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Violent Clashes at Cairo’s Roxy Square and Beyond, Up Close in Photo and Video

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When I set out to the Itihadiyya Presidential Palace in Heliopolis, Cairo, I wanted to capture some footage of the Muslim Brotherhood's pro-Mohamed Morsi sit-in and the clashes that were reported earlier in the evening, with five deaths and more than three hundred injuries confirmed. At that time, I was uncomfortably speaking at an American University in Cairo panel on the Middle East and Knowledge Production. I got some of that "knowledge" produced right in my face first hand in the Itihadiyya quarter, Korba Street, and Roxy Square shortly after.

It was a little after 11 pm. I returned around 4 am, as the raging clashes began to subside. Below is a quick account. For further background on the current situation and confrontations, see these posts on jadaliyya here and here. The night before, I captured the oppositions' sit-in in Tahrir Square here.

On a tip from friends, I stopped first at Korba Street in Heliopolis where clashes were taking place. I witnessed two bloody fist-fights between Morsi supporters and opponents, an overturned vehicle, and palpable tension (see photos). I refrained from filming.

My intention was to see the Brotherhood's sit-in around the Presidential Palace, and converse with the adherents. They had marched in large numbers to camp there protect the "legitimacy" of President Morsi, a day after that same area was swarming with his opponents who led him to leave the palace before too long. Pro-Morsi groups apparently took down the tents that stood in their way from the day before, roughed up and beat the campers, and pushed them away, initiating a day-long clashes that lasted until recently (it is 5:30 am in Cairo now).

Against the advice of make-shift yuppie-looking neighborhood-watching baton-wielding younger men who said they are protecting their quarter from a possible "Ikhwan" incursion, I proceeded right to the Marghani Street, alongside the Presidential Palace, where a very large number of Brotherhood supporters lined the street for as far as the eye can see. By then, many were sleeping opposite the palace on the grass (see pictures). I spoke with nearly thirty individuals at some length about why they were there. They repeated the above, regarding protecting the President, and almost verbatim, they stated that this whole mess is caused by people who lost out after Hosni Mubarak fell. Contrary to actual numbers, when I pointed out that today Morsi is opposed by many who also opposed Mubarak and even Ahmad Shafiq for President, they claimed that these came in very small numbers. They were cordial, extremely polite and welcoming, but quite off in their reading of what constitutes the opposition and its various motivations. I respectfully asked if I can take pictures, and I was allowed every time (see photos). I spoke to bloodied supporters who recount their stories, with no mention of any infringements on their parts and on the parts of their group--though this was the same account from the other side, except we have access to footage on various social media that shows the destruction of camped tents by Morsi supporters early on.

I then proceeded to leave that area, and was advised to stay away from Roxy Square, which prompted me to head there right away. I had to cross the barricades that separated the Ikhwan camp site from the anti-Morsi protesters across from al-`Urouba tunnel (see photos). The entire streets were littered by rocks and damaged material used to blockade various parts of streets. It was like an abandoned war zone. I took a cab to get to Roxy Square quickly, but when roads were blocked, I made may way on foot.

I was immediately sucked into the real deal, where clashes were raging. Crowds by the hundreds on both sides were at a stand-off around Roxy Square, throwing molotov cocktails and tear-gas bombs, big stones, and firing live ammunition, but mostly towards the ground. You could hear primal-type screaming in waves, which I then found out was a precursor and an accompaniment to group-wide dynamic attacks on the other side, where dozens would run in unison toward the other side of the street while screaming (to develop the courage to do what is in reality nuts as you totally expose yourself), throwing at them whatever they can grasp.

Admittedly, the first thing I thought about is that my mother would have a hear-attack if she knows that I was there, let alone headed to the eye of the storm that was being reported and simulcast, well, everywhere. Then I remembered I was over forty, so I forged ahead on the side of the anti-Morsi protesters (I'm using pro- and anti-Morsi casually, but much can be found on Jadaliyya that unpack these dynamics/positions). I got hit on the knee with a stone from the other side, but can't claim a real injury--damn it.

For about ninety minutes, crowds would advance, throwing stones and molotov bombs, get targeted via the same means, plus what sounded like live ammunition which was apparently aimed at the ground. The one added element was the tear-gas that nearly blinded most of us who were closer to the front (see video on the "Aftermath of Roxy"). The systematic and plentiful throwing of tear-gas bombs, and the police vehicles stationed on the Ikhwan side, left little to ponder in terms of whose side the police were taking--at least in that particular confrontation.

     Video of the Roxy Clahes Captured by Author. Note the small explosion at 50 seconds.
Click HERE
 to see the eye of the storm.

As you will see in the video above, the more fortified Ikhwan side was using leftovers from construction sites to create shields behind which they would advance. In that particular confrontation, they were more organized and strategic, but not more courageous than the folks who were on the other side, and usually locals to Heliopolis. One has to also account for the support the other side received from the police, though any such reports must be confirmed on a case by case bases, given the instances I witnessed in which not all policemen were sympathetic to the Ikhwan. At some level, it boiled down to personal preference and location of officers, though the tilt was certainly not towards the opposition when it really mattered.

You could physically feel the tension in the thick air. This is not just some skirmish or group clash. It is a visceral and definitive battle about the future of Egypt. What is quite evident, however, is that the Ikhwan have lost a lot of stature in the past days, and certainly any aura of sacredness attached to the message they espouse. Opponents of Morsi are not all apple pie either. They include a minority that is sympathetic to the old political order, though these are far from being the driving force of the opposition, in contrast to the Brohtherhood's claims. It remains to be seen who can consistently mobilize a greater number of people based on a sustainable and non-alienating message/propaganda. But the current struggle/confrontation runs much deeper than numbers and strategy. Issues of identity are at its front and center. 


Batal: Fighting for Truth, Justice and the Armenian Way

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When I first moved to Beirut to start my doctoral research, I would spend hours at the apartment of my mother’s family in the neighborhood of Zarif. Sometimes I would bring work with me and sit on the chair reading as clouds of smoke from my aunts’ cigarettes and nargila varied in intensity around me. My attention would drift between conversing with my cousins and their mothers, and the reading at hand.

I visited them almost daily. I did this, even though I had not grown up with them. I wasn’t one of those Lebanese returnees - I mean I was, but not in what might be termed the traditional sense. I returned, but I was older than most people are when they make that journey and I was alone. My parents didn’t accompany me: we never did summers “bi Beirut,” or visited “even though there was war” (two taglines I consistently heard my other Lebanese friends say who grew up outside of Lebanon). Rather, I came to meet my mother’s family and to make her memories of her birthplace my own.

Through my visits and my fieldwork during that time, I became familiar with Zoqaq al-Blat, a neighborhood in central Beirut about a fifteen-minute walk northeast of Hamra, the neighborhood in which my mother was born and raised. I learned that some forty to fifty years ago it had been home to many Armenians, as had been the adjacent quarter of Zarif. During the 1950s and 1960s, most Armenians attended local neighborhood Armenian grade, middle, and high schools until college. If they were able to continue their education, most attended the American University of Beirut and Haigazian University (the first Armenian university established outside of Armenia, in 1952), as their Arabic language training was not strong enough to enable attending the public Lebanese University. Accordingly, many Armenians largely interacted only with one another. Such relationships were bolstered by membership in Armenian scouting troops, political youth groups, and sporting teams, along with the attendance of weekly Armenian Church services that all took place in the area. Additional socio-economic connections augmented these activities, as Armenians in these neighborhoods patronized Armenian-owned bakeries, pharmacies, hairdressers, butchers, car mechanics, and clothing sellers.[i]

The attachments that many Armenians shared with each other may have been connected to the circumstances that brought their families to Lebanon. The vast majority of Armenians had arrived to Lebanon as refugees from southern and southeastern Anatolia in the wake of the Armenian Genocide of World War I. The French mandatory government of Lebanon extended citizenship to these Armenians in 1924 (thereby buoying the Christian population of Lebanon) and by the time last of the French troops left in 1946, about 75,000 Armenians were recognized within the official eighteen sects in Lebanon (Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic were each their own category; the smaller population of Armenian Protestants fell under the larger Protestant grouping).[ii]

Yet the relationship of Armenians to Lebanon was also evolving. My mother’s generation was the first generation categorized as Lebanese citizens by birth. And by the time my visits to my family and Lebanon became habitual in the mid 1990s, my family’s daily interactions were no longer as insular. As a result of the 1975-1990 Civil War and other economic hardships, many Armenians had moved away from Zoqaq al-Blat and Zarif to areas northeast of Beirut in the North Metn, to Antelias and Naccache. Others left Lebanon permanently, emigrating to the United States and Canada. For those who remained in Zoqaq al-Blat and Zarif however, like my family, their interactions and relationships with non-Armenians increased. They still frequented their local pharmacy and area clothing stores, but conversed with their now non-Armenian owners in the broken Arabic acquired from such social interactions and television. They began to employ Arabic on a daily level and in situations that used to be conducted in Armenian. My aunts still remained familiar with neighbors, inviting them for coffee from the balcony as they walked by, but the passers-by weren’t their old familiar Armenian coffee partners. These former neighbors (if they even still lived in near Beirut) would arrive at their apartment at a prearranged time by car, on their way to somewhere else in the city. My two aunts, Armenian language teachers in Armenian grade schools, grew accustomed to having non-Armenian students in their classes. Accordingly, the Arabic of my older aunts greatly improved. I noticed my younger cousins spoke native Arabic, often correcting older relatives.

My family adapted to their neighborhood’s shifting demographics and landscape. Yet given their declining numbers (difficult to ascertain as there hasn’t been an official census in Lebanon since 1932), Armenians in Lebanon continue to be – if not increasingly so – represented in the Lebanese government. Six out of 128 deputies in parliament – up from five during the pre-Civil War period – and one out of fourteen ministers in the cabinet is Armenian. Still, I often felt that my family and other Armenians I interacted with felt that their continued presence as Armenians in Lebanon was under threat. While members of older generations often speak longingly about a romanticized past, my family invoked the past as an era of refuge. They felt shielded from pressures of assimilation and comforted by their insular interactions between Armenians. They also equated this time with a sense of the socio-economic and political prowess of Lebanon’s Armenian community. They reminded me of how the mansion now housing Future TV administration offices on Spears Street in Zarif was once the headquarters of the Armenian Dashnak political party and that the large community center complex of the Armenian General Benevolent Union on Salim Boustani street was being demolished to make way for a shopping center that would stretch towards the main street of Spears (as went the latest rumor, anyway). Armenian presence in Lebanon, they explained, was literally eroding. 

Every afternoon, my family and I would assemble to attentively watch the Armenian news broadcast in between the Arabic language news and other station programming. I quickly noticed, however, that we didn’t seem to watch the Armenian news for content. We already knew the news--we had just watched the Arabic version. Plus, if we missed notice of an important event, we would consistently reconvene during the evening Arabic news hour. In addition, both broadcasts were shown on the same Lebanese channel (presumably forwarding the same political position(s)). They rarely, if ever, differed. The only variance was that the Arabic version went into more detail, as its programming was half an hour longer.

I once asked my family why we were such faithful viewers of the Armenian news after we had, once again, watched both Armenian and Arabic cycles. My aunts and cousins all responded similarly: “If we don’t watch the Armenian news, who will?” We’ve already lost so much,” they would say, a reference to the diminishing Armenian population and material visibility in Lebanon. They also anticipated a day when Lebanon would no longer broadcast the news in Armenian. “We only get fifteen minutes anyway, and if we don’t watch it, they’ll take that away too.” I never got who this “they” referred to (or what the “too” meant), but I decided not to point out that Armenian news on Lebanese TV was a relatively new development. I also didn’t bother to correct them that the news program ran for thirty minutes, not fifteen. More significantly, the Lebanese media was increasing its focus on the Armenian community. All of the major Lebanese TV channels covered Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day commemorations on April 24 and TeleLiban broadcast Armenian Christmas mass on 6 January every year. Future TV began broadcasting news in Armenian in 2000 with OTV beginning in 2008. In addition, all Lebanese news outlets avidly followed the voting actions of the Armenian inhabitants in the Metn district during the 5 August, 2007 by-elections that resulted in the defeat of Amin Gemayel and the victory of Camille Khoury, the candidate backed by both the Dashnak party and General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. Lebanese newspapers in Arabic, English, French, and Armenian reacted to the racist statements made by Lebanese politicians Gabriel Murr and Amin Gemayel in the election’s aftermath, when both accused Armenians in Bourj Hamoud of corruption and vote-rigging. The apologies of Gemayal and Murr, along with statements in defense of the Armenian community offered by the Hizballah leadership, resulted in continuous reporting on the Armenian community in Lebanon in August 2007. The press also profiled many Armenians who returned to Lebanon to vote in the countrywide parliamentary election in June 2009.

For my family (and for many Armenians in Beirut as I came to find out), watching the news in Armenian was perceived as a national duty. By watching the program, even when it was a replica of the Arabic version they had just seen, they defended Armenian identity against assimilation into a greater Lebanese identification. Failing to watch the program became akin to forsaking the Armenian nation. This sense of responsibility was also interconnected with a sense of being deserted by the Lebanese government, as many Armenians in Beirut explained to me that they had to protect the Armenian nation, or the Armenian footprint in Lebanon would be gone forever. Having fulfilled our national obligation for the day, we would then continue watching whatever else was lined up on station programming.

Well, almost anything else. Certain Arabic programming was boycotted: my family would never watch the Turkish soap operas dubbed in Arabic. Turkish soap operas became increasingly popular in 2008, especially after the commercial success of Nour (originally Gümüş in Turkish) whose finale drew 85 million viewers, according to surveys by the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) channel.[iii] Watching these shows apparently tested an Armenian’s loyalty. Once the soap operas began, and only when they did, my family changed the channel to the Armenian satellite station. While the soap operas were translated into Arabic, the language change did not offset the “Turkishness” of the program. Arabic acted as a vehicle to translate news to Armenians, aiding in the project to support the Armenian nation, but could not change Turkish character of an entertainment program. I often heard conversations where people tried to measure each other’s commitment to the Armenian Cause by simply asking, “Do you watch Turkish programs?”

This litmus test took a more public – and oddly enough more serious – tone at the Armenian comedic play “Tshkoh Batal (Unhappy Batal)” that I attended in Burj Hammoud last January. My cousin called me to let me know she had landed one of the leading roles, and I thought I should go and support her. In general, I like the theatre, but I had my doubts about this production. I had seen one of this director’s shows before and found the plot dim-witted and rife with bathroom humor and childish sexual innuendo. Nevertheless, I estimated I could still finish early enough to be back in Hamra meeting friends by 11 p.m.

Tshkoh Batal was sexist, shrill, and relied on gendered sexual humor. And yet, even with the cheap laughs, I was grateful that it was at least a comedy. That was a welcome change from my past experiences at the Armenian theatre. From the time I was a child until just a few years ago, going to an Armenian play usually included either a dramatization of the violence during the Armenian Genocide, or (not so oblique) references to the psychological trauma that it left behind.

The focus of this play was family dynamics. Two of the women were sisters, and the third woman was the daughter of the elder sister. Mother and daughter lived in the same house with their husbands, and the sister/aunt lived next door with hers. The story centered on the relationships between the three men who were related to each other through their wives. Being the only commonality that brought the men together, they would gather to complain about the women in their lives – about their stupidity, their incessant whining, and that they either oozed too much sexuality or not enough. The plot of the play was simple and predictable: The woman and her husband who lived next door must move into her older sister’s house temporarily. This upsets the dynamics within the home, as there are already two couples (mother and father, and daughter and husband) living there. They feel annoyed and intruded upon by their neighbors, albeit members of their own family, and spend the duration of the play (in vain) trying to get them out. “Batal,” the star of the show, was played by the show’s writer, comedian Pierre Chamassian. His grand plan to drive the third couple out of the home by flirting with his wife’s aunt, unsurprisingly, comes to naught.

Yet within this fairly obvious and slapstick play, Chamassian created a condition to publically rebuke the Armenian viewers of Arabic-dubbed Turkish soap operas. In the midst of an argument between Batal and his sex kitten/idiot wife, Batal goes on a solo rant against the Turkish musalsalat industry, calling its producers manipulative dogs. He criticizes his wife for wasting her time with these television soap opera serials while she should be taking care of him. And in the midst of yelling at her, he shifts focus, and accuses all Armenians who watch Turkish serials of suffering from a sickness that causes them to commit treason.

Via a marital quarrel between Batal and his wife, Chamassian took over the stage--and the play--to address what he considered to be a “social disease” plaguing the Armenian community. As he continued, getting redder in the face along with veins bulging from the left side of his neck, he moved to shout directly to--and at--the audience. Switching from the singular “you” to the plural form, he shouted how shameful and disgusting it was that “you” (plural) watched the Turkish musalsalatner (plural).

The same audience who had laughed playfully at jokes minutes before, was now being accused of a social malady that culminated in treason. I looked around at the audience members who could not have known they would be taking part in some social court in the center of the Armenian neighborhood that evening. But the charged accepted their indictment. The audience, after a few moments of silence erupted into loud cheers, whistles, applause, and many stood and clapped. We (sex-kitten wife and guilty audience) were collectively reprimanded for our crimes, and reminded of the Armenian tragedies perpetrated by the Turks. The now slightly more tempered--yet still outraged--Batal reminded us that whatever ordeal occurred in the Turkish television serials, these were nothing compared to the tragedies “we” as Armenians had suffered at “their” hands. “How,” he demanded to know, “can we possibly sit around and waste hours feeling and crying for them?!”

This last statement was greeted with furious clapping and with many audience members standing up and shouting back to Batal, “You’re right!” Yes!” and “Bravo!” Others looked around at fellow audience members and shouted, “He’s right!” “Exactly!” and accusingly began to shout at each other “you must stop [watching]!”

The transformation from play to court of law took place quickly. The audience became the accused and accepted their guilt, and Batal (meaning hero in Arabic), suddenly personified his name. Through the use of the name and character of Batal, Arabic regained its positioning as a vehicle that assisted Armenians in Beirut in forwarding their national cause. Arabic could not counter the “Turkishness” of the soap opera. However, similar to its role as the source of Armenian news on the Lebanese channel, in the play Arabic helped preserve an Armenian identification within Arabic and Lebanese society. Batal (he was never called heros, or hero in Armenian) was the hero-prosecutor who was trying to preserve Armenian victimhood by not allowing others--who did not warrant the claim of being victims themselves--to sully it, even from the fictional setting of a soap opera.

According to Batal and the audience members, by watching these shows Armenians collectively diminished the legitimacy of the larger Armenian Cause that fought to honor the memory of the victims of the Armenian Genocide. In addition, the guilty audience seemed to readily accept that they were represented by the dim-witted sex kitten. Was this to symbolize the audience’s own foolishness their misdirected sympathy? By following these Turkish fictional stories, they unknowingly challenged their own victimization. The general exclamations of the audience suggested an appreciation for both Batal’s ability to identify their crimes and for his intervention on behalf of the Armenian nation.

Watching this scene, I wondered if the play was a new way to communicate nationalist trope to a broader audience. Chamassian, through “Batal” (be it the character or the Arabic use of the word), rendered fictional Turkish television serials as the latest site of struggle over memory and ownership of trauma. Is this how an Armenian in contemporary Lebanon articulates a sense of Armenianness? After all, these audience members thought they were coming to see a comedy--there was nothing ostensibly political (or particularly real) about the play. There was no hint that acting would suddenly be used to represent a malady (as identified by the director) afflicting the Armenian nation in Beirut. Was performance art--be it the vehicle of the Turkish soap opera or the theatre--the new site to declare positions on Armenian-Turkish relations? Through Batal and Chamassian’s play, watching Turkish serials in Lebanon and consuming them as entertainment became a public measure of an Armenian’s devotion to the nation.

And yet, it was not merely about Turkish serials--it was also their content. The main part of Batal’s diatribe against his wife (representing an Armenian public) was that she sympathized with the tragedies in the television shows, as if trumping them over the “real” tragedy, the Armenian Genocide. And this trauma, Batal seemed to say, was owned by Armenians, as if others, especially Turks, did not have the right to display or represent trauma or tragedy, even in its fictional and entertaining form. His nationalist interjection—seemingly out of place, though entirely expected on some level—was a pointed policing of how and what Beiruti Armenians should watch. The play became a public conversation about owning tragedy. By using the simulated platform of theatre, Batal was critiquing the real-life actions of the audience. And they agreed with him. In fact, I witnessed the battle cry: “we” Armenians are not going to let those soap operas “do” tragedy better than us. Tragedy is ours (and ours alone). Dealing with the legacy of genocide was relegated to a simple action of watching a soap opera or changing the channel.

Then Batal gently smiled and showing no signs of fury (aside from redness of the face that quickly began to fade) turned and once again began to conspire with his love-struck sex-kitten on how they would get the unwanted occupants out of the house.



[i] Marriage and baptismal records of the era reflect this aforementioned separation of the Armenian community. Marriage records from the 1940s indicate that bride and groom were usually from the same village or town in Anatolia. Similarly, Armenians from specific towns and villages almost always attended the same church: for example, those that were from Sis went to St. Sarkis Church in Nor Sis. It was only in the late 1940s and 1950s that we begin to see “intermarriage” between Armenian villages. The same holds true for baptismal records. Those who were from the same towns and villages were married in specific churches, and attended the same church to baptize their children. In addition, the godfathers and godmothers of the children were more often than not siblings of the parents, maintaining the insular community of these churches. (source: Armenian Marriage Records, Armenian Prelacy of Lebanon, located in Burj Hammoud.)

[ii] Nicola Migliorino, (Re)Constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria: Ethno-Cultural Diversity and the State in the Aftermath of a Refugee Crisis (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 89.

[iii] Alexandra Buccianti, “Turkish soap operas in the Arab world: social liberation or cultural alienation?” Arab Media & Society (Issue 10, Spring 2010). http://www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=735

Syria Media Roundup (December 6)

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[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Syria and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Syria Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to syria@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

Regional and International Perspectives

 

Hurricane Sandy Hits Little Syria: Worrying about Buildings and Brothers Todd Fine tells the story of the residents of this New York district, emphasizing the idea that “we should not save Little Syria to instrumentalize past people and affirmatively deploy them as weapons in the present.”

The Human Cost of Syria’s War Al Jazeera’s Inside Syria Programme on the help provided to refugees, with Melissa Fleming, Ruba Khoury and Sarab al-Jijakli.

 

Syrian Narratives

 

The Eyes of Homs Amal Hanano on the lives of citizen journalists like Aboud who sacrifice their lives to the revolution.

 

No Time to Waste Maysaloon, who senses the end might be near for the regime, says “what needs to happen now, and not when Assad falls, is frank dialogue with all - whether they are Islamists, Free Syrian Army, Jabhat al Nusra, the Kurds, whoever it may be, about core principles.”

 

More Agony Ahead for Syria Patrick Seale maintains that “the rebels have made significant advances but are still far from landing a decisive blow.”

 

Sakr Tapes: Saad Hariri in the Syrian Battlefield by Radwan Mortada

Why is it Taking so Long? Nahed Hattar says “If Damascus wants to win, it has to join the crowds in Tahrir Square. It has to define its war in terms of the Square’s stand against political Islam. It has to take a stand on much more radical positions on Arab nationalism, secularism, and social justice.”

 

Chairman Mao vs. President Assad: People’s War in Syria Jack Mulcaire suggests the FSA is at the second stage of what Mao had described as a three stage plan to defeat his enemy.

 

Les Arrestations d’Avocats s’Accelerent en Syrie Ignace Leverrier says half a dozen lawyers were arbitrarily arrested in cities around Syria this week.

 

Le ministère syrien des Affaires étrangères a perdu son porte-parole Ignace Leverrier on Makdisi’defection and what we can learn from it

The Price of Principle: Abd al-Majid Abushala A profile on the late Abu al-Majib Abushala by Amal Hanano

 Rape is Shredding Syria’s Social Fabric Lauren Wolfe on sexual violence in Syria.

 

Islamic Fighters in Northern Syria not United Tareq al-Abed provides an overview of the three main types of armed groups, varying in their religious commitment, arms, discipline and popular support.

Inside Syria


Finding Bread in Aleppo
Abu Leila on the economic hardships in the city as lived by its citizens.

 

Interview: Yassin al Haj Saleh on developments in Syria, including discussions on extremism, government support and international interference.

 

Three Syrian Interviews Odai al Zoubi interviews figures of the opposition with three distinct positions: Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Bakr Sidki and Hazem Nahar.

 

Art and Social Media

 

And You’re Still Dead Razzan Ghazzawi’s poignant entry on slain activist and filmmaker Bassel Shahade.

 

Filmed in Beirut, Will Syrian Drama Sell? Wissam Kanaan on the growing Syrian television industry, which is now partly relocated in Beirut

 

Policy and Reports

How Syria Turned Off the Internet CloudFlare’s reports on the event that occurred on November 29.

Month-by-Month Summary of Developments in Syria (Updated) International Crisis Group’s update

Arabic

 

«هنا دمشق».. حتى لو «من جهنم»

Ziyad Haydar writes about the recent network blackout in Syria and the subsequent launching of the social media campaign "From … This is Syria."

 

الارتباكات حول الانتفاضة السورية

Salama Kayla writes about the political economy of the Syrian uprisings and highlights the reasons behind the misunderstandings about the current situation in the country.

 

إغاثة السوريين بين الحاجة و الادعاءات

Fayez Sarrah writes about the obstacles that prevent humanitarian aid from reaching people inside Syria and refugees in neighboring countries.

حلب إلى معركة فاصلة... وطويلة: من يسيطر على ساحتها اليوم؟

Tarek Al-Abed writes about the current situation in the Syria's northern city of Aleppo, which has been witnessing bloody clashes between the Syrian National Army and the Free Syrian Army for four months now.

 

معركة حاسمة تلوح في أفق دمشق .. أم كمين؟

Mohammad Balloot writes about the recent escalations in violence around Damascus, especially after the recent clashes in the areas surrounding the airport road.

 

النزاع في سورية مرشح للاستمرار

Patrick Seale analyses--according to his views--the future of the struggle in Syria.

 

ناشطون ينتقدون تغطية القنوات الفضائية

Damascus bureau on activists' criticism of the media's coverage of the events that have been unfolding in Syria.

 

الريبة الكردية في سوريا من المسلحين والمتشددين... وتركيا

Tarek Al-Abed writes about the Kurdish population in Syria and their tense relationship with some of the opposition in the country.

 

الإنترنت السوري

Ziad Majed on the importance of the internet in the daily lives of some Syrians after the revolution.

 

معتقلو الهلال العربي السوري لدى النظام: ذنبهم أنهم ساعدوا جميع المتضررين بلا تمييز

Yara Nseir reports about the detained volunteers of the Syrian Red Crescent and the new campaign that's been launched to raise awareness about the important role that these volunteers play and the hardships they face.

 

!الثورة خلاصنا

Hayfa Al-Jundi writes about the revolutionary left.

 

Maghreb Media Roundup (December 6)

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[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Maghreb and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Maghreb Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to maghreb@jadaliyya.com by Wednesday night of every week.]

Algeria

Algeria: Islamists Lose Ground in Algeria Local Elections FLN-RND governing coalition won majorities in most communes in the 29 November elections. Turnout is reported at 44% and accusations of irregularity are widespread.

Algeria: La Victoire du FLN aux élections locales. Le Pourquoi. 'Laseptiemewilaya' argues that FLN victory resulted from its heavily entrenched 'brand name' rather than electoral fraud.

Algerian Government Reconciles With Citizens Algeria forms a new watchdog committee to monitor government performance, better "respond to the needs of society, and "understand citizens."

Algeria and the Malian Borderline Disorder. @7our comments on the severely impractical proposal to close the Algerian-Mali border.

الجزائر في المرتبة 105 عالميًا من حيث تفشي الفساد
Transparency International ranks Algeria 105 in index of of most corrupt countries in the world, referencing in particular the lack of government will to combat corruption and the immunity of ministers involved in current cases. 

الصراع يشتعل في الجزائر لخلافة بوتفليقة
Sources close to the FLN's former secretary general, Ali Benflis, reveal that a growing coalition of groups and parties appear to be gearing up to support his 2014 campaign against Boutefilka. 

الشباب الجزائري يناقش نتائج الانتخابات
Nazim Fethi interviews youth on their expectations of the recent elections. 

Libya

The Libyan public’s role in drafting the Constitution: Part II Lorianne Toler discusses public pressure to directly elect the Constitutional Commission, a mandate which a controversial NTC declaration had assigned to the GNC.

Religious Violence in Libya: Who Is to Blame? Igor Cherstich argues that conflicts between Salafists and Sufis reflect 'legacies of the old regime.'  

Libya, my father and I Daughter of dissident Mansur Rashid Kikhia reflects on the personal and psychological impact of Qaddafi's rule.

Higher education and scientific research in Libya: reality and ambitions Mohamed Eljarh highlights the obstacles facing higher education reform, severely neglected under the former regime.

مؤسسات المجتمع المدني بين الفاعليه و قِصر النظر
'Atellysi' suggests several approaches to improve the engagement and impact of new civil society organizations.

الحكومة الليبية…نخلة عوجة
Ahlamelbadri relates popular frustration at the GNC's recent $200 million grant to Tunisia in the midst of neglected and mounting internal economic troubles.  

Mauritania

Mauritania: Commemorating Inal's Massacre against Black Soldiers Thalia Rahme reports on the march held by activists to memorialize and demand justice for the 1990 ethnic cleansing that occurred within the Mauritanian army.  Succeeding reports indicate the march was dispersed by police.

مجزرة "إينال" حقائق تنشر لأول مرة.. وشهادات بالصور والفيديو
El Watan provides in-depth documentation of the Inal Massacre, including testimonies from survivors and witnesses. 

الكثير منا ما زال محكوما بعقلية الحزب الواحد
Interview with diplomat Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah on contemporary political, economic, and security issues in Mauritania. 

Morocco

Le mouvement de contestation au Maroc à l’honneur dans la revue « L’Année du Maghreb » Mamafakinch editors compile abstracts featured in IREMAM's "The year of the Maghreb" which adress the #Feb20 Movement.

Morocco delays Tamazight implementation Siham Ali reports on campaigns to actualize the official recognition of Tamazight, which was amended into the constitution over a year and a half ago.  

Misère de la politique ou politique de la misère Driss Benali examines the Makhzen's recycled policies and power structures.

Mamfakinch Counter Corner: Responding to Pam Hait Samia Errazzouki challenges tropes of "Moroccan exceptonalism"  in a piece reposted by the Moroccan lobby.

Tunisia

Tunisia: Siliana and the Heritage of Farhat Hached Sixty Years After His Assassination Robert Prince profiles the significance of Farhat Hached, father of the Independent Tunisian Trade Union, in both his contemporary era, the 2011 revolution, and current uprisings in Siliana.

Tunisie : La marche de Siliana pour la dignité. Protestation et tension contre le gouvernement d’Ennahdha Nawaat Editor criticizes government reactions to Siliania protests which attempt to downplay state violence.

La Polit-Revue: Siliana, « bassin miné » du gouvernement Seif Soudani reviews this weeks's political stories.

Trade Union Calls for Countrywide Strike on December 13 UGTT decides to strike after an attack on its headquarters and aggression against its members, allegedly perpetrated by Ennahda. The Tunisian opposition called for a boycott of the National Constituent Assembly in solidarity with the UGTT.

Strikes raise tensions between unions, Islamist govt in Tunisia Aljazeera English report on UGTT-Ennahda conflicts.

Tunisians frustrated over lack of change Al Jazeera video coverage of protests in Siliana and wider calls to address unemployment and deteriorating living standards. Earlier coverage on Marzouki's call for a new cabinet here.

WesternSahara

Western Sahara May Also Request UN Observer Status Reda Shannouf reports on the impact of Palestine's recognition on the Sahara National Council's prospective strategies.

Recent Jadaliyya Articles on the Maghreb

من أجل مدنية الحكم في موريتانيا
L’an I de la Révolution tunisienne ou les résurgences d’un passé qui divise
Neither Regret Nor Remorse: Colonial Nostalgia Among French Far Right
From Opposition to Puppet: Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development
Lonely Servitude: Child Domestic Labor in Morocco
Quelle justice transitionnelle pour la Tunisie ?
ثورة . . . أما بعد
Plurality, Hybridity, and the Self: A Review of Benjamin Stora's "Voyages en postcolonies"

O.I.L. Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (November 2012)

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[This is a monthly archive of pieces written by Jadaliyya contributors and editors on the Occupations, Interventions,and Law (O.I.L.) Page. It also includes material published on other platforms that editors deemed pertinent to post as they provide diverse depictions of O.I.L.-related topics. The pieces reflect the level of critical analysis and diversity that Jadaliyya strives for, but the views are solely the ones of their authors. If you are interested in contributing to Jadaliyya, send us your post with your bio and a release form to post@jadaliyya.com [click "Submissions" on the main page for more information]


A Tale of Two Interviews, Habib Battah

Is Gaza Still Occupied and Why Does It Matter?, Lisa Hajjar

The Limits of International Law Legalese, Lama Abu Odeh

No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense In International Law Against Occupied Palestinian Territory, Noura Erakat

On the Insignificance of Stevie Wonder, Mouin Rabbani

A Separate Piece?: Gaza and the “No-State Solution”, Darryl Li

O.I.L. Media Roundup (December 4), O.I.L. Editors

Who's Afraid of the Qassams?, Max Ajl

A New Mohawk, Chavisa Woods

Palestine at the United Nations?, Mouin Rabbani

Citizenship and the New “State of Palestine”, Lauren Banko

Israeli Supreme Court Hearing on Petition Against Anti-Boycott Law Set for 5 December, Jadaliyya Reports

Qatar and the Palestinians, Mouin Rabbani

More Quick Thoughts on Palestine at the United Nations, Mouin Rabbani

Quick Thoughts on the Significance of the November 2012 Palestine UN Bid, Noura Erakat

Infographic: Palestinian & Israeli Deaths, Visualizing Palestine

Tradition and the Anti-Politics Machine: DAM Seduced by the “Honor Crime”, Lila Abu Lughod and Maya Mikdashi

Going from Pillar to Truce, Vijay Prashad

Bibi Bombs, Khalil Bendib

The BICI Reforms: Promises of Progress, A Worsening Reality, Jadaliyya Reports

New Texts Out Now: Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir, Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel, Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir

Democracy Now! Interview with Raji Sourani and Richard Falk on Gaza Assault and International Humanitarian Law, Jadaliyya Interview

O.I.L. Media Roundup (19 November), O.I.L. Editors

Colonial Experiments in Gaza, Samera Esmeir

Dissecting IDF Propaganda: The Numbers Behind the Rocket Attacks, Phan Nguyen

The “End of the Two-State Solution” Spells Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing, not Binationalism and Peace, Toufic Haddad

Netanyahu's First War, Mouin Rabbani

Israeli Aggression in the Gaza Strip: In Pictures, Mouin Rabbani and Michelle Woodward

The One-State Solution and Rebuilding the Palestinian National Movement: An Interview with Awad Abdel Fattah, Parts One and Two , Jonathan Cook

Two Steps Back: How HR 35 Fails to Protect California Students, Samantha Brotman and Ed Gaier

The Agonies of Susan Rice: Gaza and the Negroponte Doctrine, Vijay Prashad

Timeline: Israel's Latest Escalation in Gaza, Jadaliyya Reports

Counting Calories and Making Lemonade in Gaza, Sherene Seikaly

Conditions on Aid and the Politics of Development, Rena Zuabi

Putting Palestine on the Map, Vijay Prashad

Draft Resolution Requesting Palestine Upgrade from Observer Mission Status to Observer State Status, Jadaliyya Reports

Palestinian Youth Statement from Lebanon, Jadaliyya Reports

National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference Opposes “Normalizing” Israeli Human Rights Abuses, Amith Gupta

O.I.L. Media Roundup (5 November), O.I.L. Editors

New Texts Out Now: Norman Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much, Norman G. Finkelstein

 

Signs of New Feminism? Promises of Morocco's February 20

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The absence of established figures from feminist organizations is one of the most striking features of the February 20 movement in Morocco. Nevertheless the movement shows modes of engagement with feminism, such as the call for gender equality, and a practice of parity, which suggest that feminist discourse has not only penetrated the social imaginary of younger generations of activists, but also informed their practices.

Signs of new gender arrangements were already visible in the first calls for protest on the internet. Young men and women’s alternating faces indicate an understanding of gender or sex “parity” in political representation. A young woman, Amina Boughalbi begins the call stressing her desire to march for “freedom and equality for all Moroccans.” During the movement’s first press conference, it was Tahani Madmad, another young woman, who spoke on behalf of February 20.  Tahani concluded her intervention, before the press, by expressing her desire to see the “flag of freedom, equality and social justice reign over Morocco, through peaceful means.”

The absence of established feminist organizations, including the Association democratique des femmes du Maroc (ADFM), the Ligue democratique pour les droits des femmes, and l’Union de l’action feminine, from the February 20movement calls for a reconsideration of a shifting topography of a feminist consciousness. The implication of feminist leaders in a political process still dominated by the King, is creating a gap between the leaders of these organizations and the youth who mobilize on the ground for more radical change. Liberal feminist organizations rely on the King’s constitutional role as a mediator in a political field dominated by Islamist players. The ability of February 20 to work with several brands of Islamists and Salafi triggered memories about the struggle feminist groups faced during their bid to reform the Code of Personal Statute (mudawana) in Morocco (Salime 2011). Feminist leaders have vocalized fear about first, the loss of painfully won rights as they anticipate an electoral process would certainly bring the Islamists into the government. Second, leaders of feminist organizations did not want to see women’s rights subsumed under a general call for a political change that may not occur.  For these reasons, it was difficult to see an alliance among these organizations and the youth movement. 

Yet feminism does not seem to have been confined to the alliances and weaknesses of these liberal movements. The discourse of equality has appeared outside of the usual boundaries of traditional feminist circles and established feminist leaders. Can we then speak of a new feminism? 

A Counter-Topography of Feminism 

The new feminist subjectivities in February 20 present us with a counter-topography that disturbs first, the NGO-ization of feminist activism, second, the confinement of this activism to women’s spaces, and third, the state’s regulation of the NGOs sector. It is certainly risky to draw quick generalizations about an emerging movement that is still struggling for a wider legitimacy.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to attend to indications that provide a counter-narrative to the overly sexist, patriarchal, and hyper-masculine public space that emerged out of feminist and academic assessments of the “Arab Spring” (Amar 2011, al-Tahaoui 2012). The virginity tests performed under the military rule in Egypt, sexual harassment in the Cairo streets, the various attempts to curtail women’s rights by the newly elected governments in Libya and Tunisia, and the suicide of Amina Filali—a teenager allegedly raped and wedded to her rapist in Morocco, are all alarming cases of abuses.

My take on the importance of feminism as one of the sources of inspiration for political subjectivities in Morocco’s February 20 is meant to carve out a space for a feminist talk, not only a gender talk. More specifically, highlighting a debate that places the focus on the gender dynamics of the “Arab Spring” in the ongoing struggles for dignity, equal opportunities, and sovereignty. A feminist talk is concerned with using feminist sensibilities and politics as a lens to understand and theorize the movements that emerged in the mist of the Arab Spring.  In the case of February 20, I propose that feminism, as a discourse of gender equality, has penetrated the social imaginary of a new generation of activists, who were not necessarily active in feminist organizations.

Of course the questions remain: what kind of tension do these rising feminist subjectivities in the youth movement of protest bring about with traditional feminist circles? Does the high visibility of women in February 20 indicate the rise of a new feminism? What are its most significant signs?

The Women Leadership

The calls to go out to the streets on February 20 first appeared on Youtube showing signs of new gender arrangements and cultural politics. Unlike the powerful, yet solitary, call by Asmae Mahfouz for “men” to come down with her to Tahrir Square on January 25, men and women made the first calls for protests.  This took many by surprise, and not only because of the alternation of colloquial Arabic (darija) and Tamazight (Berber) languages in the call. Rather, it was the young men and women’s alternating voices and faces that were indicative of new understanding of gender parity in February 20.    

The clip of the call started with Amina Boughalbi’s face and voice. Unknown to the public, Amina is a twenty-year-old journalism student and a founding member of February 20.  In a fashion similar to that of the Egyptian Asmae Mahfouz, Amina stated  “I am Moroccan and I will march on February 20th because I want freedom and equality for all Moroccans.” She was followed by a young man who stated “I am Moroccan. I am marching on February 20th because I want all Moroccans to be equal.” The faces of young men and women keep alternating, each one speaking in the first person stating her/his reason for marching. On February 20, several thousand rallied in the streets in more than sixty cities and towns in Morocco.

This gender performance of parity in the call for protest is not only virtual; the bodily presence of women in the movement is visible at all levels of mobilization and organization. The women take their share of police brutality, to which the recent kidnapping and trial of Maria Karim, a February 20 activist, bears witness. The women also speak on behalf of the movement in national and international forums. Amina Boughalbi’s intervention at the Centre Mosellan des droits de l’homme, in Paris in June 2011and the first press conference organized by the movement on 17 February 2011 in Rabat serve as examples. 

The conference took place at the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH) in Rabat.  The AMDH is headed by Khadija Riyadi, a long standing human rights and feminist activist. Riyadi opened the conference by introducing Tahani Madad, a nineteen year old science student who spoke on behalf of February 20. Tahani read the movement’s memorandum, introduced the various organizational committees, and stressed the peaceful character of the protests. She stipulated that “no sectarian, political, or religious slogans are authorized.” She also defined February 20 as a “youth dynamic” that is “secular, modernist (hadathi), democratic, and independent of all foreign agendas or political affiliations.” She concluded by sharing the desire to see the “flag of freedom, equality and social justice reign over Morocco, through peaceful means.”

The Case for Feminism

The framing of this movement’s goals in terms of equality and the institutionalization of parity in its structures indicate the emergence of what I call a “new feminism.” During my interviews with activists working in the cities of Casablanca and Rabat, in which the leadership is mainly composed of women, my respondents constantly challenged my desire to speak to female activists about gender issues. They wanted me to speak to both men and women in the movement. They made me realize that I was still working within old feminist categories of female spaces and leadership. While in February 20, I was told, the leadership alternates between men and women, as a practice of parity. 

Secondly, to my surprise, there is a deep commitment to the question of parity and representation, not necessarily deriving from on a prior involvement of these activists with feminist groups. This new understanding of feminism, or shall I say, this feminist practice of gender parity, emerges outside the traditional spaces of feminist organizations. Both men and women carry out this practice in the struggle for social, political, and economic justice. To them, the question of gender equality is too narrow to encompass the general goal of social justice that includes men and women. An activist from Casablanca believes that “working together on issues of fair distribution of resources, accountability before the law, equal opportunities, dignity and freedom for all, will create an environment in which women are not isolated in their struggle for gender equality.” It will enable, she believes, the emergence of a political culture in which women are perceived as equal partners.”

Thirdly, gender sensibilities are not expressed in the usual feminist rhetoric of “equality” before the law. More pragmatic, these activists express it in a direct-action-mode in which parity is central. Carving out spaces for women’s representation in the movement is a case in point. Women participate at all levels of organization, mobilization and debate.  For instance, the National Council of Support (NCS)of February 20 is composed of one hundred sixty members. They represent various political constituencies—leftist parties, labor unions, and human rights organizations. Each one of these is represented by three members, one of which must be a woman. The other two members could be two men, two women, or one man and one woman. As it is clear from this institutionalization of a quota system, men cannot be the sole representatives of any one constituency.  At the same time there is no limit on women’s representation. Women could conceivably form the majority of the NCS. In fact, Moroccan feminists and activists in political parties have long mobilized for the institution of a quota system in elected institutions. In 2002, they obtained ten percent of the seats in parliament. Though the 2011 reformed constitution stipulates gender parity, the women’s representation in the parliament did not reach ten percent, and the women’s representation in the newly elected Islamist government shrunk from seven ministerial positions, to one. During my interviews with members of February 20, there was a sharp consciousness about these gaps. However, there was also a desire to show that a new regime of gender equality could emerge through the practice of parity and equal division of labor among men and women in the movement. 

Very significantly, this participation of women shows a deployment of a feminist understanding of political practice in terms of gender parity. This holds true for all of the movement’s structures. The men and the women work together, organize meetings, speak to passer-byers, and distribute leaflets.  Most significant for gender representations are the street cleaning campaigns as a performance of citizenship by women, and the “Freeze for Freedom” and “Freeze Against Globalization” events. These events normalize women’s appropriation of the public space, as spectacle, for a bodily performance of dissent. The ‘freeze-out’ bodies of women transgress “modesty” as a regulatory regime of women’s presence in the public space by inviting the gaze and attracting the crowds.

Interested to learn more about the effects of the Islamist participation in February 20, I interviewed several women about their encounters with the activists of the Justice and Charity Movement (al-Adl wal-Ihsane), as a former component of February 20.  I spoke to women militants in the leftist party al-Talia, who were active in neighborhood committees in Casablanca.  The militants spoke about all the “positive changes” they witnessed in the “attitude” of the Islamist members who were part of the committee. In this committee there were twenty-six members, half of whom were women. But the implementation of parity in these committees did not go unchallenged. In one activist’s words, the “Islamists got over their initial attitude toward working, meeting, or listening to secular women.” This activist celebrates the fact that the Islamists’ perception of “secular leftist women has totally changed.” She added: “We made sure they adhere to the ethics of parity, we worked, talked and marched together, and this slowly became no issue for them.” Being herself a member of the Ligue marocaine pour les droits des femmes, this activist spoke of secularism mostly in relation to the “universality” of women’s rights. She also spoke of the need, expressed by most liberal feminist organizations in Morocco, to keep family law outside of the realm of religiously based interpretations of these rights.  

Concluding Remarks

I do not intend here to draw broad conclusions about gender arrangements in the entire movement, because of its leaderless base, flexible agendas, and multiple centers (see Bamyeh on the Egyptian revolution and its leaderless character 2011). However, I find it useful to take the information coming from my respondents as indications of emerging modes of regulating women’s access to “street politics” (Bayat 2007) and a liquidation of old feminist tensions between direct action and mediation through NGOs and state institutions.  My intention is not to engage in a conversation about the role of NGOs as governing bodies in the neo-liberal era (Kamat 2004; Salime, 2007). I want instead, to point to the displacement of a “feminist talk” from self-defined feminists to self-defined social justice activists. What we see is the desire accompanied with an endeavor, to couch all of the movement’s structures into notions of gender equality. This goes against the very gendered, disciplinary, and regulated arenas of feminist organizations. 

References:

Amar, Paul (2011). Turning the Security State Gendered Politics Inside Out . International Journal of Feminist Politics. 13(3): 299-328

Bamyeh, M. ( 2011). “Arab Revolutions and the Making of New Patriotism”. Orient III. 6-10

Bayat, A. (2007). Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn. Stanford University Press

Bayat, A ( 2011). ‘‘A new Arab Street in Post Islamist Times’’. Foreign Policy. The Middle East Channel. Posted on January 26, 2011.  Retreived on May 29, 2012.

El Tahawy, Mona (2012) Why do they Hate Us ? The Real War on Women is in the Middle East. Foreign Policy. May/June 2012. Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/23/why_do_they_hate_us?page=0,1

Kamat, S (2004). “The Privatization of Public Interest: Theorizing NGOs in a Neoliberal Era.” Review of International Political Economy 11 (1): 155-176.

Salime, Zakia (2012). A New Feminism? Gender Dynamics in Morocco’s February 20th Movement. Journal of International Women’s Studies

Salime, Zakia (2011) Between Feminism and Islam: Human and Rights and Shari 'a Law in Morocco. University of Minnesota Press.

Salime, Zakia (2007) The “War on Terrorism:” Appropriation and Subversion by Moroccan Women.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33-1: 1:24

“Beirut Photographer”: An Ode to Memory

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What does it mean to bear witness to events? What responsibility does the act of witnessing carry? These are the central questions evoked by George Azar and Mariam Shahin’s documentary film “Beirut Photographer.” Released on Al Jazeera English in part to remember the thirtieth anniversary of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon–and more particularly of Beirut–the film is a multi-layered and fascinating portrayal of the often contradictory aspects of battles that would become subsumed under the label of the “Lebanese civil war,” as well as of the process, and cost, of documenting conflict.

The film initially centers on photographer and filmmaker George Azar. He introduces himself as having Lebanese heritage and explains his interest and fascination with the Middle East: “Like a lot of Arab-American kids, […] the Middle East was a mystery to me” until, he states, the Palestinian liberation struggles of the 1970s put the region at the forefront of people’s consciousness in new ways. Upon graduating from UC Berkeley, he picked up a camera and, with hardly any experience whatsoever, landed in Beirut in 1981 to visually document the war.  His timing was, in a sense, optimal for such a move – it included the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the accompanying brutal eig-day siege of Beirut, followed by the PLO’s exile to Tunis, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in September of that year, the definitive battles at Baddawi camp in northern Lebanon in 1983, and the general havoc wrought on the country’s human and political infrastructures.


[Beirut. Photo by George Azar.]

An idealistic young man when he landed in Lebanon, Azar grew up quickly. He was kidnapped multiple times, captured by the Israelis, held at gunpoint, and put up against a wall to be executed. He witnessed combat, death, the loss of youth and innocence, hypocrisy and the effects of political corruption, in hundreds of photographs. Thirty years after he first arrived in the land of his ancestors, he returned with a selection of those photographs in an attempt to locate their subjects and hear the stories of their lives, as he puts it, "outside the frame.” 

In a recent interview with Jadaliyya, Azar gave a précis of some of the moments of reconnection in the film. The flower shop owners who loses a son; the Palestinian family, displaced yet again, seeking refuge; the “Smurfs,” as the teenaged gunmen he befriended referred to themselves. “Beirut Photographer” visually brings these and other characters to life as Azar returns to visit people whose lives he captured in his lens for an instant. He clearly loves his work and holds a deep affinity and affection for Beirut and for Lebanon – you hear it in his voice as he narrates the film and in the sensitivity with which he speaks of the people in his photographs. He is gentle and respectful when he encounters them again decades later, understanding that the war may still be a painful subject to reflect upon.

Yet “Beirut Photographer” occasionally slips into melodrama and the kind of stereotyping one does not expect to see in a film made by a photojournalist – i.e. someone who witnesses in a manner that allows him to comprehend the multi-dimensionality and contradictions of conflict. What is more, in what appear to be attempts at inserting elements of drama, the film relinquishes nuance and even accuracy. Slips in Azar’s narration include statements like “I’ll never forget seeing Lebanon from the air, burning.” Overly dramatic statements like this can be chalked up to both poetic license (here he is describing the intense experience of being forcibly flown out of Lebanon by the Israeli army) and to the selective memory of an individual in a traumatic situation. But they are disappointing and problematic when used in the context of a documentary film that is not only about the personal perspective of Azar but also about historical events. In this sense, the interface between Azar’s memory and an overarching historical narrative gets a bit wrinkled.


[Beirut. Photo by George Azar.]

Another problematic statement comes when he discusses Israel’s renewed occupation of South Lebanon. Azar states that the “Israelis underestimated the Lebanese in the South,” and that a coalition of Amal and Hizballah “began a resistance campaign” that ultimately “drove the Israelis out” in 2000. The narrative sequence, even allowing for time limitations imposed by a film, is a sort of historical hopscotch whereby it sidelines the much more complicated aspects of this coalition and skips over the tensions that belie a simplified teleological formula of resistance + coalition = liberation.

Puzzling too, are the moments when the film simultaneously romanticizes and demonizes its subject matter. In his discussion of teenaged fighters, for example, Azar describes the low-income, Shi‘a neighborhood of Shiyyah as “the most dangerous neighborhood in the most dangerous city in the world.” Even allowing for Shiyyah’s location as a stone’s throw from ‘ground zero’ of hostilities in 1975 and its consistent treacherousness throughout the conflict, how could it possibly compare with other equally if not more dangerous neighborhoods or cities around the world at the time? What is the point of making such a sensationalist declaration here? Moreover, what does “dangerous” even mean in this context? Unfortunately, “Beirut Photographer” tosses such statements into the mix with little scaffolding to hold them in place other than Azar’s understandably horrifying experiences on the front lines. It further reminds us that bearing witness to events in no way implies a more authentic view of the bigger picture (literally). The finality of a photographed moment, frozen as it is, is not the last word.  These solecisms in the film’s narration do a disservice to Azar and Shahin’s otherwise sensitive and carefully crafted film.


[Beirut civilians. Photo by George Azar.]

Viewers may also be left asking questions about Azar’s choices: why follow up with these photographs in particular? What, exactly, did finding these people mean? He partially answers the last question when he implies wanting to find some consolation–one may venture to say closure--for what he has called the most formative period of his life. But one wishes for a little more introspection in the film about Azar’s sense of accountability and responsibility to the people he lived with, sought shelter with, and befriended during the conflicts. What did he think returning might mean to the people in the pictures? Photojournalists rarely go in search of the people they photographed. What does the unusualness of this journey suggest about the larger costs of this profession and the burden of responsibility that bearing witness entails?  


[Zutti, West Beirut, 1984. Photo by George Azar.]

In its seamless shifting between 1982 and 2012, the film poses important questions about memory and its “uses” – so to speak – both in general and during times of war and trauma. It pushes us to ask what responsibility we have when engaging with other people’s memories. What does it mean to pull people back into those moments? How do we hand memories back to people, as Azar does literally when he gives the subjects photographs depicting what is likely one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives? Who ‘owns’ that memory, the photographer who captures it yet who remains outside the frame, or the picture’s subjects? In the end, after all, they were both there and both suffered, although in different ways and in different degrees.

By revisiting his photographs, and in visiting their human subjects, Azar reminds us of the details that people can still call up, decades later – gold bangles, a corridor, a pair of socks. In that vein, what “Beirut Photographer” does best is illustrate the strength, power, and longevity of memory. It may seem an obvious point – yet is one that colonizers, invaders, corporations, and dictators continue to ignore at their peril.

“Beirut Photographer” began airing on 5 December as part of Al-Jazeera English’s Witness series.

Maghreb Monthly Edition on Jadaliyya (November 2012)

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[This is a monthly archive of pieces written by Jadaliyya contributors and editors on the Maghreb. It also includes material published on other platforms that editors deemed pertinent to post as they provide diverse depictions of Maghreb-related topics. The pieces reflect the level of critical analysis and diversity that Jadaliyya strives for, but the views are solely the ones of their authors. If you are interested in contributing to Jadaliyya, send us your post with your bio and a release form topost@jadaliyya.com [click “Submissions” on the main page for more information].

L’an I de la Révolution tunisienne ou les résurgences d’un passé qui divise Jocelyne Dakhlia's critique attempts to posit a "authentic" Tunisian identity.

Neither Regret Nor Remorse: Colonial Nostalgia Among French Far Right Thomas Serres analyzes the French far right's reactions to Hollande's acknowledgement of the 17 October 1961 massacre.

Maghreb Media Roundup (29 November) Weekly curation of articles published on the Maghreb from various outlets.

From Opposition to Puppet: Morocco’s Party of Justice and Development Samia Errazzouki discusses the PJD's failure to adopt the "critical voice" of reform promised in campaigns, instead yielding subserviently to the monarchy's power structures.  

Maghreb Media Roundup (22 November) Weekly curation of articles published on the Maghreb from various outlets.

Lonely Servitude: Child Domestic Labor in Morocco HRW reports on the prevalence of child domestic labor abuse in Morocco.

Quelle justice transitionnelle pour la Tunisie? Myriam Guetat explores problematic conceptions of  "transitional justice," and obstructions to its realization in Tunisia.  

ثورة . . . أما بعد Raouia Briki argues that revolutionary ideals involving employment, media freedom, dignity, and corruption have been forsaken by a government entrenched in ideological controversies.

Plurality, Hybridity, and the Self: A Review of Benjamin Stora's "Voyages en postcolonies" Samuel Everett explores Stora's latest publication, which Everett expounds as a departure from his previous works as it chronicles concepts and episodes of post-colonial studies from a  highly personal perspective.

Maghreb Media Roundup (15 November) Weekly curation of articles published on the Maghreb from various outlets.

Maghreb Media Roundup (8 November) Weekly curation of articles published on the Maghreb from various outlets.

Du « péril noir » au Maroc Michael Vogel discusses a controversial Maroc Hebdo feature that attempts to justify the state's recent abuses against sub-Saharan African migrants.

Maghreb Media Roundup (2 November) Weekly curation of articles published on the Maghreb from various outlets.

Tunisian Unionists on Strike in Kasserine Province UGTT executive member's statement on the recent wave of protests demanding employment, regional development, and genuine democratic transition. 

 


Al-Masry Al-Youm Goes Inside the Brotherhood's Torture Chambers

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Al-Masry Al-Youm spent three hours Wednesday night in a Muslim Brotherhood torture chamber at the presidential palace. The central chamber was located at the gate of the palace in front of Omar bin Abdel Aziz Mosque on Merghany Street. The chamber was cordoned by iron barriers and Central Security Forces, who only allowed this reporter access after a colleague from Misr 25 satellite channel, owned by the Brotherhood, intervened.

Police officials in uniform were present inside the chamber, as were plainclothes officers from the Nozha police station. Fifteen Brotherhood members were also present, supervised by three bearded men who decided who should be there. They could order anyone out of the room.

Opposing protesters were brought to the chambers after being detained by Brotherhood members, who beat them and tore their clothes. The chambers were informal and it was unclear how many there were; when someone was detained, a chamber would be established anywhere near a building.

The kidnappers would take the detained person’s ID card, mobile phone and money before beginning “investigations,” which included intervals of beating to force the confession that he or she is a “thug.”

The interrogators would then ask their captive why they had taken to the street, if they had received any money for protesting, and if they belonged to Mohamed ElBaradei’s Constitution Party, Hamdeen Sabbahi’s Popular Current or the dissolved National Democratic Party of Hosni Mubarak.

If the detainee denied affiliation, the torturers would intensify beatings and verbal abuse. They also documented the interrogations on a mobile phone camera and contacted the Misr 25 TV channel to name the detainees as thugs.

After a while, a captive would be transferred to a central chamber, where a Brotherhood lawyer would hand his or her ID card and personal belongings to a senior police officer, who was the head of the “investigations department” in the chamber. Some Brotherhood members claimed that they found weapons on the detainees and had handed them over to Nozha police officers.

This reporter heard detainees screaming inside the chamber. One pleaded, “I’m a bearded sheikh… It’s Safwat Hegazy who will restore my rights. I’m a friend of all sheikhs.” A bleeding man cried, “I’m an educated person. I have a car. Do I look like a thug?” A severely beaten detainee, who said he was from Sayeda Zeinab, was accused of being affiliated with former Parliament Speaker Fathi Sorour.

Some of the detainees were not able to respond to the questions the Brotherhood interrogators screamed at them because of their physical state. Some were bleeding profusely and severely fatigued, but were not given medical assistance, only offered bottles of water to drink.

The senior police official and other policemen asked the three Brotherhood leaders to help them secure the transfer of 10 detainees to the Nozha police station so they would not be attacked again by Brotherhood protesters outside the chamber. Once a group of detainees was taken away, another was brought in.

Next to the central chamber, another three people were detained inside asecurity station attached to the palace gate on Ahram Street. This area is not under the control of the Brotherhood, which has handed over these detainees to the police. Other detainees remain in the torture chambers without being transferred to security forces.

There was blood visible on the pavement outside the chambers. Some Brothers covered it with dust to try to hide it, but some of it remained visible.

[This article originally appeared in Egypt Independent.]

Morsi Past the Point of No Return

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The events of 5 December 2012 mark an important shift in Egyptian politics in light of the violence that pitted Muslim Brotherhood members and partisans of President Mohamed Morsi against protesters opposed to the president’s recent moves to centralize power and allow the Brotherhood to dictate the terms of Egypt’s new political order.

Dominant narratives in international media have implicitly or explicitly embraced the view that the clashes are the manifestation of an unfortunate cycle of conflict between two sides that are equally responsible for pushing the nation to the brink of civil strife by stubbornly sticking to blind partisanship. After all, each of the “two sides” has alleged that the opposing party employed violence—and in the case of the Brotherhood systematictorture of anti-Morsi protesters—leaving the observer with the impression that the clashes are part of a “messy battle” in which transgressions have been committed by all sides.

What this perspective misses, however, is that—regardless of how much violence each “side” has committed—the clashes were instigated by a deliberate, conscious decision by Muslim Brotherhood leaders to escalate the conflict with its adversaries. One day after thousands of opposition protesters had marched to the presidential palace and staged a sit-in in order to pressure Morsi into reversing his controversial constitutional declaration, the Muslim Brotherhood called on its supporters to march to the palace. 

Organizing a march to the same site where Morsi’s opponents are gathered is a tall order, and an inevitable recipe for physical clashes. You do not rally your activists at the same site where your opponents are assembled, expecting a peaceful tailgating picnic—and there is evidence that the Brotherhood was well aware of this. For example, last week the Muslim Brotherhood backtracked on its decision to organize a rally in support of Morsi in Tahrir Square on 1 December. The Brotherhood changed the location of the gathering to the area surrounding Cairo University in response to warnings that rallying Morsi’s supporters around Tahrir would lead to violence with opposition protesters who were already assembled in the square as part of an established sit-in.[1] Fast forward a few days, the goal of averting physical clashes with adversaries seemed no longer relevant for the Muslim Brotherhood as its leaders pressed members to march to Itihadiyya presidential palace on Wednesday December 5 in order to protect the legitimacy of the elected president.

Moreover, the call for the 5 December protests issued by the Muslim Brotherhood was anything but an invitation for a peaceful expression of political views. Reducing the president’s opponents to a subversive few, Brotherhood spokesperson Mohamed Ghozlan called on supporters to “protect” the legitimacy of the current political order from what he characterized as a minority that is forcefully imposing its own views on the rest of the country. He stated that the Brotherhood’s protests aimed to “protect [constitutional] legitimacy after the brute transgressions that a certain group has committed on Tuesday, thinking that it could destabilize [constitutional] legitimacy or impose its views by force, which has driven popular forces to demonstrate that the Egyptian people are the ones who have chosen this legitimacy and elected it, and that they, God willingly, are able to protect it, and to uphold their constitution and protect their institutions.”

Statements by other Brotherhood leaders demonized Morsi’s adversaries and invited the president’s supporters to protect him from the opposition’s alleged aggression. Prominent Brotherhood figure Essam El-Erian was quoted by Al-Masry Al-Youm saying that the Egyptian people possess the ability to impose their own will, and that they will “flood squares in all governorates, especially [around] the Itihadiyya [presidential] palace to protect [constitutional] legitimacy.” In a more ominous statement, he threatened, “Those adventurous ones, who want to seize power without respecting referendum and election ballot boxes, must reconsider [their actions] before it is too late.” [Emphasis mine] The demonization of the opposition by Brotherhood official continued even after the violence. For example, Khairat El-Shater said today that opposition protesters are small minority of thugs, and remnants of the Mubarak regime.

The clashes, in other words, ensued in a context in which the Brotherhood was asking supporters, not to simply march to the palace to express support for the president and demonstrate that many Egyptians stand by his decisions, but rather to suppress and crush Morsi’s opposition. The professed objective of Brotherhood protests was made in clear reference to Morsi’s opponents, the need to contain them, and protect the president from their “subversive ways.” Stated simply, to say that the Muslim Brotherhood’s call for protests was designed to incite attacks against the Itihadiyya sit-in is an understatement.

***

The Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to escalate the conflict with its challengers was not merely aimed at dealing the opposition an unquestionable defeat by forcing an end to its sit-in around the presidential palace and clearing the way for a transition dictated by the Brotherhood and its allies. Through this action the Brotherhood also sought to send a message to leaders of military and civilian security agencies that the Brothers are ready to take matters into their own hands, should the police and the army continue to show ambivalence in dealing with the opposition.

The events of the past week have highlighted the Brotherhood’s sense of frustration with the Ministry of Interior’s failure to contain protests organized in opposition to the president’s constitutional declaration and the Brotherhood-backed draft constitution. For instance, Essam El-Erian’s statement that called on Muslim Brotherhood supporters to march to the Itahadiyya presidential palace on Wednesday contained a subtle warning to Egypt’s security establishment: “If the state apparatus is weak and marred by the wounds of the past period, the people, led by members of the [Freedom and Justice] Party, are ready to impose their will and to protect [constitutional] legitimacy.” A day earlier, Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam Hashish expressed his frustration with the fact that the republican guard had not stepped up to the plate in protecting the presidential palace on Tuesday, when Morsi was forced to evacuate his office after finding himself surrounded by thousands of his opponents in Ithadiyya. Similarly, Brotherhood spokesperson Ghozlan suggested on Wednesday that security forces were soft on opposition protesters the night before the clashes, noting that they “withdrew and cleared the way for the opposition to reach the presidential palace.”

These statements coincided with media reports alleging that the president’s office had shared unkind words with Minister of Interior Essam Gamal El-Din on Tuesday night, and was considering replacing him due to the failure of security forces to fend off opposition protesters surrounding the palace.

The Brotherhood’s frustration was not entirely unfounded. After protesters were able to overcome barbed wires set-up in the streets leading to the presidential palace on Tuesday, security personnel withdrew to the immediate vicinity of Ithadiyya, thereby allowing Morsi’s opponents to surround the palace. Some media reports claim that the protesters applauded security forces for showing some restraint. In fact, opposition figure Hamdi Qandil commended security forces for allowing protesters to enter the presidential palace area, asserting that this marks the beginning of the “return of the police back into the arms of the people.” Although these reports may have exaggerated the police’s cooperation with the protesters, they appear to have left the Brotherhood with the impression that security agencies stood passively on the sidelines, as Morsi and his team were confronting masses of angry demonstrators by themselves. Reflecting the humiliating state in which Morsi was left, comments circulated on social networking sites that the president had to be quietly smuggled out of the “servants’ entrance” in order to avoid the angry crowds.

This week was not the first instance in which Muslim Brotherhood officials were dismayed by police performance in protecting the group’s figures and interests. Brotherhood leaders were similarly angered at the inability (or perhaps refusal) of police personnel during the past few weeks to stop foes from attacking the offices of the Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). 

The military on its part tried to signal initially that it is not party to this conflict. As observers began speculating that the armed forces deployed around the presidential palace on Wednesday morning following the end of clashes were an indication that the military had taken Morsi’s side, a military spokesperson eagerly announced that these were Republican Guard units and not regular armed forces. (Republican Guard forces are not subject to the conventional chain of military command, and its head takes orders from the president.) Reinforcing the perception, immediately after Wednesday’s violence, the Minister of Defense Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi stated that the armed forces are “working in complete loyalty to the Egyptian people.” By Friday night, protesters by the presidential palace were taking pictures with Republican Guard forces and writing on their tanks “down with Morsi” and “down with the rule [Muslim Brotherhood General] Guide.” The military, in the immediate aftermath of the violence, seemed keen on avoiding any hints of bias toward Morsi and his partisans.

***

The tensions that this crisis has highlighted in the relationship between the Brotherhood and security agencies speak to the reality that the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled presidency remains an uncomfortable guest inside the so-called deep state.

The “deep state,” broadly speaking, refers to a diverse set of longstanding, powerful bureaucratic interests entrenched inside the Egyptian state and inherited from the previous political order, including, but not limited to, military institutions and domestic security agencies. While these various bureaucratic interests do not exhibit any ideological or political cohesion, they are all unified by a commitment to resisting any attempts by outside political forces, particularly elected officials, to undermine the financial and institutional autonomy that these organizations have garnered over the course of decades. In some sectors of this deep state, this autonomy is reflected through the prevalence of “special private funds” and off-budget spending that are subject to minimal oversight, and that afford these agencies a great deal of discretion in running their own affairs away from formal lines of accountability. 

For the security agencies inside the “deep state,” the greatest threat they face is the prospect of having to confront a new class of ruling elite that is determined to advance a security sector reform agenda that could undermine their institutional autonomy, not to mention the anti-democratic privileges that this autonomy has long harbored. The Egyptian military, as many have noted, is known to own and benefit from a variety of revenue generating economic enterprises that are subject to zero accountability and transparency. The ministry of interior has long been a hub for a range of corrupt and illicit practices, many of which have continued even after Hosni Mubarak’s downfall, most notably the chronic use of deadly force against unarmed protesters, not to mention police brutality against suspects in non-political contexts.

Since the earliest days of his presidency, Morsi and his group have taken a cautiously accommodationist stance toward powerful sectors of the deep state. The Brotherhood appeared to be well aware of the fact that it cannot promote its policies and programs in a way that allows it to establish an incumbency advantage in the electoral sphere until it makes its peace with the deep state. It was, therefore, not surprising that the first government that emerged under Morsi’s leadership came to be publicly perceived as a partnership between the Muslim Brotherhood and the deep state, namely between elements that are sympathetic, if not loyal, to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, and veteran insiders to the Egyptian bureaucracy. In some ways, Prime Minister Hesham Qandil embodies this partnership, as a longtime technocrat at the Ministry of Irrigation, and, at the same time, someone with ties to ranking members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau. 

Also under Morsi’s presidency, the military and the civilian security establishment continued to enjoy the leadership of traditional bureaucrats and officers committed to the non-democratic autonomy of their agencies from usual standards of accountability and transparency. On his part, Morsi has stayed out of the “business” (quite literally) of the military and the policing establishment, steering clear of any security sector reform initiatives that could undermine their interests. As the head of the Central Accountability Agency has recently remarked, the military’s economic enterprises remain above the reach of public transparency and accountability. Article 197 of the constitution that the Brotherhood-backed constituent assembly drafted exempts the military from conventional parliamentary oversight and delegates it to a military-dominated National Defense Council, similar to the articles of the controversial Al-Selmi document that the SCAF-sponsored government presented in November 2011 and that the Brotherhood had (ironically) opposed. Additionally, Article 198 gives the military the discretion to try civilians in military courts, specifically in cases involving “crimes that harm the Armed Forces.”

In other words, the political order that the Muslim Brotherhood has been attempting to establish is one that accommodates the interests of the deep state, and, on some level, shields it from revolutionary movements and activists who seem less amenable than the Brotherhood to compromise and accommodation with entrenched bureaucratic interests. Yet these concessions by themselves, as evidenced by recent events, were not enough to institutionalize a durable partnership between the Brothers and the deep state.

*** 

In many ways, the ongoing conflict between Morsi and his challengers is putting the delicate relationship between the deep state and the Muslim Brotherhood to the test. Despite the accomodationist gestures that the Brotherhood and Morsi have made to leaders of the domestic and military security establishments over the past months, they appeared anything but eager to come to Morsi’s aid during the early phases of the Brotherhood’s current standoff with the opposition—as evidenced by the MB’s statements cited above. Their reluctance is not surprising. 

While the Morsi presidency and its pragmatic orientation toward the deep state may offer the military and the policing establishments some degree of protection from revolutionary demands for far-reaching reforms, it is clear that their faith in the stability and sustainability of the political order that the Brotherhood is erecting is tenuous. They realize that anti-Morsi popular pressure could limit if not overturn the Brotherhood’s dominance in the political arena, which makes them nervous about putting all their eggs in the Morsi basket by going into a full-scale battle with the opposition on behalf of the president. 

Thus, both the ministry of interior and the military have tried to emphasize in their initial public statements that they are taking a neutral stance in this conflict, even while their actions on the ground veered away from this stated position. Similar to the approach of military leaders to the standoff between Mubarak and his challengers during the 2011 eighteen-day uprising, the security sector of the deep state may be inclined to wait on the sidelines to determine the outcome of the ongoing battle before committing fully to protecting the emergent (and perhaps favorable) political order that the Brotherhood is constructing. 

With the escalation of conflict, however, following such a strategy has proven especially difficult for the military, particularly now that it has taken on, at the order of the president, new responsibilities to protect public order and vital installations. The military’s predicament is deep. On the one hand, it is sees safety for its institutional interests in the Brotherhood’s evolving political order, which would leave intact its unusual privileges without having to take on the burden of intervening in day-to-day politics—a task that has proven costly and internally divisive during the recent period of formal military rule. Yet at the same, if the military has to take on an active and visible role in order to protect and reap the benefits of the Brotherhood-dictated transition, the reasoning goes, then at what point do the benefits that this new order offers outweigh the costs of maintaining and preserving it? This dilemma is reflected in the military’s statement today that followed the announcement that it would formally take on new protective powers. Like in many of its previous statements, the military tried to emphasize its neutrality in this conflict, and affirmed that its foremost commitment and loyalty is to the Egyptian people. At the same time, the statement implicitly rebuffed widespread calls for Morsi’s departure, paying lip service to “legal legitimacy and democratic rules.” It also endorsed (perhaps indirectly) the president’s call for dialogue with the opposition, stating: “Dialogue is the ideal and only way to reaching a consensus that achieves the interests of the nation and citizens.” Illustrating the military’s fear of being closely associated with the Brotherhood-controlled presidency, shortly after the statement was released, an unidentified military source told Al-Masry Al-Youm that this announcement must not be interpreted as a signal that the military is returning to politics. These tensions and concerns will likely persist, as the Brotherhood continues to call on military leaders for support.

Many Muslim Brotherhood figures have characterized the clashes at Ithadiyya presidential palace as a manifestation of its conflict with the deep state and remnants of the Mubarak era. But in reality, the Brotherhood is not fighting against the alleged “deep state” and Mubarak remnants within the opposition and inside the courts, as it claims, but rather the deep state within the ranks of its sponsored government. The Brotherhood’s decision to escalate its standoff with the opposition, and the seemingly irrational ferocity with which it has begun to antagonize its opponents must not be understood merely as an attempt to eliminate challengers. Equally importantly, the Muslim Brotherhood-initiated escalation is a strong message to the deep state that the Brotherhood-controlled presidency is fully capable of erecting a political arena in which its decisions and commitments are supreme. The Brotherhood and its sponsored political order, the message goes, is here to stay, and you would be better served to jump on this bandwagon and come to its defense before it is too late. Whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood has been able to make this case convincingly remains to be seen.

In escalating the conflict with its opponents the Muslim Brotherhood may have succeeded in sending the message to the security establishment that the group will fight until the end, and will remain the only credible civilian partner for the deep state. Yet, by playing along, Morsi has also deepened his own dependency on the Muslim Brotherhood for political survival.

***

Ever since his election, observers have wondered whether Morsi would be able to break loose of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau’s control, and pave the way for a presidency that answers, not to the non-elected leaders of an exclusive secret society, but rather to the Egyptian people, particularly the partisans of the revolution who came to his aid during his electoral standoff against Mubarak’s last Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq. To a large extent, Tuesday’s events and the violence committed by Brotherhood supporters in the name of the president limits the long-term prospects for such a scenario.

The relationship between the presidency and the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be understood in isolation of the long-standing internal tension between the organization’s core leadership and its community of professional politicians. The idea that Muslim Brotherhood politicians and members of parliament could “go rogue” after reaching power, and abandon the group’s core interests speaks to an enduring fear within its ranks—a fear that seems to have shaped many of the Brotherhood’s decisions since the downfall of Mubarak. For instance, the creation of the FJP as a legally autonomous political arm of the Brotherhood coincided with the decision to pad the party’s highest ranking positions with figures whose loyalty to the Guidance Bureau is not in question. Examples of such figures include Mohamed Morsi who served as the head of the FJP until he was elected president.

On many levels, the deepening of the Brotherhood’s engagement in politics in the new Egypt has threatened the internal balance of power between those Brothers committed to the realm of politics, and others who lead less politicized social, economic, and religious endeavors—endeavors that are not always compatible with the movement’s political activities. This dynamic in part explains the chronic shifts in the Muslim Brotherhood’s position on how many seats it would contest in the 2011/2012 parliamentary elections during the months leading up the race. The internal tensions that the Brotherhood’s political engagement fosters inevitably make such decisions heavily contested, and thus, volatile.

But more importantly, the prospect of a stronger Brotherhood presence inside state institutions has always raised uncomfortable questions for the group’s Guidance Bureau, such as: Who is in charge? The Muslim Brotherhood’s General Guide? Or the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president and the community of Brotherhood politicians whose power and influence are quickly expanding independently of the group? Given this predicament, it was not surprising that the Brotherhood’s position on contesting the presidential election shifted several times before its leaders reluctantly decided to enter the race. The fear of a Brotherhood presidency that is capable of asserting its independence of the Guidance Bureau has arguably influenced the group’s presidential nominations. Its leaders granted the nomination first to Khairat El-Shater, who embodies the Guidance Bureau’s interests in many ways, and later to Mohamed Morsi, a loyal partisan of the Brotherhood who has never shown any willingness or ability to rebel against the Guidance Bureau’s preferences.

In a rare incident, the General Guide’s own paranoia surrounding the possibility of a Brotherhood-controlled government was once on public display in December 2011, long before the Brotherhood had even announced it would seek the presidency. In a curious remark that made news headlines, General Guide Mohamed Badie said in an interview on Al-Mehwar that the “position of the General Guide is more important than the position of the president.” What appeared at the time a perplexing and incomprehensible statement, speaks today to the essence of one of Egypt’s most salient political trends, namely the efforts of the Brotherhood’s core leaders to establish a presidency that is subordinate to the Guidance Bureau’s interests and preferences.

The first step toward this goal was nominating to the presidency a candidate with strong loyalty to the Muslim Brotherhood’s core leadership. But clearly the president’s personal loyalty was not sufficient to mitigate the concerns of the Guidance Bureau. While Morsi’s commitment to the Brotherhood was hardly ever questionable, there was a looming fear that the institution of the presidency could develop an independent team that, by virtue of the basic logic of politics, confronts institutional incentives and pressures that steer executive decisions away from the preferences of the Brotherhood’s leaders. After all, notwithstanding his strong partisan credentials, Morsi entered the presidency facing two political forces that were seeking to carve out a role for themselves around Egypt’s new leader, namely the deep state and the traditional class of bureaucrats that occupy it, and revolutionary forces and activists whom Morsi had promised a prominent role on the presidential team in order to secure their endorsement during his tight run-off with Shafiq.

Thus, to counterbalance these pressures, the Brotherhood’s core leaders have filled Morsi’s presidential team with individuals who enjoy strong ties to the Guidance Bureau. Essam Al-Haddad is a case in point. A former member of the Guidance Bureau, Al-Haddad currently serves as Morsi’s top foreign policy advisor. He recently led a delegation to Washington, DC to prepare for Morsi’s prospective official visit to the United States. Other Brotherhood ranking leaders who serve on the presidential team include former Guidance Bureau members Essam El-Erian, and Mohy Hamed. The influence of these individuals underscores the Guidance Bureau’s determination to keep the president in check and to ensure that under no condition—particularly moments of intense political pressure—would he ever flirt with the idea of abandoning his partisan commitments in favor of building broader coalitions with political forces outside of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In many respects, this week’s violence and Morsi’s complicity in the escalations that led to it have reinforced the Guidance Bureau’s efforts to create a presidency that takes its cues from none other than the Brotherhood, and that cannot survive independently of the group’s support. The overt use of violence by Muslim Brotherhood supporters against other members of the political community in the name of Morsi’s leadership alienated any political force that could have provided the president with a support base outside of the Brotherhood. It is anything but surprising, therefore, that the president’s calls for dialogue thus far have failed to bring to the table any political figure with meaningful stature, credibility or substantial following other than the leader of his own party (and a lonesome Ayman Nour).

Having become more beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood than ever before, the idea that the pressures and necessities of politics could force the Morsi presidency to wage more inclusive coalitions that travel beyond his core group has become more far-fetched than it was before 5 December. Returning to the question posed earlier of whether someday Egypt could have a president that answers to the people and not to leaders of his secret society or the representatives of the deep state, this week’s events suggest that such a presidency is unlikely to emerge under Morsi’s leadership.

The aftermath of Wednesday’s violence has killed any chance that Morsi could credibly claim to speak for all Egyptians, or build bases of support that go beyond two groups to which he is now more bound than ever: the Muslim Brotherhood and the deep state. Morsi is now past the point of no return.

***

Given these realities, where do we go from here? While proposing a possible exit from the current crisis is beyond the scope of this piece, and the situation is too volatile and evolving to set forth concrete solutions, three important observations are in order.

Firstly, the difficulty of the current standoff pertains to how violence has complicated any potential attempts to negotiate an easy political solution to the underlying crisis. Now that there is a widespread perception that the Muslim Brotherhood and the president have engaged in criminal abuse against their opponents, no longer are the points of contention limited to negotiating over constitution writing. Moving forward and setting aside the losses and injuries that have been incurred as a result of this week’s clashes may seem compelling for the unattached observer, but such a scenario is unlikely to hold in the face of a revolutionary popular movement that does not compromise on human dignity and the sanctity of every Egyptian life. Looking back at the events of the last two years, one could argue that there was a turning point during SCAF’s rule when negotiating the terms of Egypt’s new political order for the military ceased to be a question of constitutional and legal engineering and became an existential issue for members of the military council. One could argue that the Maspero massacre of 9 October 2011 was that turning point, after which military leaders were no longer just negotiating over the status of their institutions in the new Egypt, but more importantly, their own safe exit. Morsi and his Brothers may have just experienced their Maspero moment. This will certainly complicate the rest of Morsi’s presidency, even if in the short run a credible agreement surfaces to resolve differences over the draft constitution and the constitutional declaration.

***

Given these realities, where do we go from here? While devising a possible exit out of the current crisis is beyond the scope of this piece, and the situation is too volatile and evolving to propose concrete solutions, three important observations are in order.

Firstly, the difficulty of the current standoff pertains to how violence has complicated any potential attempts to negotiate an easy political solution to the underlying crisis. Now that there is a widespread perception that the Muslim Brotherhood and the president have engaged in criminal abuse against their opponents, no longer are the points of contention limited to negotiating over constitution writing and voting. Moving forward and setting aside the losses and injuries that have been incurred as a result of this week’s clashes may seem compelling for the unattached observer, but such a scenario is unlikely to hold in the face of a revolutionary popular movement that does not compromise on human dignity and sanctity of every Egyptian life. Reflecting on events of the last two years, there was a turning point during SCAF’s rule when negotiating over Egypt’s new political order for the military ceased to be a question of constitutional and legal engineering and became an existential issue for members of the military council. One could argue that the Maspero massacre of 9 October 2011 was that turning point, after which military leaders were no longer just negotiating over the status of their institutions in the new Egypt, but more importantly, their own safe exit. Morsi and his Brothers may have just experienced their Maspero moment. This will certainly complicate the rest of Morsi’s presidency, even if in the short run a credible agreement surfaces to resolve differences over the new constitution and the constitutional declaration.

Secondly, the more the Brotherhood realizes that it stands over a hollow political process that lacks any credibility and that the façade of democracy is no longer holding up, the greater the temptations it will face in steering Egypt closer toward a de facto or de jure state of emergency. While Morsi’s decision to grant the military new protective powers may not represent a return to SCAF-style military rule, as some observers have contended, it may prove to be the lead up to an attempt to institute an indefinite state of emergency in order to manage dissent more effectively. The viability of such an option and its sustainability will in no small part depend on how the deep state the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled presidency will choose to manage the uneasy tensions in their relationship, as mentioned above.

Finally, just because the Brotherhood and the deep state may reach agreement that the current upheavals necessitate that the country be placed under a state emergency, does not mean that they would succeed. Such schemes may have been feasible under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, but the new Egypt is one in which popular pressure does not take a backseat to elite-led pacts and backroom deals. If it were up to the Muslim Brotherhood and the deep state, they would have divided Egypt between themselves behind closed doors long time ago when the realm of elite politics was dominated by a SCAF-Brotherhood partnership. Their failure to do so speaks to the power of a revolutionary spirit inside the sphere of Egyptian contentious politics—one that has consistently subverted elite-led pacts that sought to exclude the Egyptian people from the table. This same revolutionary spirit stands in resilience throughout Egypt on the streets, in public squares, and, as of now, in front of the presidential palace.


[1] Interestingly, on Friday night the Brotherhood announced that its supporters would not march to the presidential palace in order to “avoid clashes” with the opposition, thereby suggesting that the group is conscious of the consequences of asking its own activists to assemble near opposition gatherings.

برهان شاوي: وهم الحرية

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[“كتب” هي سلسلة تستضيف “جدلية” فيها المؤلفين والمؤلفات في حوار حول أعمالهم الجديدة ونرفقه بفصل
من الكتاب.]

”وهم الحرية: مقاربات حول مفهوم حرية الفكر والإرادة“ المؤلف بُرهان شاوي، عن الدار العربية  للعلوم
ناشرون 2012 

جدلية: كيفتبلورتفكرةالكتاب،وماالذيقادكنحوالموضوع؟

 بُرهان شاوي: أنا لم أفكر في تأليف كتاب حول هذا الموضوع، أقصد هنا سؤال الحرية والإرادة، وإنما تشكل الموضوع بشكل عفوي في البداية. فقد كنت أفكر في كتابة روايتيّ (متاهة آدم) و(مشرحة بغداد)، وهما خطوة جديدة في تجربتي مع السرد الروائي، فبعد سنوات طوال من كتابة روايتي الأولى (الجحيم المقدس)، حيث كنت قد كتبتها في العام 1987، بألمانيا، بدأت كتابة روايتي (متاهة آدم) في صيف العام 2011، وكنت أثناء ذلك قد كتبت الفصل الأول من روايتي (مشرحة بغداد). ولأن الروايتين تناقشان محنة الإنسان في هذه الحياة، وأسئلة الوجود البشري، وإرادة الكائن البشري في تحديد مصيره، فقد كان من الضروري أن أصل إلى إستيعاب هذه الأسئلة بالأقل، من خلال مراجعة بعض مراحل الفكر البشري في سعيه للإجابة على هذه الأسئلة. 

وبعيداً عن كل إشكالات الرواية والكتابة الروائية، كان سؤال الحرية مقلقاً بالنسبة لي، فهو يرتبط بسؤالي عن حقيقة المقدس، وحقيقة خلق الجنس البشري، ومفهوم الخطيئة، والخطيئة الأولى لآدم، وما يترتب على ذلك عن سؤال الحرية والإرادة، وهل الإنسان مخير أم مسير؟ فإذا كان مخيراً، فلماذا هو ليس مخيراً في إعادة قوى حواسه ووظائفها، وفي التحكم بالوظائف البايولوجية على الأقل لجسده، إذ أن هذا الجسد مثل معمل كيمياوي لا سيطرة لنا عليه، بالرغم من أنه جسدنا، وملكنا؟ وإذا كان مسيراً، فسنقع في محنة أخلاقية ودينية، إذ أن كل الفساد والجريمة التي تسمم العلاقات الإنسانية لا يتحمل الإنسان وزرها، فالمجرم ليس مجرماً لأن هناك من كتب عليه هذا المصير، وبالتالي فهو بريء، وعقابه جريمة؟ هكذا بدأتُ من الأسئلة البسيطة، وهكذا توجهت لمعرفة مواقف المفكرين والأديان من هذه الأسئلة التي بدأت ساذجة وبسيطة جداً، لكن اتضح أنها بسيطة كالماء ومعقدة ومليئة بالأسرار مثل الماء أيضا. هكذا بدأت أولى خطواتي مع الكتاب. لكن من عادتي، وهذا من طبيعة عملي الأكاديمي، أن أدون الهوامش والاستشهادات بالنصوص في أوراق جانبية، وأبوبها حسب الموضوعات والفصول. وحينما انتهيت من كتابة روايتي، وجدت أنني قد أنجزت كتاباً موازياً يبحث في إشكالية الحرية وإرادة الإنسان.    

ج: ماهيالأفكاروالاطروحاتالرئيسيةالتييتضمنهاالكتاب؟

ب.شإنه كتاب بحث، وأسئلة ومراجعات شخصية حول ما تم طرحه عبر التاريخ، عما جاء في الأديان والفلسفات القديمة، وعما طرحه المفكرون، وبالتالي ليست هناك إطروحات مقصودة ومحددة في الكتاب، فهو كتاب يعرض بالشكل الذي فهمته، مفهوم الحرية والإرادة، مع تعقيباتي هنا وهناك، أثناء العرض. لكن الذي توصلت إليه من خلال الكتاب هو أن أي حديث عن حرية الإنسان المطلقة، ليس إلا ضرباً من الوهم، فالإنسان محكوم عليه بضرورات بايولوجية، لا يستطيع أن يغير من مسارها. فمع لغز أول نبض للقلب في جسد الجنين، وهو في رحم أمه، تبدأ ماكنة القلب بالحركة والنبض، وليس للإرادة الإنسان أي دور في ذلك، ولا يستطيع أن يتحكم هو بقلبه، إلا إذا قرر أن ينهي حياته. وكذا الأمر مع الدورة الدموية الكبرى والصغرى، وكذا الأمر مع عملية الهضم والتتمثيل الغذائي، بل وحتى مع البول والتغوط، فلا سيطرة للإنسان على جسده، فكأنما في أعماق جسده ثمة كائن حيواني آخر، إنسان آخر، هو الذي يسير جسده. كما إن الإنسان محكوم بضرورات كونية، فهو لا يستطيع أن يغير من حركة الليل والنهار، ولا أن يتحكم في الفصول، ولا في حركة النجوم، وتألق النجوم واختفائها عن السماء في بعض الليالي. لكن الإنسان، من الجانب الآخر، كائن حر في أن يحب أو لا يحب نوعا ما من الفواكه، أو يشتري الثياب التي تعجبه، أو أن يقرأ الكتاب الذي يشاء، وأن يتبنى الفكر الذي يعتقده صحيحا، وأن ينتمي للحزب الذي يؤمن به، ويناضل ضد الظلم، والإضطهاد، والعنصرية، والإستغلال والقمع الفكري، وأن يتحمل وزر أي تصرف يقوم به، وبالتالي يمارس حريته، أو هكذا يعتقد. وبالتالي ثمة وهم في فهم حرية الإنسان. ويمكننا أن نعود إلى حي بن يقظان لابن طفيل، او روبنسون كروزو المعزول في جزيرته، فما معنى الحرية بالنسبة لهما؟ إنها عبء لا معنى له.. إنهما أمام معنى وجودهما في هذا الكون.. مفهوم الحرية الإجتماعية والسياسية وكل مفاهيم الأخلاق والعدالة تسقط معناها حينما يكون الإنسان وحيداً، مثل روبنسون كروزو وحي بن يقظان.. إنهم أمام سؤال الوجود، وفي هذا الوضع بالذات الإنسان محكوم بالضرورات الكونية والبايولوجية أكثر من أية ضرورات إجتماعية .. إنها متاهة الوجود. 

ج: ماهيالتحدياتالتيجابهتكأثناءالبحثوالكتابة؟

ب.ش: ليست هناك تحديات محددة. ربما بذلت جهداً للحصول على أكبر عدد ممكن من المصادر، سواء  التي استخدمتها وأخذت عنها الكثير من الاستشهادات، أم التي قرأتها فقط، لاسيما وأنا كنت أكتب تحت ظروف قاهرة، وتوتر سياسي واجتماعي مرعب. الكتاب أنجزته في بغداد، ونشرته مسلسلاً في جريدة الصباح الجديد البغدادية أول الأمر، قبل أن يظهر في كتاب. وربما يمكنني الحديث عن تحدٍ ، بل عن حالة واجهتني أثناء البحث ، إذ وجدت الكثير من التفاهات والخزعبلات في الكثير من كتب التراث، مثلما في كتب بعض المعاصرين، كما اكتشفت أن الطائفية في الفكر الإسلامي تمتد من سقيفة بني ساعدة، وستبقى إلى آخر الزمان.. لقد رأيت الكثير من الباحثين المتميزين، لكنهم مثل الذي يقرأ آية (ولا تقربوا الصلاة..). مفكرو نصف القول، والإستشهادات المبتورة، والتضليل المقصود، مثلما رأيت التبعية الفكرية المقززة، حيث الكثير ممن يحاول إبراز معرفته التاريخية ودعم كتابته وبحثة بخلفية تاريخية، لا يعود للنص التراثي الأصلي، وانما لإستشهادات كتاب آخرين، ومعظم هؤلاء الآخرين قد شوهوا النص الذي استشهدوا به، والنتيجة تكون ركاماً من الاستشهادات التاريخية المبتورة والمشوهة عند قصد أو عن إستسهال فكري، لكن لتكرارها صارت أشبه بالحقيقة التاريخية.. ومراجعة بسيطة للأصل التاريخي وقراءة ممعنة له، تكشف التضليل الهائل الذي مورس على مدى عقود، بل وقرون من الزمان. الاستسهال.. الاستسهال هو سرطان البحث الفكري في التراث الإسلامي. وبالمناسبة، ولكي أكون أميناً، لقد واجهت مثل هذه الحالات في الفكر الأوربي ايضا.

ج: كيفيتموضعهذاالكتابفيالحقلالفكري/ الجنسالكتابيالخاص،وكيفيتفاعلمعه؟

ب.ش: أعتقد أن هذا الكتاب ينتمي لحقل الدراسات الثقافية..فهو يخرج عن أصولية البحث الأكاديمي الصارمة.. كتاب فيه شرح مفاهيمي وتاريخي وفلسفي أكثر من كتاب طروحات محددة سلفاً من أجل اثباتها وتأكيد نتائجها.

ج: ماهوموقعهذاالكتابفيمسيرتكالفكريةوالإبداعية؟

ب.ش: لا أستطيع أن أحدد موقعاً معينا له، لكني أعتقد أنه يقف في موقع مفصلي في تجربتي الفكرية، ومسيرتي في الكتابة. بالمناسبة..هناك فصول عديدة أخرى لم ألحقها بالكتاب، لأنها تدخل في حقول تبعد الكتاب عن مركز الأسئلة..هناك فصول عن خديعة المعتزلة التاريخية.. وعن دور الشيعة في الصراع الفكري الإسلامي.. وعن لا علمية معظم الدراسات التي تناولت المعتزلة ومنحهم هذه المكانة في تاريخ الفكر الإسلامي.. وأرجو ألا يفهم من كلامي أنني ضدهم، وإنما أردت القول بأن الدراسات التي كتبت عنهم تتناولهم دون الانتباه للشرط التاريخي، فهم يتحدثون عن أول شيوخ المعتزلة مثلاً، ويربطون طروحاته بطروحات شيخ آخر منهم عاش بعده بمائتي عام، وكأنهما رأي واحد.. مثلما نتحدث اليوم عن الماركسية، فنتحدث عن فكر ماركس ونكمل فكرته بآراء وأفكار لوي آلتوسر، علماً أن لوي آلتوسر نفسه كان يضع الحدود بين ماركس الشاب صاحب مخطوطات 1884 وماركس صاحب (رأس المال)، ويعتقد أنه هو ليس نفس الفكر الذي عُرف بالماركسية فيما بعد. 

ج: ماهوالجمهورالمفترضللكتاب،وماالذيتأملأنيصلإليهالقراء؟

ب.ش: لا أفكر بالجمهور عند الكتابة..لكني أفترض الجمهور الذي يعرف الذين أتحدث عنهم.. وقد يبدو الكتاب للمتعمقين ليس إلا تذكير بمشكلة الحرية والإرادة، لكن من موقع آخر، لا يفترض الاختلاف، وربما سيولد المتعة الفكرية والمعرفية عند الذين لم تتسن لهم الظروف لقراءة معظم الفلاسفة المفكرين الذين أتحدث عنهم في الكتاب، وربما سيولد لديهم بعض الأسئلة حول مفهوم الحرية والإرادة.. وإذا ما حصل ذلك فسأكون سعيداً حقاً، وأعتبر أنني حققت شيئا.  

ج: ماهيمشاريعكالأخرىالمستقبلية؟

ب.ش: ما زلت منهمكا في الكتابة الروائية، وأعتقد أني سأكرس نفسي ووقتي لها، فقد بدأت ثلاثية المتاهة: متاهة آدم، متاهة حواء.. والآن أنا منهمك في كتابة متاهة قابيل. أما في المجال الفكري فقد كان بودي متابعة الفصول الأخرى وتنظيمها في كتاب، لكني وجدت أن من الضروري كتابة فصول أخرى كي أتمكن من ضمها ككتاب، لكن الأمر مرهون بالوقت، ولا أعرف بالضبط متى يمكنني ذلك.

”وهم الحرية: مقاربات حول مفهوم حرية الفكر والإرادة“ المؤلف بُرهان شاوي، عن الدار العربية  للعلوم ناشرون 2012. 

الشواهد والبحوث في (تاريخ النزول) تؤكد بأن أول إشارة لقصة (آدم) وردت في صورة (ص) دون الإشارة إلى اسمه، لكن سرد نص القصة يتكرر في سور لاحقة بذكر الاسم (آدم)، بدءأ من سورة (الأعراف) حيث يرد ذكر اسم (آدم) لأول مرة في القرآن الكريم، ثم في سورة (طه)، و(الإسراء) و(الحجر) و(الكهف) و(البقرة).

عند تفكيك النص القرآني نجد ثمة (جبرية) تحكم موقف الملائكة، رغم أن الرب الخالق يمنحهم (حرية التعبير والفكر) كما جاء في القرآن الكريم:(وإذ قالَ ربُك للملائكـة ِ إنـي جـاعـلٌ  في الأرض خليفــة ً قالـوا أتجعـل فيهـا مَن يُفسدُ فيهـا ويَسفكُ الدمــاءَ ونحــنُ نُسبحُ بحمـدكَ ونُقـدسُ لكَ قالَ إنـي أعـلمُ ما لا تعــلمـون (30) وعـلمَ آدمَ الأسـماءَ كُلهـا ثمَ عـرَضَـُهم عـلى المـلائكــة ِ فقـالَ أنبئوني بأسـماء هـؤلاء إن كنتـم صـادقين (31) قـالـوا سُبحـانكَ لا عـِلمَ لنا إلا ما عَلمتنــا إنـك أنتَ العليـمُ الحكيـم (32) قالَ يا آدم أنبِهُم بأسمائهـِم فلمـا أنبـأهُم بأسمائهـِم قالَ ألمْ اقــُل لـكم إنـي أعلمُ غيب َ السمواتِ والأرض وأعلـمُ ما تبـدونَ وما كنتم تكتمُـون (33) وإذ قُلنـا للمـلائكـــةِ اسـجدوا لآدمَ فسـجدوا إلا إبليسَ أبـى وأستكبرَ وكان من الكـافــرين (34).(سـورة البقـرة).

 فالملائكة تناقش هنا خالقها وباريها وربها في خلقه، لكنهم رغم ذلك أطاعوه وسجدوا لآدم. بيد أن (العصيان) و(التمرد) أو بتعبير آخر (حرية الإرادة والاختيار) مارسهما (آدم) و(إبليس)، فقد قرر (آدم وزوجه) إلى الاقتراب من الشجرة المحرمة رغم تحذيرات ربهما وخالقهما بعدم الاقتراب منها. وبغض النظر عن مسألة (غواية إبليس) لهما فأنهما كانا (أحرارا) في (الاختيار)، إذ قررا ب( إرادتهما) أن يقتربا من الشجرة، وان الله الخالق لم يتدخل في قرارهما الذاتي بالاقتراب من الشجرة المحرمة، وإلا لو كان هذا مقدرا لهما لما كانت ثمة (خطيئة) أصلا. 

وهذا ينسحب على (إبليس) أيضا، فقد كان (حرا) في معصيته بعدم السجود لآدم، بل أن الخالق يترك له حرية الدفاع عن نفسه، حيث جاء في النص القرآني – (سورة ص): ( قالَ يا إبليسُ ما منَعكَ أن تَسجُدَ لِما خَلَقتُ بيديَّ استكبرتَ أم كُنتَ من العالين (75) قال أنا خيرٌ منهُ خلقتني من نارٍ وخلقتهُ من طين (76) قال فاخرُجْ منها فإنكَ رجيم (77) وإن عليكَ لعنَتي إلى يومِ الدين(78) قال ربِ فأنظرِني إلى يومِ يُبعثون (79) قالَ فإنكَ مِنَ المنُظرين (80) إلى يوم الوقتِ المعلوم (81)). 

وقد تكرر النص في سور قرآنية أخرى، ولو باختلاف طفيف في التعبير، ففي (سورة الحجر) نقرأ: (وإذ قالَ رَبُّكَ للملائكـةِ إني خالقٌ بشراً من صلصالٍ من حمـأٍ مسنون (28) فإذا سَويّتُهُ ونَفخَتُ فيهِ من رُوحي فقعُوا لهُ ساجدين (29) فسَجدَ الملائكــةُ كُلُهُم أجمعون (30) إلا إبليسَ أبى أن يكونَ مع الساجدين (31) قالَ يا إبليسُ مالكَ ألا تكونَ مع الساجدين (32) قالَ لمْ أكُن لأسجُدَ لبشر خلقتَهُ من صلصالٍ من حمأٍ مسنون (33) قالَ فاخرُج منها فإنكَ رجيم (34) وإنَّ عليكَ اللعنةَ إلى يومِ الدين (35) قالَ ريِ فأنِظرني إلى يوم يُبعثون (36) قال فإنكَ من المُنظَرين (37) إلى يوم الوقت المعلوم (38). 

السؤال الذي تثيره هذه القصة القرآنية العميقة الدلالة هو : هل أن (حرية) آدم و(حرية) إبليس في الجنة خاضعة لقوانين الضرورة والسببية؟ هل يدخلان ضمن سؤال (القضاء والقدر)؟ هل كان مقدرا لآدم وزوجه أن يتخذا هذا الموقف، وكذا إبليس وبهذا يكونا خارج (المعصية)؟ وإذا ما كان الأمر هكذا فهل كان مقدرا أن يهبطا إلى الأرض ليعيشا الشقاء البشري ويدفعا ثمن هذه المعصية؟. إن الأسئلة التي تثيرها هذه القصة تعود بنا إلى الأسئلة التي أثارها الإنسان المفكر (طريد الفردوس) في ما بعد، أي بعد أن تناسل (آدم وحواء) وتكاثر البشر ليشكلوا شعوبا وقبائل. أي سؤال (الحرية) في المنفى الأرضي، وهذا ما سنتوقف عنده لاحقاً.

A Nation of Pain and Suffering: Syria (Part 1)

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Our enemies did not cross our borders
They crept through our weakness like ants.
  -- Nizar Qabbani, “Footnotes to the Book of Setback”                                                   
    (Hawamesh‘ala Daftar al-Naksah), 1967. 

I. Refugees. 

News comes from a team sent by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) to Homs, Syria. They returned to Damascus in late November, reporting that thousands of displaced people in Homs now live in unheated communal shelters. Half the city’s hospitals no longer function, and severe shortages wrack the civilian population. As winter approaches, a lack of blankets, children’s shoes and warm clothing will become a serious problem -- according to the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) at least 75,000 children required blankets and warm clothes as of November 11. The team found that UNHCR plastic sheets are used to cover open doorways and windows, blown out in the fighting. “Many children have not been in school for the last 18 months. Some city hospitals have been converted into communal shelters and 60 percent of Homs doctors have left, along with other medical personnel.” Agencies like the UNHCR work on a shoestring budget. Their Syria operation is run with 350 staff members. Given the scale of the problem, this is miniscule. With winter approaching and news reports already of children suffering in the camps in Jordan from the cold, the UN has its work cut out for it.

There are, startlingly, areas of Homs where the situation seems almost normal. “Half of Homs exists as it did before,” reported Janine di Giovanni in late October. This is the half, largely Christian and Alawite, which the regime has started to protect. The tendency appears to be that if pockets of these communities are isolated from the fighting, sectarian fissures will open up and guarantee the regime of Assad with a loyal constituency. In other words, security has become a sectarian matter. If one half “exists as it did before,” di Giovanni notes, “The other half is rubble.” The UNHCR went to the second half.

The OCHA now reports that by its conservative calculations close to 2.5 million people inside Syria are affected by the violence (the dead, who number over 40,000 are in addition to this figure). The UNHCR has registered close to half a million refugees in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. But, as UNHCR’s Chief Communications officer Sybella Wilkes Moumtzis told me, there are “tens of thousands more thought to be in neighboring countries” who are being taken care of by national and non-governmental relief agencies.  

The UNHCR reports that refugees fleeing to Jordan have faced “generalized violence” during their transit. I asked Wilkes Moumtzis to define what the agency means by “generalized violence.” She notes simply that “there are daily arrivals of injured people who have to be treated in hospital.” UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Protection Erika Feller visited the Za’atri refugee camp in Jordan, which has the highest number of Syrian refugees. She found that “insecurity has extended to the country’s borders in some areas, making flight into neighboring countries particularly dangerous.” This is the reason why the UN has called for safe passage out of Syria. There is also talk among some relief agencies in Jordan that the treatment of the refugees by Jordanian authorities has not been exemplary.

Given the political paralysis on Syria, it is astounding that there is so little attention paid to the simple facts of human suffering. Qatar Charity, the Turkish Humanitarian Relief (which sponsored the Mavi Marmara ship to Gaza), the Algerian Reform and Guidance Charitable Association, Lebanon’s Bible Society, the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Danish Refugee Council and Doctors Without Borders and other charities have been raising money and sending aid to the refugee camps. Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief warns that about ten million Syrians are liable to starve this winter. The World Food Program reports that Syrians have been cutting back on their household consumption, skipping meals, eating less or eating lower quality food, sending children out to work, cutting back on education and healthcare and, most dangerously, selling their limited assets for immediate relief. The aid money is simply not enough, and some of it, aid workers tell me, has been misused through strictures of tied aid. 

During the worst of the sectarian conflict in Iraq at the time of the US occupation, Syria took in half a million Iraqi refugees. The number has now swelled to a million Iraqis under UNHCR protection. Many of them remained in their Syrian camps, afraid to return home to what they saw as dangerous instability. This year, as Syria tore at the seams, the Iraqis began their transit home (particularly middle-class Iraqis, who had been in the Damascus suburbs such as Seida Zeinab). But hundreds of thousand remain, afraid for what they will find at home, and fearful that they will be discriminated in the emergent Syria. The Iraqi government has opened its borders to fleeing Syrians. The ironies of disruption and social division are too terrible to bear for families who have lost so much of their sense of place. 

The West, which is otherwise vocal about this or that outrage, is sparing with its financial support for the agency. The financially weak Lebanese government has gone the extra mile with very little international support, a point made by the World Food Program’s Ertharin Cousins in early November as she toured the camps in the Bekaa Valley. The small (voluntary) tranches from the US government, for example, add up to the low millions (the most current contribution is $9.6 million).

Meanwhile, the USS Eisenhower, whose annual cost of operation is $200 million, has appeared off the coast of Syria – it has other motives than humanitarian assistance.

Brothers in the Hood: Egypt’s Soft Powers and the Arab World

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A Jordanian Islamist recently expressed his disappointment: “Egyptians are not giving President Mohammed Morsi a chance!” I responded, “Would you be this forgiving had Hamdeen Sabahi, a secular Nasserist, issued a decree that gave himself exceptional powers?” Silence. Irrespective of Morsi “rescinding” those powers, the continuing theatrics matters to a larger, if at times unacknowledged, constituency.

Across the Middle East, Islamist offshoots are carefully watching the political manoeuvering of Morsi and their spiritual progenitor, the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, so are a great proportion of Arab governments, elites and societies. The question riding on the chaos being played out – from the burning offices of the Freedom and Justice Party to the squares of Egyptian cities to the palace gates of power – is how will all this shape future trends throughout the Arab world?

As the centre of gravity of the Arab world, Egypt, due to its complex social structure, dynamic agencies, popular arts, and the intellectual seat of Sunni Islam, pushes ideas and principles into the international system that shape the preferences of Arab populations and, to a lesser degree, Muslim ones. The success or failure of Egypt’s political actors, narratives, and the popular mobilisation behind them, has a spill-over effect that can move their equivalents in the region.

Key groups, among them the Brotherhood, Salafis, and the recently stitched together National Salvation Front that has brought into its fold a large swathe of society including Muslims, Copts, secularists, liberals, revolutionaries, and Hosni Mubarak’s regime remnants, are battling it out with each other as the military repositioning itself again in a sacred drama in which the outcome could very well determine the regional terrain for the next fifty years.

For almost two years, the stage has seen the clash of various strands of infectious nationalism, authoritarian-leaning Islamism and a somewhat liberal pan-Arabism. Despite the differences across the political spectrum, and regardless of a weak economy, a common denominator binds them all on the vaguest of foreign policy fronts: to eventually reassert effective Egyptian hegemony (be it political, cultural, and/or religious) through the Arab world.

This is evident in the engagement level in the public space. When Egyptian liberals complain of Islamist protesters waving Saudi flags in Tahrir Square, it needs to be pointed out that this is not so different from when liberals wave Tunisian and revolutionary Syrian flags. One has a conservative pan-Islamist agenda, the other a revolutionary pan-Arab one – both with an Egypt at the head.

Even Islamists can espouse thinly-veiled (at times blatant) nationalist/pan-Arabist sentiment at the expense of “the Caliphate.” When translating earlier this year for an Australian journalist at the Alexandrian home of a senior policy-maker from the Salafist Al Nour Party, she asked him, “Many observers say you are influenced by Saudi Wahhabism.” He understood the question well enough to break out of the Arabic (thus bypassing me) and flatly told her in English: “Egypt teaches, it is never taught!” At a debate I attended last year between liberal Amr Hamzawy and Brotherhood Sobhi Saleh, the latter who started off on a Quranic platform could not resist by ending his speech by invoking Egypt’s ancient Pharaonic glory and its central role in world history and trade – to the frenzy of the audience.

Inherent in the popular Egyptian "worldview" is that Egypt has been robbed of its prestige and leadership role of the Arab world, due to its defeat in the 1967 war, but more so due to Anwar Sadat shifting course onto a state-first policy, and the unimaginative Mubarak bludgeoning the country’s aspirations for 30 years.

In the 2000s, the term soft power (coined by Joseph Nye) – meaning the power of attraction, as opposed to the power of coercion (hard power) – entered Egyptian public discourse. The expression “loss of Egypt’s soft power” was invoked by intellectuals and commentators following every crisis when Egypt was at a disadvantage, in negotiations and peacemaking, such as the Iraq War, Nile Basin talks, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Originally, soft power accompanied the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Nasser acquisitioned pan-Arabism (as conceived in 1930s Syria) and propagated it throughout the Arab world. Michael Barnett states, “Nasser helped define what counted as an Arab state in good standing, the types of norms to which it should adhere, and how those norms might relate to the desired regional order.” In fact, the dangerous precedent Nasser set (and encouraged) were military coups in Arab states, and worse, the authoritarianism, centralisation of government, and undermining of institutions which Syria inherited from its botched brief union with Egypt (1958-1961). The end result of this is the heavy price that we see Syrians paying today.

There was another dark element to Egypt’s social soft power when it laid out the ideological foundations of radical Islamism, no thanks to the country’s oppressive prison system and torture chambers. Like the abused who grow up to be abusers, the Brotherhood exhibits such strains; while not the worst of Islamist organisations, recent events have indicated that they are disturbing enough.

The argument for Egypt’s soft power often committed the vehicle fallacy, that soft power was something that can be possessed by an agent, inferring that it was a resource rather than a feature of a relationship. Therefore soft power was translated as a tangible that can be created, curtailed, or squandered. All power is relational. Egypt’s future relationship with the Arab world will depend on how it is accepted by the recipient of that influence. To give a close example, there has been talk of Qatari soft power, but this confuses resources such as Al-Jazeera for power. Qatar’s ability to influence was due, in part, to the Gulf peninsula’s positive or neutral relationship with other Arab societies, the satellite station being a feature in that relationship. Once Qatari foreign policy started to influence Al-Jazeera (Arabic) towards a pro-Muslim Brotherhood slant it angered many Egyptians in the process. The result? the recent burning down of the channel’s office in Cairo by the revolutionary camp and viewers shunning the station in droves – a sight unimaginable two years ago.

The stakes involved in Egypt’s outcome are high enough to ensure that each group has their external elite and social backers and cheerleaders: Saudi Arabia backs the Salafis, Qatar backs the Muslim Brotherhood, not to mention the Muslim Brotherhood franchise throughout the Arab and Islamic world that looks up to Cairo’s Brotherhood "mothership." Egypt’s liberals/non-Islamists/Christians are applauded, ideationally at least, by their very (the largest) counterparts in the Arab world. Finally, the wildcard, the Egyptian military, and their US/Israel/Gulf backers (See my last month’s piece The President and the fatal trilateral logic of US, Egyptian and Israeli relations).

While none of the Arab uprisings were calling for the demolition of borders (the demands were mostly domestic), the overthrow of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the subsequent cascading effects illustrated that Arab populations operate on a transnational identity-based and media-fueled shared narrative of fate and destiny. Egypt amplifies a certain narrative and eventually makes it the norm.

Arabs are watching and taking notes. It is pertinent that Egypt sends the appropriate cues by getting the democratic experiment right and puts in check the authoritarian encroachment of the Brotherhood and ensures the ink on the draft constitution does not dry. While Egypt’s democratic transition can have the opposite effect of increasing regime repression like what has been witnessed in the Gulf States. An Egypt transformed into an Arab democratic model will enable other Arab countries to move in a progressive direction, otherwise they would be reluctant to take the risks of reform and further dispirit key democratic actors. Egypt’s current opposition, and the democratic camp in general, will need to augment their appeal in inter-Arab relations by articulating and framing their argument as anti-authoritarian and avoid the identity politics that is the lynchpin of Islamist groups.

In 1932, the then infant Brotherhood knew that to alter the trajectory of Egyptian society, they had to move out of the rural areas and bring their message to Cairo. This was not only because the city was Egypt’s political, economic, and cultural capital, but as Steven A. Cook noted, “movements, ideologies, knowledge, and culture tended to reverberate from Cairo in concentric circles to the rest of Egypt then to the Levant and to the Persian Gulf beyond.”

Despite over eighty years of experience, the legitimacy of the Brotherhood is rapidly being undermined day by day. A once-fragmented opposition is gradually gaining ground. A military is redefining its relationship with Egypt’s new political actors. After the dust settles and the tear gas clears, only time will tell which Egypt is to be groomed for the Arab world of the twenty-first century. 

[This article originally appeared in Open Democracy.]

In Honor of Titans

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In hindsight, the popular uprising that erupted in the occupied Palestinian territories on 9 December 1987 and continued for six grueling yet heroic years makes perfect sense. Scholars, analysts, and activists have demonstrated how a variety of factors came together to ripen conditions for the eruption of mass protest and its development into a sustained and organized rebellion. 

These conditions included accelerated colonial expansion throughout the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip, in some respects going well beyond the Allon Plan that has since 1967 served as Israel’s master plan for the occupied territories; a palpable increase in state-sponsored settler vigilantism as well as racist brutalization of Palestinian migrant workers within Israel; Israel’s self-proclaimed adoption of a ruthless “Iron Fist policy” in 1985, replete with deportations, incarcerations, town and house arrests, house demolitions and the like; a growth spurt and gradual mainstreaming of an Israeli fascism that openly advocated not only a combination of Jim Crow and Nuremberg laws but mass expulsion of all Arabs living under Israeli rule; and growing hardship resulting from the combination of increased Israeli restrictions on Palestinian economic activity and constriction of Arab labor markets. 

No less significant were the serious investments, most notably by Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), in local popular and political organization as PLO factions – mainly Fatah, the PFLP and DFLP – joined the more longstanding campaigns of the Palestine Communist Party and Islamist movement after the PLO was evicted from Lebanon in 1982. These were augmented, in mid-1987, by the end of the Palestinian schism that had plagued the national movement since 1983, and a series of bold attacks by Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip and the PFLP-GC in northern Israel that exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s military.

To these must be added the growing despair among Palestinians as the Reagan administration transformed the American-Israeli relationship from a strategic partnership in which Washington nevertheless continued to pay lip service to international law into an insufferable erotic stage show highlighted by multiple mass Congressional orgasms. Simultaneously the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was in the West Bank and Gaza Strip translated into the further institutionalization of military government in the guise of its Civil Administration, as well as a determined Israeli campaign to mobilize collaborationist Village Leagues. And there was no Palestinian who failed to notice the growing pre-occupation of Arab officialdom with the conflict between Iraq and Iran, to the point where the 1987 Arab League Summit mentioned Palestine as a passing afterthought.

The above checklist for insurrection could go on for several pages, vital statistics included, and still be woefully deficient. The point, and what is too often forgotten, is that on 8 December 1987 no one was expecting even a traffic accident at the Erez checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip. When it came – accident or not - its four fatalities would the next day set off a series of protests in the Gaza Strip’s Jabaliyya refugee camp and then Nablus’s Balata refugee camp in the West Bank. Spreading like wildfire, these demonstrations metamorphosed into a popular revolt that within weeks made Intifada part of the English language.

To the extent that 8 December 1987 that morning had any political significance, it was yet another day in the buildup to Israel’s fortieth anniversary celebrations the following May. With the PLO down and out, Palestinians in Lebanon barely surviving the siege of their camps by the Syrian-sponsored Amal movement, the occupied territories more secure for Israeli soldiers and settlers than most small American towns, and Palestinians in Israel pre-occupied with the increasingly hostile rivalry between the local communist and Islamist parties, Israel was sitting pretty. So pretty, that its fortieth anniversary was confidently anticipated by its leaders as the moment when the accursed Palestinians and their damned cause could finally and unceremoniously be consigned to the dustbin of history and vanish forevermore. 

This was not an exclusively Israeli ambition. True, Palestine, sitting as it does at the nexus between East and West, North and South, past, present and future, had become a – often the – cause célèbre in much of the third world, Africa and South Asia in particular. Yet in most of Europe, North and South America, and significant parts of east Asia leaders and often peoples saw Israel’s upcoming celebration as a significant event, whether for strategic, political, religious, opportunistic and/or moral reasons. If Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War had for the first time televised the realities of Zionism into its supporters’ living rooms, even the Sabra-Shatila Massacre that mid-September had done little more than jolt those who had ecstatically celebrated Israel’s 1967 conquests into questioning if Israel was entirely blameless or merely thoroughly righteous. And in any case there was still a Cold War to be won.  The late 1980s was a very different world.

All that began to change on 9 December 1987. Whether one sees the Intifada as harvesting fruit sufficiently lowered by previous decades of struggle or the beginning of a new era, it was and remains the turning point. It is the date future historians will pinpoint as the moment when Israel in the global consciousness began to be transformed from a Mediterranean Shangri-La to a Middle Eastern South Africa. 

In order to pierce the ignorant conscience of hundreds of millions of people who either never knew or had forgotten that colonialism is nothing less than daily evil – Israel had after all successfully marketed its presence as “the benign occupation” – Palestinians first had to break through the barrier of fear. And a very formidable barrier it was. The occupied territories were not governed like the rest of Israel – which would have been bad enough – but rather ruled by a subsidiary military government which legislated by decree and was tailor-made to drive Palestinians out of their lands and out of their minds. Anthony Coon, a specialist in town planning at Strathclyde University, for example, concluded in a study commissioned for the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq that he had never previously come across a town planning agency that destroyed more homes than it authorized.

Israeli control was so pervasive and intrusive that the colonial administration bore greater similarities to totalitarian states than Israel itself.  Permits were required for virtually everything, with one benefit being a steady supply of informers and collaborators recruited amongst parents desperate to obtain medical attention for a severely ill child, university graduates eager for employment to support their existing families and start new ones, and a host of others. 

The list of prohibited items and activities – including the Palestinian flag, uncensored newspapers and unauthorized meetings of more than several people – would have made Kim Il Sung proud. Those who refused to cooperate, persisted with their thought crimes or actively resisted Israeli power with so much as a slogan could expect imprisonment, torture, the sealing or outright bulldozing of their homes and the ultimate punishment of deportation and exile. That’s the short version, and conditions in East Jerusalem, formally annexed and under direct Israeli government control were only in some respects better while in others even worse.

But break the barrier of fear the Palestinians did. And how. Not because they had nothing to lose, but because they had everything to gain and were determined to win. Salim Tamari has pointed out that what distinguished this uprising from previous post-1967 revolts was that it included not only towns and refugee camps but villages as well. And by early 1988 the uprising encompassed every town, every refugee camp and every village from the northern West Bank to those quarters of Rafah refugee camp adjoining the Egyptian border in the southern Gaza Strip. Their residents collectively engaged in mass demonstrations that claimed a daily toll of unarmed protestors shot or beaten to death; general and commercial strikes that Israel unsuccessfully tried to break for weeks on end with punishing sanctions including repeatedly ripping the doors off stores that refused to open and impounding everything in sight; and any variety of activities that were usually unusually creative and designed to make their homeland and themselves ungovernable. It was based on, and sustained by, numerous forms of social and economic solidarity that emerged as circumstances required and that relied first and foremost on an extraordinary and extraordinarily selfless spirit of voluntarism. 

The uprising almost immediately spawned a coherent and cohesive leadership in the form of the Unified National Command of the Uprising. Representing the main PLO factions and Islamic Jihad and reflected in a multiplicity of regional and local committees, it issued weekly communiqués exhorting the people to greater militancy and sacrifice and setting out a schedule for the coming week’s activities. Its instructions were – at least initially – unquestionably followed not out of fear but out of devotion to the national movement and the cause it represented.

One of the most memorable aspects of the uprising is that it was truly national in spirit, if not always in scale. 21 December 1987, I believe it was, was the day in which Palestinians throughout mandatory Palestine conducted an active general strike. Within Israel, Palestinian activists shut down key highways with burning tires and other obstacles. For Israel’s leaders, it was perhaps their most fearful day since October 1973. In an era when Palestinians were still led as and acted as a people rather than independent fragments of a broken whole, the uprising was as much about ending the siege of the camps in Lebanon as evicting Israel from the Gaza Strip. And indeed, within the uprising’s first month Hafiz al-Asad was left with no choice but to order his Lebanese surrogates to call off their murderous siege of Beirut’s refugee camps “in solidarity with the Intifada in Palestine”. 

Israel’s response was as furious as it was ferocious. The headlines rightly spoke of children shot through the head, stone-throwing youths having their arms deliberately broken, adults beaten to death in their homes and activists summarily executed in broad daylight. Israel’s soldiers were after all acting on Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Neanderthal exhortation to “break their bones”, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s demand to “re-establish the barrier of fear”. Away from the floodlights Israel’s finest visited 1,001 terrors upon their subjects each and every single day and night for the next six years. Yet everything the Israelis threw at the Palestinians seemed only to make them stronger and was thrown right back at them. This was particularly the case with the prison system, which became as much a rite of passage as matriculation from high school.

Collective punishment was often the Israeli weapon of choice. These included travel bans, the severance of utilities, school closures, mass arrests and the systematic ransacking of homes. Most punishing of all were the strictly enforced round-the-clock curfews that could persist for weeks on end. Overcrowded homes boiling with frustration over lost incomes, untended crops, missed classes and dwindling supplies often came to resemble pressure cookers. Many a child who managed to escape to the roof or garden to break the monotony for some playtime, along with adults foraging for food or work, or tending to the needs of relatives, friends or comrades paid with their lives. Then as now, the Gaza Strip was the collective human guinea pig for the latest developments in Israeli sadism.

At a time when Israel was rather successfully marketing itself as the only democracy this side of the Big Bang, it bears recalling some of the measures it introduced or resurrected during those years: the fax machine and electronic mail were prohibited, all international telecommunications were severed (apparently the first time a state had done so since the Second World War), and Israel began the process of severing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, and East Jerusalem from the latter. The first victim of this separation policy was not the Gaza Strip but rather East Jerusalem, which lost its position as commercial, services, socio-cultural and political hub; since 1948 it had been dependent on the West Bank (and since 1967 Gaza Strip) “hinterland” for this role.

Israel was equally inventive with weaponry. Tear gas was transformed into a lethal weapon by firing canisters directly at the heads of demonstrators, or inundating curfewed homes full of infants, pregnant women and the elderly with copious amount of it. Its rubber bullets were actually steel marbles coated with the thinnest imaginable layer of rubber. Plastic bullets were simply hardened material shaped like the real thing, and unlike those used elsewhere for crowd control could instantly kill an adult. According to an UNRWA official in the Gaza Strip at the time, the Israeli military was constantly “improving” the material in clubs used to beat Palestinians to a pulp because victims’ skulls had a tendency to break the wooden ones and the fiberglass version tended to fray after intensive use. In a display of one-upmanship towards Palestinians armed with slingshots, Israeli army engineers developed a gravel thrower that inundated streets with large quantities of small stones delivered at what seemed to be supersonic speed. 

Throughout Israel’s weapon of choice remained humiliation. Somewhere in its corridors of power, some genius determined that if enough soldiers and Border Guards insisted on being called “Abu Allah”, and forced their detainees to chant “Arafat is a dog” and then bark like one before being urinated upon or forced to masturbate in front of them and fellow detainees, Palestinians would forget they lived under occupation or at least come to love Israel with the same devotion as its friends in Congress. (That the tactic was judged wildly successful by the Americans as they prepared to invade Iraq in the midst of yet another Palestinian uprising seems almost axiomatic). 

In what was above all a test of wills, Shamir and Rabin never succeeded in breaking the Palestinians or their rebellion. Nor did the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 1991 Gulf War help them much. They did however manage to degrade the uprising, not least by removing successive layers of ever less experienced leadership through arrest or liquidation. The PLO in exile, despite receiving insufficient credit for its role in the revolt, also undermined it in a variety of ways. And with the rise of Hamas factional cooperation gradually gave way to open rivalries. 

By the early 1990s a mass movement had increasingly developed into an armed insurgency that involved a significantly smaller number of activists. This was not by definition a negative development, although guns do always seem to bring excesses along for the ride. Rather, under the circumstances incipient guerilla warfare seemed to retard the forward momentum of the movement as much as promote it. Israel, which had responded to unarmed demonstrations and stone-throwing protests with snipers and machine gun fire, fought Kalashnikovs with helicopter gunships and anti-tank missiles. And still it failed to restore the status quo.

It would take the 1993 Oslo Agreement to terminate – or more accurately to abort - the uprising and with it the increasingly successful campaign to delegitimize the Israeli occupation while continuously increasing its cost. It remains speculative, but many have persuasively argued, and many more continue to believe, that if Yasir Arafat had not rushed into secret Norwegian negotiations with Israel and instead deferred to Haidar Abd-al-Shafi’s backbone in the formal Washington talks, Israel would eventually have acceded to a settlement freeze for the duration of any interim period. If the Palestinians had played their cards right and persevered further, it is a not unreasonable view that they could also have successfully defined the length and outcome of any interim period. Doing so would have most likely extracted an unspeakably cruel cost in Palestinian blood and treasure. But it was in 1993 already apparent and indeed predictable that relinquishing the demand for an end to occupation would be exponentially more costly.

Those who maintain that Oslo could have succeeded but for the failures of Israelis, Palestinians or both fundamentally misunderstand its nature and purpose. It was neither a peace process, nor an exam administered by Rabin and Clinton to determine if Arafat would mend his evil ways. Nor was the environment it provided for further Israeli colonial expansion the heart of the matter. Rather, Israel’s rulers and particularly its security establishment had by early 1988 concluded that the Intifada had irrevocably shattered the status quo, and began the search for a new paradigm. They chose not for annexation or a two-state framework, but rather separation. Israel opted for what Ehud Barak summarized, for those lacking a proper knowledge of Afrikaans, as “Us here and them there”. Separation reflected Israel’s assessment of reality and possibility in the context of the end of the Cold War, the transformation of its economy, and the unprecedented docility of the Arab world. Essentially, it would keep what it wanted and transfer responsibility for the rest to an enclosed Palestinian Authority. 

The West Bank Wall, the isolation of East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, and the ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley are therefore not indicators of a failed process, but rather demonstrate it is working precisely as designed. Oslo was arguably never meant to reach a terminal conclusion, since Israel’s leaders must have known the maximum they were prepared to concede on any of the so-called “permanent status issues” fell considerably short of the minimum any Palestinian leader could implement. 

Few conflicts can be traced back to the conceit of a single individual. With the 2000-2005 uprising, Barak’s conviction that his powers of persuasion were such that he could convince Arafat to accept permanent suzerainty in a single tête-à-tête at Camp David is as close as it gets. To the extent Oslo has failed, this is accounted for by the PA’s failure or refusal to eradicate resistance to the occupation, and the prospect that in combination with regional transformations the model of separation under occupation is proving increasingly untenable as well.

In this context much of what currently passes for debate regarding the correct framework to resolve the Question of Palestine is extraordinarily damaging and in many cases nothing short of infantile. The issue is not whether Palestinians can or should have one or two or several dozen states. Rather, the critical question remains unchanged: can the Palestinian people achieve anything at all if they are unable to first finish the work of uprisings past and terminate the Israeli colonial occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip? A failure to do so will produce neither two states consistent with the program proposed by the PLO during the 1970s and 1980s, nor a single state that is meaningfully different than the reality that already exists today. 

Given the centrality of the struggle against occupation to any Palestinian future, and the increasingly massive international support this now has, it should come as no surprise Zionist media today welcome contributions dismissing this essential precondition to Palestinian self-determination – however defined – as an irrelevant sideshow. To re-imagine the struggle for Palestinian self-determination as one where a secular democratic state can only be achieved by abandoning the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the tender mercies of unbridled Israeli colonialism is at best criminally negligent. A more purposeful and certainly more responsible position to take is to maximize each and every opportunity that exists for the re-internationalization of the Question of Palestine. It is not BDS or UN, as if one is somehow superior to the point of invalidating the other, but rather both and ICJ and EU and much more, effectively calibrated and integrated into a meaningful strategy with concrete as opposed to rhetorical objectives.

The so-called first Intifada was neither the first uprising in twentieth-century Palestinian history nor even the first such event after 1967. Palestinians began rebelling from virtually the moment the first British High Commissioner set foot in their country during the Mandatory period. The 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion, replete with the longest general strike in recorded history, was consistently held up by the Intifada’s leaders and participants as an example to be emulated. (The former had failed, but not for lack of trying and certainly not because that previous generation of revolutionaries ever decided the struggle to end the Mandate had become meaningless and began demanding Arab unity instead). Similarly, the mid-1970s and early 1980s had seen sustained periods of unrest in the occupied territories. Nevertheless, the 1987-1993 Intifada represents – alongside the 1936 Rebellion and the 1982 Siege of Beirut – for many Palestinians their finest hour during the past century. There are many reasons for this, but top of the list may well be the abiding perception that the combination of adversity and hope consistently bought out the very best in people at the individual and collective level under the worst imaginable circumstances. And truth be told, for many of the younger generation not yet saddled with the responsibilities of job and family, it was despite the manifold horrors also an exciting era. Alongside the death, destruction and grief that could be all-consuming, it equally offered the exhilaration of freedom in all its dimensions.

As might be expected after six grueling years of rebellion many Palestinians, particularly in the occupied territories, initially welcomed Oslo and either hoped – even if against hope – that the fine print would be overtaken by events or that Israel would see the light and simply go away. When this proved to be an illusion, anger began to set in, and Palestinians directed it not just at Israel and its foreign backers, but most vociferously at their own leaders who had knowingly allowed themselves to be hoodwinked at the negotiating table. Where Salim Tamari had in the 1980s pointed out that Israel’s search for a native pillar in the occupied territories had been one of the most unsuccessful in the history of colonialism, it now seemed that Israel had recruited no less than the leadership of the national liberation movement as sub-contractor for its rule.

I particularly recall taking a ride with an acquaintance in central Ramallah during the late 1990s. As we passed the boys’ school on Radio Street a few doors down from where I lived for a time during the above events, my acquaintance, as much in exasperation as admiration, began extolling its students’ contribution to the Intifada, and exclaimed they had done more for their people than the entire Palestinian Authority had or ever would do. Damn right he was. And I will honor each of those titans until the day I die.

[An earlier version of this article was published on Mondoweiss.]

Art, Politics, and Critical Citizenry in Morocco: An Interview with Driss Ksikes

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Driss Ksikes’ presence in Morocco is not one that is easily captured by static titles. He is at once an artist, an academic, a journalist, and an activist. However, it is his ability to transcend the rigidity of any one of these roles that has allowed him to evade stereotypes. Both his artistic and political activities have also played a hand in inspiring him as director of the Centre d’Etudes Sociales, Economiques et Managériales (CESEM). Perhaps his best descriptor is the one he has used to describe himself: a “critical citizen.” 

Ksikes began his career as a playwright, publishing his first play in 1998, Pas de memoire...memoire de pas. He then published Le saint des incertains in 2000, IL in 2008, and The Match in 2010. His novel, Ma boite noire, was published by Tarik Editions (Casablanca) and Le grand souffle (Paris) in 2006. Beginning in 2002, he also acted as editor-in-chief of popular Moroccan French language magazine TelQuel, as well as editor-in-chief of its sister magazine from the same media group, the Arabic and Darija language Nichane. He subsequently left this post in 2006 after a highly publicized criminal prosecution for “defaming Islam and damaging morality” as a result of published jokes parodying the late King Hassan II and Islam.

Currently, Ksikes contributes as a freelance journalist to numerous international publications, is formally involved as director of CESEM, the research body for HEM (first business school in Morocco), and publisher of the analytical website Economia. Ksikes continues to be an influential force in Moroccan theater as a partner in DABAteatr,daba being the Moroccan word for “now.” DABAteatr’s ensemble of actors, artists, and activists create theater to engage citizen-audiences in the present, the political, and social landscape of their own lives--a project that highlights Ksikes’ own imperative of critical citizenry.

Allison McManus (AM): You have been politically active in Morocco for years and in many different roles – as a journalist, novelist, professor, playwright, activist, intellectual, and others. How has your sense of place in Moroccan society and politics changed with respect to these different roles, if it has at all?

Driss Ksikes (DK): Allow me to borrow Gramsci's well-known expression and talk about my modest ambition to be an "organic connector." I am not conveying ideology but energy, on stage and through writing as a form of action. This energy is the result of my hankering for citizenship, the feeling that you should dig even deeper in the place where you fell from the womb, to make sure you are exploring all the potential it offers--as a place for life, debate, creation, and controversy. I am mainly a free writer concerned with his time. This takes various forms but it boils down to the same result: finding poetics to write on the world and ethics to act from the spot where you are.

AM: In 2007, while editor of the magazine Nichane, you received a suspended jail sentence and fine after the magazine published a series of jokes with religious and political content. How did this incident affect your resolve as a journalist and activist? With regard to freedom of expression, how has the situation changed in the last five years?

DK: This episode helped me realize many things. The first is that one should not only offer freedom as discourse and as a media practice, but also make sure there are enough people ready to grasp the need for freedom and fight for it. This episode helped me make a major decision, which was to go back to fieldwork, theatre, public debates, and interaction with people that my full time media involvement did not allow me to do. This episode helped me realize how attached I am to independence and how reluctant I am to accept self-censorship. Since then, that is unfortunately what I observe: many editors have been so involved in business and political bargaining that they accept constant self-censorship as a press management rule.

AM: Can you describe your motivations in joining the February 20 marches? Do you feel that the demonstrations changed popular conceptions of politics – why or why not?

DK: Without the February 20 marches, there would have been neither a new (and yet to be developed and implemented) constitution, nor a general feeling that voicing political requests and asking for more accountability is the only way to pave the way for change and reform. Morocco is a complex country where game rules involve a multi-faceted clientelist elite. There should still be more structured and targeted pressure from self-authorized citizens to bring about further changes. But I am not sure there is enough awareness that February 20 is the beginning of a-way-to-go process, not a dead end.

AM: You have mentioned in the past, with regards to Dabateatr, that “art is political.” In what ways does the theater contribute to social politics? Do you feel that this role is different in a country where freedom of expression has a history of contestation? Does this history alienate the art scene from a political discourse, make it more pertinent, or otherwise?

DK: I am afraid this quote "art is politics" is very often misunderstood. I do not mean that art should by definition tackle neither political issues nor, worse, be persuasive in the sense of giving lessons to the public on what they should think, do, or believe. This is an alienating and poor conception of theatre. I am rather saying that being on stage or in the public space, playing a role, making people think, feel, and interact with what has to do with life, love, politics, beauty, is political as such. People never take such a pause and realize how important is a feeling, a look, a desire, a frustration but in theatre. This has nothing to do with contestation. It has to do with individual interpretation, post-play interaction with the public, and by large,going out from home to confront questions that concern the city.

AM: Do you feel that there is democracy in Morocco, and if so, does it differ from other countries? How does the most recent version of the constitution (approved by referendum 1 July 2011) support or deviate from a democratic vision?

DK: I do not think that only legal texts create a democracy. That helps a lot but not as much as it should in societies like ours where interpersonal, informal interaction, and illegal, but authorized, exchange has much more weight. I will not deny that we have moved some steps forward, but not enough to be a democracy. Powers are still weakly separated, economic rent is still prevalent, and the ministry of interior is still monopolistic. And besides security and administrative decisions, cities' political, economic, and social management, Morocco is still hesitating politically. I think that the will for democracy should not only come from above, where the balance of powers is by large in favor of a ruling monarchy, but from political parties who did not even dare to go as far as the monarchy did in response to the February 20 movement requests for political reform. Leadership and deliberative culture are needed to implement these reforms in various layers of our society. And in this regard, we are far behind.

AM: The idea of “Moroccan exceptionalism” seems to be beloved both by pundits and those who challenge them. In your opinion, what is Moroccan exceptionalism?

DK: That is a bad patriotic song. There is no such a thing as a nation "so different in nature" in relation to others. The Moroccan state has an old, ever-adapting political know-how that consists of managing short term crises to extend the life of the regime. It works because the state is weakly institutionalized and society is weakly empowered. It works because people are heavily indebted, individualistic, and pragmatic. These are some of the characteristics that could be compared to and nuanced in other contexts, but they are by no means exceptional.

AM: You were recently quoted in TelQuel as saying that the sense of collectiveness did not exist in Morocco, as though individuals “functioned in silos” (my translation from French). From where might a future sense of solidarity arise in the country?

DK:
Solidarity cannot be a moral stance. Only a strong, large, and prosperous middle class that creates wealth and feels concerned about collective wellbeing to share can trigger solidarity. We need economic democracy to attain social cohesion. And since we are neither heavily investing in qualitative public education and research, nor creating creative platforms for grass root economic actors, it is very hard for people to have a sense of collective belonging. 


Egypt Media Roundup (December 10)

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[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]  

“Why This Was Not A Real Compromise”
Bassem Sabry says that the new constitutional declaration is not a concession from the president since he already managed to protect the Constituent Assembly from dissolution and have it finish its work.

“Op-ed: Egypt’s democratic dictator?”
Omar Ashour says the president’s constitutional declaration has put together unlikely partners in opposition, who themselves have not upheld democratic principles.

“Update: Shater warns of 'state of sabotage' ahead of referendum”
The deputy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morshid says some forces are trying to create instability in the country and tarnish the Renaissance project.

“Egypt's army will not allow violence, says armed forces spokesperson”
SCAF calls for national dialogue to resolve the current crisis.

“Live Updates: Tens of thousands of anti-Morsi protesters cross wires at presidential palace on Friday evening”
Demonstrations in front of the presidential palace move beyond barbed wire but avoid confrontation with security forces.

“Political, legal figures meet with Morsy for dialogue session”
Leaders of Al-Wasat and Ghad Al-Thawra join the present at a meeting to discuss the ongoing crisis.

“Egypt Judicial Council to oversee referendum”
Al-Jazeera reports that the Supreme Judicial Council has decided to delegate judges to polling stations for the constitutional referendum.

“Senior FJP member downplays judicial boycott of charter vote”
Amr Darrag says he is sure that judges will concede to supervising the referendum.

“The decline and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood”
The head editor of Ahram Online criticizes the Muslim Brotherhood and accuses it of fascism.

“Head of committee overseeing Egypt constitution referendum resigns”
Zaghloul El-Balshi, the general secretary of the constitution referendum supreme committee, resigns after the clashes in front of the presidential palace.

“Mass resignations in protest at palace clashes”
Three presidential advisers resign amid clashes in front of the presidential palace, as diplomats and judges refuse to cooperate with the regime for the planned referendum.

“An account of the attack on the presidential palace sit-in”
Sit-in protesters say Muslim Brotherhood members beat both men and women while clearing up the sit-in.

“Five confirmed dead in palace fighting overnight as morning calm prevails”
Armored vehicles stand guard in front of the presidential palace after a night of violent clashes with 5 killed and more than 400 injured.

“Violence spreads outside of capital”
Anti- and pro-Morsi protests errupt in Alexandria, Zagazig, Suez, Ismalia and Damanhour.

“Egypt's draft constitution translated”                 
Full text of the new draft constitution.

“The 85 people deciding the fate of Egypt”
An overview of the members of the Constituent Assembly who voted to approve the draft constitution.

“Referendum widens rift among judges”
The duty to supervise the referendum and the recent infringement on the powers of the judicial system split Egyptian judges.

“Excuse the typos and the grammatical mistakes…”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz’s account of the clashes between opposition and pro-Muslim Brotherhood protesters in Heliopolis.

“Egypt’s constitution: the gatekeepers of the old regime and those who backtrack on their word”
Nader Bakker alleges that the president’s constitutional declaration aimed at protecting the country against a plan to bring back SCAF to power.

“12 newspapers and 5 TV channels strike for freedom of expression”
The newspapers are not printing on Tuesday, while the channels will have a blank screen for the full day.

“Workers’ unions support draft constitution”
Unions dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood issue statements in support of the draft constitution.

 

In Arabic:

“"بوابة الأهرام" تنشر نص الإعلان الدستورى الجديد.. والاستفتاء على الدستور في موعده”                 
The text of the new presidential declaration, repealing the one issued on November 21 and upholding the referendum date.

“مظاهرة في ميدان الأربعين بالسويس تهتف بسقوط «حكم المرشد»”
Suez joins the wave of protests across the country with slogans against the “rule of the Murshid.”

“زيادة أعداد متظاهري "ماسبيرو" للمطالبة بتطهير الإعلام”
Protest in front of the TV building at Maspero against the constitutional declaration.

“«الوطن» تكشف خطة الإخوان لـ«الاستفتاء»: تدريب 7 آلاف عضو للحشد بالتصويت بـ«نعم» على الدستور”
A source from the Muslim Brotherhood says that for the past 3 weeks the organization has been training its members for rallying up support for the constitutional referendum.

“«الداخلية»: التزمنا ضبط النفس أمام «الاتحادية».. ونناشد الجميع التحلي بالسلمية”
The Ministry of Interior says it has used self-restraint during the protests in front of the Presidential Palace.

“عاجل ..اجتماع طارىء لقيادات القوات المسلحة بدون الرئيس مرسي”
SCAF meets without the president to discuss the present crisis.

“مصدر عسكرى: إشراف الجيش على الاستفتاء يحتاج قراراً من الرئيس”
Military source says the president still has not requested yet the participation of the army in organizing security for the referendum.

“مصدر بالمطار: العريان غادر اليوم إلى دبى.. ومنها إلى أمريكا”
A source at the Cairo Airport Muslim Brotherhood leader Essam El-Arian has flown off to the US.

“النيابة تحقق فى اتهام البرادعى وحمدين وموسى بالخيانة العظمى”
Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdeen Sabahy and Amr Moussa are charged with high treason.

 

Recent Jadaliyya articles on Egypt:

Morsi Past the Point of No Return
Hesham Sallam says that media reports blaming the clashes on both the Muslim Brotherhood and the opposition fail to point out that it was the former’s decision to send its supporters that provoked an escalation.

Al-Masry Al-Youm Goes Inside the Brotherhood's Torture Chambers
A first-hand journalistic account of how Muslim Brotherhood members were treating anti-Morsi protesters they apprehended during clashes on December 5.

Twenty-One Egyptian Rights Organizations Urge Egyptian President to Prevent Civil War
The statement of 21 rights organizations calling on the president to launch an investigation into the clashes and cancel the referendum and constitutional declaration.

Violent Clashes at Cairo’s Roxy Square and Beyond, Up Close in Photo and Video
The account of Jadaliyya’s Bassam Haddad of the clashes on December 5 in front of the presidential palace.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Militias in Action: A Firsthand Account
Wael Eskander narrates his experience on December 5 as Morsi supporters clashed with anti-Morsi protesters.

Tahrir at Midnight: Protesting the Constitutional Decree
Bassam Haddad and Ziad Abu-Rish describe the atmosphere at Tahrir Square on December 5.

عن دولة ملوك الطوائف في مصر
Ashraf El-Sherif says that Egypt has plunged into factional strife and is failing to lay the foundations of a democratic regime.

الدستور والصراع الاجتماعي السياسي بعد الثورة في مصر
Ahmed Tohami traces the current crisis over the constitutional declaration and the draft constitution.

Uncle Morsy
Sarah Carr talks about the pro-Morsi rally on November 30 and her decision to vote for Mohamed Morsi during the presidential elections last June.

من القاهرة الجميلة الجزء الثاني
The second part of Amro Eletrebi’s piece on his experience in the clashes on Mohamed Mahmoud.

Those Who Have Tahrir Square Have the Revolution: Egyptians Between Squares
Mayssoun Sukarieh describes Tahrir Square during the first major anti-Morsi demonstration after the announcement of the new constitutional declaration.

Opposition Set to March on Presidential Palace Against Morsi Decrees
Newly formed National Salvation Front call for a march on the presidential palace to protest the presidential constitutional declaration and the Constituent Assembly.

Copts and the Power over Personal Status
Paul Sedra discusses the significance of Article 3 of the draft constitution which gives Copts the right to be governed by Christian law in personal status matters.

The People Want Reform… In Qatar, Too.

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[Perspectives Editors’ note: Over the last two years of revolt in the Middle East and North Africa, the Arab Gulf has often been portrayed in the regional and international media as an exception, standing in relative stability outside an “arc of history” struggling towards freedom and democracy. Within this discourse, whatever its merits, Qatar has come to occupy a place even further along the axis of exceptionalism, all the more so as nearly all of its neighbors – Kuwait, Eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman – are now experiencing repeated, public signs of deep discontentment, social unrest and various forms of state and popular-led violence.

Although these aspects are still absent in Qatar as of this writing, the desire for reform is not. One effort by Qataris in this regard is illustrated below in an excerpt from the Introduction to the recently published book, The People Want Reform In Qatar…Too. Written by the editor of the Arabic-language volume, Dr. Ali Khalifa al-Kuwari, the piece represents a kind of opening salvo for much of the criticism, methodology and aspirations that Dr. Kuwari and the Qatari writers he assembled in weekly meetings over the past year have long directed toward the current system of state-society relations. As he describes it:

Some sixty Qatari citizens with a special interest in the country’s public affairs participated…united by their belief in the need to generate a call for reform in Qatar, which the narrow margin for free expression and debate permitted by the authorities did nothing to facilitate. Perhaps this faint call might reach the ears of the country’s public officials and find a positive response from its decision makers.

Qatar may not be facing the same kind of extreme trends and daunting choices that so many other Arab countries are struggling with here and now, but some of its citizens, at least, firmly believe that their country’s contradictions are growing fast, threatening the very existence of Qatari society. For Dr. Kuwari, as the excerpt below suggests, this challenge must not only be met by the government and the Emir, but also by engaged Qatari citizens – for which the book represents a first step. Indeed, without both legs, Qatar may well find itself divided and effectively hobbled sooner rather than later, no matter its extraordinary rise to prominence.] 


[…]There is no chance of reform if the current state of general freedoms continues as it is, if transparency remains absent and if public and private finance affairs remain intertwined. The obstacles include the following:

Concealing and preventing the publication of information related to public affairs

The principal observation agreed on by all those present at the Monday meetings (though known about and commented on prior to this initiative) is the concealment of information connected to public affairs in Qatar and the inability to publish anything related to the decision-making process that lies behind official pronouncements. Indeed, the majority of our speakers and commentators lacked precise information and are unaware of the reasons behind public policy choices and the incentives and justifications for the ruler’s commands. This ensures the Qatari people exist in a constant state of surprise at the options taken and the decisions made, as though the public policies and life-changing decisions enacted by the government were a private affair that regular citizens had no right to know about, let alone participate in.

To start with, we find that the government of Qatar does not explain the overall purpose of its population policy, nor does it publish statistics about the number of citizens, their social make-up, or projections of how their proportion of the overall population will change. The same approach is found in finance. The estimated national budget is never published in full. Even the current Advisory Council only has the right to examine estimated capital expenditure. The budget’s final account is top secret. No one may look at it. The same applies to the report of the state’s Audit Bureau (itself answerable to the executive), whose powers do not include examining certain incomes and expenditures of public monies because such data does not come under the authority of the Council of Ministers: it is excepted from their authority and any other form of public oversight.

The same is true of the state’s public reserves, investments made with this money and the results of these operations. Citizens hear about Qatar’s massive international deals but have no idea if these benefit public finances or private interests. The size of the national debt is neither known nor published, nor the scale and composition of debts guaranteed by the state, which are estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. Reports from the International Monetary Fund’s International Institute of Finance indicate that a large part of the income from oil and gas does not appear in the relevant section of the national budget.

Alongside the mystery surrounding the income, expenditure and investment of public wealth, there is the matter of publicly owned assets, particularly land that has been developed or property confiscated under the Public Interest Law. Many of these lands and properties have passed into private hands either for token, non-competitive prices, or as gifts and bequests. Privately owned hotels, commercial and residential projects and towns are built. The upshot is projects like Souk Waqif, Al-Jasra, Mushairib, Kahraba Street, the fifteen million square meter Education City, the Katara cultural village and the various institutes and projects of the Aspire Zone. The market value of these public properties is in the hundreds of billions.

What of the transparency regarding major public policy decisions, the documents and plans that that will determine the country’s present, the fate of society, and the future that awaits generations to come?

No public debate on and participation in important socio-political decisions

We find the public and higher education systems altered on the advice of a study by the Rand Corporation (which also supervises them), in which English is the chief language of instruction and in which society and national studies have been removed from the curriculum. All this has been implemented without any public debate and without the participation of education specialists or the faculty of the University of Qatar. Now we hear of two more projects being put in place: a voucher scheme to replace the provision of free education in government schools and a health insurance scheme for citizens, replacing the government’s provision of health services. Education and health have been left to the private sector: a discriminatory private sector into whose maw the government shovels its citizens’ social services, absolving itself of responsibility for providing public services through agencies and channels that once served citizens with exemplary levels of care.

The same is true of the rationale behind infrastructure and construction projects and the property sequestration, which has grown into a phenomenon that poses a threat to citizens’ sense of stability, their jobs. We have the Human Resources Law and the decision to convert cooperative associations into commercial companies without any clarification as to why this has been done much less any thought given to its legality […]

We look on as the railway and metro project is implemented at a cost of forty billion dollars with no public debate, despite the project’s vast scale and the statistical errors it is based on. It estimates, for instance, that in ten years Qatar’s population will number five million, a growth of two hundred percent in a decade. That Qatar’s population strategy rests on such improbabilities is positively sinister.

Politically, Qatar’s constitution was drawn up by government committee without any public debate or discussion: merely a yes-or-no referendum overseen by the Ministry of the Interior, promoted by the media and meddled with by the executive branch. Qatar’s National Vision for 2030, and the National Development Strategy of 2011-2016 were both created without any discussion outside government circles. Even the Advisory Council was denied an opportunity to pass judgment on the two documents.

The list goes on, and includes many more decisions and public policy choices, such as security treaties, military bases and laws that grant residential property purchasers and beneficiaries the right to permanent residence. It is worth pointing out that this last policy, which has no counterpart outside the smaller Gulf states, has led in Qatar to the construction of residences for around two hundred and ten thousand permanent residents, not counting those who have travelled to Qatar for work or possess temporary work visas. This, at a time when the number of Qatari citizens is estimated at no more than two hundred and fifty thousand.

Freedom of opinion and expression

The lack of transparency and the concealment of information are linked to a tightening along the margin for free expression and an absence of independent civil society organizations concerned with public affairs, citizens’ rights, professional syndicates and workers’ unions. These are things the law does not allow. The Associations and Foundations Law will only grant licenses to government officials or those who have received prior approval from the authorities. Indeed, there is a failure to consider requests for setting up associations and foundations that have not received prior approval and in these cases – either because of a failure to consider the request or an outright refusal – there is no recourse to the courts: only the fruitless option of making a complaint to the Council of Ministers.

It is worth highlighting here that Qatari law does not permit the establishment of political bodies, forums for debate, professional syndicates or trade unions. There are no civil society organizations for human or citizens’ rights, nor any association or institution with a focus on public affairs. It is therefore inaccurate to talk about civil society in Qatar: it is those who hold power who set up private bodies to work in the public interest, lavishing public money on them without any oversight. There are many such examples and anyone who has attempted establishing a non-governmental organization will know them.

Freedom of expression is curtailed by a Press Law with excessively severe penalties for journalists, not to mention direct intervention by the executive in installing newspaper editors and appointing individuals in the public and private media sectors without the slightest qualification for their positions.[1]

The lack of freedom of opinion and expression, in addition to the freedom to organize, may be the chief factor in entrenching the lack of transparency, allowing the terrifying official media machine to frame the situation in Qatar until reality is essentially effaced, then to transmit this propaganda abroad, leaving the naïve dazzled, while those in the know chuckle at the passivity of the Qatari people who are deprived of their right to voice an opinion through a strategy of carrots and sticks.

All of this exists at a time when Qataris are unable to express themselves and forbidden from influencing current events, participating in building their own future, safeguarding the fate of their society, their identity and their wealth and securing it for future generations […] 

Issues in need of reform

These are the principle and most serious imbalances in the current system and the resulting flaws that manifest themselves in all areas of cultural, social, economic and political life. The imbalances that require a process of root-and-branch reform before they can be properly addressed can be summarized as follows:

Population imbalance

The first issue in need of reform is the terminal and mounting population crisis in Qatar, which has led to a drop in the proportion of Qatari citizens from forty percent in 1970 to just twelve percent by 2010. At the same time, the workforce rose from 323,000 in 2001 to 1.265 million in 2009, while over the same period the proportion of Qatari citizens in the workforce dropped from fourteen percent to six percent. This makes it the most serious and pressing challenge in need of radical reform, and the most deserving. If Qataris are unable to apply pressure to halt this growing imbalance and begin gradual reform, their natural position at the head of society will fall away and they will be rendered incapable of reforming the other and newer problems. Indeed, they will be transformed into a deprived and marginalized minority in their own land.

The perpetuation of this growing imbalance threatens to uproot Qatari society, to erase its identity and culture, to take its mother tongue, Arabic, out of circulation, and erode the role of its citizens in owning and running their own country. Local citizens constitute the leaders and administrators in every other country in the world, particularly in public administration.

It is worth noting here that the issue of population imbalance has long been recognized by both civil society and the authorities. Its reform has been a constant refrain for the last fifty years, culminating in the National Development Strategy of 2011-2016, which signaled a radical change in the official attitude towards the problem. The population imbalance was now an issue not to be spoken of, if not positively abjured. Everything is now discussed in terms of “population” and citizens and the proportion of that overall population that they represent is not mentioned.

This change in tack transforms Qataris from citizens, with corresponding rights, to a dwindling class of the population, forced to compete with immigrants for job opportunities, education and social services, all in a language not their own, even as they remain deprived for one reason or another of their political rights.

The new Nationality Law from 2005, of dubious constitutionality, paves the way for this transformation of citizens into inhabitants who enjoy none of their rights of citizenship. It does this by permanently depriving citizens who have acquired Qatari citizenship (about one third of all citizens) and their descendants of all political rights. At the same time, the current constitution fails to guarantee effective political rights to the remaining two-thirds of Qataris who are citizens by birth: such scant political rights as there are currently in abeyance, courtesy of Article 150.

We call for urgent reform of this deplorable situation. The above-mentioned demographic change makes it necessary to rethink policies and adapt strategies. The principle factor behind this worsening imbalance is an official policy brought into operation in 2004 which aimed to expand the property market and institute vast new developments (along with the infrastructure required to support them) by means of marketing property investments by granting buyers permanent residence in Qatar, regardless whether their skills were required by the workforce or the country’s ability to absorb them. The perpetuation of this imbalance is thus not only caused by the traditional demand for immigrant workers but also an indefensible official policy. New towns and residential zones were constructed, not for citizens or immigrant workers, but for an entirely new population encouraged to invest in property in return for residence for themselves and their families, without the need to possess work visas like other incomers. Nor is this imbalance acceptable from a patriotic perspective. Nothing comparable can be found in other another country in the world, great or small, with the exception of our neighbors, the United Arab Emirates, and may God forgive their rulers and ours.

There is no people or society on earth capable of absorbing more immigrants than they have citizens, so what to make of Qatar where the figure is eight times higher? Even so, activities on the international property market continue, as does expenditure on infrastructure and educational services that Qataris not only do not need, but which are not intended for them in the first place, all of which leads to a greater influx of immigrants that further erodes the status of citizens, erasing their identity and extirpating their language.

Economic imbalance

The economic imbalance results from an almost absolute – and growing – reliance on income derived from exporting Qatar’s abundant natural resources of raw petroleum (oil and natural gas). The country’s main source of income is the profit resulting from an oil price ten times higher than the cost of production. It is most evident in any breakdown of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP): The source of all income is the profit made on exporting a natural resource and not the productivity of individuals and institutions, as is the case in a production economy.

To appreciate the extent of this imbalance we must imagine the state of Qatar’s income and standard of living if oil yields were removed. We would not find the revenue sources to supply even a small part of our daily needs. Indeed, all our oil and gas funded activities would grind to a halt and our cities would become ghost cities. Because of the lack of desire (or, perhaps, inability) of individual oil-producing nations such as Qatar to adopt national policies in which oil exports are subordinate to development goals, they have responded to world demand for oil in a random and unpredictable fashion. The state rushes to increase production without any serious economic or social research or the slightest regard for their capacity or the available oil reserves.

Qatar has raised its production of liquid natural gas (LNG) to seventy-seven million tons per year, making it one of the top two suppliers in the world, without looking at alternative economic approaches or alternative uses for LNG, nor taking into consideration consequences and responsibilities. This has only increased reliance on oil and gas revenue, which has become the sole source of GDP, the only source of revenue in the national budget and thus of public expenditure and development and other national projects. Furthermore, it has encouraged risk and wastefulness in addition to promoting foreign and local investments whose impact on the national interest and economy has not been properly researched.

This ongoing imbalance has been accompanied by an interpenetration of public and private wealth and lack of transparency, which treats oil and gas yields, the budget, and public reserves as a state secret not to be divulged to Qatari citizens. This has led to a great deal of waste and misappropriation of oil revenue for purposes of short-term expenditure instead of long-term investment. Policies for the investment of oil revenue remain backward due to the failure to link the expenditure of public funds with an understanding of the economic and national benefits they might bring […]

Political imbalance

Qatar’s political imbalance in the relationship between the government and its people is best expressed in the phrase, “a more than absolute authority and a less than powerless people.” The authorities in Qatar monopolize the decision-making process with no effective political participation on the part of citizens […] It was hoped that the National Vision and National Strategy would make priorities of both political development and the necessity of transitioning to a constitutionally supported democracy. Perhaps they would offer a vision and plan for this long-awaited political reform.

Reading the National Vision for Qatar 2030, we find that it does not mention political reform and political and cultural development in its discussion of the vision’s cornerstones. Neither do we find any discussion of these issues in the National Development Strategy of 2011-2016.

Correcting this imbalance requires a transition to a democratic political system governed by a constitution drafted by committee. Only then will Qatar have a contractual constitution. Only then will the people assume their proper place as the ultimate source of authority, guided by the generous principles of Islamic Law, the human rights treaties to which Qatar is a signatory, and the values of the political system shared by all democratic countries […]

* Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

[This article was first published by Heinrich Böll Stiftung Tunis, Beirut and Ramallah in: Perspectives MENA No4: Aspirations & Realities.]


[1] Editor’s Note: In late October 2012, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged the Emir of Qatar not to approve a draft media law “unless loosely worded provisions penalizing criticism of Qatar or neighboring governments are removed… The draft law builds in a double standard on free expression that is inconsistent with Qatar’s claims to be a center for media freedom in the region.” HRW, as well as a number of press freedom organizations, also pointed to the imprisonment of Qatari poet Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami since November 2011 as evidence of “Qatar’s double standard on freedom of expression.” On 22 October, a judge postponed al-Dheeb’s trial for the fifth time. He faces charges of “inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime,” which carries the death penalty under Article 130 of the penal code in Qatar.

Last Week on Jadaliyya (Dec 3- 9)

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This is a selection of what you might have missed on Jadaliyya last week. It also includes a list of the most read articles.  Progressively, we will be featuring more content on our "Last Week on Jadaliyya" series.

 

ملف من الأرشيف: الشيخ إمام

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 [”ملف من الأرشيف“ هي سلسة تقوم ”جدلية“ بنشرها بالعربية والإنجليزية بالتعاون مع جريدة ”السفير“ اللبنانية. الملفات ستكون لشخصيات أيقونية تركت أثراً عميقاً في الحقل السياسي والثقافي في العالم العربي.]


 

 

 
الإسم:إمام محمد
الشهرة:عيسى
إسم الأب:أحمد
تاريخ الولادة: 1918
تاريخ الوفاة:
1995
الجنسية:
مصري
مكان الولادة:
ابو النمرس
الفئة: 
 فنان
المهنة:
ملحن - مغني 

 

[الشيخ إمام وأحمد فؤاد نجم]

الشيخ إمام

  •  مصري.
  • إسمه الكامل: إمام محمد أحمد عيسى.

  •  ولد لعائلة فقيرة في قرية ابو النمرس في 2 تموزعام 1918. فقد بصره حين بلغ شهره الخامس.

  • في العام 1929 اصطحبه والده إلى القاهرة ليدرس في الجمعية الشرعية السنية في الأزهر، حيث أمضى هناك خمس سنوات، تعلم خلالها قراءة القرآن وترتيله على القبوروحفظه، وهو في الثانية عشرة من عمره. وصار لسنوات طويلة ”محترفاً“ يرتل أينما دعي.
  • طرد من الجمعية الشرعية بعدما ضبط متلبساً يستمع إلى القرآن عبر الراديو، وهذا أمر كان يعد بدعة في الجمعية آنذاك. وعندما علم والده بأمر طرده، منعه من العودة إلى قريته، مما اضطره للبحث عن مكان  آخر يسكنه.
  •  في منتصف الثلاثينات تعرف على الشيخ زكريا أحمد، عن طريق الشيخ درويش الحريري، فكان الشيخ زكريا يستعين به لحفظ الألحان التي كان يقدمها لأم كلثوم، قبل أن تغنيها. إلا أنه ما لبث أن تخلى عنه، بعدما لاحظ أن ألحانه لأم كلثوم بدأت تتسرب إلى الناس قبل أن تغنيها.
  •  تعلم العزف على العود على يد كامل الحمصاني.
  • عام 1945 درس مبادئ الموسيقى والموشحات. ومارس الغناء والعزف كهواية، وبقي يرتل القرآن كمحترف.
  • اعتمد مغنياً في الإذاعة المصرية في العام 1945 إلا أنه ما لبث أن تركها لأنه لم يجد نفسه فيها.
  • تزوج بناء على رغبة والدته وإلحاحها، إلا أنه ما لبث أن انفصل عن زوجته بعد شهر واحد من الزواج ولم يتزوج بعدها أبداً.
  • هزته الأحداث أيام الملك فاروق، فراح يغني للناس ضد الحكم الفاسد والطبقة المسيطرة التي تسرق الناس، وضد الجوع والاحتلال والاعتقال.
  • في العام 1962 حدث التحول الكبير في حياته عندما التقى الشاعر أحمد فؤاد نجم، وبدأ الثنائي يعملان بصمت وصبر من أجل تطوير آفاق الأغنية السياسية بأسلوب شعبي، يلتزم بهموم الجماهير العاملة والفقيرة. ونجحا بمرور الوقت في بلورة أسلوبهما الخاص، وتوافد الناس يسمعون ويسجلون أغاني الشيخ أمام والشاعر نجم.
  • قدم نجم وإمام برنامجاً تلفزيونياً بعنوان ”مع أشعار نجم وألحان إمام“.
  • كان للنكسة في عام 1967 أثراً جلياً على الأغاني التي قدمها الثنائي والتي عبرا من خلالها عن حالة اليأس والخيبة التي شعر بها المصريون والعرب.
  • عندما جاء نيكسون إلى القاهرة استقبلاه بالأغنية التي اشتهرت كثيراً وقتذاك:  

 

شرفت يا نكســـــون بابا يا بتاع الووتر جيت
عملولك قيمة وسيمة سلاطـــــين الفول والزيت
فرشولك أوسع سكة من راس التين على مكـــــة
وهناك تنزل على عكـــــا ويقولوا عليك حجـــــيت

ما هو مولد ساير داير .. شيلاه يا صحاب البيت…

  • في عام 1968 أقامت نقابة الصحفيين "للثنائي" حفلة غنائية شعرية ودعي إليها كبار النقاد والفنانين. وفي صباح اليوم التالي كتبت الصحف المصرية عن تلك الليلة وأفاضت وأكثرت المدح ونادت بضرورة تشجيع هذه الظاهرة، والفن الملتزم.
  • في العام 1969، بدأت سلسلة اعتقالات متكررة في حياة إمام ونجم، مرة بتهمة تعاطي الحشيش، ومرة أخرى بعدها بشهور بسبب أغنية بعنوان "الحمد لله خبطنا تحت باطاتنا" ويقول مطلع الأغنية: 
     

الحمد لله الحمد لله خبطنا تحت باطاتنا
يا محلا رجعه ضباطنا من خط النار
***
يا أهل مصر المحمية بالحرامية
الفول كتير والطعمية والبر عمار
والعيشه معدن واهي ماشيه آخر أشيا
مادام جنابه والحاشية بكروش وكتار
***
ح تقول لى سينا وما سينا شي
ما تدوشناشي
ما ستميت أوتوبيس ماشي شاحنين انفار
ايه يعني لما يموت مليون أو كل الكون
العمر أصلا مش مضمون والناس أعمار...

 

• فحكم عليهما بالسجن المؤبد وتوسط القائد الفلسطيني نايف حواتمة عند الرئيس جمال عبدالناصر للإفراج عنهما، لكن عبد الناصر رفض ونقل أنه قال له “متتعبش نفسك دول بالذات مش حيطلعوا من المعتقل طالما أنا عايش...“

• لم يمكثا في السجن إلا ثلاث سنوات، إذ مع رحيل الرئيس جمال عبد الناصر في العام 1971 أفرج الرئيس المصري أنور السادات عن المعتقلين، بمن فيهم إمام ونجم، قبل أن يعودا للمعتقل مجدداً، بعد أن وجها سهام نقدهما الغنائي للسادات، ولم يفرج عنهما إلا احتفالاً بنصر أكتوبر.

• جاءت الانتفاضة الطلابية عام 1972، وكان الشيخ إمام ونجم على صلة بالطليعة الطلابية والطليعة العمالية منذ العام 1968. وفي 8 كانون الثاني 1972 اجتمع الطلاب في ساحة التحرير وذهب نجم إليها وألقى بعض قصائده الحماسية والناقدة. ولحن الشيخ إمام في ذلك اليوم القصيدة التالية:

 

رجعوا التلامذة  
يا عم حمزة  
للجد ثاني  
يا مصر أنت  
اللي باقية  
ويا قطف الأماني ...

• مع بداية مرحلة الانفتاح الاقتصادي في العام 1976، وضع الرئيس السادات، أسساً اقتصادية تدعم كبار الملاك على حساب الفقراء، وهو ما استقبله نجم وإمام بأغنيات تسخر من التوجه الاقتصادي الجديد، وتحرض العمال والفلاحين والطلاب ضده، دفاعاً عن حقهم فى عدالة اجتماعية، فاعتقل الثنائي مجدداً، لكن سرعان ما أفرج عنهما هذه المرة بعد أن قضيا عاماً فى المعتقل.

• في العام 1981 كانت المرة الأخيرة التي اعتقل فيها الشيخ إمام، حيث أفرج عنه بعد اغتيال الرئيس السادات مباشرة، ولم يعتقل خلال عهد الرئيس حسني مبارك، ربما لأن زمن الغناء السياسي في مصر لم يعد كما كان.

• في السجن كان نجم يؤلف الأغاني، ولما كان كل منهما في زنزانة مستقلة، كان الشيخ إمام يسير بالقرب من زنزانة نجم في ”فرصة التنفس“ ويسمع ما ألفه الشاعر ويردده حتى يحفظه، ثم يذهب إلى زنزانته ويبدأ بتلحينه.

• ظل الشيخ إمام مع الشاعر نجم ممنوعين من الخروج من مصر حتى عام 1984، حيث وصلا إلى باريس لإحياء عدة حفلات في فرنسا.

• في تشرين الأول 1984، وصل إلى بيروت وشارك في احتفالات الحزب الشيوعي اللبناني. وأقام عدة حفلات خارج بيروت.

• شارك في المؤتمر العالمي للشبيبة في موسكو في تموز 1985.

• توفي في 6 حزيران 1995.

ومن أغانية الشهيرة:

Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (December 11)

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[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

Reports and Opinions

Gulf states must quash unrest – Saudi official A news report on the comments made by the Saudi deputy foreign minister urging the Gulf governments to put down any protests inspired by the Arab uprisings, on Gulf News.

UAE authorities ‘detain 18-year-old blogger’ A news report on the arrest of Mohammed Salem al-Zumer for expressing support of detained activists, on BBC.

The Untouchables of Yemen Joumana Farhat writes on marginalized groups in Yemen, in Al-Akhbar English.

Oppression in Bahrain

Bahrain seeks talks with the opposition A news report on the Bahraini crown prince’s renewed call for a dialogue with the opposition, on Al-Jazeera English.

Will the Manama Dialogue debate Bahrain’s own crisis? Ian Black writes on issues to be raised at the “Manama Dialogue,” a high profile strategic conference held in Manama, in The Guardian.

How Bahrain Lost the Propaganda War John Lubbock writes on “online dissent” in the face of the Bahraini government's banning of public protests, in The Huffington Post.

Election in Kuwait

Kuwait in crisis A media report on the political crisis in the country following a controversial parliamentary election, on Al-Jazeera English.

Kuwait Prime Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Sabah reappointed A news report on the reappointment of Jaber al-Sabah as a prime minister following the parliamentary election, BBC.

Climate

Saudi Arabia: Ray of light in climate fight? A news report on the kingdom’s investment in solar energy, on Al-Jazeera English.

Green thinking takes root in midst of desert in Doha climate talks John Vidal discerns a shift toward green energy and ecological responsibility among the Gulf state, in The Guardian.

Migrant Workers

Indian worker kills self in first Dubai Metro suicide case A news report on the suicide of a 36-year old Indian national, on The Times of India.

Qatar’s migrant workers losing out in $100bn World Cup preparations John Vidal writes on work conditions for migrant workers in Qatar, in The Guardian.

Human Rights Watch

Qatar: Poet’s Conviction Violates Free Expression A statement by the organization condemning Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s life sentence for his poem “Tunisian Jasmine.”

Health

Qatar making progress fighting AIDS ‘taboo’ A news report on the daily struggles of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in the Gulf countries in general and Qatar in particular, on Al-Jazeera English.

Culture

Qatar’s ‘Tea with Nefertiti’ in unique first A media report on the first internationally touring exhibition produced and curated in an Arab country, on Al-Jazeera English.

Arabic

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