Saeed Jalili

For about a year now I've wondered if Saeed Jalili might be the strongest contender for president within the realities of Iran's political system.  Here is a profile of him by Laura Rozen:

Jalili, 47, a trusted Khamenei aide who has served since 2007 as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) — the Iranian equivalent of National Security Advisor–has managed to largely bypass the bitter feuds that have polarized Iran’s ruling factions, analysts and associates observe. As a candidate who may be able to unite key conservative factions, a Jalili presidency potentially offers the prospect of a more consolidated Iranian leadership, which might be able to muster internal Iranian consensus if the Leader decides to make a deal, some analysts suggest.

Born in 1965 in the Iranian holy city of Mashhad, where Supreme Leader Khamenei is also from, Jalili is an Iran-Iraq war vet who joined Iran’s foreign ministry around 1990. (Earning his PhD from Iran’s Imam Sadeqh University, Jalili wrote his doctoral dissertation on the prophet Mohammad’s diplomacy.) He worked in the 1990s as an official in Iran’s foreign ministry, and then in 2001 joined the Supreme Leader’s office. In 2005, he became an advisor to new Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Since 2007 he has served as the Iranian equivalent of National Security Advisor and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator.

With no real economics or management experience and a modest, mild mannered persona, Jalili may have a hard time winning popular support–even with the quiet backing of Khamenei and the machinery of Iran’s “deep state” security establishment (the Sepah, Revolutionary Guard, etc.), the Iranian analyst assessed.

The part about popular support does matter, however, since one thing the regime wants is the legitimacy of high voter turnouts and displays of public enthusiasm.

Iran's Registered Candidates

Yesterday was the deadline for candidates to register for next month's presidential elections in Iran, and Farideh Farhi has a good analysis of the field.  One candidate, a power center unto himself, as former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the pragmatist technocrat who served from 1989 until 1997 and has been a major player and fixer in Iranian politics since the 1980's.  His backing for the reformist Mir Hussain Mousavi in 2009 was significant to the Green Wave and subsequent protests, though Rafsanjani's instincts for political self-preservation have since led him to distance himself from the reformist camp and on occasion kowtow to Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i.  Still, Rafsanjani does not like Iran's direction over the past eight years, and is worrisome enough to Khamene'i that his family has been harassed, presumably to keep him in line.  Still, this time around and with the backing for reformist former president Muhammad Khatami, he looks to be the reformist standardbearer, as bizarre as that might seem given his place within the system.

Mahmood Ahmadinejad himself is clearly backing his current chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, whom he may hope to use the same way Vladimir Putin used Dmitri Medvedev in Russia, as a closely allied seatwarmer to get around term limits.  Mashaie is probably the top-line candidate least likely to actually be permitted to stand, since Khamene'i and his allies on the Council of Guardians have been intent on limiting Ahmadinejad's power since shortly after the last elections, and have targeted Mashaie in the past as an unacceptable officeholder.

Ahmadinejad himself is usually called a "principlist," which is a translation back into English of a Farsi term used for American "neoconservatives," but that faction now exists independently of him and is likely to coalesce around current nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.  Like Ahmadinejad, Jalili is an Iran-Iraq War veteran, and probably has ties to the military-economic establishment that promoted Ahmadinejad to power in 2005.  I'm not clear what sort of networks might be supporting Jalili and Mashaie respectively if the latter is approved as a candidate.

Farhi also notes the "traditional conservatives" in the mold of Khamene'i himself:

The most important conservative alliance – involving former foreign minister Velayati, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and former Parliament speaker Gholamreza Haddad Adel – has also not been able to decide which one of them should run. All three have now registered, and there is a real possibility that both Qalibaf and Velayati will run. Finally, there are the old-style traditional conservatives. Deputy speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Hassan Abutorabifard has registered on their behalf but so has former foreign minister Manuchehr Mottaki who chose to ignore the choice of traditional conservatives and enter the race himself.

Rafsanjani’s entry into the fray with solid support from Khatami and his followers will force the conservatives not only to scramble for a consensus candidate, but also search for one who is relatively popular or at least better known. The opinion polls reportedly suggest that the most popular conservative candidate is Qalibaf because of his widely hailed management of the city of Tehran. He also has quite a following in his home province of Khorasan Razavi and where he won in the first round of the 2005 presidential election (Khorasan Razavi is one of the most important provinces in electoral calculations given its population of over 5.6 million, second only to Tehran as the country’s most populous province).

This is a ridiculous number of candidates, and even as we wait for the Council of Guardians to approve a final candidate list over the next ten days, it sounds like the story to watch will be which conservatives drop out.  There are also two reformist candidates, Muhammad-Reza Aref and Hassan Rowhani, who might eventually drop out in favor of Rafsanjani, though I suspect they will wait to make sure he is not rejected by the Guardians.

Women's Sports in the Gulf

Earlier this week, I meant to blog about Saudi Arabia's decision to allow girls' sports in private schools, but was busy with the usual end of semester rush.  Today, however, AP reports on the growing trend of women's sports teams in the Gulf states:

As part of a new initiative launching sports leagues for women, Muneera and her team mates from Salwa Al Sabah club downed Qadsiya club 63-13 in a game that attracted several hundred men and female fans. The initiative to launch basketball, table tennis and athletic leagues for the first time in Kuwait illustrates how the landscape for women athletes is improving across the Gulf where hard-liners have long opposed women playing sports.

Several of the players, in deference to the conservative Muslim culture that is common across the Gulf, wore leggings and covered their heads with the hijab. Others, however, wore shorts and T-shirts...

Helped by government support, increased education and erosion of traditional values, football leagues for girls in the Gulf have started up in Qatar and the UAE. Saudi Arabia — which long barred girls from playing any sports — recently announced it would allow sports in private schools as long as they abide by the rules of Sharia, or Islamic law.

This issue is not only about women's rights to compete in sports for its own sake, but a matter of public health since sports are an important way in which physically active lifestyles are promoted in schools.

Mamluk Cairo's Street Eats

In her monumental study Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes, Paulina Lewicka calls attention to the fact that during the Mamluk period of the 14th and 15th centuries, travelers called attention to the fact that the people of Cairo generally did not cook at home, but ate prepared foods from market sellers and street vendors.  This foodway is an interesting lens into the role high politics and the environment can play in shaping everyday life.

Her account of the origins of this way of doing things begins in the 9th century during the days of the Tulunids, the first autonomous dynasty to rule Egypt since its conquest by the Roman Empire.  Cooks for the main harem palace produced surplus food which they then began selling at gate stands.  Another boost came from the fall of the Fatimid Dynasty in the 1170's, when a number of the palace cooks seem to have been tossed into the street and forced to go into business for themselves.  These two developments, and perhaps others, led to high quality food offerings being available to the general public, much the way the French Revolution led to the birth of a Parisian restaurant culture operated by former cooks to the nobility.

There was also an environment factor in play.  Cooking requires fire, and fire required wood, yet Egypt had never been fully self-sufficient in that resource, and the Mamluk naval build-up led to the complete deforestation of the country.  (I've previously blogged about Egyptian wood issues here.)  Because wood was expensive, it was not economical for everyone to have their own hearths at home.

Even if you didn't buy the street food, people generally had the food they prepared cooked by special oven operators outside their home, who of course benefited from the same economies of scale in their wood purchases as the street vendors.  In fact, many in the upper middle classes preferred to prepare their own food because many of the food sellers took shortcuts in the quality of food they provided, as well as the standards of hygiene they were expected to maintain under Mamluk market regulations.

Israel and Syria's War

The New York Times does a great job explaining the context of Israel's air strike in Syria targeting weapons it said were bound of Hizbullah:

Iran and Hezbollah have both backed President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, now in its third year. But as fighting in Syria escalates, they also have a powerful interest in expediting the delivery of advanced weapons to Hezbollah in case Mr. Assad loses his grip on power and Syria ceases to be an effective channel for funneling weapons from Iran...

In Lebanon, some analysts said they believed that a strong Hezbollah could also emerge as a powerful ally for Mr. Assad if he is forced to abandon Damascus, the Syrian capital, and take refuge in a rump Iranian-backed state on the Syrian coast, a region that abuts the Hezbollah-controlled northern Bekaa Valley...

An American official, who asked not to be identified because he was discussing intelligence reports, said the targeted shipment consisted of Iranian-made Fateh-110’s — a mobile, accurate, solid-fueled missile that has the range to strike Tel Aviv and much of Israel from southern Lebanon, and that represents a considerable improvement over the liquid-fueled Scud missile. Two prominent Israeli defense analysts said the shipment included Scud D’s, a missile that Syrians have developed from Russian weapons with a range of up to 422 miles — long enough to reach Eilat, in southernmost Israel, from Lebanon. 

Stoning and the Qur'an

The Qatari scholar is right that stoning for adultery is not in the Qur'an:

The scholar said that the Quran, the holy book of Muslims, never prescribed stoning as punishment for adultery and that the punishment prescribed by the Shariah is 100 lashes to the adulterer and the adulteress in public.

The stoning issue was a matter of interpretations by Muslims.

Although stoning is fatal by design and lashing isn't, some will correctly point out that both are extreme in the event of adultery.  My point, however, would be that this "interpreting" lashing as stoning shows the fallacy of drawing direct lines from what is written in a religious text to what people actually do, as well as how over a thousand years ago when Islamic law was being set, the prescriptions of the Qur'an were at times understood to be situational.

Ottoman Heritage Revival

Aslihan Agaoglu writes about Turkey's growing interest in Ottoman heritage:

I recently read an article on the BBC Turkish website that the Ottoman language is on its way to becoming a new selective course in Turkey’s high school curriculum. The news read: “Every day there’s a new course opening on Ottoman language and history. With the support of the government, this newfound interest in the Ottoman Empire just keeps on growing...”

Moreover, the fascination with our Ottoman heritage is not just limited to the language or TV shows; it has a significant presence in almost every aspect of cultural life. A growing number of Turkish fashion designers are creating clothing lines inspired by the Ottoman women living in the Saray; jewellery created using Ottoman motifs can be found in most stores and there are now shelves solely dedicated to Ottoman literature in bookshops.

However, there’s a deeper, more profound reason behind this fascination towards our history that goes beyond nostalgia. Language is organic, it changes and evolves over time, yet a drastic transition such as ours can cause a significant gap between the different generations, that today we find hard to bridge. When asked, a man in his fifties said his reason for wanting to learn Ottoman was to be able to read his grandfather’s tombstone. This paints a fair portrait of the situation and the causality of collective amnesia.

To understand the reason such a revival is necessary, you have to understand that after World War I, the Turkish nationalists blamed the Ottomans for the polity's failures.  The dynasty and its extensive social class of retainers and political servants were seen, correctly, actually, not as fully Turkish, but an amalgam of different ethnicities which diluted the assumed grandness of Turkishness.  Their emphasis on Islam was also seen as backward given Ataturk's push to Europeanization.

In 1974 a volume was published by Brill entitled The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History. Its chapters, which included what I believe to be Arnold Toynbee's last publication, were developed from papers presented at a conference at the University of Wisconsin, a conference that was actually protested at the time by Turkish students at that university.  Apparently, however, that rejection of an important part of the Turkish heritage has petered out, and a new generation is interested in those centuries of the Anatolian past.

Berdymuhammadov Falls Off Horse

I don't actually care that the President of Turkmenistan fell off his horse, but others seem to.

Unbeknownst to outsiders, one of the riders is Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, and his horse, Berkarar, (Turkmen for "Mighty") is in the lead.

But as soon as he gallops across the finishing line of the one-kilometer race, Berkarar’s front legs buckle underneath him...

"He crossed the finish line and, as he crossed, he looked at the crowd with a big smile and, about 20 meters further, the horse stumbled probably on a soft spot in the sand and went down on his knees and, of course, stopped at that point. And so the president who was going quite fast moved on and fell in the sand."

As the Turkmen leader lies motionless, an announcer says, “Our beloved president was able to finish the race in first place.” But any pride Berdymukhammedov had in his victory is followed by a pretty spectacular fall.

UK Returns to Gulf?

Britain may return militarily to the Persian Gulf:

The withdrawal of all British troops from Afghanistan next year will create a unique opportunity to reverse the “East of Suez” decision that formed a landmark in Britain’s retreat from imperial power, the Royal United Services Institute will say in a paper published on Monday...

The think tank says the Armed Forces are considering a partial reversal of the “East of Suez” decision. “The military intends to build up a strong shadow presence around the Gulf; not an evident imperial-style footprint, but a smart presence,” writes Professor Michael Clarke, its director. “This may not yet be declared government policy,” he writes. “But the UK appears to be approaching a decision point where a significant strategic reorientation of its defence and security towards the Gulf is both plausible and logical.” 

The paper suggests this would involve an augmented fleet in Bahrain and a military base in Oman.

Al-Jazeera and Iraqi Sectarianism

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is accusing al-Jazeera of fomenting his country's escalating Sunni/Shi'ite violence:

Iraqi authorities announced yesterday that they had revoked the operating licences of Al Jazeera and nine other satellite TV channels for promoting sectarianism during a wave of violence...

More than 180 people have been killed in gun battles with security forces and other attacks since the unrest began on Tuesday. The violence follows more than four months of largely peaceful protests by Iraq's Sunni minority against the Shiite-dominated government...

The Doha-based channel has aggressively covered the Arab Spring uprisings, and has broadcast extensively on the civil war in Syria. Qatar is a harsh critic of the Syrian regime and a leading backer of the rebels, and is accused by many supporters of Iraq's Shiite-led government of backing protests in Iraq too.

Two things are going on here.  First, al-Maliki is simply blaming his country's problems on outsiders, and specifically trying to discredit his Sunni opponents by portraying them as being manipulated by foreigners.  This is a pretty old trick in the Middle Eastern playbook, and presumably that of other regions, as well.

More troubling, however, is the way the whole complex of events, including the Iraq protests and al-Jazeera coverage of Syria, reflects an intensification of the sharp Sunni/Shi'ite divisions that emerged in the Arab world in concert with Iraq's civil war and have been amplified over the past couple of years by the conflicts in Bahrain and Syria.  Because al-Jazeera has reportedly mostly ignored Bahrain's protest movement, it might even be legitimately accused of covering events in a pro-Sunni way, though I suspect that is simply a by-product of Qatar's own political interests in keep Bahrain out of the public eye. 

Al-Maliki's policies have been aimed at entrenching the power of sectarian Shi'ite political forces in Iraq, and this entrenchment is a lot of what led to the current violence in that country.  His claims of foreign inspiration, though, will resonate with many, and so further the conflict by creating divisions in how it is remembered that will impact the attitudes and actions of people in coming years.

Obama and Syrian Chemical Weapons

During 2012, both President Obama and Mitt Romney said that a Syrian use of chemical weapons would be grounds for intervention.  Now that Syria has apparently called that bluff, the U.S. is apparently trying to come up with a response.  Stephen Walt articulates the quandary:

The case against direct U.S. intervention never depended on believing that Assad was anything but a thug; rather, it rested first and foremost on the fear that intervention might make things worse rather than better. Specifically, it has rested on the interrelated concerns that 1) the fall of the Assad regime might unleash an anarchy of competing factions and warlords, 2) the opposition to Assad contained a number of extremist groups whose long-term agendas were worrisome, and 3) pouring more weapons into a society in the midst of a brutal civil war would create another Afghanistan, Iraq, or 1970s-era Lebanon. These prudential concerns still apply, irrespective of the weaponry Assad's forces have chosen to employ. And if his forces have used chemical weapons, then one might even argue that it raises the risks of intervention and thus strengthens the case against it.

Beyond Walt's analysis, I would also say that it was never clear how most forms of intervention would work given the differences between Syria's protracted urban warfare and the fact Libya, the usual point of comparison, had something resembling an actual front in desert areas.

One case for intervening now is that Assad has broken a taboo against using chemical weapons that most of the world has tried to establish.  He is certainly not the first; the chemical weapons attacks by Saddam Hussein are well known.  All international norms, however, are situational.  The international norm against genocide seldom leads to intervention.

Still, I think there should be a response, especially because President Obama went out of his way to declare prominently that this would be a red line provoking a response.  If he did not have an idea of what such a response might look like, then he should not have pledged one knowing that the Assad regime was likely to go down this road rather than admit defeat.

Mahdis Abound

This is interesting:

Earlier this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil on earth. A website based in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and “petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March. Many of the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000 fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the Mahdi,” she says. 

Answering Islamophobia

I've been thinking about what a pain it can be to answer the stuff that gets turned out by the Islamophobia industry, but I've realized that, for everyday practical purposes, it can come down to this simple fact:

There are 4-5 million American Muslims.  Of these, I can recall only five who have engaged in violence or attempted violence related to terrorist ideology (shoe bomber, Times Square bomber, Fort Hood shooter, and the two Boston Marathon dudes).  That would make it about one in a million, though I might be forgetting someone.  Either way, the point about numbers stands.  As a practical matter, if any worthwhile proportion of these Muslims were inclined to terrorism, we'd see far more of it than we could possibly handle, which is clearly not the case.

In response to a possible counter of the above point by quoting Qur'anic verses, you can then say that people can interpret the Qur'an and life of Muhammad all they want, but unless large numbers of Muslims agree with those interpretations, what they are doing is coming up with reasons why they, personally, are not planning to convert to Islam, not making practically important statements about Islam as it exists in the world.

I'm limiting this to the United States because it is the easiest place for one answering someone with anti-Islamic instincts or opinions to get back on friendly ground, though once on this ground it becomes easier to potentially extend the analogy overseas.  It is also clearly more complicated for actual Muslims, who might be called upon to defend themselves for understanding Islam the way they do, a battle which is more optional for the non-Muslim.  Still, I've learned to appreciate the need for points that are hard to argue with and easy to understand.

UPDATE: Just realized I should add Anwar al-Awlaki, Adam Gadahn, and John Walker Lindh to the list of American Muslim terrorists.  However, the fact we are still counting individuals is telling.

Riahi and Ettounisya

Slim Riahi, founder of Tunisia's secular-free market Free Patriotic Union political party, has purchased the country's main news station:

Ettounisya is a popular television station that, like most of its Tunisian competitors, devotes a large amount of airtime to political talk shows. It was established shortly after the 2011 revolution and now is the most-watched channel in Tunisia, according to Tekiano. Its financial situation has come under scrutiny with the ongoing legal proceedings against the channel’s director, Sami Fehri, who has been held in jail for months on corruption charges...

These issues have come to the fore in the debate over the creation of a body to regulate the Tunisian media. The creation of the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA) was called for in a November 2011 law. The statute calls for a nine-person body representing the Tunisian government, the journalists’ union, and the audiovisual communications industry. The HAICA would be tasked with regulating the Tunisian media sector, supervising the media during electoral campaigns, and nominating directors of public radio and television stations.

Riahi insists he will not try to influence the channel with his political agenda, but others question why he would acquire the station given the poor economic state of the television industry.  I sincerely hope that the media environment of the Arab world does not come to resemble that in Iraq, where all major media outlets are little more than mouthpieces for the different political movements, which of course contributes to entrenched social divisions.

Tunisian Mufti TV

Tunisian state TV will now have a show for its mufti to promote what he views as proper Islam:

The Mufti of Tunisia, the country’s highest religious authority, will begin hosting a weekly program on a state-run television channel. The move, unimaginable under the previous regime, signifies the growing role of Islam in public life.

Othman Battikh, the Mufti, requested the program so that he might alleviate the confusion in society over conflicting opinions regarding Islamic law, he told Tunisia Live. Many of these opinions, called fatwas, have circulated in the country since the revolution, especially from outside of Tunisia. These are misleading people, said Battikh, and creating strife in the country.

The article focuses most on the contrast between this move and the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, which maintained a strict secularism in public life.  However, from a historical perspective, two other points stand out.  The first is simply the idea of a state mufti.  This process of government control over an official religious establishment in the Middle East developed slowly over the past thousand years, but is still striking to me since I've been reading books from multiple time periods which quote religious scholars as debating the propriety of working for a government, as opposed to holding government to account from the outside.  Furthermore, it leads to a political discourse which has shades of seeing Islamic universalism as expressed in an assembly of independent nations rather than individuals.

The second thing is the competition among religious authorities enabled by modern technology, a competition which undercuts the authority of the traditional hierarchies these states sought to control.  This mufti can't just show up on TV and say his piece, but he instead has to argue a case for paying attention to him instead of other preachers and issuers of religious opinions.  A student of Islamic history might note that such competition had always been present in major cities, but today this is happening everywhere for reasons that initially related to newspapers and the telegraph and now have more to do with cassette sermons, satellite TV, and the internet.