Egypt in Year Three
Was the gathering of millions in Egypt on June 30 the continuation of a revolution or the occasion for a coup d’état? The answer is “both,” but the question is not the right one to ask.
Connecting Dots
The life history of typographical and other errors is sometimes interesting, especially when it comes to “terrorism studies” and the panic of the national security state.
For example: On June 27, a federal grand jury indicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bombing case. The charge sheet sketches out a narrative of “radicalization” – the dots that authorities in hindsight supposedly failed to connect – by listing texts Tsarnaev allegedly downloaded to his computer:
Of Bodies and Blank Notebooks
A man walks into a library and asks the librarian for a book on human rights in Saudi Arabia. The librarian hands him a blank notebook.
A woman walks into a bookstore and asks for a tourist guide to Saudi Arabia. The bookseller hands her a blank notebook.
A reporter walks into the Saudi embassy and asks for a visa.
Americans follow events in Saudi Arabia by reading the New York Times and Washington Post.
These are all laugh lines. The first one pops up when you Google “jokes about Saudi Arabia.” The next one sort of suggests itself. The other two are equally funny to those in the know.
Football Matters in Jordan
Celebrations rocked Gaza and the West Bank when Muhammad ‘Assaf, who grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, won the region-wide singing competition known as “Arab Idol.” But spontaneous street parties also broke out in many other parts of the Arab world, including in neighborhoods across Jordan.
The Syrian Crisis in Jordan
An hour and a quarter north of Amman the rural highway rolls through the remote desert hamlet of Zaatari without slowing. The town’s lone intersection is too sleepy to need a stop sign.
‘Assaf, Palestine and the “Forgotten Palestinians”
For months Arab television watchers have been engrossed in the phenomenon of Muhammad ‘Assaf, the 23-year old Gazan singer who has now been crowned the winner on “Arab Idol.” Modeled after “American Idol,” the popular show is broadcast on MBC, a satellite channel based in Beirut. As on the original, the victor of the “Arab Idol” competition is decided by the votes of the audience, cast through text messages and phone calls. ‘Assaf received over 67 million votes.
Power Corrupts
Secretary of State John Kerry has staked his credibility on reviving the Middle East peace process. Supporting this effort on the world stage will be high on Samantha Power’s agenda, should her nomination as US ambassador to the United Nations be confirmed. But though she will urge Israelis, Palestinians, Western journalists and European officials to put aside their cynicism over yet another round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, her own record justifies it tenfold.
Wrapped in Surprise, Stuffed with Politics
Many Iranians are pinching themselves and smiling uncontrollably after Hassan Rowhani’s victory in the June 14 presidential election. The purple-clad campaigners for Rowhani (or Mohammad Reza Aref, who stepped aside for Rowhani a few days before the balloting) still taste the bitterness of 2009, when their call “Where is my vote?” met with the full force of the regime’s security apparatus. They knew that reform-oriented candidates do better when 65 percent or more of eligible voters participate.
In Search of the Building Blocks of Opposition in Turkey
In early May, Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — flush with a decade of electoral triumphs and a track record of economic growth dwarfing that of the European Union he once vowed to join — had the luxury of being magnanimous.
Editor’s Picks (Summer 2013)
Abrahamian, Ervand. The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2012).
Allen, Lori. The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).
Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, ed., Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013).
Chayut, Noam. The Girl Who Took My Holocaust: Notes from an Israeli Life (London: Verso, 2013).
El Hamel, Chouki. Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race and Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Mikhail, Water on Sand
Alan Mikhail, ed., Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
This fascinating volume provides an excellent overview of how environmental perspectives can enrich Middle East studies, thanks to contributions from leading scholars in the fields of global environmental and Middle East history. Chapters range in time from the medieval to the contemporary periods and in space from the French and Ottoman empires to the borderlands of the Eurasian steppe.
Antoon, Ya Maryam
Sinan Antoon, Ya Maryam (Beirut/Baghdad: Dar al-Jamal, 2012).
Jordan’s Military-Industrial Complex and the Middle East’s New Model Army
Raise the subject of Arab military-industrial production and the country that springs to mind is Egypt. A historian might recall Iraq’s early arms industry; a Gulf analyst might think of the weapons development projects being financed by the United Arab Emirates. Few would think of Jordan. But according to promotional literature, Jordan’s armed forces have entered joint venture partnerships with at least 26 foreign defense companies, [1] to produce everything from pre-packaged field rations and boots to backpack-portable drones and armored vehicles.
Between Grievances and State Violence
On June 16, 2012, female students at the University of Khartoum mounted a demonstration that released a wave of protest on campuses and major towns across Sudan. The young women exited the university gates chanting “Freedom, freedom,” demanding the “liberation” of their campus from the grip of the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) and the reversal of a 35 percent hike in bus and train fares announced earlier by the government.
Becoming Armenian in Lebanon
Each year in April, the municipality of Burj Hammoud, a densely populated residential and commercial city just east of Beirut, hosts a three-day festival called Badguer, the Armenian word for “image.” Free and open to the public, the event has variously been staged in an old concrete factory, a blocked-off street and other sites. In 2012, Badguer was held at La Maison Rose, a newly opened cultural center for Armenian artists and craftsmen. Like the annual celebration, La Maison Rose is part of a local effort to promote “our living Armenian cultural patrimony.”
With Friends Like These
In June 2010, amidst escalating controversy over the construction of a mosque and Islamic community center near the former site of the World Trade Center, two Egyptians found themselves on the receiving end of xenophobic abuse as a crowd accosted them with calls to “go home.” Unbeknownst to the angry mob, the two Arabic-speaking men, Joseph Nasralla Abdelmasih and Karam El Masry, had come all the way from California to join the protest against what was dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque.” In fact, Abdelmasih and El Masry, who were eventually escorted away for their own safety by police officers, were involved with “The Way,” a Christian satellite television program established in 2010 that broadcasts in English and Arabic.
Copts Under Mursi
Throughout his 2012 presidential campaign, Muhammad Mursi was keen to emphasize that he would be a president for all Egyptians, not just supporters of the Society of Muslim Brothers, and that he believed in equal citizenship for all, irrespective of religious affiliation. The majority of Egypt’s Coptic Christians were nonetheless suspicious of the Muslim Brother candidate, and in the first round many voted for one of the other main contenders, Ahmad Shafiq or Hamdin Sabbahi. Almost a year into Mursi’s presidency, it is clear that the Coptic minority — roughly 10 percent of Egypt’s population — did not overestimate either the threat to their rights or the strain on social cohesion that would attend a Mursi victory.
Iraqi Christians: A Primer
Media coverage in the West can overstate the degree to which Christians are “disappearing” from the Middle East. But one place where such characterizations have merit is Iraq. In the years since the 2003 invasion led by the United States, at least half of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country to escape the violence of war, occupation and insurgency, as well as a campaign of intimidation, forced expulsion and sectarian cleansing carried out by militias and criminal gangs. Numerous others have been internally displaced.
Nazareth Dispatch
They are Israel’s Siamese twin cities, forced into an uncomfortable pairing more than half a century ago. Nazareth and Natzrat Illit, or Upper Nazareth in English, almost share a name. Although formally separated by a ring road, Israel has tied their fates together. Each is engaged in a battle with the other, from which, it seems, given the zero-sum terms of the Zionist project, only one can emerge as victor — and survivor.
Covering the Christians of the Holy Land
Every year around Christmas and Easter, a kind of meta-ritual takes place in which American journalists describe how these holidays are celebrated in the “Holy Land.” It is a long-running story, never stripped of politics. In 1923 , for example, the New York Times published a classically Orientalist opposition of here and there, us and them. Easter in Jerusalem was a “frenzy of devotion,” “an annual release of the entire community, such as you and I in New York know nothing of. Somewhere in the centuries during which our ancestors were moving westward from the Middle East we have lost the gift of it and we have never recaptured it.” [1]
