Rami G Khouri writes: Mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square and street battles in Syria form the dramatic heart of the uprisings and revolutions that define many Arab lands these days, but the soul and the brain of the Arab world to come are being shaped in the epic battles now taking place to write new constitutions.As has happened regularly since December 2010, we must look back to Tunisia and Egypt for insights into this critical realm. The lessons to date are enlightening and heartening, as we see these days from passionate debates about issues like the status of women, the role of journalists, and the place of Islam and religion in state institutions and public life.

The fine points of writing new constitutions are often tedious and just slightly more captivating than Law of the Sea deliberations. So it is surprising perhaps to see street demonstrations and much political passion in Egypt and Tunisia over elements of the constitutional process, whether the composition of the bodies drafting the constitutions or the actual texts being formulated. This is not so surprising, though, in view of the widespread demands for constitutional reform across the entire Arab world, even in countries where no significant street demonstrations have taken place.

One of the telltale signs of the high importance that Arabs attach to this process is that calls for changing or reforming governments across the region have always been coupled with demands for new constitutions. These are important to the citizenry because they spell out in concrete and unambiguous terms the equal rights of every citizen, and they provide enforcement and accountability mechanisms to make sure that those rights are actually practiced. Arab constitutions for the past century (in fact since the first modern Arab constitution was promulgated in 1861 in … Tunisia) have all promised a full range of rights and freedoms; but these rights were never fully enforced, leaving it to security-minded governments and narrow ruling elites to monopolize power in a manner that deeply disenfranchised most citizens.

So it is important to note that beyond Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, where lifelong autocratic leaders and their elites are being replaced by more legitimate elected governments, countries like Jordan, Morocco and Oman have started tinkering with their mechanisms of power and rule, in response to populist demands for constitutional reform and more egalitarian and participatory governance systems. The changes are limited and often superficial, but they do reflect both the nature of the populist demands for constitutional changes and the reality that long-serving regimes must respond to those demands in some manner. [Continue reading…]

Nicholas Pelham writes: Since the Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself and the Arab world aflame in December 2010, young men all over the Middle East have tried to imitate him. In no country have they done so more often than in Morocco, where some twenty men, with many of the same economic grievances, are reported to have self-immolated. Five succeeded in killing themselves, but none in sparking a revolution.

It is not for want of causes. Morocco’s vital statistics are worse than Tunisia’s. Its population earns half as much on average as its smaller North African counterpart. One of every two youth are unemployed, and the number is rising: failed rains have cut the country’s wheat harvest in half and have compounded a mounting budget deficit hiked by rising fuel prices and a downturn in tourism and exports to Europe, Morocco’s beleaguered main trading partner. In late May, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Casablanca to protest the government’s failure to tackle the country’s social ills.

Meanwhile, widely circulated accounts by veteran Moroccan and French journalists describe the cronyism clawing through the palaces. The personal assets of King Mohammed VI — based on his control of the country’s phosphate mines, it is reported — have quintupled to $2.5 billion over the past decade. This makes the monarch of the impoverished realm more wealthy — according to Forbes — than Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.

But whereas Ben Ali, Tunisia’s policeman, pigheadedly sought to keep power when the streets erupted in late 2010, Morocco’s po-faced but retiring King has kept one step ahead by offering to share it. On March 9, 2011 — just weeks after Ben Ali’s exile — King Mohammed unveiled a new constitution that gave up his claim to divine rights as sovereign, but left him as Commander of the Faithful, much — said palace advisers — as Britain’s Queen remains head of the Anglican Church. And while other Arab monarchs, like Jordan’s, dithered about whether to risk parliamentary elections, Mohammed held them quickly and fairly last November; when an Islamist party won the most seats, the King declared its leader, Abdelilah Benkirane, the prime minister.

I first met Benkirane 13 years ago, in 1999, when he was standing for election in the shanties of Sale, a squalid adjunct to Morocco’s serene capital, Rabat, from which it is separated by the picturesque Bouregreg estuary. Unable to deliver running water to his constituents, he ranted against a beauty pageant that the kingdom’s elite were staging in the Rabat Hilton. His core demand was that female contestants replace their swimsuits with kaftans, the hooded woolen tunics that turn hour-glass figures into dumplings. Benkirane won both the campaign and the ballot.

Abdelilah Benkirane of the Islamist Justice and Development Party in the Moroccan parliament, Rabat, December 19, 2011

At the time, Benkirane’s claim that he would be running the country within two elections was met with guffaws. Andre Azoulay, the King’s debonair Jewish adviser, summoned me for a reprimand after I reported his prediction on the BBC. “Bullshit,” he pronounced, horrified that an Islamist might ever sully the makzhen, Morocco’s royal establishment. Benkirane was wrong — but only by an election, and he now holds more power than any previous prime minister. At his investiture, he hurriedly pecked His Majesty on the shoulder, dispensing with the tradition of kissing the hand of a man nine years his junior.

One day this spring, I met Benkirane again, by knocking on his front door in Les Orangers, an ordinary middle class neighborhood just beyond Rabat’s medieval walls — he has until now declined to leave his aging town house for the stately home that comes with his office. Unlike the more high-falutin’ Arabic of traditional courtiers, Benkirane—who is popularly known as Benky — speaks in a language Moroccans understand, a dialect called derija, which mixes the various cultures that have swept through its mountains: Tifinagh, the Berber tongue, French, and Spanish. [Continue reading…]

Rami G Khouri writes: I was in the United States 16 months ago when an Egyptian national popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to quit the presidency. And I was in the United States again this week when Mohammed Mursi was elected as the new Egyptian president. Then and now, Americans remain unsure about how to react to the popular revolutions that felled their longtime autocratic Arab allies, who in most cases were replaced by more legitimate, Islamist-led governments.

At the same time, though, Americans – who helped to define the modern revolutionary and democratic era in the 18th century – instinctively tend to support national populist revolutions that create government systems based on the consent of the governed and democratic electoral pluralism. When Arabs carry out these revolutionary and democratic endeavors, however, American society reacts with obvious hesitancy alongside the flashes of enthusiasm.

It is important for Americans and Arabs alike to understand this phenomenon, because it reflects much deeper perceptions, sentiments or biases that will continue to haunt relations between Arabs and Americans and prevent them from ever fully embracing one another, or simply developing normal relations.

My own sense is that two main underlying problems are to blame: the intrusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Washington’s deep pro-Israel bias into American-Arab relations, and the lingering consequences of several unpleasant encounters between the United States and various Arab, Iranian or South Asian parties that defined themselves in Islamist terms (Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda and others).

This was evident this week when I was reading through some “quality” American press coverage of the Mursi election victory (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle). One story in The Wall Street Journal’s coverage on June 25 was a textbook case of the recurring bias and confusion in American reactions to the transformational events in the Arab world; and one sentence in a front-page story captured this phenomenon succinctly: “Many secular Egyptians watched uneasily, wondering what Islamist rule will mean for a country that has long been a bulwark of secular, moderate and pro-American governance,” the newspaper observed. [Continue reading…]

Sharif Nashashibi writes: Mauritania. Many people have never heard of it, and most would probably be unable to pinpoint it on a map, even though its land mass is larger than France and Germany combined. Many Arabs are unaware that it is a member of the Arab League.

Even BlackBerry does not recognise it. Its messenger service auto-corrects “Mauritania” to “Martian” and, given public ignorance of the country, Mauritania might as well be on Mars. However, this could and should change.

Interviewed for a TV programme recently, I was asked whether Mauritania will be the next country to experience the Arab spring. In fact, it has been part of the spring since January 2011, when Yacoub Ould Dahoud fatally set himself alight in front of the presidential palace.

Protests have taken place across Mauritania ever since, spurred by the same factors as in other Arab states: economic, political and social disenfranchisement. But unlike those in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere in the region, Mauritania’s have been barely a blip on the news radar.

This has led al-Jazeera to describe it as the overlooked uprising. Very low internet usage in the country – reportedly less than 2% of households – has made it difficult for Mauritanians to get their views, eyewitness accounts and images out to the rest of the world as has happened among other restive Arab populations.

The international community has historically taken little interest in Mauritania since its independence from France in 1960, because until recently it was seen as a poor expanse of desert with little strategic value (it has one of the lowest GDPs in Africa, making it among the poorest countries in the world).

However, its importance is likely to increase, and with it the world’s attention. Mauritania’s extensive iron ore deposits, which account for almost half of its exports, have increased in value due to rising metal prices, leading to more mines being opened, and hundreds of millions of dollars earned last year.

Furthermore, oil was discovered in 2001, although Mauritanians have yet to benefit because the country lacks the necessary infrastructure to fully exploit its reserves. However, with production on the rise, several oil exploration deals inked in the last year, and a population of just over 3 million, the potential windfall is huge.

As China makes economic and developmental inroads into Africa it may only be a matter of time before Mauritania’s largely untapped resources come into focus. This could irk the US into also seeking greater involvement, as Africa is fast becoming an economic battleground for the current and upcoming superpowers. [Continue reading…]

Narges Bajoghli writes: From the Green Movement in Iran in 2009 through the Arab revolts that began in 2011, social media have held center stage in coverage of popular protest in the Middle East. Though the first flush of overwrought enthusiasm is long past, there is consensus that Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 applications, particularly on handheld devices, have been an effective organizing tool against the slower-moving security apparatuses of authoritarian states. The new technology has also helped social movements to tell their story to the outside world, unhindered by official news blackouts, unbothered by state censors and unfiltered by the traditional Western media.

But what happens when digital means of communication and coordination are no longer an option for activists or, at least, a very dangerous option? The state of activism in Iran, nearly three years after the largest protests since the 1979 revolution, offers a cautionary tale for partisans of social media’s emancipatory promise. The Internet, in fact, has become the site of a protracted cat-and-mouse game as the state attempts to reassert its control after the 2009 presidential election, which large segments of the population believe to have been stolen by the state for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The very qualities that make new media so attractive to people seeking change from below also make them an ideal means of surveillance and manipulation from above. [Continue reading…]

Robert Fisk writes: It was my old Jordanian-Palestinian chum Rami Khouri who first spotted what is going on in the Middle East right now: it’s the counter-revolution. Bahrain is crushing dissent. Syria is crushing dissent. Mubarak’s former head of intelligence, the sinister Omar Suleiman, is standing for president in Egypt – the cancellation of his candidacy last week by a dodgy “electoral committee” may well be overturned. Libya is at war with itself. Yemen has got its former dictator’s sidekick back. Sixty-one dead in a battle between soldiers and al-Qa’ida last week – in a single day. All in all, a pretty mess.

But let me quote Khouri. “In Washington-speak, a ‘crisis’ is like love: you can define it any way you want, but you know when it happens to you. So a popular revolt in Bahrain for full civil rights is a crisis that must be crushed by force. But a revolt in Syria is a blessed event that deserves support. Similarly, this peculiar mindset warns against Iranian support to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, while accepting as perfectly logical and legitimate for the US and its allies to send arms and money to their favourite rebel groups around the region – not to mention attacking entire countries…”

And there you have it. As Khouri notes, there’s now a new group called the “Security Cooperation Forum” linking the US with the Gulf Cooperation Council. La Clinton turned up to assure the oil states of Washington’s “rock solid and unwavering commitment” to the GCC. Now where have we heard that before? Why, isn’t that what Obama is always saying to the Israelis? And weren’t Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia the two guys who called Obama to ask him to save Mubarak?

And in Syria – where the Qataris and the Saudis are all too keen to send weapons for the rebels – things are not going very well for the revolution. After claiming for weeks a year ago that “armed bands” were attacking government forces, the bands now exist and are well and truly attacking Assad’s legions. For many tens of thousands who were prepared to demonstrate peacefully – albeit at the cost of their lives – this has become a disaster. Syrian friends of mine call it a “tragedy”. They blame the Gulf states for encouraging the armed uprising. “Our revolution was pure and clean and now it’s a war,” one of them said to me last week. I believe them.

The Economist reports: A bill on “information-technology crimes” with extraordinarily broad wording and harsh punishments is due to come before Iraq’s parliament in April, once the dignitaries and television cameras at this week’s Arab League summit in Baghdad have departed.

The bill is one of four proposed laws that could severely restrict basic freedoms. (A fifth, on journalists, was passed last summer.) Access Now, a human-rights group with a focus on technology, has a report on it out today. According to an English translation from last August, it includes mandatory life sentences for using computers or the internet to “compromise” the “unity” of the state (Article 3), promote “ideas which are disruptive to public order” (Article 4), or engage in “trafficking, promoting or facilitating the abuse of drugs” (Article 5), which could include merely blogging about them.

Some of the most egregiously loose definitions make it a crime—though at least not one carrying a life sentence—to cause “damage, defect or obstruction to computer hardware, operating systems, software or information networks”, even by mistake; to “intrude, annoy or call computer and information network users without authorisation”; to “benefit unduly from telecommunications services” (all these from Article 14); or to “relate words, images or voices to someone else involving cursing or slander” (Article 22).

The law on journalists and the other three bills, which cover public assembly, telecoms and political parties, are similar in style, notes a report from the Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD), another human-rights group: filled with vague references to “public morals”, “public order”, “national interests”, “threatening” or “insulting” messages, and so on.

Several governments tried temporarily restricting or shutting off the internet during the Arab Spring, and it should be no surprise that they are now looking for more permanent ways to limit its influence. Yet these stem from more than a simple desire to repress.

Rami G Khouri writes: Three great battles over political power have been unleashed across the Arab world and will persist for many years, until a new political order stabilizes in every country. One in particular is now reaching an important point that will reveal much about the current political character of Arab societies. The three battles are those between military and civilian authorities (democracy vs. autocracy), between Islamists and secularists (the authority of God vs. the citizenry), and between narrow ethnic/tribal/sectarian identity and a more inclusive national identity (tribe vs. state).

These contests will take years to play themselves out, because they comprise such complex factors as identity, allegiance, collective solidarity, access to state power and resources, and self-preservation. Some of them will endure for decades or more, as we have witnessed in the lively American context between fundamentalist Christians and more secular politicians vying for presidential power, over two centuries after the American independence years first defined religion-state ties.

In the Arab context, we are at an important station in the long road to the new, more participatory, democratic and accountable, national political governance systems. The issue at hand on this stop is about the balance between Islamists and secularists.

This is not a turning point, but simply a stop along the long road, a point at which some decisions will be made by society as a whole, and the march forward will continue, with other decisions to be made at other stops. Many in the region and abroad often jump to hasty conclusions that the various Arab revolutions and uprisings have been reversed and nullified because the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists have now taken over political systems in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and are in the process of dominating the opposition movements in Syria. This is a premature rush to judgment.

A Syrian refugee family wait for rebels to help them across the Turkish border. Photograph: Giorgos Moutafis/AFP/Getty Images

Jonathan Jones writes: Here is the truth about revolution, war, dictatorship and resistance. It is a simple truth and it is crushing: people suffer. In this powerful picture by Greek photojournalist Giorgos Moutafis a refugee family in Janoudia in north-western Syria wait for rebels to help them across the border into Turkey. In the bold rhetoric of our time, this might be described as a picture of defeat, an indictment of Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on opposition to his rule, a call to arms for western democracies that are so much less eager to help in Syria now than they were in Libya a year ago. Perhaps it is all those things, and anything else politics wants it to be. But first, it is a human document.

Five children sit in a pool of light amid the dark, their faces patient and resilient, their confusion and fear obvious. Each has a different expression but none are smiling. One child gazes downward while the youngest-looking boy stares at the camera. The adults in the picture, knowing more, look back at the photographer as they gather close to the children. Everyone’s eyes seem to be searching, puzzling. The glow that warms their faces reveals a moment of contemplation before the next arduous stage of a journey.

Painters have known for centuries how to use nocturnal light to intensify our recognition of vulnerability. In his painting The Nativity at Night, which dates from about 1490, Geertgen tot Sint Jans shows the Madonna and child by candlelight against the dark. In this photograph, the shiny wall of the tent or canopy behind them creates a starless black night. Against this eeriness, Moutafis is able to give this family a profound dignity as the human instinct for light in the shadowed hours heightens their meditative companionship.

Issandr El Amrani writes: I’d like to touch upon America and Egypt, because I’ve seen a lot of hand-wringing in American newspapers about the future of that relationship and a sense of misplaced buyers’ remorse about the Egyptian revolution – misplaced because the US had little to do with the revolution, and because it is wrong-headed thinking about an unstoppable, irreversible event.

Generally speaking, the American foreign policy establishment is stuck on Egypt. It is having a hard time imagining a different Middle East. Its path of least resistance is banking on their financial and political relationship with the generals now in charge and maintaining the ability to project power in the region that it has had since 1945 to some extent and since 1990 in particular. If it continues on this path, which is unfortunately likely, because of the dearth of imagination in a foreign policy elite that has grown lazy in its imperial thinking, and because of the dire state of American politics, it will fail.

The most important thing you can do about Egypt right now is be patient and not try to force things or maintain a system that Egyptians clearly want to change. This is what worries me the most: that the US will choose to encourage the perpetuation of military rule in Egypt, as people like Jon Alterman have already subtly advocated and many others in Washington are discreetly but more vigorously doing in games of “armchair generals”. They are the Status Quo Lobby.

America is a country that has grown complacent in its assumptions about the Middle East and its politics, and too wedded to the idea of having an imperial role in the region (of which CENTCOM is the embodiment) and the world more generally. For several years I have advocated an American withdrawal from the Arab world. The Arab uprisings have made this all the more urgent, although it is a delicate, difficult, and potentially dangerous matter. But that’s a debate for another day.

Let me focus now on a few pieces by people who have written very unwise things, and who are the other bigpart of the problem with American foreign policy in the region: those who primarily see US Middle East policy through the lens of Israel.

Robert Satloff, a leading hack of the Israel lobby think tank WINEP, and Eric Trager have a piece in the WSJ you can read here. A few years ago Satloff was all into pressuring Egypt on democracy issues, but now has buyer’s remorse – confirming my long-held suspicion that people like him and Elliott Abrams (and many others) were only tactically interested in democracy promotion as a manner to wield greater influence over the Mubarak regime. Now that Islamists have won a majority in Egypt’s parliament, they are shitting their proverbial pants.

Mark LeVine writes: They were two “new media” events that changed history, unalterably shifting its course into uncharted waters – not merely in the Arab world, but globally as well. And yet their very impact points to two of the most important weaknesses underlying the past year’s worth of revolutionary protests across the region.

The first, an image shot by a cell phone camera, is heartrending to view, as it shows a young man completely on fire, like a still from some bad horror film. Today the world knows the pain behind the grainy image of 26-year-old fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, which lit the Arab world on fire. A young man, struggling to survive in an economy that had made him and so many young Arabs expendable, suffers one too many indignities, and is driven – or inspired – to stage a death that would give life to the hopes of his generation.

Today, revolutionaries across the Arab world circulate his supposed final words on Facebook: “Maybe by setting myself on fire, life can change”.

Bouazizi’s last Facebook entry was a plea for forgiveness from his mother: “Blame the times and not me.”

“Living in a land of treachery,” he explained, had driven him out of his mind. It was a mental state that was shared by so many of his friends – indeed, for the past decade it has been impossible for me to count how many young Arabs have told me they feel schizophrenic or mentally ill, just from living their daily lives in a system that only crushes them down and offers little hope for the future. And so several young men from Sidi Bouzid told me that, when they heard the news about what he’d done, their first reaction was: “Why wasn’t I brave enough to have been the one to do it?”

Across North Africa, in Egypt, pro-democracy activist Asmaa Mahfouz, also 26 years old, watched the unfolding revolution in Tunisia with great anticipation. Bouazizi’s hometown of Sidi Bouzid was a relative backwater, without much of a robust or well-developed public sphere or civil society network to channel his frustrations into more positive action. Mahfouz, however, was a founding member of the April 6 movement, which itself emerged out of the struggle for jobs and dignity by Egyptian workers in the previous half decade.

She well understood the despair and the circumstances that drove Bouazizi to take his own life; but, crucially, she also had the training, vision and networks to take the energy unleashed by Bouazizi in Tunisia and attempt to translate it into concrete political action – not merely one time, but multiple times, until her words broke through the wall of fear that had long kept most Egyptians, such as their counterparts in Tunisia, away from political protest. If Bouazizi acted alone and in desperation, her actions were the product of years of preparation, even if the speech on the video was ad-libbed.

And so, if on December 17, 2010, Bouazizi addressed his final Facebook posting only to his mother, almost one month later to the day, on January 18, 2011, Mahfouz put up a video on Facebook addressed to the entire Egyptian nation. “Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation and hunger and poverty and degradation they had to live with for 30 years,” she declared, setting the context for her call to Tahrir.

“[They were] thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honour and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died, and I saw people commenting and saying: ‘May God forgive him. He committed a sin and killed himself for nothing.'”

And then she uttered the words that would bring her generation into the streets: “People, have some shame!” (“Ya gama’, haram ‘aleyku!”)

The idea of shame is crucial in the history of the Arab Spring, and not, as the Bush administration’s torture masters would have had us believe, because Arab culture and Arab men especially are uniquely preoccupied with shame. Rather, because Mahfouz understood that she had to shame her compatriots out of their passivity in order to awaken a level of political consciousness, and through it agency, necessary to create a powerful, mass-based protest movement against the Mubarak regime.

In simple, yet elegant words, she described how only days before she’d posted another video calling on people to join her in Tahrir, only to wind up joined by “only three guys, and three armoured cars filled with police”, who violently pushed them out of the square, before trying to convince them that those who had set themselves on fire were “psychopaths”. She refused to accept such a characterisation – even though the term evoked precisely the feeling of being “out of one’s mind” that Bouazizi described in his final Facebook posting. But she also understood that while self-martyrdom could launch a revolution in Tunisia, it wouldn’t be enough to do the same in Egypt. Instead, a much more sophisticated discourse and strategy would have to be deployed. [Continue reading…]

Max Fisher reports: The societies of the Middle East and North Africa are not much freer than they were one year ago, according to the new annual report by Freedom House on global trends in freedom. The 2012 Freedom in the World report, out today, finds that political rights and civil liberties in the region were pulled back almost as much as they were advanced. It seems that, although the popular democracy movements of the Arab Spring ejected three dictators and altered the region, perhaps forever, Middle Eastern autocrats and monarchs are fighting back, nearly to a draw.

The people of the Middle East and North Africa are still the least free in the world, according to Freedom House’s authoritative data. Their annual report characterizes 85 percent of Middle Easterners as “not free,” 13 percent as “partly free,” and only 2 percent as “free.” (By comparison, 39 percent of Sub-Saharan Africans — half the rate of the Middle East — are considered “not free.”) That didn’t really change this year. Middle Easterners may be organizing, protesting, fighting, and often dying for freedom, but they have by and large still not gotten it.

Freedom House describes a country’s freedom on a one-to-seven scale, with seven as the least free, for political rights and for civil liberties. For example, the U.S. receives a “one” for both political rights and civil liberties, while North Korea has a “seven” for each. According to this metric, political rights changed in only one of the region’s 21 countries and territories: Tunisia, where peaceful revolution brought the score down from a Stalinist seven to an Eastern European-style three. Civil liberties actually got worse in the aggregate. Revolution and reform brought one-point drops in Tunisia, Libya, and Lebanon; but fearful dictators and bloody crackdowns saw the scores rise by a point each in six countries: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and the Western Sahara.