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Viewing all posts tagged "middle east"
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An introduction to a paper I never wrote
Timur Kuran has written extensively on so-called Islamic economies and political Islam. Just as the “five pillars of Islam” are meant to be followed by every practicing Muslim, the “three pillars of Islamic economy” are meant to be followed by every practicing Muslim system of production, distribution and consumption. The first, behaviour norms with regard to economic decision making, are derived from the holy texts. The second, zakat, the traditional sub-governmental religious tax, is also mandated by the holy texts and is considered by some to be the basis of Islamic fiscal policy. Finally, the traditional-religious prohibition of the charging of interest, Islamic economists would argue, is the centerpiece of Islamic monetary policy.
This trio has been recognized and defended not only by theologians and other non-economists, by also by scholars from a range of social scientific disciplines. This three-pronged blueprint for Islamic economies has “always been there” — what I am concerned with is the extent to which changing economic conditions in the Middle East since the Second World War caused a revival in the literature on Islamic economic theory.
By examining the contextual base of Islamic economic theory, in other words, by focusing on the material wealth and social standing of the literature’s intended audience, I hope to come away with a better understanding of the popularity of this discourse. I hope to see why it has become so common to apply Islamic religious principles to social, political, and economic institutional models. I also hope to gauge the degree that deteriorating economic conditions in parts of the Middle East, coupled with the mass production of economic theory “couched in the language of Islam,” contributed to the attractiveness of political Islam, whether secularist, populist, or militant.
One problem of Islamic economics is determining what exactly constitutes just and correct behaviour. Are this year’s wages Islamically fair given last year’s inflation? Does Islamic economic theory account for the fluid realities of a globally interconnected marketplace? Kuran writes,
The ambiguity inherent in the Islamic norms suggests that the actions one takes may subject one to charges of opportunism by other equally pious individuals who happen to interpret the relevant norms differently.
The obscurity of the norms also suggests that they are susceptible to modification over time.
The problem of ambiguity spans all Islamic social disciplines. It seems that merely attaching the word “Islam” to any institution, whether politics, economics, history, or, indeed, religion, opens it up to innumerable interpretations, each potentially as logical as the next.
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Gaza: An Inside Look
(From B’Tselem)
Immediately after Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip ended last year, B’Tselem gave video cameras to 15 young Gazan students and asked them to document everyday life around them. Each volunteer chose his or her personal viewpoint. The results are on air in Israel’s leading online news portal, Ynet, and have been covered by the New York Times.
That images of life in the occupied territories are being aired on Israeli media at all is striking. Israeli citizens, including journalists, are prohibited by their government from entering the Palestinian terrorities.
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Syria makes it into the New York Times top 10 destinations
Damascus ranks number 7 in the top places to visit in 2010, mainly on the basis of its new boutique hotels. Thank you, Don Duncan, former correspondent for the Global Post Beirut, for your insightful review of a city in which you don’t even reside. Forget the great mosques, markets, museums, and mausoleums: you can travel halfway across the world and stay in a luxury hotel with an “inviting courtyard”!
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A town called Saddam
One of the strangest stories I’ve heard in a while. Is it true?
Residents of a town in south Jordan plan to go to court to appeal a decision by the government that banned them from renaming their town after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein… In protest to the government’s decision, residents of the town, called Al-Rumeitha, also agreed to name all new born males during January after Saddam Hussein… When the former Iraqi president was executed three years ago, residents erected a symbolic tomb in his honour and are currently building a mosque to be named after the dictator.
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Dissidents Shift Discussion to Web
Yet another example of how communications technologies are enabling individuals to connect regardless of the physical distance and political barriers which separate them.
A Syrian pro-democracy forum that was shut down by the authorities in 2005 has found a new life in cyberspace and discussion is thriving. The Atassi forum has rallied more than 250 members to its Facebook group to share views on civic issues that are not aired in the state-controlled and state-monitored media. The police state bars intellectuals and dissidents from holding that kind of discussion face to face. Now pro-democracy groups are hoping that social networks like Facebook will help give vigour to their cause and connect opponents inside and outside the country, despite official attempts to block them.
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Don’t like what’s on TV? Shut down the network!
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill aimed at shutting down media outlets accused of inciting violence against Americans. First introduced in May 2009, Resolution 2278 is mainly aimed at Arabic language satellite TV networks like Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar.
Its passage though House vote in December went largely unnoticed by the U.S. press, but it sent media watchers across the Middle East into an uproar over the bill’s implications. Arab information ministers convened in Cairo last month called the bill “an interference in the internal affairs of Arab states who regulate media affairs according to national legislation.”
Lebanese Information Minister Tareq Mitri added, “We insist on media freedom and reject any restrictions on it.”
Reporters Without Borders warned, “It could eventually be turned into a formidable weapon against freedom of information.”
Mark Lynch, author of Voices of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today — a key inspiration of my SOAS Masters dissertation! — sounds equally concerned with the bill:
In short, H.R. 2278 is a deeply irresponsible bill which sharply contradicts American support for media freedom and could not be implemented in the Middle East today as crafted without causing great damage. … Hillary Clinton just laid out a vision of an America committed to internet freedom, and that should be embraced as part of a broader commitment to free and open media.
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Why so Syria? A new start to relations with America
Rafiq Hariri was the Prime Minister of Lebanon from 1992 to 1998 and again from 2000 to 2004. As politician and business tycoon, Hariri was responsible for reconstructing Beirut after the 15-year civil war, but in so doing he created a climate of corruption that crippled the Lebanese economy, with public debt rising 16 times as growth slowed to a halt. He resigned his post as Prime Minister in October 2004.
On 14 February 2005, Hariri was blown up, along with 21 others, when a bomb struck his motorcade as it traveled through Beirut. Fact-finding missions carried out that year implicated both Lebanese and Syrian officials, and while the Syrian government repeatedly claimed it had no knowledge of the bombing, President George W. Bush, as a result of the bombing, called home the American Ambassador from Damascus. The position has been left vacant ever since.
So it was a welcome surprise last week when President Barack Obama announced the nomination of William Ford to fill the job of Ambassador to Damascus, and arranged a meeting between William Burns, a senior US diplomat, and Syrian President al-Assad. Affairs in the Middle East, much like US foreign policy in general, are not always what they seem. So why the (seemingly) sudden change of strategy? Simple Intelligence offers a simple explanation:
A Damascus wooed away from Tehran, party to peace talks with Israel, and supportive of counter-terrorism and anti-Islamist campaigns throughout the Middle East would be a boon to American foreign policy. It could also, provided enough economic results for Syrian citizens, be a welcome infusion of economic and political rewards to Syria as a whole and Assad’s government in particular.
Add to this the fact that a Syria properly allied with the United States would be a Syria much less vulnerable to an Israeli military strike, threats of which have been spewing from Netanyahu government officials in recent weeks. Granted, there are cases where Israel has gone ahead and done whatever it wants without explicit or tacit approval from the United States. But to bomb Damascus at a time when President Obama is trying to normalize relations with the Syrian government would be strategically next to impossible. Much more difficult than, say, strikes against Gaza, which do not seem to bother Washington.
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Obama’s Middle East policy: progressive or merely cross-mogination?
My first job after undergrad was as a paralegal at a law firm, where I met some attorneys who had come up with a term that embodied their daily existence: cross-moginating. This farcical verb referred to the act of shuffling documents back and forth but not really achieving anything.
Insanity, is it often said, is repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results, and today the Obama administration is being criticized for once again misunderstanding the balance of power in the Middle East.
In dividing the protagonists in the style of former President Bush — that is, into pro-American moderates who must be supported vs. anti-progress fanatics who must be wiped out — President Obama risks repeating the same mistakes of times past.
Granted, Obama has reached out to some Middle Eastern countries in ways not seen in some decades, and indeed, the United States shares many strategic goals with other culturally, politically and economically significant powers in the region, i.e. Syria, Egypt and Turkey.
But how different is Obama’s Middle East Policy? He’s withdrawing many but not all US troops from Iraq, but 50,000 troops can hardly be considered an end to the occupation. Still, it’s a good development, and the same logic could have been applied to Afghanistan as well. But meanwhile, he has escalated the war there with his troop surge plus regular drone attacks within territorial Pakistan. And on Israel-Palestine, well, Ussama Makdisa says it best:
The same dynamic that was at work during the failed Camp David Summit of 2000 is again evident: an Israeli leadership openly unwilling to make peace on the basis of genuine reciprocity, let alone justice or equality is meeting a Palestinian leadership utterly dependent on an American ability to pressure Israel into significant concessions, under the aegis of an American administration with the same kind of pro-Israel mentality and frame of reference that oversaw the last failed round.
The Obama administrate has been cross-moginating: shifting troops, shifting rhetoric, but not really achieving too much.
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Kuwait bans the use of cameras in public places, joins Syria in the club of ridiculousness
The image you see could get it’s photographer in serious legal trouble in Kuwait after authorities there have banned the use of DSLRs in public places unless you’re part of the press. Which is just ridiculous.
Speaking of things that are “sort of” banned in the Middle East, here in Syria you cannot access the following without doing some computer nerdery:
- facebook.com (or any of its subdomains, eg m.facebook.com)
- youtube.com
- skype.com (are you serious?! you can still use Skype, you just can’t visit the website or download the latest version of the software)
- wikimedia.org (you can access Wikipedia just fine, but because all its images and web style sheets are hosted on wikimedia.org, the Wikipedia pages look all lo-fi and broken)
- the entire Android app market
- amazon.com (although amazon.co.uk works just fine)
- all blogspot.com blogs
- 150+ other websites deemed by the government as too politically sensitive for Syrians to handle (including websites of political parties, Arabic newspapers, reform oriented groups, and individual journalists and bloggers — both internal and external to Syria)
To access these websites, you must go into your web browser’s connection settings and define an off-shore proxy server (the ones we’ve been using are located in Cyprus and Sri Lanka, I think).
The OpenNet Initiative’s profile of internet censorship in Syria states the following:
The telecommunications market is Syria is the most regulated in the Middle East and is among the least developed…
The vast majority of Syrian users get online at Syria’s ubiquitous Internet cafés, and from houses using dial-up connections via landlines…
Repressive legislation and the imprisonment of journalists and bloggers for their activities online have led many Syrians to engage in self-censorship. Meanwhile, the government continues to promote the growth of the Internet throughout the country.
By comparison, Kuwait’s internet media is said to be some of the most outspoken in the Middle East, and besides a few politically sensitive and extremist/pro-terrorist sites, pornographic websites are about the only ones that are blocked by the Kuwaiti government on the basis of content. In Syria, on the other hand, you regularly find men in internet cafes clicking through photos of naked women. Maybe that’s why the lights are always so dimmed in these places — to get you in the mood?
What do you think? Comments
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Book review: Juan Cole's "Engaging the Muslim World"
Source: Electronic Intifada
Cole steers the conversation away from what Mahmood Mamdani has called “Culture Talk” — i.e., the tendency to seek cultural causes for political effects, especially, the tendency of Western analysts to pathologize political violence and look for its causes in the teachings of Islam. He shows terrorism as a fringe phenomenon, analogous to white supremacist groups in the United States. He makes a distinction between reformist political Islamist organizations and Islamist revolutionaries and advocates engagement with the former as a means of marginalizing the latter. However, in a curious omission, no chapter is devoted to Palestine even though Cole admits that an equitable solution to the conflict “would resolve 90 percent of America’s problems with the Muslim world.”
While Cole rightly notes the absurdity of notions such as “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” (“the word ‘Islamic’ like ‘Judaic’ merely refers to the ideals of the religion”), his own first chapter is entitled “The struggle for Islamic oil.” US dependence on “Islamic” oil, according to Cole, is one of the major sources of what he calls “Islam Anxiety.” However, he does not explain why Venezuelan oil isn’t a source of Latino Anxiety. Also, as Cole himself notes, of the top five energy suppliers to the US in 2008, only one (Saudi Arabia) is a Muslim country. Cole concedes that it is not the dependence on foreign imports that Americans resent. Oil, he argues, is “wrought up with gender and race” because “American men view [their] vehicles as symbols of freedom and masculinity,” and having Arabs and Iranians — “among the more disliked ethnicities” — determine its price is “galling and even perhaps felt as castrating” because they control American sources of “manhood and liberty.”
There is no disputing that oil remains the pre-eminent US interest in the Middle East; [and] each one of Big Oil’s setbacks has been the consequence of US support for Israel. This US-Israel special relationship was recognized as a handicap by former CIA director and energy expert John McCone as far back as 1967, Cole shows. But if Israel is such a liability, why does the United States continue to support it? This is the fundamental question that Cole unfortunately sidesteps. Domestic political imperatives in the form of pressure from the Israel lobby have ensured unconditional support for Israel, and this has served as the main barrier to US economic interests in the region. Like most analysts on the left, Cole fails to appreciate that commerce is the potential bridge between the US and the resource-rich Middle East.
[Cole] refutes the racist and bigoted assumptions that underlie American views of the Muslim world, and makes a persuasive case for engagement. In the end, however, relations between the US and the Middle East are not strained because of nebulous notions such as “Islam anxiety,” but power configurations such as the Israel lobby which have an interest in thwarting any such engagement lest it jeopardize the US’s special relationship with Israel. By failing to address these barriers Cole offers prescriptions that have at best ad hoc value. This is an important book — a must read — in so far as it addresses how Americans keep getting the Middle East wrong; it could have been an indispensable book had Cole also questioned why.
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Juan Cole: Top Ten Middle East Wikileaks Revelations so Far
Source: Informed Comment
1. The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of it.
2. Afghan President Hamid Karzai routinely pardons drug dealers and corrupt officials.
3. Karzai’s brother, Ahmad Wali, is called a corrupt drug dealer. He is chief of the provincial council of Qandahar and said to be more powerful than the province’s governor. A US official wrote, “While we must deal with AWK as the head of the Provincial Council, he is widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker. End Note.”
4. The Boston Globe reports of Senator John Kerry that he urged the return of the Golan Heights to Syria in return for peace: “In the meeting last February with the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Kerry said Syria should be involved simultaneously in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, saying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “needs to compromise and work the return of the Golan Heights into a formula for peace,’’ according to the summary of Kerry’s remarks.”
5. Israeli General admits that Israel’s narrow focus on its qualitative military edge often conflicts with the global interests of the United States.
6. Former US-appointed interim prime minister of Iraq in 2004-early 2005, Iyad Allawi, is Alleged to have urged a US attack on Iran. He denies the report.
7. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the US to forget about democracy in Iraq and instead install a dictator (“the Iraqis are too tough.”) He also warned the US to stay in Iraq militarily, asserting that otherwise the Iranians would take over the country. Mubarak had vigorously opposed the US march to war against Iraq in 2002-2003.
8.The Israelis wanted military dictator Pervez Musharraf to remain in power.
9. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the current Pakistani chief of staff, allegedly considered making a coup in spring, 2009, when Nawaz Sharif was leading a popular movement in the streets to demand the reinstatement of the dismissed supreme court chief justice. Kayani considered moving against President Asaf Ali Zardari in case his weakness might allow Nawaz to return to power.
10. Aside from that occasion, Kayani, is said to have learned from dictator Gen. Musharraf not to try to rule directly. He is adept at staying behind the scenes but using other institutions to protect the interests of the military. He succeeded in foiling an American plan to put civilian politicians in control of the military. (Obviously, this French assessment of Kayani was made before, or in ignorance of, his having toyed with a coup in spring 2009).
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America will want to be on the right side of history
Good, thoughtful post from a fellow Tumblrer:
The emotional chords will always be tugging for the U.S. to forcefully and vocally throw their support behind pro-democracy movements across the globe, even if it’s impractical, counterproductive, or largely useless (as was the case with Iran in the summer of 2009). And it’s important to respect state sovereignty and recognize the limitations outside forces can have compared to the citizenry themselves. Keep in mind that when the Communist bloc was falling apart in 1988, George H.W. Bush was criticized for his reserved public statements in the wake of ‘The Third Wave’ of democratization.
Meddling in internal state affairs can have a counterproductive effect, as I suspect if the U.S. wades too deep into the Tunisian affair, it will have the effect of empowering the Islamist party in a way that benefits neither the U.S. nor the largely secular and economic-reform minded Tunisians who initiated the overthrow in the first place.
But in Egypt, where in El Bareidei you have a ready-made leader of the democracy movement who has credibility in the West, where Hosni Mubarak’s declining health and fast-approaching death was inviting fears of instability even before this week’s events, and where the U.S. has a personal responsibility to the situation because of Egypt’s role as a client state over the past several decades, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to be on the right side of history, and not alienate the legion of young Arabs ready to embrace democracy and secular reforms (keeping in mind that with the Muslim Brotherhood now involving itself in the demonstrations, Islam will be a necessary part of a new government or Constitution) by turning its back on them when they are openly seeking out U.S. support.
This isn’t really even about starry eyed idealism, about supporting the good guys, though on a moral level it would be hard to ignore the irony of one former Nobel Peace Prize winner (Obama) turning his back on the pro-democracy demonstrations of a fellow former Nobel Peace Prize winner (El Baredei). It’s about recognizing that the youth bulge in the Middle East has real consequences for the political makeup of the region, and the U.S. needs to adapt and react accordingly. In this case, it means realizing that pursuing a unilateral policy of propping up authoritarian leaders who pledge to be our ‘allies’ in the war on terror is not a viable path forward.
My guess/hope is that Obama and Clinton are nudging Mubarak behind the scenes to give it up and peacefully leave power. If there is to be a new wave of democritization in the Middle East, let us hope Egypt is the 2nd domino to fall.
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”You cannot tell me take the bus and go with you without knowing where I am meant to go. We do not drive in a foggy weather. This is Syria.
The Syrian President, in an incredible interview with the Wall Street Journal. Very much worth a read for Little Bear’s logical, unembellished, sometimes humorous take on recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries; the war in Iraq and relations with the United States; Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran and Israel; and other topics.
Comments