Jadaliyya: [The following statement was issued by activists involved in The Uprising of Women in the Arab World on 7 November 2012 in response to attempts by Facebook to suppress their online activities. It was originally issued in Arabic, English, and French. This English version has been slightly edited for style. The Arabic version, along with an introduction and background to the issue, can be found on Beirut Walls.]

On the morning of 7 November 2012, the five admins of The Uprising of Women in the Arab World Facebook Page logged onto Facebook to find out that one’s account had been blocked for thirty days, another for three days, two others for twenty-four hours, and one other received a warning notification.

According to Facebook, those persons had violated its policy by sharing a post asking Twitter followers to support Dana Bakdounes. The message that was sent to the admins explaining the reasoning for the ban from Facebook read as follows: “You have posted a content that violates Facebook Community Rules. The post says: Follow us on Twitter @UprisingOFWomen. Support Dana with hashtag #WindToDana”

Dana Bakdounes is one of the hundreds of women and men who participated in the Uprising of Women in the Arab World campaign, holding a sign expressing the reason why they support this uprising. Dana’s slogan stated: “I am with the uprising of women in the Arab world because for twenty years I was not allowed to feel the wind in my hair and on my body.” Her picture showed an unveiled woman carrying her passport with a picture of when she was veiled.

Dana’s picture was initially posted on 21 October 2012, among many other photos and statements of women and men of various religious beliefs and practices. Some women were veiled, some unveiled, some in niqab, and all were demanding women’s rights and equal enjoyment of freedom of speech, in a secular space that promotes tolerance and embraces differences. But on 25 October, Facebook chose to censor Dana’s image and to suspend the account of the admin who posted it for twenty-four hours. This incident provoked an outrage among the defenders of freedom of speech who started sharing Dana’s picture all over Facebook, Twitter, and other media outlets.

On 28 October, having been persuaded that Facebook had mistakenly taken down the photo due to abusive reports of haters of the Page, that the photo held no offensive content, as well as seeing that it was all over the web, we uploaded it again. A few hours later, Facebook removed it again and blocked another admin’s account for seven days.

However, on 31 October, Facebook restored Dana’s censored photo to The Uprising of Women in the Arab World Page without any notice or explanation. However, it did not lift the ban on the admin’s account, which ended only on 5 November.

On 7 November, all five admins of The Uprising of Women in the Arab World Page received threats by Facebook for the earlier cited reasons that their accounts may be permanently deleted. The repeated temporary blocks on the admins’ personal accounts with no clear motive or explanation constitute a direct attack on The Uprising of Women in The Arab World’s Page. It also raises serious questions about the true intentions behind Facebook’s policies and whether Dana’s “controversial” image is a mere excuse to shut down the voice of The Uprising of Women in The Arab World. [Continue reading…]

HA Hellyer writes: For more than a decade I have been studying the community dynamics of Muslim Britons. Their views on the Arab uprisings are intriguing: sectarian fears, disappointments, scepticism, hope and ethnic concerns are all there.

Muslim British community activists have not ignored the Arab uprisings. They could not have. The Arab world is at the heart of the Muslim world.

True, most Muslim Britons do not have Arab ethnic backgrounds, and most have evolved to become essentially “post-Islamist”. Post-Islamism, in this sense, means their initial impetus for engaging in political life was from an emotional attachment to Islamism, but they have a secular rationale in the public arena that is not dissimilar from British social conservatives. But many of them have roots in Islamist community organisations and links, if only symbolic ones, to the Muslim Brotherhood.

So even the many Muslim Britons who are post-Islamist are deeply interested in the Islamist project in power, and in the challenges that project finds in Egypt and Tunisia, in particular.

There are, of course, differences of opinion. Many ordinary Muslim Britons of Pakistani descent, for example, now consider Pakistani politics to be utterly hopeless – and instinctively assume that the political state of the Arab world is likewise impervious to constructive change.

In activist circles, however, there is something of a quandary. On the one hand, many Muslim British activists came to political maturity in the anti-war movement, and their stances on the Arab uprisings are imbued by that experience, and by left, and far-left, opinions.

After the Nato intervention in Libya, I heard an interesting interview illustrating that tension. An activist intellectual was talking to a representative of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood who had lived in the UK for many years. The activist, as a staunch supporter of the anti-war movement, was opposed to the intervention. But the Libyan was very much in support of it.

That activist was not alone; his opinion is common among many Muslim British activists, who have come to be sceptical of any western engagement in the Muslim world. [Continue reading…]

Faisal Al Yafai writes: The death of Arab secularism is the story of a country that no longer exists and a world almost impossible to imagine.

That world can be glimpsed in old newsreels from the Arab cities of the 1950s and 1960s. The cities of the post-war period – Cairo, Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Aden – look much the same as many developing countries of the time: American-built cars, European-style suits, a certain easy mingling of men and women.

Unseen is something difficult to describe, but immediately apparent to anyone familiar with the Egypt or Yemen of today: the thick beards of men and the tightly wrapped headscarves of women – symbols of religious devotion, but also symbols of a public expression of Islam – were almost entirely absent from the new urban world then being created.

The vision of the future the men and women in those over-saturated newsreels had, how they saw their modern world unfolding, cannot easily be understood.

But it can perhaps be surmised from a joke, told by Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to an audience in the years after the Muslim Brotherhood was accused of attempting to assassinate him. Nasser described meeting with the Brotherhood’s leader in 1953 in an attempt to reconcile the group with his leadership. (Nasser doesn’t mention whom he met, but it was most likely Hassan Al Hudaybi, a judge who led the group for 20 years from 1951.)

“The first thing he asked me was to make the wearing of hijab mandatory in Egypt,” says Nasser, “and to force every woman walking on the street to wear a hijab.” The crowd laughs and Nasser hams it up for them, looking perplexed at such an outlandish request. “Let him wear it!” shouts an audience member, and the crowd erupts in laughter and applause.

But that’s not the punchline. Nasser tells Al Hudaybi he knows the Brotherhood’s leader has a daughter studying medicine, and his daughter doesn’t wear the hijab. “Why haven’t you made her wear the hijab?” he asks, before delivering a knockout blow: “If you cannot make one girl – who is your own daughter – wear the hijab,” he says, “how do you expect me to make 10 million women wear the hijab, all by myself?” The crowd roars its approval.

Nasser’s joke is instructive for the world view it implies. The middle and upper classes of 1950s Egypt considered it ridiculous that the wearing of the hijab could be enshrined in law. Most did not wear it; they considered the proper role of religion to be private, outside the realm of government and politics. Nasser himself explicitly declared the same thing.

Contrast that with today’s Egypt, and indeed the wider Arab world, and it is clear how much has changed in just half a century. [Continue reading…]

Millions of women voted in Egypt's first free presidential election but none were on the ballot.

At Aeon Magazine, Amal Ghandour writes: The face, a nod to her Egyptian mother, is pharaonic, curls freefalling all around it. The muscles packing her body betray countless hours of toil in the pool, on the bench press, on her feet — running. Her attire is as blunt in its skimpiness as Jordan, where she lives, is adamant in its conservatism. But while the look screams a fight easily won, her demeanor is tactful, her tenor even-keeled. This is a woman used to negotiating her way through life.

I will call her Hadaf, a common enough Arabic name, befitting a woman whose 34 years have been just that: hadaf, meaning singular purpose. At first glance, neither her impressive résumé nor her place in Jordanian society surprise. The milestones are all there: a BA in graphic design from Yarmouk University, up north in Irbid; a stint with a successful advertising agency, followed by a top executive job in a global company; and, just recently, an MBA from the London Business School. In Jordan, among the well-heeled, an education and a career with the tight skirts to match are not unusual.

Get to know Hadaf a little better, though, and you uncover a life that encapsulates the hard-going, incessant, yet finally successful struggles of Arab women to transform their unforgiving circumstances into a better set of odds.

Hadaf’s Palestinian father and Egyptian mother met in Egypt in the late 1960s. She was studying interior design, he agricultural engineering. Like thousands of Palestinians looking for a living, and indeed a home, he moved to Kuwait to teach. Hadaf’s mother soon followed, becoming a teacher herself so as to tiptoe neatly around her husband’s ego; interior design, they both knew, would have made them better money, but it would have made him feel less of a man.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and Yasser Arafat took his side, many Palestinians found themselves no longer welcome in the Gulf emirate, and so they moved to Jordan to try to reconstitute a decent life. Hadaf’s father was among them. Settling on the outskirts of the capital, he started up a spare-parts business, but it failed even before it had built up steam, plunging the entire family into near poverty.

There is no equivalent dramatic moment when Hadaf’s own battles began. No epiphanies that made her want to reach for something different. Her father’s tumble from middle-class status was not drastic. The neighbourhood was more ‘a social than an economic slum’ — very conservative and very comfortable with it. Her mother donned the veil when she hit 40, because that’s what women in her milieu do upon reaching the gateway to middle age. Her father stopped drinking alcohol but did not pray his way through the days. And there was love around — plenty of it. It’s just that Hadaf walked to the beat of a different drum.

‘Inch by inch. This is how I escaped marriage at 16 to a car mechanic; how I shortened the skirt and rolled up the sleeves a tiny bit; how I managed to go to Yarmouk; how I worked as a waitress there, and at the Hard Rock Café in Amman during the summers… I lobbied my mother, talked my father to death; had him visit the dorms, had him meet the owner of the restaurant up in Irbid, had him pick me up at 2am from the Hard Rock… But, you see, I was making a living. It was very difficult for them to argue with that.’

There were, of course, many fudges, omissions and fibs. ‘I did not tell my parents that I moved into my own apartment the second year of college [and] I escaped marriage to that mechanic by parading in a T-shirt in front of his shop. He was the one to break off the engagement. All I had to do then was persuade my father to let me finish high school.’

When Hadaf started to win the family’s bread, as it were, the parents went quiet. And they’ve been quiet ever since. Yet, even now, for their sake, Hadaf says, ‘I have two wardrobes at home: one for me, for my life; and one for them, when I go visiting.’

The Hadafs of the Arab world outnumber women like me, for whom life has been much gentler. But we don’t strain to reach out for each other across the divides. I did not have to go in search of her for insight. She lives everywhere around me. Hadaf populates the Middle East.

That said, hers is a distinctly upbeat story. Other women are fighting tooth and nail for much smaller breaks. They do win in the end — inch by inch — but the toll tends to draw age early on a young face, and the demands on grit and courage are almost always insufferably unkind.

A 22-year-old Palestinian – I’ll call her Suad – works with me on a region-wide community development initiative. She has just set aside her veil in conservative surroundings. She describes her own and her female friends’ lives in Beirut as an incessant search for opportunity amid a heap of constraints. ‘You worry about the consequences, and then you take a step, and then another one after that, and another one after that… You make use of every opening.’

This particular step, her unveiling, has proven to be especially charged. Suad took up the veil, a blend of shapes and colours in her case, at the age of 17, the last in her class to do so. Although most of her school friends were veiled, her parents’ leftist inclinations helped check the growing calls for Suad to amass herself into the fold. It was her teacher’s warning that finally tipped the scales. ‘She brought me before the entire class and told me that my mother would go to hell if I did not wear it. I succumbed.’

Suad took off her hijab two months ago, inspired by the rousing theme of nonconformity threading through her English literature courses. She felt she was being true to her identity.

Yet reactions to her move in a milieu that actively discourages feminine unorthodoxies are mixed. Suad’s father is happy to see her let her hair down and so, she thinks, would have been her mother, had she lived to witness this pointed return to visibility. So far, however, the neighbourhood has been worryingly quiet; and the backlash at work, especially among the men, upsetting. In the midst of widespread opprobrium, only one friend has said: ‘If that’s what you want, then do it.’ Suad shrugs. ‘Better this than hypocrisy.’

On their own, such triumphs as Suad’s and Hadaf’s stand as little more than heartening anecdotes on the margins of what is a crushingly discouraging situation for Arab women. One is tempted to ask: only this, after so many years of struggle? But pulled together and read differently, these small victories create a different norm of empowerment — one that, paradoxically, draws strength from the very subtlety and everyday nature of the ‘dissident’ acts themselves. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The past month, during which I have had the opportunity to interact with thousands of Americans across the United States, has also been one of the most difficult and volatile in the American-Middle Eastern relationship. This has reflected the lively, occasionally violent, reactions to the anti-Islamic film that took place across the world, the exaggerated rhetoric of the American presidential elections, and the spirited, provocative rhetoric at the United Nations by Iranian and Israeli leaders. Passions are high all around, as Arabs, Americans, Turks, Israelis and Iranians all struggle with sharp rhetoric, violence, death, deep antagonisms and ongoing or threatened wars. The mass media and political classes everywhere tend to focus on the negatives that they see in others, giving the impression that we are on the verge of a catastrophic global war due to inflamed emotions and feelings of existential vulnerability by many of these parties.

The reality, fortunately, seems less frightening, as I have always sensed from my routine life and work in the Arab world, and as I am discovering from my extensive discussions with Americans this month. The many Americans I have engaged in conversations seem more realistic and sober than ever before about Middle Eastern issues and peoples. I have also sensed much less arrogance on the most appropriate role for the U.S. in the region, and in most cases a greater sense of humility about the limits of what the U.S. can and cannot do in this fast-changing region, where local actors drive events and the global powers tend to respond to rather than initiate change.

An important consequence of this is that more Americans now seem to view the Middle East, and react politically to its people and leaders, in a more pragmatic and nuanced manner than in recent years, when a more cartoon-like mentality prevailed that saw the region as a single lump with good guys and bad guys and nothing in between. Some new research tends to confirm this.

This week has seen the publication of a poll-based study entitled “Americans on the Middle East: A Study of American Public Opinion,” headed by Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull, of the University of Maryland’s Anwar Sadat Chair and the Program on International Policy Attitudes. They explored how Americans across the board felt about several key, current issues in the Middle East, including the Libyan and Egyptian governments, foreign aid, Iran, Syria and the importance of U.S. relations with the Muslim world and dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. [Continue reading…]

James Traub writes: When I was in Morocco this summer, I heard a great deal about “Moroccan exceptionalism.” Historian Abdallah Laroui has described Morocco as “an island” cut off from its neighbors by sea, sand, and mountains, making it subject to its own laws of development. For the last four centuries, Morocco has been ruled by the Alaoui dynasty, which claims direct descent from the Prophet Mohammed. Moroccans, it is said, revere the monarchy as an almost divine institution, and they expect the current Alaoui king, Mohammed VI, to be an active, engaged monarch, to lead the country and serve as the arbiter among its diverse interests, classes, tribes, and regions. The king, in turn, wants to rule, but not dominate, I was told, which is why he agreed last year to promulgate a new constitution sharply limiting his powers. Morocco, in short, isn’t like Tunisia or Egypt or Libya or the other countries turned upside down and inside out by the Arab Spring. It has, instead, embarked on “a third path of reform with stability,” as Mustapha El Khalfi, the government’s spokesman and its communications minister, told me.

Has it? Nearly everywhere else in the Arab world since the upheaval began in the last days of 2010, power has been seized after a traumatic convulsion, or the ruler has stood his ground by crushing a popular opposition. Absolute rulers, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, do not normally surrender their power without a fight. So Morocco’s “third path” would constitute a rare, and precious, form of incremental democratization. If it worked.

It’s true that the country has not only a new constitution but a new prime minister, Abdelilah Benkirane, and a new government, which is feeling its way, albeit very haltingly, toward a new modus operandi with the king. No one really knows, however, whether the king and his palace aides are prepared to let the new government succeed or whether the mild Islamists of the ruling Party of Justice and Development are prepared to challenge entrenched royal prerogative.

One morning I took myself on a tour of the 19th-century royal palace complex in the capital city of Rabat. Visitors cannot penetrate the interior. (Moroccans cannot even linger within the outer walls.) As I was walking along the facade past a great tiled doorway, a security official emerged to say, “You cannot walk any farther.” I smiled and said that I didn’t see a line. “No,” he said gravely, “there is no line.” That is today’s Morocco: There are still limits, and you may not know until you’ve transgressed them. [Continue reading…]

Tariq Ramadan writes: a recent visit to the United States, I was asked by intellectuals and journalists: Were we misled, during the Arab awakening, into thinking that Muslims could actually embrace democratic ideals?

The short answer is no. Participants in the recent violent demonstrations over an Islamophobic video were a tiny minority. Their violence was unacceptable. They do not represent the millions of Muslims who have taken to the streets since 2010 in a disciplined, nonviolent manner to bring down dictatorships.

Many Americans were nonetheless shocked by the chaos and bloodshed across Muslim countries, believing that they had come generously to the aid of the Arab peoples during the uprisings. But Arabs, and Muslims in general, have a longer memory and a broader view. Their mistrust is fueled by America’s decades-long support for dictators who accommodated its economic and security interests; by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; by the humiliating treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay; and by America’s seemingly permanent and unconditional support for Israel.

The United States and its European allies would be well advised to examine why Muslims are seething. Withdrawing from Afghanistan, respecting United Nations resolutions and treaty obligations with regard to Palestine, calling back the killer drones and winding up the “war on terror” would be excellent places to start.

However, the time has come to stop blaming the West for the colonialism and imperialism of the past. Muslim-majority societies must jettison their historic posture as victims and accept that they are empowered actors, as millions of Arabs demonstrated last year by coming out into the streets and changing the course of history. [Continue reading…]

Moncef Marzouki, the president of Tunisia, writes: The violent demonstrations that have spread across the Muslim world in recent weeks have convinced many in the United States and Europe that the Arab revolutions that began in late 2010 are now over and that the democratic project has failed. Bitterness and a sense of impending catastrophe are replacing the enthusiasm that followed the toppling of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt last year.

Now there is ominous talk of an “Islamist Fall” and “Salafi Winter” after a supposedly failed Arab Spring. To these skeptics, religion is the driving force in Arab politics, and hateful anti-Western slogans and the killing of America’s ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, are evidence of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West.

While these fears are understandable, such alarmism is misplaced. The Arab revolutions have not turned anti-Western. Nor are they pro-Western. They are simply not about the West. They remain fundamentally about social justice and democracy — not about religion or establishing Shariah law.

The democratization of Tunisia, Egypt and other countries has allowed a number of extremist free riders into the political system. But it has also definitively refuted the myth that democracy and Islam are incompatible. Islamists are political actors like any others: they are no more pure, more united or more immune from criticism than anyone else.

Islamist parties are now free to take part in political debates and to win seats in legislatures and governments. However, these political changes have also rendered the divisions among Islamists more apparent than ever before. [Continue reading…]

Antoine Gregoire, a journalist for iloubnan.info, speaking in Beirut.

Pankaj Mishra writes: The murder of four Americans in Libya and mob assaults on the United States’ embassies across the Muslim world this month have reminded many of 1979, when radical Islamists seized the American mission in Tehran. There, too, extremists running wild after the fall of a pro-American tyrant had found a cheap way of empowering themselves.

But the obsession with radical Islam misses a more meaningful analogy for the current state of siege in the Middle East and Afghanistan: the helicopters hovering above the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city.

That hasty departure ended America’s long and costly involvement in Indochina, which, like the Middle East today, the United States had inherited from defunct European empires. Of course, Southeast Asia had no natural resources to tempt the United States and no ally like Israel to defend. But it appeared to be at the front line of the worldwide battle against Communism, and American policy makers had unsuccessfully tried both proxy despots and military firepower to make the locals advance their strategic interests.

The violent protests provoked by the film “Innocence of Muslims” will soon subside, and American embassies will return to normal business. But the symbolic import of the violence, which included a Taliban assault on one of the most highly secured American bases in Afghanistan, is unmistakable. The drama of waning American power is being re-enacted in the Middle East and South Asia after two futile wars and the collapse or weakening of pro-American regimes.

In Afghanistan, local soldiers and policemen have killed their Western trainers, and demonstrations have erupted there and in Pakistan against American drone strikes and reported desecrations of the Koran. Amazingly, this surge in historically rooted hatred and distrust of powerful Western invaders, meddlers and remote controllers has come yet again as a shock to many American policy makers and commentators, who have promptly retreated into a lazy “they hate our freedoms” narrative.

It is as though the United States, lulled by such ideological foils as Nazism and Communism into an exalted notion of its moral power and mission, missed the central event of the 20th century: the steady, and often violent, political awakening of peoples who had been exposed for decades to the sharp edges of Western power. [Continue reading…]

Rami G. Khouri identifies five genuinely historic, new and meaningful developments in many of the Arab states in transformation, after 21 months of the Arab uprisings:

1. New legitimacies are coming into play, including legitimate governance structures, leaders and political actors, replacing their former counterparts that enjoyed incumbency but had long ago lost legitimacy. The transition from mass public humiliation to newfound legitimacy in national governance and the exercise of power is the single most important foundational change that is taking place in these Arab uprisings and national reconfigurations. These new legitimacies provide the foundation on which all other new developments occur, especially new national systems of governance and citizen rights.

2. New actors now participate in the process of contested politics that will shape national governments systems and policies at home and abroad; these include most notably revolutionary and other youth, individual citizens with the power to choose and change governments and presidents, Muslim Brothers and more hard-line Salafist Islamists (some of whom lead or participate in coalition governments), tribes (some with militias), secular-nationalist political parties, the armed forces that now engage in open rather than secret politics, the judiciary, civil society groups, and private sector interests.

We should note three important aspects of these new players. They all emanate from these Arab societies and did not parachute in from abroad, and they now operate in public and with populist democratic legitimacy, rather than working in the shadows as many of them did before, including the military, tribal forces, the private sector, and some Islamists. They reflect the important development that very few people are now excluded or marginalized, as was the case previously when the vast majority of citizens were shut out from the decision-making process. And, they evolve and change, as they share or seek power via the consent of the governed; they soften or harden positions and clarify their policies in response to citizen demands, and so they act in a political manner, reflecting their need to remain legitimate and credible in the eyes of their supporters and the public at large. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: It is always instructive but also irritating to be in the United States when tumultuous events occur around the Middle East or the wider Arab-Asian region with its predominantly Muslim populations. Last week was such a week, as we witnessed demonstrations and occasional violence in over a dozen countries, from Morocco to Indonesia, sparked by the insulting film trailer about Islam and the Prophet Mohammad that angered so many Muslims and others, including myself.

I see the fascinating and troubling dimension of mainstream American media coverage of the past week’s events, including the prevailing themes of public political discussions, as the tendency to link the historic events of the past 21 months (the Arab Spring, as it is known in the United States) to the outbursts of anger and resentment among those who demonstrated across the Arab-Asian region, and to ask: “Was the Arab Spring worth it?” A variation on this is to declare that the Arab Spring has led to a Dark Autumn, or some other such pairing of positive and negative attributes.

Many conclusions are drawn from this sort of discussion, including one streak in American thinking that says the U.S. should minimize its contacts with those violent and ungrateful Muslims over there who keep attacking our embassies and killing our citizens every time they are angered by manifestations of American free speech.

A subtext of this is the questioning of why those Muslims cannot be modern and tolerant like Americans or Westerners, who are much more casual about insults to their religion or prophets (and the questions are always about “Muslims,” not Nigerians, Indonesians or Tunisians, let’s say, and often the subject of bewilderment here is simply “Islam,” not even Muslims as individuals).

My concern is primarily about the frequent and negative linkages between the Arab uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa that seek more legitimate and democratic governance systems, and the angry protests and the few incidents of violence or death that erupted across the Arab-Asian region in the past week. Some in the U.S. now feel that demonstrations and occasional violence essentially negate the epic gains of the Arab uprisings.

This is such a terrible equation because the demonstrators usually involved a few hundred and occasionally a few thousand people (mostly men) who went out for a few hours here and there to express their rather legitimate anger (along with a few illegitimate and unacceptable acts of violence) at having their Prophet and religion deliberately demeaned. The attacks against the American consulate in Benghazi may also have included a preplanned attack by a small band of Salafist militants.

In contrast, the Arab Spring uprisings have gone on uninterrupted, in some cases for a year and nine months, and have seen tens of millions of ordinary citizens go out into the streets to demonstrate peacefully for the most part as they worked to remove their dictators and live a more dignified and free life. In some cases, as in Syria and Libya, violent regime responses prompted some opposition elements to use military means to confront the regimes, usually with assistance from Arab and Western countries.

One gets the impression over and over in the United States that Arabs and Muslims often are perceived as something akin to juvenile delinquents on parole – they have to behave well and obey the rules in order to enjoy the normal benefits of a free life. Arab freedom and sovereignty do not seem to be absolute rights, but rather are held hostage to American, Western and, in some cases, Israeli validation that we are behaving correctly. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: The criminal tragedy of the death of four American diplomats in Benghazi has rightly captured the attention of the world and raised questions about whether attacks against embassies are a reasonable way for people to express their anger. It is clear that the three things we witnessed this week – spontaneous mob scenes, pre-planned orderly demonstrations and organized military attacks against American facilities – represent three different phenomena, each of which reflected a significant political reality in the Arab world today. Why these three all gravitate to American embassies is a relevant question that deserves more analysis, but for another day.

At the other end is the spark of this week’s dynamics, namely the vulgar and deliberately provocative film by anti-Islamic criminals in the United States (including some of Egyptian Coptic origin) who know that if they insult the Prophet Mohammad they will incite demonstrations and violence across parts of the Arab-Islamic world. A small number of virulent Islamophobic movements in North America and Europe vent their racist insults through websites, publications and other means, and when these are translated into Arabic and spread through the digital world, the result is what we witnessed this week in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and other countries.

But what, in fact, did we witness? It is important to try to understand the separation lines between the different players comprising the new scorecard of Arab political cultures in a process of deep transformation, and, in cases like Libya, that also represent the birth of totally new national political and governance systems. Small groups of armed Salafist militants carry out operations such as the attack against the American consulate in Benghazi, while the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and other such Islamists tend to stick to orderly and peaceful demonstrations. Spontaneous groups of angry citizens fall somewhere in between when they vent their anger at the insulting film about the Prophet Mohammad by storming American embassies and tearing down or burning the flag.

These groups represent the equivalent of the American terrorist Timothy McVeigh, the ideological Tea Party, those many Americans who spontaneously gathered, danced and celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed, and those few Americans who burned down mosques around the country. The criminals in this mix must be viewed and dealt with very differently from the others who are angry, energetic and excitable, but not necessarily criminal in either their intent or their conduct. [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: Egregious insults like the Innocence of Muslims film would not be so easily translated into rage at U.S. power were it not for the simmering long-term rage at Washington over its invasions of Muslim countries, its support for Israeli governments and Arab despots, its drone strikes and more.

Deep anger at U.S. foreign policy is the extended preexisting condition that geopolitical Obamacare has failed to significantly alter; the outrage at an offensive film is the opportunistic virus that, when combined with the preexisting condition, creates a crisis. Instances of American Islam-bashing are used to prove that the policies and actions of the U.S. that most anger ordinary Arabs are not simply discrete foreign policy choices driven by self-interest and other agendas but rather expressions of a deeper animus toward Islam itself — a proof that functions as a chemical catalyst that can bring residual anger to a boil.

Yes, it’s always manipulated by cynical opportunists driven by narrow political agendas, but the outrage itself is real, and it’s hardly confined to a movie. Without the pre-existing anger, in fact, the film would be like a detonator without dynamite. Only the combination of the two creates the explosion.

So in that sense, President Obama’s Republican critics are not wrong in suggesting that this week’s upsurge in protests represents, at least in part, a response to the Administration’s handling of the Middle East or even to what vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan on Friday called ”mixed signals” from the White House. But where Ryan and those echoing him are wrong — egregiously, spectacularly wrong — is in suggesting that the protests are a response to a retreat from “moral clarity and firmness of purpose,” watchwords of the Bush era. On the contrary, the Muslim world was up in arms against the U.S. on a sustained basis for most of the Bush presidency, precisely because of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unconditional backing of Israel as it pummeled Palestinians and the obvious hypocrisy of a policy of proclaiming democracy and freedom while coddling friendly despots. If the Arab world is angry at the “mixed messages” coming from the Obama Administration, that’s because the President in Cairo in 2009 had promised a break from Bush-era policies yet failed on many fronts to deliver it. It’s not the changes Obama’s made since the Bush era that drive Arab anger; it’s his Administration’s many continuities with Bush-era policies in the Middle East.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad writes: The maelstrom of anti-western violence in the Arab world has little to do with an anti-Islam propaganda film released on YouTube.

It has more to do with decades of perceived western imperialism – and the organisational skills of the Salafis, known for their no-compromise, literal interpretation of the faith.

Such rightwing Islamists were wrongfooted by the Arab spring. For years, the jihadis and Salafis thought they had a monopoly on revolution and were the only viable opposition to the Arab dictators.

When the regimes were threatened by popular uprisings, the Salafis took weeks and months to respond. In Libya they initially called for the demonstrators to support the ruler of the land, Muammar Gaddafi. As it became clear that the revolutions would not instantly deliver the brighter future people had marched for, the Salafis began to use that discontent to their advantage.

They are brilliant at agitating on the streets – working on the unemployed, the frustrated, people who feel life should be better. In Tunis, the Salafi agitation began months before the propaganda film – the Innocence of Muslims – surfaced. They attacked cinemas, secularists and artists. In Bahrain and Syria they worked along sectarian lines, and in Egypt they launched vicious confrontations with the Coptic Christians. [Continue reading…]

In Cairo, protests outside the U.S. embassy appear to have lost support from the Salafists and a demonstration at Tahrir Square only drew a few hundred.

The Wall Street Journal reports: “Egyptians don’t like to protest this way,” said Hisham Al Ashry, a self-identified adherent to hardline Salafi Islam and one of the main speakers at the Salafi-led protest outside the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. “They want to protest against America, they want to protest against the embassy, but not this way. They want a peaceful protest to express their opinions.”

Many self-identified Islamists in Tahrir Square distanced themselves Thursday from the scene at the U.S. Embassy. They said it was the work of nonpolitical hooligans who are often in their young teens and in several instances have joined in violent clashes with police after what started as peaceful protests.

“Egyptians refuse this,” said one of the protesters in Tahrir Square who called himself Abu Safiyan. He invoked from memory the Prophet Muhammed’s invocation to protect foreign emissaries.

Most of the crowd that could be seen throwing rocks at police officers along the Nile River a block from the U.S. Embassy appeared to be in their teens. Few were dressed like Mr. Abu Safiyan, whose long beard and starched white gown characterizes many adherents to Salafi Islam.

Issandr El Amrani writes: One of the hopes – for me at least – of the Arab uprisings is that they will lead to a qualitative change in the substance of Arab politics. I mean this not just in the sense that undemocratic regimes will be undone, replaced by real politics with real stakes and rotation of power. I also mean that I hope the uprisings can short-circuit some old tropes of regional politics, about identity, wounded pride and angry impotence.

Alas, this week’s embassy protests and senseless killings show there is still much farther to go.

Protests and incitement about books, films or statements deemed insulting to Islam have for decades been a staple tool of Islamists, and of both religious and secular governments in the region.

Consider the 2005 Danish cartoon crisis, when thousands took to the streets against offensive cartoon depictions of Prophet Mohammed – months after they had been published. This was fomented in good part by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which, at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, refocused the region’s attention on a newspaper published four months earlier.

That resulted in protests (apparently backed by both governments and the Islamist movements with which they usually fought). In Syria and Gaza at least, governments apparently allowed several European embassies to be raided. The Danish embassy in Pakistan was also bombed. By early 2006, over 100 had died either as a result of the attacks or because of the efforts to control the riots worldwide.

Other examples quickly come to mind, from the 1988 fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s campaign in 2000 against Syrian novelist Hayder Hayder’s Banquet for Seaweed.

These usually served political purposes – no doubt Khomeini used the Rushdie fatwa to distract Iranians from the consequences of the terrible war with Iraq he prolonged; the Muslim Brothers loved to embarrass the government for having published Hayder’s book. And in 2005, the Mubarak regime made use of the Danish cartoon crisis just as it was coming under increased domestic and external pressure to democratise.

Islamist movements (even if they are not alone in this) have shown that they excel in using an insult (real or perceived) as part of their culture wars: the tactic is to portray themselves as the sole defenders of the faith. In this week’s case, they chose to do so even though the film in question was released only online and no one would have heard of it or paid attention to it without their efforts. [Continue reading…]

Deen Sharp writes: The physical spaces of the Arab uprisings emerged as powerful political tools in the course of the revolts for both protesters and regimes. Protestors in streets and squares affirmed that power also exists in real exchanges, in real places between real people. Tahrir Square experienced a metamorphosis from a denied political space to a metonym for revolution, a symbol of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings. The spatial dynamics of the uprisings, however, are not only in the streets and public squares of the major metropolises. Indeed, the protests antedate the move to public squares in capital cities.

Despite urban spaces outside the major metropolises remaining almost invisible in discourses surrounding the Arab uprisings, small cities played a critical role in the revolts in 2011, the year that changed the Middle East. Normatively, it is the spaces of the largest cities that are deemed to produce the region’s history. Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad, and their ilk, do not form the realities for the majority of inhabitants in the Arab region, however. Urban morphologies of small cities, such as Sidi Bouzid, Suez and Dera’a, are closer to the everyday spatial realities of the majority of the regions inhabitants. The Arab uprisings have articulated how the neglect of areas outside the major metropolises hindered our understanding of human patterns of social life.

To differentiate and comprehend the morphologies of small cities, towns, peri-urban areas and villages, and thus engage with the daily spatial realities of the majority of inhabitants in the region, a correction to the under theorizing of areas outside big cities needs to be undertaken. The uprisings have brought to the fore the urgency of establishing a small cities research agenda for the region. Engagement with space beyond the metropolis would not only introduce new avenues to analyze the historical contexts and undetermined futures of the Arab uprisings but also engender an improved understanding of social life in the region more broadly. It took a fruit and vegetable vendor to instigate a region-wide revolution and depose the big men – Ben Ali, Mubarak and Saleh. It took small cities to awaken the larger metropolis. [Continue reading…]