Kosovo and Karabakh

Unsurprisingly, the International Court of Justice's ruling in favor of Kosovo's declaration of independence is being well received in Karabakh:

"Authorities in Armenia and Karabakh have reacted very positively to the July 22 decision by the highest UN court to uphold the legality of Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia. They say it strengthens the Armenian case for international recognition of Karabakh’s de facto secession from Azerbaijan. One apparent implication of this is that they will now be even less likely to agree to the disputed region’s return under Azeri rule...

"Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister, Shavarsh Kocharian, welcomed the ruling as 'truly unprecedented' just hours after its announcement. He said the ICJ ruled that the principle of peoples’ self-determination, championed by the Armenian side, should take precedence over territorial integrity in the resolution of other ethnic or territorial disputes (Armenian Public Television, July 22)...

"Azerbaijan’s reaction to the development was predictably different. Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Elkhan Polukhov, was quoted by the Trend news agency as saying that the ICJ cannot have any implications for the resolution of the Karabakh conflict. The US State Department agreed, saying that the ICJ’s advisory verdict is based on 'unique facts specific to Kosovo. We do not see that this ruling and these facts apply to other cases,' department spokesman Philip Crowley told a daily news briefing in Washington (www.state.gov, July 22)."

Simply put, what the ICJ said is that Kosovo could unilaterally declare independence. This ruling carefully did not state that it was, in fact, independent, which depends on international recognition, and some uncertain grounds the court said the Kosovo decision should not be interpreted as a precedent for other regions. The situation actually seems to support my sense that international law doesn't matter that much, and the international order can easily be adapted to the actions of great powers. At the same time, the fact it can provide popular legitimacy to certain schools of thought may mean that public opinion in Armenia and Karabakh will become even more solid in favor of eventual independence, affecting leaders' negotiating position.

Hizbullah, Hariri, Syria, and the Saudis

In 2005, Lebanon's prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated, launching what some call the "Cedar Revolution" which forced Syrian troops from Lebanon. A few years later, a crisis over the distribution of power among the country's religious groups threatened to spark a civil war before the Qatari government stepped in to mediate. Now, the tribunal investigating Hariri's death may lead to a crisis:

"The Syrian president, Bashar al Assad, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are due in Beirut today, as part of a concerted diplomatic effort to head-off a brewing crisis in Lebanon.

"Fears are growing that a peace agreement between Lebanese factions, sealed two years ago in Doha, is in jeopardy following claims that Hizbollah, the Shiite Islamist movement, is to be implicated in the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

"The Hizbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said he will not accept any of the group’s members being indicted by the United Nations tribunal investigating the killing, warning that the militants 'know how to defend' themselves. That stance could put his movement, once again, on collision course with supporters of the current Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, son of the murdered former premier."

I suspect this crisis will be averted by somehow holding Hizbullah blameless even if its members were involved in the assassination. National unity is too important to the main actors, and neither Saudi Arabia nor Syria wants another crisis to disrupt relations.

Beatrice de Cardi

The blog has been silent lately due to the annual Seminar for Arabian Studies, a conference dominated by archaeology but including many different disciplinary perspectives on the past and occasionally the present of the Arabian Peninsula. While there, a group focusing on archaeology in Baluchistan came to honor Beatrice de Cardi as the founder of their field. A comment to this post at Historiann emphasizes just how rare it is for a field not focused on gender to venerate a woman as its founder, especially from her generation.

Here's an Independent profile from two years ago:

"At 93, Miss De Cardi can lay claim to being the world's oldest practising archaeologist. An expert on the pre-Islamic history of the Lower Arabian Gulf states and the civilisations of her beloved Baluchistan, she is part-Indiana Jones, part-Miss Marple. Her life is an extraordinary testament to a woman whose intense motivation has never left her. One who steadfastly refused to compromise in what was – and many argue still is – an avowedly man's world.

"'I have never had any difficulties,' she said. 'I am not a woman or a man when I am working in the Gulf or anywhere else. I am a professional and they have always accepted that.'

"For Miss De Cardi, archaeology allowed her to visit places and meet peoples unheard of among the girls of her social class...

"Having obtained maps, a jeep and a driver as well as a small team led by an illiterate Punjabi tribesman called Sadar Din, who remains her greatest teacher in the field, she set out to prove that Baluchistan was an 'archaeologist's paradise'. It took only a couple of weeks to make her point...

"In 1960 the region was closed to foreigners and Miss De Cardi was forced to approach from the Iranian side at Bampur. Finds here led her to the lower Gulf, now part of the United Arab Emirates. In the northernmost state Ras al-Khaimah, she discovered lost tombs now obliterated by new motorways funded by the petrodollar billions. Eventually she was forced to quit the country because of encroaching hostilities. But not before she had come to the attention of the emirate's ruler and later that of the government of Qatar, who asked her to lead an expedition charting the country 'from Stone Age to Oil Age', something she was required to do in just 10 weeks.

"Miss De Cardi, who never married, continues to travel to the region each year to catalogue new finds at the national museums she was instrumental in founding."

De Cardi continues to attend the annual London conference and takes time to meet the younger generation of scholars on the region.

IRGC Leaves South Pars

An interpretation advanced by me among others holds that the growing economic role of Iran's Revolutionary Guards was an important factor contributing to the 2009 electoral coup. The fact that economic role is increasing in any case makes this interesting:

"Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards will not be involved in developing Tehran’s part of the world’s largest gas field, said a senior gas official on Monday.

"'Khatam al-Anbia has pulled out of developing all phases of the South Pars gas field,' Mohammad Hassan Mousavizadeh told reporters. Khatam al-Anbia is an engineering and construction arm of the Guards.

"The Guards, hit by sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the United States, has played a growing economic role in the Islamic Republic since hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first took office in 2005...

"After Norway’s Kvaerner pulled out, development of phases 15 and 16 of South Pars were handed over to Khatam al-Anbia in 2006.

"In May the group also signed an agreement to develop three other phases of South Pars, the world’s largest reservoir of gas.

"The Security Council resolution passed in June blacklisted 15 firms belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps."

Meanwhile, the bazaar strike has ended.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Not a War Against Islam

In his book Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British, Roberto Mazza a note issued in 1917 by the British Foreign Office's News Department:

"The attention of the press is again drawn to the undesirability of publishing any article, paragraph of picture suggesting that military operations against Turkey are in any sense a Holy War, a modern Crusade, or have anything whatever to do with religious questions. The British Empire is said to contain a hundred million of Mohammedan subjects of the King and it is obviously mischievous to suggest that our quarrel with Turkey is one between Islam and Christianity."

Bazaar Strike Revisited

By coincidence, this week I've been reading Arang Keshavarzian's Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace, an extremely theory-heavy political science monograph examining the effects on political mobilization of transformations within the Tehran Bazaar since the Iranian Revolution. It usefully examines the bazaar, not as a unity, but as a series of networks created by the space of the bazaar and the ways of doing business, and argues that under the Pahlavi regime, these networks gave rise to a "cooperative hierarchy" which allowed for mass mobilization of the type seen in the revolution, whereas the policies of the Islamic Republic have, largely as unintended side effects, reduced the importance of bazaar space and given rise to new "coercive hierarchies" which are related to patronage ties, tend to be segmented among different sections of the bazaar, and do not have the same social force as the pre-revolutionary bonds. This new situation means that bazaar strikes tend to be of short duration and limited to certain areas.

The current bazaar strikes have had an impressive duration, but how do they fit this pattern? Reading articles closely, one finds:

"A strike that began last week at the gold and textile sections of the bazaar in Tehran as a protest against a government plan to increase the income tax on merchants grew on Tuesday to other sections, according to the Web site Khabar Online."

There is also:

"On Sunday, subways heading to the bazaar were relatively empty. Whole swaths of the market were shut down...

"News websites said authorities arrested the head of the union of fabric traders in Tehran’s old bazaar for allegedly speaking to merchants through a loudspeaker to assemble in Sabzeh Maidan Square, the main gate of the old bazaar, against the tax hike.

"Some Iranian youth joined the merchants in protest at Sabzeh Maidan. Eyewitnesses report that when a student attempted to record the scene, police beat him with a baton and arrested him, spiriting him away to an unknown location. Witnesses claim that plainclothes policemen and government security forces then launched tear gas bombs at protesters...

"Some merchants continue to pay the taxes. A man who has been selling scarves in the bazaar for more than 40 years said he will comply with the law...

"In the sections of the bazaar still open, electricity brown-outs kept plunging the shops in darkness, even during daylight, and the merchants could be seen angrily fanning themselves with small hand-held fans, made in China."

One can see while this is a significant event, there is clearly a segmented element to its organization, and many shops, apparently those in certain areas which almost certainly sell similar products remain open. Organization is difficult even such a significant grievance on the part of the entire merchant class. Some unknown number of students are also involving themselves. Strikingly, Reformist leaders seem invisible, perhaps because they see the new taxes as necessary even if they condemn the policies of the oil boom years that led to the current situation.

UPDATE: Keshavarzian himself weighs in with Tehran Bureau.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Direct Deposit

Kuwait's Parliament is considering legislation to ensure domestic workers are paid:

"They are dedicated and endeavour to offer the best services. They toil day and night, winter or summer and they rarely object to any kind of work. They think that their personal sacrifices will help them make enough money to fulfil some of their ambitions.

"But there is a problem, some of these expatriate domestic helpers have not been paid their salaries for years...

"According to Brigadier General Abdullah Al Ali, the Managing Director of Kuwait's Immigration Department, cases of abuses could be avoided in the future if a plan to deposit a monthly salary directly into domestic helpers' bank-accounts is pushed through parliament...

"Under the new text drafted by the government, employers will have to pay salaries directly to the domestic helpers' bank accounts and the state will establish a shelter for runaway housemaids which would house around 1,000 people."

Iranian Economic Unrest

IPS News reports that bazaaris aren't the only ones with complaints in Iran:

"Meanwhile, industrial workers are increasingly restive. According to the Iran Labor Report, a Web publication of Iranian labour activists, 180 workers at the Alborz china company in the northwestern city of Qazvin staged a demonstration Jul. 6, complaining that they had been paid only twice in the last 12 months. They had previously protested on May 1.

"Kevan Harris, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who frequently travels to Iran, noted that the head of a government-run trade union in the northern city of Tabriz complained recently that workers there have 'reported not receiving wages on time, receiving below the minimum wage, no payment of overtime, being cut out of government sponsored entitlements such as food vouchers, and moving towards temporary contract labour'...

"A major test is likely to come when the government phases out subsidies of consumer staples and replaces them with cash payments. The subsidy reform, already postponed several times, is now due to be implemented in late September."

One school of thought felt that the regime was so repressive in 2009 because it knew 2010 would be a year of austerity.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Tehran Bazaar Strike

Iran's capital is witnessing one of the largest bazaar strikes since the fall of the shah:

"With shops that sell everything from herbs and spices to carpets and gems now firmly closed, Tehran’s Grand Bazaar is on strike with merchants warning that higher taxes could force them to shut down for good.

"The usually bustling corridors of the centuries old market, known as 'Iran’s economic pulse', have been deserted for the past week in a standoff between the hard-line government and merchants. Some shops were draped with black banners in protest.

"Work stoppages are rare in Iran but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s decision to raise the rate of Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods set off a strike that merchants have threatened to extend despite a government offer to suspend the increase...

"Iran’s economy is over 60 percent dependent on oil income and the sharp fall in oil prices threatens its finances. The government had hoped to fill the shortfall by increasing tax.

"The tax forms part of wider economic reforms planned by the government, including a bill that will end subsidies on energy and food."

The government has declared a holiday in a probable attempt to disguise the strike.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Kom Ombo

The temple of Sobek and Horus in Kom Ombo, Egypt

Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour

Here's an interesting bit of Iranian politics:

"As Iran’s top man sponsoring Islamic groups abroad like Hezbollah and Hamas, Ali Akbar Mohtashamipour looks like a man who should be close to the current regime’s heart.

"Not a bit of it. Although a staunch supporter of exporting the Islamic revolution, Mohtashamipour’s political sympathies at home have for years lain with the opposition. In the June 2009 presidential ballot, he ran an election monitoring body to try to ensure opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi was not cheated of votes.

"This seemed to be the last straw for the regime, which paid him back in April 2010 by dismissing him from his post as secretary-general of Iran’s Committee for the Support of the Intifada, which operates under parliamentary supervision.

"Although the motive may have been political, Mohtashamipour's dismissal also reflected the growing divergence between those like him who support Hezbollah and Hamas out of ideological principle, and other establishment figures who see such groups merely as pawns in the bigger game of advancing Iran’s interests abroad."

Mohtashamipour's career and where things are at now is worth reading more fully, and reinforce the sense that the 2009 elections have represented a major turning point in modern Iranian history.

Muslims in the U.S.

Jon Stewart is good:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Travelling Wives

Women's rights has taken a step forward in the UAE:

"The UAE has taken another step towards enhanced rights for women and children with a ruling by the Federal Supreme Court that women may travel abroad with their children even if their husbands object.

"The Supreme Court argued that although the law granted husbands the power to prevent a mother from travelling with her child or children, it also granted citizens and residents the freedom of travel and movement.

"The new judgment follows a decision announced last week that a husband divorced by his wife must pay her 'deferred dowry', a portion of the dowry payable only after divorce, if there is evidence of abuse. Experts say that ruling would prevent a husband from abusing or harassing his wife with the intent of forcing her to file for divorce, thus forfeiting her financial rights under the marriage contract."

Fadlallah Dies

One of the world's top Shi'ite clerical leaders, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, has died:

"His career as an interpreter of Islamic jurisprudence and Shiite intellectual culture spanned more than half a century and touched on every aspect of public and private life for the millions of Shiite Muslims who considered him their 'marja', or 'object of emulation', a title bestowed upon only those clerics who have attained the highest level of scholarship and influence.

"But despite these varied religious and intellectual accomplishments, he is best remembered for his fierce resistance to the 1978-2000 Israeli occupation of Lebanon, as well as his role as the first major Muslim cleric of any sect to use religious justification for suicide bombing operations...

"Willingness to discard prior religious precedent...often endeared him to his community of followers far more than his support for military action against Israel, and turned him into one of the most liberal intellectuals in the Muslim world.

"In an interview four years ago, Fadlallah described much of what is considered Sharia as 'nothing more than outdated Arabic tribal traditions that both pre-date and contradict the teachings of the prophets but are continued by falsely linking them to Islamic tradition'.

"It was this mentality that led him to challenge many tenets commonly associated with Islam that involve family law, divorce, women’s rights and even sex outside of marriage.

"He often granted divorces to women who could prove abuse or neglect by their husbands and would do so without consulting or even informing the husband or his family, as in his view their opinion was irrelevant once the tenets of marriage were broken by abuse or infidelity...

"This liberalism towards women led him to argue that not only would it be permissible for women to lead prayers in mosques for mixed audiences but that God had actually commanded that women should be allowed into the highest ranks of Shiite Islam as ayatollahs."

Good pieces on his life and role have been written by Mohamad Bazzi and Juan Cole. Despite living in Lebanon, he was not that close to Hizbullah, but was deeply involved with the leaders of Iraq's Da'wa Party, as well as its offshoots in the Gulf, particularly Bahrain, and the Bahraini cleric 'Abdullah al-Ghurayfi is one possibility to rise to the head of his network.

UPDATE: Global Voices has a round-up of links from Arab blogs.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

al-Qaeda Magazine

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula now has a magazine.