The Unacknowledged Legislators of Mankind

DEBORAH SONTAG

March 19, 2000

Israel's education minister created a political storm, culminating in a no-confidence vote in the government, when he decided to include a nationalist Palestinian poet's work in the high school literature curriculum.

A fierce debate in Parliament ensued over whether the poems of Mahmoud Darwish were too anti-Israel or whether Israeli students should broaden their horizons by experiencing ''the other.''

The government survived. Mr. Darwish's verse got quite an airing. And the Palestinian Culture Minister decided to introduce Israeli poets to Palestinian students. So there

Mahmoud Darwish, Leading Palestinian Poet, Is Dead at 67

ETHAN BRONNER

August 10, 2008

JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Darwish, whose searing lyrics on Palestinian exile and tender verse on the human condition led him to be widely viewed as the pre-eminent man of Palestinian letters as well as one of the greatest contemporary Arab poets, died Saturday night in Houston after complications from heart surgery. He was 67.

Mr. Darwish, a heavy smoker, was known to suffer from health problems. Still, his death was received among Palestinians with shock and despair.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, declared three days of mourning on Sunday, saying that Mr. Darwish was “the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project,” adding, “Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts.”

Yasir Abed Rabbo, secretary of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said, “No one could have imagined that Mahmoud’s voice could disappear.”

The Palestinian Authority will give Mr. Darwish a state funeral in the West Bank on Tuesday, the first since Yasir Arafat died in 2004.

Twice divorced with no children, Mr. Darwish had the straight hair, wire-rim glasses and blue blazer of a European intellectual and was, paradoxically for someone seen as the voice of his people, a loner with a narrow circle of friends. He was uncomfortable in public, where he was widely recognized, but he cared deeply about young Arab writers and published their work in the Ramallah-based journal that he edited, Al Karmel.

And while he wrote in classical Arabic rather than in the language of the street, his poetry was anything but florid or baroque, employing a directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern literary Arabic.

“He used high language to talk about daily life in a truly exceptional way,” said Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet and a close friend. “This is someone who remained at the top of Arabic poetry for 40 years. It was not simply about politics.”

Nonetheless, politics played a major role in Mr. Darwish’s life and work. Born to a middle-class Muslim farming family in a village near Haifa in what is today Israel, Mr. Darwish identified strongly with the secular Palestinian national movement long led by Mr. Arafat.

Mr. Zaqtan and Mr. Abed Rabbo said he was the author of Mr. Arafat’s famous words at the United Nations General Assembly in 1974: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

He also wrote the Palestinian declaration of independent statehood in 1988 and served on the executive committee of the P.L.O. But he quit in the early 1990s over differences with the leadership and moved firmly out of the political sphere, lamenting the rise of the Islamist group Hamas and what he viewed as the bankruptcy of Palestinian public life.

Mr. Darwish first gained a following in the 1960s for his frank political poems, and to some extent they remain the source of his fame. Among his best known was “Identity Card” from 1964, in which he attacked Israel’s desire to overlook the presence of Arabs on its land:

“Write down!/I am an Arab/ and my identity card number is 50,000/I have eight children/And the ninth will come after a summer.”

It ends: “Therefore!/Write down on the top of the first page:/I do not hate people/Nor do I encroach/But if I become hungry/The usurper’s flesh will be my food/Beware .../Beware ... /Of my hunger/And my anger.”

There were other harsh political works in the following two decades, but those who knew Mr. Darwish said he had often expressed little pride in them, preferring his more personal and universal poems. He told The New York Times in a 2001 interview in Paris: “Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She’s not a symbol.”

During the war that led to Israel’s independence, Mr. Darwish and his family, from the Palestinian village of Al Barweh, left for Lebanon. The village was razed but the family sneaked back across the border into Israel, where Mr. Darwish spent his youth.

Politically active fairly early, he was arrested several times and was a member of the Israeli Communist Party. He left in 1971 and lived in the Soviet Union, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and France.

After Mr. Arafat set up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza in the mid-1990s, Mr. Darwish came to live in Ramallah, where he rented a house. He said he never really felt at home there — he made clear that exile for him was increasingly an emotional rather than a purely political dilemma — and wrote more comfortably when in Europe.

He maintained a wide circle of literary acquaintances, including Israelis, and he said he fully supported a two-state solution.

His work earned him a number of international literary awards and was translated into more than 20 languages, more than any other contemporary Arab poet, according to Mahmoud al-Atshan, a professor of Arabic literature at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

There was at first some question of where he would be buried, as some close to him sought to persuade Israel to let him be buried in the area of his home village. But the mayor of Ramallah said Mr. Darwish would be buried in Ramallah, the effective Palestinian capital of the West Bank

Where Muslims and Christians Drew Lines in the Sand

August 17, 2010

The most impressive thing about “The Tenth Parallel” is that Eliza Griswold lived to write it.

Traveling the latitude that describes the borderland of Islam and Christianity in much of Asia and Africa, where warlords, missionaries, aid workers and profiteers battle for oil as well as for souls, Ms. Griswold dodges attack dogs in Nigeria, leaves an office building in Somalia hours before it is hit by a suicide bomber and departs the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, on the island of Java, the morning before an earthquake that killed 5,000 people.

As a literary device, an invisible line 700 miles north of the equator is rather meaningless, no matter how many times Ms. Griswold insists that it unites her book. Even writing so assured and efficient — this intrepid journalist is also an accomplished poet - cannot make us forget how different Indonesia is from Sudan, or Malaysia from Somalia.

But given the danger at which Ms. Griswold scoffs, and the disorienting violence she describes, it would be surprising if there were a smooth, narrative coherence to her dispatches. It is enough that the 10th parallel is, very generally, where the southward advance of Islam’s armies, from the seventh century onward, was arrested, either by human resistance or by wet weather and vegetation. In places as disparate as the Philippines and East Africa, it was somewhere just north of the equator that Muslims encountered Christians, who had either preceded them or arrived soon thereafter.

In these regions the Muslims and Christians also encountered native traditions and competing imports, like Chinese Confucianism in Malaysia. And today the 10th parallel is the site of internecine religious strife, too. In Africa, for example, Pentecostal Christians now push aside Anglicans, while some children of moderate Sufi Muslims adopt a more radical, intolerant faith, one they believe is purer and links them to a global struggle.

Ms. Griswold never states her arguments as clearly as I would wish, but several emerge nonetheless.

First, she believes that Muslim versus Christian fights in Africa and Asia have been amplified, even caused, by the West. Sometimes the legacy of colonialism is the culprit, as in Sudan, where the British governor-general of Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, first played the Arab Muslim northerners against the darker Africans in the south. In 1905, she writes, he “declared it illegal for Christian missionaries to evangelize among Muslims to the north of the 10th parallel, and eventually Muslim traders could not travel to the south of it.” This division won the British the favor of their Muslim puppet leaders in the north, but of course its legacy can be read in the spilled blood of Darfur.

In other cases what seemed like an unremarkable bit of butterfly wing-flapping in the West set off a tsunami in distant lands. Using hawala, the Muslim good-faith money-transfer system, the Somali company Al-Barakat once helped expatriates send home about $790 million annually. Believing — wrongly, it turned out — that Al Qaeda had used hawala to finance the 9/11 attacks, “the United States shut down the company, destroying Somalia’s economy in the process,” Ms. Griswold writes. Where a formal economy cannot exist, black markets and corruption thrive: thus did the United States empower Somali warlords.

Ms. Griswold further argues that leaders along the 10th parallel use Islam cynically, to bolster their power and win recruits. In the 1990s President Suharto of Indonesia “needed religion to bolster his waning authority,” she writes, so he “built mosques and prayer halls in villages and schools, went on the hajj, promoted Islamic education and scholars, and placed Muslims, instead of Christians, in high military positions.”

And for penny-ante warlords, the collapse of Western sponsorship has driven them to religion. “Without the funding from the Soviet Union and the United States,” Ms. Griswold writes, of Somalia, “would-be leaders were searching for new claims to power.”

In that quest “Islamic authority was de rigueur,” she says. In anarchic, failed states, it is easier to raise an army by declaring jihad than by advertising for teenagers to extort roadside bribes near the strongman’s compound.

Everywhere Ms. Griswold travels, Christianity and Islam are debased by their own practitioners. In Khartoum she sees the evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son) visit a 4-month-old girl in the hospital who is dying of a congenital heart defect; he gives her mother a gift box that contains a pamphlet encouraging her to repent and come to Jesus. In Malaysia the government pays isolated villagers who cling to their indigenous beliefs the equivalent of several dollars to convert to Islam.

Ms. Griswold’s outlook is fairly hopeless. Climate change exacerbates competition for resources, and thus religious conflict; Christian missionaries are naïve, often willfully; Islamic leadership proves as corrupt as whatever it replaces. She is all too persuasive, which leaves the reader grateful for moments of whimsy and absurdity: the demographer trying to catalog how every Christian martyr in history died (“roasted alive, sawed in two, thrown from airplane”); the Indonesian terrorist whose Facebook page proclaims him a fan of Ashton Kutcher.

A number of recent books have enlarged our sympathy by focusing on memorable victims of global conflict: Dave Eggers’s “What Is the What,” for example, and Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.” “The Tenth Parallel” is not a page-turner like those. But Ms. Griswold’s fearless wandering has given her a broad view of religious and ethnic conflict, one that reminds us just how many victims Mr. Eggers and Mr. Kidder had to choose from, and how many millions more continue to be with us

Christians and Muslims

THE TENTH PARALLEL
Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam
By Eliza Griswold
317 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27

August 19, 2010

The influential political scientist Samuel P. Huntington theorized about the “clash of civilizations.” The journalist and poet Eliza Griswold takes on the same topic in a much more visceral way: she traveled through the “torrid zone” to see, smell, taste and write about it. Her book “The Tenth Parallel” is a fascinating journey along the latitude line in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam often meet and clash. Since Americans commonly equate Islam with the Arab Middle East, this book is a useful reminder that four-fifths of Muslims live elsewhere. It’s also an intimate introduction to some of those who live in places like Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

“The Tenth Parallel” is a beautifully written book, full of arresting stories woven around a provocative issue — whether fundamentalism leads to violence — which Griswold investigates through individual lives rather than caricatures or abstractions. In this tropical region where monsoons and jungles give way to desert, she looks at how history, resources, climate and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions. Because of both population growth and the explosion of Christianity in Africa in the last half-century, nearly a fourth of the world’s Christians now live south of the 10th parallel, alongside Muslims who are migrating from the north to escape creeping desertification. All along this fault line, struggles over valuable resources like oil, lumber and minerals add to the volatile mix.

Africa is a logical place for Griswold to begin her story, since Muhammad sent followers and family to find refuge in Christian-ruled Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) in 615. Traders have plied the route from Mecca to Timbuktu in western Africa ever since. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and its 140 million people are evenly divided between the Muslim north and the Christian south. It is also America’s fifth-largest supplier of oil. Chronic conflict springs from both these sources. Griswold visited a local Muslim king, the emir of Wase, in his hilltop castle in 2006 to hear him bemoan the worsening outbreaks of religious violence — which had taken tens of thousands of lives — that neither his clout as a traditional leader nor his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh could halt.

Griswold’s journey is made all the more interesting because of her personal motivations. The daughter of a leading liberal Episcopal bishop, she recalls being spooked by the consecration ceremony in which he lay facedown on the floor of the cathedral in Chicago with his legs and arms stretched out in the shape of a cross. As a young girl she saw the Bible “as a book of spells, one whose extravagant metaphors, whose terrible and powerful parables were ways to call God down to earth.” And as a teenager she feared that God would ask her to be a nun. “I spent those years wondering how it was that smart people could believe in God,” she writes.

In 2003 Griswold traveled to Sudan with Billy Graham’s son Franklin, who attempted to convert her by inviting her to pray with him. She could not find a logical reason to decline, since, as a good ecumenical Episcopalian, she had prayed with Sunnis and Sufi Muslims. She returned to Sudan five years later, after its leader was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. The war-torn country’s Christian south is preparing for a 2011 vote on whether to split from the Muslim north, which would break Africa’s largest country in half. Griswold also reports from Somalia at great personal risk, vividly describing in 30 pages the religious violence and ill-informed policies that America has pursued since its failed attempts to corral the murderous Aidid clan (members of which she meets with). More recently, Washington has been trying to weaken the Qaeda-linked Shabab gang and shore up a hapless Islamist government.

In Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population, the religious ferment mostly occurs between conservative and moderate Islam. Bouts of violence shocked the quiescent majority into defending a traditionally tranquil version of its faith and, happily, the moderates may now have the upper hand. Griswold trekked from Jakarta to the province of Aceh, meeting all sorts of Indonesians, from a terrorist leader to a bride-to-be worried she would be found not to be a virgin. Those unfamiliar with Asia may be surprised to learn that a much more draconian legal system defends and promotes Islam in tiny, prosperous Malaysia, whose oil wealth and skyscrapers coexist with measures that ban usury and ensure compliance with Shariah or Islamic law; make it illegal for a Muslim to leave the faith and forbid proselytizing by other religions — all to preserve the Malay culture and Muslim religion in this melting pot of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and aboriginal tribes like the Orang Asli, who practice animism.

“The Tenth Parallel” ends in the Philippines, the only Christian country in Asia. Nine of 10 Filipinos practice the religion Ferdinand Magellan brought to the archipelago in 1521. But the Moros, as Magellan termed the Muslims he found there, still populate the southern islands, which Griswold visited to see the local points of conflict. These date back to the start of the 20th century, when Christian Filipinos moved south and fought the rebellious locals. They were encouraged by the neocolonial power, the United States, whose president, William McKinley, was an evangelizing Methodist.

The Abu Sayyaf of the southern Philippines, like the extremist Jemaah Islamiyah movement in Indonesia, was first radicalized by conflicts in the Balkans and Afghanistan, where militants went to earn their battle stripes. Among the loose global federation of radical Islamists, Abu Sayyaf earned a reputation for thievery, kidnapping and other common crimes. It was during one such crime spree that the group kidnapped the missionaries Martin and Gracia Burnham. Their yearlong ordeal as hostages wasting away in the jungle ended in tragedy when Gracia was rescued but Martin was killed; it was the Philippine Army’s 17th attempt to free them. Gracia, whom Griswold interviewed, was remarkably generous toward her captors, understanding the role that poverty has played in their lives. “Jihad was a ‘career move,’ she said. The only other job besides kidnapping was fishing. And fishing required a boat.” Gracia, who had lived among the impoverished people of the developing world for most of her adult life, felt more at home in places like the Philippines than the Kansas heartland where she settled after Martin’s death.

The same might be said of the itinerant and intrepid author, who candidly admits that she has discovered no neat theory to explain why people fight over religion or why someone like the self-proclaimed Reverend Abdu, a former Muslim Fulani nomad, lives his life as an unpaid proselytizer or why a missionary couple in the Sudan persist although they have not converted a single soul. Sitting in Abdu’s sweltering hut one day Griswold experienced the paradoxically cooling effect of the hot tea he serves her and realizes that some mysteries cannot be solved

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/excerpt-the-tenth-parallel.pdf

In Iraq, Western Clocks, but Middle Eastern Time

ANTHONY SHADID

August 14, 2010

BAGHDAD — There was an exchange some months ago about the notion of time that said a little bit about Iran, something about Iraq, but probably most about the United States.

At the sidelines of a United Nations meeting, Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, chatted with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The American military had left Iraqi cities — thankfully, in the eyes of many here. By Aug. 31, it was supposed to bring its numbers down to 50,000. The dates had less to do with the prowess of the Iraqi police in Sadr City and more with priorities elsewhere: shifting resources to Afghanistan, weariness with a costly war never quite understood at home, and the unpredictability of midterm elections in, say, southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Americans planted a tree in Iraq, Mr. Zebari recalled Mr. Ahmadinejad telling him, with the stilted sympathy of sarcasm. They watered that tree, pruned it and cared for it. “Ask your American friends,” he said, shaking his head, “why they’re leaving now before the tree bears fruit.”

The story in Iraq is unfinished, whatever the Obama administration, and the generals and diplomats who do its bidding, may say. The country is neither occupied nor independent, but rather in a limbo whose descriptions are as pliable as the pretexts for the invasion that began America’s seven-year involvement here. Through those years, the experience was colored by promises that sometimes sounded like propaganda to Iraqis: democracy, good governance and better lives. But its one constant was perhaps time.

Iraq today is replete with American-ordered deadlines, timetables and benchmarks that sought to create realities where realities never existed. The administration is leaving now on its own terms. Perhaps staying would make an already traumatized Iraq worse; much of its dysfunction dates to the American occupation and its earliest days. But the very nature of America’s departure — with no government formed, an unpredictable Iraqi military, and deep popular disenchantment with a hapless political elite — underscores one of the most enduring traits of American strategy in the Middle East.

Powerful but fickle, the United States has never seemed to understand time, at least not in the way it is acknowledged by Islamic activists willing to serve decades in jail, Syrian presidents assured that American policies will eventually change, and Iraq’s neighbors, who bide their turn to fill the vacuum left by an American departure.

Its policies — support for Israel and authoritarian Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq and war in Afghanistan — may shape sentiments toward it. But time, an American measure of it, often shapes the way it acts.

“It certainly is American politics and it is American culture, the sense that we are an impatient people,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and veteran diplomat in the Arab world. “ ‘Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, at the latest, and if that’s not going to happen, we’re going to move on.’ ”

The Middle East has long suffered under a peculiarly American notion that if the world’s greatest power wants something, it will somehow come to pass, on its schedule. In Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Syria, the messy realities never quite fit. Since 2003, they rarely have in Iraq, either.

The occupation ended, at least formally, in summer 2004, before Iraq’s midterm elections. Elections proceeded whether Iraq was ready or not, sometimes helping exacerbate divisions rather than bridge them. The American withdrawal may reflect a new reality, but its timing has proceeded regardless of political progress.

“Patience is always in short supply in Washington,” said Mr. Zebari, wondering what that meant for Iran, Turkey and Iraq’s other neighbors.

“The dates have been set for U.S. disengagement. This has encouraged our neighbors to position themselves in the vacuum. This is what is happening. I have heard it from them,” he said. “They’re waiting, they’re not in a hurry, they’re not in a rush. They are our eternal neighbors.”

American officials’ perspective on the withdrawal usually dictates how they see this notion of time, in particular whether deadlines reflect the ambiguous reality here these days. The military calls the timing right, as do many diplomats, even if they acknowledge the impact of American domestic politics.

“Look, when you spend several trillion dollars in a country, some of your political issues are going to spill into that country, that’s just the reality,” said Christopher R. Hill, the outgoing ambassador, whose mandate was to reshape the American role in Iraq by a specific deadline.

But, Mr. Hill added, “The notion that this country has been mortgaged to our political interests is simply not accurate.”

His predecessor, Mr. Crocker, called it more of a burden. “It was a constant fight,” he said. “ ‘We’re tired of this, too much in blood and treasure, it isn’t working, we have to move on.’ It was a constant battle. ‘If we don’t get X number of benchmarks, by Y date, that equals Z, which is failure.’ Our whole notion that we can somehow develop a mathematical model that includes concrete achievements, factor in a time frame and voilà. Iraq doesn’t work that way and Afghanistan doesn’t work that way.”

It is perhaps a cliché, the way the past intersects with the present in the Middle East, though not necessarily untrue.

In the serpentine alleys around the shrine of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, beside the tumult of Al Hussein in Cairo’s venerable old city and along the majesty of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, what has been here is often more palpable than what is here now. For Arabs, the Crusades resonate in the creation of Israel. Wars in Iraq are cast in millennium-old narratives of suffering and martyrdom.

Perspective becomes politics. So does patience.

In a tumultuous time in 2005, Syria was beset by a crisis some deemed existential. There were rumors that an international tribunal investigating the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister would indict some of its leaders. Sprawling protests had helped force it to leave Lebanon, where many reviled its 29-year presence. The United States had withdrawn its ambassador in a bid to isolate it.

The most knowing officials, though, seemed confident that their horizons were broader, longer and more historical than the Americans.

President Bashar al-Assad had learned from his father, Hafez, the air force commander who ruled Syria as strongman for three decades and knew perhaps better than anyone that time was a tool. “There was the master manipulator of time, and someone who understood everybody’s clock — Middle Eastern clocks, Western clocks, the American clock,” Mr. Crocker said.

“That legacy has passed on to his son, against all odds,” he added. “They’ve done pretty darn well. I think history is going to catch up with them ultimately, but ultimately can be a very long time.”

In 2010, a new American ambassador has been nominated, and Syria, in some fashion, has returned to Lebanon. In the Lebanese capital, where protests by tens of thousands once crudely insulted the Syrian president, another banner hung during his first visit to Beirut since the assassination.

“Welcome among your family,” it read.

Amid the timelines and deadlines, half-starts and false starts of American diplomacy in the Middle East, between the grand gestures and follies, there is a counternarrative. It belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, the forefather of Islamic politics in the Arab world that was born in Egypt in 1928. Maamoun al-Hodeibi, a longtime leader who died in 2004, preached a quietism to his supporters in Egypt that some saw as defeatist, but he saw as enduring.

Another round of arrests had depleted the movement’s ranks in the late 1990s. American officials refused to talk to the Brotherhood, deeming engagement recognition, and the Egyptian government was no closer to lifting a ban on the group. Its leadership was under surveillance so suffocating that the license plates of any visitor were recorded.

“In the prisons, there will be a period of training and study,” said Mr. Hodeibi, avuncular, even light-hearted. “In the long run, it will be useful.”

A wry smile followed, as did a proverb.

“God is with the patient,” he said

Crime (Sex) and Punishment : Stoning

ROBERT F. WORTH

August 21, 2010

It may be the oldest form of execution in the world, and it is certainly among the most barbaric. In the West, death by stoning is so remote from experience that it is best known through Monty Python skits and lurid fiction like Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”

Yet two recent real world cases have struck a nerve: a young couple were stoned to death last week in northern Afghanistan for trying to elope, in a grim sign of the Taliban’s resurgence. And last month, an international campaign rose up in defense of an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who had been sentenced to death by stoning on adultery charges.

Much of the outrage those cases generated — apart from the sheer anachronism of stoning in the 21st century — seems to stem from the gulf between sexual attitudes in the West and parts of the Islamic world, where some radical movements have turned to draconian punishments, and a vision of restoring a long-lost past, in their search for religious authenticity.

The stoning of adulterers was once aimed at preventing illegitimate births that might muddy the male tribal bloodlines of medieval Arabia. But it is now taking place in a world where more and more women demand reproductive freedoms, equal pay and equal status with men — in parts of the Islamic world as well as throughout the West.

Those clashing perspectives became apparent last month when Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, offered to grant asylum to Ms. Ashtiani, the Iranian woman convicted of adultery. His comments made clear that he viewed her as a victim — Brazil is not exactly known for its severe attitudes toward out-of-wedlock sex — and an online petition for her release drew hundreds of thousands of signatures. The case became an embarrassment to the Iranian government, which values its warm diplomatic ties with Brazil. The Iranian authorities quickly redefined her crime as murder, in an apparent effort to legitimize their case against her.

The Taliban, by contrast, are not vulnerable to shaming. They defined themselves in the 1990s largely through the imposition of an incredibly harsh and widely disputed version of Islamic law, under which stonings for adultery became common. Last week’s stoning, by hundreds of villagers in Kunduz Province, was a dire indicator of where Afghanistan may be headed.

“There is no way to say how many stonings took place, but it was widespread” when the Taliban ruled, said Nader Nadery, a senior commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. “Often the man escaped, and the woman only was punished, especially if he had connections or was a member of the Taliban.” Other sexual crimes were accorded similarly grotesque penalties: homosexuals, for instance, had a brick wall collapsed onto them.

Stoning is not practiced only among Muslims, nor did it begin with Islam. Human rights groups say a young girl was stoned to death in 2007 in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Yazidi community, which practices an ancient Kurdish religion. The Old Testament includes an episode in which Moses arranges for a man who violated the Sabbath to be stoned, and stoning probably took place among Jewish communities in the ancient Near East. Rabbinic law, which was composed starting in the first century A.D., specifies stoning as the penalty for a variety of crimes, with elaborate instructions for how it should be carried out. But it is not clear to what extent it was used, if ever, said Barry Wimpfheimer, an assistant professor of religion at Northwestern University and an expert on Jewish law.

Some Muslims complain that stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands — is too often sensationalized in the West to smear the reputation of Islam generally. Most of these severe punishments are carried out by the Taliban and other radicals who, many Islamic scholars say, have little real knowledge of Islamic law. Stoning is a legal punishment in only a handful of Muslim countries — in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria, but it is very rarely put to use.

Stoning is not prescribed by the Koran. The punishment is rooted in Islamic legal traditions, known as hadiths, that designate it as the penalty for adultery. While the penalty may seem savage to Western eyes, scholars say it is consistent with the values of Arabian society at the time of Muhammad, Islam’s founding prophet.

Adultery “was considered to offend some of the fundamental purposes of Islamic law: to protect lineage, family, honor and property,” said Kristen Stilt, an associate professor at Northwestern University who has written about Islamic law. “It was a tribal society, and knowing who children belonged to was very important.”

That may help explain the link between sexual crimes and stoning, as opposed to another form of execution. A crime that seemed to violate the community’s identity called for a communal response. Certainly the special horror of stoning is rooted in the prospect of being pelted to death by one’s own friends, neighbors and relatives.

But Islamic law requires very strict conditions for a stoning sentence: four male eyewitnesses must attest to having seen the sexual act and their accounts must match in all details, or else they can be subject to criminal penalties, said Aron Zysow, a specialist on Islamic law at Princeton University. Some scholars even argue that the stoning penalty is meant more as a symbolic warning against misbehavior than as a punishment to be taken literally.

In any case, societies evolve. The move to implement severe penalties like stoning — known collectively as “hud” after the Arabic word for limits — is ultimately a matter of policy, not religious orthodoxy. Even under the Ottoman empire, when secular and religious authority were combined, stoning and other penalties were viewed at times as crude remnants of the past.

In Iran, the empowerment of political Islam after the 1979 revolution brought a new criminal code that included stoning. It prescribes a detailed ritual: men are to be buried in a standing position up to their waists, women to above the breasts. The stones used must not be large enough to kill a person with one or two throws, nor so small as to be considered pebbles. If the adultery was proved by confession, the judge must cast the first stone; if it is proved by witnesses, then one of the witnesses goes first.

Anyone who survives a stoning is set free without further punishment. But that is unlikely, given that victims are usually bound in cloth and have their hands tied before they are buried.

Iranian leaders are clearly uneasy about stoning, which has helped to darken their country’s reputation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently said that “very few” people were sentenced to stoning, and that the judiciary did not release any information about stoning cases. Iranian lawyers who have been involved in such cases say that as many as 100 stonings have been carried out since the revolution, but that the practice was becoming less common.

Between 2006 and 2008 at least six stonings took place, all of them in secret, said Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. Currently at least 10 people are in Iranian jails under stoning sentences, seven women and three men, he added.

There is a vigorous domestic campaign against stoning in Iran, largely led by women. The former head of Iran’s judiciary made several recommendations to judges not to impose or implement stoning sentences, but all have been ignored. A parliamentary committee recommended last year that stoning be deleted from the penal code, but the measure has not been taken to a vote.

In Afghanistan, by contrast, stoning seems to be on the rise, despite its unpopularity.

“You do see an increase in these so-called applications of justice by the Taliban in morality cases,” Mr. Nadery said. “Over the last seven months, 200 people have been killed for showing disapproval or criticizing actions by the Taliban

A special report on the Arab world : Which way will they go

A great struggle for ideas is under way in the Middle East

Jul 23rd 2009

“THE Arab world is more or less a vicious circle. None of its problems will be solved soon. All these troubles have the capacity to reinvent themselves.” So says Ali al-Din Hillal Dessouki, a former minister and senior figure in Egypt’s ruling party. This special report opened by arguing that the causes of conflict in the Arab world—the competition for energy, the conflict with Israel, the weakness of Arab statehood and the stagnation of politics—are taking on the characteristics of a chronic condition. But they are not just chronic. They are also connected to each other, and self-reinforcing.

One cause of Arab woes is the interference of outsiders. The end of colonialism in the mid-20th century did not leave the Arabs free from external meddling. During the cold war, anxiety about the vulnerability of oilfields sundered the region into American and Soviet camps, and the cold war’s end brought the briefest of respites. At present at least four non-Arab powers—America, Israel, Iran and to a much lesser degree Turkey—play an active part both in shaping relations between the Arab states and influencing their internal politics.

Even after its chastening experience in Iraq, the strongest of these is America. The superpower that once saw its strategic role in the region as an “offshore balancer” has since the Gulf war of 1991 been very much onshore, with bases in the Persian Gulf and, for the time being still, a large army and air force in Iraq. America continues to have a vital interest in the region’s oil and remains the chief armourer and presumed protector of Saudi Arabia and its GCC neighbours. Because America is also Israel’s great defender, American policies have a sharp impact on all the Arab states affected by the Palestine conflict, on the fate of the Palestinians themselves and on the internal standing of regimes that are seen as American allies or dependants.

However, America’s brief moment of unchallenged dominance, ushered in by the collapse of the Soviet Union and sealed by the ease with which the first President Bush summoned a grand regional coalition (Syria included) against Iraq in 1991, did not last for long. The younger President Bush’s invasion sent American prestige into a dizzying fall. It also created an opening for Iran, another non-Arab power with vital interests in the region, to promote its own ambitions.

Given the opacity of Iran’s politics, the extent of those ambitions is hard to fathom. Some Iran-watchers fear that the country aspires to fulfil the vision of Ayatollah Khomeini, its revolution’s founder, and export a brand of theocratic government to its Arab neighbours. But an equally plausible counter-argument is that Iran is motivated by insecurity rather than ambition, seeks only to secure its rightful place in the region and is therefore susceptible to the overtures of a President Obama who has abandoned the reflexive antagonism of the Bush years. Or it is possible, in light of the recent upheaval, that both points of view are represented within the regime and that neither has yet prevailed.

For as long as this riddle remains unanswered, the eastern part at least of the Arab world seems condemned to remain an arena of rivalry between America and Iran. And like the cold war, this struggle has an ideological dimension. Arabs may be excluded from participation in real politics at home, but Mr Lynch’s “new Arab public”, forged by the al-Jazeera phenomenon, cannot but be vicarious participants in this argument between great powers.

Which way the majority will eventually turn is impossible to say. For the present, al-Qaeda’s vision of endless war against the West and a return to the simple verities of Islam’s first century appears to have lost the glamour it acquired after the felling of the twin towers. America’s reputation suffered a terrible beating in the sands of Iraq, but so in the end did Osama bin Laden’s as the Arab public, Sunni as well as Shia, recoiled from al-Qaeda’s atrocities, which killed more Muslims than infidels.

The waning of al-Qaeda’s star does not mean that Islam itself is losing its potency in Arab politics. For millions of Arabs it goes without saying that the faith should have the main or even final say in the ordering of society. But in the Sunni world political Islam comes in a bewildering variety of forms. Shia thinking on the political role of Islam is divided, too. In Iraq, the only large Arab country where Shias outnumber Sunnis, the Shia religious establishment has not embraced the Iranian idea, invented by Ayatollah Khomeini, of setting a supreme Islamic jurist above the elected leadership of the state.

The opium of the Arabs

With a world of alternatives to choose from—authoritarianism, democracy, secularism, different brands of Islamism—it is a pity that Arab perceptions are overshadowed by one issue that ought in principle to have nothing to do with the way they are governed. This is Israel. Egypt and Jordan have made peace with Israel but the conflict shows no sign of abating. Thanks in part to al-Jazeera, it looms larger than ever in Arab minds (see chart 6), and this distorts the internal Arab debate about politics and government.

One country that has understood this well is Iran. Far from the front line, with none of its own interests directly at stake, Iran has turned the Palestinian conflict into a tool against America’s Arab allies. By ramping up its words and deeds against the “Zionist regime” and taunting the Arab governments for their relative pusillanimity, Iran reaches over the heads of the Arab leaders directly to the passions of the street. This is desperately uncomfortable for the pro-American regimes. Lacking the legitimacy democracy might confer, they rightly dread being branded as appeasers who have sold out the Palestinians at the behest of a resented superpower.

The job of the Arab moderates was made all the harder by Israel’s recent wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Shocking television footage transformed both of these local fights into moments of pan-Arab and even pan-Muslim rage. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which on both occasions made it too clear for too long that they would not mind seeing Iran’s allies in Hizbullah and Hamas take a beating at Israel’s hands, had to pay a heavy price in public opinion.

Amal Saad Ghorayeb, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut, takes an extreme view of the consequences of the two wars. In their wake, she says, many Arabs have come permanently to reject the very idea of peaceful coexistence with Israel. More: this conflict now eclipses familiar internal quarrels between secular and religious, Sunni and Shia or left and right. Arabs, she says, are judging their leaders less on their democratic credentials or domestic behaviour and more by their will and capacity to “resist” Israel and America. That is why, in Lebanon and beyond, Hizbullah is admired even by its enemies for having fought Israel to a standstill in 2006. Ms Ghorayeb sees Hizbullah as a state within a non-state—“a microcosm of the successful Arab state we haven’t seen anywhere else in the Arab world: efficient, uncorrupted and self-sufficient”.

For more than a year this notion—that the Arabs are divided by an internal cold war between a “resistance” front sponsored by Iran and a “moderate” front sponsored by America—has been the prevailing conventional wisdom. But how long, especially after Iran’s recent internal upheavals, will it continue to be true?

Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian columnist who writes from New York, calls Israel “the opium of the Arabs”: an intoxicating way for them to forget their own failings, or at least blame them on someone else. Arab leaders have long practice of using Israel as a pretext for maintaining states of emergency at home and putting off reform. At a meeting in Amman in 2005, when an American official suggested that it was time for an Arab democratic spring, the Pavlovian response of Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, was this: “There will be no spring or autumn or winter or summer without solving the Palestine problem. We want our friends in the United States to know that this is the consensus in the region.”

How disconcerting, then, must be the advent of an American president who shows signs of heeding Arab complaints. By expressing impatience with Israel and empathy for the “intolerable” plight of the Palestinians in his speech in Cairo last month, and forcefully reiterating his promise to withdraw America’s armies from Iraq, Mr Obama plainly hopes to open cracks in the resistance front. It may be no coincidence that within a week of his big Cairo speech Lebanese voters re-elected a pro-American government and withheld victory from a coalition led by Hizbullah.

Come the revolution?

The failure of Mr Bush’s freedom agenda suggests that no amount of American soft power is going to persuade the regimes to embrace democracy. The presidents, kings and emirs know that this could cost them their jobs. And as this special report has argued, it is far from clear what sort of future Arabs would opt for if they had a free choice. After all, the ultra-conservative Saudi royals may well be more liberal than the ultra-conservative Saudi people. Perhaps the best to hope for is that a rebalanced American diplomacy will draw some poison from Palestine and Iraq and prevent the case for reform being drowned out by the calls for “resistance”.

And then? In a much-noticed essay in 2004, Sadik Al-Azm, a professor of philosophy at the University of Damascus, said the modern Arabs had become “the Hamlet of our times, doomed to unrelieved tragedy, forever hesitating, procrastinating and wavering between the old and the new”. Mr Dessouki, the former minister, says that the advocates of democracy in the Arab world “are not willing to pay the price of change”.

That seems too bleak. The Arab world faces chronic problems, but its people are no longer docile or passive. They are starting to speak out, to strike, even to take to the streets in pursuit of their demands. But a revolution? “You need an occasion for a revolution,” notes Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Centre in Beirut. “The volcano is there, but it is held in place by the heavy mountain of the Arab state, which oppresses its people very well and has learned how to play the game of elections.” Will change come? Some day

Sources

Jul 23rd 2009

Books:

“The Middle East: A Beginner’s Guide”, by Philip Robins. Oneworld

“A Path Out of the Desert”, by Kenneth Pollack. Random House

“Voices of the New Arab Public”, by Marc Lynch. Columbia

“The Arab Economies in a Changing World”, by Marcus Noland and Howard Pack, Peterson Institute for International Economics

“Arabs”, by Mark Allen. Continuum

“Getting to Pluralism: Political Actors in the Arab World” edited by Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy. Carnegie Middle East Centre, publication date: September 2009

“Last Chance”, by David Gardner, I.B. Tauris

“Resistance, the Essence of the Islamist Revolution”, by Alastair Crooke. Pluto Press

Papers from the Carnegie Middle East Centre:

“The Challenge of Economic Reform in the Arab World”, by Sufyan Alissa

“Fighting on Two Fronts: secular parties in the Arab World”, by Marina Ottaway and Amr Hamzawy

“When Money Talks: Arab Sovereign Wealth Funds in the Global Public Policy Discourse”, by Sven Behrendt

“The Oil Boom in the GCC Countries 2002-2008: Old Challenges, Changing Dynamics”, by Ibrahim Saif

Papers from the Middle East Youth Initiative:

“Why Shabab? Youth, Demographics, and Economic Growth”, Middle East Youth Initiative

“Inclusion: Meeting the 100 Million Youth Challenge”, by Navtej Dhillon and Tarek Yousef

A special report on the Arab world : The fever under the surface

A silent social revolution

Jul 23rd 2009

PRESIDENT ASSAD’S decision to nip the reform movement in the bud in 2005 should not have surprised Syria’s would-be democrats, for this was a moment of extreme danger to the regime. Influential voices in Washington, DC, were urging Mr Bush to finish what he had started in Iraq by toppling Syria’s leadership too. And in neighbouring Lebanon, which Syria had long treated as a vassal, the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a popular former prime minister, had triggered massive protests. Many Lebanese blamed Syria for Mr Hariri’s murder. Their spontaneous protests—one of the biggest manifestations of “people’s power” the Arab world had witnessed—came to be known as the “cedar revolution”. Within months (and with the prodding of France and America) the cedar revolution forced Mr Assad to withdraw his army from Lebanon, after a stay of 30 years.

The sort of people’s power on display in Lebanon in 2005 has not yet expressed itself on a similar scale anywhere else in the Arab world. All the same the habit of protest is gaining ground. Three years ago, in a stand-off between the government and parliament over an electoral law, student demonstrators in Kuwait camped out in front of the parliament. In the Sinai peninsula, Bedouin tribesmen demanding property rights from the Egyptian government have staged embarrassing sit-ins on the border with Israel. And on April 6th 2008 a strike by textile workers in a city north of Cairo was joined by young activists and billowed into a cloud of protests that spread across Egypt.

Despairing of the possibility of change from above, says Mr Fergany, Egyptians from every social class except the plutocratic clique at the heart of the regime are taking their political and economic demands to their streets and workplaces. “Hardly a day passes without scores if not hundreds of protests in different areas of the country,” he claims.

A spirit of Arab protest is also alive in the blogosphere. Like young Iranians, young Arabs are tuning into social-networking sites such as Facebook, posting videos on YouTube and writing blogs, some of them with overtly political themes. When Saudi Arabia sent a men-only team to the Beijing Olympics last year Saudi women staged a protest and posted images of it on the internet. To mark women’s day in 2008, a courageous Saudi activist, Wajeha al-Huwaider, used YouTube to post a video of herself breaking the law by driving a car. Wael Abbas, an Egyptian blogger, has used his site to publish video footage showing the police beating up protesters, torturing detainees and rigging vote counts. Egypt’s April 6th movement started life as a Facebook page. Mr Abaza of Egypt’s Wafd party says that the Islamists already had their network of mosques but that the web is now giving young liberals a network too.

Still, these are slender straws from which to construct a claim that the Arab world is in a “pre-revolutionary” condition. “There is something taking place, it’s new, it’s interesting—but from there to see revolution? No.” So says one Cairo-based social scientist, requesting anonymity.

The lot of young people in the Arab world may be difficult, but their woes should not be exaggerated. In global surveys young Arabs turn out to be relatively optimistic about the future. The frustrations they experience as they turn into adults—notably the years of “waithood” that are typical before they find jobs and, therefore, before they can marry and enjoy sex (premarital relations are taboo in much of the Arab world)—are hardly the stuff of which political revolutions are generally made. Though some young people may look to politics to redress their grievances, the response of many is merely to retreat into the private sphere.

Moreover, such protests as have taken place have been easy to snuff out. When the Egyptian movement inspired by the April 6th 2008 protests tried to organise a follow-up “day of anger” on the same date this year, the effort fizzled. Pre-emptive arrests and a massive police presence kept would-be demonstrators at home.

As for the blogosphere, internet penetration in the Arab world is low by global standards (and compared with Iran), and bloggers are all too easy to identify and intimidate. In April an Egyptian blogger, Ahmed Mohsen, was detained on the Orwellian charge of “exploiting the democratic climate to overthrow the government”.

The last popular revolution in the Middle East took place in 1979 in Iran, after liberal, left and Islamist forces combined to overthrow the shah, a man who had tried recklessly to force his own version of secular modernity on a complex, traditional and devout society. Last month’s Iranian election caused a new eruption of popular protest in Tehran. Nowhere in the Arab world, where the system of state control tends to be more subtle and the regimes’ opponents are divided, looks ripe for an upheaval of this sort.


Green shoots of change

However, political revolution is one thing, social revolution another. If the prospect of the first looks far-fetched, the second is already in train in every Arab society. Fertility is in decline. More people, especially women, are becoming educated. A young labour force has new aspirations. Arabs know far more than they ever used to about the world and about each other, thanks to a transformation in the region’s media spearheaded by satellite television. Private investors and entrepreneurs are playing a growing role in economies that used to be dominated by the state. Taken together, all this has produced what Ahmed Galal, a distinguished economist and managing director of the Cairo-based Economic Research Forum, calls “a fever under the surface”.

Though none may be a game-changer on its own, all these influences have political consequences of some kind. For example, Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al Ahram Centre in Cairo, believes that the growing economic role of the private sector is changing the way Egypt is governed. For the first time in decades, he says, the private sector employs more people and invests more in the economy than the government does. This is creating greater transparency: the government budget is nowadays submitted for debate to the Shura Council (parliament’s upper house), not just handed down from on high. Business associations and chambers of commerce are increasingly involved in public policy in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait. And an unprecedented number of businessmen now sit in Arab parliaments. In Egypt’s (with 454 elected seats, including ten presidential appointees) the number grew from 37 in the five-year term starting in 1995 to 68 in the term starting in 2005.

Since the parliaments the businessmen are joining are pretty toothless affairs, it would be wrong to make extravagant claims for changes like this. Businesspeople do not enter politics in order to antagonise the governments on whose patronage, permissions, licences and other favours they depend. “No politics—that is my golden rule,” was the telling opening remark of one businessman interviewed for this special report. Even the few who do speak out on politics tend to emphasise the need for “modernisation”: of procedures, regulations, education and training. That is hardly the same thing as political reform. Nonetheless, the expanding role of business means that the circle of consultation and decision-making has grown beyond the coterie that used to call the shots.

A far greater change over the past two decades is that Arabs today enjoy unprecedented access to information and, especially, debate. Even as late as the early 1990s, watching television in the Arab world was a dispiriting business. What passed for coverage of news and current affairs was solemn footage of presidents and emirs receiving visitors and cutting ribbons at official events.

All this changed utterly after 1996 when the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, established the al-Jazeera television station in his capital, Doha. In return for choosing not to dwell overmuch on the blemishes of Qatar itself, the new station was allowed to broadcast proper, hard-hitting news from everywhere else in the Arab world. With a staff of zealous journalists, many of them Palestinians, it went on to do so with gusto and quickly spawned many imitators and competitors.

Cognitive anarchy

After 1996, says Wadah Khanfar, al-Jazeera’s (Palestinian) director-general, “everything exploded”; the Arab world entered a period of “cognitive anarchy”. The consequence of it all, in the view of Marc Lynch, an academic at George Washington University in Washington, DC, has been the birth of “a new Arab public”. After the al-Jazeera phenomenon, he thinks, Arabs will no longer put up with the old tradition of enforced public consensus. They are making their leaders explain and justify themselves as never before. And although it is no substitute for a proper electoral democracy, this is building the underpinnings of a new kind of pluralist politics “rooted in a vocal, critical public sphere”.

Its many critics would be surprised to hear that al-Jazeera was a force for progress. The station’s screening of the hate videos Osama bin Laden smuggles out of hiding is controversial. So—in the West—is the vehemence of its support for the Palestinian cause. During Israel’s Gaza war this year al-Jazeera broadcast the sort of unedited footage that most stations deem too gruesome to air. Even in times of relative calm its Arabic-language coverage (the English channel is milder) of the conflict is relentless and partisan. Unlike al-Arabiya, its Saudi-sponsored rival, it makes little effort to cover Palestine in a manner a Western audience would consider balanced. To some degree Mr Khanfar acknowledges this. His journalists are professional, he insists, but there is a limit to how far the station can offend “the strongest collective feelings” of the Arab world.

Then again, Palestine is the uniting and almost sacred cause of the Arab world. If you judge al-Jazeera by the rest of its coverage, a different picture emerges. In 2006 Mr Lynch published a study of the station’s reporting of Iraq since the late 1990s (“Voices of the New Arab Public”, Columbia). Like Palestine, Iraq is a story that has gripped and preoccupied Arabs everywhere. But on this one they have not formed a single view. His conclusion is that al-Jazeera reflected all sides of the bitter arguments that divided Arabs over issues such as the behaviour of Saddam, the Western sanctions, the American invasion and the legitimacy—or not—of the Iraqi government that followed. Both al-Jazeera and its rivals provided detailed and enthusiastic coverage of the Iraqi elections of 2005, despite the conviction of many Arabs outside the country that a vote held under American occupation had to be bogus.

Moreover, this open-minded approach to reporting and analysis did not apply only to Iraq and its vicissitudes. From 2003 onwards al-Jazeera’s reporters and talk-show hosts put themselves at the heart of the American-initiated debate about political reform in the Arab world.

The station looked closely at the G8’s American-inspired Greater Middle East Initiative, giving airtime to American as well as Arab talking heads. In one online al-Jazeera poll in 2003, 84% of viewers said that Arab governments were neither sincere about reform nor capable of bringing it about. When President Bush said he had been inspired by reading a book on democracy by Natan Sharansky, an Israeli politician (and former Soviet dissident), al-Jazeera interviewed the author and asked him how his book might apply to the Arab world. It did this even though many Arabs, reformers included, remain deeply shocked by al-Jazeera’s now well-established practice of letting Israelis appear on its shows.

Where broadcasting has led, the printed press has followed. The meek official newspapers that used to have the field to themselves are facing new and more outspoken private competitors. Even the most authoritarian regimes accept that it is no longer possible to suppress all information and stifle every criticism. Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group based in New York, returned from a recent visit to Libya reporting the stirrings of a new glasnost. Although the regime remains firmly in control, new newspapers were being allowed to nibble away at sensitive subjects, with one carrying pages of editorials exposing bureaucratic misconduct and corruption.

Naturally, such freedoms have their carefully circumscribed limits. Al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are careful not to antagonise their respective Qatari and Saudi sponsors. They are vulnerable to high Arab politics: al-Jazeera has recently been muting its criticism of Saudi Arabia, probably at the behest of the Qatari royal family. Moreover, there is always a danger that freedoms extended at the whim of a ruler can be withdrawn.

The Syrian Media Centre, a private monitoring organisation, told Reuters in May that the Syrian authorities blocked 225 internet sites in 2008, up from 159 in 2007. They included several Arab newspapers and portals, Amazon, Facebook and YouTube. In April Human Rights Watch noted that a new media law pending in the United Arab Emirates would tighten restrictions on media freedom. And the editor of a Qatari newspaper, speaking privately, told The Economist that laws were anyway not the main impediment to press freedom in his country. What checked his pen was the certainty of social exclusion if he offended the establishment.

Another change with implications for politics is that the new Arab public now tuning into stations like al-Jazeera is better educated than ever before. Over the past five years, reckons Vincent Romani in a paper for the Crown Centre for Middle East Studies at America’s Brandeis University, the GCC countries have spent at least $50 billion on higher education in an effort to buy these traditional societies a place in the global knowledge economy. Qatar has attracted half a dozen American and two Australian universities to its Education City in Doha; Dubai’s International Academic City houses branches of 32 foreign universities; and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is due to open later this year with a personal royal endowment of $10 billion.

These are huge investments, even if their concentration in one rich corner of the Arab world will limit their impact. Citadel Capital’s Ahmed Heikal says that such efforts need to be replicated throughout the region. “In an area of our size we cannot have a single centre for excellence in education,” he says. So far, however, higher education in the Arab world at large has produced few critical minds. Most Arab universities are victims of “massification”: Egypt shoves 30% of the relevant age group into university, of whom fewer than half graduate. Outside the private sector standards are abysmal.

Liberals and conservatives

If the “fever under the surface” does eventually transform Arab politics and society, what direction will the change take? It is a mistake to assume that trends such as greater media freedom push invariably in a liberal direction. On the contrary, Arab conservatives have a record of exploiting new communications technology at least as well as liberals, and often better.

Well before the advent of the internet, radical imams made brilliant use of videocassettes to spread their teachings, drowning out the sermons of milder clerics. The Muslim Brothers, especially the younger ones, are active bloggers. And the messages being pumped into the airwaves by satellite television stations are by no means all congenial to the West. The new media have created a vast audience for Shia firebrands like Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hizbullah, and Sunni radicals like Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, a Qatar-based preacher who may not be a jihadist but is no liberal either. In some Arab countries, indeed, democracy and liberalism push in opposite directions. There are places where the lot of women has deteriorated precisely because the regimes have felt the need to pay more heed to the social conservatism of the Islamist opposition.

Another mistake is to exaggerate the degree to which Arabs want to participate in politics at all. For the most part this remains a minority sport. Some of the most significant trends among Arabs are therefore not captured by political analysis. And those who stay silently out of politics are not all secular liberals waiting for times to change. A growing pattern is for Arabs with strong and even extreme religious ideals to eschew long-established political movements, such as the Brotherhood, and devote themselves to personal lives of extreme piety, a phenomenon that has come to be labelled “apolitical” or sometimes “scientific” Salafism.

The Salafist movement champions a return to the pure Islamic traditions practised by Muhammad and his contemporaries at the time of Islam’s birth (the al-Salaf al-Salih are “the pious forefathers”). Like al-Qaeda, the apolitical Salafists adhere to a Utopian vision of Islam mastering the world. But they do not pursue jihad against the West and refrain from attacking the prerogatives or legitimacy of the Arab regimes. They do not form political organisations, yet they are organised: when last year hundreds of people were buried under a rock slide in Cairo, commentators observed that Salafist groups were quicker than the Brotherhood to help the smitten.

Politics by stealth

Because they do not usually criticise the regimes, the apolitical Salafists are tolerated by the security services and so enjoy an advantage in spreading their message. They also have ample funds. Although the Saudi government denies giving active support to such groups, much of their inspiration, as well as generous amounts of private—and princely—money, seems to come from Saudi Arabia. Egyptians remark that a lot of their countrymen who spend a few years working in Saudi Arabia return home as devout Salafists.

Personal religious choices such as these are not directly political, but the sum of these choices influences the trajectory of the Arab world. Extreme social conservatives, obsessed with ritual, purity and often sex, the Salafists are unfriendly to liberal causes such as female emancipation. Moreover, there is reason to wonder how long their present quietism will last. Issandr el Amrani, an independent analyst, calls them “incipiently takfiri”. Like al-Qaeda, in other words, they tend to regard those Muslims whose practice of the faith falls short of their own exacting standards as takfir—unbelievers or even apostates. Experience suggests that this sort of intolerance can all too easily give rise to political violence.

In the eyes of the regimes, Islam itself is a potential danger, because it is a source of authority and wellspring of action which the media revolution has put beyond the control of governments. Religious fervour is growing among Arabs at a time when venerable religious institutions with the imprimatur of governments, such as Al-Azhar in Cairo, are no longer able to lay down doctrinal law and command automatic obedience. Access to the airwaves and the internet has democratised Islam, forcing rival interpreters of the faith to compete on their own merits for an audience that crosses sects and borders. And this cacophony inside Islam is itself part of a wider, and surprising, paradox of today’s Arab world, which is that, behind the stagnation of its formal politics, it is engaged in a fierce and potentially history-altering battle of ideas

A special report on the Arab world : How to stay in charge

Not just coercion, sham democracy too

Jul 23rd 2009

P : The gentler side of Kuwaiti politics

A LOT of the wounding comparative statistics trotted out to demonstrate the backwardness of the Arabs appeared first in the Arab Human Development Report of 2002. Its stark findings influenced the design of the Bush administration’s Middle East Partnership Initiative. In the Arab world itself the report owed its resonance to the fact that it was written not by Western technocrats but by a team of Arab academics. The lead author was Nader Fergany, encountered earlier in this report berating the Americans as “the new Mongols” of the Middle East.

Now director of the Almishkat Centre for Research and Training in Cairo, Mr Fergany is no less furious with the Arab regimes, which he accuses of doing everything in their power to obstruct democracy and social justice. In most Arab countries, he says, the political order is oppressive and democracy a sham, a hollow system incapable of accommodating the vitality of the people. Egypt’s ruling party (no, he corrects himself, “the party of the ruler”) has no popular support and “the so-called legitimate opposition parties are essentially dead corpses.”

Though the local details vary, most Arab regimes maintain their power in remarkably similar ways. At the apex of the system sits either a single authoritarian ruler, be he a monarch or a president, or an ever-ruling party or royal family. The ruler is shored up by an extensive mukhabarat (intelligence service) employing a vast network of informers. One retired Egyptian diplomat, speaking unattributably, puts the size of his own country’s internal-security apparatus at about 2m people.

A second instrument of control is the government bureaucracy. With no rotation of power, Arab countries have blurred the distinction between ruler and state. Bloated civil services, says Brookings’s Mr Pollack, provide the regimes with a way to dispense patronage and pretend-jobs to mop up new graduates. The size of these administrative behemoths is staggering. In 2007, he reckons, Egypt’s civil service was about 7m strong, and as a proportion of their population the Gulf oil producers’ public-sector payroll is higher still.

Elections galore, signifying nothing

And yet, strange to say, one of the regimes’ most effective instruments of control is the elaborate system of democracy—sham democracy, that is—they have devised in order to channel and contain political dissent. Most Arab countries have parliaments and hold formal elections. In recent years national constitutions have been earnestly revised, and then revised again. The catch is that the parliaments have few powers and the elections are rigged to ensure that the ruler or his party cannot be unseated.

The few half-exceptions merely prove the rule. In May Kuwait made headlines when for the first time four women were elected to parliament, a genuinely rambunctious institution. But Kuwait’s politics limp from crisis to crisis because the ever-ruling al-Sabah family refuses to let parliament hold its senior members, such as the prime minister, to account. When it threatens to, the emir dissolves parliament or the government resigns.

In Lebanon the election last month was an unrigged, hard-fought affair. But since Lebanon is a system of confessional baronies, no government wins full control of it through the ballot box. The strongest military force in Lebanon is not the national army but the militia run by Hizbullah, which is part of the opposition. So the convincing victory won by the pro-Western coalition led by Saad Hariri will not stop Hizbullah from controlling large parts of the country and having a big say in policy towards Israel.

That said, Mr Fergany does the opposition parties of the Arab world an injustice when he calls them “corpses”. The Muslim Brotherhood is a powerful force in Egypt, even if it is not allowed to contest elections openly. Arabs who take part in opposition politics have few illusions about their ability ever to win power but hope that they can influence debate on the margins. Mahmoud Abaza, the leader of Egypt’s venerable liberal party, the Wafd, says that neither his organisation nor the ruling National Democratic Party has any impact on legislation: laws are written by technicians and the job of the parliament is to provide a rubber-stamp. But he is proud of the role his party newspaper has played in provoking debate about political reform.

Besides, there are Arab countries with livelier parties than Egypt’s. The Party for Justice and Development (PJD) in Morocco is a sophisticated movement with a large following and an aspiration to emulate the AK, the moderately Islamist party that has been so successful in Turkey. Indeed, Morocco has a long tradition of multi-party politics in which both secular and religious parties (though some of the latter are banned) have been allowed to flourish. In Algeria, too, a rich array of serious-minded parties is allowed to compete for parliamentary seats.

Permission to be a contender, however, should not be confused with an opportunity to win, and still less to govern. For all Morocco’s long tradition of multi-party politics, it is the instincts of the king and the machinations of his palace that ultimately determine national policy. And in Algeria’s election earlier this year the fact that five candidates ran against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika did not stop him from winning a third term with an entirely implausible 90% of the vote.

Let’s all join together and fear Islam

If you are an autocrat but want to run a system of sham democracy, it is a boon if the opposition is divided. And so, in the Arab world, it is. Islamist parties stand on one side of the divide and secular ones on the other. In theory, your hold on power would be weaker if there were a danger of the secular and religious opposition joining forces. But so far they have not, and for a probably insurmountable reason: the secular parties fear the Islamists more than they dislike the present regimes.

By comparison with the regimes and the Islamist movements, the secular opposition parties are at a particular disadvantage. Their awful dilemma is dissected in a forthcoming book (“Getting to Pluralism”, Carnegie Middle East Centre) by Amr Hamzawy and Marina Ottaway. The regimes, the authors point out, can offer their supporters the patronage of the state. The Islamists can offer theirs charity and social services through the mosques. The secular parties have no such favours to dole out. Nor, in truth, do they have much ideological fire in their bellies. The causes that propelled them in the glory days are either redundant (independence from colonial masters) or discredited (the pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdul Nasser or the Baathism of Syria and Iraq).

Moreover, given a choice between the status quo and the uncertain future promised by the Islamists, the instinct of such parties is to stick to the devils they know, however much it costs them at the polls. The 2005 election that delivered 20% of seats in Egypt’s parliament to the Muslim Brotherhood gave a mere 5% to the four secular opposition parties.

Still, if the secular opposition parties are weak, their Islamist rivals are not necessarily as lusty as they seem. In the 1970s, says Mr Hamzawy, they built up a “mighty machinery” of social services, providing the needy with the practical help the regimes seemed unable to deliver. More recently Islamist parties have found themselves on the right side of the religious revival sweeping the Arab world. Even so, the going is becoming harder. Arabs are not becoming less pious, but the pious are beginning to question the point of participating in politics.

One reason for this is simple exhaustion. Exclusion from power begins to sap the motivation of even the most ardent of parties. In countries such as Morocco, where the Islamists are permitted to compete but never to win, voters are losing faith in the ability of the PJD to deliver even the mild reforms it proposes, such as more transparent and accountable government. In most Arab elections turnout is falling. And in Egypt and Jordan the Muslim Brotherhood has had to endure unpredictable cycles of repression and inclusion as the fears and whims of the regimes change. Jordan’s King Abdullah has sometimes let Brotherhood members sit in cabinet and at other times moved against them, occasionally by squashing the vital social and charitable activities on which much of their popularity rests.

Another problem for the Islamists is that they, too, are prey to troubling ideological doubts. The PJD has debated endlessly what the “Islamist” label should mean. In meetings with Western journalists its leaders sometimes disavow it altogether and describe themselves as mildly pious social or liberal democrats. For some time now the Brotherhood in Egypt has been split over whether to stick to the simple, familiar slogan that has served them so well, that “Islam is the solution”, or to elaborate a more detailed political programme, containing potentially divisive policies on economic management, women’s rights and the rights of Egypt’s large Coptic Christian minority. The mildly Islamist ruling AK party in Turkey is seen by the PJD as a model to emulate but accused by the Brotherhood of selling out.

Beyond these ideological perplexities the Islamists are hampered because, for all their popularity compared with both the regimes and the secular opposition parties, their popular support in the Arab world has a ceiling. On the basis of recent election results, Mr Hamzawy puts this at about 20% of the electorate, with some evidence from polls in Jordan and Morocco of a downward trend. In order to secure a majority, he argues, the Islamists need to form alliances with secular movements. But they are deterred from doing so by a mixture of arrogance and fear of diluting their simple message of adherence to the faith. With the Islamists disdaining the secular opposition and the secular parties afraid of the Islamists, the opposition in many Arab countries has checkmated itself.

From generation to generation

If opposition politics are stymied, what about change from within the regimes themselves? One hope has been that the grip of authoritarian rulers would relax as power passed down the generations, bringing to the fore a new brand of leaders with a more modern outlook. In some cases it has. Morocco’s King Muhammad is more of a moderniser than was his father, King Hassan. Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, who eventually ascended the throne in 2005 at the tender age of 80, has cautiously accelerated the careful reforms he initiated during his time as crown prince when his even older half-brother Fahd was king. Earlier this year an administrative reshuffle caused a flutter when Nora al-Fayez was appointed as a deputy minister, the highest government job ever to have been filled by a woman.

In other cases, however, the passing of the torch to a new generation has brought mainly disappointment. Jordan has not become conspicuously more liberal under King Abdullah than it was under King Hussein. When Bashar Assad, educated as an ophthalmologist in London and married to a Syrian born and raised in Britain, assumed power in 2000 after the long reign of his ruthless father Hafez, he was greeted by some in the West as an internet-savvy liberal reformer, promising a breath of fresh air. But an all-too-brief “Damascus spring” did not last long.

At the beginning of 2001 more than 1,000 Syrian activists signed a declaration calling for political reform and an end to the state of emergency that has been in effect since 1963, ostensibly because of the conflict with Israel. The new president’s reaction was to take fright and have many of the most prominent signatories arrested. In 2005 a few brave souls renewed their demands in a “Damascus Declaration”. This led to another crackdown.

In March this year President Assad did at last hint that a cautious economic liberalisation now under way in Syria might be accompanied by political changes, such as the creation of an upper house that would give a bigger voice to the opposition. But all that, he added, would come about “gradually, at our own pace”. Will change at the leaders’ pace be fast enough

A special report on the Arab world : All change, no change

Mountain above, volcano below

Jul 23rd 2009

IMAGINE an Arab Rip Abu Winkle who had fallen into a deep slumber some time in the early 1980s. If he woke up now, he would rub his eyes in disbelief at how little had changed.

Hosni Mubarak is still the president of Egypt, after a cool 28 years in the top job. In Syria the grim reaper did for Hafez Assad after a run of three decades as the country’s ruler, but his son, Bashar, has become president in his place. In Tunisia Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali remains president after 22 years. Ali Abdullah Saleh has been president of parts or all of Yemen for more than 30 years. Jordan is still run by the Hashemite family, Morocco by the Alouite family, Saudi Arabia by the al-Sauds and Kuwait by the al-Sabahs. Muammar Qaddafi has been imposing his idiosyncratic brand of “Islamic socialism” on Libyans since 1969. And like Syria, Libya may become a family business on the old man’s death: as in Egypt, there is much talk of a favoured son inheriting the fief.

And yet an awakening sleeper would be amazed not only by how little had changed in Arab politics but also by how much had changed in Arab society. One shock would be the sheer press of humanity. By next year the region’s population will have doubled over 30 years—from fewer than 180m people to some 360m. He might also be astonished by the youth of so many of these people: the majority of Arabs are under 25 years old.

Our Rip Abu Winkle would not have to consult a book of statistics to find out about the ballooning of this youthful population. It is highly visible. That is because rapid population growth has coincided with a massive influx into the cities from the countryside, transforming the sights, sounds and sociology of every corner of the Arab world. Cairo burgeoned from 9m souls in 1976 to a cacophonous 18m in 2006. Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, hardly a city at all 50 years ago, by 1990 had a population of more than 2m and today has 5m. By 2006 some 87% of Lebanese and 83% of Jordanians were living in cities.

If, to take this fable a bit further, Rip Abu Winkle were a political scientist, he could hardly fail to be disturbed by the contrast between the decades of political stagnation on the one hand and the decades of rapid social change on the other. At some point, will the demands of all these young people for jobs and prospects, together with the impact of mass education, global ideas and modern media, not mutate into demands for a voice—and then for the broader freedoms common in the rest of the world? How much longer can systems of government based on personal authoritarian rule, or on the rule of a single party, dam up this rising tide of expectations?

Predicting disaster in the Arab world has become something of a cottage industry. Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst now at the Brookings Institution, argued in a book last year that the Arab world is floundering in socio-economic problems so deep that almost every Arab country can be considered to be in a “pre-revolutionary” condition. A recent book on Egypt is subtitled “The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of Revolution”. David Gardner, a writer for the Financial Times, called his recent book on the region “Last Chance”.

The dark side

If you trawl through comparative global economic and social statistics, it is not difficult to paint a bleak picture of Arab failure, based on a broad pattern of underperformance in investment, productivity, trade, education, social development and even culture. The total manufacturing exports of the entire Arab world have recently been below those of the Philippines (with less than one-third the population) or Israel (with a population not much bigger than Riyadh’s). From 1980 to 2000 Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Syria and Jordan between them registered 367 patents in the United States. Over the same period South Korea alone registered 16,328 and Israel 7,652. The number of books translated into Arabic every year in the entire Arab world is one-fifth the number translated by Greece into Greek.

Comparisons like these need to be treated with care. For millions of Arabs, living conditions have improved rather than deteriorated over recent decades. Indeed, the starkest economic challenge Arabs face—a massive population bulge—is itself the product of big strides in immunisation, nutrition and child health. In a survey of Arab economies published in 2007 by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Marcus Noland and Howard Pack reported that on fundamental social indicators such as literacy, poverty and education the Arab countries do as well as or better than most other countries with similar incomes. And within the Arab world there are vast regional discrepancies that limit the value of generalisations. In 2002 The Economist noted in a special report on the Gulf states (see article) that the six desert monarchies since 1970 had trebled literacy levels to 75%, added 20 years to average life expectancy and created a world-class infrastructure by spending a total of $2 trillion. Such efforts should be given their due.


Some of these gains are now threatened by the global economic downturn. The bursting of the property and tourism bubble in the Gulf will have ramifications throughout the region. Most of the migrant workers in the Gulf states hail from Asia, but a lot are also sucked in from the poorer Arab countries. They—and Arabs working in Europe—are now losing their jobs and heading home, so families and home economies are deprived of precious remittances. The World Bank reckons that remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Lebanon and Jordan. Egypt will be hit too: an unknown number of Egyptians, but at least several million, live and work abroad, many of them in the Gulf.

And yet the present downturn is not the Arabs’ main economic worry. If anything, Arab countries are less vulnerable than other parts of the world. The energy producers still have the cash windfall they collected before oil prices tumbled—and now prices are rising again (see chart 4). Thanks to the advent of well-managed sovereign-wealth funds, many have looked after their financial assets far more prudently over this cycle than during previous bonanzas. As for the wider Arab world, what in good times is a disadvantage—the fact that their economies and financial institutions are weakly integrated into the global economy—is at present providing a measure of shelter from the storm.

Too young

By far the biggest difficulty facing the Arabs—and the main item in the catalogue of socio-economic woes submitted as evidence of looming upheaval—is demography. The population of the Arab world is expected to grow some 40% over the next two decades. That amounts to almost 150m additional people, the equivalent of two new Egypts. But Arab countries already have the lowest employment rate in the world and one of the highest rates of youth unemployment, with about one in five young people out of work. The median age in the three most populous Arab countries—Egypt, Algeria and Morocco—is 24, 26 and 26 respectively. Even before the downturn in energy prices and the world economy, the prospects of creating enough jobs for all these young workers as they enter the labour market looked remote.

It is not for want of trying. Arab governments are acutely aware that too much of the growth in their economies has been driven by oil, property and tourism. They know, and keep saying, that they need to address these imbalances. In June last year Qatar published an ambitious economic “vision” for 2030. At the beginning of this year Abu Dhabi followed suit with a 2030 vision document of its own. Grand strategies such as these voice all the fashionable aspirations about improving skills, freeing the labour market, shrinking the role of the government and diversifying ahead of the day when the oil and gas will eventually run out. But the governments have been saying this sort of thing for decades, and the results are decidedly mixed.


Saudi Arabia has invested heavily in downstream energy activities, creating big industrial cities. Dubai, with relatively little oil and gas, seemed until the recent crash to have become a successful business, shopping and tourism hub somewhat like Singapore or Hong Kong. Kuwait pioneered the idea of safeguarding its own economic future by becoming a long-term investor in the economies of others. Sven Behrendt of the Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut notes that the huge and increasingly sophisticated sovereign-wealth funds of the Gulf states have for the first time turned Arab countries into a big force in the world economy as strategic investors and not just as suppliers of oil. Some of the countries that lack oil but are close to European markets and influence, such as Morocco and, especially, Tunisia, have begun to create diversified economies.

And yet economic reform, difficult anywhere, is especially hard for the rentier economies and authoritarian polities of the Arab world. Sufyan Alissa of the World Bank points out that both the oil- and non-oil states depend disproportionately on collecting rents—if not from oil then in some other form, such as remittances or foreign aid or loans. Such rents, he argues, are used to provide a temporary cushion against economic pressures, preserve the privileges of the elite and buy continued loyalty to the state. At the same time reform is hampered by chronic weaknesses in the government bureaucracy, defective judicial systems, a lack of political transparency or accountability and the vested interests of those who benefit from the existing arrangements.

Having it too good

It follows that when rents increase, the incentive to tackle underlying economic problems diminishes. When oil prices are high, grumbles Ahmed Heikal of Citadel Capital, a private-equity group based in Egypt, governments become less enthusiastic about encouraging private investment. In a study for the Carnegie Middle East Centre, Ibrahim Saif, an economist, notes that the long boom in oil prices which began in 2002 undid many of the good intentions of the Gulf states.

Until then they had been contemplating raising taxes and opening more of the economy to competition in order to deal with mounting budget deficits. But the rising oil price allowed them once again to avoid grasping the nettle of reform. Oil revenues in 2006 contributed a bigger share (86%) of government revenue in the GCC countries than they did in 2002 (77%), and domestic taxes, on average, amounted to less than 5% of GDP.

It seems unlikely, then, that another spike in the oil price will enable even those Arab countries that enjoy the mixed blessing of hydrocarbons to create balanced economies capable of providing enough work for their fast-growing populations. Barring some miracle, a large proportion of Arabs now entering adulthood face hard times and long periods of joblessness ahead, in societies that have systematically blocked peaceful, institutional avenues to political change. That is why so many analysts conclude that something has to give. Will the mass of Arabs continue to bite their lips and buckle under? Or is there a danger of an eruption