Camel Shortage

Foreign Policy calls attention to a growing global camel shortage:

"The stock of meat-producing camels in (Saudi Arabia) decreased from a high of 426,000 in 1997 to just 260,000 today, a drop of 39 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Thousands of camels are slaughtered every year during the hajj pilgrimage -- hence the need for imports.

"But where to get them? The animals were once as common as squirrels in Pakistan, but the country's camel population is now down to about 700,000 thanks largely to demand from the camel-racing industry in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Overall, the Asian camel population decreased nearly 20 percent between 1994 and 2004.

"The biggest winner has been Australia, which boasts the world's largest remaining population of wild camels -- descendants of the animals brought by British settlers from India in the 19th century -- and has profited from the demand by shipping the animals to Saudi Arabia to be slaughtered for food."

The Enemy Within

Gershom Gorenberg writes about the development of settler movement activism against Arabs within Israel's borders:

"For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such 'price tag' attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.

"Now that conflict is coming home. The words 'price tag' spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.

"Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society.

"The agents of this change include veterans of West Bank settlements seeking to establish a presence in shared Jewish-Arab cities in Israel and politicians backing a wave of legislation intended to reduce the rights of Arab citizens...

"Rabbi Yossi Stern, the yeshiva’s dean, described the transformation of Acre’s Wolfson neighborhood — a set of Soviet-style apartment blocks built in the 1960s — from a Jewish to a majority-Arab area as 'a national sin.' He argued forcefully that Jews should move back into such shifting areas. For Arabs and Jews 'to be in the same neighborhood, in the same building ... that’s not good,' Rabbi Stern said. Coexistence was clearly not his goal.

"Segregation, though, is intrinsically a denial of rights. The countryside throughout the Galilee region of northern Israel is dotted with a form of segregated exurb, the 'community settlement.' In each of these exclusive communities, a membership committee vets prospective residents before they can buy homes.

"The concept, born in the mid-1970s, originally allowed West Bank settlers to ensure that their neighbors shared their 'ideological-social background,' including the same shade of religious commitment. The Likud government that came to power in 1977 applied the model to create Jewish-only bedroom communities in the Galilee and in the Negev."

I remember that the Knesset did not approve the first new Arab town since Israel declared independence since some point during my time there from 2006-2008.

Which Egyptian Christians?

This Thursday-Sunday will be the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, and the program contains lots of sessions about the past year's political developments. One that looks interesting is at the very end, and includes, among others, this paper by Mourad Sinot:

"The investigation shows that Copts participated as individuals; the Church hierarchy had little influence. Evidence indicates that the number of Copts increased as a reaction against the Patriarch’s support of the regime after Mubarak’s speech on February 1. Later, Christians had a bigger presence in Tahrir because of Evangelical efforts culminating in what was mistakenly publicized as 'mass,' as well as commemorations of the Martyrs of the Alexandria bombing on February 6 and 9. Perhaps ignorant of denominational differences, the media hailed 'Coptic' participation in the Revolution and the unity of the nation. Lastly, in spite of their somewhat marginal position within the protest movement, Christians in general and Coptic Orthodox Christians in particular, have now seen the need for their direct involvement in the public sphere and are actively discussing possible modalities for such involvement – a fact that may redeem their slowness in endorsing the Revolution."

In Egypt, "Evangelical" is denomination of sorts rather than a tendency, and my understanding is that they are in some sense followers of Billy Graham. If they were disproportionately participating in the revolution despite the media portrayal of all Egyptian Christians as Copts, that would be interesting.

SCAF, MB and Political Failures

The best way to follow events in Egypt is through a judicious selection of Twitter accounts, but in blog form, Issandr El-Amrani has some points worth noting. One is his assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood:

"I often think the Brothers' biggest problem is not that they are fundamentalist, or out of touch with the Egyptian mainstream, or too radical. It's that they are perceived, rightly, as schemers by average people. It's true of their leaders, at least, and it's what has made so many bright young people leave them in recent years and so many others doubt their intentions."

Over the past few decades, much of the leadership class of the Muslim Brotherhood did what other Egyptian elites did, and calculate how best to function in an undemocratic regime where some dissent was tolerated and cooption often a possibility. The leaders of major parties, such as the longtime opposition Wafd Party, have carried this mentality over to post-Mubarak Egypt, with the SCAF as the new rulers and referees in the competition for influence. Issandr also comments on this situation:

"The failure of SCAF's transition over the last nine months is not theirs alone. It is that of a good part of the political class that said nothing when key former regime figures where left alone for months, and Mubarak was in Sharm al-Sheikh with his sons. It is that of the Egyptian elite that went back to its privileged lifestyle and did nothing to address the social injustice in the country. Not to always compare things to Tunisia, but there the private sector, trade unions and the government got together and negotiated 10-15% salary increases across the board. They bought social peace by renegotiating the social contract.

"In Egypt you get the feeling that the upper class has completely ignored the social roots of the January uprising, and at the same time backed a return to similar kinds of politics of patronage, where parties and movements try to buy the poor with handouts and cheap meat at Eid. People don't want to be given charity, they want to be given social rights. This too is political — it's not about economic mismanagement. It's not about an uprising of the poor. It's about the political vision for a social economy.

"Whether it's about police brutality, social change or politics, my feeling is that Egyptians want to feel like they've actually had a revolution. Whoever gives them that feeling might win the people in Tahrir over."

Some people passionately argue that events, not just in Egypt, but elsewhere in the Arab world, have been about rights and dignity rather than economic circumstances, as if the latter were somehow a soiled motive. The two spheres often go together, however.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has a good roundup of analysis.

All Power to the Leader

Iranian "Supreme" Leader Ali Khamene'i's comments about eliminating the country's elected presidency may be only one part of a broader push for clerical monarchy:

"Khamenei will further control the legislative branch with the recent approval of the 'Parliamentary Supervision over Members of Parliament' bill. On Tuesday, September 27, the Iranian Parliament approved Article 4 of the 'Parliamentary Supervision over Members of Parliament' bill, which specifies a method for Parliament to expel certain MPs from the body. Based on one of the provisions in this bill, if the Council of Supervision votes to expel a certain member, he or she is not able to file a legal objection through the judicial system. The bill completely removes the legal immunity of members of the parliament in fulfilling their role as representatives.

"This provides Khamenei or his aides with the ability to eliminate any parliamentary member deemed to be a trouble maker. By eliminating the position of the presidency, the Supreme Leader effectively dissolves a semi-independent branch of the government whose head is directly chosen by the people, after the Guardian Council vets the candidates seeking to run in the election.

"It appears that discussion about eliminating the position of the president has been underway for a few months. According to Fars News, a semi-official news agency, a powerful deputy in the parliament, Mohammad Dehghan, revealed that the office of the Supreme Leader had assigned a group of legal experts to study the feasibility of a shift in the political structure of the country."

The Next Phase

My weekend was dominated by pre-Thanksgiving binge grading, and so I'm only now getting my mind around the details of the tumult taking place, not just in Cairo, but Alexandria, the Suez Canal cities, and elsewhere around Egypt. The direct chain of events leading to the current clashes came when Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Silmi of the SCAF's transitional government proposed a set of "supra-constitutional principles" which he asked Egypt's political parties to sign on to in advance of the first round of parliamentary elections November 28. These included two controversial articles putting the military beyond the control and oversight of any elected civilian government. All of the Islamist groups and some of the leftist opposition refused these conditions, and on Friday staged a major protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square to pressure the SCAF into accepting a civilian-controlled government as quickly as possible. Marc Lynch explains what happened next:

"The Islamists and most other participants in the demonstration left Tahrir at the end of the rally. A few hundred people, mostly (it seems) families of the martyrs of the January 25 revolution and veterans of past Tahrir occupations, decided to launch a new sit-in. This does not seem to have been coordinated with the political strategy of the day's demonstration. The move risked going down the same path as the July 8 demonstration, an originally successful rally which squandered its gains with a wildly unpopular occupation of Tahrir.

"But then Egyptian security forces, acting on authority which remains murky, moved in with extreme force to drive out the small group attempting to occupy Tahrir. Their over the top violence, including massive tear gas and highly abusive police behavior, seems to have then attracted the attention of the core of Egyptian activists who came running to join the fight. Instead of rapidly clearing the square, the security forces found themselves locked in an epic running battle with thousands of protestors. The momentum shifted repeatedly, with protestors holding the square and then being driven out and then returning. The security forces used massive amounts of tear gas, brute force, and weapons. That battle rages on."

Today, on the third day of protests, the crowds have become large enough and the demonstrations geographically widespread enough to recall the days of the revolution last winter. They are demanding an end to SCAF rule, and lethal fighting continues at the entrance to the street leading to the headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. The latter point suggests that the SCAF regime's frequent resort to violence in the face of any street opposition is the major sore point, and that a critical mass of Egyptians see the failure to rebuild the government's internal security apparatus as an important piece of unfinished revolution business.

Aside from the SCAF, the Muslim Brotherhood is the institutional political actor drawing the most scrutiny. MB leaders show a sensitivity to any slight against their potential influence, and seem to have, perhaps with some justification, interpreted the supra-constitutional principles as something akin to the Turkish tradition where the military stands on guard against Islamists. There is also muttering that this entire crisis might have been provoked deliberately to postpone the elections, in which their Freedom and Justice Party is expected to win upwards of 40% of the seats. Because of this, they are insistent that the elections go forward as scheduled, arguing that they represent the best way to bring a civilian government into power. The leftist opposition, however, seems to favor postponing the vote on the grounds the situation is too chaotic and the SCAF cannot be trusted to fairly administer it. The MB has been ambivalent towards the protests, expressing sympathy with the demonstrators grievances, refusing to participate as an organization, and yet highlighting the participation of individual MB members, especially medical personnel.

As a historian, I find it unsurprising that a revolution would traverse multiple phases, as that is simply what often happens. This is especially true when there is no ready made united opposition to assume the helm. Even in Tunisia, there were protests several weeks after Ben Ali fled to oust his prime minister, Muhammad Ghannoushi. In the Egyptian case, almost everyone seemed to put the regime's flaws primarily on Mubarak, and so were content to leave the transition to the military. Even then, I've seen a steady stream of stories in which a large number of groups fight for different types of influences and changes in local communities, businesses, and other institutions. It would not surprise me if Egypt's politics develop something like Kyrgyzstan did after the Tulip Revolution, with a steady ebb and flow of protest as groups with conflicting agendas that trust neither each other nor the system vie for influence.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Sectarianism in Homs

Anthony Shadid fears that what's happening in Homs could be a harbinger of things to come in Syria:

"A harrowing sectarian war has spread across the Syrian city of Homs this month, with supporters and opponents of the government blamed for beheadings, rival gangs carrying out tit-for-tat kidnappings, minorities fleeing for their native villages, and taxi drivers too fearful of drive-by shootings to ply the streets...

"Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, has a sectarian mix that mirrors the nation. The majority is Sunni Muslim, with sizable minorities of Christians and Alawites, a heterodox Muslim sect from which Mr. Assad draws much of his top leadership. Though some Alawites support the uprising, and some Sunnis still back the government, both communities have overwhelmingly gathered on opposite sides in the revolt...

"Fear has become so pronounced that, residents say, Alawites wear Christian crosses to avoid being abducted or killed when passing through the most restive Sunni neighborhoods, where garbage has piled up in a sign of the city’s dysfunction...

"Even as the death toll has dropped in Homs in recent days, the sectarian strife seems to have gathered a relentless momentum that has defied the attempts of both Sunni and Alawite residents to stanch it. One prominent Sunni activist, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, used the term shabeeha — an Arabic word that refers to government paramilitaries — to describe the situation evolving inside Homs.

"'There are shabeeha on both sides now,' he said."

There is a relentless logic to these kinds of identity-based conflicts by which a small number of militants can pry apart larger communities that would otherwise get along. Where public order is weak, armed fanatics will target you just for who you are. How do you respond? By finding the armed fanatics who will protect you just for who you are. We saw this dynamic play out in Iraq, especially between 2006 and 2008, when mixed Sunni/Shi'ite neighborhoods were cleansed of one group or the other. As a result of the turmoil of post-Saddam Iraq, hundreds of thousands of mainly Sunni Iraqis remain as refugees in Syria and Jordan, an everyday reminder in those countries of what many Arabs see, not entirely fairly, but also not unfairly, as an ethnic tyranny that now controls Mesopotamia.

Much as Saddam Hussein's regime was not overtly sectarian but disproportionately favored Sunnis based on personal connections, so Ba'athist Syria supports and is supported by the Alawite communities and other religious minorities. When Sunni/Shi'ite prejudices are already high because of the Iraq situation, the more recent developments in Bahrain, and Arab fears of Iranian influence, the ground is ripe for a repeat of sectarian civil war following the collapse of a Ba'athist regime. Based on the reporting out of Syria, I fear the worst.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Saudi Women in the Olympics

Some activists have called for Saudi Arabia to be banned from the Olympics for practicing "gender apartheid," much like South Africa became an international pariah for racial apartheid. Crossroads Arabia notes that the pressure has yielded a concession:

"Saudi Arabian women are barred from driving and face penalties for attempting to do so, including public lashings. This hasn’t stopped the country from reportedly giving the green light to women to participate in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.

However, the country only plans to send a female equestrian team to the games. The move is largely due to warnings from the International Olympic Committee’s Women and Sports Commission, which said the conservative Gulf kingdom could be barred from the Olympics altogether if women are not allowed to participate...

"This is not new for the conservative Gulf region. Qatar has only recently agreed to allow women to join its 2012 Olympic team, a likely move ahead of the small country receiving the World Cup bid for 2022."

This seems like a small move, but the symbolism should not be underestimated.

Jaber and Salim

Kristin Smith Diwan links Kuwait's parliamentary issues to divisions in the royal family:

"However the election of Kuwait's most pro-government Parliament since liberation did not end the political intrigue. For the conflict between Kuwait's executive and legislative branches has been matched by the in-fighting within the ruling family itself. Since the contentious succession of 2006, rival princes have been fighting a proxy battle for influence through Kuwait's expanded private media and through the Parliament itself. This leadership struggle has stymied government-led economic diversification plans, further eroded the effectiveness of public services, and sown corruption throughout Kuwait's governing institutions.

"New evidence of the growth in corruption has been mounting for months. In August reports leaked to the media indicated that Kuwait's two largest banks were looking into the transfer of $92 million dollars into the accounts of two members of Parliament. By September, Kuwait's Public Prosecutor took the unprecedented move of opening an investigation into an ever-broadening number of politically suspicious transactions, resulting in allegations that around 16 MPs received about $350 million in bribes to vote in support of the government earlier this year. In October, the scandal spread to the Foreign Ministry on accusations by the parliamentary opposition members that the Prime Minister had diverted public funds to personal accounts abroad. This prompted the resignation of Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Salem al-Sabah, the lone minister from a rival branch of the ruling al-Sabah, who cited his unwillingness to serve in 'a government that does not carry out true reforms regarding the multi-million bank deposits.'"

The two branches of the Al Sabah royal family Diwan refers to are the Al Jaber and the Al Salim. Jaber and Salim were the two sons of Mubarak the Great, who reigned from 1896-1915 and is considered the "Father of Modern Kuwait." Jaber and Salim both briefly succeeded him as rulers, and then when Salim died in 1921 power passed to one of Jaber's sons. Power alternated more or less regularly between regularly between the two branches until 2006, when the longtime emir Jaber III of the Al Jabir died. His heir, Shaykh Saad of the Al Salim, was old and ill, and reigned for only a few days before being forced out due to his incapacitation. Thus began the reign of the current ruler, Sabah IV of the Al Jabir, who named another one of the Al Jabir as heir and a third, his nephew Nasir b. Muhammad, as prime minister.

In this way, the Al Jabir managed to monopolize the country's main executive power centers, and the idea seems current that the Al Salim have sought to avoid complete marginalization by mobilizing parliament against the monarchy. This clearly intersected with a grassroots interest in greater democracy seen throughout 2006. Although Kuwaitis had little interest in the subsequent institutional maneuvering, the corruption revelations, public sector employee dissatisfaction, and "Arab Spring" climate have converged to create a space where the opposition, latching on to the disputes among the ruling Al Sabah, is clearly hoping to push the envelope further.

Nahda's Caliphate Concept

This dispute over whether Tunisia's Nahda party has a secret radical agenda briefly revealed in a leader's comment about a caliphate is all about nothing:

"Talks on forming a coalition government halted briefly this week after a secular party questioned the motives of its moderate Islamist partner amid intense jockeying for power.

"The trouble began when Le Maghreb, a Tunisian newspaper, reported that Hamadi Jebali, secretary general of the Islamist Ennahda party and pick for interim prime minister, had likened post-Ben Ali Tunisia to a new caliphate.

"The secularist Ettakatol promptly suspended talks on forming a government, sending Ennahda scrambling to reassure its partners and public opinion of its commitment to democracy...

"'Mr Jebali was talking to Islamists in the audience, people who think about the caliphate,' said Said Ferjani, a member of Ennahda's political bureau. 'Mr Jebali said that if they want a caliphate, it's what's happening now: democracy.'

"Ettakatol has accepted that explanation and agreed to restart talks, said Abdellatif Abid, a co-founder of the party and member of its political bureau."

The caliphate is actually a Qur'anic concept according to which humans are the regents of God on Earth, and probably did not become a title for an individual ruler until the Umayyad dynasty. In modern Islamist thought, the definition has gained new salience in calling believers to take upon themselves the task of setting the world to right. This is such a common usage that, particularly during a semester in which I'm teaching a course called "Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East," I thought of it immediately when I heard of the controversy, and therefore certainly believe Nahda's explanation. That does not mean, however, that Arabs who are suspicious of public religious movements, and there are many among Tunisians who came of age under Habib Bourguiba, would immediately recognize that just because they're Muslims. A comparison in American politics would be when a conservative Christian candidate speaks of God "calling" them to do something, and more secular people believe they think God is really talking to them.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Cairo's Neoliberal Urbanisn

Over the summer, I ran into the concept of "neoliberal urban restructuring". It refers to transformations in which formerly public areas become the domains of elites linked to global capitalism, such as in Amman's urban renewal project. I thought of it again when I saw Arabist's link to this book review by Frederick Deknatel:

"By the late 1990s, though, the character of the satellite cities had changed in government plans from mass, working-class housing to suburban getaways in the desert. The regime and its business allies announced a series of high-end commercial developments and luxury, gated communities, complete with golf courses, amusements parks, and star architecture. Today many of these projects sit half-built. Are golf courses, or an office park designed by Zaha Hadid, really rising on that distant stretch of desert? Rather than being the solution to a population boom and a middle-class escape from congestion, the desert cities came to represent the failures and corruption of Mubarak’s neoliberal regime. Urban planning in the desert was sold off, effectively, to private real estate and business interests. Their low-density, wide streets, and sprawl — in contrast to central Cairo’s density — require massive infrastructure investments, from expensive access roads and highways to abundant water and sewage treatment plants. The desert cities are practically unreachable by public transportation."

The review is of David Sims's Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control, which sounds fascinating, and which I'm sure I'll read eventually. One thing Deknatel reports about Sims's take is the agency of the working class in adapting the urban space themselves:

"Despite all these problems, the interplay between state planning in the desert and unregulated, informal expansion near the historic center has in some ways, Sims argues, inadvertently served Cairo — just not how the regime intended. In the ring of slums creeping in on the Nile, Sims sees “true ironic serendipity.” In his view, the state’s neglect of former agricultural land near the center in favor of developing empty desert on the fringes has actually saved Cairo’s density. Affordable housing arose in well-located but officially ignored former agricultural areas around the Nile, with only a fraction of poorer residents moving out to the desert as the government hoped...

"Sims describes Cairo’s informal economy and transportation network, with the aid of government surveys and international development reports, revealing a city of perseverance and adaptability. The informal economy absorbs over half of Cairo’s labor force — which grows by some 200,000 people every year — while investment in informal residential real estate in Greater Cairo is estimated to be over $36 billion, almost 40 percent of the city’s total. Traffic might be horrendous, but informal transportation systems, like fleets of minibuses, shuttle millions across Greater Cairo every day, cheaply and efficiently, for between .5 and 1.50 Egyptian pounds (from less than a penny to a quarter)."

Kuwait Parliament Stormed

Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed their country's parliament today, calling for the ouster of Prime Minister Nasser al-Sabah:

"Thousands of Kuwaitis have stormed parliamentary buildings after police and elite forces beat protesters.

"The protesters marched earlier on Wednesday to Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad Al-Sabah's home to demand his resignation, an opposition MP said...

"The demonstrators broke open the parliament's gates and entered the main chamber, where they sang the national anthem and left after a few minutes.

"The police had used batons to prevent protesters from marching to the residence of the prime minister, a senior member of the ruling family, after staging a rally outside parliament...

"Some activists said they will continue to camp outside parliament until the prime minister is sacked."

Kuwaitis have been protesting since March over a corruption scandal which has already led to the resignation of the foreign minister. Kuwaitis are not new to protests, having staged a successful 2006 "Orange Revolution" for election reform. The current prime minister's saga shows the edges of Kuwaiti democracy, in that parliament has been inhibited from supervising him as a member of the royal family. The current political crisis has been accompanied by a wave of public sector strikes, but I haven't been able to tell if the two are related.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Syria Suspended

Back when I taught an interdisciplinary survey of Middle East Studies, I told my students that one constant of Middle East politics was that nothing ever happened at Arab League meetings. Today, however, they did something:

"The Arab League voted Saturday to suspend Syria in four days and warned the regime could face sanctions if it does not end its bloody crackdown against anti-government protesters. The decision was a symbolic blow to a nation that prides itself on being a powerhouse of Arab nationalism.

"Qatar's Foreign Minister Hamad bin Jassim said 18 countries agreed to the suspension, which will take effect on Wednesday. Syria, Lebanon and Yemen voted against it, and Iraq abstained. The Arab League also will consider introducing political and economic sanctions against Syria, he said...

"The decision comes as November shapes up to be the bloodiest month yet in Syria's 8-month-old uprising, with more than 250 Syrian civilians killed so far, most as part of a siege of the rebellious city of Homs, according to activist groups.

"Bin Jassim suggested that Arab League members withdraw their ambassadors from Damascus but left that up to the individual countries.

"The 22-member league will monitor the situation and revisit the decision in a meeting Wednesday in the Moroccan capital Rabat, bin Jassim said, a move that appeared to give Syrian President Bashar Assad time to prevent the action from being implemented."

Notice, of course, from that last paragraph, that that they can take it back. Meanwhile, Marc Lynch notes how regimes killing their people is suddenly bad:

"The rapid spread of a new norm against Arab regimes killing their own people is a frankly astonishing, but largely unremarked, change in the regional game. Since the Arab League backed the UN intervention in Libya in March, the idea that regimes might be sanctioned for their domestic brutality has become a normal part of the Arab political debate and enshrined in official Arab League resolutions...

"Let's recall how odd it is that Arab leaders would agree with even an empty principle that regimes which kill their own people should forfeit their legitimacy. Almost every regime in the Arab world has been doing exactly that for decades. Jordan's King Hussein kept his throne in 1970 when his troops massacred Palestinians in the infamous Black September. Syria's President Hafez al-Assad didn't forfeit his Arab legitimacy when his forces leveled Hama in 1982. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein suffered no great normative sanctions for his genocidal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s."

He suggests this development may partially be from an unintended, now snowballing precedent set by their decision to use Qadhafi's repression to move against him.

Philpott on Arab Christians

Andrew Sullivan links to Daniel Philpott making an argument similar to what I said below:

"But however dangerous Arab Christians’ fate now may be, going back to the good old days of dictatorships is not an option. The surge of democracy-demanding youth, popular impatience with corruption and economic stagnation, and a religious reawakening over the past generation all serve to block such a backslide. Of course, for other minorities and for Muslims at odds with their regimes, the good old days were not good at all. They were not good for the residents of Hama, Syria, 10,000 of whose inhabitants were murdered by the current president’s father, Hafez al-Assad; and they are not good for protesters of the son’s dictatorship, over 2900 of whom the regime has killed by now. They were not good for democracy activists or traditional Muslims in Egypt, over 20,000 of whom Mubarak held in his jails. Arab authoritarianism was a model that could not last. Apart from suppressing the dynamism of democracy and the free market, such regimes were repressively secular, creating legions of religious discontents and radicalizing traditional Muslims, often in the direction of violence. Ultimately this shelter for Christians proved to be not only leaky but rotten at its foundations.

"The position of today’s Arab Christians is indeed precarious. Among the possible outcomes, Islamist regimes that afford Christians little freedom to practice their faith or participate in politics are entirely plausible. But this outcome is far from inevitable, no more inevitable than was the persistence of dictatorship. Only this past week, elections in Tunisia, the country that ignited the Arab Spring, gave a plurality of votes to an Islamic party, but one that is relatively liberal and that will rule in coalition with non-religious liberal parties. In Egypt, too, the possibilities are more complex than secularist safety and Salafist violence. When Christians are attacked it is not always at the hands of Muslims. The shooting of Christian demonstrators in Cairo this past October 9th was carried out by the army. When Muslims have attacked Christians, far more have defended them. Just after Muslim terrorists slaughtered 25 Coptic worshippers and injured some 100 others in Alexandria on New Year’s Day of this year, thousands of Muslims across the country gathered in candlelight vigils and formed human chains around Coptic churches during worship. Today, Egyptian Muslim office-seekers are divided among proponents of a strongly Islamic state and supporters of liberal rights, including religious freedom for Christians. The scenario of religious freedom, then, is plausible, too."

Gingrich on Arab Christians

Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has blamed U.S. policy in the Middle East for what he calls the "anti-Christian Spring." He needs a better fact-checker, since he also blamed Muslims for a complaint an unrelated professor at George Washington University filed against Catholic University of America. Juan Cole, meanwhile, points out how Gingrich's stated policy preferences on the matter are incoherent, and he's obviously just playing for evangelical votes in South Carolina. The idea that the Obama administration had anything to do with outcomes in Egypt and Tunisia is also ludicrous. In Egypt, the administration clearly supported Mubarak until it became clear he was toast, has since cast in its lot with the SCAF which is seeking to preserve whatever it can of the old regime, and may even have encouraged such a development through military-to-military back channels back in February.

What matters more to me right now is the mindset he is articulating, which I suspect is widespread in some circles, that autocratic regimes in the Middle East are necessary to protect Christian populations. This view is unacceptable if one takes seriously the human rights of non-Christians in these societies. Would Gingrich now trade al-Maliki's government for Saddam Hussein?

The most important problem currently faced by Christians in Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere is a security vacuum caused by regime collapse. Chaos often accompanies revolutions, as happened with the classic cases of the French, Russian, and Iranian. In Eastern Europe in 1989, it was largely avoided as the old communist regimes mostly chose to manage the transition rather than cling to power until the last possible minute. Even then, nationalist violence erupted in Yugoslavia and Karabakh when the new leaders simply didn't have legitimacy with large swathes of the population. In Egypt, Christians have been victimized by salafi vigilantes, the SCAF trying to maintain power, and ignorant people susceptible to superstition and conspiracy theorizing. Their problem is that they are a powerless minority during a period when security is weakened. Such turmoil might be a reason to fear revolutions in general, but that's not a viewpoint I'm hearing articulated.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

Nahda's Constitutional Plans

Leaders of Tunisia's ascendant Islamist party say they will not bring religion into the constitution:

"Tunisia’s Islamist-led government will focus on democracy, human rights and a free-market economy in planned changes to the constitution, effectively leaving religion out of the text it will draw up, party leaders said. The government, due to be announced next week, will not introduce sharia or other Islamic concepts to alter the secular nature of the constitution in force when Tunisia’s Arab Spring revolution ousted autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January...

"Interviews with politicians and analysts revealed a consensus that the new assembly, the first to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings, will focus on reassuring Tunisian voters, and the foreign tourists and investors vital to its economy.

"All parties agreed to keep the first article of the current constitution which says Tunisia’s language is Arabic and its religion is Islam. 'This is just a description of reality,' Ghannouchi said. 'It doesn’t have any legal implications. There will be no other references to religion in the constitution. We want to provide freedom for the whole country,' said the Islamist leader, who will not take any official role in the new government. The new constitution is due in about a year."

Assad's Italian Tech Support

Blake Hounshell flags the story of the company installing Syria's dissent-quenching network:

"As Syria’s crackdown on protests has claimed more than 3,000 lives since March, Italian technicians in telecom offices from Damascus to Aleppo have been busy equipping President Bashar al-Assad’s regime with the power to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country.

"Employees of Area SpA, a surveillance company based outside Milan, are installing the system under the direction of Syrian intelligence agents, who’ve pushed the Italians to finish, saying they urgently need to track people, a person familiar with the project says. The Area employees have flown into Damascus in shifts this year as the violence has escalated, says the person, who has worked on the system for Area...

"When the system is complete, Syrian security agents will be able to follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens’ networks of electronic contacts, according to the documents and two people familiar with the plans."

This company's contract for installing the system they call "Asfador" is $18 million.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)

The Ikhwan's Organization

Shadi Hamid explains the election organization of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood:

"During last November's parliamentary contest -- arguably the most fraudulent Egypt had ever seen -- I had the chance to witness the Brotherhood's 'get-out-the-vote' operation up close. One Brotherhood campaign worker, perhaps unaware it would sound somewhat implausible, told me that the organization has an internal vote turnout of nearly 100 percent. In other words, everyone who is an active Muslim Brotherhood member is expected to vote and actually does. Even if this is a stretch, it is true that the Brotherhood, in part because it is a religious movement rather than a political party, has the sort of organizational discipline of which competing parties can only dream.

"This discipline is deeply rooted in the organization's culture. Each Muslim Brotherhood member signs on to a rigorous educational curriculum and is part of something called an usra, or family, which meets weekly. If a Brother chooses to stay home on election day, other Brothers will know. But it's not just a matter of peer expectations. At each polling station, there is a Brotherhood coordinator who essentially does a whip count. Because the number of voters at a particular polling station can be quite small -- with the number of Brothers in the hundreds -- this is feasible in many districts. The 'whip' stays there the entire day, watching who comes and goes and tallies up the figures. If you were supposed to go and didn't, the whip will know. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, one such whip assured me, 'Well, you have to understand -- I know every single Brother who lives in the area.'"

Late last month we were covering the Muslim Brotherhood in my "Islam and Politics in the Modern Middle East" course, and my students wholeheartedly rejected the idea that any group that size could have the discipline level it claimed, with student veterans saying that not even the U.S. military did. I encouraged this some by noting its tendency to spin out breakaway groups. The MB is definitely more ideologically diffuse than is often recognized, but this account does point to how strong a short-term vote-whipping operation could be. Hamid's larger point is that along with inexperienced and highly fragmented competition, the Brotherhood's organization is like to cause it to outperform its frequently referenced 30% support in polls, polls which in any case strike me as uncertain due to what I imagine are significant difficulties in statistically modeling Egypt politically. I agree, though, that free elections are likely to give Islamists a turn dominating parliament, for better or worse.

Language as Skill

Matthew Yglesias says something important:

"Meanwhile, as someone who “speaks” French and is currently here in France, it’s clear to me that the real challenge is not so much what you can say as what you can hear. Based on years of French classes back in the day, I’m pretty darn good at taking a moment or two to think about what I want to say and coming up with an understandable way to say it. I can read French text, albeit slowly, and more or less understand what’s happening. But the risk of saying anything is that someone might reply! Parsing other people’s spoken language in real time is about 10 times harder than deciphering a text or composing your own statements."

When asked if I know Arabic, I've increasingly taken to given the perhaps annoying reply that sometimes you don't really "know" as language so much as "have skill" in it, and I do have Arabic skills. I can read fluently in my field, and could outside of it if I acquired the requisite vocabulary. I can almost always communicate my ideas to others verbally, as long as I first have a few days in country to get warmed up. Understanding the speech of others, however, is a major pain, especially when colloquial accents enter the mix.

Indian Ocean Website

Oman's Sultan Qaboos Cultural Centre has produced an outstanding website for teaching Indian Ocean history.