinian Authority. The entire plan would be based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338 and blessed by the U.N. Security Council.
The virtues of this five-state solution — Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia — are numerous: Egypt and Jordan, the Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, would act as transition guarantors that any Israeli withdrawal would not leave a security vacuum in the West Bank, Gaza or Arab Jerusalem that could threaten Israel. Israel would have time for a phased withdrawal of its settlements, and Palestinians would have the chance to do nation-building in an orderly manner. This would be an Arab solution that would put a stop to Iran’s attempts to Persianize the Palestinian issue.
President Obama, too much has been broken to go straight back to the two-state solution. It would be like trying to build a house with bricks but no cement. There’s no trust and no framework to build it. Israelis and Palestinians need the kind of cement that only Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan can provide. It would give Israelis security and Palestinians a clear pathway to an independent state.
I hope you will give careful consideration to the five-state solution.
Peace be upon you,
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz
THE MIDDLE EAST
February 1, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Long Shot for Peace
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DAVOS, Switzerland
In any discussion of the Middle East at the World Economic Forum here in Davos, the central figure is a man who isn’t even here: President Obama.
Mr. Obama’s first moves are being greeted with vast relief by a broad range of players in the region. There’s also a whisper of hope that a serious American peace effort by Mr. Obama just might transform the Middle East, with the most promising route passing through Syria.
President Bush’s problem was that he loved Israel too much. He embraced Israeli leaders even when they responded to provocations by killing more than 1,300 people in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials — in retaliation for shelling that had killed fewer than 30 Israelis since it began in 2001.
This tilted policy was catastrophic for Israelis as well as Palestinians, for it undermined any chance of a peace agreement that is Israel’s best hope for long-term security. Now we’re starting over.
The way Gaza has raised tensions was evident in a panel discussion in Davos on Thursday when the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, complained furiously that he wasn’t given enough time to respond to Israel’s president, Shimon Peres. Mr. Erdogan then stormed off the stage and threatened never to return to Davos.
Those pyrotechnics overshadowed a much more positive undercurrent here — enthusiasm for more American engagement in the region, in a more evenhanded way.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, told me he was “very encouraged” by Mr. Obama’s first moves, like appointing George Mitchell as special envoy. “It’s high time for the Americans to take a bold initiative,” he said.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, praised Mr. Obama’s “good start” on the Middle East. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, joined the praise and added: “There is an opportunity. I hope this opportunity will be exploited to the limit.”
Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, declared, “There are prospects of the U.S. returning to the role of honest broker, which we missed.” That view seems widespread here, and is shared by many in Israel as well.
“You have a complete breakdown of trust: ‘It’s my toy!’ ‘No, it’s my toy!’ ” said David Rosen, the former chief rabbi of Ireland, now based in Jerusalem as head of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “We need someone who can move the parties beyond their own pain and vulnerability.”
There are two major ways in which the Obama administration can do that.
First, it must push to reduce the misery in Palestinian territories. A peace deal with the Palestinians is not possible today, partly because the Palestinians themselves are bitterly divided between Fatah and Hamas. But nothing can be done anywhere as long as scenes of Gaza suffering are unfolding on television screens.
That means that Israel must lift the siege of Gaza, completely opening the crossings. If Hamas resumes its unconscionable rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, then bomb the tunnels or strike Hamas targets in a proportional way, but don’t escalate.
Mr. Obama should also insist on a complete halt of settlement activity on the West Bank, and on an easing of the West Bank checkpoints that make life wretched for Palestinians. All that would also bolster moderates in the Palestinian Authority, making an eventual deal more likely.
Second, the United States should focus on a peace deal between Syria and Israel. With a Palestinian deal impossible for the time being, the path forward is to try to peel Syria away from Iran. If that strategy succeeded, Iran’s subversive influence would be reduced, Hamas might be moderated, and there would be momentum for further gains.
Turkey has been mediating talks between Syria and Israel, and Prime Minister Erdogan said those talks had been making great progress. “We were very close until the Gaza events,” added the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan. That peace effort must be revived with strong American participation.
Most of the elements of the Israel-Syria deal were agreed upon years ago, and one of Syria’s main aims is better relations with the United States. That is something that the Obama administration can provide.
Mr. Ban has been conducting his own relentless shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, and he said he was hopeful after recent conversations with Syria’s president and Israel’s prime minister.
All this is a long shot, of course. But Mr. Obama knows something about long odds coming home, and few people have made money betting against him.
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Long Shot for Peace
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
DAVOS, Switzerland
In any discussion of the Middle East at the World Economic Forum here in Davos, the central figure is a man who isn’t even here: President Obama.
Mr. Obama’s first moves are being greeted with vast relief by a broad range of players in the region. There’s also a whisper of hope that a serious American peace effort by Mr. Obama just might transform the Middle East, with the most promising route passing through Syria.
President Bush’s problem was that he loved Israel too much. He embraced Israeli leaders even when they responded to provocations by killing more than 1,300 people in Gaza, according to Gaza health officials — in retaliation for shelling that had killed fewer than 30 Israelis since it began in 2001.
This tilted policy was catastrophic for Israelis as well as Palestinians, for it undermined any chance of a peace agreement that is Israel’s best hope for long-term security. Now we’re starting over.
The way Gaza has raised tensions was evident in a panel discussion in Davos on Thursday when the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, complained furiously that he wasn’t given enough time to respond to Israel’s president, Shimon Peres. Mr. Erdogan then stormed off the stage and threatened never to return to Davos.
Those pyrotechnics overshadowed a much more positive undercurrent here — enthusiasm for more American engagement in the region, in a more evenhanded way.
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, told me he was “very encouraged” by Mr. Obama’s first moves, like appointing George Mitchell as special envoy. “It’s high time for the Americans to take a bold initiative,” he said.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, praised Mr. Obama’s “good start” on the Middle East. Hoshyar Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, joined the praise and added: “There is an opportunity. I hope this opportunity will be exploited to the limit.”
Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, declared, “There are prospects of the U.S. returning to the role of honest broker, which we missed.” That view seems widespread here, and is shared by many in Israel as well.
“You have a complete breakdown of trust: ‘It’s my toy!’ ‘No, it’s my toy!’ ” said David Rosen, the former chief rabbi of Ireland, now based in Jerusalem as head of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “We need someone who can move the parties beyond their own pain and vulnerability.”
There are two major ways in which the Obama administration can do that.
First, it must push to reduce the misery in Palestinian territories. A peace deal with the Palestinians is not possible today, partly because the Palestinians themselves are bitterly divided between Fatah and Hamas. But nothing can be done anywhere as long as scenes of Gaza suffering are unfolding on television screens.
That means that Israel must lift the siege of Gaza, completely opening the crossings. If Hamas resumes its unconscionable rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, then bomb the tunnels or strike Hamas targets in a proportional way, but don’t escalate.
Mr. Obama should also insist on a complete halt of settlement activity on the West Bank, and on an easing of the West Bank checkpoints that make life wretched for Palestinians. All that would also bolster moderates in the Palestinian Authority, making an eventual deal more likely.
Second, the United States should focus on a peace deal between Syria and Israel. With a Palestinian deal impossible for the time being, the path forward is to try to peel Syria away from Iran. If that strategy succeeded, Iran’s subversive influence would be reduced, Hamas might be moderated, and there would be momentum for further gains.
Turkey has been mediating talks between Syria and Israel, and Prime Minister Erdogan said those talks had been making great progress. “We were very close until the Gaza events,” added the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan. That peace effort must be revived with strong American participation.
Most of the elements of the Israel-Syria deal were agreed upon years ago, and one of Syria’s main aims is better relations with the United States. That is something that the Obama administration can provide.
Mr. Ban has been conducting his own relentless shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, and he said he was hopeful after recent conversations with Syria’s president and Israel’s prime minister.
All this is a long shot, of course. But Mr. Obama knows something about long odds coming home, and few people have made money betting against him.
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Other Iran
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN
At one of the embassies offering islands of peace from the gridlocked, grinding Iranian capital, a Western diplomat said this of United States and allied policy toward Iran: “You could argue that our policy has not yet failed.”
That would be the most charitable view. But it is failing. Where Iran had a handful of centrifuges enriching uranium four years ago, it now has at least 5,000. With its enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan removed by American military force, it has extended its regional influence.
This city, whose real-estate boom has rivaled Manhattan’s in recent years, is still awash in cash from the giddy oil price season. Those billions, even ebbing, equal confidence. The Iranian Revolution, at its 30th anniversary, has recharged its batteries on a global wave of Bush-inspired, Gaza-cemented, anti-Western sentiment.
It’s time to think again, not merely to recalibrate old formulas, in order to end the three-decade impasse in U.S.-Iranian ties, a breakdown of huge cost and menace. A non-relationship has locked itself in stereotypes as American threats (“the military option must be kept on the table”) and demands (stop the centrifuges) meet a wall of Iranian pride.
One place to begin that reflection might be in southern Tehran, where I was the other day on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return from France. I’d been at an airport ceremony, featuring a kitschy reproduction of the Air France jumbo jet that brought him home, and found myself surrounded by graves near the Khomeini shrine.
The graves, many adorned with wrenching photos of 16-year-olds, stretch away, hundreds of thousands of them, mostly for victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which followed the 1978-79 revolutionary violence. Iran bled for a decade.
The psychological impact is still palpable. Iranians don’t want to bleed again; they want to get ahead. In this, they resemble the post-Cultural Revolution Chinese.
For all the inflammatory official rhetoric, pragmatism reigns. Money, education and opportunity drive people. Years of mayhem in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan have concentrated Iranian minds: who needs that?
“Overthrowing regimes is no longer on the agenda,” Mohammad Atrianfar, the former editor of a reformist magazine shut down by the government, told me. “Reform, yes, upheaval, no.”
Young people — and well over half the population is under 30 — may want a freer press or freer dress. But cellphones, widespread Internet access and satellite TV (government restrictions are as easily circumvented as Western sanctions) sap confrontational adrenaline. The Islamic Revolution has proved resilient in part through flexibility.
In this land of competing currents, the U.S. has focused on one: Iran as an expansionist, would-be nuclear power. Iran’s political constellation includes those who have given past support to terrorist organizations. But axis-of-evil myopia has led U.S. policy makers to underestimate the social, psychological and political forces for pragmatism, compromise and stability. Iran has not waged a war of aggression for a very long time.
Tehran shares many American interests, including a democratic Iraq, because that will be a Shiite-governed Iraq, and a unified Iraq stable enough to ensure access to holy cities like Najaf.
It opposes Taliban redux in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda’s Sunni fanaticism. Its democracy is flawed but by Middle East standards vibrant. Both words in its self-description — Islamic Republic — count.
These common interests and the long misreading of Iranian priorities demand that President Obama innovate. The radical Bush presidency produced a radical Iranian response. While modern Iraq was sketched on a 20th-century map, Persia is a millennial thing. Its pride requires treatment as an equal.
To suggest, as a recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington did, that Obama must “begin augmenting the military lever” to complement intensified diplomacy is to recommend burrowing deeper into failure.
Blinking is never pleasant but can be shrewd. America and its allies should drop their insistence that enrichment at Natanz cease before talks begin (Iran could always restart enrichment anyway). Obama should also say the military threat has moved under the table in the name of restoring dialogue. These steps would place the onus on Iran.
Can revolutionary Iran live without “Death to America?” Powerful hard-line Iranian factions think not, but I’m with the majority of Iranians who believe their Islamic Republic can coexist with a functioning U.S. relationship.
Obama should do five other things: Address his opening to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because he decides. State that America is not in the Iranian regime-change game. Act soon rather than wait for the June Iranian presidential elections; Khamenei will still be around after them. Start with small steps that build trust. Treat the nuclear issue within the whole range of U.S.-Iranian relations rather than as its distorting focus.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Other Iran
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN
At one of the embassies offering islands of peace from the gridlocked, grinding Iranian capital, a Western diplomat said this of United States and allied policy toward Iran: “You could argue that our policy has not yet failed.”
That would be the most charitable view. But it is failing. Where Iran had a handful of centrifuges enriching uranium four years ago, it now has at least 5,000. With its enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan removed by American military force, it has extended its regional influence.
This city, whose real-estate boom has rivaled Manhattan’s in recent years, is still awash in cash from the giddy oil price season. Those billions, even ebbing, equal confidence. The Iranian Revolution, at its 30th anniversary, has recharged its batteries on a global wave of Bush-inspired, Gaza-cemented, anti-Western sentiment.
It’s time to think again, not merely to recalibrate old formulas, in order to end the three-decade impasse in U.S.-Iranian ties, a breakdown of huge cost and menace. A non-relationship has locked itself in stereotypes as American threats (“the military option must be kept on the table”) and demands (stop the centrifuges) meet a wall of Iranian pride.
One place to begin that reflection might be in southern Tehran, where I was the other day on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return from France. I’d been at an airport ceremony, featuring a kitschy reproduction of the Air France jumbo jet that brought him home, and found myself surrounded by graves near the Khomeini shrine.
The graves, many adorned with wrenching photos of 16-year-olds, stretch away, hundreds of thousands of them, mostly for victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which followed the 1978-79 revolutionary violence. Iran bled for a decade.
The psychological impact is still palpable. Iranians don’t want to bleed again; they want to get ahead. In this, they resemble the post-Cultural Revolution Chinese.
For all the inflammatory official rhetoric, pragmatism reigns. Money, education and opportunity drive people. Years of mayhem in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan have concentrated Iranian minds: who needs that?
“Overthrowing regimes is no longer on the agenda,” Mohammad Atrianfar, the former editor of a reformist magazine shut down by the government, told me. “Reform, yes, upheaval, no.”
Young people — and well over half the population is under 30 — may want a freer press or freer dress. But cellphones, widespread Internet access and satellite TV (government restrictions are as easily circumvented as Western sanctions) sap confrontational adrenaline. The Islamic Revolution has proved resilient in part through flexibility.
In this land of competing currents, the U.S. has focused on one: Iran as an expansionist, would-be nuclear power. Iran’s political constellation includes those who have given past support to terrorist organizations. But axis-of-evil myopia has led U.S. policy makers to underestimate the social, psychological and political forces for pragmatism, compromise and stability. Iran has not waged a war of aggression for a very long time.
Tehran shares many American interests, including a democratic Iraq, because that will be a Shiite-governed Iraq, and a unified Iraq stable enough to ensure access to holy cities like Najaf.
It opposes Taliban redux in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda’s Sunni fanaticism. Its democracy is flawed but by Middle East standards vibrant. Both words in its self-description — Islamic Republic — count.
These common interests and the long misreading of Iranian priorities demand that President Obama innovate. The radical Bush presidency produced a radical Iranian response. While modern Iraq was sketched on a 20th-century map, Persia is a millennial thing. Its pride requires treatment as an equal.
To suggest, as a recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington did, that Obama must “begin augmenting the military lever” to complement intensified diplomacy is to recommend burrowing deeper into failure.
Blinking is never pleasant but can be shrewd. America and its allies should drop their insistence that enrichment at Natanz cease before talks begin (Iran could always restart enrichment anyway). Obama should also say the military threat has moved under the table in the name of restoring dialogue. These steps would place the onus on Iran.
Can revolutionary Iran live without “Death to America?” Powerful hard-line Iranian factions think not, but I’m with the majority of Iranians who believe their Islamic Republic can coexist with a functioning U.S. relationship.
Obama should do five other things: Address his opening to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because he decides. State that America is not in the Iranian regime-change game. Act soon rather than wait for the June Iranian presidential elections; Khamenei will still be around after them. Start with small steps that build trust. Treat the nuclear issue within the whole range of U.S.-Iranian relations rather than as its distorting focus.
February 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Why the Muslim World Can’t Hear Obama
By ALAA AL ASWANY
Cairo
PRESIDENT OBAMA is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.
But have these efforts reached the streets of Cairo?
One would have expected them to. Mr. Obama had substantial support among Egyptians — more than any other American presidential candidate that I can remember. I traveled to America several days before the election. The Egyptians I met in the United States told me — without exception — that they backed Mr. Obama. Many Egyptians I know went to his Web site and signed up as campaign supporters.
In Cairo, which is seven hours ahead of Washington, some people I know stayed up practically all night waiting for the election results. When Mr. Obama won, newspapers here described Nubians — southerners whose dark skin stands out in Cairo — dancing in victory.
Our admiration for Mr. Obama is grounded in what he represents: fairness. He is the product of a just, democratic system that respects equal opportunity for education and work. This system allowed a black man, after centuries of racial discrimination, to become president.
This fairness is precisely what we are missing in Egypt.
That is why the image of President-elect Obama meeting with his predecessors in the White House was so touching. Here in Egypt, we don’t have previous or future presidents, only the present head of state who seized power through sham elections and keeps it by force, and who will probably remain in power until the end of his days. Accordingly, Egypt lacks a fair system that bases advancement on qualifications. Young people often get good jobs because they have connections. Ministers are not elected, but appointed by the president. Not surprisingly, this inequitable system often leads young people to frustration or religious extremism. Others flee the country at any cost, hoping to find justice elsewhere.
We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of this justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza. Even before he officially took office, we expected him to take a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza. We still hope that he will condemn, if only with simple words, this massacre that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians. (I don’t know what you call it in other languages, but in Egypt we call this a massacre.) We expected him to address the reports that the Israeli military illegally used white phosphorus against the people of Gaza. We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.
But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out. We were beginning to recognize how far the distance is between the great American values that Mr. Obama embodies, and what can actually be accomplished in a country where support for Israel seems to transcend human rights and international law.
Mr. Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya on Jan. 27 was an event that was widely portrayed in the Western news media as an olive branch to the Muslim world. But while most of my Egyptian friends knew about the interview, by then they were so frustrated by Mr. Obama’s silence that they weren’t particularly interested in watching it. I didn’t see it myself, but I went back and read the transcript. Again, his elegant words did not challenge America’s support of Israel, right or wrong, or its alliances with Arab dictators in the interest of pragmatism.
I then enlisted the help of my two teenage daughters, May and Nada, to guide me through the world of Egyptian blogs, where young Egyptian men and women can express themselves with relative freedom. There I found a combination of glowing enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, a comparison between the democratic system in America and the tyranny in Egypt, the expectation of a fairer American policy in the Middle East, and then severe disappointment after Mr. Obama’s failure to intercede in Gaza. I thus concluded that no matter how many envoys, speeches or interviews Mr. Obama offers to us, he will not win the hearts and minds of Egyptians until he takes up the injustice in the Middle East. I imagine the same holds true for much of the greater Muslim world.
Have Egyptians irreversibly gone off Mr. Obama? No. Egyptians still think that this one-of-a-kind American president can do great things. Young Egyptians’ admiration for America is offset by frustration with American foreign policy. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this came from one Egyptian blogger: “I love America. It’s the country of dreams ... but I wonder if I will ever be able someday to declare my love.”
Alaa Al Aswany is the author of “The Yacoubian Building” and “Chicago.” This article was translated by Geoff D. Porter from the Arabic.
*****
February 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Beyond the Banks
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Jenin, West Bank
Visiting Israel, I’ve been peppered with questions from Israelis and Palestinians about where their peace process will fit in among President Obama’s priorities. My guess, I’ve answered, is that President Obama has three immediate priorities: banks, banks and banks — and none of them are the West Bank.
That said, once Obama is able to think afresh about the Middle East, he will find that the Bush team has left an interesting legacy here: 140,000 U.S. soldiers doing nation-building in Iraq and one U.S. soldier — actually a three-star U.S. Army general — doing nation-building in the West Bank. We need a better balance.
Those U.S. soldiers in Iraq can take pride in the recent Iraqi elections, which have strengthened the more secular and centrist parties. But we have to wait and see if the losers in this election take their defeat peacefully and whether the winners can actually produce better governance. The Iraqi elections, though, are a rare example of Arabs getting a chance to build their own future from the bottom up, and I continue to root for them.
Palestinians need the same chance. You can’t have a two-state solution without two states, and today the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which still supports a two-state deal, doesn’t have the institutions of a state, particularly an effective police force. Therefore, my hope is that Obama will focus not only on peace plans from the top down, but also on institution-building from the bottom up. The best way to isolate Hamas in Gaza is to build the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank into a decent government with steadily expanding control over its territory.
That’s exactly what the one U.S. Army officer in the West Bank, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, is up to. I accompanied him and his little team to Jenin — once the most violent city in the West Bank — to see their work. It was quite a scene: I watched a company of newly trained, proud and professional-looking Palestinian Authority troops, standing at attention, AK-47 assault rifles at their side, listening with obvious respect to the American general telling them: “What you’ve done has done more to advance the Palestinian national project than anything else ... You took care of your people at a difficult time. That is how the security forces of a country behave.”
No, you don’t see that every day.
General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. It was trained by the Jordanian police in a program overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator — a k a Dayton. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. Some 1,600 Palestinian N.S.F. troops have since graduated, and 500 are now in training. Schooled in everything from riot control to human rights, the N.S.F. is the only truly professional force controlled by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Israeli Army, originally dubious about the Dayton mission, has come to respect it and is now allowing it to expand to Hebron. What really got Israel’s attention was that during the three-week Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the West Bank never blew up, largely because N.S.F. troops allowed widespread protests but kept Palestinian demonstrators from clashing with Israeli soldiers.
“General Dayton is our friend,” said Col. Radi Abu Asida of the N.S.F. “Now we have excellent training. Now we have professionalism in our security work. We told the people during the Gaza demonstrations, ‘You can protest, but you must do it in a modern way.’ ”
Unfortunately, funding for Dayton’s work — secured by two farsighted U.S. House members, Nita Lowey and Gary Ackerman — runs out soon. That would be a tragedy. Before the N.S.F. was deployed “there was chaos here,” said Mohammed Abu Bakr, a Jenin wedding shop owner, referring to the security vacuum after the collapse of the Arafat regime. “Everyone wanted to fight with everyone else. Now everything is organized.”
The Dayton mission — a rare bright spot in a broken landscape — is the ground floor we need to build upon. “The issue is not just territory, but how we fill that territory,” said Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute. “Jenin is important. This is the beginning of capacity-building, which leads to institution-building, which leads to state-building, which leads to independence.” But the legitimacy of the Palestinian police depends on the peace process moving forward and Palestinians being ceded control, by Israel, over more territory as they prove themselves, he added. “Otherwise, they are seen as a tool to promote the occupation and will be delegitimized and attacked.”
So it is important to have George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, steadily pushing the diplomacy from above, but nothing will happen without vastly increasing U.S. efforts from below to help West Bankers build a credible governing capacity. Do that, and everything is possible. Don’t do it, and nothing is possible.
****
Op-Ed Contributor
Why the Muslim World Can’t Hear Obama
By ALAA AL ASWANY
Cairo
PRESIDENT OBAMA is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.
But have these efforts reached the streets of Cairo?
One would have expected them to. Mr. Obama had substantial support among Egyptians — more than any other American presidential candidate that I can remember. I traveled to America several days before the election. The Egyptians I met in the United States told me — without exception — that they backed Mr. Obama. Many Egyptians I know went to his Web site and signed up as campaign supporters.
In Cairo, which is seven hours ahead of Washington, some people I know stayed up practically all night waiting for the election results. When Mr. Obama won, newspapers here described Nubians — southerners whose dark skin stands out in Cairo — dancing in victory.
Our admiration for Mr. Obama is grounded in what he represents: fairness. He is the product of a just, democratic system that respects equal opportunity for education and work. This system allowed a black man, after centuries of racial discrimination, to become president.
This fairness is precisely what we are missing in Egypt.
That is why the image of President-elect Obama meeting with his predecessors in the White House was so touching. Here in Egypt, we don’t have previous or future presidents, only the present head of state who seized power through sham elections and keeps it by force, and who will probably remain in power until the end of his days. Accordingly, Egypt lacks a fair system that bases advancement on qualifications. Young people often get good jobs because they have connections. Ministers are not elected, but appointed by the president. Not surprisingly, this inequitable system often leads young people to frustration or religious extremism. Others flee the country at any cost, hoping to find justice elsewhere.
We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of this justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza. Even before he officially took office, we expected him to take a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza. We still hope that he will condemn, if only with simple words, this massacre that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians. (I don’t know what you call it in other languages, but in Egypt we call this a massacre.) We expected him to address the reports that the Israeli military illegally used white phosphorus against the people of Gaza. We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.
But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out. We were beginning to recognize how far the distance is between the great American values that Mr. Obama embodies, and what can actually be accomplished in a country where support for Israel seems to transcend human rights and international law.
Mr. Obama’s interview with Al Arabiya on Jan. 27 was an event that was widely portrayed in the Western news media as an olive branch to the Muslim world. But while most of my Egyptian friends knew about the interview, by then they were so frustrated by Mr. Obama’s silence that they weren’t particularly interested in watching it. I didn’t see it myself, but I went back and read the transcript. Again, his elegant words did not challenge America’s support of Israel, right or wrong, or its alliances with Arab dictators in the interest of pragmatism.
I then enlisted the help of my two teenage daughters, May and Nada, to guide me through the world of Egyptian blogs, where young Egyptian men and women can express themselves with relative freedom. There I found a combination of glowing enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, a comparison between the democratic system in America and the tyranny in Egypt, the expectation of a fairer American policy in the Middle East, and then severe disappointment after Mr. Obama’s failure to intercede in Gaza. I thus concluded that no matter how many envoys, speeches or interviews Mr. Obama offers to us, he will not win the hearts and minds of Egyptians until he takes up the injustice in the Middle East. I imagine the same holds true for much of the greater Muslim world.
Have Egyptians irreversibly gone off Mr. Obama? No. Egyptians still think that this one-of-a-kind American president can do great things. Young Egyptians’ admiration for America is offset by frustration with American foreign policy. Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this came from one Egyptian blogger: “I love America. It’s the country of dreams ... but I wonder if I will ever be able someday to declare my love.”
Alaa Al Aswany is the author of “The Yacoubian Building” and “Chicago.” This article was translated by Geoff D. Porter from the Arabic.
*****
February 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Beyond the Banks
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Jenin, West Bank
Visiting Israel, I’ve been peppered with questions from Israelis and Palestinians about where their peace process will fit in among President Obama’s priorities. My guess, I’ve answered, is that President Obama has three immediate priorities: banks, banks and banks — and none of them are the West Bank.
That said, once Obama is able to think afresh about the Middle East, he will find that the Bush team has left an interesting legacy here: 140,000 U.S. soldiers doing nation-building in Iraq and one U.S. soldier — actually a three-star U.S. Army general — doing nation-building in the West Bank. We need a better balance.
Those U.S. soldiers in Iraq can take pride in the recent Iraqi elections, which have strengthened the more secular and centrist parties. But we have to wait and see if the losers in this election take their defeat peacefully and whether the winners can actually produce better governance. The Iraqi elections, though, are a rare example of Arabs getting a chance to build their own future from the bottom up, and I continue to root for them.
Palestinians need the same chance. You can’t have a two-state solution without two states, and today the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which still supports a two-state deal, doesn’t have the institutions of a state, particularly an effective police force. Therefore, my hope is that Obama will focus not only on peace plans from the top down, but also on institution-building from the bottom up. The best way to isolate Hamas in Gaza is to build the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank into a decent government with steadily expanding control over its territory.
That’s exactly what the one U.S. Army officer in the West Bank, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, is up to. I accompanied him and his little team to Jenin — once the most violent city in the West Bank — to see their work. It was quite a scene: I watched a company of newly trained, proud and professional-looking Palestinian Authority troops, standing at attention, AK-47 assault rifles at their side, listening with obvious respect to the American general telling them: “What you’ve done has done more to advance the Palestinian national project than anything else ... You took care of your people at a difficult time. That is how the security forces of a country behave.”
No, you don’t see that every day.
General Dayton was addressing the Second Special Battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force, or N.S.F. It was trained by the Jordanian police in a program overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator — a k a Dayton. He was originally assigned to help reform Palestinian security by the Bush team in 2005, but only got the funds to do so after Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. Some 1,600 Palestinian N.S.F. troops have since graduated, and 500 are now in training. Schooled in everything from riot control to human rights, the N.S.F. is the only truly professional force controlled by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Israeli Army, originally dubious about the Dayton mission, has come to respect it and is now allowing it to expand to Hebron. What really got Israel’s attention was that during the three-week Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the West Bank never blew up, largely because N.S.F. troops allowed widespread protests but kept Palestinian demonstrators from clashing with Israeli soldiers.
“General Dayton is our friend,” said Col. Radi Abu Asida of the N.S.F. “Now we have excellent training. Now we have professionalism in our security work. We told the people during the Gaza demonstrations, ‘You can protest, but you must do it in a modern way.’ ”
Unfortunately, funding for Dayton’s work — secured by two farsighted U.S. House members, Nita Lowey and Gary Ackerman — runs out soon. That would be a tragedy. Before the N.S.F. was deployed “there was chaos here,” said Mohammed Abu Bakr, a Jenin wedding shop owner, referring to the security vacuum after the collapse of the Arafat regime. “Everyone wanted to fight with everyone else. Now everything is organized.”
The Dayton mission — a rare bright spot in a broken landscape — is the ground floor we need to build upon. “The issue is not just territory, but how we fill that territory,” said Gidi Grinstein, the president of the Israeli think tank, the Reut Institute. “Jenin is important. This is the beginning of capacity-building, which leads to institution-building, which leads to state-building, which leads to independence.” But the legitimacy of the Palestinian police depends on the peace process moving forward and Palestinians being ceded control, by Israel, over more territory as they prove themselves, he added. “Otherwise, they are seen as a tool to promote the occupation and will be delegitimized and attacked.”
So it is important to have George Mitchell, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, steadily pushing the diplomacy from above, but nothing will happen without vastly increasing U.S. efforts from below to help West Bankers build a credible governing capacity. Do that, and everything is possible. Don’t do it, and nothing is possible.
****
February 12, 2009
Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down
By ROBERT F. WORTH
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city — or worse.
“I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.”
With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.
The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.
No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.
Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.
Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. Asked about the number, Humaid bin Dimas, a spokesman for Dubai’s Labor Ministry, said he would not confirm or deny it and refused to comment further. Some say the true figure is much higher.
“At the moment there is a readiness to believe the worst,” said Simon Williams, HSBC bank’s chief economist in Dubai. “And the limits on data make it difficult to counter the rumors.”
Some things are clear: real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai’s six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. Last week, Moody’s Investor’s Service announced that it might downgrade its ratings on six of Dubai’s most prominent state-owned companies, citing a deterioration in the economic outlook. So many used luxury cars are for sale , they are sometimes sold for 40 percent less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai’s roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear.
Some analysts say the crisis is likely to have long-lasting effects on the seven-member emirates federation, where Dubai has long played rebellious younger brother to oil-rich and more conservative Abu Dhabi. Dubai officials, swallowing their pride, have made clear that they would be open to a bailout, but so far Abu Dhabi has offered assistance only to its own banks.
“Why is Abu Dhabi allowing its neighbor to have its international reputation trashed, when it could bail out Dubai’s banks and restore confidence?” said Christopher M. Davidson, who predicted the current crisis in “Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success,” a book published last year. “Perhaps the plan is to centralize the U.A.E.” under Abu Dhabi’s control, he mused, in a move that would sharply curtail Dubai’s independence and perhaps change its signature freewheeling style.
For many foreigners, Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here.
But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.
“Is it going to get better? They tell you that, but I don’t know what to believe anymore,” said Sofia, who still hopes to find a job before her time runs out. “People are really panicking quickly.”
Hamza Thiab, a 27-year-old Iraqi who moved here from Baghdad in 2005, lost his job with an engineering firm six weeks ago. He has until the end of February to find a job, or he must leave. “I’ve been looking for a new job for three months, and I’ve only had two interviews,” he said. “Before, you used to open up the papers here and see dozens of jobs. The minimum for a civil engineer with four years’ experience used to be 15,000 dirhams a month. Now, the maximum you’ll get is 8,000,” or about $2,000.
Mr. Thiab was sitting in a Costa Coffee Shop in the Ibn Battuta mall, where most of the customers seemed to be single men sitting alone, dolefully drinking coffee at midday. If he fails to find a job, he will have to go to Jordan, where he has family members — Iraq is still too dangerous, he says — though the situation is no better there. Before that, he will have to borrow money from his father to pay off the more than $12,000 he still owes on a bank loan for his Honda Civic. Iraqi friends bought fancier cars and are now, with no job, struggling to sell them.
“Before, so many of us were living a good life here,” Mr. Thiab said. “Now we cannot pay our loans. We are all just sleeping, smoking, drinking coffee and having headaches because of the situation.”
A New York Times employee in Dubai contributed reporting.
Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down
By ROBERT F. WORTH
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai’s fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who make up 90 percent of the population here, she has been laid off and faces the prospect of being forced to leave this Persian Gulf city — or worse.
“I’m really scared of what could happen, because I bought property here,” said Sofia, who asked that her last name be withheld because she is still hunting for a new job. “If I can’t pay it off, I was told I could end up in debtors’ prison.”
With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.
The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.
No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.
Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.
Last month, local newspapers reported that Dubai was canceling 1,500 work visas every day, citing unnamed government officials. Asked about the number, Humaid bin Dimas, a spokesman for Dubai’s Labor Ministry, said he would not confirm or deny it and refused to comment further. Some say the true figure is much higher.
“At the moment there is a readiness to believe the worst,” said Simon Williams, HSBC bank’s chief economist in Dubai. “And the limits on data make it difficult to counter the rumors.”
Some things are clear: real estate prices, which rose dramatically during Dubai’s six-year boom, have dropped 30 percent or more over the past two or three months in some parts of the city. Last week, Moody’s Investor’s Service announced that it might downgrade its ratings on six of Dubai’s most prominent state-owned companies, citing a deterioration in the economic outlook. So many used luxury cars are for sale , they are sometimes sold for 40 percent less than the asking price two months ago, car dealers say. Dubai’s roads, usually thick with traffic at this time of year, are now mostly clear.
Some analysts say the crisis is likely to have long-lasting effects on the seven-member emirates federation, where Dubai has long played rebellious younger brother to oil-rich and more conservative Abu Dhabi. Dubai officials, swallowing their pride, have made clear that they would be open to a bailout, but so far Abu Dhabi has offered assistance only to its own banks.
“Why is Abu Dhabi allowing its neighbor to have its international reputation trashed, when it could bail out Dubai’s banks and restore confidence?” said Christopher M. Davidson, who predicted the current crisis in “Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success,” a book published last year. “Perhaps the plan is to centralize the U.A.E.” under Abu Dhabi’s control, he mused, in a move that would sharply curtail Dubai’s independence and perhaps change its signature freewheeling style.
For many foreigners, Dubai had seemed at first to be a refuge, relatively insulated from the panic that began hitting the rest of the world last autumn. The Persian Gulf is cushioned by vast oil and gas wealth, and some who lost jobs in New York and London began applying here.
But Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.
“Is it going to get better? They tell you that, but I don’t know what to believe anymore,” said Sofia, who still hopes to find a job before her time runs out. “People are really panicking quickly.”
Hamza Thiab, a 27-year-old Iraqi who moved here from Baghdad in 2005, lost his job with an engineering firm six weeks ago. He has until the end of February to find a job, or he must leave. “I’ve been looking for a new job for three months, and I’ve only had two interviews,” he said. “Before, you used to open up the papers here and see dozens of jobs. The minimum for a civil engineer with four years’ experience used to be 15,000 dirhams a month. Now, the maximum you’ll get is 8,000,” or about $2,000.
Mr. Thiab was sitting in a Costa Coffee Shop in the Ibn Battuta mall, where most of the customers seemed to be single men sitting alone, dolefully drinking coffee at midday. If he fails to find a job, he will have to go to Jordan, where he has family members — Iraq is still too dangerous, he says — though the situation is no better there. Before that, he will have to borrow money from his father to pay off the more than $12,000 he still owes on a bank loan for his Honda Civic. Iraqi friends bought fancier cars and are now, with no job, struggling to sell them.
“Before, so many of us were living a good life here,” Mr. Thiab said. “Now we cannot pay our loans. We are all just sleeping, smoking, drinking coffee and having headaches because of the situation.”
A New York Times employee in Dubai contributed reporting.
There are photos at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
February 14, 2009
A New Role for Iraqi Militants: Patrons of the Arts
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
BAGHDAD — Two years ago the American authorities arrested Sheik Mazin al-Saedi, a senior aide to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, accusing him of organizing kidnappings and killings.
This week in Baghdad, the city once terrorized by those killings, Sheik Mazin mingled in a white-walled art gallery as the patron of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that would not, exactly, be out of place in Chelsea or SoHo: abstract art, expressionist paintings and conceptual works larded with symbols of Iraq’s ancient history and today’s reality.
The goal was “to show the entire world that we are not as the media portrays us, a movement that believes only in bearing arms and knows no culture other than that of violence,” Sheik Mazin said of Mr. Sadr’s movement, which is widely blamed for its part in the violence that followed the American invasion in 2003.
“The Sadr movement,” he said, “is also one that believes in ideas and encourages and patronizes the arts.”
And so Baghdad’s first Sadrist art exhibition, titled “Beacons of Humanity,” collected 80 works of art by 39 Iraqi artists and displayed them for three days on the eve of a Shiite holiday commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, which culminates in Karbala on Monday.
Some of the works are jarring, challenging fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that forbid depictions of human figures. Others suggest peace, reconciliation and the triumph of good over evil. For Iraqis, the mere fact of the exhibition was a sign that Iraq’s artistic traditions might have not only survived years of war and chaos, but also emerged reinvigorated.
Hassan Nassar, who owns a gallery called Madarat, one of the few that stayed open during the worst of Iraq’s violence, called the Sadrists’ patronage of the arts welcome, if unexpected.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, “when they lay down their weapons and show their ideas through civilized methods.”
Whether it is a cynical ploy of a movement that has lost popular support or a genuine shift in tactics remains to be seen. Mr. Sadr’s military wing has splintered, having been routed by Iraqi government offensives last year in Basra and its Shiite stronghold in Baghdad, even as the organization’s political and social wings have sought to refashion themselves as purveyors of what the Americans call “soft power,” convincing rather than coercing.
For Baghdad’s artists, anyway, the opening of any gallery space amounts to an artistic revival after years of despair. Art suffered like everything else during the country’s descent into sectarian warfare. Museums and galleries closed. Art sales evaporated, depriving artists of means to live.
Many fled the country, among them Akram Naji, a ceramicist who went to Syria for medical treatment and stayed for two years. He returned last year and, for the exhibition, created a triptych of bright ceramic forms. The colors, he said, were a response to the violence.
The exhibition took place in a gallery and studio called Biyarq, which means flag. It is located in a worn house in Baghdad’s Waziriya neighborhood, a cultural region of sorts, anchored by the Academy of Fine Arts.
Its director, Hasim Hamid al-Hashami, opened the gallery six months ago as an artistic oasis, with workshops and lectures as well as exhibitions. Standing on the gallery’s roof, he gestured to a lot below, spotted with weeds and broken furniture, and imagined a theater for the performing arts. There are already separate studios for painters, designers, sculptors, actors and playwrights.
The gallery is even putting up Adel Dawod, 39, a painter who recently arrived from Nasiriya, striving to make it in his country’s capital. “I wanted to live the life of art in Baghdad,” he said.
The gallery is independent, an artists’ collective, but it welcomed the Sadrists’ commission: a series of works focused on Imam Hussein’s example of resistance and martyrdom in the fight against injustice, a foundation of Shiite faith.
It is part of a project the Sadrists announced in August to create “an ideological, cultural, religious and social army” to battle “the secular Western tide,” as a pamphlet put it at the time. (The pamphlet also emphasized that this new army would be “prevented totally from using weapons.”)
“It is actually a revolution carried out without violence,” said Ghufran al-Saedi, a member of Parliament representing Mr. Sadr’s party. Still, as she toured the exhibition, she was shadowed by bodyguards, a reminder that Baghdad remained a dangerous place for anyone of prominence.
The curators and artists said they felt no pressure to be dogmatic, to hew to the Sadrists’ version of Islam or of art. While the exhibition was religious, the styles and subjects were not necessarily so. The exhibit amounts to a campaign by the Sadrists to go beyond their past as a purely confrontational force to Iraqis, presenting a more moderate version of Shiite tenets, which is significant after an election that widely rejected religious parties.
“There are two kinds of Islamic forces: one that is extreme and one that is not,” Mr. Hashami, the director, said. “The moderate Islamic forces allow painting and drawing all those things, while the extremist ones threaten to kill all who work in this field.”
Roughly a year ago, he added, he felt the tide change perceptively toward moderation, signaling at last the artistic renaissance Saddam Hussein’s ouster promised but failed to deliver.
“Isn’t it pessimistic?” a person in the crowd of visitors asked the exhibition’s curator, Asad al-Sagheer, as he described an unsettling composition of death masks, painted in thick strokes of red and blue. The artist, Halim Qassim, found inspiration in Baghdad’s central morgue, near his home in Babalmuabhm, a place once overflowing with corpses.
“He thinks there’s beauty in the faces,” Mr. Sagheer said, “even after they’ve been killed.”
A painting by Mr. Dawod incorporated Sumerian forms to portray the traditional Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala, where Imam Hussein died in the seventh century. Other symbols were topical, given the bombings that have struck the millions clogging the country’s roads, including one on Friday that killed 35 people, many of them women and children, north of Karbala.
“These are the I.E.D.’s,” he said, pointing to his painting and referring to the so-called improvised explosive devices used by insurgents, “that are harassing and killing and bombing the visitors.”
Sheik Mazin, Baghdad’s newest patron of the arts, sounded defensive when asked about the sectarian violence that the Sadr movement was blamed for. As for his own arrest, he said, he was released after two days because of a lack of evidence.
As the people in the gallery circled around him, he said Mr. Sadr’s fighters had staged “an honest resistance” to Iraq’s foreign occupiers, but never singled out artists.
“There is no rupture between Islamists and artists,” he said. “True Islam patronizes the arts.”
Riyadh Mohammed and Stephen Farrell contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
February 14, 2009
A New Role for Iraqi Militants: Patrons of the Arts
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
BAGHDAD — Two years ago the American authorities arrested Sheik Mazin al-Saedi, a senior aide to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, accusing him of organizing kidnappings and killings.
This week in Baghdad, the city once terrorized by those killings, Sheik Mazin mingled in a white-walled art gallery as the patron of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that would not, exactly, be out of place in Chelsea or SoHo: abstract art, expressionist paintings and conceptual works larded with symbols of Iraq’s ancient history and today’s reality.
The goal was “to show the entire world that we are not as the media portrays us, a movement that believes only in bearing arms and knows no culture other than that of violence,” Sheik Mazin said of Mr. Sadr’s movement, which is widely blamed for its part in the violence that followed the American invasion in 2003.
“The Sadr movement,” he said, “is also one that believes in ideas and encourages and patronizes the arts.”
And so Baghdad’s first Sadrist art exhibition, titled “Beacons of Humanity,” collected 80 works of art by 39 Iraqi artists and displayed them for three days on the eve of a Shiite holiday commemorating the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, which culminates in Karbala on Monday.
Some of the works are jarring, challenging fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that forbid depictions of human figures. Others suggest peace, reconciliation and the triumph of good over evil. For Iraqis, the mere fact of the exhibition was a sign that Iraq’s artistic traditions might have not only survived years of war and chaos, but also emerged reinvigorated.
Hassan Nassar, who owns a gallery called Madarat, one of the few that stayed open during the worst of Iraq’s violence, called the Sadrists’ patronage of the arts welcome, if unexpected.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, “when they lay down their weapons and show their ideas through civilized methods.”
Whether it is a cynical ploy of a movement that has lost popular support or a genuine shift in tactics remains to be seen. Mr. Sadr’s military wing has splintered, having been routed by Iraqi government offensives last year in Basra and its Shiite stronghold in Baghdad, even as the organization’s political and social wings have sought to refashion themselves as purveyors of what the Americans call “soft power,” convincing rather than coercing.
For Baghdad’s artists, anyway, the opening of any gallery space amounts to an artistic revival after years of despair. Art suffered like everything else during the country’s descent into sectarian warfare. Museums and galleries closed. Art sales evaporated, depriving artists of means to live.
Many fled the country, among them Akram Naji, a ceramicist who went to Syria for medical treatment and stayed for two years. He returned last year and, for the exhibition, created a triptych of bright ceramic forms. The colors, he said, were a response to the violence.
The exhibition took place in a gallery and studio called Biyarq, which means flag. It is located in a worn house in Baghdad’s Waziriya neighborhood, a cultural region of sorts, anchored by the Academy of Fine Arts.
Its director, Hasim Hamid al-Hashami, opened the gallery six months ago as an artistic oasis, with workshops and lectures as well as exhibitions. Standing on the gallery’s roof, he gestured to a lot below, spotted with weeds and broken furniture, and imagined a theater for the performing arts. There are already separate studios for painters, designers, sculptors, actors and playwrights.
The gallery is even putting up Adel Dawod, 39, a painter who recently arrived from Nasiriya, striving to make it in his country’s capital. “I wanted to live the life of art in Baghdad,” he said.
The gallery is independent, an artists’ collective, but it welcomed the Sadrists’ commission: a series of works focused on Imam Hussein’s example of resistance and martyrdom in the fight against injustice, a foundation of Shiite faith.
It is part of a project the Sadrists announced in August to create “an ideological, cultural, religious and social army” to battle “the secular Western tide,” as a pamphlet put it at the time. (The pamphlet also emphasized that this new army would be “prevented totally from using weapons.”)
“It is actually a revolution carried out without violence,” said Ghufran al-Saedi, a member of Parliament representing Mr. Sadr’s party. Still, as she toured the exhibition, she was shadowed by bodyguards, a reminder that Baghdad remained a dangerous place for anyone of prominence.
The curators and artists said they felt no pressure to be dogmatic, to hew to the Sadrists’ version of Islam or of art. While the exhibition was religious, the styles and subjects were not necessarily so. The exhibit amounts to a campaign by the Sadrists to go beyond their past as a purely confrontational force to Iraqis, presenting a more moderate version of Shiite tenets, which is significant after an election that widely rejected religious parties.
“There are two kinds of Islamic forces: one that is extreme and one that is not,” Mr. Hashami, the director, said. “The moderate Islamic forces allow painting and drawing all those things, while the extremist ones threaten to kill all who work in this field.”
Roughly a year ago, he added, he felt the tide change perceptively toward moderation, signaling at last the artistic renaissance Saddam Hussein’s ouster promised but failed to deliver.
“Isn’t it pessimistic?” a person in the crowd of visitors asked the exhibition’s curator, Asad al-Sagheer, as he described an unsettling composition of death masks, painted in thick strokes of red and blue. The artist, Halim Qassim, found inspiration in Baghdad’s central morgue, near his home in Babalmuabhm, a place once overflowing with corpses.
“He thinks there’s beauty in the faces,” Mr. Sagheer said, “even after they’ve been killed.”
A painting by Mr. Dawod incorporated Sumerian forms to portray the traditional Shiite pilgrimage to Karbala, where Imam Hussein died in the seventh century. Other symbols were topical, given the bombings that have struck the millions clogging the country’s roads, including one on Friday that killed 35 people, many of them women and children, north of Karbala.
“These are the I.E.D.’s,” he said, pointing to his painting and referring to the so-called improvised explosive devices used by insurgents, “that are harassing and killing and bombing the visitors.”
Sheik Mazin, Baghdad’s newest patron of the arts, sounded defensive when asked about the sectarian violence that the Sadr movement was blamed for. As for his own arrest, he said, he was released after two days because of a lack of evidence.
As the people in the gallery circled around him, he said Mr. Sadr’s fighters had staged “an honest resistance” to Iraq’s foreign occupiers, but never singled out artists.
“There is no rupture between Islamists and artists,” he said. “True Islam patronizes the arts.”
Riyadh Mohammed and Stephen Farrell contributed reporting.
February 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Magic Mountain
By ROGER COHEN
Tehran
The Alborz Mountains soar above the north side of the megalopolis that is the Iranian capital, their snowy peaks arousing dreams of evasion in people caught by the city’s bottlenecks. One day I could resist them no longer.
Near Evin prison, where thousands languish and executions are frequent, a trail begins. Following a rushing stream, it winds up past teahouses full of the fragrant smoke of hookahs and stalls offering fresh pomegranate juice, into the bracing wild.
Iran’s pursuit of liberty, unbowed since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, remains unfulfilled. The Islamic revolution has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible. So the freedom of the mountains is double in nature.
For young Iranians, the Alborz trails are a physical escape from the city where jobs are elusive, but also a mental one — from self-censorship, from monochrome dress, and from the morality police ever alert for a female neck revealed, hands fleetingly held, or hair cascading from a headscarf.
Their youthful voices open up. They sing to the haunting sound of the kamancheh, a bowed fiddle. They bellow into the gullies. They recite the poetry of the great Hafez. They allow fingertips, and more, to touch. Their camaraderie is strong: bowling alone is not what repressive societies do. Iran’s force — a population younger than its 30-year-old revolution — is palpable.
At a teahouse around the 1,900-meter mark, I fell into conversation with a couple, Narges Azizi, 23, and her 26-year-old boyfriend, Behnam Moradi. Students of graphics and design, they hike once a week. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue sweat suit, a sufficient affront to Islamic dress code to have caused her detention back in the city.
“They took my photo, face to the camera, both profiles,” Azizi said. “My parents had to get me.” I’d heard a similar story from a divorced woman in her mid-30s stopped for wearing another proscribed garment — a skirt — even though it reached to her ankles. She was still seething from the humiliation of the experience, parental rescue and all.
“Our relationship is like stealing,” Moradi said.
“It’s worse than stealing,” Azizi said.
Highly educated, lacking the means to marry or acquire their own apartment, dodging parental reproach and dour governmental strictures, dissatisfied but not to the point of rebellion, this young couple is typical enough of a nation in a halfway house of Islam and modernity.
Iran’s emblem should be a turbaned mullah on a motor scooter talking on a cell phone; or a young woman who has fashioned a hijab into an article of Parisian elegance.
“Should we leave?” Moradi asked me.
“Not if you’re prepared to be patient.”
“Change could take two generations,” he said.
One is more likely if the United States shows restraint. I thought back to a senior cleric, Mohsen Gharavian, whom I’d met in the holy city of Qom. He’d seemed at ease expounding on the union of Islam, politics and freedom until the subject of women’s attire came up.
“Prostitution is a career for some people in some countries, but here we cannot bear that,” Gharavian said. “So the reason this looseness in dressing is not admitted is that this concept may lead gradually to a negation of our values and bring the preconditions for the spread of prostitution.”
Right.
Yet the revolution of which this cleric is a bastion has empowered women. In the end, it was only Ayatollah Khomeini who could tell traditional families they had to educate their daughters.
Today, as my colleague Nazila Fathi recently noted, more than 60 percent of university students are women. Laws cannot forever lag the reality of an emancipated mindset.
The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.
That is why I suggested Azizi and Moradi be patient. That is also why it is essential that the West engage with Iran and avoid the one thing that could set back the country’s inexorable evolution: an act of war that would increase repression and embolden religious nationalism.
It’s not easy to be patient. Service in the Basiji, the pro-government volunteer militia, is often a surer path to a good job than a college degree.
Still, up in the Alborz, Iranians’ long-held dream of freedom seems within reach. At 2,100 meters, I saw two young women with their hair down. Afraid? They laughed.
Higher still, I met Marjan Safiyar, 20, an electrical engineering student. She looked chic in a tight-fitting silvery jacket. Up here, she said, “I breathe.” I asked her if she thought Iran would change.
“No,” she laughed, “Our men don’t have the courage.”
But its women are another story. They are reason to see Iran as one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East rather than one of the most threatening.
Op-Ed Columnist
The Magic Mountain
By ROGER COHEN
Tehran
The Alborz Mountains soar above the north side of the megalopolis that is the Iranian capital, their snowy peaks arousing dreams of evasion in people caught by the city’s bottlenecks. One day I could resist them no longer.
Near Evin prison, where thousands languish and executions are frequent, a trail begins. Following a rushing stream, it winds up past teahouses full of the fragrant smoke of hookahs and stalls offering fresh pomegranate juice, into the bracing wild.
Iran’s pursuit of liberty, unbowed since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, remains unfulfilled. The Islamic revolution has not birthed a totalitarian state; all sorts of opinions are heard. But it has created a society whose ultimate bond is fear. Disappearance into some unmarked room is always possible. So the freedom of the mountains is double in nature.
For young Iranians, the Alborz trails are a physical escape from the city where jobs are elusive, but also a mental one — from self-censorship, from monochrome dress, and from the morality police ever alert for a female neck revealed, hands fleetingly held, or hair cascading from a headscarf.
Their youthful voices open up. They sing to the haunting sound of the kamancheh, a bowed fiddle. They bellow into the gullies. They recite the poetry of the great Hafez. They allow fingertips, and more, to touch. Their camaraderie is strong: bowling alone is not what repressive societies do. Iran’s force — a population younger than its 30-year-old revolution — is palpable.
At a teahouse around the 1,900-meter mark, I fell into conversation with a couple, Narges Azizi, 23, and her 26-year-old boyfriend, Behnam Moradi. Students of graphics and design, they hike once a week. She was wearing a loose-fitting blue sweat suit, a sufficient affront to Islamic dress code to have caused her detention back in the city.
“They took my photo, face to the camera, both profiles,” Azizi said. “My parents had to get me.” I’d heard a similar story from a divorced woman in her mid-30s stopped for wearing another proscribed garment — a skirt — even though it reached to her ankles. She was still seething from the humiliation of the experience, parental rescue and all.
“Our relationship is like stealing,” Moradi said.
“It’s worse than stealing,” Azizi said.
Highly educated, lacking the means to marry or acquire their own apartment, dodging parental reproach and dour governmental strictures, dissatisfied but not to the point of rebellion, this young couple is typical enough of a nation in a halfway house of Islam and modernity.
Iran’s emblem should be a turbaned mullah on a motor scooter talking on a cell phone; or a young woman who has fashioned a hijab into an article of Parisian elegance.
“Should we leave?” Moradi asked me.
“Not if you’re prepared to be patient.”
“Change could take two generations,” he said.
One is more likely if the United States shows restraint. I thought back to a senior cleric, Mohsen Gharavian, whom I’d met in the holy city of Qom. He’d seemed at ease expounding on the union of Islam, politics and freedom until the subject of women’s attire came up.
“Prostitution is a career for some people in some countries, but here we cannot bear that,” Gharavian said. “So the reason this looseness in dressing is not admitted is that this concept may lead gradually to a negation of our values and bring the preconditions for the spread of prostitution.”
Right.
Yet the revolution of which this cleric is a bastion has empowered women. In the end, it was only Ayatollah Khomeini who could tell traditional families they had to educate their daughters.
Today, as my colleague Nazila Fathi recently noted, more than 60 percent of university students are women. Laws cannot forever lag the reality of an emancipated mindset.
The irony of the Islamic Revolution is that it has created a very secular society within the framework of clerical rule. The shah enacted progressive laws for women unready for them. Now the opposite is true: progressive women face confining jurisprudence. At some point something must give.
That is why I suggested Azizi and Moradi be patient. That is also why it is essential that the West engage with Iran and avoid the one thing that could set back the country’s inexorable evolution: an act of war that would increase repression and embolden religious nationalism.
It’s not easy to be patient. Service in the Basiji, the pro-government volunteer militia, is often a surer path to a good job than a college degree.
Still, up in the Alborz, Iranians’ long-held dream of freedom seems within reach. At 2,100 meters, I saw two young women with their hair down. Afraid? They laughed.
Higher still, I met Marjan Safiyar, 20, an electrical engineering student. She looked chic in a tight-fitting silvery jacket. Up here, she said, “I breathe.” I asked her if she thought Iran would change.
“No,” she laughed, “Our men don’t have the courage.”
But its women are another story. They are reason to see Iran as one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East rather than one of the most threatening.
February 19, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Reading Khamenei in Tehran
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN
No Iranian puzzle frustrates America and its allies as much as how to reach Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who sets the country’s direction.
When I asked one veteran Iran hand how old Khamenei is, the answer was: “Not old enough.” Years of probing have failed to unearth a conduit to the man with the white beard and outsized glasses whose image, often smiling, dots the billboards of Tehran. The guy’s a mystery.
Solving it lies at the heart of the Iranian challenge facing President Obama because although Khamenei’s authority is not absolute, his veto power is. He can no more be bypassed than the Great Recession.
Khamenei, imprisoned and tortured under the shah, will be 70 in July. He’s led Iran for two decades, since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His vast authority includes the right to name the heads of the elite Republican Guards, the armed forces, the judiciary and state television. He has indirect power to vet parliamentary candidates. Yet he cloaks his absolutism in the mild garb of the arbiter.
Under the system know as “Velayat-e-faqih,” or the guardianship of the religious jurist, an idea developed by Khomeini to justify the clergy assuming political power, Khamenei is virtually assured of ruling for life. Short of the reappearance of the “hidden imam,” not spotted since his disappearance in the 9th century, his earthly deputy presides as custodian of the Islamic Revolution.
To many Iranians, this setup represents the core betrayal of the revolution, whatever the elements of democracy — including a June presidential election — that have emerged around the Constitution’s incorporation of the contested idea of a God-given guide.
To many western officials — enamored or unhappy by turns with various more colorful figures than Khamenei, and casting around for the real center of power in Iran’s labyrinth of the democratic and the deified — the system is equally maddening.
But it’s not about to change. On the contrary, I’d say the central Iranian political phenomenon of recent years has been the reinforcement of Khamenei. How to engage with Iran begins and ends with him.
The notorious wealth of his chief rival, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has tended to reinforce Khamenei’s pious image. The favoring of the Revolutionary Guards under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has strengthened an institution beholden to Khamenei. The reformist wave has ebbed.
More important, his attacks on “the arrogant powers” — read the United States — have been buttressed by the hubris of the Bush administration. His passionate support for the Palestinian cause has resonated, most recently because of the Gaza debacle. Even his attempts to align the Islamic Revolution with the world’s disinherited against U.S. “economic dominance” have been comforted by the travails of global capitalism.
So what does this astute man want? What will he give? Khamenei said last year: “Undoubtedly, the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation, I will be the first one to approve of that.” This suggests dogma does not preclude movement.
Khamenei sees his primary task as safeguarding a revolution whose core values include independence, cultural and scientific self-sufficiency, the global revitalization of Islam as a guiding body of law, and social justice. He believes America demands “submission and surrender to its hegemony.”
Given these convictions, the United States must embark on a visionary change of direction. Obama must assure Khamenei that not only has America abandoned the goal of regime change, it sees Iran as a central player in regional stability. That deals with the independence obsession.
Obama must abandon military threats to Iran’s nuclear program in favor of an approach recognizing the country’s inevitable mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, while securing verifiable conditions that ensure such mastery is not diverted to bomb manufacturing. That addresses Iran’s intellectual pride (as well as the fact that the neighborhood includes the nuclear-armed powers of Israel, Pakistan and India).
He must redirect U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine to make Hamas-Fatah reconciliation a core American objective, recognize that the “terrorist” label is an inadequate description of the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah and end the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy that sabotages a two-state solution. This would allow Khamenei to claim that his demands for Palestinian justice — as the self-styled leader of the world’s Muslims — have been heard.
In return, Iran must accept the two-state solution backed by the Arab League (Khamenei has said “the fate of Palestine should be determined by the Palestinian people”). It must reciprocate American movement on Hamas and Hezbollah by ending its military, but not political, support for them.
It must back U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. It must improve its poor human-rights record. And, to show goodwill, it must hit the pause button on the centrifuges once high-level talks with America begin.
Khamenei is not irrational. Social justice is the fourth pillar of the revolution. He has said, “What Islam pursues is economic development and prosperity for all social strata.” Yet Iran is a profoundly unequal society. With oil prices at around $35 a barrel, that won’t change without creating more wealth in ways that only engagement with the West can bring.
Op-Ed Columnist
Reading Khamenei in Tehran
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN
No Iranian puzzle frustrates America and its allies as much as how to reach Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who sets the country’s direction.
When I asked one veteran Iran hand how old Khamenei is, the answer was: “Not old enough.” Years of probing have failed to unearth a conduit to the man with the white beard and outsized glasses whose image, often smiling, dots the billboards of Tehran. The guy’s a mystery.
Solving it lies at the heart of the Iranian challenge facing President Obama because although Khamenei’s authority is not absolute, his veto power is. He can no more be bypassed than the Great Recession.
Khamenei, imprisoned and tortured under the shah, will be 70 in July. He’s led Iran for two decades, since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His vast authority includes the right to name the heads of the elite Republican Guards, the armed forces, the judiciary and state television. He has indirect power to vet parliamentary candidates. Yet he cloaks his absolutism in the mild garb of the arbiter.
Under the system know as “Velayat-e-faqih,” or the guardianship of the religious jurist, an idea developed by Khomeini to justify the clergy assuming political power, Khamenei is virtually assured of ruling for life. Short of the reappearance of the “hidden imam,” not spotted since his disappearance in the 9th century, his earthly deputy presides as custodian of the Islamic Revolution.
To many Iranians, this setup represents the core betrayal of the revolution, whatever the elements of democracy — including a June presidential election — that have emerged around the Constitution’s incorporation of the contested idea of a God-given guide.
To many western officials — enamored or unhappy by turns with various more colorful figures than Khamenei, and casting around for the real center of power in Iran’s labyrinth of the democratic and the deified — the system is equally maddening.
But it’s not about to change. On the contrary, I’d say the central Iranian political phenomenon of recent years has been the reinforcement of Khamenei. How to engage with Iran begins and ends with him.
The notorious wealth of his chief rival, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has tended to reinforce Khamenei’s pious image. The favoring of the Revolutionary Guards under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has strengthened an institution beholden to Khamenei. The reformist wave has ebbed.
More important, his attacks on “the arrogant powers” — read the United States — have been buttressed by the hubris of the Bush administration. His passionate support for the Palestinian cause has resonated, most recently because of the Gaza debacle. Even his attempts to align the Islamic Revolution with the world’s disinherited against U.S. “economic dominance” have been comforted by the travails of global capitalism.
So what does this astute man want? What will he give? Khamenei said last year: “Undoubtedly, the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation, I will be the first one to approve of that.” This suggests dogma does not preclude movement.
Khamenei sees his primary task as safeguarding a revolution whose core values include independence, cultural and scientific self-sufficiency, the global revitalization of Islam as a guiding body of law, and social justice. He believes America demands “submission and surrender to its hegemony.”
Given these convictions, the United States must embark on a visionary change of direction. Obama must assure Khamenei that not only has America abandoned the goal of regime change, it sees Iran as a central player in regional stability. That deals with the independence obsession.
Obama must abandon military threats to Iran’s nuclear program in favor of an approach recognizing the country’s inevitable mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, while securing verifiable conditions that ensure such mastery is not diverted to bomb manufacturing. That addresses Iran’s intellectual pride (as well as the fact that the neighborhood includes the nuclear-armed powers of Israel, Pakistan and India).
He must redirect U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine to make Hamas-Fatah reconciliation a core American objective, recognize that the “terrorist” label is an inadequate description of the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah and end the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy that sabotages a two-state solution. This would allow Khamenei to claim that his demands for Palestinian justice — as the self-styled leader of the world’s Muslims — have been heard.
In return, Iran must accept the two-state solution backed by the Arab League (Khamenei has said “the fate of Palestine should be determined by the Palestinian people”). It must reciprocate American movement on Hamas and Hezbollah by ending its military, but not political, support for them.
It must back U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan. It must improve its poor human-rights record. And, to show goodwill, it must hit the pause button on the centrifuges once high-level talks with America begin.
Khamenei is not irrational. Social justice is the fourth pillar of the revolution. He has said, “What Islam pursues is economic development and prosperity for all social strata.” Yet Iran is a profoundly unequal society. With oil prices at around $35 a barrel, that won’t change without creating more wealth in ways that only engagement with the West can bring.
Small reforms will whet saudi appetite for more
The Economist
February 22, 2009
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia may be the world's last country to let a woman into its government-- albeit giving her a post that deals only with educating females. The lady in question still cannot drive herself to work. Nor may she travel in a car without her husband or a closely related male chaperon to ensure that she upholds her moral standards.
But at least King Abdullah, an 86-year-old, is himself driving in the right direction, hitherto at a snail's pace.
All the other changes that have resulted from his government shuffle--in the royally appointed proto-parliament known as the Shura Council, in the armed forces, in the courts, at the central bank, among the clergy, even in the frightful religious police --have been for the good.
Most daring of all, though unmentioned in his recent pronouncement, is the prospect that the gerontocratic method whereby Saudi kings have been succeeded, one after another, by a brother, each being a son of the state's gloriously procreative founding father, Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, may be dropped in favour of a prince from the younger generation.
A callow stripling of 60 or so may then conceivably be allowed to steer the kingdom faster toward modernity and perhaps even greater justice, equality and choice; forget the infamy of full democracy for now.
The pity is that the reforms have come so late and have previously been so tentative. After all, the king has been running the show since his half-brother, King Fahd, suffered a stroke in 1995.
When he came to the throne in 2005, Abdullah's friends predicted a spurt towards modernity and a less illiberal society. Senior princes insisted that permission for women to drive--never the topmost priority but a signal of intent--would soon be granted.
Shortly before he became king, Abdullah endorsed an element of choice in local elections, but the councils that resulted have proved feeble, and backward-looking Islamists have emerged as the loudest voices within them.
Reforming education and the courts has been impeded. Divisions and dithering in the upper ranks of the royal family have led to calls for caution. Even after the latest changes, the crown prince, Sultan, is still minister of defence, a mere 46 years after taking the post; Prince Saud, the foreign minister, stays in his job, 34 years on.
A noted reactionary, Prince Nayef, another of the king's brothers (one of 44 recognized sons of Abdel Aziz), still runs the Interior Ministry, his fief since 1975.
The chief reason aired in defence of this near-paralyzing slowness to reform is that the people of the kingdom are themselves loath to countenance rapid change and that the Wahhabist clergy, with whom the royal family made a compact nearly nine decades ago, would not tolerate moves toward a more liberal and secular society.
The disciples of Osama bin Laden are still itching to accuse the king of ungodliness should he go down a venal Western path. The king, it is said, cannot breezily ignore the reactionaries; he is doing his best.
This is true up to a point. Yet it is also true that frustration and resentment in Saudi Arabia are growing--and look set to go on doing so.
Nearly half of university graduates are women, yet less than a 10th of them have proper jobs outside the home. As the oil price plummets, unemployment may rise dangerously. As the Internet draws the young into the outside world, irritation at restrictions --against the cinema, against music, even against jingles in mobile telephones--will grow.
On the day the king declared his changes, the religious police checked shops to ensure that none was selling Valentine's Day cards, those harbingers of paganism and Christianity.
Though the king has opened an admirably ecumenical dialogue with leaders of other faiths, and even shown cautious signs of reaching out to Israel, no church or synagogue may yet be built on Saudi soil.
King Abdullah should be praised for his latest changes. But in the end the question is for how long just one extended family, said now to comprise perhaps 8,000 princes, will be able to control the country's power and wealth, founded simply on the fact of its holding more than a fifth of the world's oil reserves.
The old saw, that if you allow a little democracy you end up by getting the whole caboodle, applies to this kingdom too. It would be good if the new succession mechanism, run by a so-called Council of Allegiance, were able to skip the present ruling generation in search of a more youthful and dynamic monarch.
But in the longer run the Saudi people, like most people, will want not just a bigger slice of the cake but also the chance to wield some real political power for themselves.
distributed by the new york times syndicate.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
The Economist
February 22, 2009
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia may be the world's last country to let a woman into its government-- albeit giving her a post that deals only with educating females. The lady in question still cannot drive herself to work. Nor may she travel in a car without her husband or a closely related male chaperon to ensure that she upholds her moral standards.
But at least King Abdullah, an 86-year-old, is himself driving in the right direction, hitherto at a snail's pace.
All the other changes that have resulted from his government shuffle--in the royally appointed proto-parliament known as the Shura Council, in the armed forces, in the courts, at the central bank, among the clergy, even in the frightful religious police --have been for the good.
Most daring of all, though unmentioned in his recent pronouncement, is the prospect that the gerontocratic method whereby Saudi kings have been succeeded, one after another, by a brother, each being a son of the state's gloriously procreative founding father, Abdel Aziz ibn Saud, may be dropped in favour of a prince from the younger generation.
A callow stripling of 60 or so may then conceivably be allowed to steer the kingdom faster toward modernity and perhaps even greater justice, equality and choice; forget the infamy of full democracy for now.
The pity is that the reforms have come so late and have previously been so tentative. After all, the king has been running the show since his half-brother, King Fahd, suffered a stroke in 1995.
When he came to the throne in 2005, Abdullah's friends predicted a spurt towards modernity and a less illiberal society. Senior princes insisted that permission for women to drive--never the topmost priority but a signal of intent--would soon be granted.
Shortly before he became king, Abdullah endorsed an element of choice in local elections, but the councils that resulted have proved feeble, and backward-looking Islamists have emerged as the loudest voices within them.
Reforming education and the courts has been impeded. Divisions and dithering in the upper ranks of the royal family have led to calls for caution. Even after the latest changes, the crown prince, Sultan, is still minister of defence, a mere 46 years after taking the post; Prince Saud, the foreign minister, stays in his job, 34 years on.
A noted reactionary, Prince Nayef, another of the king's brothers (one of 44 recognized sons of Abdel Aziz), still runs the Interior Ministry, his fief since 1975.
The chief reason aired in defence of this near-paralyzing slowness to reform is that the people of the kingdom are themselves loath to countenance rapid change and that the Wahhabist clergy, with whom the royal family made a compact nearly nine decades ago, would not tolerate moves toward a more liberal and secular society.
The disciples of Osama bin Laden are still itching to accuse the king of ungodliness should he go down a venal Western path. The king, it is said, cannot breezily ignore the reactionaries; he is doing his best.
This is true up to a point. Yet it is also true that frustration and resentment in Saudi Arabia are growing--and look set to go on doing so.
Nearly half of university graduates are women, yet less than a 10th of them have proper jobs outside the home. As the oil price plummets, unemployment may rise dangerously. As the Internet draws the young into the outside world, irritation at restrictions --against the cinema, against music, even against jingles in mobile telephones--will grow.
On the day the king declared his changes, the religious police checked shops to ensure that none was selling Valentine's Day cards, those harbingers of paganism and Christianity.
Though the king has opened an admirably ecumenical dialogue with leaders of other faiths, and even shown cautious signs of reaching out to Israel, no church or synagogue may yet be built on Saudi soil.
King Abdullah should be praised for his latest changes. But in the end the question is for how long just one extended family, said now to comprise perhaps 8,000 princes, will be able to control the country's power and wealth, founded simply on the fact of its holding more than a fifth of the world's oil reserves.
The old saw, that if you allow a little democracy you end up by getting the whole caboodle, applies to this kingdom too. It would be good if the new succession mechanism, run by a so-called Council of Allegiance, were able to skip the present ruling generation in search of a more youthful and dynamic monarch.
But in the longer run the Saudi people, like most people, will want not just a bigger slice of the cake but also the chance to wield some real political power for themselves.
distributed by the new york times syndicate.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
February 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
What Iran’s Jews Say
By ROGER COHEN
Esfahan, Iran
At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan.”
The Jews of Iran remove their shoes, wind leather straps around their arms to attach phylacteries and take their places. Soon the sinuous murmur of Hebrew prayer courses through the cluttered synagogue with its lovely rugs and unhappy plants. Soleiman Sedighpoor, an antiques dealer with a store full of treasures, leads the service from a podium under a chandelier.
I’d visited the bright-eyed Sedighpoor, 61, the previous day at his dusty little shop. He’d sold me, with some reluctance, a bracelet of mother-of-pearl adorned with Persian miniatures. “The father buys, the son sells,” he muttered, before inviting me to the service.
Accepting, I inquired how he felt about the chants of “Death to Israel” — “Marg bar Esraeel” — that punctuate life in Iran.
“Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ ” he said. “I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”
The Middle East is an uncomfortable neighborhood for minorities, people whose very existence rebukes warring labels of religious and national identity. Yet perhaps 25,000 Jews live on in Iran, the largest such community, along with Turkey’s, in the Muslim Middle East. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran; here in Esfahan a handful caters to about 1,200 Jews, descendants of an almost 3,000-year-old community.
Over the decades since Israel’s creation in 1948, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the number of Iranian Jews has dwindled from about 100,000. But the exodus has been far less complete than from Arab countries, where some 800,000 Jews resided when modern Israel came into being.
In Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq — countries where more than 485,000 Jews lived before 1948 — fewer than 2,000 remain. The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better.
Of course, Israel’s unfinished cycle of wars has been with Arabs, not Persians, a fact that explains some of the discrepancy.
Still a mystery hovers over Iran’s Jews. It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.
Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.
That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 — a position popular in some American Jewish circles — is misleading and dangerous.
I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.
Among minorities, the Bahai — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.
I asked Morris Motamed, once the Jewish member of the Majlis, if he felt he was used, an Iranian quisling. “I don’t,” he replied. “In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews.” He said “Death to Israel” chants bother him, but went on to criticize the “double standards” that allow Israel, Pakistan and India to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.
Double standards don’t work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.
Green Zoneism — the basing of Middle Eastern policy on the construction of imaginary worlds — has led nowhere.
Realism about Iran should take account of Esfehan’s ecumenical Palestine Square. At the synagogue, Benhur Shemian, 22, told me Gaza showed Israel’s government was “criminal,” but still he hoped for peace. At the Al-Aqsa mosque, Monteza Foroughi, 72, pointed to the synagogue and said: “They have their prophet; we have ours. And that’s fine.”
Op-Ed Columnist
What Iran’s Jews Say
By ROGER COHEN
Esfahan, Iran
At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: “Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan.”
The Jews of Iran remove their shoes, wind leather straps around their arms to attach phylacteries and take their places. Soon the sinuous murmur of Hebrew prayer courses through the cluttered synagogue with its lovely rugs and unhappy plants. Soleiman Sedighpoor, an antiques dealer with a store full of treasures, leads the service from a podium under a chandelier.
I’d visited the bright-eyed Sedighpoor, 61, the previous day at his dusty little shop. He’d sold me, with some reluctance, a bracelet of mother-of-pearl adorned with Persian miniatures. “The father buys, the son sells,” he muttered, before inviting me to the service.
Accepting, I inquired how he felt about the chants of “Death to Israel” — “Marg bar Esraeel” — that punctuate life in Iran.
“Let them say ‘Death to Israel,’ ” he said. “I’ve been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I’ve visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian.”
The Middle East is an uncomfortable neighborhood for minorities, people whose very existence rebukes warring labels of religious and national identity. Yet perhaps 25,000 Jews live on in Iran, the largest such community, along with Turkey’s, in the Muslim Middle East. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran; here in Esfahan a handful caters to about 1,200 Jews, descendants of an almost 3,000-year-old community.
Over the decades since Israel’s creation in 1948, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the number of Iranian Jews has dwindled from about 100,000. But the exodus has been far less complete than from Arab countries, where some 800,000 Jews resided when modern Israel came into being.
In Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq — countries where more than 485,000 Jews lived before 1948 — fewer than 2,000 remain. The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better.
Of course, Israel’s unfinished cycle of wars has been with Arabs, not Persians, a fact that explains some of the discrepancy.
Still a mystery hovers over Iran’s Jews. It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.
Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.
That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 — a position popular in some American Jewish circles — is misleading and dangerous.
I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.
Among minorities, the Bahai — seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel — have suffered brutally harsh treatment.
I asked Morris Motamed, once the Jewish member of the Majlis, if he felt he was used, an Iranian quisling. “I don’t,” he replied. “In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews.” He said “Death to Israel” chants bother him, but went on to criticize the “double standards” that allow Israel, Pakistan and India to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.
Double standards don’t work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.
Green Zoneism — the basing of Middle Eastern policy on the construction of imaginary worlds — has led nowhere.
Realism about Iran should take account of Esfehan’s ecumenical Palestine Square. At the synagogue, Benhur Shemian, 22, told me Gaza showed Israel’s government was “criminal,” but still he hoped for peace. At the Al-Aqsa mosque, Monteza Foroughi, 72, pointed to the synagogue and said: “They have their prophet; we have ours. And that’s fine.”
February 26, 2009
Editorial
A Promise of Reform in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is notoriously change-averse, but four years after assuming the crown, King Abdullah may finally be ready to fulfill his promise to lead his country toward greater tolerance and modernity.
We welcome his decision to name several reformers to top posts in his government — and his even more surprising decision to oust certain hard-line leaders of the country’s powerful religious establishment. We hope it means that Saudi Arabia will soon grant full civil and legal rights to women and all who reside in the kingdom.
Most of the attention has centered on the king’s appointment of the first female deputy minister, who will focus on women’s education. That is an important first step. But there is still a very long way to go before women have anything approaching equality.
Saudi women need permission from their husbands or fathers to work, travel, study or even receive health care. They cannot drive. While more than half of the university students are women, their job prospects are severely limited.
The ordeal of the “Qatif girl” is a horrifying reminder of the insecurity and injustice of women’s lives in Saudi Arabia. In 2006, the young woman was gang-raped and later was nearly victimized again when the religious-dominated justice system sentenced her to 200 lashes for being alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married. She was only spared after King Abdullah heeded international protests and pardoned her.
Last week, King Abdullah challenged the conservative establishment even more directly, firing the chief of the widely feared religious police and the leader of the kingdom’s highest tribunal, the Supreme Council of Justice. The ousted chief justice issued a ruling last September saying that it would be permissible to kill the owners of TV channels broadcasting “immorality.”
Moderates also were added to the Grand Ulema Commission, an influential body of religious scholars from all branches of Sunni Islam. Regrettably, the king stopped short of adding minority Shiites to the mix.
Since the 9/11 attacks — 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis — Saudi Arabia has pledged to reform a hard-line religious-based education system that is seen as encouraging extremism. And Saudi officials say that the king’s new education minister, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, is a committed reformer. He also is the king’s son-in-law, so there can be no more excuses if Saudi textbooks continue to spew hateful views of non-Muslims.
King Abdullah has demonstrated a laudable desire for change, but he must make even bolder changes to meet the needs of his people and to set an example of moderation and tolerance for the rest of the Arab world.
For that, he will have to carve out more space for political debate and citizen participation and create modern political institutions. That is the only way to ensure his reforms will continue no matter who is advising the king in years to come — or who is king.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
A Promise of Reform in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is notoriously change-averse, but four years after assuming the crown, King Abdullah may finally be ready to fulfill his promise to lead his country toward greater tolerance and modernity.
We welcome his decision to name several reformers to top posts in his government — and his even more surprising decision to oust certain hard-line leaders of the country’s powerful religious establishment. We hope it means that Saudi Arabia will soon grant full civil and legal rights to women and all who reside in the kingdom.
Most of the attention has centered on the king’s appointment of the first female deputy minister, who will focus on women’s education. That is an important first step. But there is still a very long way to go before women have anything approaching equality.
Saudi women need permission from their husbands or fathers to work, travel, study or even receive health care. They cannot drive. While more than half of the university students are women, their job prospects are severely limited.
The ordeal of the “Qatif girl” is a horrifying reminder of the insecurity and injustice of women’s lives in Saudi Arabia. In 2006, the young woman was gang-raped and later was nearly victimized again when the religious-dominated justice system sentenced her to 200 lashes for being alone in a car with a man to whom she was not married. She was only spared after King Abdullah heeded international protests and pardoned her.
Last week, King Abdullah challenged the conservative establishment even more directly, firing the chief of the widely feared religious police and the leader of the kingdom’s highest tribunal, the Supreme Council of Justice. The ousted chief justice issued a ruling last September saying that it would be permissible to kill the owners of TV channels broadcasting “immorality.”
Moderates also were added to the Grand Ulema Commission, an influential body of religious scholars from all branches of Sunni Islam. Regrettably, the king stopped short of adding minority Shiites to the mix.
Since the 9/11 attacks — 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudis — Saudi Arabia has pledged to reform a hard-line religious-based education system that is seen as encouraging extremism. And Saudi officials say that the king’s new education minister, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, is a committed reformer. He also is the king’s son-in-law, so there can be no more excuses if Saudi textbooks continue to spew hateful views of non-Muslims.
King Abdullah has demonstrated a laudable desire for change, but he must make even bolder changes to meet the needs of his people and to set an example of moderation and tolerance for the rest of the Arab world.
For that, he will have to carve out more space for political debate and citizen participation and create modern political institutions. That is the only way to ensure his reforms will continue no matter who is advising the king in years to come — or who is king.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/opini ... nted=print
March 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, the Jews and Germany
By ROGER COHEN
So a Jerusalem Post article says that I’m “hardly the first American to be misled by the existence of synagogues in totalitarian countries.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg finds me “particularly credulous,” taken in by the Iranian hospitality and friendliness that “are the hallmarks of most Muslim societies.” (Thanks for that info, Jeffrey.)
A conservative Web site called American Thinker, which tries to prove its name is an oxymoron, believes I would have been fooled by the Nazis’ sham at the Theresienstadt camp.
The indignation stems from my recent column on Iranian Jews, which said that the 25,000-strong community worships in relative tranquillity; that Persian Jews have fared better than Arab Jews; that hostility toward Jews in Iran has on occasion led to trumped-up charges against them; and that those enamored of the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran regard any compromise with it as a rerun of Munich 1938.
This last point found confirmation in outraged correspondence from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany. I was based in Berlin for three years; Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust inhabited me. Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state.
Munich allowed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries.
Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.
Most of Iran’s population is under 30; it’s an Internet-connected generation. Access to satellite television is widespread. The BBC’s new Farsi service is all the rage.
Abdullah Momeni, a student opponent of the regime, told me, “The Internet is very important to us; in fact, it is of infinite importance.” Iranians are not cut off, like Cubans or North Koreans.
The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared with the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned the Majlis, or parliament, down.
If you’re thinking trains-on-time Fascist efficiency, think again. Tehran’s new telecommunications tower took 20 years to build. I was told its restaurant would open “soon.” So, it is said, will the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a project in the works for a mere 30 years. A Persian Chernobyl is more likely than some Middle Eastern nuclear Armageddon, if that’s any comfort.
For all the morality police inspecting whether women are wearing boots outside their pants (the latest no-no on the dress front) and the regime zealots of the Basiji militia, the air you breathe in Iran is not suffocating. Its streets at dusk hum with life — not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear — but the vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society.
This is the Iran of subtle shades that the country’s Jews inhabit. Life is more difficult for them than for Muslims, but to suggest they inhabit a totalitarian hell is self-serving nonsense.
One Iranian exile, no lover of the Islamic Republic, wrote to me saying that my account of Iran’s Jews had brought “tears to my eyes” because “you are saying what many of us would like to hear.”
Far from the cradle of Middle Eastern Islamist zealotry, she suggested, “Iran — the supposed enemy — is the one society that has gone through its extremist fervor and is coming out the other end. It is relatively stable and socially dynamic. As my father, who continues to live there, says, ‘It is the least undemocratic country in the region outside Israel.’ ”
This notion of a “post-fervor” Iran is significant. The compromises being painfully fought out between Islam and democracy in Tehran are of seminal importance. They belie the notion of a fanatical power; they explain Jewish life.
That does not mean fanaticism does not exist or that terrible crimes have not been committed, like the Iran-backed bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires 15 years ago.
But the equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.
I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one — the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.
It’s worth recalling that hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. He should not.
Nor should racist demagoguery — wherever — prompt facile allusions to the murderous Nazi master of it.
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, the Jews and Germany
By ROGER COHEN
So a Jerusalem Post article says that I’m “hardly the first American to be misled by the existence of synagogues in totalitarian countries.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg finds me “particularly credulous,” taken in by the Iranian hospitality and friendliness that “are the hallmarks of most Muslim societies.” (Thanks for that info, Jeffrey.)
A conservative Web site called American Thinker, which tries to prove its name is an oxymoron, believes I would have been fooled by the Nazis’ sham at the Theresienstadt camp.
The indignation stems from my recent column on Iranian Jews, which said that the 25,000-strong community worships in relative tranquillity; that Persian Jews have fared better than Arab Jews; that hostility toward Jews in Iran has on occasion led to trumped-up charges against them; and that those enamored of the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran regard any compromise with it as a rerun of Munich 1938.
This last point found confirmation in outraged correspondence from several American Jews unable to resist some analogy between Iran and Nazi Germany. I was based in Berlin for three years; Germany’s confrontation with the Holocaust inhabited me. Let’s be clear: Iran’s Islamic Republic is no Third Reich redux. Nor is it a totalitarian state.
Munich allowed Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Iran has not waged an expansionary war in more than two centuries.
Totalitarian regimes require the complete subservience of the individual to the state and tolerate only one party to which all institutions are subordinated. Iran is an un-free society with a keen, intermittently brutal apparatus of repression, but it’s far from meeting these criteria. Significant margins of liberty, even democracy, exist. Anything but mad, the mullahs have proved malleable.
Most of Iran’s population is under 30; it’s an Internet-connected generation. Access to satellite television is widespread. The BBC’s new Farsi service is all the rage.
Abdullah Momeni, a student opponent of the regime, told me, “The Internet is very important to us; in fact, it is of infinite importance.” Iranians are not cut off, like Cubans or North Koreans.
The June presidential election pitting the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Mohammad Khatami (a former president who once spoke in a synagogue) will be a genuine contest as compared with the charades that pass for elections in many Arab states. No fire has burned the Majlis, or parliament, down.
If you’re thinking trains-on-time Fascist efficiency, think again. Tehran’s new telecommunications tower took 20 years to build. I was told its restaurant would open “soon.” So, it is said, will the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a project in the works for a mere 30 years. A Persian Chernobyl is more likely than some Middle Eastern nuclear Armageddon, if that’s any comfort.
For all the morality police inspecting whether women are wearing boots outside their pants (the latest no-no on the dress front) and the regime zealots of the Basiji militia, the air you breathe in Iran is not suffocating. Its streets at dusk hum with life — not a monochrome male-only form of it, or one inhabited by fear — but the vibrancy of a changing, highly educated society.
This is the Iran of subtle shades that the country’s Jews inhabit. Life is more difficult for them than for Muslims, but to suggest they inhabit a totalitarian hell is self-serving nonsense.
One Iranian exile, no lover of the Islamic Republic, wrote to me saying that my account of Iran’s Jews had brought “tears to my eyes” because “you are saying what many of us would like to hear.”
Far from the cradle of Middle Eastern Islamist zealotry, she suggested, “Iran — the supposed enemy — is the one society that has gone through its extremist fervor and is coming out the other end. It is relatively stable and socially dynamic. As my father, who continues to live there, says, ‘It is the least undemocratic country in the region outside Israel.’ ”
This notion of a “post-fervor” Iran is significant. The compromises being painfully fought out between Islam and democracy in Tehran are of seminal importance. They belie the notion of a fanatical power; they explain Jewish life.
That does not mean fanaticism does not exist or that terrible crimes have not been committed, like the Iran-backed bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires 15 years ago.
But the equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic. Hamas and Hezbollah have evolved into broad political movements widely seen as resisting an Israel over-ready to use crushing force. It is essential to think again about them, just as it is essential to toss out Iran caricatures.
I return to this subject because behind the Jewish issue in Iran lies a critical one — the U.S. propensity to fixate on and demonize a country through a one-dimensional lens, with a sometimes disastrous chain of results.
It’s worth recalling that hateful, ultranationalist rhetoric is no Iranian preserve. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s race-baiting anti-Arab firebrand, may find a place in a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. He should not.
Nor should racist demagoguery — wherever — prompt facile allusions to the murderous Nazi master of it.
March 16, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, Jews and Pragmatism
By ROGER COHEN
LOS ANGELES
The Persian New Year, or Norouz, is celebrated this month, often with great extravagance. Among its traditions is jumping over a bonfire while declaiming: “Take away my yellow complexion and give me your red glow of health.”
One way of looking at Iran’s particular calendar, its language and Shiite branch of Islam is as forms of resistance against the Arab and Sunni worlds. Shiism has been a means to independence. The defense of Farsi against Arabic took the form of a medieval epic, “Shahnameh,” by the poet Ferdowsi.
I have, in a series of columns, and as a cautionary warning against the misguided view of Iran as nothing but a society of mad mullah terrorists bent on nukes, been examining distinctive characteristics of Persian society.
Iran — as compared with Arab countries including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — has an old itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The June presidential vote will be a genuine contest by the region’s admittedly low standards. This is the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel.
Another Iranian exception is that it had its Islamic Revolution three decades ago. Been there, done that. So its lessons are important.
From Egypt to Algeria to Afghanistan, Islamist movements are radicalized by dreams of everlasting dominion. Democracy is feared because it may prove to be their means to power. In Iran, by contrast, life is a daily exercise in difficult compromises that temper Islam with modern society’s demands. Iran is emerging from extremist fervor as clerical absolutism and pluralism spar.
While Bernard Lewis, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, posits an epochal clash between “Islamic theocracy and liberal democracy” whose outcome will be decisive, I don’t see any victor in this fight. Rather, a variety of compromises between the two forces will emerge, as in Iran.
It is therefore in America’s strong interest to develop relations with the most dynamic society in the region. What autocrats from the Gulf to Cairo fear most is an Iranian-American breakthrough, precisely because it would shake up every cozy, static regional relationship, including Washington’s with Israel.
Another distinctive characteristic of Iran is the presence of the largest Jewish community in the Muslim Middle East in the country of the most vitriolic anti-Israel tirades. My evocation of this 25,000-strong community, in the taboo-ridden world of American Middle East debate, has prompted fury, nowhere more so than here in Los Angeles, where many of Iran’s Jewish exiles live.
At the invitation of Rabbi David Wolpe of the Sinai Temple, I came out to meet them. The evening was fiery with scant meeting of minds. Exile, expropriation and, in some cases, executions have left bitter feelings among the revolution’s Jewish victims, as they have among the more than two million Muslims who have fled Iran since 1979. Abraham Berookhim gave me a moving account of his escape and his Jewish uncle’s unconscionable 1980 murder by the regime.
Earlier, Sam Kermanian, a leader of the Iranian Jewish community, said I had been used, that Iran’s Jews are far worse off than they appear, and that my portrayal of them was pernicious as it “leads people to believe Israel’s enemies are not as real as you may think.” He called the mullahs brilliantly manipulative: “They know their abilities and limitations.”
On at least this last point I agree. Just how repressive life is for Iran’s Jews is impossible to know. Iran is an un-free society. But this much is clear: the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.
The presence of these Jews undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.
I think pragmatism lies at the core of the revolution’s survival. It led to cooperation with Israel in cold-war days; it ended the Iraq war; it averted an invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 after Iranian diplomats were murdered; it brought post-9/11 cooperation with America on Afghanistan; it explains the ebb and flow of liberalization since 1979; and it makes sense of the Jewish presence.
Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.
What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.
That, in turn, will require President Obama to jump over his own bonfire of indignation as the Mideast taboos that just caused the scandalous disqualification of Charles Freeman for a senior intelligence post are shed in the name of a new season of engagement and reason.
Op-Ed Columnist
Iran, Jews and Pragmatism
By ROGER COHEN
LOS ANGELES
The Persian New Year, or Norouz, is celebrated this month, often with great extravagance. Among its traditions is jumping over a bonfire while declaiming: “Take away my yellow complexion and give me your red glow of health.”
One way of looking at Iran’s particular calendar, its language and Shiite branch of Islam is as forms of resistance against the Arab and Sunni worlds. Shiism has been a means to independence. The defense of Farsi against Arabic took the form of a medieval epic, “Shahnameh,” by the poet Ferdowsi.
I have, in a series of columns, and as a cautionary warning against the misguided view of Iran as nothing but a society of mad mullah terrorists bent on nukes, been examining distinctive characteristics of Persian society.
Iran — as compared with Arab countries including Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt — has an old itch for representative government, evident in the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The June presidential vote will be a genuine contest by the region’s admittedly low standards. This is the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel.
Another Iranian exception is that it had its Islamic Revolution three decades ago. Been there, done that. So its lessons are important.
From Egypt to Algeria to Afghanistan, Islamist movements are radicalized by dreams of everlasting dominion. Democracy is feared because it may prove to be their means to power. In Iran, by contrast, life is a daily exercise in difficult compromises that temper Islam with modern society’s demands. Iran is emerging from extremist fervor as clerical absolutism and pluralism spar.
While Bernard Lewis, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, posits an epochal clash between “Islamic theocracy and liberal democracy” whose outcome will be decisive, I don’t see any victor in this fight. Rather, a variety of compromises between the two forces will emerge, as in Iran.
It is therefore in America’s strong interest to develop relations with the most dynamic society in the region. What autocrats from the Gulf to Cairo fear most is an Iranian-American breakthrough, precisely because it would shake up every cozy, static regional relationship, including Washington’s with Israel.
Another distinctive characteristic of Iran is the presence of the largest Jewish community in the Muslim Middle East in the country of the most vitriolic anti-Israel tirades. My evocation of this 25,000-strong community, in the taboo-ridden world of American Middle East debate, has prompted fury, nowhere more so than here in Los Angeles, where many of Iran’s Jewish exiles live.
At the invitation of Rabbi David Wolpe of the Sinai Temple, I came out to meet them. The evening was fiery with scant meeting of minds. Exile, expropriation and, in some cases, executions have left bitter feelings among the revolution’s Jewish victims, as they have among the more than two million Muslims who have fled Iran since 1979. Abraham Berookhim gave me a moving account of his escape and his Jewish uncle’s unconscionable 1980 murder by the regime.
Earlier, Sam Kermanian, a leader of the Iranian Jewish community, said I had been used, that Iran’s Jews are far worse off than they appear, and that my portrayal of them was pernicious as it “leads people to believe Israel’s enemies are not as real as you may think.” He called the mullahs brilliantly manipulative: “They know their abilities and limitations.”
On at least this last point I agree. Just how repressive life is for Iran’s Jews is impossible to know. Iran is an un-free society. But this much is clear: the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime — with no sense of its limitations — so frenziedly anti-Semitic that it would accept inevitable nuclear annihilation if it could destroy Israel first.
The presence of these Jews undermines that vision. It blunts the hawks’ case; hence the rage.
I think pragmatism lies at the core of the revolution’s survival. It led to cooperation with Israel in cold-war days; it ended the Iraq war; it averted an invasion of Afghanistan in 1998 after Iranian diplomats were murdered; it brought post-9/11 cooperation with America on Afghanistan; it explains the ebb and flow of liberalization since 1979; and it makes sense of the Jewish presence.
Pragmatism is also one way of looking at Iran’s nuclear program. A state facing a nuclear-armed Israel and Pakistan, American invasions in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and noting North Korea’s immunity from assault, might reasonably conclude that preserving the revolution requires nuclear resolve.
What’s required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.
That, in turn, will require President Obama to jump over his own bonfire of indignation as the Mideast taboos that just caused the scandalous disqualification of Charles Freeman for a senior intelligence post are shed in the name of a new season of engagement and reason.
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,881 ... 39,00.html
Thursday, Mar. 19, 2009
A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World
By Robin Wright
Three decades after Iran's upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.
When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women's rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen. (See pictures of Islam's revolution.)
Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo's first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night--waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.
Ziada shies away from little, including the grisly intimate details of her life. But she also wears a veil, a sign that her religious faith remains undimmed. "My ultimate interest," she wrote in her first blog entry, "is to please Allah with all I am doing in my own life."
That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.
Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself. "It's a nonviolent revolution trying to mix modernity and religion," Ziada says, honking as she makes her way through Cairo's horrendous traffic for a meeting of one of the rights groups she works with.
The new Muslim activists, who take on diverse causes from one country to another, have emerged in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and all that has happened since. Navtej Dhillon, director of the Brookings Institution's Middle East Youth Initiative, says, "There's a generation between the ages of 15 and 35 driving this soft revolution--like the baby boomers in the U.S.--who are defined by a common experience. It should have been a generation outward looking in a positive way, with more education, access to technology and aspirations for economic mobility." Instead, he says, "it's become hostage to post-9/11 politics." Disillusioned with extremists who can destroy but who fail to construct alternatives that improve daily life, members of the post-9/11 generation are increasingly relying on Islamic values rather than on a religion-based ideology to advance their aims. And importantly, the soft revolution has generated a new self-confidence among Muslims and a sense that the answers to their problems lie within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. The revolution is about reform in a conservative package.
See pictures of the Hajj going high-tech.
See TIME's Person of the Year, People Who Mattered, and more.
Text-Messaging The Koran
The soft revolution is made concrete in hundreds of new schools from Turkey to Pakistan. Its themes echo in Palestinian hip-hop, Egyptian Facebook pages and the flurry of Koranic verses text-messaged between students. It is reflected in Bosnian streets honoring Muslim heroes and central Asian girls named after the holy city of Medina. Its role models are portrayed by action figures, each with one of the 99 attributes of God, in Kuwaiti comic books. It has even changed slang. Young Egyptians often now answer the telephone by saying "Salaam alaikum"--"Peace be upon you"--instead of "Hello." Many add the tagline "bi izn Allah"--"if God permits"--when discussing everything from the weather to politics. "They think they're getting a bonus with God," muses Ziada.
Even in Saudi Arabia, the most rigid Muslim state, the soft revolution is transforming public discourse. Consider Ahmad al-Shugairi, who worked in his family business until a friend recruited him in 2002 for a television program called Yallah Shabab (Hey, Young People). Al-Shugairi ended up as the host. Although he never had formal religious training, al-Shugairi quickly became one of the most popular TV preachers, broadcast by satellite to an audience across the Middle East and watched on YouTube. "The show explained that you could be a good Muslim and yet enjoy life," says Kaswara al-Khatib, a former producer of Yallah Shabab. "It used to be that you could be either devout or liberal, with no middle ground. The focus had been only on God's punishment. We focused on God's mercy."
In 2005, al-Shugairi began a TV series called Thoughts during the holy month of Ramadan, focusing on the practical problems of contemporary Muslim life, from cleanliness to charity. Sometimes clad in jeans and at other times a white Saudi robe and headdress, he often speaks informally from a couch. "I'm not reinventing the wheel or the faith," al-Shugairi explains in Jidda's Andalus Café, which he opened for the young. "But there is a need for someone to talk common sense." (See pictures of Ramadan.)
Al-Shugairi's own life mirrors the experimentation and evolution of many young Muslims. In the 1990s, he says, he bounced from "extreme pleasure" as a college student in California to "extreme belief." The shock of Sept. 11, an attack whose perpetrators were mostly Saudi, steered him to the middle.
Traditional clerics deride al-Shugairi, 35, and other televangelists for preaching "easy Islam," "yuppie Islam," even "Western Islam." But his message actually reflects a deepening conservatism in the Islamic world, even as activists use contemporary examples and modern technology to make their case. One of al-Shugairi's programs on happiness focused on Elvis Presley, a man with fame, talent and fortune but who died young. Life without deep spirituality, al-Shugairi preaches, is empty.
The soft revolution's voices are widening the Islamic political spectrum. Mostafa Nagar, 28, an Egyptian dentist, runs a blog called Waves in the Sea of Change, which is part of an Internet-based call for a renaissance in Islamic thinking. Yet Nagar belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement in the Middle East. His blog launched a wave of challenges from within the Brotherhood to its proposed manifesto, which limits the political rights of women and Christians. Nagar called for dividing the religious and political wings of the movement, a nod to the separation of mosque and state, and pressed the party to run technocrats rather than clerics for positions of party leadership and public office.
When Nagar and his colleagues were urged to leave the Brotherhood, they decided to stay. "As a public party," he says, "its decisions are relevant to the destiny of all Egyptians, so their thoughts should be open to all people." And indeed, his blog--and other criticism from the movement's youth wing--has caused the manifesto to be put on ice.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See the top 10 religion stories of 2008.
The flap underscores an emerging political trend. Since 9/11, polls have consistently shown that most Muslims do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy. They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them. As a consequence, Islamist parties are now under intense scrutiny. "Islamists, far from winning sweeping victories, are struggling to maintain even the modest gains they made earlier," says a recent survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Iraq's recent elections, for example, secular parties solidly trumped the religious parties that had fared well four years ago.
Rethinking Tradition
Politics is not the only focus of the soft revolution. Its most fundamental impact, indeed, may be on the faith itself. In the shadows of Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey, a team of 80 Turkish scholars has been meeting for the past three years to ponder Muslim traditions dating back 14 centuries. Known as the hadith, the traditions are based on the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and dictate behavior on everything from the conduct of war to personal hygiene. (See pictures of Iranians.)
Later this year, the Turkish scholars are expected to publish six volumes that reject thousands of Islam's most controversial practices, from stoning adulterers to honor killings. Some hadith, the scholars contend, are unsubstantiated; others were just invented to manipulate society. "There is one tradition which says ladies are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind," says Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University's divinity school, a member of the commission. "We think this does not conform with the soul of the Koran. And when we look at the Prophet's behavior toward ladies, we don't think those insulting messages belong to him." Another hadith insists that women be obedient to their husbands if they are to enter paradise. "Again, this is incompatible with the Prophet," Unal says. "We think these are sentences put forth by men who were trying to impose their power over the ladies."
The Hadith Project is only one of many such investigations into Islam's role in the 21st century. This is perhaps the most intellectually active period for the faith since the height of Islamic scholarship in the Middle Ages. "There is more self-confidence in the Islamic world about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society," says Ibrahim Kalin of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara. "The West is no longer the only worldview to look up to. There are other ways of sharing the world and negotiating your place in it."
Crucially, this latest wave of Islamic thought is not led only by men. Eman el-Marsafy is challenging one of the strictest male domains in the Muslim world--the mosque. For 14 centuries, women have largely been relegated to small side rooms for prayer and excluded from leadership. But el-Marsafy is one of hundreds of professional women who are memorizing the Koran and is even teaching at Cairo's al-Sadiq Mosque. "We're taking Islam to the new world," el-Marsafy says. "We can do everything everyone else does. We want to move forward too."
The young are in the vanguard. A graduate in business administration and a former banker, el-Marsafy donned the hijab when she was 26, despite fierce objections from her parents. (Her father was an Egyptian diplomat, her mother a society figure.) But last year, el-Marsafy's mother, now in her 60s, began wearing the veil too. That is a common story. Forty years ago, Islamic dress was rare in Egypt. Today, more than 80% of women are estimated to wear the hijab, and many put it on only after their daughters did.
Piety alone is not the explanation for the change in dress. "The veil is the mask of Egyptian woman in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men," says Nabil Abdel Fattah of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and author of The Politics of Religion. "The veil gives women more power in a man's world." Ziada, the human-rights activist, says the hijab--her headscarves are in pinks, pastels, floral prints and plaids, not drab black--provides protective cover and legitimacy for her campaigns.
Read "Finding God on YouTube."
Waiting for Obama
The ferment in the Muslim world has a range of implications for President Barack Obama's outreach to Islam. Gallup polls in Islamic societies show that large majorities both reject militants and have serious reservations about the West. "They're saying, 'There's a plague on both your houses,'" says Richard Burkholder Jr., director of Gallup's international polls. Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11. "Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon, of the Brookings Institution. Muslims fume that a few perpetrators of violence have led the outside world to suspect a whole generation of supporting terrorism. "The only source of identity they have is being attacked," Dhillon says. The post-9/11 generation has been further shaped by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, all of which Washington played a direct or indirect role in.
Although he is the first U.S. President to have lived in the Muslim world and to have Muslim relatives and a Muslim middle name, Obama is likely to face skepticism even among those who welcomed his election. In an open letter on the day of his Inauguration, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference appealed for a "new partnership" with the Obama Administration. "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace, concordance and tranquility," wrote Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the conference. He then pointedly added, "We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared--never imposed." (See pictures of Muslims in America.)
That is the key. Gallup polls show that by huge margins, Muslims reject the notion that the U.S. genuinely wants to help them. The new Administration, with a fresh eye on the world, wants to bolster the position of the U.S. But "Obama will have a narrow window to act," says Burkholder, "because the U.S. has failed so often in the past."
Ask Naif al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist from Kuwait. Al-Mutawa is the publisher of The 99, glossy comic books popular from Morocco to Indonesia, with 99 male and female superheroes, each imbued with godly qualities such as mercy, wisdom and tolerance. In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, al-Mutawa recounted a conversation with his father about his newborn son. Al-Mutawa's grandfather had recently died, and he expected his father to ask him to keep the name in the family. Instead, his father suggested the child be named after Obama. "I was stunned," al-Mutawa wrote. "Instead of asking me to hold on to the past, my conservative Arab Muslim father was asking me to make a bet on the future."
But al-Mutawa opted against it. "I want to see results, not just hope, before naming my children after a leader," he wrote. Such pragmatism is typical of the Muslim world's soft revolutionaries. They believe that their own governments, the Islamist extremists and the outside world alike have all failed to provide a satisfying narrative that synthesizes Islam and modernity. So they are taking on the task themselves. The soft revolution's combination of conservative symbols, like Islamic dress, with contemporary practices, like blogging, may confuse outsiders. But there are few social movements in the world today that are more important to understand.
Wright's most recent book is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
See pictures of people around the world watching Obama's Inauguration.
See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.
Click to Print Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 39,00.html
Thursday, Mar. 19, 2009
A Quiet Revolution Grows in the Muslim World
By Robin Wright
Three decades after Iran's upheaval established Islamic clerical rule for the first time in 14 centuries, a quieter and more profound revolution is transforming the Muslim world. Dalia Ziada is a part of it.
When Ziada was 8, her mother told her to don a white party dress for a surprise celebration. It turned out to be a painful circumcision. But Ziada decided to fight back. The young Egyptian spent years arguing with her father and uncles against the genital mutilation of her sister and cousins, a campaign she eventually developed into a wider movement. She now champions everything from freedom of speech to women's rights and political prisoners. To promote civil disobedience, Ziada last year translated into Arabic a comic-book history about Martin Luther King Jr. and distributed 2,000 copies from Morocco to Yemen. (See pictures of Islam's revolution.)
Now 26, Ziada organized Cairo's first human-rights film festival in November. The censorship board did not approve the films, so Ziada doorstopped its chairman at the elevator and rode up with him to plead her case. When the theater was suspiciously closed at the last minute, she rented a tourist boat on the Nile for opening night--waiting until it was offshore and beyond the arm of the law to start the movie.
Ziada shies away from little, including the grisly intimate details of her life. But she also wears a veil, a sign that her religious faith remains undimmed. "My ultimate interest," she wrote in her first blog entry, "is to please Allah with all I am doing in my own life."
That sentiment is echoed around the Muslim world. In many of the scores of countries that are predominantly Muslim, the latest generation of activists is redefining society in novel ways. This new soft revolution is distinct from three earlier waves of change--the Islamic revival of the 1970s, the rise of extremism in the 1980s and the growth of Muslim political parties in the 1990s.
Today's revolution is more vibrantly Islamic than ever. Yet it is also decidedly antijihadist and ambivalent about Islamist political parties. Culturally, it is deeply conservative, but its goal is to adapt to the 21st century. Politically, it rejects secularism and Westernization but craves changes compatible with modern global trends. The soft revolution is more about groping for identity and direction than expressing piety. The new revolutionaries are synthesizing Koranic values with the ways of life spawned by the Internet, satellite television and Facebook. For them, Islam, you might say, is the path to change rather than the goal itself. "It's a nonviolent revolution trying to mix modernity and religion," Ziada says, honking as she makes her way through Cairo's horrendous traffic for a meeting of one of the rights groups she works with.
The new Muslim activists, who take on diverse causes from one country to another, have emerged in reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks and all that has happened since. Navtej Dhillon, director of the Brookings Institution's Middle East Youth Initiative, says, "There's a generation between the ages of 15 and 35 driving this soft revolution--like the baby boomers in the U.S.--who are defined by a common experience. It should have been a generation outward looking in a positive way, with more education, access to technology and aspirations for economic mobility." Instead, he says, "it's become hostage to post-9/11 politics." Disillusioned with extremists who can destroy but who fail to construct alternatives that improve daily life, members of the post-9/11 generation are increasingly relying on Islamic values rather than on a religion-based ideology to advance their aims. And importantly, the soft revolution has generated a new self-confidence among Muslims and a sense that the answers to their problems lie within their own faith and community rather than in the outside world. The revolution is about reform in a conservative package.
See pictures of the Hajj going high-tech.
See TIME's Person of the Year, People Who Mattered, and more.
Text-Messaging The Koran
The soft revolution is made concrete in hundreds of new schools from Turkey to Pakistan. Its themes echo in Palestinian hip-hop, Egyptian Facebook pages and the flurry of Koranic verses text-messaged between students. It is reflected in Bosnian streets honoring Muslim heroes and central Asian girls named after the holy city of Medina. Its role models are portrayed by action figures, each with one of the 99 attributes of God, in Kuwaiti comic books. It has even changed slang. Young Egyptians often now answer the telephone by saying "Salaam alaikum"--"Peace be upon you"--instead of "Hello." Many add the tagline "bi izn Allah"--"if God permits"--when discussing everything from the weather to politics. "They think they're getting a bonus with God," muses Ziada.
Even in Saudi Arabia, the most rigid Muslim state, the soft revolution is transforming public discourse. Consider Ahmad al-Shugairi, who worked in his family business until a friend recruited him in 2002 for a television program called Yallah Shabab (Hey, Young People). Al-Shugairi ended up as the host. Although he never had formal religious training, al-Shugairi quickly became one of the most popular TV preachers, broadcast by satellite to an audience across the Middle East and watched on YouTube. "The show explained that you could be a good Muslim and yet enjoy life," says Kaswara al-Khatib, a former producer of Yallah Shabab. "It used to be that you could be either devout or liberal, with no middle ground. The focus had been only on God's punishment. We focused on God's mercy."
In 2005, al-Shugairi began a TV series called Thoughts during the holy month of Ramadan, focusing on the practical problems of contemporary Muslim life, from cleanliness to charity. Sometimes clad in jeans and at other times a white Saudi robe and headdress, he often speaks informally from a couch. "I'm not reinventing the wheel or the faith," al-Shugairi explains in Jidda's Andalus Café, which he opened for the young. "But there is a need for someone to talk common sense." (See pictures of Ramadan.)
Al-Shugairi's own life mirrors the experimentation and evolution of many young Muslims. In the 1990s, he says, he bounced from "extreme pleasure" as a college student in California to "extreme belief." The shock of Sept. 11, an attack whose perpetrators were mostly Saudi, steered him to the middle.
Traditional clerics deride al-Shugairi, 35, and other televangelists for preaching "easy Islam," "yuppie Islam," even "Western Islam." But his message actually reflects a deepening conservatism in the Islamic world, even as activists use contemporary examples and modern technology to make their case. One of al-Shugairi's programs on happiness focused on Elvis Presley, a man with fame, talent and fortune but who died young. Life without deep spirituality, al-Shugairi preaches, is empty.
The soft revolution's voices are widening the Islamic political spectrum. Mostafa Nagar, 28, an Egyptian dentist, runs a blog called Waves in the Sea of Change, which is part of an Internet-based call for a renaissance in Islamic thinking. Yet Nagar belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest Islamist movement in the Middle East. His blog launched a wave of challenges from within the Brotherhood to its proposed manifesto, which limits the political rights of women and Christians. Nagar called for dividing the religious and political wings of the movement, a nod to the separation of mosque and state, and pressed the party to run technocrats rather than clerics for positions of party leadership and public office.
When Nagar and his colleagues were urged to leave the Brotherhood, they decided to stay. "As a public party," he says, "its decisions are relevant to the destiny of all Egyptians, so their thoughts should be open to all people." And indeed, his blog--and other criticism from the movement's youth wing--has caused the manifesto to be put on ice.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
See the top 10 religion stories of 2008.
The flap underscores an emerging political trend. Since 9/11, polls have consistently shown that most Muslims do not want either an Iranian-style theocracy or a Western-style democracy. They want a blend, with clerics playing an advisory role in societies, not ruling them. As a consequence, Islamist parties are now under intense scrutiny. "Islamists, far from winning sweeping victories, are struggling to maintain even the modest gains they made earlier," says a recent survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In Iraq's recent elections, for example, secular parties solidly trumped the religious parties that had fared well four years ago.
Rethinking Tradition
Politics is not the only focus of the soft revolution. Its most fundamental impact, indeed, may be on the faith itself. In the shadows of Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey, a team of 80 Turkish scholars has been meeting for the past three years to ponder Muslim traditions dating back 14 centuries. Known as the hadith, the traditions are based on the actions and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and dictate behavior on everything from the conduct of war to personal hygiene. (See pictures of Iranians.)
Later this year, the Turkish scholars are expected to publish six volumes that reject thousands of Islam's most controversial practices, from stoning adulterers to honor killings. Some hadith, the scholars contend, are unsubstantiated; others were just invented to manipulate society. "There is one tradition which says ladies are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind," says Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University's divinity school, a member of the commission. "We think this does not conform with the soul of the Koran. And when we look at the Prophet's behavior toward ladies, we don't think those insulting messages belong to him." Another hadith insists that women be obedient to their husbands if they are to enter paradise. "Again, this is incompatible with the Prophet," Unal says. "We think these are sentences put forth by men who were trying to impose their power over the ladies."
The Hadith Project is only one of many such investigations into Islam's role in the 21st century. This is perhaps the most intellectually active period for the faith since the height of Islamic scholarship in the Middle Ages. "There is more self-confidence in the Islamic world about dealing with reason, constitutionalism, science and other big issues that define modern society," says Ibrahim Kalin of the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research in Ankara. "The West is no longer the only worldview to look up to. There are other ways of sharing the world and negotiating your place in it."
Crucially, this latest wave of Islamic thought is not led only by men. Eman el-Marsafy is challenging one of the strictest male domains in the Muslim world--the mosque. For 14 centuries, women have largely been relegated to small side rooms for prayer and excluded from leadership. But el-Marsafy is one of hundreds of professional women who are memorizing the Koran and is even teaching at Cairo's al-Sadiq Mosque. "We're taking Islam to the new world," el-Marsafy says. "We can do everything everyone else does. We want to move forward too."
The young are in the vanguard. A graduate in business administration and a former banker, el-Marsafy donned the hijab when she was 26, despite fierce objections from her parents. (Her father was an Egyptian diplomat, her mother a society figure.) But last year, el-Marsafy's mother, now in her 60s, began wearing the veil too. That is a common story. Forty years ago, Islamic dress was rare in Egypt. Today, more than 80% of women are estimated to wear the hijab, and many put it on only after their daughters did.
Piety alone is not the explanation for the change in dress. "The veil is the mask of Egyptian woman in a power struggle against the dictatorship of men," says Nabil Abdel Fattah of Cairo's al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and author of The Politics of Religion. "The veil gives women more power in a man's world." Ziada, the human-rights activist, says the hijab--her headscarves are in pinks, pastels, floral prints and plaids, not drab black--provides protective cover and legitimacy for her campaigns.
Read "Finding God on YouTube."
Waiting for Obama
The ferment in the Muslim world has a range of implications for President Barack Obama's outreach to Islam. Gallup polls in Islamic societies show that large majorities both reject militants and have serious reservations about the West. "They're saying, 'There's a plague on both your houses,'" says Richard Burkholder Jr., director of Gallup's international polls. Many young Muslims are angry at the outside world's support of corrupt and autocratic regimes despite pledges to push for democracy after 9/11. "Most of the young feel the West betrayed its promises," says Dhillon, of the Brookings Institution. Muslims fume that a few perpetrators of violence have led the outside world to suspect a whole generation of supporting terrorism. "The only source of identity they have is being attacked," Dhillon says. The post-9/11 generation has been further shaped by wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza, all of which Washington played a direct or indirect role in.
Although he is the first U.S. President to have lived in the Muslim world and to have Muslim relatives and a Muslim middle name, Obama is likely to face skepticism even among those who welcomed his election. In an open letter on the day of his Inauguration, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference appealed for a "new partnership" with the Obama Administration. "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace, concordance and tranquility," wrote Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the conference. He then pointedly added, "We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared--never imposed." (See pictures of Muslims in America.)
That is the key. Gallup polls show that by huge margins, Muslims reject the notion that the U.S. genuinely wants to help them. The new Administration, with a fresh eye on the world, wants to bolster the position of the U.S. But "Obama will have a narrow window to act," says Burkholder, "because the U.S. has failed so often in the past."
Ask Naif al-Mutawa, a clinical psychologist from Kuwait. Al-Mutawa is the publisher of The 99, glossy comic books popular from Morocco to Indonesia, with 99 male and female superheroes, each imbued with godly qualities such as mercy, wisdom and tolerance. In a recent article for the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, al-Mutawa recounted a conversation with his father about his newborn son. Al-Mutawa's grandfather had recently died, and he expected his father to ask him to keep the name in the family. Instead, his father suggested the child be named after Obama. "I was stunned," al-Mutawa wrote. "Instead of asking me to hold on to the past, my conservative Arab Muslim father was asking me to make a bet on the future."
But al-Mutawa opted against it. "I want to see results, not just hope, before naming my children after a leader," he wrote. Such pragmatism is typical of the Muslim world's soft revolutionaries. They believe that their own governments, the Islamist extremists and the outside world alike have all failed to provide a satisfying narrative that synthesizes Islam and modernity. So they are taking on the task themselves. The soft revolution's combination of conservative symbols, like Islamic dress, with contemporary practices, like blogging, may confuse outsiders. But there are few social movements in the world today that are more important to understand.
Wright's most recent book is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
See pictures of people around the world watching Obama's Inauguration.
See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.
Click to Print Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 39,00.html
There is a related multimedia at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/world ... hrain.html
March 28, 2009
Sectarian Tension Takes Volatile Form in Bahrain
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
MALIKIYA, Bahrain — It was just another night in this small Shiite Muslim village on the Persian Gulf. A mattress and chairs were set on fire in the street. The police shot tear gas canisters at the crowds. Neighborhood children taunted the police. The police fired more tear gas.
There were smiles all around, not on the faces of the police, who were sweating and trying not to inhale their own tear gas. The people from the village were nearly festive, egging the police on, with rocks and slogans and the speed of youth. They darted. The police lumbered. Their tormentors got away.
It was just another night, and there would be another and another and another all over this sliver of a nation where, as in Iraq before the American invasion, a majority Shiite population is ruled by Sunni Muslims.
It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and the Shiites frequently complain that they are marginalized and discriminated against. As in Iraq, the situation has endured for decades, and no one is suggesting that the security forces are in danger of losing their grip.
But Bahrain, the base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is in turmoil.
“We are demanding the release of political prisoners,” said Ihsan Abdel Reda, 25, explaining why he and his friends take to the streets nightly. “We are against sectarian discrimination.”
Coastal villages are marred by these confrontations. Walls are stained with antigovernment graffiti written at night, and then painted over in the morning by the government. “No, no to oppressing freedoms,” read one slogan that had not yet been whitewashed. The roads are scarred with soot from burned tires.
“These people who demonstrate in the streets have demands; it is not sectarian,” said Muhammad Jamil al-Jamir, a Parliament member whose family has long been a leader in Shiite political movements. “The Shiites say they are not treated equally.”
For years there have been tense relations between Bahrain’s Sunni elite and the Shiite majority. That tension exploded into regular protests this year after the police arrested 23 opposition organizers, including two popular figures, Hassan Mushaima’a and a Shiite cleric, Sheik Mohammed Habib al-Moqdad. Prosecutors accused them of trying to destabilize the government and planning terrorist attacks.
But their supporters say they were just trying to organize political opposition and peaceful demonstrations. “We sacrifice our souls and our blood for you, Mushaima’a,” young men chanted, fists pumped in the air until the police gave chase.
Then they ran.
Compared with other places in the Persian Gulf, tiny Bahrain feels laid back and calm in the capital and the better neighborhoods. More than half the nation’s one million residents are expatriate workers, giving the streets a relatively cosmopolitan feel. Bahrain also has a not-too-hidden seedy side. Prostitution is rampant in the hotels and nightclubs, and the streets are filled with “massage parlors.” Bahrain is a destination for sex tourism.
Bahrain’s politics are heated, too. The 40-member Parliament is controlled by religious parties, Sunnis and Shiites, who have turned it into a sectarian battleground. The country is run by a self-declared king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who presides over a police force staffed primarily by foreigners: Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, almost anyone who happens to be a Sunni and is eager to earn a Bahraini passport.
Shiites are all but banned from the military and security forces — certainly from command positions — one of their primary grievances.
The Shiite majority complains that the government has a plan to naturalize as many Sunnis as possible, to change the demographic balance. The government and its supporters insist that is not true.
But the Shiites do not believe them. “I don’t work, and I don’t go to school,” said Muhammad Nasser, 19. “I am demonstrating because there are no jobs because of naturalization of foreigners, because of the political prisoners, because of the abuse of the rights of the citizen.”
The government and its supporters say that the Shiites are not discriminated against, but that they also cannot be trusted to serve in the security forces.
“There are so many riots, burnings, killings, and not even one case is condemned by the Shiites,” said Adel al-Maawdah, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, defense and national security and a member of a fundamentalist Sunni political party. “Burning a car with people inside is not condemned. How can we trust such people?”
In fact, plenty of people condemn the violence. But the young people are so bored, and so agitated by religious leaders who define the conflict as sectarian, that they see protest as both entertainment and a duty.
“When we demonstrate peacefully, when we just hold banners, they don’t like it,” said Salman Hassan, 20, with a touch of sarcasm and defiance. “They want us to burn things so that they can say, ‘See, you are destructive.’ ”
There was no plan to throw rocks and light fires, or at least that is how it seemed when the protest here began. About 4 p.m., three dozen young men, some children and a small group of women gathered in a traffic circle carrying banners in support of political prisoners. They set up a small speaker, and a local religious leader, Al Sayyid Sadeq, began to speak.
Within minutes a fleet of police cars with flashing blue lights started toward them. Some in the crowd held their ground and jeered at the police. A second group of police charged in from a side road. The protesters ran. The crack of tear gas guns filled the air, followed by clouds of white acrid smoke.
Soon everyone was gone but the police.
But the young men quickly regrouped and blocked the road with construction materials. Two young boys dragged furniture into the street, and the older men doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. Only 11 officers were left, hardly a show of force.
The police made a final push, with a second group charging from another direction. They still failed to catch anyone. By 6 p.m., with the fires burned out, the police seemed exhausted, and the young men had faded into the neighborhood, excited and ready to do it again.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/world ... hrain.html
March 28, 2009
Sectarian Tension Takes Volatile Form in Bahrain
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
MALIKIYA, Bahrain — It was just another night in this small Shiite Muslim village on the Persian Gulf. A mattress and chairs were set on fire in the street. The police shot tear gas canisters at the crowds. Neighborhood children taunted the police. The police fired more tear gas.
There were smiles all around, not on the faces of the police, who were sweating and trying not to inhale their own tear gas. The people from the village were nearly festive, egging the police on, with rocks and slogans and the speed of youth. They darted. The police lumbered. Their tormentors got away.
It was just another night, and there would be another and another and another all over this sliver of a nation where, as in Iraq before the American invasion, a majority Shiite population is ruled by Sunni Muslims.
It is an inherently unstable arrangement, and the Shiites frequently complain that they are marginalized and discriminated against. As in Iraq, the situation has endured for decades, and no one is suggesting that the security forces are in danger of losing their grip.
But Bahrain, the base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is in turmoil.
“We are demanding the release of political prisoners,” said Ihsan Abdel Reda, 25, explaining why he and his friends take to the streets nightly. “We are against sectarian discrimination.”
Coastal villages are marred by these confrontations. Walls are stained with antigovernment graffiti written at night, and then painted over in the morning by the government. “No, no to oppressing freedoms,” read one slogan that had not yet been whitewashed. The roads are scarred with soot from burned tires.
“These people who demonstrate in the streets have demands; it is not sectarian,” said Muhammad Jamil al-Jamir, a Parliament member whose family has long been a leader in Shiite political movements. “The Shiites say they are not treated equally.”
For years there have been tense relations between Bahrain’s Sunni elite and the Shiite majority. That tension exploded into regular protests this year after the police arrested 23 opposition organizers, including two popular figures, Hassan Mushaima’a and a Shiite cleric, Sheik Mohammed Habib al-Moqdad. Prosecutors accused them of trying to destabilize the government and planning terrorist attacks.
But their supporters say they were just trying to organize political opposition and peaceful demonstrations. “We sacrifice our souls and our blood for you, Mushaima’a,” young men chanted, fists pumped in the air until the police gave chase.
Then they ran.
Compared with other places in the Persian Gulf, tiny Bahrain feels laid back and calm in the capital and the better neighborhoods. More than half the nation’s one million residents are expatriate workers, giving the streets a relatively cosmopolitan feel. Bahrain also has a not-too-hidden seedy side. Prostitution is rampant in the hotels and nightclubs, and the streets are filled with “massage parlors.” Bahrain is a destination for sex tourism.
Bahrain’s politics are heated, too. The 40-member Parliament is controlled by religious parties, Sunnis and Shiites, who have turned it into a sectarian battleground. The country is run by a self-declared king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, who presides over a police force staffed primarily by foreigners: Syrians, Iraqis, Jordanians, almost anyone who happens to be a Sunni and is eager to earn a Bahraini passport.
Shiites are all but banned from the military and security forces — certainly from command positions — one of their primary grievances.
The Shiite majority complains that the government has a plan to naturalize as many Sunnis as possible, to change the demographic balance. The government and its supporters insist that is not true.
But the Shiites do not believe them. “I don’t work, and I don’t go to school,” said Muhammad Nasser, 19. “I am demonstrating because there are no jobs because of naturalization of foreigners, because of the political prisoners, because of the abuse of the rights of the citizen.”
The government and its supporters say that the Shiites are not discriminated against, but that they also cannot be trusted to serve in the security forces.
“There are so many riots, burnings, killings, and not even one case is condemned by the Shiites,” said Adel al-Maawdah, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, defense and national security and a member of a fundamentalist Sunni political party. “Burning a car with people inside is not condemned. How can we trust such people?”
In fact, plenty of people condemn the violence. But the young people are so bored, and so agitated by religious leaders who define the conflict as sectarian, that they see protest as both entertainment and a duty.
“When we demonstrate peacefully, when we just hold banners, they don’t like it,” said Salman Hassan, 20, with a touch of sarcasm and defiance. “They want us to burn things so that they can say, ‘See, you are destructive.’ ”
There was no plan to throw rocks and light fires, or at least that is how it seemed when the protest here began. About 4 p.m., three dozen young men, some children and a small group of women gathered in a traffic circle carrying banners in support of political prisoners. They set up a small speaker, and a local religious leader, Al Sayyid Sadeq, began to speak.
Within minutes a fleet of police cars with flashing blue lights started toward them. Some in the crowd held their ground and jeered at the police. A second group of police charged in from a side road. The protesters ran. The crack of tear gas guns filled the air, followed by clouds of white acrid smoke.
Soon everyone was gone but the police.
But the young men quickly regrouped and blocked the road with construction materials. Two young boys dragged furniture into the street, and the older men doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. Only 11 officers were left, hardly a show of force.
The police made a final push, with a second group charging from another direction. They still failed to catch anyone. By 6 p.m., with the fires burned out, the police seemed exhausted, and the young men had faded into the neighborhood, excited and ready to do it again.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.
April 6, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Turkey Wants U.S. ‘Balance’
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is a man of brisk, borderline brusque, manner and he does not mince his words: “Hamas must be represented at the negotiating table. Only then can you get a solution.”
We were seated in his suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel, where a Turkish flag had been hurriedly brought in as official backdrop. Referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, Erdogan said, “You will get nowhere by talking only to Abbas. This is what I tell our Western friends.”
In an interview on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey, his first to a Muslim country since taking office, Erdogan pressed for what he called “a new balance” in the U.S. approach to the Middle East. “Definitely U.S. policy has to change,” he said, if there is to be “a fair, just and all-encompassing solution.”
A firm message from Israel’s best friend in the Muslim Middle East: the status quo is untenable.
How Hamas is viewed is a pivotal issue in the current American Middle East policy review. The victor in 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas is seen throughout the region as a legitimate resistance movement, a status burnished by its recent inconclusive pounding during Israel’s wretchedly named — and disastrous — “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.
The United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization. They won’t talk to it until it recognizes Israel, among other conditions. This marginalization has led only to impasse because Hamas, as an entrenched Palestinian political and social movement, cannot be circumvented and will not disappear.
Former Senator George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, has expressed support for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. I think this should become a U.S. diplomatic priority because it is the only coherent basis for meaningful peace talks. Erdogan called Mitchell “perfectly aware and with a full knowledge, a very positive person whose appointment was a very good step.”
The Turkish prime minister, who leads Justice and Development, or AKP, a party of Islamic inspiration and pragmatic bent, earned hero’s status in the Arab world when he walked out on the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a debate earlier this year in Davos. Any regrets?
“If I had failed to do that, it would have been disrespectful toward myself and disrespectful of the thousands of victims against whom disproportionate force was being used,” Erdogan said. He alluded to the children killed in Gaza — 288 of them according to the United Nations special rapporteur — and asked: “What more can I say?”
Erdogan, 55, urged Obama to become “the voice of millions of silent people and the protector of millions of unprotected people — that is what the Middle East is expecting.”
He went on: “I consider personally the election of Barack Hussein Obama to have very great symbolic meaning. A Muslim and a Christian name — so in his name there is a synthesis, although people from time to time want to overlook that and they do it intentionally. Barack Hussein Obama.”
I suggested that synthesis was all very well but, with a center-right Israeli government just installed, and its nationalist foreign minister already proclaiming that “If you want peace prepare for war,” the prospects of finding new bridges between the West and the Muslim world were remote.
“Your targets can only be realized on the basis of dreams,” Erdogan said. “If everyone can say, looking at Obama, that is he is one of us, is that not befitting for the leading country in the world?”
Dreams aside, I see Obama moving methodically to dismantle the Manichean Bush paradigm — with us or against us in a global battle of good against evil called the war on terror — in favor of a new realism that places improved relations with the Muslim world at its fulcrum. Hence the early visit to Turkey, gestures toward Iran, and other forms of outreach.
This will lead to tensions with Israel, which had conveniently conflated its long national struggle with the Palestinians within the war on terror, but is an inevitable result of a rational reassessment of U.S. interests.
I asked Erdogan if Islam and modernity were compatible. “Islam is a religion,” he said, “It is not an ideology. For a Muslim, there is no such thing as to be against modernity. Why should a Muslim not be a modern person? I, as a Muslim, fulfill all the requirements of my religion and I live in a democratic, social state. Can there be difficulties? Yes. But they will be resolved at the end of a maturity period so long as there is mutual trust.”
The problem is, of course, that Islam has been deployed as an ideology in the anti-modern, murderous, death-to-the-West campaign of Al-Qaeda. But Erdogan is right: Islam is one of the great world religions. Obama’s steps to reassert that truth, and so bridge the most dangerous division in the world, are of fundamental strategic importance.
Synthesis begins with understanding, which is precisely what never interested his predecessor.
Op-Ed Columnist
Turkey Wants U.S. ‘Balance’
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is a man of brisk, borderline brusque, manner and he does not mince his words: “Hamas must be represented at the negotiating table. Only then can you get a solution.”
We were seated in his suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel, where a Turkish flag had been hurriedly brought in as official backdrop. Referring to Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered Fatah leader and president of the Palestinian Authority, Erdogan said, “You will get nowhere by talking only to Abbas. This is what I tell our Western friends.”
In an interview on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey, his first to a Muslim country since taking office, Erdogan pressed for what he called “a new balance” in the U.S. approach to the Middle East. “Definitely U.S. policy has to change,” he said, if there is to be “a fair, just and all-encompassing solution.”
A firm message from Israel’s best friend in the Muslim Middle East: the status quo is untenable.
How Hamas is viewed is a pivotal issue in the current American Middle East policy review. The victor in 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas is seen throughout the region as a legitimate resistance movement, a status burnished by its recent inconclusive pounding during Israel’s wretchedly named — and disastrous — “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza.
The United States and the European Union consider Hamas a terrorist organization. They won’t talk to it until it recognizes Israel, among other conditions. This marginalization has led only to impasse because Hamas, as an entrenched Palestinian political and social movement, cannot be circumvented and will not disappear.
Former Senator George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, has expressed support for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. I think this should become a U.S. diplomatic priority because it is the only coherent basis for meaningful peace talks. Erdogan called Mitchell “perfectly aware and with a full knowledge, a very positive person whose appointment was a very good step.”
The Turkish prime minister, who leads Justice and Development, or AKP, a party of Islamic inspiration and pragmatic bent, earned hero’s status in the Arab world when he walked out on the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a debate earlier this year in Davos. Any regrets?
“If I had failed to do that, it would have been disrespectful toward myself and disrespectful of the thousands of victims against whom disproportionate force was being used,” Erdogan said. He alluded to the children killed in Gaza — 288 of them according to the United Nations special rapporteur — and asked: “What more can I say?”
Erdogan, 55, urged Obama to become “the voice of millions of silent people and the protector of millions of unprotected people — that is what the Middle East is expecting.”
He went on: “I consider personally the election of Barack Hussein Obama to have very great symbolic meaning. A Muslim and a Christian name — so in his name there is a synthesis, although people from time to time want to overlook that and they do it intentionally. Barack Hussein Obama.”
I suggested that synthesis was all very well but, with a center-right Israeli government just installed, and its nationalist foreign minister already proclaiming that “If you want peace prepare for war,” the prospects of finding new bridges between the West and the Muslim world were remote.
“Your targets can only be realized on the basis of dreams,” Erdogan said. “If everyone can say, looking at Obama, that is he is one of us, is that not befitting for the leading country in the world?”
Dreams aside, I see Obama moving methodically to dismantle the Manichean Bush paradigm — with us or against us in a global battle of good against evil called the war on terror — in favor of a new realism that places improved relations with the Muslim world at its fulcrum. Hence the early visit to Turkey, gestures toward Iran, and other forms of outreach.
This will lead to tensions with Israel, which had conveniently conflated its long national struggle with the Palestinians within the war on terror, but is an inevitable result of a rational reassessment of U.S. interests.
I asked Erdogan if Islam and modernity were compatible. “Islam is a religion,” he said, “It is not an ideology. For a Muslim, there is no such thing as to be against modernity. Why should a Muslim not be a modern person? I, as a Muslim, fulfill all the requirements of my religion and I live in a democratic, social state. Can there be difficulties? Yes. But they will be resolved at the end of a maturity period so long as there is mutual trust.”
The problem is, of course, that Islam has been deployed as an ideology in the anti-modern, murderous, death-to-the-West campaign of Al-Qaeda. But Erdogan is right: Islam is one of the great world religions. Obama’s steps to reassert that truth, and so bridge the most dangerous division in the world, are of fundamental strategic importance.
Synthesis begins with understanding, which is precisely what never interested his predecessor.
April 17, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
A Loud and Promised Land
By DAVID BROOKS
TEL AVIV
On my 12th visit to Israel, I finally had my baptism by traffic accident. I was sitting at a red light, when a bus turning the corner honked at me to back up. When I did, I scraped the fender of the car behind me.
The driver — a young, hip-looking, alt-rocker dude — came running out of the car in a fury. He ran up to the bus driver and got into a ferocious screaming match. Then he came up to me graciously and kindly. We were brothers in the war against bus drivers. Then, as we were filling out our paperwork, another bus happened by and honked. The rocker ran out into the street and got into another ferocious screaming match with this driver. Then he came back to me all smiles and warmth.
Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.
Ethan Bronner, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live.
One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.
We can all think of reasons that Israeli culture should have evolved into a reticence-free zone, and that the average behavior should be different here. This is a tough, scrappy country, perpetually fighting for survival. The most emotionally intense experiences are national ones, so the public-private distinction was bound to erode. Moreover, the status system doesn’t really revolve around money. It consists of trying to prove you are savvier than everybody else, that above all you are nobody’s patsy.
As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel, but I have to confess, I find the place by turns exhausting, admirable, annoying, impressive and foreign. Israel’s enemies claim the country is an outpost of Western colonialism. That’s not true. Israel is, in large measure, a Middle Eastern country, and the Israeli-Arab dispute is in part an intra-Mideast conflict.
This culture of disputatiousness does yield some essential fruits. First, it gives the country a special vividness. There is no bar on earth quite so vibrant as a bar filled with Israelis.
Second, it explains the genuine national unity. Israel is the most diverse small country imaginable. Nonetheless, I may be interviewing a left-wing artist in Tel Aviv or a right-wing settler in Hebron, and I can be highly confident that they will have a few things in common: an intense sense of national mission, a hunger for emotionally significant moments, an inability to read social signals when I try to suggest that I really don’t want them to harangue me about moving here and adopting their lifestyle.
Most important, this argumentative culture nurtures a sense of responsibility. The other countries in this region are more gracious, but often there is a communal unwillingness to accept responsibility for national problems. The Israelis, on the other hand, blame themselves for everything and work hard to get the most out of each person. From that wail of criticism things really do change. I come here nearly annually, and while the peace process is always the same, there is always something unrecognizable about the national scene — whether it is the structure of the political parties, the absorption of immigrants or the new engines of economic growth.
Today, Israel is stuck in a period of frustrating stasis. Iran poses an existential threat that is too big for Israel to deal with alone. Hamas and Hezbollah will frustrate peace plans, even if the Israelis magically do everything right.
This conflict will go on for a generation or more. Israelis will keep up their insufferable and necessary barrage of self-assertion. And yet we still dream of peace and the day when I am standing in line at an Israeli cash register and an Israeli shopper sees a chance to butt in front of me, and — miracle of miracles — she will not try to take it.
Op-Ed Columnist
A Loud and Promised Land
By DAVID BROOKS
TEL AVIV
On my 12th visit to Israel, I finally had my baptism by traffic accident. I was sitting at a red light, when a bus turning the corner honked at me to back up. When I did, I scraped the fender of the car behind me.
The driver — a young, hip-looking, alt-rocker dude — came running out of the car in a fury. He ran up to the bus driver and got into a ferocious screaming match. Then he came up to me graciously and kindly. We were brothers in the war against bus drivers. Then, as we were filling out our paperwork, another bus happened by and honked. The rocker ran out into the street and got into another ferocious screaming match with this driver. Then he came back to me all smiles and warmth.
Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.
Ethan Bronner, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live.
One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.
We can all think of reasons that Israeli culture should have evolved into a reticence-free zone, and that the average behavior should be different here. This is a tough, scrappy country, perpetually fighting for survival. The most emotionally intense experiences are national ones, so the public-private distinction was bound to erode. Moreover, the status system doesn’t really revolve around money. It consists of trying to prove you are savvier than everybody else, that above all you are nobody’s patsy.
As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel, but I have to confess, I find the place by turns exhausting, admirable, annoying, impressive and foreign. Israel’s enemies claim the country is an outpost of Western colonialism. That’s not true. Israel is, in large measure, a Middle Eastern country, and the Israeli-Arab dispute is in part an intra-Mideast conflict.
This culture of disputatiousness does yield some essential fruits. First, it gives the country a special vividness. There is no bar on earth quite so vibrant as a bar filled with Israelis.
Second, it explains the genuine national unity. Israel is the most diverse small country imaginable. Nonetheless, I may be interviewing a left-wing artist in Tel Aviv or a right-wing settler in Hebron, and I can be highly confident that they will have a few things in common: an intense sense of national mission, a hunger for emotionally significant moments, an inability to read social signals when I try to suggest that I really don’t want them to harangue me about moving here and adopting their lifestyle.
Most important, this argumentative culture nurtures a sense of responsibility. The other countries in this region are more gracious, but often there is a communal unwillingness to accept responsibility for national problems. The Israelis, on the other hand, blame themselves for everything and work hard to get the most out of each person. From that wail of criticism things really do change. I come here nearly annually, and while the peace process is always the same, there is always something unrecognizable about the national scene — whether it is the structure of the political parties, the absorption of immigrants or the new engines of economic growth.
Today, Israel is stuck in a period of frustrating stasis. Iran poses an existential threat that is too big for Israel to deal with alone. Hamas and Hezbollah will frustrate peace plans, even if the Israelis magically do everything right.
This conflict will go on for a generation or more. Israelis will keep up their insufferable and necessary barrage of self-assertion. And yet we still dream of peace and the day when I am standing in line at an Israeli cash register and an Israeli shopper sees a chance to butt in front of me, and — miracle of miracles — she will not try to take it.
April 19, 2009
Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Revisits Old Ways
By ROD NORDLAND
BAGHDAD — Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it.
Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.
Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them.
Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense.
It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps part way back to the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.
“Everything is going back to its natural way,” said Ahmed Assadee, a screenwriter who works on a soap opera.
Men gather in cafes to smoke a hookah and gamble on dice and domino games. On weekends, the Mustansiriya Coffee Shop’s back room is crammed with low bleachers set up around a clandestine cockfighting ring. On one recent day, the 100 or so spectators were raucous while watching the bloody spectacle, but they placed their bets discreetly.
Gambling, after all, is illegal.
Walid Brahim, 25, a bomb disposal expert with the Iraqi Army, and his brother Farat, 20, an electrician, recently sat side by side at a table in the Nights of Abu Musa bar, on an alley off Saddoun Street, working their way through a bucket of ice and a bottle of Mr. Chavez Whiskey, an Iraqi-made hooch.
“This is great,” Walid Brahim said. “We used to buy alcohol and just drink secretly in our house.”
The bar is men-only, as pretty much all respectable taverns are, but the brothers look forward to an even brighter future.
“If this security continues,” Farat Brahim said, “within a year all the waiters will be girls.”
The local police, weary of years of dodging assassins and cleaning up after car bombings, are blasé about a little vice.
“Today we are dealing with more normal things. All the world is facing such problems,” said Col. Abdel Jaber Qassim Sadir, assistant police chief in Karada, a central Baghdad neighborhood.
“Prostitution, this kind of behavior cannot be stopped,” Colonel Sadir said. “It’s very hard to find it in public; it goes on in secret, isolated places.”
Actually, not so secret. There are a half-dozen night spots in Karada now where the entry fee is $50. With $150 a week considered a good wage, customers would not pay that much merely for the privilege of drinking.
At the Ahalan Wasahalan Club on Al Nidhal Street one recent night, the owner, Tiba Jamal, was holding court, as she usually does, on the dais at the front of a room with a mostly empty dance floor and lots of tables.
Ms. Jamal calls herself the Sheikha, or a female sheik, an honorific title she has apparently adopted. She dresses in a head-to-toe, skin-tight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings and rings, her response to the financial crisis.
The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but nothing that would be considered risqué on a street in Europe — in August. At one point in the evening they outnumbered the men, as they sat in a big group until being summoned to one of the men’s tables.
“It’s nice to see people having fun again,” Ms. Jamal said.
One regular customer said, “You can have any of those girls to spend the night with you later, only $100.” First, though, patrons are expected to spend a few hours buying $20 beers or even more costly whiskey.
A young woman who said she was 28 but looked 18 sat smoking, and downing soft drinks while her “date” drank Scotch. A university student, she would give her name only as Baida, but she was frank about her nighttime profession. Had something happened to force her into this? “No,” she said. “I go out with men so I can get money.” To support her family? She seemed stunned by the question. “No, for myself.”
One police detective said he would not dream of enforcing the law against prostitutes. “They’re the best sources we have,” said the detective, whose name is being withheld for his safety. “They know everything about JAM and Al Qaeda members,” he said, using the acronym for Jaish al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia.
The detective added that the only problem his men had was that neighbors got the wrong idea when detectives visited the houses where prostitutes were known to live. They really do just want to talk, he said.
“If I had my way, I’d destroy all the mosques and spread the whores around a little more,” the detective said. “At least they’re not sectarian.”
Others are uncomfortable with the prostitutes’ presence.
“It is terrible to see prostitution increased like this,” said Hanaa Edwar, secretary general of the Iraqi human rights group Al-Amal. “These are women from displaced families, poor people, people who have to sell themselves to get money for their families and children.”
She was incensed after she raised the subject before the Iraqi Parliament. “They were shocked and didn’t agree to open discussion on this issue,” she said. The shock, she said, was that she dared to mention the problem.
Al Amal commissioned a report last year that surveyed prostitutes working on the streets in Baghdad. One was a 15-year-old girl who had been thrown out of school for dressing inappropriately, then took to prostitution, the report said. Another was an 18-year-old forced to become the second wife of an older man; she ran away and had no other way to support herself. One girl was 12.
Certainly, vice often has an ugly side. During a recent undercover operation in Karada aimed at a human trafficking ring, a pimp offered a plainclothes officer an opportunity to buy a young woman to take to Syria, according to a detective, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the sting.
Drug abuse, at least, is one problem that has not shown up much, or has stayed well underground, the police say. “The only problems we see are some illegal pills occasionally,” Colonel Sadir said.
Not surprisingly, the Baghdadis’ drug of choice is Valium, the colonel said.
Most people have had enough excitement these past six years just staying home.
Riyadh Mohammed, Suadad al-Salhy and Muhammed al-Obaidi contributed reporting.
Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Revisits Old Ways
By ROD NORDLAND
BAGHDAD — Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it.
Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.
Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them.
Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense.
It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps part way back to the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.
“Everything is going back to its natural way,” said Ahmed Assadee, a screenwriter who works on a soap opera.
Men gather in cafes to smoke a hookah and gamble on dice and domino games. On weekends, the Mustansiriya Coffee Shop’s back room is crammed with low bleachers set up around a clandestine cockfighting ring. On one recent day, the 100 or so spectators were raucous while watching the bloody spectacle, but they placed their bets discreetly.
Gambling, after all, is illegal.
Walid Brahim, 25, a bomb disposal expert with the Iraqi Army, and his brother Farat, 20, an electrician, recently sat side by side at a table in the Nights of Abu Musa bar, on an alley off Saddoun Street, working their way through a bucket of ice and a bottle of Mr. Chavez Whiskey, an Iraqi-made hooch.
“This is great,” Walid Brahim said. “We used to buy alcohol and just drink secretly in our house.”
The bar is men-only, as pretty much all respectable taverns are, but the brothers look forward to an even brighter future.
“If this security continues,” Farat Brahim said, “within a year all the waiters will be girls.”
The local police, weary of years of dodging assassins and cleaning up after car bombings, are blasé about a little vice.
“Today we are dealing with more normal things. All the world is facing such problems,” said Col. Abdel Jaber Qassim Sadir, assistant police chief in Karada, a central Baghdad neighborhood.
“Prostitution, this kind of behavior cannot be stopped,” Colonel Sadir said. “It’s very hard to find it in public; it goes on in secret, isolated places.”
Actually, not so secret. There are a half-dozen night spots in Karada now where the entry fee is $50. With $150 a week considered a good wage, customers would not pay that much merely for the privilege of drinking.
At the Ahalan Wasahalan Club on Al Nidhal Street one recent night, the owner, Tiba Jamal, was holding court, as she usually does, on the dais at the front of a room with a mostly empty dance floor and lots of tables.
Ms. Jamal calls herself the Sheikha, or a female sheik, an honorific title she has apparently adopted. She dresses in a head-to-toe, skin-tight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings and rings, her response to the financial crisis.
The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but nothing that would be considered risqué on a street in Europe — in August. At one point in the evening they outnumbered the men, as they sat in a big group until being summoned to one of the men’s tables.
“It’s nice to see people having fun again,” Ms. Jamal said.
One regular customer said, “You can have any of those girls to spend the night with you later, only $100.” First, though, patrons are expected to spend a few hours buying $20 beers or even more costly whiskey.
A young woman who said she was 28 but looked 18 sat smoking, and downing soft drinks while her “date” drank Scotch. A university student, she would give her name only as Baida, but she was frank about her nighttime profession. Had something happened to force her into this? “No,” she said. “I go out with men so I can get money.” To support her family? She seemed stunned by the question. “No, for myself.”
One police detective said he would not dream of enforcing the law against prostitutes. “They’re the best sources we have,” said the detective, whose name is being withheld for his safety. “They know everything about JAM and Al Qaeda members,” he said, using the acronym for Jaish al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia.
The detective added that the only problem his men had was that neighbors got the wrong idea when detectives visited the houses where prostitutes were known to live. They really do just want to talk, he said.
“If I had my way, I’d destroy all the mosques and spread the whores around a little more,” the detective said. “At least they’re not sectarian.”
Others are uncomfortable with the prostitutes’ presence.
“It is terrible to see prostitution increased like this,” said Hanaa Edwar, secretary general of the Iraqi human rights group Al-Amal. “These are women from displaced families, poor people, people who have to sell themselves to get money for their families and children.”
She was incensed after she raised the subject before the Iraqi Parliament. “They were shocked and didn’t agree to open discussion on this issue,” she said. The shock, she said, was that she dared to mention the problem.
Al Amal commissioned a report last year that surveyed prostitutes working on the streets in Baghdad. One was a 15-year-old girl who had been thrown out of school for dressing inappropriately, then took to prostitution, the report said. Another was an 18-year-old forced to become the second wife of an older man; she ran away and had no other way to support herself. One girl was 12.
Certainly, vice often has an ugly side. During a recent undercover operation in Karada aimed at a human trafficking ring, a pimp offered a plainclothes officer an opportunity to buy a young woman to take to Syria, according to a detective, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the sting.
Drug abuse, at least, is one problem that has not shown up much, or has stayed well underground, the police say. “The only problems we see are some illegal pills occasionally,” Colonel Sadir said.
Not surprisingly, the Baghdadis’ drug of choice is Valium, the colonel said.
Most people have had enough excitement these past six years just staying home.
Riyadh Mohammed, Suadad al-Salhy and Muhammed al-Obaidi contributed reporting.
May 1, 2009
Culling Pigs in Flu Fight, Egypt Angers Herders and Dismays U.N.
By NADIM AUDI
CAIRO — Egypt has begun forcibly slaughtering the country’s pig herds as a precaution against swine flu, a move that the United Nations described as “a real mistake” and one that is prompting anger among the country’s pig farmers.
The decision, announced Wednesday, is already adding new strains to the tense relations between Egypt’s majority Muslims and its Coptic Christians. Most of Egypt’s pig farmers are Christians, and some accuse the government of using swine flu fears to punish them economically.
According to World Health Organization officials, the decision to kill pigs has no scientific basis. “We don’t see any evidence that anyone is getting infected from pigs,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization’s assistant director general. “This appears to be a virus which is moving from person to person.”
The outbreak has been dubbed swine flu — now officially called influenza A(H1N1) — because scientists believe it started in pigs, but they do not know if that was recently or years ago. The name change was designed to allay fears about pigs and eating pork.
Egypt has not reported any cases of the new virus that has hit 11 other nations, but the country has been hard hit by avian flu.
The great majority of Egyptians are Muslim and do not eat pork because of religious restrictions, but about 10 percent of the population is Coptic Christian. As a result, Egyptian pig farmers are overwhelmingly Christian. And although some of the country’s Christians are middle class or wealthy, the Christian farmers are generally poor.
On Thursday, several urban pig farmers in Cairo said they see the government’s decision as just another expression of Egyptian Muslims’ resentment against Christians. Last year, there were several violent incidents that some believed were aimed at Christians, including the kidnapping and beating of monks. The Egyptian government denied the incidents had sectarian overtones, saying they were each part of other disputes, including a fight over land.
Barsoum Girgis, a 26-year-old pig farmer, lives in a poor neighborhood, Manshiet Nasser, built along the Mukatam cliffs on the eastern end of the city where most of the ramshackle, red-brick buildings were built illegally.
Mr. Girgis makes his living through a combination of raising pigs and collecting garbage — two professions that are often tied together in a city where garbage collection can be an informal affair and where poor farmers rely on food scraps to feed their livestock.
He wakes up every morning around 4 a.m. to collect garbage around the city. When he gets back to Manshiet Nasser, at around 9 a.m., he sorts the trash, putting aside what can be sold at the city’s booming scrap markets and what he can use as pig feed.
“The government here is going after our livelihood,” he said, nervously playing with a wooden cross he wears around his neck. “These pigs are perfectly healthy. How am I going to feed my children and send them to school without my livestock?”
Mr. Girgis lives with his extended family, about 30 people, in the first two floors of a building that leans against a cliff. His 60 small pigs live on the ground floor. They have dark, furry skin, and their squeals can be heard a block away from Mr. Girgis’ home.
Many of Cairo’s pig farmers live in similar conditions, sharing their small spaces in the teeming city with their animals.
After international health officials criticized Egypt’s decision to kill about 300,000 pigs, the Agriculture Ministry’s head of infectious diseases, Saber Abdel Aziz Galal, explained that the cull was “a general health measure,” according to Agence France-Presse.
"It is good to restructure this kind of breeding in good farms, not on rubbish," the agency quoted him as saying.
“We will build new farms in special areas, like in Europe,” he said. “Within two years the pigs will return, but we need first to build new farms."
It remains unclear if the government will compensate the farmers for their losses. The Health Ministry originally said the farmers would be paid, but after many in Parliament disagreed, the ministry appeared to back down.
Some in Cairo, anxious over the reports of swine flu agree, with the government’s move. “Now we know there is a reason God bans pigs: they spread sickness” said Mohsen Hamady, a 50-year-old accountant who was sipping tea after work in a Cairo tea house.
But many pig farmers say they do a valuable service for the rest of Cairo that will be recognized only if they stop picking up the trash.
“If they take away our pigs, why would we go collect their garbage every morning?” said Marcos Shalab, a 40-year-old pig farmer in Manshiet Nasser.
Mr. Girgis echoed this feeling. “We are Christian, and we are the underclass, so it’s very easy to go after us. But this city relies on us to process its waste. It relies on the pigs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/healt ... nted=print
Culling Pigs in Flu Fight, Egypt Angers Herders and Dismays U.N.
By NADIM AUDI
CAIRO — Egypt has begun forcibly slaughtering the country’s pig herds as a precaution against swine flu, a move that the United Nations described as “a real mistake” and one that is prompting anger among the country’s pig farmers.
The decision, announced Wednesday, is already adding new strains to the tense relations between Egypt’s majority Muslims and its Coptic Christians. Most of Egypt’s pig farmers are Christians, and some accuse the government of using swine flu fears to punish them economically.
According to World Health Organization officials, the decision to kill pigs has no scientific basis. “We don’t see any evidence that anyone is getting infected from pigs,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization’s assistant director general. “This appears to be a virus which is moving from person to person.”
The outbreak has been dubbed swine flu — now officially called influenza A(H1N1) — because scientists believe it started in pigs, but they do not know if that was recently or years ago. The name change was designed to allay fears about pigs and eating pork.
Egypt has not reported any cases of the new virus that has hit 11 other nations, but the country has been hard hit by avian flu.
The great majority of Egyptians are Muslim and do not eat pork because of religious restrictions, but about 10 percent of the population is Coptic Christian. As a result, Egyptian pig farmers are overwhelmingly Christian. And although some of the country’s Christians are middle class or wealthy, the Christian farmers are generally poor.
On Thursday, several urban pig farmers in Cairo said they see the government’s decision as just another expression of Egyptian Muslims’ resentment against Christians. Last year, there were several violent incidents that some believed were aimed at Christians, including the kidnapping and beating of monks. The Egyptian government denied the incidents had sectarian overtones, saying they were each part of other disputes, including a fight over land.
Barsoum Girgis, a 26-year-old pig farmer, lives in a poor neighborhood, Manshiet Nasser, built along the Mukatam cliffs on the eastern end of the city where most of the ramshackle, red-brick buildings were built illegally.
Mr. Girgis makes his living through a combination of raising pigs and collecting garbage — two professions that are often tied together in a city where garbage collection can be an informal affair and where poor farmers rely on food scraps to feed their livestock.
He wakes up every morning around 4 a.m. to collect garbage around the city. When he gets back to Manshiet Nasser, at around 9 a.m., he sorts the trash, putting aside what can be sold at the city’s booming scrap markets and what he can use as pig feed.
“The government here is going after our livelihood,” he said, nervously playing with a wooden cross he wears around his neck. “These pigs are perfectly healthy. How am I going to feed my children and send them to school without my livestock?”
Mr. Girgis lives with his extended family, about 30 people, in the first two floors of a building that leans against a cliff. His 60 small pigs live on the ground floor. They have dark, furry skin, and their squeals can be heard a block away from Mr. Girgis’ home.
Many of Cairo’s pig farmers live in similar conditions, sharing their small spaces in the teeming city with their animals.
After international health officials criticized Egypt’s decision to kill about 300,000 pigs, the Agriculture Ministry’s head of infectious diseases, Saber Abdel Aziz Galal, explained that the cull was “a general health measure,” according to Agence France-Presse.
"It is good to restructure this kind of breeding in good farms, not on rubbish," the agency quoted him as saying.
“We will build new farms in special areas, like in Europe,” he said. “Within two years the pigs will return, but we need first to build new farms."
It remains unclear if the government will compensate the farmers for their losses. The Health Ministry originally said the farmers would be paid, but after many in Parliament disagreed, the ministry appeared to back down.
Some in Cairo, anxious over the reports of swine flu agree, with the government’s move. “Now we know there is a reason God bans pigs: they spread sickness” said Mohsen Hamady, a 50-year-old accountant who was sipping tea after work in a Cairo tea house.
But many pig farmers say they do a valuable service for the rest of Cairo that will be recognized only if they stop picking up the trash.
“If they take away our pigs, why would we go collect their garbage every morning?” said Marcos Shalab, a 40-year-old pig farmer in Manshiet Nasser.
Mr. Girgis echoed this feeling. “We are Christian, and we are the underclass, so it’s very easy to go after us. But this city relies on us to process its waste. It relies on the pigs.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/healt ... nted=print
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/world ... ?th&emc=th
May 8, 2009
Pope, Hope in Hand, Is Heading to Mideast
By RACHEL DONADIO
VATICAN CITY — When Pope John Paul II traveled to the Holy Land in 2000, the visit was history, the first by a pope to recognize the state of Israel or visit sites holy to Islam.
When Benedict XVI travels on Friday to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, it will be much more about him personally. A man whose four-year papacy has been marked by missteps that angered and offended Jews and Muslims will deliver 32 speeches at some of the holiest sites in the world to Muslims, Jews and Christians. Each word will be scrutinized, particularly by listeners with little affection for him. Already, Islamic groups in Jordan are protesting.
“The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here,” Archbishop Fouad Twal, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, told the Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday. “One word for the Muslims and I’m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I’m in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.”
But for the Vatican, Benedict’s trip is an opportunity to urge Palestinians and Israelis toward peace and to continue his assiduous efforts to improve his standing with Jews and Muslims.
“The trip is very important and very complex,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said this week. He called the journey “an act of hope and faith toward peace and reconciliation.” Given the tensions in the region, he added, “it seems a brave gesture.”
In the works since last fall, Benedict’s trip comes at a time of change and uncertainty in the region. Israel just ushered in a new right-wing government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the two main Palestinian factions remain hostile and divided, with the secular Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, controlling the West Bank, and the Islamist group Hamas ruling Gaza.
Emotions are still raw after 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli military assault on Gaza in January, which some at the Vatican opposed.
But Vatican officials say the pope was eager to make the trip, no matter the conditions, given his age. He turned 82 last month. Benedict sparked global outrage in January by revoking the excommunication of a schismatic bishop from an ultratraditionalist sect — a Briton, Richard Williamson, who had recently been filmed denying the scope of the Holocaust. Many Jews had already viewed Benedict with some suspicion, given that he is a German who was forced into the Hitler Youth and the German Army in World War II.
After Jews and Catholics alike said the church’s moral authority had been eroded by the Williamson episode, Benedict issued an unprecedented personal letter in March explaining his motives. And in Israel, he will likely be able to draw on reserves of good will for his many years, as a cardinal, improving once tense relations between Catholics and Jews. He will visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and meet with survivors.
His visit comes three years after he offended many Muslims with a speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who said Islam encouraged violence and brought things “evil and inhuman.” To make amends, he reached out to various Muslim groups and prayed in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on a trip to Turkey two months after the speech. And he will continue that effort in Jordan, where he arrives on Friday and will visit a mosque and meet with Muslim clerics and scholars.
“His willingness to open up to members of other faith communities is obviously a welcome development,” said Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for the Common Word initiative, a group of Muslim leaders and scholars that began a dialogue with the Vatican after the Regensburg speech.
Benedict will also visit Mount Nebo, the spot from which Moses is believed to have seen the Promised Land.
On Monday, Benedict lands in Tel Aviv for four intense days in Israel that will include visits to the Western Wall, holy to Jews; and, sacred to Catholics, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the hall where Jesus is believed to have had the Last Supper. In Jerusalem he will visit the religious compound in the Old City known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The Vatican’s Jewish interlocutors say they hope the trip will mend fences, while Israeli officials hope it will boost Christian tourism to the region.
The trip is an important opportunity for the pope “to demonstrate visually,” that the relationship between Jews and Catholics “has continued to flourish since the visit of John Paul II,” said Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations.
In recent months, tensions have brewed between Israel and the Vatican over a plaque in Yad Vashem criticizing Pope Pius XII for not doing enough to save Jews during the Holocaust. Pius, who served from 1939 until 1958, is on track for sainthood.
Israeli officials sidestepped the issue by having the pope visit the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, but not the museum.
Tensions are even higher over the visit to Bethlehem, where Palestinians erected a stage for the pope next to a portion of the separation barrier that Israel has been building to wall itself off from the West Bank. But after complaints from Israel, the Vatican nuncio said that Benedict would speak from a nearby United Nations school.
There, Benedict is expected to make a speech calling attention to a pressing concern of the Catholic Church: the rapidly declining number of Christians in the Middle East. Although Christians have remained about 2 percent of Israel’s population since its founding, their presence in places like Bethlehem has decreased radically in past decades.
Faced with poverty and unemployment, many Palestinians are “not too optimistic about the pope’s visit,” said Mohammed Dajani, the founder of the Wasatia Movement that promotes moderation in Islam and director of American Studies department at Al-Quds University.
“People are saying the pope is pro-Israel, that he wants to please Israel, so they don’t have much hope from the visit,” Mr. Dajani added.
In a message on Wednesday, Benedict addressed the people of the places on his itinerary. “My primary intention is to visit the places made holy by the life of Jesus, and, to pray at them for the gift of peace and unity for your families, and all those for whom the Holy Land and the Middle East is home.”
Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
****
Papal visit angers Islamists
Canwest News ServiceMay 8, 2009
Jordanian Islamist leaders on Thursday condemned Pope Benedict's visit to the Middle East, saying it was provocative because he has not apologized for offending comments implying Islam was violent and irrational.
They said the Pope, who arrives in Jordan on Friday on the first leg of a tour including Israel and the Palestinian territories, still owed them an apology for hinting Islam was violent and irrational in a 2006 speech.
A senior Amman official acknowledged some discontent but said the government would warmly welcome Benedict.
"The present Vatican Pope is the one who issued severe insults to Islam and did not offer any apology to the Muslims," said Zaki Bani Rusheid, head of the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
May 8, 2009
Pope, Hope in Hand, Is Heading to Mideast
By RACHEL DONADIO
VATICAN CITY — When Pope John Paul II traveled to the Holy Land in 2000, the visit was history, the first by a pope to recognize the state of Israel or visit sites holy to Islam.
When Benedict XVI travels on Friday to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, it will be much more about him personally. A man whose four-year papacy has been marked by missteps that angered and offended Jews and Muslims will deliver 32 speeches at some of the holiest sites in the world to Muslims, Jews and Christians. Each word will be scrutinized, particularly by listeners with little affection for him. Already, Islamic groups in Jordan are protesting.
“The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here,” Archbishop Fouad Twal, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, told the Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday. “One word for the Muslims and I’m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I’m in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.”
But for the Vatican, Benedict’s trip is an opportunity to urge Palestinians and Israelis toward peace and to continue his assiduous efforts to improve his standing with Jews and Muslims.
“The trip is very important and very complex,” the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said this week. He called the journey “an act of hope and faith toward peace and reconciliation.” Given the tensions in the region, he added, “it seems a brave gesture.”
In the works since last fall, Benedict’s trip comes at a time of change and uncertainty in the region. Israel just ushered in a new right-wing government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the two main Palestinian factions remain hostile and divided, with the secular Palestinian Authority, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, controlling the West Bank, and the Islamist group Hamas ruling Gaza.
Emotions are still raw after 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli military assault on Gaza in January, which some at the Vatican opposed.
But Vatican officials say the pope was eager to make the trip, no matter the conditions, given his age. He turned 82 last month. Benedict sparked global outrage in January by revoking the excommunication of a schismatic bishop from an ultratraditionalist sect — a Briton, Richard Williamson, who had recently been filmed denying the scope of the Holocaust. Many Jews had already viewed Benedict with some suspicion, given that he is a German who was forced into the Hitler Youth and the German Army in World War II.
After Jews and Catholics alike said the church’s moral authority had been eroded by the Williamson episode, Benedict issued an unprecedented personal letter in March explaining his motives. And in Israel, he will likely be able to draw on reserves of good will for his many years, as a cardinal, improving once tense relations between Catholics and Jews. He will visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and meet with survivors.
His visit comes three years after he offended many Muslims with a speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who said Islam encouraged violence and brought things “evil and inhuman.” To make amends, he reached out to various Muslim groups and prayed in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul on a trip to Turkey two months after the speech. And he will continue that effort in Jordan, where he arrives on Friday and will visit a mosque and meet with Muslim clerics and scholars.
“His willingness to open up to members of other faith communities is obviously a welcome development,” said Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for the Common Word initiative, a group of Muslim leaders and scholars that began a dialogue with the Vatican after the Regensburg speech.
Benedict will also visit Mount Nebo, the spot from which Moses is believed to have seen the Promised Land.
On Monday, Benedict lands in Tel Aviv for four intense days in Israel that will include visits to the Western Wall, holy to Jews; and, sacred to Catholics, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the hall where Jesus is believed to have had the Last Supper. In Jerusalem he will visit the religious compound in the Old City known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The Vatican’s Jewish interlocutors say they hope the trip will mend fences, while Israeli officials hope it will boost Christian tourism to the region.
The trip is an important opportunity for the pope “to demonstrate visually,” that the relationship between Jews and Catholics “has continued to flourish since the visit of John Paul II,” said Rabbi David Rosen, chairman of International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations.
In recent months, tensions have brewed between Israel and the Vatican over a plaque in Yad Vashem criticizing Pope Pius XII for not doing enough to save Jews during the Holocaust. Pius, who served from 1939 until 1958, is on track for sainthood.
Israeli officials sidestepped the issue by having the pope visit the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem, but not the museum.
Tensions are even higher over the visit to Bethlehem, where Palestinians erected a stage for the pope next to a portion of the separation barrier that Israel has been building to wall itself off from the West Bank. But after complaints from Israel, the Vatican nuncio said that Benedict would speak from a nearby United Nations school.
There, Benedict is expected to make a speech calling attention to a pressing concern of the Catholic Church: the rapidly declining number of Christians in the Middle East. Although Christians have remained about 2 percent of Israel’s population since its founding, their presence in places like Bethlehem has decreased radically in past decades.
Faced with poverty and unemployment, many Palestinians are “not too optimistic about the pope’s visit,” said Mohammed Dajani, the founder of the Wasatia Movement that promotes moderation in Islam and director of American Studies department at Al-Quds University.
“People are saying the pope is pro-Israel, that he wants to please Israel, so they don’t have much hope from the visit,” Mr. Dajani added.
In a message on Wednesday, Benedict addressed the people of the places on his itinerary. “My primary intention is to visit the places made holy by the life of Jesus, and, to pray at them for the gift of peace and unity for your families, and all those for whom the Holy Land and the Middle East is home.”
Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
****
Papal visit angers Islamists
Canwest News ServiceMay 8, 2009
Jordanian Islamist leaders on Thursday condemned Pope Benedict's visit to the Middle East, saying it was provocative because he has not apologized for offending comments implying Islam was violent and irrational.
They said the Pope, who arrives in Jordan on Friday on the first leg of a tour including Israel and the Palestinian territories, still owed them an apology for hinting Islam was violent and irrational in a 2006 speech.
A senior Amman official acknowledged some discontent but said the government would warmly welcome Benedict.
"The present Vatican Pope is the one who issued severe insults to Islam and did not offer any apology to the Muslims," said Zaki Bani Rusheid, head of the Islamic Action Front, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
May 12, 2009
Memo From Cairo
Egypt to Be Center Stage in Obama’s Address to Arabs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — President Obama’s decision to deliver a speech here next month has given significant encouragement to a once powerful ally that has grown increasingly frustrated over its waning regional influence and its inability to explain to its citizens why it remains committed to a Middle East peace process that has failed to produce a better life for Palestinians.
After eight years in which Egypt felt unappreciated and bullied by the Bush administration, Egyptian officials were gleeful about Cairo’s selection last week for the president’s address to the Muslim world. They said that it proved Egypt remained the capital of the Arab world and that it eased concerns that Washington might undermine its Arab allies in exchange for a grand deal with their rivals in Iran.
“The aptest choice was Cairo,” the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, told the state-owned daily newspaper Rose Al-Yousef. “It is the capital of moderation in Islam and the capital of cultural sway in the Arab and Muslim worlds.”
Still, President Obama’s decision to address a deeply skeptical Arab audience from Cairo is fraught with potential land mines, according to political analysts, human rights advocates and government officials. He has selected an authoritarian state where political and economic reform has stalled under President Hosni Mubarak, 82, who has been in power for nearly 30 years.
Those factors will put some pressure on Mr. Obama to at least address the issue of democracy and human rights. The Egyptian government bristles at outside pressure, and the general population often sees hypocrisy when Western leaders call for democracy, then partner with authoritarian leaders.
“America’s standing alongside authoritarian regimes is what created terrorism in the Arab world,” said Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate who was recently freed after more than three years in prison here on what were widely seen as politically inspired charges. “It is what strengthened the thorn of extremism in the Arab world.”
Even before the issue of human rights is raised, though, Egyptian leaders and activists will be looking for Mr. Obama to address their first priority: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If Mr. Obama wants to improve United States relations with the Muslim world, that is the first step, many here said.
There was a time when progress on process was enough, they argued. Not anymore.
People here want results, a challenge made all the more complicated for Mr. Obama by recent regional developments: the splintering of the Palestinian leadership; the empowerment of militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas; lingering anger over Israel’s offensive in Gaza; and the aggressive foreign policy of Iran.
Still, there will be an expectation that Mr. Obama drive real changes, initially by having Israel freeze settlements, dismantle checkpoints and open the crossings to Gaza, officials here said.
“For 18 years, the peace process has gone on?” said a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat speaking anonymously under diplomatic rules. “Who in their right mind would think it can go on for another 18 years?”
Egypt sees in the peace process the key to most regional problems, from its diminished credibility to what it perceives as the rising threat of Iran. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with Mr. Mubarak on Monday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, has tried to promote the idea that Arabs, Israelis and Americans have a common enemy in Iran and should first unite against that threat.
Egypt agrees, but only to a point.
Egypt maintains that to tame Iran — with which it is in open conflict — the issue of a Palestinian state must first be resolved. As long as that conflict is festering, Iran will be able to undermine Egypt by attacking its allegiance to the peace treaty with Israel, officials here said. Egypt has struggled to convince its people, and Arabs around the region, that its commitment to the treaty is the best way to help the Palestinians and to preserve Egypt’s own national security.
“I affirmed the importance of resuming negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority for a clear political horizon that deals with all final status issues and that establishes an independent Palestinian state to live alongside Israel,” Mr. Mubarak said after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu.
Egypt has already made clear that it cannot begin to give until it gets. That is why Egypt — along with the 21 other members of the Arab League — last week flatly rejected a proposal floated by Washington’s emissaries in the region that called on the Arab states to drop their demands for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel.
Concessions would only undermine Egypt with its adversaries, primarily Iran, analysts here said. Ambassador Hesham Youssef, chief of staff to the Arab League, said he was hopeful that President Obama would spell out a specific plan when he spoke in Cairo.
“The question is not talking about the issues; the question is changes on the ground,” Mr. Youssef said.
But even if Mr. Obama manages to satisfy on the Palestinian question, he will have to step carefully around the issue of human rights and democracy. It is a treacherous subject, almost a no-win situation for any outsider.
If he presses Cairo on freedom issues, he risks alienating a government he needs for strategic reasons. He could also incite anger among average Egyptians who almost instinctively recoil at outsiders’ telling them what to do. And yet, if he does not raise the issues, he could be taken to task for conveniently overlooking a serious point.
“We have not seen any American commitments in supporting democracy and respecting the wishes of Arab and Muslim people,” said Essam el-Arian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated organization that is the only real opposition movement in the country and supports the application of Islamic law. “It can be summed by measuring American interests with American values.”
There is, however, a way to navigate the issue of human rights, said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy advocate living in self-imposed exile because the government has threatened to jail him. He said he recently spoke with Mr. Obama’s advisers and suggested that the speech address the “infrastructure of democracy, which to us is the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, free media, autonomous civil society and gender equality.”
“If those five things are emphasized without talking about democracy as such, we democrats in nondemocratic countries would be more than happy,” he said.
Samer al-Atrush contributed reporting.
Memo From Cairo
Egypt to Be Center Stage in Obama’s Address to Arabs
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — President Obama’s decision to deliver a speech here next month has given significant encouragement to a once powerful ally that has grown increasingly frustrated over its waning regional influence and its inability to explain to its citizens why it remains committed to a Middle East peace process that has failed to produce a better life for Palestinians.
After eight years in which Egypt felt unappreciated and bullied by the Bush administration, Egyptian officials were gleeful about Cairo’s selection last week for the president’s address to the Muslim world. They said that it proved Egypt remained the capital of the Arab world and that it eased concerns that Washington might undermine its Arab allies in exchange for a grand deal with their rivals in Iran.
“The aptest choice was Cairo,” the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, told the state-owned daily newspaper Rose Al-Yousef. “It is the capital of moderation in Islam and the capital of cultural sway in the Arab and Muslim worlds.”
Still, President Obama’s decision to address a deeply skeptical Arab audience from Cairo is fraught with potential land mines, according to political analysts, human rights advocates and government officials. He has selected an authoritarian state where political and economic reform has stalled under President Hosni Mubarak, 82, who has been in power for nearly 30 years.
Those factors will put some pressure on Mr. Obama to at least address the issue of democracy and human rights. The Egyptian government bristles at outside pressure, and the general population often sees hypocrisy when Western leaders call for democracy, then partner with authoritarian leaders.
“America’s standing alongside authoritarian regimes is what created terrorism in the Arab world,” said Ayman Nour, a former presidential candidate who was recently freed after more than three years in prison here on what were widely seen as politically inspired charges. “It is what strengthened the thorn of extremism in the Arab world.”
Even before the issue of human rights is raised, though, Egyptian leaders and activists will be looking for Mr. Obama to address their first priority: the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If Mr. Obama wants to improve United States relations with the Muslim world, that is the first step, many here said.
There was a time when progress on process was enough, they argued. Not anymore.
People here want results, a challenge made all the more complicated for Mr. Obama by recent regional developments: the splintering of the Palestinian leadership; the empowerment of militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas; lingering anger over Israel’s offensive in Gaza; and the aggressive foreign policy of Iran.
Still, there will be an expectation that Mr. Obama drive real changes, initially by having Israel freeze settlements, dismantle checkpoints and open the crossings to Gaza, officials here said.
“For 18 years, the peace process has gone on?” said a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat speaking anonymously under diplomatic rules. “Who in their right mind would think it can go on for another 18 years?”
Egypt sees in the peace process the key to most regional problems, from its diminished credibility to what it perceives as the rising threat of Iran. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who met with Mr. Mubarak on Monday in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, has tried to promote the idea that Arabs, Israelis and Americans have a common enemy in Iran and should first unite against that threat.
Egypt agrees, but only to a point.
Egypt maintains that to tame Iran — with which it is in open conflict — the issue of a Palestinian state must first be resolved. As long as that conflict is festering, Iran will be able to undermine Egypt by attacking its allegiance to the peace treaty with Israel, officials here said. Egypt has struggled to convince its people, and Arabs around the region, that its commitment to the treaty is the best way to help the Palestinians and to preserve Egypt’s own national security.
“I affirmed the importance of resuming negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority for a clear political horizon that deals with all final status issues and that establishes an independent Palestinian state to live alongside Israel,” Mr. Mubarak said after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu.
Egypt has already made clear that it cannot begin to give until it gets. That is why Egypt — along with the 21 other members of the Arab League — last week flatly rejected a proposal floated by Washington’s emissaries in the region that called on the Arab states to drop their demands for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel.
Concessions would only undermine Egypt with its adversaries, primarily Iran, analysts here said. Ambassador Hesham Youssef, chief of staff to the Arab League, said he was hopeful that President Obama would spell out a specific plan when he spoke in Cairo.
“The question is not talking about the issues; the question is changes on the ground,” Mr. Youssef said.
But even if Mr. Obama manages to satisfy on the Palestinian question, he will have to step carefully around the issue of human rights and democracy. It is a treacherous subject, almost a no-win situation for any outsider.
If he presses Cairo on freedom issues, he risks alienating a government he needs for strategic reasons. He could also incite anger among average Egyptians who almost instinctively recoil at outsiders’ telling them what to do. And yet, if he does not raise the issues, he could be taken to task for conveniently overlooking a serious point.
“We have not seen any American commitments in supporting democracy and respecting the wishes of Arab and Muslim people,” said Essam el-Arian, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned but tolerated organization that is the only real opposition movement in the country and supports the application of Islamic law. “It can be summed by measuring American interests with American values.”
There is, however, a way to navigate the issue of human rights, said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy advocate living in self-imposed exile because the government has threatened to jail him. He said he recently spoke with Mr. Obama’s advisers and suggested that the speech address the “infrastructure of democracy, which to us is the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, free media, autonomous civil society and gender equality.”
“If those five things are emphasized without talking about democracy as such, we democrats in nondemocratic countries would be more than happy,” he said.
Samer al-Atrush contributed reporting.
May 13, 2009
Mideast’s Christians Declining in Influence
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Christians used to be a vital force in the Middle East. They dominated Lebanon and filled top jobs in the Palestinian movement. In Egypt, they were wealthy beyond their number. In Iraq, they packed the universities and professions. Across the region, their orientation was a vital link to the West, a counterpoint to prevailing trends.
But as Pope Benedict XVI wends his way across the Holy Land this week, he is addressing a dwindling and threatened Christian population driven to emigration by political violence, lack of economic opportunity and the rise of radical Islam. A region that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping.
Since it was here that Jesus walked and Christianity was born, the papal visit highlights a prospect many consider deeply troubling for the globe’s largest faith, adhered to by a third of humanity — its most powerful and historic shrines could become museum relics with no connection to those who live among them.
“I fear the extinction of Christianity in Iraq and the Middle East,” the Rev. Jean Benjamin Sleiman, the Catholic archbishop of Baghdad, said in a comment echoed across the region.
The pope, in a Mass on Tuesday at the foot of the Mount of Olives, addressed “the tragic reality” of the “departure of so many members of the Christian community in recent years.”
He said: “While understandable reasons lead many, especially the young, to emigrate, this decision brings in its wake a great cultural and spiritual impoverishment to the city. Today I wish to repeat what I have said on other occasions: in the Holy Land there is room for everyone!”
On Sunday in Jordan the pope argued that Christians had a role here in reconciliation, that their very presence eased the strife, and that the decline of that presence could help to increase extremism. When the mix of beliefs and lifestyles goes down, orthodoxy rises, he implied, as does uniformity of the cultural landscape in a region where tolerance is not an outstanding virtue.
A Syrian international aid worker said, “When other Arabs find out that I am Christian, many seem shocked to discover that you can be both an Arab and a Christian.” The worker asked to remain anonymous so as not to bring attention to his faith.
The Middle East is now, of course, overwhelmingly Muslim. Except for Israel, with its six million Jews, there is no country where Islam does not prevail. This includes Lebanon, where Christians now amount to a quarter of the population, and the non-Arab countries of Iran and Turkey.
Local Christians are torn between sounding the alarm and staying mum, unsure whether attention will reduce the problem or aggravate it by driving out those who remain.
With Islam pushing aside nationalism as the central force behind the politics of identity, Christians who played important roles in various national struggles find themselves left out. And since Islamic culture, especially in its more fundamental stripes, often defines itself in contrast to the West, Christianity has in some places been relegated to an enemy — or least foreign — culture.
“Unless there is a turn toward secularism in the Arab world, I don’t think there is a future for Christians here,” said Sarkis Naoum, a Christian columnist for the Lebanese newspaper Al Nahar.
Just as some opponents of President Obama sought to defame him by claiming he was a Muslim, so in Turkey was President Abdullah Gul accused of having Christian origins. Mr. Gul won a court case last December against a member of Parliament who made the accusation.
A century ago there were millions of Christians in what is today Turkey; now there are 150,000. There is a house in Turkey where the Virgin Mary is believed to have spent her last days, yet the country’s National Assembly and military have no Christian members or officers except temporary recruits doing mandatory service. Violence against Christians has risen.
Among Palestinians, Islam is also playing an unprecedented role in defining identity, especially in Gaza, ruled by Hamas. Benedict’s arrival in Jerusalem on Monday prompted a radical member of the legislature in Gaza to call on Arab governments not to greet him because of his contentious remark in 2006 regarding the Prophet Muhammad.
The West Bank Palestinian leadership, more secular, tries to include Christians to ward off separatist sentiments and stop the population decline. It has been a losing battle. In 1948, Jerusalem was about one-fifth Christian. Today it is 2 percent.
Rafiq Husseini, the chief of staff of President Mahmoud Abbas’s office, said of the exodus of Christians: “It is a very negative thing if it continues to happen. Our task, from the president downwards, is to keep the presence of the Christians alive and well.”
In Bethlehem, where the Church of the Nativity marks where Jesus is said to have been born, Christians now make up barely a third of the population after centuries of being 80 percent of it. Emigration is the first option for anyone who has the opportunity, and there are large communities of Christian émigrés throughout the West to absorb them.
“Economy, economy, economy,” said Fayez Khano, 63, a member of the Assyrian community, explaining the reasons for the continuing exodus while cutting olive-wood figurines in his family workshop on Manger Street. Mr. Khano’s three adult children live in Dublin, and since business is slow he and his wife are about to go to Dublin for six months.
The story has been similar in Iraq. Of the 1.4 million Christians there at the time of the American invasion in 2003, nearly half have fled, according to American government reports and local Iraqi Christians.
Many left early in the war when they were attacked for working with the Americans, but the exodus gained speed when Christians became targets in Iraq’s raging sectarian war. Churches were bombed, and priests as well as lay Christians were murdered. As recently as March 2008, an archbishop was kidnapped and killed outside the northern city of Mosul.
And in Egypt, where 10 percent of the country is Coptic Christian, the prevalent religious discourse has drifted from what was considered to be a moderate Egyptian Islam toward a far less tolerant Saudi-branded Islam.
In Saudi Arabia, churches are illegal. In the rest of the Persian Gulf region, Christians are foreign workers without the prospect of citizenship.
The decline of the Christian population and voice in the region is not only a source of concern for Christians, but for broadminded Muslims as well.
“Here in Lebanon, Muslims will often tell you Lebanon is no good without the Christians, and they mean it,” said Kemal Salibi, a historian. “The mix of religions and cultures that makes this place so tolerant would disappear.”
Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Bethlehem, Rachel Donadio with the pope, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon, Mona el-Naggar from Cairo and Campbell Robertson from Baghdad.
Mideast’s Christians Declining in Influence
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM — Christians used to be a vital force in the Middle East. They dominated Lebanon and filled top jobs in the Palestinian movement. In Egypt, they were wealthy beyond their number. In Iraq, they packed the universities and professions. Across the region, their orientation was a vital link to the West, a counterpoint to prevailing trends.
But as Pope Benedict XVI wends his way across the Holy Land this week, he is addressing a dwindling and threatened Christian population driven to emigration by political violence, lack of economic opportunity and the rise of radical Islam. A region that a century ago was 20 percent Christian is about 5 percent today and dropping.
Since it was here that Jesus walked and Christianity was born, the papal visit highlights a prospect many consider deeply troubling for the globe’s largest faith, adhered to by a third of humanity — its most powerful and historic shrines could become museum relics with no connection to those who live among them.
“I fear the extinction of Christianity in Iraq and the Middle East,” the Rev. Jean Benjamin Sleiman, the Catholic archbishop of Baghdad, said in a comment echoed across the region.
The pope, in a Mass on Tuesday at the foot of the Mount of Olives, addressed “the tragic reality” of the “departure of so many members of the Christian community in recent years.”
He said: “While understandable reasons lead many, especially the young, to emigrate, this decision brings in its wake a great cultural and spiritual impoverishment to the city. Today I wish to repeat what I have said on other occasions: in the Holy Land there is room for everyone!”
On Sunday in Jordan the pope argued that Christians had a role here in reconciliation, that their very presence eased the strife, and that the decline of that presence could help to increase extremism. When the mix of beliefs and lifestyles goes down, orthodoxy rises, he implied, as does uniformity of the cultural landscape in a region where tolerance is not an outstanding virtue.
A Syrian international aid worker said, “When other Arabs find out that I am Christian, many seem shocked to discover that you can be both an Arab and a Christian.” The worker asked to remain anonymous so as not to bring attention to his faith.
The Middle East is now, of course, overwhelmingly Muslim. Except for Israel, with its six million Jews, there is no country where Islam does not prevail. This includes Lebanon, where Christians now amount to a quarter of the population, and the non-Arab countries of Iran and Turkey.
Local Christians are torn between sounding the alarm and staying mum, unsure whether attention will reduce the problem or aggravate it by driving out those who remain.
With Islam pushing aside nationalism as the central force behind the politics of identity, Christians who played important roles in various national struggles find themselves left out. And since Islamic culture, especially in its more fundamental stripes, often defines itself in contrast to the West, Christianity has in some places been relegated to an enemy — or least foreign — culture.
“Unless there is a turn toward secularism in the Arab world, I don’t think there is a future for Christians here,” said Sarkis Naoum, a Christian columnist for the Lebanese newspaper Al Nahar.
Just as some opponents of President Obama sought to defame him by claiming he was a Muslim, so in Turkey was President Abdullah Gul accused of having Christian origins. Mr. Gul won a court case last December against a member of Parliament who made the accusation.
A century ago there were millions of Christians in what is today Turkey; now there are 150,000. There is a house in Turkey where the Virgin Mary is believed to have spent her last days, yet the country’s National Assembly and military have no Christian members or officers except temporary recruits doing mandatory service. Violence against Christians has risen.
Among Palestinians, Islam is also playing an unprecedented role in defining identity, especially in Gaza, ruled by Hamas. Benedict’s arrival in Jerusalem on Monday prompted a radical member of the legislature in Gaza to call on Arab governments not to greet him because of his contentious remark in 2006 regarding the Prophet Muhammad.
The West Bank Palestinian leadership, more secular, tries to include Christians to ward off separatist sentiments and stop the population decline. It has been a losing battle. In 1948, Jerusalem was about one-fifth Christian. Today it is 2 percent.
Rafiq Husseini, the chief of staff of President Mahmoud Abbas’s office, said of the exodus of Christians: “It is a very negative thing if it continues to happen. Our task, from the president downwards, is to keep the presence of the Christians alive and well.”
In Bethlehem, where the Church of the Nativity marks where Jesus is said to have been born, Christians now make up barely a third of the population after centuries of being 80 percent of it. Emigration is the first option for anyone who has the opportunity, and there are large communities of Christian émigrés throughout the West to absorb them.
“Economy, economy, economy,” said Fayez Khano, 63, a member of the Assyrian community, explaining the reasons for the continuing exodus while cutting olive-wood figurines in his family workshop on Manger Street. Mr. Khano’s three adult children live in Dublin, and since business is slow he and his wife are about to go to Dublin for six months.
The story has been similar in Iraq. Of the 1.4 million Christians there at the time of the American invasion in 2003, nearly half have fled, according to American government reports and local Iraqi Christians.
Many left early in the war when they were attacked for working with the Americans, but the exodus gained speed when Christians became targets in Iraq’s raging sectarian war. Churches were bombed, and priests as well as lay Christians were murdered. As recently as March 2008, an archbishop was kidnapped and killed outside the northern city of Mosul.
And in Egypt, where 10 percent of the country is Coptic Christian, the prevalent religious discourse has drifted from what was considered to be a moderate Egyptian Islam toward a far less tolerant Saudi-branded Islam.
In Saudi Arabia, churches are illegal. In the rest of the Persian Gulf region, Christians are foreign workers without the prospect of citizenship.
The decline of the Christian population and voice in the region is not only a source of concern for Christians, but for broadminded Muslims as well.
“Here in Lebanon, Muslims will often tell you Lebanon is no good without the Christians, and they mean it,” said Kemal Salibi, a historian. “The mix of religions and cultures that makes this place so tolerant would disappear.”
Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Bethlehem, Rachel Donadio with the pope, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon, Mona el-Naggar from Cairo and Campbell Robertson from Baghdad.
May 16, 2009
Oman Navigates Between Iran and Arab Nations
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
MUSCAT, Oman — As Iran finds itself locked in an escalating cold war-style conflict with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, the quietly influential Sultanate of Oman has accelerated its cooperation with Tehran, nurturing an alliance that helps empower Iran while highlighting the deep divisions among Arab capitals.
Oman, a strategically vital, insistently pragmatic country, has refused overtures of its larger neighbors to pull away from Iran. Instead, it defied Egypt and Saudi Arabia by declining to join them in boycotting a summit meeting in Qatar in January that was held to support Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group. The Iranian news agency Fars said that Oman and Iran were close to completing a security pact.
The close ties between Iran and Oman, and the reasons behind them, help explain the West’s failure to cripple Iran with trade sanctions, as well as the inability of Iran’s Arab opponents to build a unified opposition to its growing regional influence.
“For us, this is the expression of being realistic,” said Salim al-Mahruqi, a former Omani diplomat who had served in Washington. He now works for the Culture Ministry here in Muscat, the capital city.
“Iran is a big neighbor, and it is there to stay,” he said.
Oman, like Syria and Qatar, sees in Iran an important political and economic ally that is too powerful and too potentially dangerous to ignore, let alone antagonize. Even the United Arab Emirates, which is battling with Iranian leaders over the title to three Persian Gulf islands, has done little to stop billions of dollars in annual trade with Iran.
Rarely in the news, Oman has long been a pivotal behind-the-scenes player in the region. It is an absolute monarchy, led since 1970 by Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who has fostered a diplomatic approach that gives his nation the unique status of having close ties to both Iran and the United States.
Oman has at times served as a go-between for the two nations, and it has left open the possibility that the United States could use Omani military bases for staging operations in the region.
Unlike Syria and Qatar, which want larger regional roles, Oman is strictly focused on bolstering its domestic stability. Omanis continue the relationship with Iran because of historic ties, because they know it could easily overrun their nation, if it so chose, and because it has for generations been an important commercial partner.
One visible sign of that cooperation lies far from Muscat, at the tip of an unforgiving peninsula of jagged, rocky mountains in the governate of Musandam. Here, Oman has for years helped Iranian smugglers circumvent international trade sanctions.
Fleets of small, open-topped speedboats cross the Strait of Hormuz daily, making the trip in under an hour. Docked in Oman, they load up with a wide variety of goods, including food, clothing, electronics, pharmaceuticals, air-conditioners, even motorcycles.
“No one has ever tried to stop this smuggling,” said Omran Abdel Kader Abdullah, 18, a local resident who said he joined the family business supplying goods to smugglers when he finished high school. “It’s our living. Every family is involved.”
In fact, the local government coordinates the delivery of goods to the smugglers’ speedboats, distributing pickup and delivery orders each morning to anyone with a small truck. The trade is considered illegal in Iran, because the smugglers avoid paying Iranian duty and taxes. But Oman collects taxes on all the goods.
Pragmatic considerations like those have done little to calm the anxiety of Arab governments that see in Iran a threat to their own regional standing and national interests. As a result, Oman is experiencing strained relations with its Arab neighbors.
While the West is concerned that Iran will develop nuclear weapons in the future, officials in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain complain about what Iran is doing today. Morocco took the most extreme step, severing diplomatic relations with Iran in March.
Egyptian officials recently accused Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, of sending an agent to Egypt to set up a terrorist cell. Hezbollah acknowledged sending the agent but said it had been trying only to help smuggle weapons into Gaza to aid Hamas in its war with Israel. It denied planning terrorist attacks on Egypt. Egyptians have also charged that Iran has undermined reconciliation between Palestinian factions; tried to instigate an uprising against the Egyptian government; become involved in domestic politics and conflicts in Sudan, Chad and other countries; and tried to spread Shiite Islamic beliefs in Sunni-majority countries. Iran has denied meddling in Arab affairs.
But while Oman is eager to maintain good relations with Cairo, it also sees Egypt as a withered Arab center struggling to reclaim its former glory.
“Unfortunately, what is going on is Egypt is creating an enemy from nothing and undermining the Egyptian role,” said Saif al-Maskery, a former official in Oman’s Foreign Ministry.
Omanis said they did not fear Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But they are concerned about Iran’s exporting its Islamic revolutionary ideology. And most of all, Iran has a far stronger conventional military force. Oman’s foreign policy reflects religious differences with Saudi Arabia. Many people in Muscat said that they saw the ultraconservative Saudi Arabian approach to Islam as more of a danger to Omani interests, and stability, than Iranian activities in the region.
Oman is a Muslim state, but 75 percent of the population is affiliated with a conservative sect called Ibadism. Over the years Saudi religious figures have tried to spread their more fundamentalist views in Oman. “We don’t allow Saudis to work in our community,” said Said al-Hashmi, manager of research for the State Council, a government advisory body.
There is also the matter of economics. Oman faces a budget deficit this year, in part because of a drop in oil revenues. It has far less oil than many of its Persian Gulf neighbors and wants to diversify its economy.
Exports to Iran provide important revenue. Allowing the smugglers to operate is another example of how Oman’s self-interest is often aligned with Iran’s.
The weathered speedboats line up along three small piers in Musandam every morning, right next to large police boats that patrol the strait. The trip is short, but many captains said it can be perilous because they have to dodge massive oil tankers and avoid Iranian coast guard patrols. “It’s all business,” said Rashed Said, 27, as he delivered 140 boxes loaded with clothing to the pier. “It’s all money.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Oman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/world ... k6b5nBPnmg
Oman Navigates Between Iran and Arab Nations
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
MUSCAT, Oman — As Iran finds itself locked in an escalating cold war-style conflict with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, the quietly influential Sultanate of Oman has accelerated its cooperation with Tehran, nurturing an alliance that helps empower Iran while highlighting the deep divisions among Arab capitals.
Oman, a strategically vital, insistently pragmatic country, has refused overtures of its larger neighbors to pull away from Iran. Instead, it defied Egypt and Saudi Arabia by declining to join them in boycotting a summit meeting in Qatar in January that was held to support Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group. The Iranian news agency Fars said that Oman and Iran were close to completing a security pact.
The close ties between Iran and Oman, and the reasons behind them, help explain the West’s failure to cripple Iran with trade sanctions, as well as the inability of Iran’s Arab opponents to build a unified opposition to its growing regional influence.
“For us, this is the expression of being realistic,” said Salim al-Mahruqi, a former Omani diplomat who had served in Washington. He now works for the Culture Ministry here in Muscat, the capital city.
“Iran is a big neighbor, and it is there to stay,” he said.
Oman, like Syria and Qatar, sees in Iran an important political and economic ally that is too powerful and too potentially dangerous to ignore, let alone antagonize. Even the United Arab Emirates, which is battling with Iranian leaders over the title to three Persian Gulf islands, has done little to stop billions of dollars in annual trade with Iran.
Rarely in the news, Oman has long been a pivotal behind-the-scenes player in the region. It is an absolute monarchy, led since 1970 by Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who has fostered a diplomatic approach that gives his nation the unique status of having close ties to both Iran and the United States.
Oman has at times served as a go-between for the two nations, and it has left open the possibility that the United States could use Omani military bases for staging operations in the region.
Unlike Syria and Qatar, which want larger regional roles, Oman is strictly focused on bolstering its domestic stability. Omanis continue the relationship with Iran because of historic ties, because they know it could easily overrun their nation, if it so chose, and because it has for generations been an important commercial partner.
One visible sign of that cooperation lies far from Muscat, at the tip of an unforgiving peninsula of jagged, rocky mountains in the governate of Musandam. Here, Oman has for years helped Iranian smugglers circumvent international trade sanctions.
Fleets of small, open-topped speedboats cross the Strait of Hormuz daily, making the trip in under an hour. Docked in Oman, they load up with a wide variety of goods, including food, clothing, electronics, pharmaceuticals, air-conditioners, even motorcycles.
“No one has ever tried to stop this smuggling,” said Omran Abdel Kader Abdullah, 18, a local resident who said he joined the family business supplying goods to smugglers when he finished high school. “It’s our living. Every family is involved.”
In fact, the local government coordinates the delivery of goods to the smugglers’ speedboats, distributing pickup and delivery orders each morning to anyone with a small truck. The trade is considered illegal in Iran, because the smugglers avoid paying Iranian duty and taxes. But Oman collects taxes on all the goods.
Pragmatic considerations like those have done little to calm the anxiety of Arab governments that see in Iran a threat to their own regional standing and national interests. As a result, Oman is experiencing strained relations with its Arab neighbors.
While the West is concerned that Iran will develop nuclear weapons in the future, officials in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain complain about what Iran is doing today. Morocco took the most extreme step, severing diplomatic relations with Iran in March.
Egyptian officials recently accused Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy force in Lebanon, of sending an agent to Egypt to set up a terrorist cell. Hezbollah acknowledged sending the agent but said it had been trying only to help smuggle weapons into Gaza to aid Hamas in its war with Israel. It denied planning terrorist attacks on Egypt. Egyptians have also charged that Iran has undermined reconciliation between Palestinian factions; tried to instigate an uprising against the Egyptian government; become involved in domestic politics and conflicts in Sudan, Chad and other countries; and tried to spread Shiite Islamic beliefs in Sunni-majority countries. Iran has denied meddling in Arab affairs.
But while Oman is eager to maintain good relations with Cairo, it also sees Egypt as a withered Arab center struggling to reclaim its former glory.
“Unfortunately, what is going on is Egypt is creating an enemy from nothing and undermining the Egyptian role,” said Saif al-Maskery, a former official in Oman’s Foreign Ministry.
Omanis said they did not fear Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But they are concerned about Iran’s exporting its Islamic revolutionary ideology. And most of all, Iran has a far stronger conventional military force. Oman’s foreign policy reflects religious differences with Saudi Arabia. Many people in Muscat said that they saw the ultraconservative Saudi Arabian approach to Islam as more of a danger to Omani interests, and stability, than Iranian activities in the region.
Oman is a Muslim state, but 75 percent of the population is affiliated with a conservative sect called Ibadism. Over the years Saudi religious figures have tried to spread their more fundamentalist views in Oman. “We don’t allow Saudis to work in our community,” said Said al-Hashmi, manager of research for the State Council, a government advisory body.
There is also the matter of economics. Oman faces a budget deficit this year, in part because of a drop in oil revenues. It has far less oil than many of its Persian Gulf neighbors and wants to diversify its economy.
Exports to Iran provide important revenue. Allowing the smugglers to operate is another example of how Oman’s self-interest is often aligned with Iran’s.
The weathered speedboats line up along three small piers in Musandam every morning, right next to large police boats that patrol the strait. The trip is short, but many captains said it can be perilous because they have to dodge massive oil tankers and avoid Iranian coast guard patrols. “It’s all business,” said Rashed Said, 27, as he delivered 140 boxes loaded with clothing to the pier. “It’s all money.”
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Oman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/world ... k6b5nBPnmg
May 18, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Arabs, Persians, Jews
By ROGER COHEN
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA — A story is doing the rounds in Washington about an Arab ambassador whose view of Barack Obama’s overtures to Iran is: “We don’t mind you seeking engagement, but please, no marriage!”
It’s sometimes hard to know if the Arabs or Israelis are more alarmed — or alarmist — about Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.
A comment a few months back from an Iranian official to the effect that the small desert kingdom of Bahrain was historically a province of Iran sent fears of exportable Shia revolution into overdrive in Sunni Arab capitals. Iran apologized, but the damage was done.
After Iran’s American-aided push into Iraq through the establishment of a Shia-dominated government there, the Bahrain talk set frayed Arab nerves on edge. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, called on Arab states to “deal with the Iranian challenge.”
The mistrust has a long history. Arabs and Persians enjoy cordial enmity; the cultural rivalry between the Sunni and Shia universes dates back a mere 1.5 millennia or so, to the battle of Karbala in 680 and beyond.
But recent developments have envenomed things to the point that Arab diplomats troop daily into the State Department to warn that the U.S. quest for détente with Tehran is dangerous.
That point will be made with vigor by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he meets with President Obama Monday. After all, when Israelis and Arabs make common cause, surely the danger is real.
Obama should be skeptical, for reasons I will explain. But first those Arab fears.
The Saudis have been incensed by how U.S. policy has favored “the Persians” — as they refer to them — by removing Iran’s Sunni Taliban enemy in Afghanistan and ending Sunni dominance of Iraq. Despite U.S. prodding, the Saudis have not named an ambassador to Iraq and view the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, as an Iranian pawn. Their strategic goal remains an “Iraq that comes back to be a solid Arab country,” as one Saudi official put it to me.
They also express frustration at the U.S. failure to rein in Israel, whose wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza have stirred growing support for these Iran-backed movements. Anger on the Arab street is easily exploited by Iranian leaders using insurgent rhetoric.
With a significant Shia minority, Saudi Arabia — like Kuwait and Bahrain — believes Iran is inciting these communities to rebellion. It’s not uncommon to see posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, in Shia homes. Shiites, in turn, say Iran’s rising influence is used to justify oppression.
When popular rage rises, the region’s Arab autocrats look in the mirror and see the Shah. They don’t want a rerun of Tehran 1979.
“The Arabs are very worried that, for expediency’s sake in Iraq or Afghanistan, we’ll cut some deal with Iran that will leave Tehran as the regional hegemon,” one U.S. official told me.
It’s not going to happen. Washington and Tehran are a long way from even starting bilateral talks. Differences are such that any deal would take time.
What’s really at issue here is that neither Israel nor the Arabs want a change in a status quo that locks in Israeli regional military dominance and the cozy relationships — arms deals, aid and all — that U.S. allies from the Gulf to Cairo enjoy.
American interests are, however, another story. They are not served by having no communication with Iran, the rising Mideast power; nor by the uncritical support of Israel that has allowed West Bank settlements to grow and peace to fade; nor by relationships with Arab states that comfort stasis.
The Arab arguments over Iran are weak. It is precisely U.S. non-engagement that has led to Tehran’s rising power. So it makes sense to change policy. Only within an American “grand bargain” with Iran will a solution to the nuclear issue be possible.
Given that a Mideast peace is inconceivable without Iran because of its influence over Hamas and Hezbollah, it is in the Arab interest that the United States attempt to bring Iran “inside the tent.” Outside it will make trouble.
Moreover, the Arabs themselves have engaged. The Saudis have normal if strained diplomatic relations with Iran.
So here’s what Obama should say to Netanyahu when he says Arab states have identical fears over Iran:
“We’re aware of this, Mr. Prime Minister, which is why we sent Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others to reassure Arab allies. But the U.S. interest is not served by the Mideast status quo. Our interest lies in new region-wide security arrangements that promote a two-state peace, end 30 years of non-communication with Iran, and ultimately afford Israel a brighter future. You can’t build settlements and expect Iran’s influence to diminish.”
When Netanyahu demurs, Obama should add: “And you know what the Arabs tell me in private? That Israeli use of force against Iran would be a disaster. And that it’s impossible to tell Iran it can’t have nukes when Israel has them. They say that’s a double standard. And you know what? They may have a point.”
Readers are invited to comment at global.nytimes.com/opinion
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Arabs, Persians, Jews
By ROGER COHEN
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA — A story is doing the rounds in Washington about an Arab ambassador whose view of Barack Obama’s overtures to Iran is: “We don’t mind you seeking engagement, but please, no marriage!”
It’s sometimes hard to know if the Arabs or Israelis are more alarmed — or alarmist — about Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.
A comment a few months back from an Iranian official to the effect that the small desert kingdom of Bahrain was historically a province of Iran sent fears of exportable Shia revolution into overdrive in Sunni Arab capitals. Iran apologized, but the damage was done.
After Iran’s American-aided push into Iraq through the establishment of a Shia-dominated government there, the Bahrain talk set frayed Arab nerves on edge. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, called on Arab states to “deal with the Iranian challenge.”
The mistrust has a long history. Arabs and Persians enjoy cordial enmity; the cultural rivalry between the Sunni and Shia universes dates back a mere 1.5 millennia or so, to the battle of Karbala in 680 and beyond.
But recent developments have envenomed things to the point that Arab diplomats troop daily into the State Department to warn that the U.S. quest for détente with Tehran is dangerous.
That point will be made with vigor by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he meets with President Obama Monday. After all, when Israelis and Arabs make common cause, surely the danger is real.
Obama should be skeptical, for reasons I will explain. But first those Arab fears.
The Saudis have been incensed by how U.S. policy has favored “the Persians” — as they refer to them — by removing Iran’s Sunni Taliban enemy in Afghanistan and ending Sunni dominance of Iraq. Despite U.S. prodding, the Saudis have not named an ambassador to Iraq and view the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, as an Iranian pawn. Their strategic goal remains an “Iraq that comes back to be a solid Arab country,” as one Saudi official put it to me.
They also express frustration at the U.S. failure to rein in Israel, whose wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza have stirred growing support for these Iran-backed movements. Anger on the Arab street is easily exploited by Iranian leaders using insurgent rhetoric.
With a significant Shia minority, Saudi Arabia — like Kuwait and Bahrain — believes Iran is inciting these communities to rebellion. It’s not uncommon to see posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, in Shia homes. Shiites, in turn, say Iran’s rising influence is used to justify oppression.
When popular rage rises, the region’s Arab autocrats look in the mirror and see the Shah. They don’t want a rerun of Tehran 1979.
“The Arabs are very worried that, for expediency’s sake in Iraq or Afghanistan, we’ll cut some deal with Iran that will leave Tehran as the regional hegemon,” one U.S. official told me.
It’s not going to happen. Washington and Tehran are a long way from even starting bilateral talks. Differences are such that any deal would take time.
What’s really at issue here is that neither Israel nor the Arabs want a change in a status quo that locks in Israeli regional military dominance and the cozy relationships — arms deals, aid and all — that U.S. allies from the Gulf to Cairo enjoy.
American interests are, however, another story. They are not served by having no communication with Iran, the rising Mideast power; nor by the uncritical support of Israel that has allowed West Bank settlements to grow and peace to fade; nor by relationships with Arab states that comfort stasis.
The Arab arguments over Iran are weak. It is precisely U.S. non-engagement that has led to Tehran’s rising power. So it makes sense to change policy. Only within an American “grand bargain” with Iran will a solution to the nuclear issue be possible.
Given that a Mideast peace is inconceivable without Iran because of its influence over Hamas and Hezbollah, it is in the Arab interest that the United States attempt to bring Iran “inside the tent.” Outside it will make trouble.
Moreover, the Arabs themselves have engaged. The Saudis have normal if strained diplomatic relations with Iran.
So here’s what Obama should say to Netanyahu when he says Arab states have identical fears over Iran:
“We’re aware of this, Mr. Prime Minister, which is why we sent Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others to reassure Arab allies. But the U.S. interest is not served by the Mideast status quo. Our interest lies in new region-wide security arrangements that promote a two-state peace, end 30 years of non-communication with Iran, and ultimately afford Israel a brighter future. You can’t build settlements and expect Iran’s influence to diminish.”
When Netanyahu demurs, Obama should add: “And you know what the Arabs tell me in private? That Israeli use of force against Iran would be a disaster. And that it’s impossible to tell Iran it can’t have nukes when Israel has them. They say that’s a double standard. And you know what? They may have a point.”
Readers are invited to comment at global.nytimes.com/opinion
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/opini ... nted=print
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/world ... &th&emc=th
May 22, 2009
Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Death for Murder
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — A wealthy and politically connected Egyptian businessman was sentenced to death on Thursday for hiring a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop singer in a case that has captivated the Middle East for nearly a year with its storyline of revenge, power and money.
The businessman, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, was a multimillionaire who seemed to have it all. He headed a real estate conglomerate, was a member of the upper house of Parliament and had close ties to the family of President Hosni Mubarak. He was part of the most elite strata of Egyptian society, a high roller of the type that Egyptians have long assumed to operate beyond the reach of the law.
Then Suzanne Tamim was found dead in July, slashed and stabbed in her apartment in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. She was 30, a pop diva and, it was charged, had fled from a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa.
When rumors first spread of Mr. Moustafa’s links to the killing, Egypt’s leadership appeared to react instinctively, closing ranks to protect one of its own. But Egyptians have been growing increasingly frustrated with two scales of justice, one for the poor and one for the rich, political commentators here said. And there was pressure from Dubai, which was unwilling to let a murderer walk, no matter how rich and connected.
In the hours after the sentence was announced, it seemed as though Mr. Moustafa was all people could talk about in Cairo. People were astounded, and pleased, at the rare fall from grace.
“There is a fundamental element missing in the political system here, and this is the element of trust, the ability of the people to trust that their regime is just,” said Osama Ghazali Harb, an editor and researcher at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “This verdict can bring citizens to have some trust in the judiciary, and it can have a positive outcome for the regime because people don’t trust it in general.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/world ... &th&emc=th
May 22, 2009
Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Death for Murder
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — A wealthy and politically connected Egyptian businessman was sentenced to death on Thursday for hiring a hit man to kill a Lebanese pop singer in a case that has captivated the Middle East for nearly a year with its storyline of revenge, power and money.
The businessman, Hisham Talaat Moustafa, was a multimillionaire who seemed to have it all. He headed a real estate conglomerate, was a member of the upper house of Parliament and had close ties to the family of President Hosni Mubarak. He was part of the most elite strata of Egyptian society, a high roller of the type that Egyptians have long assumed to operate beyond the reach of the law.
Then Suzanne Tamim was found dead in July, slashed and stabbed in her apartment in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. She was 30, a pop diva and, it was charged, had fled from a failed relationship with Mr. Moustafa.
When rumors first spread of Mr. Moustafa’s links to the killing, Egypt’s leadership appeared to react instinctively, closing ranks to protect one of its own. But Egyptians have been growing increasingly frustrated with two scales of justice, one for the poor and one for the rich, political commentators here said. And there was pressure from Dubai, which was unwilling to let a murderer walk, no matter how rich and connected.
In the hours after the sentence was announced, it seemed as though Mr. Moustafa was all people could talk about in Cairo. People were astounded, and pleased, at the rare fall from grace.
“There is a fundamental element missing in the political system here, and this is the element of trust, the ability of the people to trust that their regime is just,” said Osama Ghazali Harb, an editor and researcher at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “This verdict can bring citizens to have some trust in the judiciary, and it can have a positive outcome for the regime because people don’t trust it in general.”
Some photos at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/arts/ ... &th&emc=th
May 27, 2009
Abu Dhabi Gets a Sampler of World Art
By CAROL VOGEL
The public on Tuesday got its first peek at some of the art that will fill the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the 260,000-square-foot museum designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and expected to open in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates by 2013.
At a ceremony to commemorate the beginning of construction, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, officially opened an exhibition at the Emirates Palace hotel that includes 19 works of art bought over the last 18 months for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as loans from the French national museums.
Acquired for what is being billed as the first universal museum in the Middle East, the works range from a Greek ceramic figure from around 520 B.C. to two 1862 canvases by Edouard Manet.
“By its very nature this museum will cover many cultures and many civilizations from the ancient to the present time,” Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chairman of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, said in a telephone interview. “We have historic relations with our friends in France which are extending to the cultural side.” The collaboration, he added, will “help educate our people” in the building and running of such cultural institutions.
Under a two-year-old agreement, Abu Dhabi will pay France $555 million for the use of the Louvre’s name, as well as for art loans, special exhibitions and management advice. Securing the Louvre’s involvement and brand name was a crucial step in the emirates’ plan to build a $27 billion tourist and cultural development on Saadiyat Island, off the city’s coast. The project’s cultural components also include a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a maritime museum, a performing arts center, hotels, golf courses, marinas.
With an acquisitions budget of more than $56 million a year, a team of curators from the French museums have worked full time deciding how to shape the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection.
“There are specialists in every field who are aware of the market,” said Laurence des Cars, the curatorial director of the Agence France-Muséums, a French public organization set up to oversee the project.
The curators are not out to create a mini-Louvre but rather a new museum melding two cultures and two traditions.
“We want this to be a collection of masterpieces that make sense together, that have soul and that will form a dialogue with different civilizations,” Ms. des Cars said. Once the museum opens, the curators will also organize four special exhibitions a year for the next 15 years that will include loans from French museums and institutions all over the world.
Among the acquisitions that are part of “Talking Art: Louvre Abu Dhabi,” on view in the capital through July 2, are a standing bodhisattva from the second to third century A.D.; a Chinese white marble head of Buddha from the Northern Qi Dynasty, A.D. 550-577; and a 16th-century polychrome painted copper ewer from Venice. There are also works on Christian religious themes, including a Bellini “Madonna and Child” from the 1480s and a 16th-century sculpture of Jesus from Bavaria or Austria.
Areas like African art have yet to be represented, Ms. des Cars said, although they will be included later. In the meantime the curators have borrowed objects like a 19th-century wood Tsonga headrest from Zambia and a wooden stool from Benin, both on loan from the Musée du Quai Branly.
Paintings that have been bought for the Louvre Abu Dhabi include a canvas by Jean-François de Troy, “Esther Fainting Before Ahaseurus,” from 1730, and the two Manets — “The Bohemian” and “Still Life With Bag and Garlic” — which were originally part of a larger canvas.
“In 1867, after a critical flop when it was shown in Paris, Manet cut up the painting,” Ms. des Cars said, and it became three paintings, one of which, “Boy With Pitcher,” is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The other two canvases disappeared and were found only recently.
“We had an opportunity to buy them from the Wildenstein gallery,” she said. They are being shown along with an etching by the artist, “Les Gitanos,” also from 1862, which shows the paintings’ original composition and is on loan from the Bibilothèque Nationale de France.
The curators also bought two works from the sale of art and objects belonging to Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, at Christie’s in Paris in February: an African-style stool from the 1920s for $640,000 and Mondrian’s “Composition With Blue, Red, Yellow and Black,” from 1922, for $29.4 million.
Eventually, Ms. des Cars said, “all civilizations and cultures will be represented” at the new museum. But for now, she added, what is on view in this exhibition illustrates the curators’ mission.
“There is a big sculpture of Christ facing the head of a Buddha and a 14th-century Koran,” she said. “It’s the perfect symbol of our universal spirit.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/arts/ ... &th&emc=th
May 27, 2009
Abu Dhabi Gets a Sampler of World Art
By CAROL VOGEL
The public on Tuesday got its first peek at some of the art that will fill the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the 260,000-square-foot museum designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel and expected to open in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates by 2013.
At a ceremony to commemorate the beginning of construction, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, officially opened an exhibition at the Emirates Palace hotel that includes 19 works of art bought over the last 18 months for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as well as loans from the French national museums.
Acquired for what is being billed as the first universal museum in the Middle East, the works range from a Greek ceramic figure from around 520 B.C. to two 1862 canvases by Edouard Manet.
“By its very nature this museum will cover many cultures and many civilizations from the ancient to the present time,” Sheikh Sultan bin Tahnoon Al Nahyan, chairman of Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, said in a telephone interview. “We have historic relations with our friends in France which are extending to the cultural side.” The collaboration, he added, will “help educate our people” in the building and running of such cultural institutions.
Under a two-year-old agreement, Abu Dhabi will pay France $555 million for the use of the Louvre’s name, as well as for art loans, special exhibitions and management advice. Securing the Louvre’s involvement and brand name was a crucial step in the emirates’ plan to build a $27 billion tourist and cultural development on Saadiyat Island, off the city’s coast. The project’s cultural components also include a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a maritime museum, a performing arts center, hotels, golf courses, marinas.
With an acquisitions budget of more than $56 million a year, a team of curators from the French museums have worked full time deciding how to shape the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection.
“There are specialists in every field who are aware of the market,” said Laurence des Cars, the curatorial director of the Agence France-Muséums, a French public organization set up to oversee the project.
The curators are not out to create a mini-Louvre but rather a new museum melding two cultures and two traditions.
“We want this to be a collection of masterpieces that make sense together, that have soul and that will form a dialogue with different civilizations,” Ms. des Cars said. Once the museum opens, the curators will also organize four special exhibitions a year for the next 15 years that will include loans from French museums and institutions all over the world.
Among the acquisitions that are part of “Talking Art: Louvre Abu Dhabi,” on view in the capital through July 2, are a standing bodhisattva from the second to third century A.D.; a Chinese white marble head of Buddha from the Northern Qi Dynasty, A.D. 550-577; and a 16th-century polychrome painted copper ewer from Venice. There are also works on Christian religious themes, including a Bellini “Madonna and Child” from the 1480s and a 16th-century sculpture of Jesus from Bavaria or Austria.
Areas like African art have yet to be represented, Ms. des Cars said, although they will be included later. In the meantime the curators have borrowed objects like a 19th-century wood Tsonga headrest from Zambia and a wooden stool from Benin, both on loan from the Musée du Quai Branly.
Paintings that have been bought for the Louvre Abu Dhabi include a canvas by Jean-François de Troy, “Esther Fainting Before Ahaseurus,” from 1730, and the two Manets — “The Bohemian” and “Still Life With Bag and Garlic” — which were originally part of a larger canvas.
“In 1867, after a critical flop when it was shown in Paris, Manet cut up the painting,” Ms. des Cars said, and it became three paintings, one of which, “Boy With Pitcher,” is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The other two canvases disappeared and were found only recently.
“We had an opportunity to buy them from the Wildenstein gallery,” she said. They are being shown along with an etching by the artist, “Les Gitanos,” also from 1862, which shows the paintings’ original composition and is on loan from the Bibilothèque Nationale de France.
The curators also bought two works from the sale of art and objects belonging to Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, at Christie’s in Paris in February: an African-style stool from the 1920s for $640,000 and Mondrian’s “Composition With Blue, Red, Yellow and Black,” from 1922, for $29.4 million.
Eventually, Ms. des Cars said, “all civilizations and cultures will be represented” at the new museum. But for now, she added, what is on view in this exhibition illustrates the curators’ mission.
“There is a big sculpture of Christ facing the head of a Buddha and a 14th-century Koran,” she said. “It’s the perfect symbol of our universal spirit.”
Photo at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world ... &th&emc=th
May 31, 2009
Devotion and Money Tie Iranians to Iraqi City
By SAM DAGHER
KARBALA, Iraq — Over just two days, about 80 Iranian pilgrims were killed in April in suicide bombings in Iraq. But even though the pilgrims are clearly a favored target for Sunni extremists in Iraq, and though the threat continues, it seems nothing will keep the Iranians from coming here.
On a recent afternoon, a group of pilgrims from the Iranian city of Isfahan — many in tears and in a trancelike state — inched toward the shimmering golden-domed shrine ahead chanting “Hussein beloved” in Persian. Inside, Iranians jostled other pilgrims to grip the ornate gold and silver cagelike structure bearing the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, shrouded in green fabric embroidered with precious stones.
It is religious devotion that compels them to come. But Iran’s government is part of the equation, too, encouraging a greater Iranian presence in Iraq by supporting companies that control a lucrative segment of the pilgrimage business and renovating and maintaining Shiite shrines in Iraq.
While the United States and surrounding Arab nations worry about direct Iranian influence and support for armed groups, the pilgrimages present a small but important example of Iran’s rising soft power in Iraq. And it is something that makes Iraqis increasingly resentful.
Recently, the Interior Ministry banned Persian signs inside Karbala despite the fact most Iranian pilgrims speak no Arabic.
In April, Karbala’s residents demonstrated against the awarding of a contract to an Iranian company, Al Kawthar, to renovate the historic city center, including the area around the shrines of Imam Hussein and his brother Abu Fadhil al-Abbas, part of a $100-million project. Officials say they have been inundated with petitions against the Iranian proposal.
“We are Arabs, we will not accept to be colonized by anyone,” said Ali al-Hayawi, a hotel owner in Karbala catering to pilgrims, who is opposed to Iran’s involvement in the project. “We do not take orders from the Iranians.”
The dynamic in Karbala suggests that Iran may have a hard time exerting any deep sway among Iraqis, even among fellow Shiites, with suspicion playing out on several fronts. But at the national level, the relationship is more of a tug of war. The Iraqi government may want to keep Iran at arm’s length, but it also needs Iran economically and as a strategic ally.
Iran and Iraq have always had a contentious relationship, and it became more complicated with the American presence in Iraq.
The two predominantly Shiite countries share an 800-mile border and historical, cultural and trade ties, but attitudes on both sides remain colored both by ancient enmities and an eight-year war in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands dead or maimed. Saddam Hussein did allow Iranian pilgrims back into Iraq in the mid-1990s, but it was a fraction of the current number and they were under the constant watch of his secret police.
Iraq signed an agreement with Iran in 2005 to allow up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims in each day. Most come by land and stay for a week. There are also three daily flights now ferrying Iranian pilgrims to Iraq. Tehran wants to send many more and to improve the infrastructure in the shrine cities to allow it.
Karbala, for instance, receives millions of visitors each year but has a maximum hotel capacity of 23,000, local officials say.
Nationalists and Sunni extremists aside, many Iraqis welcome Iranian pilgrims, whose business is vital for the economies of this shrine city, nearby Najaf and the area around the Shiite shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. And the government deploys its security forces liberally to protect them.
At the same time many Iraqis bristle at Iran’s perceived negative influence and meddling in internal politics, especially through the governing Iraqi Shiite parties that have been nurtured by Iran for years.
“Three-quarters of the power is in their hands,” said Haidar Abdul-Hassan, a shopkeeper in Karbala, referring to Iranians and their Iraqi allies.
Iraqi officials, eager not to be seen as beholden to Iran, become cagey and agitated when asked about Iranian influence in Karbala, insisting that it is minimal.
A closer look, though, reveals a different picture.
Behind the Imam Hussein shrine, through a dimly lighted hotel lobby and up a flight of stairs are the offices of Shamsa, a private Iranian company that has a virtual monopoly on Iranian pilgrimages to Iraq.
Shamsa gets to choose which Iraqi companies to deal with for the transportation, protection and accommodation of pilgrims. Almost all its partners are companies affiliated with Iraqi political parties close to Iran, according to those in the business. An example is the Ihsan private security company, which is close to the influential Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Tucked inside a warren of alleys in Karbala’s bazaar are the nondescript offices of Setad Bazsazi Atabat Aliyat. It is a company owned by the Iranian government, involved in shrine renovation worldwide and busy at work here.
An entry on a whiteboard reads: “Deliver five air-cooling units to Imam Hussein’s shrine.”
Glossy graphic designs of the contentious Karbala shrine renovation project hang on the walls. The project entails demolishing old homes, enlarging the plaza between the shrines and constructing two underground levels and shopping malls. Al Kawthar, the Iranian company awarded the design contract, is a Setad affiliate.
Both operate in all shrine cities. Projects in Karbala alone include a hospital, several large hotels and apartment complexes and an Iranian-run religious seminary.
In May 2008, Setad’s chairman told Iranian news media that Iran donated nearly $1 billion to equip and renovate Iraq’s shrines. Shrine officials in Karbala at the time said the number was “highly exaggerated.”
The United States military commander for the nine mainly Shiite provinces south of Baghdad, including Karbala, said recently that while Iran reduced but did not completely cut off its “lethal support” and arming of militias in Iraq, it had sought to increase its soft power through charities and economic and political organizations.
“Some of it is good,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Oates. “My concern is the degree to which they may seek to influence Iraqi politics.”
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/world ... &th&emc=th
May 31, 2009
Devotion and Money Tie Iranians to Iraqi City
By SAM DAGHER
KARBALA, Iraq — Over just two days, about 80 Iranian pilgrims were killed in April in suicide bombings in Iraq. But even though the pilgrims are clearly a favored target for Sunni extremists in Iraq, and though the threat continues, it seems nothing will keep the Iranians from coming here.
On a recent afternoon, a group of pilgrims from the Iranian city of Isfahan — many in tears and in a trancelike state — inched toward the shimmering golden-domed shrine ahead chanting “Hussein beloved” in Persian. Inside, Iranians jostled other pilgrims to grip the ornate gold and silver cagelike structure bearing the tomb of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein, shrouded in green fabric embroidered with precious stones.
It is religious devotion that compels them to come. But Iran’s government is part of the equation, too, encouraging a greater Iranian presence in Iraq by supporting companies that control a lucrative segment of the pilgrimage business and renovating and maintaining Shiite shrines in Iraq.
While the United States and surrounding Arab nations worry about direct Iranian influence and support for armed groups, the pilgrimages present a small but important example of Iran’s rising soft power in Iraq. And it is something that makes Iraqis increasingly resentful.
Recently, the Interior Ministry banned Persian signs inside Karbala despite the fact most Iranian pilgrims speak no Arabic.
In April, Karbala’s residents demonstrated against the awarding of a contract to an Iranian company, Al Kawthar, to renovate the historic city center, including the area around the shrines of Imam Hussein and his brother Abu Fadhil al-Abbas, part of a $100-million project. Officials say they have been inundated with petitions against the Iranian proposal.
“We are Arabs, we will not accept to be colonized by anyone,” said Ali al-Hayawi, a hotel owner in Karbala catering to pilgrims, who is opposed to Iran’s involvement in the project. “We do not take orders from the Iranians.”
The dynamic in Karbala suggests that Iran may have a hard time exerting any deep sway among Iraqis, even among fellow Shiites, with suspicion playing out on several fronts. But at the national level, the relationship is more of a tug of war. The Iraqi government may want to keep Iran at arm’s length, but it also needs Iran economically and as a strategic ally.
Iran and Iraq have always had a contentious relationship, and it became more complicated with the American presence in Iraq.
The two predominantly Shiite countries share an 800-mile border and historical, cultural and trade ties, but attitudes on both sides remain colored both by ancient enmities and an eight-year war in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands dead or maimed. Saddam Hussein did allow Iranian pilgrims back into Iraq in the mid-1990s, but it was a fraction of the current number and they were under the constant watch of his secret police.
Iraq signed an agreement with Iran in 2005 to allow up to 5,000 Iranian pilgrims in each day. Most come by land and stay for a week. There are also three daily flights now ferrying Iranian pilgrims to Iraq. Tehran wants to send many more and to improve the infrastructure in the shrine cities to allow it.
Karbala, for instance, receives millions of visitors each year but has a maximum hotel capacity of 23,000, local officials say.
Nationalists and Sunni extremists aside, many Iraqis welcome Iranian pilgrims, whose business is vital for the economies of this shrine city, nearby Najaf and the area around the Shiite shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad. And the government deploys its security forces liberally to protect them.
At the same time many Iraqis bristle at Iran’s perceived negative influence and meddling in internal politics, especially through the governing Iraqi Shiite parties that have been nurtured by Iran for years.
“Three-quarters of the power is in their hands,” said Haidar Abdul-Hassan, a shopkeeper in Karbala, referring to Iranians and their Iraqi allies.
Iraqi officials, eager not to be seen as beholden to Iran, become cagey and agitated when asked about Iranian influence in Karbala, insisting that it is minimal.
A closer look, though, reveals a different picture.
Behind the Imam Hussein shrine, through a dimly lighted hotel lobby and up a flight of stairs are the offices of Shamsa, a private Iranian company that has a virtual monopoly on Iranian pilgrimages to Iraq.
Shamsa gets to choose which Iraqi companies to deal with for the transportation, protection and accommodation of pilgrims. Almost all its partners are companies affiliated with Iraqi political parties close to Iran, according to those in the business. An example is the Ihsan private security company, which is close to the influential Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
Tucked inside a warren of alleys in Karbala’s bazaar are the nondescript offices of Setad Bazsazi Atabat Aliyat. It is a company owned by the Iranian government, involved in shrine renovation worldwide and busy at work here.
An entry on a whiteboard reads: “Deliver five air-cooling units to Imam Hussein’s shrine.”
Glossy graphic designs of the contentious Karbala shrine renovation project hang on the walls. The project entails demolishing old homes, enlarging the plaza between the shrines and constructing two underground levels and shopping malls. Al Kawthar, the Iranian company awarded the design contract, is a Setad affiliate.
Both operate in all shrine cities. Projects in Karbala alone include a hospital, several large hotels and apartment complexes and an Iranian-run religious seminary.
In May 2008, Setad’s chairman told Iranian news media that Iran donated nearly $1 billion to equip and renovate Iraq’s shrines. Shrine officials in Karbala at the time said the number was “highly exaggerated.”
The United States military commander for the nine mainly Shiite provinces south of Baghdad, including Karbala, said recently that while Iran reduced but did not completely cut off its “lethal support” and arming of militias in Iraq, it had sought to increase its soft power through charities and economic and political organizations.
“Some of it is good,” said the commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Oates. “My concern is the degree to which they may seek to influence Iraqi politics.”
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran.
June 3, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama on Obama
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:
There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he’d go to synagogue and pray: “God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?” But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: “God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?”
And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: “Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!”
I told the president that joke because in reading the Arab and Israeli press this week, everyone seemed to be telling him what he needed to do and say in Cairo, but nobody was indicating how they were going to step up and do something different. Everyone wants peace, but nobody wants to buy a ticket.
“We have a joke around the White House,” the president said. “We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.”
A key part of his message, he said, will be: “Stop saying one thing behind closed doors and saying something else publicly.” He then explained: “There are a lot of Arab countries more concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon than the ‘threat’ from Israel, but won’t admit it.” There are a lot of Israelis, “who recognize that their current path is unsustainable, and they need to make some tough choices on settlements to achieve a two-state solution — that is in their long-term interest — but not enough folks are willing to recognize that publicly.”
There are a lot of Palestinians who “recognize that the constant incitement and negative rhetoric with respect to Israel” has not delivered a single “benefit to their people and had they taken a more constructive approach and sought the moral high ground” they would be much better off today — but they won’t say it aloud.
“There are a lot of Arab states that have not been particularly helpful to the Palestinian cause beyond a bunch of demagoguery,” and when it comes to “ponying up” money to actually help the Palestinian people, they are “not forthcoming.”
When it comes to dealing with the Middle East, the president noted, “there is a Kabuki dance going on constantly. That is what I would like to see broken down. I am going to be holding up a mirror and saying: ‘Here is the situation, and the U.S. is prepared to work with all of you to deal with these problems. But we can’t impose a solution. You are all going to have to make some tough decisions.’ Leaders have to lead, and, hopefully, they will get supported by their people.”
It was clear from the 20-minute conversation that the president has no illusions that one speech will make lambs lie down with lions. Rather, he sees it as part of his broader diplomatic approach that says: If you go right into peoples’ living rooms, don’t be afraid to hold up a mirror to everything they are doing, but also engage them in a way that says ‘I know and respect who you are.’ You end up — if nothing else — creating a little more space for U.S. diplomacy. And you never know when that can help.
“As somebody who ordered an additional 17,000 troops into Afghanistan,” said Mr. Obama, “you would be hard pressed to suggest that what we are doing is not backed up by hard power. I discount a lot of that criticism. What I do believe is that if we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then, at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.”
Similarly, the president said that if he is asking German or French leaders to help more in Afghanistan or Pakistan, “it doesn’t hurt if I have credibility with the German and French people. They will still be constrained with budgets and internal politics, but it makes it easier.”
Part of America’s “battle against terrorist extremists involves changing the hearts and minds of the people they recruit from,” he added. “And if there are a bunch of 22- and 25-year-old men and women in Cairo or in Lahore who listen to a speech by me or other Americans and say: ‘I don’t agree with everything they are saying, but they seem to know who I am or they seem to want to promote economic development or tolerance or inclusiveness,’ then they are maybe a little less likely to be tempted by a terrorist recruiter.”
I think that’s right. An Egyptian friend remarked to me: Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them. Mr. Obama will be speaking at Cairo University. When young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering and disturbing at the same time. People will be asking: “Why is this guy who looks like everyone on the street here the head of the free world and we can’t even touch freedom?” You never know where that goes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... nted=print
******
Op-Ed Contributors
What the Muslim World Wants to Hear From Obama
Published: June 2, 2009
President Obama’s tour of the Middle East is intended to set the groundwork for a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and improve the image of the United States in the Muslim world. On Thursday, he is scheduled to give his first speech in Cairo. Here are seven views from the region about what he should say.
Voter Recall
By AHMED al-OMRAN
Talk to the leaders, not just the people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Ahmed.html
No Meddling
By OMAYMA ABDEL-LATIF
Respect the elections, no matter who wins.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Latif.html
Rigged to Lose
By AYMAN NOUR
Revive the conviction to support true democracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... nNour.html
Right Time, Wrong Place
By HOSSAM el-HAMALAWY
Does a presidential visit endorse the oppressive government in Egypt?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... alawy.html
Mutual Understanding
By SHAHAN MUFTI
The road to reconciliation goes through Pakistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Mufti.html
Promises Kept
By ABDULJALIL ALSINGACE
Revive the conviction to support true democracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... ngace.html
A Poverty Plan
By ABDULKAREEM al-ERYANI
Help the Islamic world fight poverty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... ryani.html
Op-Ed Columnist
Obama on Obama
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. It goes like this:
There is this very pious Jew named Goldberg who always dreamed of winning the lottery. Every Sabbath, he’d go to synagogue and pray: “God, I have been such a pious Jew all my life. What would be so bad if I won the lottery?” But the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Week after week, Goldberg would pray to win the lottery, but the lottery would come and Goldberg wouldn’t win. Finally, one Sabbath, Goldberg wails to the heavens and says: “God, I have been so pious for so long, what do I have to do to win the lottery?”
And the heavens parted and the voice of God came down: “Goldberg, give me a chance! Buy a ticket!”
I told the president that joke because in reading the Arab and Israeli press this week, everyone seemed to be telling him what he needed to do and say in Cairo, but nobody was indicating how they were going to step up and do something different. Everyone wants peace, but nobody wants to buy a ticket.
“We have a joke around the White House,” the president said. “We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East.”
A key part of his message, he said, will be: “Stop saying one thing behind closed doors and saying something else publicly.” He then explained: “There are a lot of Arab countries more concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon than the ‘threat’ from Israel, but won’t admit it.” There are a lot of Israelis, “who recognize that their current path is unsustainable, and they need to make some tough choices on settlements to achieve a two-state solution — that is in their long-term interest — but not enough folks are willing to recognize that publicly.”
There are a lot of Palestinians who “recognize that the constant incitement and negative rhetoric with respect to Israel” has not delivered a single “benefit to their people and had they taken a more constructive approach and sought the moral high ground” they would be much better off today — but they won’t say it aloud.
“There are a lot of Arab states that have not been particularly helpful to the Palestinian cause beyond a bunch of demagoguery,” and when it comes to “ponying up” money to actually help the Palestinian people, they are “not forthcoming.”
When it comes to dealing with the Middle East, the president noted, “there is a Kabuki dance going on constantly. That is what I would like to see broken down. I am going to be holding up a mirror and saying: ‘Here is the situation, and the U.S. is prepared to work with all of you to deal with these problems. But we can’t impose a solution. You are all going to have to make some tough decisions.’ Leaders have to lead, and, hopefully, they will get supported by their people.”
It was clear from the 20-minute conversation that the president has no illusions that one speech will make lambs lie down with lions. Rather, he sees it as part of his broader diplomatic approach that says: If you go right into peoples’ living rooms, don’t be afraid to hold up a mirror to everything they are doing, but also engage them in a way that says ‘I know and respect who you are.’ You end up — if nothing else — creating a little more space for U.S. diplomacy. And you never know when that can help.
“As somebody who ordered an additional 17,000 troops into Afghanistan,” said Mr. Obama, “you would be hard pressed to suggest that what we are doing is not backed up by hard power. I discount a lot of that criticism. What I do believe is that if we are engaged in speaking directly to the Arab street, and they are persuaded that we are operating in a straightforward manner, then, at the margins, both they and their leadership are more inclined and able to work with us.”
Similarly, the president said that if he is asking German or French leaders to help more in Afghanistan or Pakistan, “it doesn’t hurt if I have credibility with the German and French people. They will still be constrained with budgets and internal politics, but it makes it easier.”
Part of America’s “battle against terrorist extremists involves changing the hearts and minds of the people they recruit from,” he added. “And if there are a bunch of 22- and 25-year-old men and women in Cairo or in Lahore who listen to a speech by me or other Americans and say: ‘I don’t agree with everything they are saying, but they seem to know who I am or they seem to want to promote economic development or tolerance or inclusiveness,’ then they are maybe a little less likely to be tempted by a terrorist recruiter.”
I think that’s right. An Egyptian friend remarked to me: Do not underestimate what seeds can get planted when American leaders don’t just propagate their values, but visibly live them. Mr. Obama will be speaking at Cairo University. When young Arabs and Muslims see an American president who looks like them, has a name like theirs, has Muslims in his family and comes into their world and speaks the truth, it will be empowering and disturbing at the same time. People will be asking: “Why is this guy who looks like everyone on the street here the head of the free world and we can’t even touch freedom?” You never know where that goes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... nted=print
******
Op-Ed Contributors
What the Muslim World Wants to Hear From Obama
Published: June 2, 2009
President Obama’s tour of the Middle East is intended to set the groundwork for a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and improve the image of the United States in the Muslim world. On Thursday, he is scheduled to give his first speech in Cairo. Here are seven views from the region about what he should say.
Voter Recall
By AHMED al-OMRAN
Talk to the leaders, not just the people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Ahmed.html
No Meddling
By OMAYMA ABDEL-LATIF
Respect the elections, no matter who wins.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Latif.html
Rigged to Lose
By AYMAN NOUR
Revive the conviction to support true democracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... nNour.html
Right Time, Wrong Place
By HOSSAM el-HAMALAWY
Does a presidential visit endorse the oppressive government in Egypt?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... alawy.html
Mutual Understanding
By SHAHAN MUFTI
The road to reconciliation goes through Pakistan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opinion/03Mufti.html
Promises Kept
By ABDULJALIL ALSINGACE
Revive the conviction to support true democracy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... ngace.html
A Poverty Plan
By ABDULKAREEM al-ERYANI
Help the Islamic world fight poverty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/opini ... ryani.html
June 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
After Cairo, It’s Clinton Time
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry after reading the reactions of analysts and officials in the Middle East to President Obama’s Cairo speech. “It’s not what he says, but what he does,” many said. No, ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, it is what he says and what you do and what we do. We must help, but we can’t want democracy or peace more than you do.
What should we be doing? The follow-up to the president’s speech will have to be led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This will be her first big test, and, for me, there is no question as to where she should be putting all her energy: on the peace process.
No, not that peace process — not the one between Israelis and Palestinians. That one’s probably beyond diplomacy. No, I’m talking about the peace process that is much more strategically important — the one inside Iraq.
The most valuable thing that Mrs. Clinton could do right now is to spearhead a sustained effort — along with the U.N., the European Union and Iraq’s neighbors — to resolve the lingering disputes between Iraqi factions before we complete our withdrawal. (We’ll be out of Iraq’s cities by June 30 and the whole country by the close of 2011.)
Why? Because if Iraq unravels as we draw down, the Obama team will be blamed, and it will be a huge mess. By contrast, if a decent and stable political order can take hold in Iraq, it could have an extremely positive impact on the future of the Arab world and on America’s reputation.
I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women. Any decent outcome in Iraq would bolster all the progressive forces by creating an example of something that does not exist in the Middle East today — an independent, democratizing Arab-Muslim state.
“The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today,” said Stanford’s Larry Diamond, the author of “The Spirit of Democracy.” “When there is no model, it is hard for an idea to diffuse in a region.”
Rightly or wrongly, we stepped into the middle of this war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world in 2003 when we decapitated the Iraqi regime, wiped away its authoritarian political structure and went about clumsily midwifing something that the modern Arab world has never seen before — a horizontal dialogue between the constituent communities of an Arab state. In Iraq’s case, that is primarily Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
Yes, in a region that has only known top-down monologues from kings, dictators and colonial powers, we have helped Iraqis convene the first horizontal dialogue to write their own social contract for how to share power.
At first, this dialogue took place primarily through violence. Liberated from Saddam’s iron fist, each Iraqi community tested its strength against the others, saying in effect: “Show me what you got, baby.” The violence was horrific and ultimately exhausting for all. So now we’ve entered a period of negotiations over how Iraq will be governed. But it’s unfinished and violence could easily return.
And that brings me to Secretary Clinton. I do not believe the argument that Iraqis will not allow us to help mediate their disputes — whether over Kirkuk, oil-sharing or federalism. For years now, our president, secretary of state and secretary of defense have flown into Iraq, met the leaders for a few hours and then flown away, not to return for months. We need a more serious, weighty effort. Hate the war, hate Bush, but don’t hate the idea of trying our best to finish this right.
This is important. Afghanistan is secondary. Baghdad is a great Arab and Muslim capital. Iraq has something no other Arab country has in abundance: water, oil and an educated population. It already has sprouted scores of newspapers and TV stations that operate freely. “Afghanistan will never have any impact outside of Afghanistan. Iraq can change minds,” said Mamoun Fandy, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
You demonstrate that Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can write their own social contract, and you will tell the whole Arab world that there is a model other than top-down monologues from iron-fisted dictators. You will expose the phony democracy in Iran, and you will leave a legacy for America that will help counter Abu Ghraib and torture.
Ultimately, which way Iraq goes will depend on whether its elites decide to use their freedom to loot their country or to rebuild it. That’s still unclear. But we still have a chance to push things there in the right direction, and a huge interest in doing so. Mrs. Clinton is a serious person; this is a serious job. I hope she does it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
After Cairo, It’s Clinton Time
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry after reading the reactions of analysts and officials in the Middle East to President Obama’s Cairo speech. “It’s not what he says, but what he does,” many said. No, ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, it is what he says and what you do and what we do. We must help, but we can’t want democracy or peace more than you do.
What should we be doing? The follow-up to the president’s speech will have to be led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This will be her first big test, and, for me, there is no question as to where she should be putting all her energy: on the peace process.
No, not that peace process — not the one between Israelis and Palestinians. That one’s probably beyond diplomacy. No, I’m talking about the peace process that is much more strategically important — the one inside Iraq.
The most valuable thing that Mrs. Clinton could do right now is to spearhead a sustained effort — along with the U.N., the European Union and Iraq’s neighbors — to resolve the lingering disputes between Iraqi factions before we complete our withdrawal. (We’ll be out of Iraq’s cities by June 30 and the whole country by the close of 2011.)
Why? Because if Iraq unravels as we draw down, the Obama team will be blamed, and it will be a huge mess. By contrast, if a decent and stable political order can take hold in Iraq, it could have an extremely positive impact on the future of the Arab world and on America’s reputation.
I have never bought the argument that Iraq was the bad war, Afghanistan the good war and Pakistan the necessary war. Folks, they’re all one war with different fronts. It’s a war within the Arab-Muslim world between progressive and anti-modernist forces over how this faith community is going to adapt to modernity — modern education, consensual politics, the balance between religion and state and the rights of women. Any decent outcome in Iraq would bolster all the progressive forces by creating an example of something that does not exist in the Middle East today — an independent, democratizing Arab-Muslim state.
“The reason there are no successful Arab democracies today is because there is no successful Arab democracy today,” said Stanford’s Larry Diamond, the author of “The Spirit of Democracy.” “When there is no model, it is hard for an idea to diffuse in a region.”
Rightly or wrongly, we stepped into the middle of this war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world in 2003 when we decapitated the Iraqi regime, wiped away its authoritarian political structure and went about clumsily midwifing something that the modern Arab world has never seen before — a horizontal dialogue between the constituent communities of an Arab state. In Iraq’s case, that is primarily Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
Yes, in a region that has only known top-down monologues from kings, dictators and colonial powers, we have helped Iraqis convene the first horizontal dialogue to write their own social contract for how to share power.
At first, this dialogue took place primarily through violence. Liberated from Saddam’s iron fist, each Iraqi community tested its strength against the others, saying in effect: “Show me what you got, baby.” The violence was horrific and ultimately exhausting for all. So now we’ve entered a period of negotiations over how Iraq will be governed. But it’s unfinished and violence could easily return.
And that brings me to Secretary Clinton. I do not believe the argument that Iraqis will not allow us to help mediate their disputes — whether over Kirkuk, oil-sharing or federalism. For years now, our president, secretary of state and secretary of defense have flown into Iraq, met the leaders for a few hours and then flown away, not to return for months. We need a more serious, weighty effort. Hate the war, hate Bush, but don’t hate the idea of trying our best to finish this right.
This is important. Afghanistan is secondary. Baghdad is a great Arab and Muslim capital. Iraq has something no other Arab country has in abundance: water, oil and an educated population. It already has sprouted scores of newspapers and TV stations that operate freely. “Afghanistan will never have any impact outside of Afghanistan. Iraq can change minds,” said Mamoun Fandy, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
You demonstrate that Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds can write their own social contract, and you will tell the whole Arab world that there is a model other than top-down monologues from iron-fisted dictators. You will expose the phony democracy in Iran, and you will leave a legacy for America that will help counter Abu Ghraib and torture.
Ultimately, which way Iraq goes will depend on whether its elites decide to use their freedom to loot their country or to rebuild it. That’s still unclear. But we still have a chance to push things there in the right direction, and a huge interest in doing so. Mrs. Clinton is a serious person; this is a serious job. I hope she does it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opini ... nted=print
June 10, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Ballots Over Bullets
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Beirut
I confess. I’m a sucker for free and fair elections. It warms my heart to watch people drop ballots in a box to express their will, especially in a region where that so rarely happens. So I came to Lebanon on Sunday to watch the Lebanese hold their national election. It was indeed free and fair — not like the pretend election you are about to see in Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run. No, in Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
O.K., I know. Neither man was on the ballot, but there’s no question whose vision won here. First, a solid majority of Lebanese Christians voted against the list of Michel Aoun, who wanted to align their community with the Shiite Hezbollah party, and tacitly Iran, because he viewed them as being best able to protect Christian interests — not the West. The Christian majority voted instead for those who wanted to preserve Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence from any regional power.
Second, a solid majority of all Lebanese — Muslims, Christians and Druse — voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. This U.S.-supported coalition sees Lebanon’s future as a state independent of Syrian and Iranian influence and committed to its pluralism, modern education, a modern economy and a progressive outlook.
Saad Hariri, with 71 out of 128 seats in Parliament, is likely to be the next prime minister. He knows that his cabinet will have to include significant elements of the Aoun faction and Hezbollah. But to the extent that anyone came out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese — not for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel.
Alas, Lebanon is still far from having a stable government, and Hezbollah remains a powerful, armed force outside the Lebanese state. Nevertheless, something important happened here: The Lebanese mainstream, armed only with ballots, not bullets, won.
“They voted for their country and way of life,” said the Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi. “There was a doggedness. It was a triumph of hope and courage.”
Ballots were the only weapons the March 14 coalition had against an Iran-Hezbollah-Syria alliance that is widely suspected of having been involved in murdering Rafik Hariri, as well as six progressive members of the last Parliament and two of Lebanon’s best journalists — Gebran Tueni and Samir Kassir — for having insisted on their country’s independence. And yet, the allies, sons and, in one case, daughter — Nayla Tueni — of these slain activists still stood for election and won.
I watched the voting at a school in the mountain village of Brummana. People came by car, by wheelchair, by foot — young, old and sick. One very elderly lady walked in hooked up to a small oxygen tank. The tube was in her nose helping her to breathe. A young man was carrying the silver oxygen canister on one side of her and a young woman was holding her steady on the other side. But, by God, she was going to vote.
“People never turned out like this before,” Sebouh Akharjelian, 29, a businessman in the voting line said to me. “The stakes are very high. It is either surrender to Ahmadinejad or be in the pro-Western camp.”
It was striking to me how conciliatory the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was in the concession speech on Monday. All the fiery rhetoric and threats of the previous weeks were gone. I have no doubt that he will do whatever Iran dictates. But he can no longer pretend that he has some mandate to drag Lebanon into war with Israel again. It tells you that there is a power in all those people, all the little old ladies, who voted against him, and he seemed to know it.
While the Lebanese deserve 95 percent of the credit for this election, 5 percent goes to two U.S. presidents. As more than one Lebanese whispered to me: Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 — and forcing them to get out of Lebanon after the Hariri killing — this free election would not have happened. Mr. Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr. Obama helped stir the hope. Words also matter.
“People in this region have become so jaded by the ability of their states to dominate everything and hold sham elections,” said Paul Salem, analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And mostly the world never cared. And then here came this man [Obama], who came to them with respect, speaking these deep values about their identity and dignity and economic progress and education, and this person indicated that this little prison that people are living in here was not the whole world. That change was possible.”
Again, you don’t want to exaggerate what happened here. But in a region where extremists tend to go all the way and moderates tend to just go away, seeing moderates stand their ground and win somewhere — with ballots, not bullets, no less — well, that’s worth applauding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Ballots Over Bullets
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Beirut
I confess. I’m a sucker for free and fair elections. It warms my heart to watch people drop ballots in a box to express their will, especially in a region where that so rarely happens. So I came to Lebanon on Sunday to watch the Lebanese hold their national election. It was indeed free and fair — not like the pretend election you are about to see in Iran, where only candidates approved by the Supreme Leader can run. No, in Lebanon it was the real deal, and the results were fascinating: President Barack Obama defeated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
O.K., I know. Neither man was on the ballot, but there’s no question whose vision won here. First, a solid majority of Lebanese Christians voted against the list of Michel Aoun, who wanted to align their community with the Shiite Hezbollah party, and tacitly Iran, because he viewed them as being best able to protect Christian interests — not the West. The Christian majority voted instead for those who wanted to preserve Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence from any regional power.
Second, a solid majority of all Lebanese — Muslims, Christians and Druse — voted for the March 14 coalition led by Saad Hariri, the son of the slain Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. This U.S.-supported coalition sees Lebanon’s future as a state independent of Syrian and Iranian influence and committed to its pluralism, modern education, a modern economy and a progressive outlook.
Saad Hariri, with 71 out of 128 seats in Parliament, is likely to be the next prime minister. He knows that his cabinet will have to include significant elements of the Aoun faction and Hezbollah. But to the extent that anyone came out of this election with the moral authority to lead the next government, it was the coalition that wants Lebanon to be run by and for the Lebanese — not for Iran, not for Syria and not for fighting Israel.
Alas, Lebanon is still far from having a stable government, and Hezbollah remains a powerful, armed force outside the Lebanese state. Nevertheless, something important happened here: The Lebanese mainstream, armed only with ballots, not bullets, won.
“They voted for their country and way of life,” said the Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi. “There was a doggedness. It was a triumph of hope and courage.”
Ballots were the only weapons the March 14 coalition had against an Iran-Hezbollah-Syria alliance that is widely suspected of having been involved in murdering Rafik Hariri, as well as six progressive members of the last Parliament and two of Lebanon’s best journalists — Gebran Tueni and Samir Kassir — for having insisted on their country’s independence. And yet, the allies, sons and, in one case, daughter — Nayla Tueni — of these slain activists still stood for election and won.
I watched the voting at a school in the mountain village of Brummana. People came by car, by wheelchair, by foot — young, old and sick. One very elderly lady walked in hooked up to a small oxygen tank. The tube was in her nose helping her to breathe. A young man was carrying the silver oxygen canister on one side of her and a young woman was holding her steady on the other side. But, by God, she was going to vote.
“People never turned out like this before,” Sebouh Akharjelian, 29, a businessman in the voting line said to me. “The stakes are very high. It is either surrender to Ahmadinejad or be in the pro-Western camp.”
It was striking to me how conciliatory the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was in the concession speech on Monday. All the fiery rhetoric and threats of the previous weeks were gone. I have no doubt that he will do whatever Iran dictates. But he can no longer pretend that he has some mandate to drag Lebanon into war with Israel again. It tells you that there is a power in all those people, all the little old ladies, who voted against him, and he seemed to know it.
While the Lebanese deserve 95 percent of the credit for this election, 5 percent goes to two U.S. presidents. As more than one Lebanese whispered to me: Without George Bush standing up to the Syrians in 2005 — and forcing them to get out of Lebanon after the Hariri killing — this free election would not have happened. Mr. Bush helped create the space. Power matters. Mr. Obama helped stir the hope. Words also matter.
“People in this region have become so jaded by the ability of their states to dominate everything and hold sham elections,” said Paul Salem, analyst of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And mostly the world never cared. And then here came this man [Obama], who came to them with respect, speaking these deep values about their identity and dignity and economic progress and education, and this person indicated that this little prison that people are living in here was not the whole world. That change was possible.”
Again, you don’t want to exaggerate what happened here. But in a region where extremists tend to go all the way and moderates tend to just go away, seeing moderates stand their ground and win somewhere — with ballots, not bullets, no less — well, that’s worth applauding.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/opini ... nted=print