ازدادت في الآونة الأخيرة ظاهرة إرغام الفتيات على الزواج بسن مبكِّرة، وأخذت منحى جديداً من حيث الأسباب وصيغ الإرغام. فمنذ تأسيس الدولة العراقية عام 1921 وحتى بداية السبعينيات، كانت الفتاة عرضة للزواج من رجل غريب أو من المقربين للعائلة، لأن ولي أمرها ارتأى أن يمنحها لهذا الرجل كأي سلعة تُهدى، من دون أن يكون لها حق الاعتراض أو مجرد إبداء الرأي. كما أنها كانت تمنح لرجل من قبيلة أخرى كجزء من «دية» تتَّفق عليها العشيرتان لحلِّ خلافاتٍ ناشبة بينهما، وتسمَّى «فَصْليَّة». والفتاتان، المهداة والفَصْليَّة، ليس لهما حقّ المطالبة بالتفريق أو الطلاق، لأنَّهما مجرَّدتان من حقوقهما وفقاً للأعراف العشائريَّة. ولذلك فإنَّ «الحوليَّة الديموغرافيَّة» التي تصدرها الأمم المتَّحدة نشرت عام 1968 جدولاً لحالات الطلاق في تسع دول عربيّة خلال الأعوام 1963-1967 وبيّنت حينها أن نسبة العراق في معدلات الطلاق هي الأقل في الجدول، بينما جاءت مصر في مقدمتها.

أما في منتصف سبعينيات القرن الماضي، فقد أصدرت حكومة الرئيس العراقي الأسبق أحمد حسن البكر قراراً مُنع بموجبه تزويج الفتيات وفق أعراف الدية أو الهدية. ومثَّل القرار خطوة أولى في توجه المجتمع نحو المدنيّة، وعزوفاً واضحاً عن ترسبات المجتمع القبلي أو البدوي، وجاء ضمن حزمة قرارات فرضتها الثّقافة المجتمعيَّة الجديدة التي ساعد على نشرها التحالف الجبهوي بين حزب البعث الحاكم آنذاك والحزب الشيوعي العراقي وأحزاب كردية، تحت لافتة «الجبهة الوطنية والقومية التقدمية». وهذه استهدفها صدام حسين فشنِّ حملة شرسة على التنظيمات المنضوية في الجبهة، وقتل وشرد قياداتها وكوادرها وقواعدها. وكان هذا من بين أسباب أخرى لعودة القيم والأعراف العشائريَّة والبدويَّة الى الانتعاش، وهي التي تشكِّل المرأة إحدى أهم ضحاياها، على حساب قيم الدولة المدنيَّة.

من اللهو الطفولي إلى هودج العرس

شهدت سنوات الحصارالذي فرضه مجلس الأمن الدولي على العراق، والتي امتدت من عام 1990 لغاية عام 2003، تراجعاً كبيراً في الوضع المعيشي للفرد العراقي. وقدَّرت منظَّمة الغذاء والزراعة الدوليَّة أن الفقر اتسع بين عامي 1995 1996 ليشمل 71 في المئة من السكان. وإثر هذا، أصبح العراقيون يعيشون في ضائقة مالية كبيرة عجزوا خلالها عن توفير أبسط مقوِّمات الحياة، مما دفع ببعض الآباء إلى تزويج بناتهم بأعمار مبكِّرة ليحقِّقوا هدفين في آن واحد، أوَّلهما التخلَّص من عبء أحد أفراد العائلة، وثانيهما الاستفادة من المهر المقدَّم للعروس، وهو في أغلب هذه الزيجات عبارة عن مبلغ مالي يتسلمه الأب كـ«ثمن» لتلك الفتاة المسفوحة على اعتاب حياة تجهل كل تفاصيلها.

وبعد التغيير الذي حصل عام 2003 ، بإطاحة نظام صدام حسين واحتلال القوات الاميركية للعراق، ازدادت حالات الفقر. وجاءت مصحوبة بظاهرة التأجيج الطائفي الذي شرّد مئات الآلاف من العوائل العراقية داخل البلاد وخارجها، مما زاد في حالات الزواج المبكِّر، بعيداً عن رقابة القانون وأجهزة الدولة ومنظَّمات المجتمع المدني، على الرغم من أن هذا الزواج يمثَّل انتهاكاً لحقوق الإنسان، وخرقاً لمواثيق ومعاهدات دولية وقَّع عليها العراق. وقد أخذ الخط البياني لهذه الظاهرة بالتصاعد خلال السنوات العشرة من عمر الدولة العراقية «الديمقراطية» التي تشكلت بعد عام 2003.

ويؤكد مسح أجراه الجهاز المركزي للإحصاء، التابع لوزارة التخطيط العراقية بشأن «معارف وسلوكيات وطموحات الفتاة المراهقة»، بالتعاون مع هيئة إحصاء إقليم كردستان، ووزارتي الصّحة والمرأة، إن التقديرات السكانيَّة تشير إلى أن عدد الفتيات في العراق ضمن الفئات العمريَّة (10 14) سنة بلغ 1.9 مليون فتاة. ووفقاً لهذه التقديرات، فإنِّهن يمثِّلن تقريباً 6 في المئة من إجمالي السكان. وبحسب نتائج المسح فان الفتيات من هذه الفئة العمريَّة يتوزَّعن بواقع 65.4 في المئة في المناطق الحضرية و34.6 في المئة في الأرياف.

وتلفت نتائج المسح إلى أن أغلب الفتيات في هذه المرحلة العمرية على مقاعد الدراسة، إذ بلغت نسبة الملتحقات بالتعليم 82.4 في المئة، وترتفع هذه النسبة في إقليم كردستان لتصل الى 92.9 في المئة.

وقد أظهر المسح الاجتماعي والاقتصادي للأسرة في العراق الصادر عام 2007 أن 21 في المئة من الفتيات تزوجّن قبل بلوغهن سن الـ19سنة، مقارنة بـ15 في المئة في أعوام 1997 و2004، فيما يظهر الجهاز المركزي للإحصاء عام 2011 أن 5 في المئة من الفتيات العراقيات تزوَّجن بعمر دون 15 سنة، ونحو 22 في المئة دون 18 سنة. ويأتي تصاعد الخطوط البيانيَّة في نسب الزواج المبكِّر، على الرغم من تحذير وزارة المرأة في عام 2010 من أن «النساء بين أعمار 15 إلى 18 سنة هنّ أكثر عرضة للوفاة أثناء الحمل أو الولادة بمرتين بالقياس إلى النساء اللاتي تتراوح أعمارهن بين 20 و24 سنة». وهذه الإحصائيات تفتح الأبواب مشرَّعة أمام حقوق القاصرات، اللواتي يتعرَّضن أكثر للوفاة أثناء الحمل أو اثناء الولادة.

شرعية خارج المحاكم

ومع أن قانون الأحوال الشخصيَّة في العراق رقم 188 لسنة 1959 يُعدُّ متوافقاً إلى حد ما مع القوانين الدولية التي تدعو إلى أن يكون الحدّ الأدنى للزواج عند اكمال الـ18 عاماً، (إذ يمنع القانون زواج الفتاة دون الـ15 عاماً، ويعطي التقدير للقاضي وبرضا الوالدين في تزويج الفتاة بين الـ15 والـ18 عاماً)، إلا أن الشرعيَّة التي تسبغ على العقود المكتوبة خارج إطار المحاكم ولاسيما تلك التي تعقدها مكاتب رجال الدين من سادة ومشايخ، تعتبر ملاذاً لمن يريد تزويج ابنته دون السن القانوني، ولمن يريد أن يتزوج فتاة دون هذا السن. وعقد «السيّد»، أصبح في المجتمع العراقي الحالي ضرورة لا يستقيم العقد الشرعي المعقود في محاكم الاحوال الشخصية بدونها.

وطلاق على ورقة زواج

شكَّلت ظاهرة الزواج المبكر من ناحية، واستقلال المرأة العاملة الاقتصادي من ناحية أخرى، (والذي شهد بعد عام 2003 طفرة كبيرة في المرتبات والامتيازات المالية كالمنح والقروض)، إضافة الى اتساع حجم البطالة وصعوبة الحصول على سكن منفرد للزوجين خارج إطار بيت العائلة... شكلت هذه الظواهر حاضنة أساسيَّة لتصاعد نسب الطلاق في العراق، التي بلغت أعداداً كبيرة، حيث أظهرت دراسة ميدانية للباحثة سجى عبد الرضا، بتوجيه من قاضي الأحوال الشخصية في محكمة الشعب في بغداد، أن الشهر الأول من سنة 2010 شهد حالات زواج للقاصرات، راح يتزايد منذ الشهر الأوَّل ولغاية الشهر الخامس من تلك السنة. وبيَّنت الدراسة أن بداية الشهر الأوَّل شهدت عشر حالات زواج للقاصرات من أصل 46 حالة زواج، وفي الشهر الثاني لاحظت تزايداً وصل إلى 47 حالة من أصل 132 حالة، ثم تزايد أكبر في شهر آذار/مارس وصل إلى 87 حالة من أصل 281 حالة، وفي شهر نيسان/أبريل وصل إلى 100 حالة من أصل 297 حالة، أما الشهر الخامس، من السنة ذاتها، فقد شهد تصاعداً واضحاً في معدَّل تلك الزيجات، إذ تشير الدراسة إلى أنها بلغت 36 حالة من أصل 50 حالة خلال الايام الاربعة الأولى منه.

وأوضحت الدراسة أن أغلبيَّة أفراد العينة تقع أعمارهن ما بين الـ15-17 سنة، حيث بلغ عددهن تقريباً خلال الأشهر الخمسة 244 من أصل 746 من الزيجات الحاصلة في محكمة الأحوال الشخصية في منطقة الشعب (شرقي بغداد)، مشدَّدة على أن هذا يوضح ارتفاعاً مستمراً في عدد حالات زواج القاصرات للأعمار المبينة آنفاً والتي تمثِّل ما يقارب 30 في المئة من إجمالي عقود الزواج. 

بمقابل هذا، تشير الأرقام الصادرة من مجلس القضاء الأعلى إلى أن حالات الطلاق تتزايد بشكل مطرد منذ عام 2004 الذي شهد 28690 حالة طلاق. وفي عام 2005، أصبح عدد الحالات 33384 حالة، ثم 35627 حالة في عام 2006، وليستمر في الارتفاع مع سنة الاحتقان الطائفي عام 2007، فيبلغ 41560 حالة. أما في عام 2008، فكانت زيادة نسبة الطلاق ملحوظة حيث بلغت 44116 حالة، وتوَّجت في العام 2009 بنسبة كبيرة بلغت 61466 حالة. إلا أن العام الذي تلاه شهد تراجعاً طفيفاً، ولكنه لم يستمر، فجاء عام 2011 ليستعيد النسبة الأسبق.

بالرغم من تشخيص المشكلة من قبل الوزارات ولجان مجلس النوّاب المختصة بالقضايا الاجتماعية، فلا وجود لحلول جذريَّة لها. وتلخِّص تلك الهيئات أسباب الطلاق المتزايد بعوامل رئيسة ثلاثة هي «الزواج المبكَّر بسبب التأثيرات العشائرية»، و«البطالة»، و«أزمة السكن».

إدراك ولكن لا حلول 

وتبدو هذه العوامل الثلاثة عصيَّة على الحل، إذ لا يزال السياسيون يهرعون إلى شيوخ العشائر لتحشيدهم من أجل الحصول على أصوات أبناء عشائرهم في الانتخابات، ما يعطي لهؤلاء قوَّة تتعدَّى حدود القانون في الكثير من الأحيان. أما البطالة، التي بلغت 11 في المئة بحسب احصائية لوزارة التخطيط، فإنها لا تبدو متناغمة مع نسبة الفقر في البلاد التي بلغت 38 في المئة بحسب «اللجنة العليا للتخفيف من الفقر». أما أزمة السكن، فقد أصبح حلَّها الحلقة الأصعب في تاريخ العراق الحديث. ما يعني، وفق كلَّ هذه الاحصائيات، إن العراق سيحلُّ في طليعة الدول في قائمة الزواج المبكِّر لإحصائيات الأمم المتحدة التي تتوقَّع فيها أن تبلغ حالات زواج القاصرات نحو 50 مليون حالة في العالم بحلول عام 2020، وأن هذا العدد سيصبح 100 مليون بحلول عام 2030، في حال استمرت الأمور على ما هي عليه.

[عن ملحق "السفير العربي" لجريدة "السفير" اللبنانية.]

As debate over Egypt’s draft constitution proceeds, the editors would like to bring to your attention a page compiling Jadaliyya’s coverage of the lead-up to the constitutional referendum, as well as the political battles that have shaped the context in which the referendum is being convened.

A few highlights from Egypt's Constitutional Referendum Page include: 

• A set of video clips produced by the Mosireen collective and in which relevant Egyptian activists and experts explain the implications that the new constitution would have for workers’ social and economic rights, freedom of expression, state-sponsored violence against citizens and detained suspects, and the military’s non-democratic political and economic privileges
• Paul Sedra’s analysis of the draft constitution and what it means for Egypt’s Copts and their relationship with the Coptic Orthodox Church
• A summary of the most controversial articles in the draft constitution by Lina Attalah
• Karim Abou-Youssef’s legal analysis of the draft constitution, and the limitations it could place on personal rights and government accountability.

The page also contains analysis of the broader political and social contexts animating the ongoing conflicts between President Mohamed Morsi and his challengers, including articles by Ellis Goldberg, Hesham Sallam, Seifeldin Fawzy, and Linda Herrera, Magdy Alabady, and Adel Iskandar.

The compilation of articles also includes personal testimonies, and on-the-ground coverage of protests and clashes between Morsi’s partisans and his opponents, including pieces by Mohamad Adam, Wael Eskandar, Bassam Haddad, and Dina Amer.

And there is more!

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS EGYPT’S CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM PAGE

[The following video is part of a series of clips produced by the Mosireen collective to promote greater awareness around the draft constitution currently under consideration in national referendum in Egypt. The full series can be accessed by clicking here.]

"We cannot tolerate a regime that practices torture, no matter who is at the head of it," were the opening remarks of Aida Seif El Dawla of the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture. 

On the issue of torture the draft constitution’s most critical offense against the Egyptian people is its failure to define torture, not to mention that it makes no mention of the government's obligation to the United Nations Convention against Torture. Given that this constitution is being sponsored by a government that has not only harbored a variety of forms of torture, but also systematically protected security force personnel who perpetrated these acts, this omission proves that the draft constitution is poised to protect a regime of terror directed at the Egyptian people.

The wording of the constitution, coupled with its silence on the question of torture, provides a legal framework that would permit the persistence of state-sponsored violence, which had been a trademark of the Hosni Mubarak regime.

Under the draft constitution, security forces can detain citizens for twelve hours without the right to contact a lawyer or a family member.

One of the primary reasons that drove Egyptians to take to the streets in support of the January 25 Revolution was their rejection of the brutal and systematic use of deadly violence and torture against innocent citizens and detained suspects. The draft constitution, particularly its failure to define acts of state violence, will inevitably perpetuate these same practices. This is a document that seeks to overturn the January 25 Revolution, rather than fulfill its demands.

For more details, please watch the video below (click “CC” for English subtitles).

Egyptian academic, activist and author Samer Soliman has died after a battle with terminal illness. He was forty-four years old.

Soliman was a founding member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party and the Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination Movement. He was also professor of political economy at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

Soliman graduated in 1990 from Cairo University with a BSc in economics. He then earned a diploma in African studies in 1992, followed by a Masters in sociology from AUC in 1997. He earned his PhD in political science from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris in 2004.

Soliman worked as an affiliated researcher at the CEDEJ (Centre d'etudes et de documentations economiques, juridiques et sociales) in Cairo. He also worked at, and was one of the founders of, the FrenchAl-Ahram Hebdo, beginning in 1994. He worked as a journalist with Ahram Online and contributed to many publications, including El-Bosla, El-Watan and El-Shorouk newspaper.

The main publication of Dr. Soliman is the book Strong Regime, Weak State: The fiscal crisis and political change in Egypt under Mubarak.

Soliman also published a lengthy piece in the series, "Cairo Papers in Social Science," under the title State and Industrial Capitalism in Egypt.

Soliman came from a middle class Egyptian Christian family. Both of his parents were teachers. He was raised in downtown Cairo and attended an Egyptian French school.

In one interview published in the Democratizing New Egypt blog, shortly after the revolution in 2011, Soliman said that he was raised in a political family.

“I grew up in a politicized family. Many people in my family were interested in or engaged in politics. I was raised in a secular family,” Soliman said. “My family was Christian, but secular. My mother is religious. My father was a communist … I was never raised as a Copt. I was raised as a nationalist, in a secular home, that was somehow leftist.”

Soliman said that he began to understand the sectarian issue in Egypt when he entered the army, which he called “a corrupt institution based on wasta (nepotism).” However, he added it gave him an intense education in the social situation in Egypt.

“I got in deep touch with the peasants, uneducated peasants from deep in the Egyptian countryside. [It was an amazing social education.] There is strong solidarity among soldiers with regard to the big monster, the institution of the military,” Soliman said in the interview.

Soliman was a much-loved professor at AUC. His student Mariam Kirollos, a graduate of political science and sociology, told Ahram Online that his death “is a great loss.”

"He was an amazing professor. He was very enthusiastic, very understanding and open to discussion,” she said. “He encouraged me to enter politics with him. He had so much compassion for his students. His lectures were extremely insightful. He was the most wonderful teacher you could have."

Karima Hafez, another AUC student who took classes with Soliman, said that he left a huge legacy.

"He used to give the political science introductory courses and we owe him a lot. He opened our eyes to the corruption in the country,” Hafez said. “I remember his passion for teaching. He was the only professor that you would see in protests all the time. It’s a great loss but his legacy will remain."

Soliman leaves behind wife Mary Mourad Shenouda, activist and editor of the books section at Ahram Online.

[Originally appeared on Ahram Online]

“Today I lost part of my life. Farewell, Samer,” scholar Amr Abdel Rahman wrote of his longtime friend Samer Soliman, who family, friends, students and readers lost Sunday after a battle with cancer. 

Soliman’s death at a critical juncture in the history of Egypt, a nation he lived of and for, has shaken many. As a scholar, an intellectual, an activist, a teacher and a friend, he lived a life of continual giving. 

Soliman led a thorough academic life, traveling between different degrees, the last of which was a PhD he received in political science from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris in 2004. His scholarly path was always outward-looking, transcending the boundaries of academic institutions. He lived the life of an engaged activist and political organizer, who tactfully hoped and genuinely believed in change. He mediated his intellect on the editorial pages of newspapers and through the endless conversations we had with him as journalists and scholars.  

Soliman’s scholarship was stimulated by a curiosity of the institution of the state and its mechanisms of survival through the internal machinations of the ruling regime. His seminal work, Strong Regime, Weak State questioned the former regime of President Hosni Mubarak’s handling of financial woes while preserving its political position, examining in particular the grave effects of shallowly conceived policies such as international borrowing, otherwise described by scholar Mostafa Hefny as “the temporary stitching of the growing cleavages in the workings of government.” 

In his more recent work, The Autumn of Dictatorship Soliman further explored the roots of revolution in the consistent weakening of the state apparatus, which limited political freedoms while financial resources were dwindling. Soliman argued that by investing in a robust security apparatus, the former regime, though remaining strong for three decades, left behind a weakened state. The work can be read retrospectively, but also as a document for the future, with the current government of the Muslim Brotherhood venturing to reproduce the duality of limiting freedoms while running out of economic alternatives.  

Mirroring this concern with government policy-making, Soliman was interested in the view from the other side, or otherwise the “social infrastructure of political change.” This interest transcended the confines of academic work, and translated itself into his activism, social engagement and political organizing. 

In his lifetime, Soliman was concerned with envisaging the possibilities of a democratic experience within an authoritarian environment. Throughout the process of interrogating these possibilities, Soliman was at the heart of several important initiatives. He co-edited Al-Bosla, a journal whose title literally translates as “the compass” and which became a platform for poignant conversations about how democracy can be born to the very specific conditions of historical development in Egypt. 

He also co-founded “Egyptians Against Discrimination,” moved by his passionate battle against sectarianism and other forms of discrimination. While many have submitted to the notion that sectarianism has grown to become an inherent sentiment in our society, Soliman recalled a moment in history that powerfully disputed this notion: The 1919 anti-colonial movement in Egypt framed national identity around the battle against British occupation, in which religious identity became only a parcel of this identity. Commenting on the incident of Erian Youssef Saad, a Christian activist who attempted to kill Youssef Pasha Wahba, Christian pro-occupation prime minister back in 1919, he jokingly noted: “To prove that you are truly Egyptian before being a Copt, you will have to start by killing a Copt.”

His longtime friend and activist Akram Ismail recalled how Soliman spoke of his upbringing by a leftist father, during which time he never sensed the pains of sectarianism until he stepped outside the confines of his household.

“Samer departed, leaving behind his bitterness from sectarianism and his long struggle for a more humane society,” Ismail wrote. “We will miss you.”

Soliman’s death leaves us alone in a turbulent moment, but armed with all the thoughts and energy with which he filled us. His death makes us wonder about the future he often thought of, but did not get a chance to see. And above all, his death reminds us of the eternal challenge of struggling so much to live a life ultimately rendered ephemeral by the abrupt moment of death.

[This article originally appeared in Egypt Independent.]

The most recent rampage school shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary (SHE), Newtown, Connecticut, that claimed the lives of twenty kindergarteners and six school staffers at the hands of another young white male, took the US and the world by a storm. As messages of sympathy poured down from world leaders and interfaith vigils were held in solidarity with the victims and their families, people in their shock and disbelief tried hard to make sense of this unthinkable act of violence against these innocent children. But no sooner had the news about the sixth mass shooting this year and the second-deadliest school mass murder in the history of the country broke out than the mainstream media pundits as well as some progressive commentators began recycling some ready-made framing narratives that have been repeated ad nauseam in the mainstream news coverage of similar incidents in the past. These narratives, however, ideologically mystify the root causes of the problem and foreclose the possibility of reimagining an adequate political solution to it.

Central to these narratives is the understanding of school mass murders as subjective, or individual, forms of violence that can be more appropriately explained in terms of the individual and cultural conflicts that are presumed to beset a pluralistic society such as the United States. Hence, the media coverage of these events tends to frame these mass murders within a psychobiographical model that profiles the perpetrators as simply alienated loners or misfits. This has recently taken the form of a mental health narrative that portrays them as insane, disturbed individuals, or victims of the failures of the public health system to offer adequate resources to treat them. In the case of Adam Lanza, the mass murderer in the SHE tragedy, he was described as a “deeply disturbed” and “mentally ill” kid,” who was subject to outbursts and who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, even though Asperger is a neurodevelopmental disorder not a mental illness.

This psychobiographical model is also embedded within a cultural narrative that interprets these school mass murders in the context of the ubiquitous glamorization of violence in American society. These critics like to point out the pathological obsession with graphic narratives of violence and gore, especially in videogames, as a method to solve personal conflicts. Adam Lanza, it appears, was obsessed with violent video games such as Counter Strike, in which he “would use a military-style assault rifle and a Glock handgun in games with other students.” Such a cultural narrative is valorized over an account that traces the ubiquity of violence in this country back to its irrational anti-Enlightenment foundations that were built on genocide, slavery, and exclusion (from property rights, constitutional privilege, etc.).

This culturalization of violence is also evident in liberal discourses that situate these subjective acts of violence within the crisis of dominant heteronormative structures of white supremacy in the US. The main concern of these liberal critics is white men’s “aggrieved entitlement” and the ways in which the media relentlessly tries to cover up and normalize the white masculine identity of the mass majority of the perpetrators. Even when photographs of the perpetrator are on display, these critics contend, a deliberate effort is made not to turn either the perpetrator’s racial identity or gender into an issue. In addition, critics maintain, the media uses the passive voice to normalize young white male violence. This omission, they argue, has grave consequences for understanding the root causes of the violence and for imagining workable policy solutions and intervention strategies that can help prevent and put an end to this pandemic.

Moreover, liberal critics unravel how this omission and normalization of white male violence invokes unconscious national mythologies (deeply held beliefs) that connect such acts with stereotypically racialized images of crime, ethnic pathology, and social deviancy. This culturalization of violence, with its obsession with identity politics, takes also the form of deconstructing the power of white privilege through a minoritarian frame that reimagines the implications of these shootings, should the perpetrators have been identified as an Other, be it (pathologically criminal) racial Other (Black or Latino) or the (pathologically terrorist) religious Other (Muslim).

Again and again, the focus is on the politics of recognition and representation (who speaks for whom and the power of white privilege in absolving the white perpetrators from speaking for or on behalf of their racial communities) in a way that forecloses the political significance and implication of these acts for envisioning a radical solution to the problem. Albeit, some attribute redemptive value to these violent as rituals or ceremonies of violence that offer the perpetrators resources for reformulating their identities and the social values that could perhaps (posthumously) suture these increasingly fragmented and split communities (which are supposed to be organically whole).

All this media talk about identity politics within the psychobiographical and cultural narratives, therefore, obscures the root causes of rampage school shootings. Media coverage, that is, completely disassociates these tragic events from the contradictions of the political and economic structures of power and domination namely, the national security state and the neoliberal capitalist system that drives it. These power structures constitute the objective or structural forms of violence that have engendered school mass murders in the first place and in which they are embedded.

To understand these forms of objective violence in the case of school mass murders, one must account for the qualitative change of the context, the schools themselves, in which these acts occur. It must be noted that mainstream media coverage of these acts of violence approaches the problem of rampage school shootings within an exclusively American cultural discourse that represents schools as sacred sites, where safety and personal security are guaranteed, since any use of violence is thought to be inappropriate on school premises. Hence, media pundits claim that such shootings are rare, citing various variables as evidence of their unique and distinct form of violence in a widely violent culture. At stake here is an aspirational discourse that holds American schools up to some ideal of what we think education should be at the expense of actual student experiences in the system.

As any review of the sociological literature on this sub-genre of mass murder can tell, nonetheless, this type of subjective violence has occurred throughout the history of formal education in the country. Indeed, the mass school shooting at SHEis the twelfth of its kind in the last thirty years of US history and also the sixth mass murder in the country this year alone. One must also remember that these rampage school shootings have become increasingly popular since the 1990s especially, after the end of the Cold War and the intensification of neoliberal capitalist policies, including the push for privatization of the welfare state.

Consequently, the biopolitical forms of power, coercion, and violence, underpinning the neoliberal security state and global capitalist system, have turned schools for many students across the socio-economic spectrum, but especially for students from colonized, non-immigrant communities in the US, into sites of violation, humiliation, persecution, reification, and alienation. Hence, a link must be drawn between the alienation and reification that students experience in contemporary schools and the ways in which schools have become sites that replicate the structures of violence, including state-sponsored terrorism, colonial oppression, and economic exploitation that underlie the power of the security state and the global capitalist economy.

As various sociologists have pointed out, schools have been ideologically redesigned around principles of “economic instrumentalism” and “specialization” that train students to maximize their productivity in the service capitalist interests. Moreover, schools have encoded and reenacted the repressive practices of the security state through the implementation of various surveillance technologies, metal detectors, and the presence of probation officers as well as security guards, turning schools in effect into semi-penitentiaries. It should not come as a surprise, then, to hear various law makers rehash the talking points of the NRA that call for appropriating funds for beefing up security measures, arming teachers on school premises, and for creating a school protection program, the National School Shield Program. These militaristic solutions can only reinforce the normalization and naturalization of the repressive power of the structural forms of violence, neoliberal security state and the global market economy, within which schools are embedded.

These objective forms of violence, nonetheless, remain largely invisible in public discourse. And on the rare occasion when they are alluded to, they are justified in the name of national security, the global war on terror, developmentalism, and modernization. In their daily interactions with the system, however, students can identify the coercive nature of the schools, and might (un)consciously make the connection between these forms of violence and the larger structure of objective violence that permeates their lives inside and outside schools. No wonder, then, schools in the minds of these mass murderers are not much different from any other public or private site where spectacles of violence can be reenacted. To this extent, schools constitute a proper site for the expression of violence, which had always already been inscribed within its classrooms and halls.

But the proper way to understand the connections between rampage school shootings and these objective forms of violence is to reframe them within an internationalist perspective that seeks not only to establish a clear link between subjective and objective forms of violence, shifting the debate thus from culture to politics, but also to consider meaningfully the politics of redistribution and socialist justice within an alternative economic order. At stake here is the need to outline the ways in which these school mass shootings and other homologous and non-homologous forms of violence around the world are interconnected within the same global structures of power and domination. In light of the shrinking, finite resources in this world, the privilege of some is necessarily based on the exclusion and disposability of others. This has tremendous implications for understanding the destruction of life, in general, and the lives of the disenfranchised and subjugated masses, in particular, under conditions of structural violence mobilized by the security state and global capitalism around the world.

More specifically, the killing of innocent children anywhere in the world deserves to be the site of political mobilization, not only intense national debate, regarding US national security and the war on terror as an alibi for the intensification of global capitalist exploitation, neoliberal economics, and colonial oppression in the world. It is a shame that we have to be bombarded by an endless stream of images of the recent school mass murders in Newtown, Connecticut, as tragic as they were, but hear almost nothing about the senseless death of over 160 Pakistani children by American drones or have the news of the murder of Palestinian children in Gaza by the Israeli army erased from public discourse and collective memory.

Talking about human loss in Newtown cannot make sense unless we recognize and seek to end human loss everywhere else. The humanity of the Other should not be questioned the way it is done, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly; how else can we explain the dehumanization tropes that depict the victims of the indiscriminate drone extermination program as “bug splats” and wild grass to be mown? To see Obama shed those tears for the victims in SHE can send chills down one’s spine. Only then can we appreciate the perverse obscenity of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s condolence letter to President Obama, in which he engaged in his typical shameless falsification stating, “We in Israel have experienced such cruel acts of slaughter and we know the shock and agony they bring.” Over and over again, anti-Palestinian Zionist propaganda blames the victims and inverts the realities of the geopolitical context in which the imbalance of power that favors Israel’s military supremacy is always obscured by the elevation of Israel to the status of pre-ontological victimization. The chutzpa!!!

It is the irony of our times that the system’s dehumanized Others, those subjugated masses in the age of the American empire and global capitalism, would be the ones to carry the torch on this issue. In the eloquent texts they produce, they teach us the true meaning of sympathy with the victims of colonial aggression and global capitalist exploitation in the global South and call on to us to take full responsibility for all the material and institutional privileges we take for granted, without ever questioning how these privileges have been systematically consolidated by the collaborative interventions of the neoliberal security state with global capitalism by depriving them from other around the world. It is from this sense of mutual responsibility for decolonization that a truly internationalist perspective should be developed for envisioning more effective political strategies that will allow us to think Other/wise, resist nationally-sanctioned forms of ignorance, and articulate the social bases of long-lasting solidarities that find their most transformative expression within a universal history of the struggle for liberation and emancipation.

[”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:أحمد فؤاد

الشهرة:نجم

إسم الأب:محمد عزت

إسم الأم:هانم مرسي

تاريخ الولادة: 1929

مكان الولادة:كفور نجم

الجنسية:مصر

الأولاد:نوارة/ زينب /عفاف

اللقب:الفاهوم

الفئة: مؤلف

المهنة:شاعر 

أحمد فؤاد نجم

• ولد في 1929/05/22 في قرية "كفور نجم".
•  توفي والده محمد عزت نجم وهو ضابط بوليس في 1935/07/08 وكان هو في السادسة من عمره، واضطر منذ ذلك الوقت لكسب قوته . فعمل ”خادماً“ في المنازل ، وعاملاً ”زراعياً“ ثم ”كواء“ و“خياطا“ ، وكان له 16 شقيقاً وشقيقة.
• والدته : هانم مرسي نجم.
• تزوج  عدة مرات: أولها من فاطمة منصور أنجب منها عفاف، كما تزوج الفنانة عزة بلبع والكاتبة صافيناز كاظم التي أنجب منها نوارة نجم (الصحافية والناشطة في الثورة المصرية), ثم تزوج ممثلة المسرح الجزائرية الأولى صونيا ميكيو، وأخيراً تزوج من السيدة أميمة عبد الوهاب وأنجب منها زينب، ولديه 3 أحفاد من عفاف: مصطفى، صفاء وأمنية. 
• يطلق عليه لقب "الفاجومي".
• عمل موظفاً في مصلحة سكة الحديد من 1951 إلى 1956 ثم نقل إلى وزارة الشؤون الاجتماعية، ثم إلى النقل الميكانيكي في العباسية.
•  تعرف إلى عمال المطابع الشيوعيين في مدينة فايد على قناة السويس، وشارك في التظاهرات التي اندلعت سنة 1946.
• عام 1959 حكم عليه 33 شهراً بتهمة الاختلاس، وخرج من السجن في أيار 1962 ليعمل في مؤتمر التضامن الآسيوي - الافريقي.
•  بعد إلغاء المعاهدة المصرية الإنجليزية دعت الحركة الوطنية العاملين بالمعسكرات الإنجليزية إلى تركها فاستجاب للدعوة وعينته حكومة الوفد كعامل بورش النقل الميكانيكي وفي تلك الفترة قام بعض المسؤولين بسرقة المعدات من الورشة، وعندما اعترضهم اتهموه بجريمة تزوير استمارات شراء مما أدى إلى الحكم عليه 3 سنوات بسجن قره ميدان (أكد احمد فؤاد نجم في أحد البرامج أنه كان مذنباً فعلاً) حيث تعرف هناك على أخوه السادس (علي محمد عزت نجم).
•  

 [قصيدة "مصر ياما يا بهية" بصوت أحمد فؤاد نجم] 

• التقى في السجن الكاتب الروائي عبد الحكيم قاسم، واكتشف نفسه شاعراً . وقد شجعه أحد ضباط السجن، من هواة الأدب ونسخ له قصائده على الآلة الكاتبة وأرسلها إلى وزارة الثقافة، التي كانت تقيم آنذاك مسابقة شعرية . وقد فاز بها ديوانه، الذي سمي "صور من الحياة في السجن"، بالجائزة الأولى. وكتبت له المقدمة سهير القلماوي ليشتهر وهو في السجن. ونشرت الوزارة الديوان عام 1962.
• التقى المغني الضرير الشيخ إمام عيسى المعروف باسم "الشيخ إمام"سنة 1962.
• عام 1964 التحق بالعمل في سكرتارية منظمة التضامن الآسيوي الأفريقي بالقاهرة، وظل فيها حتى عام 1969 حين قبض عليه بتهمة سياسية.
• هزته هزيمة حزيران 1967 هزة عنيفة، وبدأ منذ ذلك الحين كتابة الشعر السياسي الذي كان الشيخ إمام يقوم بتلحينه وغنائه وذاعت أغانيهما، وعرضت عليهما إغراءات مادية كبيرة ، ولكنهما رفضاها ، وبقيا في غرفتهما المتواضعة في حي الغورية.
• دخل الشاعر السجن نحو 9 مرات، وكانت أطول مدة قضاها في السجن ثلاث سنوات في عهد الرئيس جمال عبد الناصر، الذي أمر بسجنه والشيخ إمام، بعد صدور أغنيتهما "الحمد الله" التي هاجم فيها السلطات بعد نكسة 1967 وصدر الحكم عليه بالسجن المؤبد، الا أنه خرج من السجن بعد رحيل عبد الناصر، وتراوحت الفترات التي أمضاها في السجن بين أسبوعين وثلاث سنوات.
• في تشرين الثاني 1977 قبض عليه ووجهت إليه تهمة تلاوة قصيدة "بيان هام" في إحدى كليات جامعة عين شمس ، ثم أصدر الرئيس أنور السادات قراراً بإحالته إلى المحكمة العسكرية التي أصدرت عليه حكما بالسجن لمدة عام.

[قصيدة "مصر ياما يا بهية" لأحمد فؤاد نجم غناء الشيخ إمام]

•  قبض عليه سنة 1981 في بيت باحثين علميين فرنسيين . وقد عقد هذان الباحثان مؤتمراً صحافياً في باريس نشرته جريدة "لوموند" الفرنسية ، أعلنا فيه أنهما تعرضا للتعذيب في سجن القلعة . وقالا أن نجم تعرض أيضا للتعذيب في سجن طرة، وفي السجن أعلن الإضراب عن الطعام حتى الموت إذا لم يفرج عنه.
• في العام 1984 قام برحلة مع الشيخ إمام ، الذي غنى خلالها في باريس والجزائر وتونس ولبنان وسوريا واليمن . ومنذ تلك الرحلة حدثت القطيعة بينهما، وعاد الشيخ إمام إلى مصر من دونه.
• سنة 2004 وبعد تأسيس حركة "كفاية" صار من أبرز رموز التحركات الشعبية التي انتعشت في مصر. وكتب ضد جمال مبارك قصيدة لاذعة بعنوان: "عريس الدولة".

[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.]  

“Full unofficial results of Egypt's constitutional referendum: A visual breakdown”
The new constitution passes with 64% of the vote.

“Referendum voting lowest turnout since revolution”
Thirty-two percent of Egyptians have cast their vote in the two rounds of the constitutional referendum.

“Morsi's Pyrrhic Victory”
Nervana Mahmoud analyzes the results of the referendum and says it shows that the president’s claims that 80% of Egyptians support him are untrue.

“Cairo Administrative Court to review legitimacy of referendum”
The legal challenge is on the basis of the 2011 constitutional declaration which stipulates that the referendum has to be held in one day.

“Alexandria clashes escalate”
Clashes between Islamist and non-Islamist protesters result in a few dozen injured near Al-Qa’ed Ibrahim Mosque.

“Voting for Egypt's constitution”
Sarah Mousa shares her views as an Egyptian voter in the constitutional referendum.

“Anti-constitutional referendum marches flop”
Marches organized by the National Salvation Front have low attendance.

“Morsy appoints 90 members to Shura Council”
The Shura Council will take over legislative functions from the president until the lower house is elected.

“Prosecutors protest against prosecutor-general”
Prosecutors organize a protest in front of the prosecutor-general office after he retracts his resignation from earlier this week.

“FJP: Finance Ministry policies embarrass the govt.”
Freedom and Justice Party criticizes the finance ministry over passing an Islamic Crediting Bill.

“Morsi-appointed prosecutor general 'resigns'”
Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah resigns after protests from judges against his appointment as the new prosecutor general.

“Constitutional Court head slams Morsi's statement to foreign media”
Judge Maher El-Beheiry condemns President Morsi's recent statements that the Constitutional Court is 'anti-revolutionary force.'

“Presidency 'lies' on the constitution, says No to Military Trials Campaign”
No to Military Trials Campaign criticizes the presidency statement that the new constitution bans military trials against civilians, saying that the text is ambiguous.

“State Council refuses to supervise next referendum vote”
The State Council Judges Club board has decided not to supervise the second round of voting in the constitutional referendum.

“Rethinking the Muslim Brotherhood”
Khalil Al-Annani argues that the Brotherhood’s recent behavior can be explained by the internal dynamics of the organization rather than with ideology.

“Taking a stand”
Ibrahim El-Houdaiby commemorates Sheikh Emad Effat’s death, recounting memories of him and reminding the reader that his murders have not been brought to justice yet.

“Journalists summoned for insulting President Morsi”
Journalists from Youm El-Sabae are interrogated over an article deemed offensive to the president.

“Ahmed al-Zend, anti-Morsy judge, assaulted outside Judges Club”
Head of the Judge’s Club gets assaulted by a group of men in front of its headquarters.

“Rethinking Egypt’s Opposition”
Bassem Sabry says the Egyptian opposition can emerge strong out of the current crisis if it does not repeat past mistakes.

“Egyptian opposition to form united party after defeats”
Leaders of the National Salvation Front say they will found a new party after constitutional vote.

In Arabic:

“مفاجأة..النائب العام يعترف: الرئيس أجبرني على المنصب”
The recently resigned prosecutor general acknowledges that the constitutional declaration was flawed.

“استقالة المستشار محمود مكي نائب رئيس الجمهورية من منصبه”
Vice-President Mahmoud Mekki resigns from his positions, saying that he wanted to put forward his resignation in early November, but decided against it because of the political situation in Egypt.

“لماذا رفض 43% من المصريين الشريعة الإسلامية؟”
Ahmed Samir writes about why 43% of Egyptians voted against the constitution in the first round.

“النائب العام يأمر بالتحقيق مع إبراهيم عيسى وسيف اليزل بتهم ازدراء الأديان وتهديد الوحدة الوطنية وإثارة الفوضى”
The prosecutor-general orders an investigation against prominent journalist Ibrahim Eissa for contempt of religions and threatening the unity of the nation.

“الغضبُ الساطع آتٍ ..!”
Mohamed Abu El-Gheit argues that the majority of Egyptians are seeking social justice which will not come from the new constitution.

“«الحرية والعدالة» يدعو المعارضة لحوار شامل «دون شروط مسبقة»”
Freedom and Justice Party call on the opposition for a dialogue “without pre-conditions.”

Recent Jadaliyya articles on Egypt:

Samer Soliman, Prominent Academic and Activist, Dies at Forty-Four
An obituary for Samer Soliman, professor, activist and founding member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party and the Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination Movement

Egypt's Draft Constitution in Focus: Torture
Mosireen’s video about the lack of provisions in the new constitution against the use of torture.

Jadaliyya Page on Egypt's Constitutional Referendum
An overview of Jadaliyya’s coverage of the constitutional referendum.

من القاهرة الجميلة - الجزء الرابع
The fourth part of Amro Eletrebi’s article describing his feelings about protests and the city of Cairo.

Say “Yes” to the Revolution
An English translation of Mohamed Adam’s letter to his parents on why to vote “No” at the referendum.

The Severed Branches of Local Government
Aaron Jakes says the new constitution does not resolve the problems with local governance that Egypt is suffering from.

Egypt's Draft Constitution in Focus: Freedom of Expression
Mosireen’s video of leading Egyptian editors and journalists discussion the provisions for freedom of expression in the new constitution.

قولوا نعم للعيش والحرية والعدالة الاجتماعية
Mohamed Adam writes in a letter to his parents why they have to vote “No” at the constitutional referendum.

Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus – The Role of the Army [Video]
Mosireen’s video with political researcher Ibrahim El Houdaiby and Hossam Bahgat, Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights talking about the role of the army as set by the new constitution.

The Battle for Sinai
Al-Jazeera’s Fault Lines explores the ongoing uprising in Sinai and its national and regional consequences.

Morsi's Democracy Devoid of Press and Media Freedoms
Seifeldin Fawzy talks about recent the rising trend of harassing and intimidating journalists in Egypt, using different tactics, including legislation.

Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus: Labor Rights [Video]
Mosireen’s video with Fatma Ramadan, independent trade unions official, and Ahmad Sayed Al-Naggar, economist at Al-Ahram Center discussing labor rights in the new constitution.

الطائفة الشرطية وحكومة الرئيس مرسي: تحالف يقوم على رؤية أمنوقراطية للدولة
Karim Ennarah says the current government has entered a ruling coalition with the police and the army.

Year Three
At the anniversary of Muhammad Bouazzizi’s self-immolation, Mouin Rabbani writes about the directions the Arab Spring is taking in different countries in the region.

الأقباط وصراع السلطة على الأحوال الشخصية
An Arabic translation of Paul Sedra’s article on the changing attitudes of the Church towards the Personal Status issue.

الواقع يرفض بديلكم الوحيد
Wael Gamal criticizes the continuing trend on the Egyptian political scene to present certain decisions or political forces as “the only choice.”

A Faraway Neighbor
Jihad Abaza describes his trip to Gaza with the delegation of Egyptian activists during the recent Israeli attack on the strip.

Remembering Emad Effat
Murdered preacher’s wife, Nashwa Abdel-Tawab, still mourns her husband.

صندوقالألم

(مقطع)

لم تكنْ هناك، هذا الفجر،

حين أطلَّ المرضى والركابُ والجنود

برؤوسٍ صلعاء وحليقة

مثل أكواخٍ معتمة في نوافذ بعيدة.

ضبابٌ خفيف لم يمكثْ  طويلاً

عبَرهُ الصبيُّ أمام بوّابةِ المستشفى

حيث وجدَ مسدساً ملقى على العشب.

لم تكن هناك.

الآن، أنت قصةٌ تُروى في مكانٍ لستَ فيه.

حلقك، صندوقُ الألم،

مليءٌ بالعظامِ والريش.

في بياضِ  عينك

بقعةُ دمٍ صغيرةٌ وصدئة

كشمسٍ تغربُ في البعيد

فوق حقلٍ من الثلج

داسَتْهُ أرتالٌ طويلةٌ من الجنودِ الجوعى.

-ضوءُآذار-

(مقطعان)

انظُرْ:

الغيمةُ فوق رأسك

       مثل بطنِ حيوانٍ تحبُّ أن تداعبه،

الثلجُ يغطّي في الظلّ

           حجراً وكسرةَ خبز.

أتسمعُ الريحَ  بين غصونِ الخوخ المزهرة؟

هل فهمتني؟

إنهُ الصباح،

الهواءُ أصفى من عيوننا

    ولا أحدَ يتركُ أثراً في مرآة.

*** *** *** ***

العصفورُ الذي رفرفَ عن سلكِ الغسيل تعرّفَ إليّ دون أن يعرفَ اسمي. كانت ساقاه أنحلَ من السلك؛ ولكنهما تخدمان حياته جيداً. أفزعتهُ بظهوري فأطلقَ الفزعُ جناحيه عالياً. لا فرقَ لديه بين سائر الأشكال التي يُطْلَقُ عليها اسمُ البشر؛ سيانِ أنا أو سواي، فعيناه البراقتان لا تستأمنان أحداً. أما أنا فأكره إني أحرسُ اسمي الذي وُهِبْتهُ كي يأسرَني، أجرَّه ويجرَّني، فالتصقَ بوجهي وصار جزءاً من نبرة صوتي، أستغربه أحياناً إذا قرأتهُ أو سمعته، أو أضجر منه وأمقته. كالآخرين جميعاً، أمضيتُ وقتاً طويلاً كي أسجنَ نفسي في اسمي، إذ كلُّ امرئ يُدفَنُ حياً في اسمه: قبرٌ من الخوف والمتعة وسوء الفهم.

*** **** ***** ****

-الزُّناة-

(مقطع)

أفكاري أبْردُ من يديك

أقسى من حَلَمةٍ أفاقَتْ  بين أسنانِ غريب.

نفخةٌ ستُبعثرني بين الظلال

حيث تومضُ النذورُ والعلامات

ويَهرمُ المؤرَّقون

وتبردُ الأطباقُ  كوجوهٍ تنسانا.

يثرثرُ الموت

حين تعبرُ يدي المائدةَ كعربةٍ بطيئةٍ من القشّ

ثم يبتعدُ عنا، غاضباً مثلنا،

ويتركُ هذا المنديل

وقصاصةً تحملُ اسمك

كيلا تضيعي إذا خرجتِ.

The latest non-scandal scandalizing the American commentariat is whether Barack Obama will be able to nominate former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his new Secretary of Defense. The narrative is that the Zionist lobby is eager to scuttle Hagel’s nomination because he has uttered one too many words “critical” of Israel, and displayed too many sentiments suspected of being contrary to the agenda of the lobby: namely, destroying Iran.

The narrative is true enough.

That the lobby does not want Hagel is clear, and his nomination would be a defeat for the lobby’s right wing.

Still, it is barely a scandal, except in the sense that it is scandalous how narrow the parameters of debate are in this country such that leftists think that an aggressive nationalist like Hagel merits their defense.

There are a few reasons for that.

First, Hagel’s policy prescriptions for dealing with Iran are, in fact,American policy. US policymakers have been huffing and puffing about a US attack on Iran for over a decade – without producing that attack. They are not the only ones. While the Israeli political class itinerantly threatens Iran, its defense intelligentsia warns against it. So does the Pentagon and the US State Department. At the military level, there is no direct war on Iran, and the absence of a military attack against Iran is not a policy secured by the dominance of responsible and beleaguered technocrats fending off the neocons’ pressure.

It is simply the consensual policy amongst most of the Washington elite.

The second element of American policy against Iran is clear, and it is one that Hagel himself has made clear: the slow-motion erosion of the Iranian economy and society. And that policy is going ahead fine. As Hagel has observed, “We do have some rather significant evidence that sanctions are working.”

The “work” that sanctions are doing so well is also clear: hammering the Iranian economy, and crucially, scaring away investment in the oil and gas industries.

Unfortunately undernoticed is the causal relationship between the verbal fervor for war and the continued sanctions regime: the role of the former is to convince those scared of war to accept sanctions, on the premise that anything is better than war.

They forget that sanctions are war by other means.

Over the past year, Iranian oil production has quietly descended from its post-revolution apex of 4.23 million barrels per day. In November, oil production hit 2.7 million daily barrels. In lock-step with declining production, exports too have plummeted, from a peak of 2.2 million barrels per day to less than one million now.

Of course, Hagel has linked the sanctions to Iran’s non-existent nuclear program. But the claims that US-impelled sanctions are linked to Iranian nuclear proliferation are nonsense, as even a conservative commentator like Hillary Mann Leverett makes clear. They are intended to “increase hardship for ordinary Iranians.” As Leverett continues, the “idea [is] that [people] will then rise up and overthrew their government and get rid of a system that Washington does not like.”

So why doesn’t Washington like Iran? Some would have us blame the Israel lobby. There’s some truth to that. But the isolation of Tehran traces back to 1979, and few dispute that even without the lobby, the US would pursue a very similar policy vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic, centered on the need for “containment.” As the two analysts most notorious for introducing discussion of the Israel lobby to American discourse write, the US and the Gulf States “have an independent interest in keeping Iran non-nuclear and preventing it from becoming a regional hegemon.”

While literally true, the goal of preventing Iran from becoming a “regional hegemon” displaces rather than answers the question about the sources of US aggression against Iran. The United States warmly embraced Iran as the “policeman of the Gulf” under the Shah, and in turn shipped over nine billion dollars worth of weapons to it in the 1970s.

Hegemony was not the issue then.

So the question of contesting Iran’s “regional hegemony” must be – at least in part – obfuscation.

Instead, the question, then and now, is not the objective power of Iran but the strategic orientation of that power, and the direction in which the petrodollars upon which that power is based flow.   

Stephen Walt confirms that the point is petroleum and the revenues to be extracted from its sale. He writes that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are “deeply worried about Iran” because of “the Gulf states' interest in keeping oil prices high enough to balance their own budgets, in a period where heightened social spending and other measures are being used to insulate these regimes from the impact of the Arab Spring.”

He then spells out the nexus between high oil prices and Iran: the Gulf Cooperation Council states “have an interest in keeping Iran in the doghouse, so that Iran can't attract foreign companies to refurbish and expand its oil and gas fields and so that it has even more trouble marketing its petroleum on global markets.”

As Walt obliquely admits, the economics of oil have nothing to do with securing a “free flow.” Oil is an incredibly cheap commodity to produce, nowhere more so than the Middle East, and the economics of oil – from the perspective of oil companies, both corporate and national – is maximizing the rent they receive. Maximizing that rent entails engineering the largest possible difference between the price of gas and other petroleum derivatives and the price of production and extraction. But the price of derivatives and gas is not a “market” phenomenon, at least as vernacularly understood. It is a political arrangement, the outcome of a multi-partner dance in which the choreography is broadly known but the dancers occasionally stutter and misstep, as national oil companies and foreign oil majors jockey for their chunk of the profits and investors in commodity index funds elbow in for their share of the revenues from the black gold.

Most centrally, managing the price of oil means managing the supply of oil, and one manages the supply of oil by keeping some oil off the market. One does this by preventing the development of some oil fields – especially those of an Iran that has broken free of the American orbit – and maintaining the capacity of others, especially those of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.

Once it is clear that the “market,” far from the equilibrium model of equally-informed and equally-empowered participants beloved of neo-classical economics, is actually a carefully constructed and politically instituted phenomenon through which power flows in the form of capital to various players, institutions like “the economy” and “the state” look markedly different, as does the language used to describe them.

In particular, the rhetoric of statesman has to be inspected and dissected as the way bureaucrats repackage the interests of private monopolies, and cast policies pursued for quite other reasons as ones pursued for reasons of state.

Thus the US and the Gulf states' fear of Iranian “regional hegemony” means a fear of an Iran diverting the proceeds from petroleum away from US armaments – and potentially, treasuries–to internal development, such as health care and education.

And “stability” doesn’t mean the absence of armed conflict, but the stability of the triangular relationship between the social structures of accumulation in the Gulf States, their external patrons, and the oil companies which profit from selling and refining the raw petroleum which is pumped in its millions of barrels out of the Gulf daily.

For that reason, the tacit collusion between the Gulf States, the United States, and the transnational oil companies is generally at the core of decision-making when it comes to plotting aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran and staving off its threats to “destabilize” the region.

Walt makes that clear as he writes that keeping Iran and Iranian oil production down is “also about enabling certain ruling families to keep writing checks,” and that we ought to “keep that in mind the next time you fill your gas tank or pay your home heating bill.” To which one might add, keeping the share prices and profits of the international petroleum corporations elevated – it is after all the latter determining prices at the pump, not Saudi Aramco.

This is something that ought be kept in mind by those over-eager to defend Hagel from the neocons who are supposedly sabotaging American foreign policy: the sanctions regime benefits not just the Gulf regimes but also the United States, no matter some may prefer to cast this regime as originating from the malefactions of Arab sheikhdoms messing up American foreign policy or the influence of Israel’s domestic partners in the United States.

Furthermore, since belligerence against Iran has institutional rather than personalistic roots, a changing of the personnel up top will produce only a slight change in strategy.

The goal – a hobbled Iran – will remain unchanged.

Still others defend the Hagel nomination through a fixation on his openness to discussions with Hamas. What this perspective misses is that a push for dialogue with Hamas has been the position of “liberal” Beltway think-tanks for some time. It is premised on the assumption that through dialogue, the US will be able to tame, contain, and turn Hamas, either making it serve a similar function as the Egyptian or Syrian Muslim Brotherhoods, enfolded into a Gulf-supported Sunni crescent, or pushing it into “national reconciliation” with Fateh.

Little good will come of this nomination.

And without question, sanctions and occupation will continue apace.

This makes it unfortunate that the campaign to defend Hagel has gathered support not merely from realist analysts like Walt, but by many of a more progressive bent, some of whom are happy that the J Street lobby group – nearly indistinguishable from AIPAC – is defending Hagel’s candidacy.

Indeed, the support of J Street ought to be a red flare clarifying Hagel’s projected role.

Instead, it has somehow convinced some that he will tamp down the imperial role in the region, or that his appointment will move US foreign policy to the left. That seems unlikely, if not delusory. The question is minute divergences of strategy within a broader vision of domination of the region – a reflection of inter-elite bickering over the best way to cripple Iran and impose surrender terms on the Palestinian people.

The potential nomination of Hagel is meaningful only if one naturalizes the social and political landscape and assumes that the best which can be hoped for is an ever-so-slightly gentler empire.

And so the hubbub over Hagel is a squabble which tells us only a little about internal disagreements within foreign policy circles, but much about the widespread tendency not merely to confuse the spectacle of politics for politics itself, but also to foreclose entirely the possibility of meaningful change.

The killing has changed the city’s shape - This rock
Is bone
This smoke people breathing,

Adonis, “The Desert,” 1982-83.

On December 20, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ independent commission of inquiry on Syria released its periodic update. The short report makes for frightful reading. The numbers of dead and affected has reached mythical proportions – more than forty thousand corpses, more than five hundred thousand refugees, and more than four million people in dire straits as their country collapses around them. The restrained prose of the UN carries forward the perils of the civil war, “As battles between Government forces and anti-Government armed groups approach the end of their second year, the conflict has become overtly sectarian in nature.” “Feeling threatened and under attack,” the report notes, “ethnic and religious minority groups have increasingly aligned themselves with parties to the conflict, deepening sectarian divides.”

The UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, said on December 21 that he worries that the conflict has now become “overly sectarian in nature.” There is an air of paralysis in the chambers of the UN. Dieng, who worked on the Rwanda tribunal, has only clichés to offer, “I urge all parties to adhere to international humanitarian and human rights law” which prohibits the targeting of people on religious and ethnic lines. These sentiments are important, but they do seem stale as sectarianism sees to envelop Syrian society.

In Geneva, the UN released its 2013 Syria Humanitarian Assistance Response Plan (SHARP) and the Syria Regional Response Plan (SRRP). This is the third SHARP and fourth SRRP released this year. “It is highly unusual for such plans to be revised so often,” said Radhouane Nouicer, the regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria. “It is indicative of the rapid developments on the ground and the dramatically deteriorating humanitarian situation in the country. The magnitude of the humanitarian crisis is indisputable.”

The plan makes for disturbing reading. Here are three points that bear notice:

1. Collapse of Livelihood.

Armed clashes, a pall of insecurity and the massive internal and external migrations has thrown a wrench into the Syrian economy. The UN Periodic Update notes, “Towns and villages across Latakia, Idlib, Hama and Dara’a governorates have been effectively emptied of their populations. Entire neighborhoods in southern and eastern Damascus, Deir al-Zour and Aleppo have been razed. The downtown of Homs has been devastated.” Consequentially, the SHARP/SRRP document notes that people ability to scrabble together a livelihood has collapsed. Unemployment is combined with a loss of assets – no income has meant that people have had to rely upon their savings and sale or slaughter of their fixed assets (rates of slaughter of livestock are much higher than normal). Families that had come to rely upon remittances from relatives abroad are now having a hard time accessing this money “due to the difficulty of money transfer services as a result of economic sanctions. While it is difficult to isolate the effect of the sanctions from other intertwining internal and external factors, there is no doubt that the sanctions have exacerbated the impact of the current events. Sanctions bear a disproportionately high share of the economic and social burden.”

2. On the threshold of Starvation.

The World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agricultural Organization’s monitoring missions confirm that food stocks are depleting rapidly and coping strategies have eroded. As homes are destroyed, families have taken in relatives and neighbors. “The Syrian population has shown its strong and traditional generosity and solidarity with people who fled areas affected by the events by opening their homes and sharing resources,” notes the UN report. “Hospitality is extended and assistance provided by host families, local communities, religious and local charitable and community organizations. However, previously robust networks and support mechanisms are coming under increasing pressure in view of the limited and depleting resources of host families and local communities.” Social networks of love and fellowship are stretched thin, particularly as sectarian tensions rise, as livelihoods collapse and as the cruelty of war pushes into its second winter.

3. Health and Education.

The monitoring mission from the World Health Organization has been especially worried about the frayed health care infrastructure, and the depletion of medicines. The UN report notes, “In affected areas there is a critical shortage of life-saving medicines. For example, Insulin is not available in a number of areas. There are more than 430,000 registered diabetic patients in Syria out of which 40,000 are children with insulin dependent diabetes. In Al Raqqa, the Director of Health reported that before the influx of people who left their homes because of the current events three months ago, there were 10,300 patients registered with diabetes. At the end of October 2012, the number of registered diabetic patients was 21,000.”

Like hospitals, schools are also being used as refugee shelters. Teaching in large parts of the country has either been curtailed or ceased. Hundreds of thousands of young people, especially refugees, “have already lost one school year” and others, the report notes chillingly, “might never go back to school.”

Exponential pressures grew on the relief agencies as the war entered the camps of the Palestinians, particularly when the Yarmouk Camp in Damascus was emptied of its residents after December 16. Close to 90 percent of the 180,000 residents of the oldest (1957) and largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria fled to other parts of Syria and toward Lebanon. Some who have been stuck at the Lebanon-Syria border and had to turn back say that this is because the UNHCR and the UNRWA, the agencies for refugees and for the Palestinians, have intimated that this wave is outside their ambit. UN agencies deny this, but do agree that there are great difficulties at the border, and in the transition. Palestinians in Syria were generally treated as Syrians, whereas in Lebanon they are not treated as Lebanese. As Salameh Kaileh, the writer who was twice a guest of the Assad family in its prisons and is now in Amman (Jordan) put it wryly, “if we make a mistake, we are arrested just like any other Syrian.”

“These people have already suffered tremendously in their journey in search of safety for their families and young children, moving from one place to the other hungry, terrified and cold,” said Ertharin Cousin, head of the WFP. The WFP promised to provide 12 kilograms of food to each family per week (just to put this in context, an average US individual eats about 5 kilograms per week). One and a half million Syrians are now being fed by the WFP’s “ready-to-eat” packages.

Meanwhile, in Cairo, the UN’s Lakhdar Brahimi met with the Syrian opposition’s leadership (Moaz al-Khatib, Riad Seif, Suheir al-Atassi and George Sabra) on December 21. The opposition briefed Brahimi on their assessment of the situation prior to his visit to Damascus to meet Bashar al-Assad that began on December 23. It is an important statement about the security situation that for this, his third visit to Damascus since August, Brahimi had to travel by land from Beirut because security at Damascus airport could not be guaranteed. In 1989, when Brahimi was proctoring the Taif Accord for a ceasefire in Lebanon, he landed in the safe Damascus airport to drive to dangerous Beirut; the roles are now reversed. It is likely that a framework for the establishment of a transitional government will be worked out on this visit. Sources in the UN tell me that both the Syrian opposition and sections in the Assad regime (particularly Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa) have come to the view that the Islamist extremists are beginning to pose the greater danger to Syria. Al-Sharaa was not in the meeting with Assad on December 24, since he was accompanied by Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, his deputy Faisal Muqdad and Assad’s adviser Buthaina Shaaban. Not much should be made of this, however. Brahimi’s own card has been to convince them that what unites them is opposition to groups like Jubhat al-Nusra, and to play on the fumes of Syrian nationalism that remain to choke out the emergent sectarianism. He left the meeting despondent. The tea leaves for mediation do not look as good as they did during his car ride from Beirut.

Even if the regime falls tomorrow, however, the humanitarian crisis will remain for the Syrian people. It is important to register that in 2012, the UN requested $835 million for humanitarian assistance. The UN only received $525 million. The agencies have now asked for $1.5 billion – a figure that will likely not be met given the poor track record of the powers that be. 

[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.] 

Regional and International Relations

Britain could deploy more troops to Gulf, says David Cameron Emma Graham-Harrison examines military relations between the United Kingdom and the Gulf countries, in The Guardian.

David Cameron visits Oman as BAE announces £2.5bn defence deal – video A media report on Cameron’s visit to Muscat, in The Guardian.

Oman set to buy 20 aircraft from BAe Emma Graham-Harrison reports on the latest arms deal between Oman and the United Kingdom, in The Guardian. 

Reports and Opinions  

Jumbo fit for a prince the £240 million private jet with a Turkish bath, boardroom and concert hall Hannah Roberts reports on Prince al-Walid bin Talal al-Saud’s customized Airbus A380, in the Daily Mail.

The Environmental Conference of the Bourgeoisie Rami Zurayk examines the paradoxes of holding the international conference on climate change in Qatar, on al-Akhbar English.

Omanis vote in municipal elections A news reports on municipal election in Oman, on al-Jazeera English.

Prominent Saudi Writer Arrested After Controversial Tweets A news report on the arrest of Turki al-Hamad after he criticized Islamists on Twitter, on Riyadh Bureau.

Crisis in Yemen

Yemen’s president shakes up the army A news report on President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s efforts to curb the influence of Saleh’s loyalists in the army, on al-Jazeera English.

Yemen Army Strikes Gunmen for Oil Pipeline Blasts A news report on a military operation against tribesmen suspected of attacking oil pipelines and electricity stations.

Three Westerners kidnapped in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa A news report on the kidnapping of three Europeans in Sanaa, on BBC.

Kidnappings of foreigners on rise in Yemen Joe Sheffer writes on the implication of the capture of an Austrian man and Finish couple in Sanaa, in The Guardian.

Yemen’s winter of discontent Nasser Arraabyee reflects on political protests in Yemen vis-à-vis the uprisings in the region, on Al-Ahram Weekly. 

Bleeding resources A news report on Yemen’s economic losses since the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, on Al-Ahram Weekly. 

Repression in Bahrain

Bahrain Welcomes European Delegation, Not Delegates’ Calls to Free Dissidents Robert Mackey reports on a visit by a delegation from the European Parliament to discuss human rights issues in the kingdom, in The New York Times.

MP refuses to accept hamper from Bahrain’s ambassador Rajeev Syal reports on a Fortnum & Mason package sent from Bahrain’s ambassador to London to Ann Clwyd, Labour MP and member of a select committee inquirying into human rights abuses in the Gulf state, in The Guardian.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International

Saudi Arabia: Website Editor Facing Death Penalty A statement by HRW calling upon the Saudi authorities to drop all charges against Raif Badawi. 

Bahrain: Child held without charge in adult prison A statement by AI condemning the detention of a sixteen-year-old boy.
 

Arabic

Based on numbers reported by Egyptian media outlets, below is a summary of the constitutional referendum vote results broken down by governorate.

What do these numbers tell us?

• In two stages of voting, average turnout across governorates was 30%, with Egyptians abroad participation being the most notable outlier with a 41% turnout rate.
• The only three governorates where the majority of voters elected to reject the draft constitution are Cairo, Gharbiyya, and Menofia.

What do these numbers not tell us?

• Given that the vast majority of eligible voters (68% or 33,855,564) did not participate in the referendum, we can neither conclude that the majority of the eligible voting population supports the constitution, nor can we conclude that a majority rejects it.
• Only 16,232,035 or 32% of eligible voters have reportedly cast a vote. It is, therefore, misleading to claim that the silence of the other 68% is reflective of support for one position or another.

What conclusions are impossible to draw from these numbers?

• The reasons behind the low turnout are many, not mutually exclusive, and unclear. Thus far, there has been no empirical evaluation of the possible links between voter abstention and lack of motivation, or the restriction that a voter can only vote in her assigned polling station—as opposed to the 19 March 2011 referendum, when Egyptians were allowed to vote wherever they pleased. It is unclear whether this restriction was enforced, and whether it was consistently respected.
• Attempting to establish relationships between governorate-level voting results and various demographic and social indicators, such as literacy rate, is misleading, because eligible voters in a given governorate may include individuals who reside in different governorates and whose demographics are not captured by governorate-level indicators. For instance, claiming that predominantly rural governorates support the constitution can be misleading if it turns out that registered voters in these supposedly rural regions include a large number of well-educated youth working in nearby urban centers.
• Commentators in social media have examined every possible correlation between [name your favorite social or demographic indicator] and governorate level voting outcomes. While drowning in interesting and seemingly revealing scatterplots and tables, it is easy to lose track of the fact that correlation is not causation. For example, given the data under consideration, the courageous inferences that commentators have been making with regards to the role of the rural/urban divide or illiteracy rates in driving voting behavior across governorates are anything but justified.

 Constitutional Referendum Results Broken down by Governorate

 Notes: AO: Ahram Online; EI: Egypt Independent; FJP: Freedom and Justice Party; MY: Al-Masry Al-Youm

The paradox is stark. Vice President Mahmoud Mekky, Justice Minister Ahmed Mekky and Constituent Assembly Chief Hossam al-Gheriany — three icons of the Independence Current in the judiciary — are in the executive authority’s camp in the current constitutional crisis. Meanwhile, others who are considered part of the former regime, such as Judges Club head Ahmed al-Zend, are now defending the independence of the judiciary.

The Egyptian judiciary is going on strike for the first time in its history, a move, which the Independence Current did not dare undertake. Most judges decided not to supervise the constitutional referendum. But the dilemma is that many of the leaders of the Independence Current reject such a move.

This is a watershed moment in the history of the current. It signifies its clear historic collapse.

The Independence Current’s legitimacy grew out of its call for total independence of the judiciary from the ruling authority during the Hosni Mubarak-era. Now its main icons are in power, but so far they have failed to present a comprehensive vision or launch genuine initiatives to implement what they have been defending for many years. Worse than that, they joined the president in his ploys to get rid of the prosecutor general, while practically approving his 22 November constitutional declaration designed to curtail the judiciary’s powers.

This turnaround needs an explanation.

At least part of the explanation lies in the judiciary’s structural position in society. Above anything else, judges are part of society’s “elite.” The way they are chosen, the benefits they secure, their prestige and authority — all these factors testify to the fact that in their eyes, and in the eyes of lay people, they belong to “al-hukkam” (the ruling strata).

This reflects itself in a conservative reformist mindset, which prefers top-down reform. Not surprisingly, this is also the preferred method of change of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Judges prefer peaceful, rather than radical change. Before rising to power, the Independence Current icons rarely led a confrontational escalation. Perhaps the only moment of confrontation in the history of the current’s old generation was the Justice Conference, which was headed by Yahia al-Refai in 1986. And this may be attributed to Refai’s own courage.

Under the presidency of Zakaria Abdel Aziz, who led the club in the late 1990s and 2000s, the club became more vocal in context of the rising democratic opposition to the Mubarak regime. However, several members of the Independence Current’s younger generation told me that “the mentors of the current” disliked the confrontational methods he championed, above all the sit-in in the club’s headquarters in 2006.

Abdel Aziz may have been courageous. But he respected the prominent figures within the current. In general, patriarchalism and seniority are highly-valued among judges. Indeed, this is part of a mechanism that curbs any radical moves by dissenting voices.

The young independent judges consider Mekky and Gheriany their mentors. Loyal to their conservative reformism, these two now believe the moment has come to introduce reform from inside the regime. And the fact that these icons have joined the political authority camp has dealt a severe blow to the current and its longstanding struggle.

I am not saying that the young members of the current will no longer be active or that there will be no movements calling for the independence of the judiciary. Indeed, taking into consideration the current polarization and struggles, there will most certainly be a movement. However, this will be a completely different movement, divorced to a large extent from the historical struggles of the Independence Current.

One of the young members of the Independence Current told me that Zend was the wrong person leading the right movement. This is the dilemma that a new Independence Current will have to deal with.

That being said, I expect the Judges Club to remain active. The club is unique in the fact that it is neither a civil society organization nor a social club, but rather a syndicate that brings together members of one of the state’s authorities, which makes it necessarily politicized. And that is why control of the Judges Club has been an important battle between pro-and anti-regime judges, ever since the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But the club’s politics reflect wider pressures. And the fact that the icons of the Independence Current have become pro-regime, and conservative judges have become the de facto defenders of the independence of the judiciary will have a deep impact on the orientation of the club and its internal balance of forces for a long time to come.

If the constitution is scrapped in the referendum, the polarization among judges might ease a little. But that will be short-term. For the real problem will persist: a conservative and non-confrontational stratum — the judges — constitutes the manpower of an institution wherein wider political and social conflicts are resolved.

[Originally appeared in Egypt Independent]

We have had the opportunity to highlight an extraordinary series of books and articles on New Texts Out Now this year. Before we make our way into the new year, here are all of the NEWTONs that we published in 2012. Enjoy, and see you in 2013. 

Myriam Ababsa, Badouin Dupret, and Eric Denis, Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East: Case Studies from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey 

Lila Abu-Lughod and Anupama Rao, Women’s Rights, Muslim Family Law, and the Politics of Consent 

Gilbert Achcar, “Eichmann in Cairo: The Eichmann Affair in Nasser’s Egypt” 

Ali Ahmida, “Libya, Social Origins of Dictatorship, and the Challenge for Democracy” 

Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najar, We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War 

Nezar AlSayyad, Cairo: Histories of a City 

Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education 

Amahl Bishara, Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics 

Jason Brownlee, Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the US-Egyptian Alliance 

Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber, Speaking About Torture 

Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism 

Stephen W. Day, Regionalism and Rebellion in Yemen: A Troubled National Union 

Hilal Elver, The Headscarf Controversy: Secularism and Freedom of Religion 

Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey 

Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture 

Norman G. Finkelstein, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel Is Coming to an End 

Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry 

James Gelvin, The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know 

Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 

Pascale Ghazaleh, Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World 

Bassam Haddad, Rosie Bsheer, and Ziad Abu-Rish, The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? 

Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in Cairo and Early Modern Capitalism (1600-1800) 

Jens Hanssen, “Kafka and Arabs”

Mervat F. Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of `A’sha Taymur

Rikke Hostrup Haugbolle and Francesco Cavatorta, “Beyond Ghannouchi: Social Changes and Islamism in Tunisia” 

Linda Herrera, “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt” 

Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia 

Karima Khalil, Messages from Tahrir: Signs from Egypt’s Revolution 

Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies 

Akram Khater, Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion, and Politics in the Christian Middle East 

Mark LeVine and Gershon Shafir, Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel 

Anne Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics 

Farzaneh Milani, Words not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement 

Amy Motlagh, Burying the Beloved: Marriage, Realism, and Reform in Modern Iran 

Roger Owen, The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life 

Hakan Özoğlu, From Caliphate to Secular State: Power Struggle in the Early Turkish Republic 

Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora 

Mohammad Salama and Rachel Friedman, “Locating the Secular in Sayyid Qutb” 

Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine 

Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime 

Magid Shihade, Not Just a Soccer Game: Colonialism and Conflict Among Palestinians in Israel 

Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation 

Joshua Stacher, Adaptable Autocrats: Regime Power in Egypt and Syria 

Shahla Talebi, Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran

Maaike Voorhoeve, Family Law in Islam: Divorce, Marriage, and Women in the Muslim World 

Elisabeth Weber, Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace

Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy

We were happy to find on the pages of Jadaliyya supporters and friends who understand our work and respect what we have been doing as artists and members of our community for many years. 

We also feel an urgency to respond to the analysis that Lila Abu-Lughod and Maya Mikdashi offered of our work. We take the issue and the critique seriously. Normally we don’t feel the urge to reply to a review but we felt that this specific review crossed a few lines, especially with its title!

Tradition and the Anti-Politics Machine: DAM Seduced by the “Honor Crime.”The title, like the article’s content, implies that DAM (and Jackie and the other artists who created the song and the video) are politically and intellectually naïve. This approach is a top-heavy one and stops short of a serious engagement of our work.

When we write songs, we do not sit and think, "what would America or Israel think of this?" We open the window and document what we see. We document the struggles of our generation in the service of our communities. We are confident that our artistic and political work is one that engages its context. Our view, is if nothing else, a close and engaged one.  

“If I Could Go Back in Time” is a testimony to the women whose families murdered them over the last few years in Lyd, where we live. These deaths do not include the countless women who are subject to abuse and oppression in their homes. This issue is not confined to Israeli occupation. We see Arab women being killed over the so-called "honor of the family" in Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and many other places. There are no Israeli tanks over there.  Domestic violence against women happens in all societies and we, as Arab men and women are fighting against it in our own.

The authors claim that we ignored “the committed Palestinian feminist activists who have been working for decades on the various forms of violence Palestinian women suffer.” But the authors themselves ignore the Palestinian women who worked on the song and video. Amal Murkus, a known activist for Palestine and women rights, sings the chorus of the song. The authors overlook her political work and choose to focus instead on her appearance and how she did not provide a solution in her twenty-second chorus. And by the way, she is not just knitting a sweater, she is knitting the words “al hurriya unsa.”

The article claims that DAM wrote ”If I Could Go Back in Time” without providing any context. This song, however, is one chapter of many in a compilation. Each piece offers a portion of what DAM addresses. We should not have to mention the Occupation in every song to prove our political legitimacy. 

There is nothing politically problematic with a three and a half minute track that focuses on violence against women in our community. In fact we believe this focus to be a crucial part of our broader political project. Fighting the Occupation and fighting sexism and patriarchy is for DAM, one fight. In mentioning “Born Here” and “Who Is the Terrorist” Abu-Lughod and Mikdashi themselves point to our politics and our history of political work.

To claim that we were seduced by Western propaganda is a cheap shot. DAM’s song was written in Arabic, for an Arab audience, followed by workshops in the same areas that these murders occurred in. We have a strategy that we are implementing. We see the risks in singing about Arab social and political issues. Opportunistic actors can co-opted and manipulated these messages. But this is not the case for us DAM is addressing an Arab audience in Arabic. We can speak to your own communities without being worry how others will abuse it. 

It is not clear why the authors found the UN funding problematic. Did they think that UN funding influenced our music or our lyrics or our message? Or did they think that the UN used us for its purposes? We deserve more credit here. First, there is our commitment to principled politics. Second, there is our context at work here—we are politicized artists living as an indigenous population in the country, which we are boycotting in line with a global movement. We have little to no funding sources from "our" state institutions and even if we did, we would boycott them according to the academic and cultural boycott. We are boycotting Israeli companies and are boycotted by the International Arab countries such as the music company: “Rotana.” Were we more foolish or less principled, we would be producing an album every year as opposed to one album every five years. 

Last time we checked, we don’t recall seeing the UN on the boycott list.  

For the last two years we have witnessed political revolution and upheaval in the Arab world. It is for many of us perhaps the greatest historical moment we have ever experienced. This is precisely moment when we should dispense with concerns over how we may be read (particularly by the West). Propaganda will exploit any issue it deems fit, this does not mean we should turn a blind eye. Arabs are standing up and demanding a change from within. We see “If I Could Go Back in Time,” as one effort of many in these momentous times. 

We are part of a new artistic movement in Palestine that is secure enough to take on occupation and domestic violence, racism and sexism. We will not shy away from engaging our society's taboos. We believe we can, and we must, tackle these issues with openness, bravery, and honesty.

DAM’s new album “Dabke on the Moon” is being sold on our website www.damrap.com. We invite you to listen to it. Some tracks address our society from within. Others address the occupation of Palestine. We see all the tracks as part of one political battle. 
 
DAM (Tamer and Suhell Nafar, Mahmood Jrery)

My goal in this short essay is to capture for the reader the gains and losses associated with Islamic-based family rules in the context of an economy that has a generous supply of cheap domestic workers and a sparing one of female public employment. I do so from the perspective of the housewife who is able to hire a domestic servant. I specifically argue that a spill-over effect of family law rules occurs in a household that employs domestic servants triangulating the relationship between husband, wife and servant. On the one hand, rules on the family are as formative of the domestic servant’s life as rules on labor, while at the same time the presence of domestic labor modifies upwards and downwards the impact of family rules on the relationship between husband and wife.

While in western states, the availability of cheap domestic work is thought of as a supplement, and an important one at that, to female paid employment, this wisdom does not seem to hold true in the Arab world. Female employment in the region is one of the lowest in the world, averaging at no more than twenty-six percent of the labor force and mostly concentrated in the public sector, itself undergoing shrinkage as a result of privatization. The majority of women among the poor work in the informal economy, which includes domestic work.[1] The supply of local domestic workers is compounded by an even bigger supply of very cheap foreign domestic workers hailing from various Asian and African countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Ethiopia, and the Ivory Coast. The wages of such servants are so low that a good one seventh of all households in the Arab world employ either a local or a foreign domestic worker.[2] Even for those who could not afford them, hiring a domestic servant is something to aspire to as one would rise in the world. In short, a large number of Arab housewives find themselves in the (enviable?) position of having cheap maids with nowhere else to go for paid employment.

I should assert though to avoid common misunderstandings on the relevance of sharia to modern family law and women in the Arab world that (a) sharia’s relevance to the lives of women in the modern Arab world has been largely confined to the area of family law; (b) in the modern nation state, shari’a has been codified, i.e., certain rules derived from Islamic jurisprudence on the family have been selected and passed as laws, each nation state having its own unique combination of such rules; (c) the courts and the judges who adjudicate disputes on family law are either secular courts/judges, or judges trained in state-run judiciary institutions with specific instruction on the state-based modern understanding of what shari’a is; and (d) the code, rather than Quran, the prophetic traditions, or the school of Islamic jurisprudence, is the primary source of the law. The latter constitute secondary sources.

The Household Not Woman

Instead of using the category “woman” as the primary unit of analysis, I will use that of the “household”. I do so for two reasons: First, the household is the primary place in which the category “woman” starts to break down into several women competing for power and resources, dislodging the feminist political desire for a unified category that is the bearer of a political program for “women’s empowerment” in confrontation with men. This occurs through the figure of the “domestic servant” who triangulates the wife’s relationship with the husband inside the domestic household. Introducing the “domestic servant” into the discussion of the “legal status of women in the Arab World” (mediated through the category of the “household”) allows me to do the following: (a) take the figure of “women in the Arab World” seriously without privileging nationalism or culture (i.e. subverting the common practice of discussing the wife’s (Arab) legal status without including that of her domestic servant (often non-Arab: Sri Lankan, Philippina, Indonesian, etc...); (b) stress that including the domestic servant in the analytics of gender in the Arab World allows us to better understand the plight of the wife under family law. This is so because the wife partially transfers to the servant the legal duty of “obedience” to her husband and at the same time shares with the servant the benefit of spousal support by the husband (the servant’s wages); and (c) following (a) and (b) marshal into the discussion the legal status of the domestic servant who while sharing the costs and benefits of family law is not governed by it, but whose own entry into the household is mediated by a specific rule structure, mainly, contract law (the contract of employment), as well as state regulatory regimes (of her country of origin as well as that of the country where she temporarily resides to work). If we put the servant’s contract of employment (written in the case of foreign workers, oral in the case of local ones) as well as the various regulations that touch on her labor back inside the household, we end up with the law of the “household” instead of family law, in effect, reverting to a medieval legal norm of categorizing the “private.” As it should be, for this allows us to capture better, given the very low rate of female public employment in the Arab world, the legal status of women in the Arab world as primarily a question of female domestic labor and the ways in which this labor is commodified, exchanged, and circulated.

Second, the category “household” is a subcategory of the larger economic mode, which in turn could be seen as a macro household, interacting with the familial one dynamically with reciprocal feedback from each, and is therefore in my view more appropriate analytically in situating women legally. For instance, a windfall of gain (rent) on the macroeconomic level accrues to Gulf Arab states from selling oil in the international market. This then circulates in the rest of the Arab world in the form of remittances from export labor to the oil producing countries and oil-wealth-based investment capital in the non-oil producing countries. If we take the marriage contract as one of the founding acts of the domestic household, then it is hard to ignore the fact that the “price of marriage” has increased exponentially over the years in the Arab world as a reflection of general economic trends. The price attached to a woman’s dowry[3], her expectation of the husbands income, its prospective stability and security, the assets the husband brings into the household such as furnishings, have become inflated over time as a result of the circulation of oil wealth in the Arab World. If we compare that to the incredibly low wages given to domestic servants and their stability over time, we cannot help but conclude that a windfall of “surplus labor” accrues to the household, primarily the wife, from the domestic servant. In other words, while the wife’s “price” has increased as a reflection of the generalization of oil wealth, that of the servant has remained steadily low as a reflection of the depressed economies from which these servants hail and the nature of international labor relations that ensues. 

There Is Also Sex

The household is not just the site of labor circulation/commodification but also sex. Before sex enters the household to be captured by family law, it is already circulating as an effect of the distributive work of criminal law rules (on crimes of honor/passion,[4] adultery,[5] abortion[6]) constricting and distributing sex and sexualities in a particular form so that they arrive at the date of the marriage contract ready to be commodified. Two rules in family law bring about this effect, both of which have to be contended with if our picture of the household is to be made complete: the rule on dowry and the rule on obedience. The rule that captures sex at the date of the contract is that of dowry: “the man is under the legal obligation to pay dowry to the woman at the date of contract”. While criminal rules ensure the penalization of pre-marital sex for women (and less so for men), family law allows women to bargain their socially and legally enforced virginity in the form of dowry. Dowry is the commodified expression of women’s pre-marital virginity payable at the initiation of marriage.

The rule in family law that commodifies sex during marriage is the wife’s legal duty to her husband to be sexually available to him.[7] In return, she earns her right to spousal support.[8] It is not clear how much of that circulates “down” to the domestic servant. While incidents of rape and sexual abuse of domestic servants by husbands are reported by human rights agencies as well as by anecdotal accounts, it is not clear how prevalent these practices are.

A Short History of Dowry

There is a history to the way the dowry became commodified in the Arab world (with consequences for wife’s maintenance). In village economies, before the petro-dollar swept the village with its luring promises of consumption, a dowry given to a woman was often an asset valued by village life (a goat or two, a piece of land, etc…). These were assets that were productive of more assets in the village economy. Women worked on their dowry/land, husbanded their dowry/animals, and reaped the profit they yielded which was legally their own. This had a spillover effect on wife’s maintenance as an obligation of the husband’s in return for which he had sexual access to the wife. It lessened greatly the stakes for women associated with such financial support because women were productive agents with income of their own.

The cash economy of the petro-dollar changed all that. The daughters of these women moved to the city to inhabit a middle class apartment as “housewives” (or the city moved to the village). A dowry paid in cash, furnishings, and jewelry lubricated their entry into the urban, insular, often jobless, middle class existence. The new urban middle class wife typically deferred the cash part of her dowry to be payable upon divorce as a form of security, settling for furnishings and jewelry payable upfront. Islamic family law gave the husband the right to no-fault divorce while limiting the woman’s right to grounds-based divorce.[9] Upon divorce a woman was entitled to a limited amount of financial support/reimbursement. Deferred dowry, always in cash, would come in handy under such circumstances.

The move to cash dowry, mostly deferred as security, raised exponentially the stakes associated with wife’s maintenance and I would presume consequently those associated with sexual availability, making the overall pull of obedience that much stronger in order to survive. Turning cash and jewelry into “productive” assets through investment in the urban economy would require overcoming the wall that separated the urban household from the urban economy, specialized skills that the new urban housewife in her insular life seemed unqualified for; without the assistance of her husband that is. The rule in family law that conditioned wife’s work outside the house on husband’s permission had a prohibitive effect.[10]

The paradox is that while wife “price” may have become inflated as a result of the petro-dollar economy, the wife’s bargaining power in relation to her husband decreased because of the erosion of the productive quality of those assets that she was now bringing to the household. Indeed, the inflation of the “price” of marriage produced a prohibitive effect on the event of marriage itself: fewer and fewer men could afford to enter into marriage, producing the much-discussed phenomenon in the Arab World: the single woman in her thirties ready and willing to be married with no men available to make the right bid for her asking price for marriage. This new single woman (“spinster”) lives in the vortex of the newly “priced” rules: single, in her thirties, and a virgin (may or may not be employed).

Where Labor and Sex Meet

The obedience rule is where labor and sex meet.[11] The introduction of the petro-dollar economy as we have seen increased the pull of sexual obedience for the wife as a consequence of her increased financial dependence on her husband, itself a function of the erosion of the productivity of the assets she brought into the marriage. On the other hand, it reaped her windfall of labor, the result of the depressed value of the servant’s wages and exclusion from labor regulations that left her at the mercy of the familial demands throughout her waking hours. One would imagine that at least in the latter case, the wife would feel “freed” from the obedience leg of performing domestic labor. In fact, quite the opposite and for the following reasons: (a) the transfer of the performance of domestic labor to a lowly paid domestic servant paid for by the husband intensified the husband’s expectation of such performance whose management was delegated to the wife: performed by the servant, it remained the responsibility of the wife; (b) what could have been cause for gender friction if the wife had performed it (the wife demanding that the husband assist her with household chores in an attempt to improve her position in the household) was converted into class friction in which they were both allied against the servant. In other words, the formal articulation of wifely duty remained the same because it was never politicized in the form of the “battle of the sexes”; (c) Indeed, the definition of what constitutes wifely duties may have been even taken a stricter turn (more is expected of the wife). This is so because the wife’s performance of domestic work is priced higher than that performed by the domestic servant given the comparative rule structure that govern their respective lives giving wives higher bargaining power vis-à-vis the husband. The tightly reciprocal articulation of the wifely duties and rights in marriage (obedience for financial support, deferred dowry for divorce) combined with the wife’s capacity to mobilize the forces of familial pressure to improve her position in the household are not available for the domestic servant given her heightened insular status and the extreme terms of her contract. This led to the redefinition socially of what constituted domestic work with spillover effect on the definition of wifely duties. More was now socially expected of the wife given the “cheapness” with which the work could be transferred to the servant. Perversely enough, the wife’s class power came to imprison her further in her gender trap; (d) the presence of cheap domestic service maintained/increased social expectations of social norms expected of both genders (hospitality) which would have otherwise eroded or been greatly compromised had cheap domestic labor not been available and gender friction arose as a result. Moreover if women were inclined to help other women perform domestic labor in social gatherings (as a form of gender solidarity), they were far less inclined to do so when a servant was performing those chores (an effect of class friction). The total burden ended up being intensified in the servant with wife as her close manager responsible for her performance; and (e) Given the above, even though the wife and the servant were formally separated by different rule networks applying to each producing differential bargaining powers (family law for the wife, employment contract for the servant), a rule spillover effect was taking place with the duty of “obedience” (to the husband) being now that of the servant (to the husband and wife) and the “obedience” of the servant (to the husband and wife) as a total sum of the servant’s terms of employment being that of the wife (to the husband). In other words, the servant had become a split-off fragment of the wife and the wife a split-off fragment of the servant. Needless to say, the more exacting weight of class friction relative to the weight of gender friction, giving the wife a much higher bargaining power in relation to the servant, tips the overall burden of obedience in favor of the wife at the expense of the servant, and in favor of the husband at the expense of wife and servant.

Exit

Unlike the wife, the domestic servant exited the system once her contract of employment terminated. She exited the spouse’s “marriage” with assets (her wages) which if carefully administered would earn her bargaining power in the marriage she would rejoin or enter into back home. At the end of her servant’s employment, the wife may have practiced a great deal of class power over her servant, but her labor of management and as stand-in for servant in case of emergencies remained unrewarded. Whatever work the wife did was in return for her food and upkeep; all of which the servant was entitled to plus her wages.

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

• UC Berkeley's New Chancellor Endorses the Falsehood: Criticizing Israel is Anti-Semitic
• بانتظار علياء
• "من المآسي المضاعفة للنزوح:فتيات سوريات للزواج "بثمن بخس
• The Politics of Killing Women in Colonized Contexts
• How Thomas Friedman Distorts Realities in Egypt, Pakistan, and India
• The Triumph and Irrelevance of Meta-Narratives Over Syria: “Rohna Dahiyyah”
• DAM Explores the Unmapped in Their New Album "Dabke on the Moon"
• Exile, Part One
• Inside Syria: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad Interview with David Barsamian
• عن دولة ملوك الطوائف في مصر

• Egypt's Draft Constitution in Focus: Freedom of Expression
• Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus – The Role of the Army [Video]
• Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus: Labor Rights [Video]

• Egypt's Draft Constitution in Focus: Torture
• Jadaliyya Page on Egypt's Constitutional Referendum
• Reports Roundup (December 22)
• زواج الــقــــاصــــــــــرات فــــــــي الــعــــــــــــراق: طــلاق مبكِّـــر ومـــوت يُجــاور المخــاض
• من القاهرة الجميلة - الجزء الرابع
• Say “Yes” to the Revolution
• How Thomas Friedman Distorts Realities in Egypt, Pakistan, and India
• A Battle For Legitimacy: Gauging Kuwait's Electoral Results
• Exile, Part One
• Egypt's Draft Constitution in Focus: Freedom of Expression
• Maghreb Media Roundup (December 20)
• قولوا نعم للعيش والحرية والعدالة الاجتماعية
• Syria Media Roundup (December 20)
• Inside Syria: Jadaliyya Co-Editor Bassam Haddad Interview with David Barsamian
• From Yarmouk to Sabra-Shatila: The Guardian's Martin Chulov on Palestinian Refugees Fleeing Syria
• Regional and International Players in Syria's Civil War, The Protest Movement In Bahrain: Interviews with Bassam Haddad and Toby Jones
• Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus – The Role of the Army [Video]
• Tadween Publishing Roundup: News and Analysis from the Publishing World
• The Battle for Sinai
• Morsi's Democracy Devoid of Press and Media Freedoms
• Tadween Blog Comes To Jadaliyya
• New Texts Out Now: Amahl Bishara, Back Stories: US News Production and Palestinian Politics
• DAM Explores the Unmapped in Their New Album "Dabke on the Moon"
• UC Berkeley's New Chancellor Endorses the Falsehood: Criticizing Israel is Anti-Semitic
• Egypt’s Draft Constitution in Focus: Labor Rights [Video]
• الطائفة الشرطية وحكومة الرئيس مرسي: تحالف يقوم على رؤية أمنوقراطية للدولة
• Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (December 18)
• مي وملح في إضراب الأسرى
• Memory Wars and the Messiness of History: An Interview with Jim House on the Commemoration of 17 October 1961
• Ghada Assamman: A Profile from the Archives
• Year Three
• The Interactive Lebanese Flag
• الأقباط وصراع السلطة على الأحوال الشخصية
• الواقع يرفض بديلكم الوحيد
• The Triumph and Irrelevance of Meta-Narratives Over Syria: “Rohna Dahiyyah”
• Bedouin Resolution: Standing Firm in the Jerusalem Periphery
• A Faraway Neighbor
• Last Week on Jadaliyya (Dec 10-16)
• The Politics of Killing Women in Colonized Contexts
• O.I.L. Media Roundup (17 December)
• Egypt Media Roundup (December 17)

Dear Tamer, Suhel, and Mahmood, 

If We Could Go Back in Time… we would have made even clearer that our reaction came from our deep admiration for you and our appreciation of your political and social influence.  We are, as we said, fans. Lila has sent your songs to countless people around the world and has made statements about the importance of your art publicly. As the daughter of an exile from Jaffa who lived and worked for Palestine his whole life, she is particularly thrilled with you as a strong and highly visible voice of a new generation of ’48 Palestinians.  

If We Could Go Back in Time….we would have crafted our words more carefully to make clear that we wrote about this issue of “honor killing” not to fault you but because we have learned that when women’s rights and imperial and colonial politics intersect, it is hard for all of us to position ourselves. Because of where we are based, and because we do research and teach about women and gender in the Arab world, and in Maya’s case, are activists as well, we are especially aware of the international and Western machinery that has de-politicized women’s issues. We are worried about attributing social problems to Muslim or Arab culture alone because even if this is a factor, it is not the only one. 

Your song against violence is an important intervention. But once it enters this wider field that you do not control, it takes on meanings you did not intend. The music video circulated as a statement in the ongoing debate on honor crimes. We had to enter that debate. As is clear from Nadera-Shalhoub Kevorkian and Suhad Daher Nashef's important piece, addressing violence against women in colonized contexts is complicated by the ways this violence is reproduced and institutionalized within racialized states. The standard discourse on honor crimes solidifies power relations between genders, indigenous peoples, and the states they live and die in, and between the “international” community and the types of peoples who are said to commit honor crimes. 

In fact, the way the discourse on honor crimes operates in Israel/Palestine is strikingly similar to the ways that homophobia is weaponized by the Israeli state in order to stigmatize Arabs and rationalize their continued occupation of Palestinian lands and bodies. Had a video circulated, for example, that showed a “gay killing” in Palestine and only attributed that killing to cultural intolerance, we also would have felt compelled to respond publicly. Not to do so would have been a disservice to the work that activists and scholars have been doing for years on the complex questions of violence against women and--more recently--against members of the LGBTQ community.

If We Could Go Forward in Time . . . we would continue these productive debates on the important topic of violence against women.  We would continue to push and be pushed to think, write, and research more carefully, with solidarity as our first stance. We never doubted your integrity. We hope you can also respect our integrity as sisters and comrades in the struggle for justice for Palestinians of all ages, genders, and classes. 

Yours,

Lila Abu-Lughod and Maya Mikdashi 

هذه المرة تجيء نذر إفلاس مصر من كل صوب وحدب. بدأ الأمر بتصريحات من وزير الصناعة والتجارة عن صعود متوقع فى عجز الموازنة ربما يؤدي «إلى عدم القدرة على سداد الرواتب إذا لم يتم التعامل معه». ثم يقول الأمين العام لجبهة الإنقاذ المعارضة محمد البرادعي بالنص وهو يدعو الرئيس لوقف الاستفتاء على الدستور وإعادة تشكيل الجمعية التأسيسية: «البلد على وشك الإفلاس. اذا اكملنا ٣ أشهر فلن نكمل ٤ أشهر». ويخبرنا الكاتب والسياسي محمد حسنين هيكل في نفس الليلة بفحوى لقاء بين محافظ المركزى فاروق العقدة والرئيس مرسي حذره فيه من أن «كل مصابيح الاقتصاد الحمراء صارت مضاءة».

الحديث عن إفلاس مصر تجدد مرات خلال السنتين الماضيتين في تزامن متطابق مع أزمات مصر السياسية، أشهرها كان فىي فبراير ٢٠١١ حينما حذرنا رئيس الوزراء العسكري آنذاك، أحمد شفيق، من مجاعة إن استمرت مظاهرات التحرير. بل وحذرنا الدكتور البرادعي نفسه في أكتوبر ٢٠١١ وسط أزمة محتدمة مع المجلس العسكري من أن مصر ستفلس خلال ٦ أشهر. بالطبع فإن الوضع السياسى المضطرب يترك أثرا سلبياً في وضعية الاقتصاد، ومن المؤكد أن الأوضاع الاقتصادية سيئة وأن حكومة الرئيس مرسي، تعول حتى الآن على الاستدانة الخارجية والمحلية فقط للتعامل معها. إلا أن حديث الإفلاس ورقة سياسية صار الجميع يستخدمها كلٌ لأهدافه. بل أحيانا في مناط الدفاع عن مبدأ «وداوها بالتي كانت هي الداء»، كما تفعل حكومة الرئيس مرسي حالياً باستخدام انهيار الاقتصاد، بفعل عقود من سياسات الخصخصة والتوجه للاستثمار الأجنبى وتطويع الاقتصاد والسياسة لحساب المستثمرين، كي تروج للمزيد من هذه السياسات نفسها.

متى تفلس الدول؟

الإفلاس السيادي Sovereign Default هو عدم قدرة الحكومة أو الدولة ذات السيادة أو رفضها لسداد ديونها أو إلتزاماتها. وقد يعنى ذلك إعلان التوقف عن سداد المترتبات من أصول وفوائد الديون رسمياً أو التوقف الفعلي عنه. وعادة ما يتعلق إفلاس الدول بالدائنين الأجانب، لأنه دائما فى قدرتها أن تطبع العملة المحلية لكى تسدد ديونها بها. وهذا ما دعا اليه الاقتصادي الكبير آلان جرينسبان، لرفض فكرة إفلاس الاقتصاد الأمريكي من حيث المبدأ قائلاً لقناة ”إن بي سي“ في أغسطس ٢٠١١ «احتمال إفلاس أمريكا صفر» وذلك بالطبع لأن لديها ميزة أن الدولار هو عملتها المحلية.

وهناك سوابق عالمية لتوقف الدول عن سداد ديونها منها الأرجنتين في العقد الماضى (كانت مدينة وحدها بما يصل لسبع ديون الدول النامية الخارجية) وما يثار حاليا عن اليونان «المعرضة للإفلاس».

لكن المقارنة باليونان تكشف أن دعاوي إفلاس مصر بهذا المعنى زائفة. ففي الحالة اليونانية وبالرغم من تلقى أثينا دعما أوروبيا بحوالى ١٤٨ مليار يورو وسياسات التقشف الهائلة التى حدثت وأنتجت ملايين العاطلين، ووصول معدل الدين إلى ١٧٦٪ من الناتج المحلي، ومع انكماش الاقتصاد بحوالي ٢٠٪ (أي إغلاق خمس قدرته الإنتاجية) منذ ٢٠٠٩، وتراجع احتياطياتها من النقد الأجنبي إلى 7.6 مليارات دولار، لم تعلن اليونان إفلاسها ولم يعلنها أحد دولة مفلسة للآن.

في مصر مازال الاقتصاد ينمو بمعدل 2.2٪. لدينا معدل دين مرتفع لكنه أقل بكثير من اليونان (حوالى ١٠٠٪ من الناتج المحلي)، واحتياطيات من النقد الأجنبي ضعف اليونان (فوق ال١٥ مليار دولار). ويشير تقرير البنك المركزي الصادر في نوفمبر إلى زيادة فى الودائع بالجهاز المصرفي من ١.٠٣ تريليون جنيه في يوليو ٢٠١٢ إلى ١.٠٥ تريليون بنهاية سبتمبر، منها ١١٦.٨ مليار جنيه ودائع حكومية بزيادة عن الشهر السابق، من ضمنها ما يوازي ٥٣ مليار جنيه بالعملة الأجنبية. وفيما يتعلق بسداد أجور الموظفين، فإنه لا احتمال على الإطلاق لفكرة الإفلاس. فأمام الدولة دائما أن تطبع النقد، وهو قرار له مساوئه طبعاً فيما يتعلق بالتضخم وغيره، إلا أن المقصود هو أنه لا مجال لتوقف الدولة عن سداد التزاماتها المحلية.

ولا يوجد حتى الآن، بالقياس وبالمعلومات المتوافرة رسمياً، ما يشير لعدم قدرة مصر على سداد التزاماتها بالدولار أيضا في الأمد الذي تحدث عنه البرادعي أو تتحدث عنه حكومة الرئيس مرسي.

لكن استبعاد الإفلاس لا ينفي أن هناك مشكلة كبرى في الاقتصاد وفي إدارته، يتعلق جزء كبير منها في الاهتمام بالجوانب المالية منه، وفي عزلة كاملة عن الاقتصاد الحقيقي. إذ تحدثنا الحكومة دائما عن العجز والدين العام ولا تحدثنا عن الوظائف وتحفيز الطلب المحلي. وحتى فى إطار الجانب المالي، فإن الحكومات المتعاقبة بعد الثورة (التى ورثت من نظام مبارك تركة ثقيلة من التشوهات والانحيازات الاقتصادية ضد الأغلبية ومن الفشل)، وقفت مشلولة دون أن تتحرك لاتخاذ أية إجراءات للتعامل مع الوضع حتى من زاوية خطط الطوارئ العاجلة، واقتصرت على الاستدانة والمزيد من الاستدانة مع العويل والتهديد بالكارثة المحدقة.

ما الذى كان يجب فعله ومازال يجب فعله؟ 

فى المعجم الوسيط الإفلاس حالة تترتب على توقف التاجر عن الوفاء بديونه. أما فى لسان العرب أَفْلَس الرجل: صار مُفْلِساً كأَنما صارت دراهِمه فُلُوساً وزُيوفاً. لكن فى لسان العرب هناك أيضا فَلَّس بفتح اللام وتشديدها. قد فَلَّسه الحاكم تَفْلِيساً: نادى عليه أَنه أَفْلَس. وفى معجم اللغة العربية المعاصر – فلَّس فلانًا : جعله يُفْلِس ؛ يفقد ماله «كم من رجل مستور قد فلَّسته امرأته حتَّى هام على وجهه». وكم من دولة ثائرة مستورة فَلَّسها مسؤولوها لحساب المصالح القديمة. 

عند الأطباء هناك لكل مرض علاجان: أحدهما يشخص سبب الصداع والهزال والضعف ويعالج أصل المرض. وثانيهما ما يتعامل مع الأعراض فيصف ما يخفف من حدتها إلى حين ويكتفي بذلك فيزيد المرض إلى أن يأتى على المريض. وحال سياستنا الاقتصادية من النوع الثانى. أنظر مثلا للضغط على الجنيه. يخبرنا ساستنا الاقتصاديون بأن قيمة العملة تتراجع بسبب أننا نستورد أكثر مما نصدر، وبسبب خروج رؤوس الأموال من البورصة والأوراق الحكومية، بالإضافة إلى هروب الأموال – شرعية وغير شرعية - الذى تواصل على مدى سنوات قبل ٢٥ يناير وبعدها. يخبرنا هؤلاء عن تراجع عوائد الدولة من الضرائب وغيرها وزيادة إنفاقها في دعم الطاقة وغيره.

والحلول لهذا النوع من المشاكل معروفة ومعتادة ومنطقية وموجودة: عليك أن توقف النزيف من حيث منبعه: فتفرض ضريبة على الأموال الساخنة في البورصة لتقليص التذبذبات والضغوط على العملة وزيادة الحصيلة، فلتفَعِّل الضرائب على الأغنياء ورجال الأعمال المحتكرين (فى العقارات والأرباح الرأسمالية وضريبة التلوث لمصانع الأسمنت والسيراميك، مع إنفاذ قوانين مكافحة الاحتكار)، فلتفرض قيودًا على التحويلات الرأسمالية (حتى وإن كانت مؤقتة وهو أمر تسمح به حتى مقررات منظمة التجارة العالمية) فتقلل من المال الهارب، فلتقتد بتونس التي استردت ١٣ مليار دولار من أموال بن على الهارب وتضع خطة لاسترجاع أموال الفساد الهاربة من مبارك وأبنائه الذين هم تحت يديك في السجن. فلتقيد استيراد السلع الترفية فتوفر العملة الأجنبية. والأهم فلتضع تصورًا لسياسة صناعية (لا تعني الصناعة فقط وإنما سياسة اقتصادية متكاملة) لتحفيز الاقتصاد والتشغيل بإجراءات عاجلة تقيم عود الاقتصاد المريض سريعًا. 

هذه أمثلة لإجراءات ممكنة لكن إفلاس السياسة وسياسات الإفلاس توقفها وتظهرها مستحيلة. بينما تترك المرض ينهش في المريض كي تعود الأعراض أكثر قسوة، فتتحين الفرصة لفرض سياسات التقشف برفع الأسعار على الفقراء، المتفق عليها مع صندوق النقد الدولي.

••• 

وبين المُفْلِسين والمُفَلِّسين، تظهر قوة أخرى لا يحسب لها أحد حسابًا تصفها كلمات الصديق حاتم تليمة على صفحته على فيسبوك يوم الجمعة الماضية: في وسط صخب حواديت «نهاية العالم» والمناقشات الحامية حول التضامن من عدمه مع أحمد عرفة أو مع علياء المهدي ومع الصراع المتأجج على الساحة السياسية حول دستور العوار أو النائب «الملاكي» واستقالته، مر انتصار عمال مصنع الألومنيوم بنجع حمادى وعمال مصنع الشرقية للدخان بهدوء (إضرابان ناجحان لعشرات الآلاف ضد الفساد وللحصول على حصة من الأرباح). إضراب فاعل كمشرط جراحي يمر في مصارين الطبقة الحاكمة. هدوء يسبق العاصفة الهادرة: «الإضراب العام».

[عن جريدة "الشروق" المصرية]