India Bound

Tomorrow morning I head off to India for a couple of weeks, so blogging will not be on a regular schedule. I might resume the travel blogging I used to do, if time permits.

Conflagration in Imbaba

Sectarian relations in Egypt have a new raw wound today after overnight clashes and riots in Cairo's Imbaba neighborhood:

"Relations between Egypt's Muslims and Christians degenerated to a new low Sunday after riots overnight left 12 people dead and a church burned, adding to the disorder of the country's post-revolution transition to democracy.

"The attack on the church was the latest sign of assertiveness by an extreme, ultraconservative movement of Muslims known as Salafis, whose increasing hostility toward Egypt's Coptic Christians over the past few months has met with little interference from the country's military rulers.

"Salafis have been blamed for other recent attacks on Christians and others they don't approve of. In one attack, a Christian man had an ear cut off for renting an apartment to a Muslim woman suspected of involvement in prostitution.

"The latest violence, which erupted in fresh clashes Sunday between Muslims and Christians who pelted each other with stones in another part of Cairo, also pointed to what many see as reluctance of the armed forces council to act. The council took temporary control of the country after President Hosni Mubarak was deposed on Feb. 11.

"After the overnight clashes in the slum of Imbaba, residents turned their anger toward the military. Some said they and the police did almost nothing to intervene in the five-hour frenzy of violence."

Ursula Lindsey notes additional angles, including a detailed account of how things started. The immediate spark was on-line rumors that a Christian woman who had converted to Islam was being held in the church and seeking liberation. There is no evidence that such a woman ever existed, but some undoubtedly found it plausible because part of the Egyptian government's policy of trying to prevent any religious conversion ever is to hand possible Christian converts to Islam over to the Coptic Church for sustained anti-conversion counseling. The Salafis, organizing through social media, began gathering outside the church, accumulating a crowd from the neighborhood, as well. Things escalated when the military appeared, though the reasons are unclear. A crowd including both Christians and Muslims tried and failed to prevent the arson.

Sarah Carr of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights has a similar account partially drawing on the one I quoted above:

"Zeinobia further points out that the rumour about Abeer began two hours after an interview with Kamilia Shehata – another woman who Salafis allege converted to Islam from Christianity but is being held against her will by the church – aired on the Christian Al-Hayat channel. During the interview Shehata denied that she has ever changed her religion...

"Exactly 100 days after the revolution - when Egypt’s sectarian divisions were briefly forgotten – eleven people have reportedly been killed, tens injured and Christian homes and shops destroyed. The army announced today that it has arrested 190 people in relation to the events and will try them in military courts, but the question remains why the authorities seemingly sat on its hands while violent protestors attacked the Mar Mina church for hours on end."

The geography of these riots matters. Two recent big conflagrations have come in a rural village where Muslims believed Coptic priests were using magic to undermine Muslim marriages and the slums around Muqattam Heights in Cairo. Imbaba is centrally located, but still a poor neighborhood. In other words, anti-Christian violence is coming from the poor and uneducated in a national revolutionary situation in which law and order have become weak.

Salafis are strongest in the poor neighborhoods, where there are lots of unlicensed mosques and independent preachers who often have some sort of connection to the Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia. Egyptian popular rumor that the Imbaba clashes were the work of Saudi intelligence speaks to that influence, though it also stems from an Egyptian tendency to blame internal problems on foreigners. Al-Masry al-Yawm names one figure to watch:

"Mohamed Hassan, a prominent Salafi figure, is taking much of the blame. Hassan has, controversially, mediated a number of recent sectarian conflicts in Egypt, but is also widely seen as a provocateur.

"'I want to tell Mohamed Hassan that you are the reason for all of this,' said Atef Erian, a young Copt in Imbaba who was injured in yesterday’s clashes. 'Please don’t worsen the relations between Muslims and Copts with your harebrained ideas.'

"'He and like-minded sheikhs were behind the whole case of Kamilia Shehata, and then he pretends to be a peaceful man seeking to bridge the differences between Muslims and Copts,' added Erian."

Finally, the violence is not coming from a belief that Islam requires hostility to Christianity. It is instead based on rumor and in some cases superstitions about alleged Christian threats to the Muslim community. Contrary to the way these matters are often discussed on the right, what just happened in Imbaba is far more similar to hate crimes against mosques in the United States and Europe than the Ottoman sieges of Vienna. The threat to the Copts is that they are a minority seen as an internal Other posing some imaginary threat to the majority. This is also why we continue to see grassroots opposition to sectarian violence. The battle taking place in Egypt takes the form of Muslim versus Christian, but is part of a larger struggle against ignorance, intolerance, and hatred.

Youth Protests and Palestinian Unity

Noura Erakat believes that the youth protests sweeping the Arab world were an important factor behind the Palestinian unity deal:

"Reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah may present the first victory of a nascent Palestinian youth movement, which earned its moniker, the March 15th movement, from the first day of its mass protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). Only one day after the launch of their movement demanding an end to the four-year internecine conflict that also divided the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas announced his willingness to travel to Gaza to engage in unity talks, while other leading Fatah members, aware of the youths’potential force, opened twitter accounts just to follow the pulse of the movement.

"Arguably, the unity government is a preemptive tactic to thwart rising Palestinian discontent, and the increasing relevance of youth protests, in a broader Arab Spring. In fact, on the day of its announcement, Hamas security forces violently dispersed nearly 100 jubilant youth celebrating in Unknown Soldier Square in Gaza for failure to obtain prior approval to congregate. Ibrahim Shikaki, a recent UC Berkeley graduate and Ramallah-based youth organizer comments that Hamas and Fatah have tried to undermine the organizers’ efforts by inhibiting media coverage, accusing its leaders of receiving foreign funding and shifting the focus of the protests to the factional division for fear of 'losing grip over power and authority.' In that case, thawed relations alone will not suffice to quell the budding movement."

Moustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative, says something similar:

"There are several factors. One major factor in my opinion is the degree to which Palestinians on all sides have grown frustrated by internal division -- and this was in part an impact of the Arab revolutions in Palestine. There was the beginning of demonstrations in late January and the beginning of February demanding the end of division, and people were wise and mature enough to realize that what we need is not a third division against both but rather pressure to end existing division. This public pressure was extremely important. Fatah and Hamas realized that they both stood to lose popular support."

Repression in Bahrain

Toby Jones notes Bahrain's ongoing crackdown on dissent:

"An eerie silence and a paralyzing sense of fear currently grip Bahrain. Since mid-March, when tens of thousands of protesters last took to the streets demanding political reform, Bahraini security and military forces have engaged in an ongoing, systematic, and brutal campaign to crush the country’s pro-democracy forces. The crackdown has been sweeping and shocking. Dozens of activists have been killed. Hundreds more have been imprisoned and tortured. Bahrain’s leading independent newspaper, al-Wasat, is expected to close down on May 10.

"Provocative government actions belie claims that all the monarchy seeks is to re-establish law and order. It is apparent, instead, that the government is using martial law to carry out a vendetta against those who challenged the authority of the ruling al-Khalifa. Checkpoints have been set up to harass the country’s Shi’i citizens, who make up the majority of Bahrain’s native population and of its political opposition. Security forces have laid siege to the island’s hospitals and arrested scores of medical personnel, in what appears to be an especially inhumane and spiteful kind of intimidation. For weeks police and pro-regime supporters roamed the streets of Shi’i villages destroying cars and other property. Those who supported the protests now fear leaving their homes, lest they be publicly accosted or, worse, arrested and disappeared.

"The regime is also taking dramatic steps to quiet critics. Authorities have targeted newspapers, journalists, and bloggers in order to stymie public criticism, to control reporting about the scale of the crackdown, and to frighten into silence those who might speak out. In the last few weeks Bahraini blogs and twitter feeds that are normally vibrant have gone quiet, stunned into submission by the brutality of what is happening around them."

Jones goes on to note in more detail the silencing of potential reporting on events in the island kingdom, as well as the predictable assertions that the largely Shi'ite opposition was pursuing a sectarian agenda. I suspect that in the background of the latter is the fear among Sunnis that Bahrain could become another Iraq, which is now led by a sectarian Shi'ite government with over one million mainly Sunni refugees still in other Arab countries.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Abbasid Civilization

Several years ago, Hugh Kennedy published a history of the Abbasid dynasty written for a popular audience, a book which today you can delightfully find new hardback copies of for one cent. That work, published in the U.K. as The Court of the Caliphs and in the U.S. as When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World, focused mainly on court history, with generous anecdotes about the personal lives and relationships of rulers and courtiers as they are portrayed in the chronicles of the period. In 2009, Amira Bennison expanded that focus for a general audience with her The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire, which goes beyond the courts to survey several areas of life throughout the lands of Islam from the 8th through the 13th centuries.

I admit the title of this work led me to believe it was much the same as Kennedy's, and so I only put it in mind as something to read when I saw a copy on the shelf of a nearby college library and noted its broader focus. Although the first of its six chapters does cover political history, it is about far more than caliphs and ranges far beyond the century or two that is more usually considered the Abbasid high point. Beyond those lands which acknowledged Abbasid suzerainty, Bennison deals extensively with both the Fatimids in North Africa and the Umayyads of Spain, meaning that the book's title probably obscures more than it reveals.

After that political history, Bennison devotes a chapter to cities and urban life, noting the different kinds of cities and towns in the medieval Middle East and their different geneses, including not only their physical features but institution-related snippets of life of those who lived there. Chapter three is dedicated to those outside the orbits of power in medieval society, such as peasants, women and children, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians, and even beggars and criminals. Thereafter she moves to the economic integration of the central Islamic lands through trade and pilgrimage before finishing up with a chapter on intellectual life of the region before a conclusion about the "Abbasid legacy." That chapter on intellectual life includes both religious and scientific learning, and explains the social context of knowledge from elementary education onward, a clear example of the author's interest in portraying society as broadly and thoroughly as she can.

This structure to the book, dispensing quickly with political history before moving to elements of civilization, has a track record in medieval Islamic history that includes Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples and before him Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam. In this case, with Bennison's up-to-date historiography, I'd love to use it in my survey of the period next year, though I still need to determine whether it will fit into the overall puzzle of the readings. A strength some will have noted is that, while noting the importance of Islam as a religion to society, it examines the physical and material basis of society before its account of the development of Islamic law and the Sufi orders. This is definitely a book from which many will benefit.

Iran's Crisis of Authority

Those interested in a brief (109-page) overview of the historical and political context for Iran's June 2009 election controversy should check out Ali Ansari's most recent book, Crisis of Authority: Iran's 2009 Presidential Election. In this Chatham House publication, Ansari analyzes the competition between principlists and reformists before and after the election as the latest stage in the struggle to work out an interaction between what he calls "Islamist" and "republican" elements of the governing system, one in which the nature of the struggle has, perhaps like never before, been made obvious for all to see. Early on, he points out that, for the Ahmadinejad and his principlist supporters, elections are not about people's right to choose their own government:

"The vanity of the governing elite may require public acclamation but not legitimacy, which for the ideologues of the right comes from God rather than from the people. In their view, if the people do not have the wisdom to vote for the correct candidate, their misfortune should not obstruct the regime's consolidation of power...The further one looks from the date of the election - in either direction - the clearer this becomes"

Amidst a brief political history of Iran since the 1989 death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ansari explains the ideological underpinnings of the different political movements and their claims to embody the ideals of the 1979 Islamic revolution. As in his other work, the reformists come across as highly complacent about the lengths to which their opponents would go to retain power. The principlists, however, fare little better, as he says:

"Their failure to see the changes taking place beneath their own gaze has regularly been their ondoing. The eruption of popular anger that followed the stolen election of 2009 stands testament to the persistence of this extraordinary hubris among Iran's governing elite; while the failure to move swiftly to capitalize on this anger reflects the persistent romanticism of the reformist leadership."

Ansari also highlights a key point about the election's aftermath:

"The strategy of the authorities has been to raise the stakes, to turn an electoral dispute into a confrontation about the nature of the velayat-i faqih (guardianship of the jurist). This had the desired effect of clarifying the nature of the dispute and reinforcing the core of their support. But it also raised fundamental questions about the nature of governance and accountability that many Iranians preferred not to confront. It was as if the ambiguity that had been essential to the character and political sustainability of the entire edifice of the velayat-i faqih had been discarded. Iranians could no longer remain ambivalent about their position towards the system; it had to be absolute, one way or the other. Put simply, did Iranians really believe that obedience to Ahmadinejad was equivalent to obedience to God."

I read this book a couple of weeks ago, then got distracted by the last week of classes and final exams before posting about it. I remember thinking Ansari was optimistic about the hardline regime's eventual collapse, but can now no longer find an explicit section that gives that impression. As the quotes above suggest, however, he believes it has become difficult if not impossible to sustain the government ideologically, while on the level of personalities, divisions among the elite remain a critical asset for the Green Movement. Regardless of those conclusions, however, this book has a clear narrative that reviews all the major elements of the 2009 crisis and their possible implications for the future.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Hamas on Bin Laden

Hamas condemned the American attack which killed Osama bin Laden:

"Hamas officials here condemned on Monday the American operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, with Ismail Haniya, the leader of the Hamas government, calling it a 'continuation of the United States policy of destruction...'

"Though the Islamic group Hamas is also defined as a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and others, its denunciations were surprising to many, given their timing. Just two weeks ago, Hamas forces stormed a building in Gaza where Al Qaeda inspired extremists accused of kidnapping and killing a pro-Palestinian Italian activist were holed up. Two died and Hamas arrested the third.

"And on Wednesday, Hamas is expected to sign a preliminary reconciliation deal in Cairo with its secularist, mainstream rival Fatah, which is now based in the West Bank. The West Bank leadership is currently trying to win Western support for the deal and the unified interim government that is supposed to emerge."

Helena Cobban speculated that Hamas's Gaza leadership has reasons to be sensitive to issues of extra-judicial killings, which makes some sense. Another angle, however, is suggested by the juxtaposition of the last two paragraphs excerpted above. Hamas is about to sign a unity deal with Fatah even as it fends off a radical salafi challenge. Speaking out against the American operation could have been a way to shore up part of its base as it makes peace with an organization many Hamas supporters view as an Israeli tool.

Osama bin Laden's Death

The death of Osama bin Laden has been a worthy objective for those like me that believe the United States should take all reasonable means to punish who attack it. The fact it took so long has been a propaganda coup for bin Laden and his fellow travelers in the salafi jihadist movement and the font of numerous unhealthy conspiracy theories both domestically and around the world.

The actual impact of his death will be minimal among the generic al-Qaeda movement he has been so instrumental in creating. Even within al-Qaeda central, his functional role was always less than that of Ayman al-Zawahiri. His greatest significance was as a symbol and rallying point, and given the significance of martyrdom in those circles, he can be that almost as effectively dead as alive. I suspect, however, that the White House is playing up the apparent use of his wife as a human shield in an attempt to tarnish his image even among that set.

There is, however, some impact on al-Qaeda's ability to present itself as an alternative within, for example, the Arab political universe. On this point, Marc Lynch is far more insightful than I could ever be, but the point is that bin Laden had a charismatic biography and sense of authenticity that gave his agenda at least some credibility in the Arab public sphere, many of whom engaged in conspiracy theories to deny his worst atrocities while lauding him as a symbol of resistance to the United States and its policies in the region. That resistance card, however, is the only one al-Qaeda ever played successfully in the court of public opinion. As Lynch says:

"Al-Qaeda was never able to attract significant support for its salafi-jihadist ideology, and thrived with mass Arab audiences only when it was able to pose as an avatar of resistance to the West. Al-Qaeda thrived on the 'clash of civilizations' and 'war of ideas' rhetoric which dominated the first five years of the Bush administration, since this vindicated its claim to speak on behalf of Islam against the West. But the Bush administration's switch in its final two years towards a more nuanced approach focused on highlighting Al-Qaeda's extremism and marginality proved more effective. The Obama administration continued this approach, and built on it by explicitly reducing its rhetorical focus on al-Qaeda and pushing back against all attempts to reignite a 'clash of civilizations' narrative...

"The message that al-Qaeda killed innocent Muslims, reinforced and amplified by American strategic communications and by sympathetic Arab governments and media, took a serious toll. So did al-Qaeda's repeated picking of losing fights with more popular Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah. In short, while it was able to appeal to and recruit from the small, extreme sub-cultures which developed around jihadist ideology, al-Qaeda has long since lost its attractiveness to mainstream Arabs."

The driving ideology in the Arab world right now is not the need to attack the "Far Enemy" so as to have the freedom to implement a puritanical vision of shari'a at home, but rather support for the idea of peaceful popular uprisings against corrupt dictatorships and social transformation through persuasion, regardless of what transformation particular movements are seeking. This is why a number of reports have indicated that the past few months have posed problems for al-Qaeda and company, as crowds in Tunisia and Egypt most prominently have undone the pillar of their distinctive ideology.

The death of Osama bin Laden is thus a good thing, but only one highly visible aspect of al-Qaeda's more general decline. In that sense, bin Laden's death may have just as much symbolism as the myths which surrounded his life, though not in the way he hoped.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)