Recently in Muslim world Category

Recently a young female was executed for adultery in Kismayo, Somalia. Initially we were told that she was 23, and had gone to the Shabaab militia, who control that part of the country, to confess and to submit to the Shari'a penalty by way of repentance. This week, Amnesty International somehow found out that she was actually 13 years old, a rape victim who had gone to the militia with her father to report the rape and was instead charged with adultery, and actually resisted the execution, as one might expect.

Leila Shahid: An urgent call for aid for Nahr el Bared in Lebanon (Comment is free)

Leila Shahid (PLO representative to the UN) on the failure of Arab governments (as opposed to organisations) to come forward with money to reconstruct the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian camp in Lebanon. Since the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) appealed for new money, on 11th Sept this year, only the USA has come foward with new money, and as a general trend, Luxembourg gives more money to UNRWA than any Arab government, and Norway gives more than all of them combined.

(Still, I personally wonder why Nahr el-Bared cannot be closed and those who lived there integrated into Lebanese society, given that it has been there for more than most of its inhabitants lifetimes. They should not be keeping the "refugees" in limbo as if Israel really were to be wiped off the map tomorrow. The reason seems to be the unwillingness to upset the balance of power between the various religious groups in Lebanon, as most of the refugees are Sunni Muslims who are a minority in Lebanon, coupled with negative Lebanese attitudes to Palestinians, which I have heard personally even from Lebanese in London.)

Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both relatives of mine, went on a day trip from Cyprus, where they had been enjoying a holiday. I have also been to Cairo; I spent two months and a bit there in 1999, learning Arabic (not much in the event). I think day trips to Cairo are a bad idea on many, many levels. Part of this is a bit of old-fashioned moralism mixed with new concerns about the environment; another is that a day trip to Cairo just does not do the place justice.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a confused ramble in today's Independent, lamenting the fact that joining the European Union has decreased in popularity since 2002, when the figure was 70% in favour (by 2006, it was half that). It appears that it has been frustrated a few times too often, with various European politicians insisting that Turkey has no place in the EU. Alibhai-Brown sees the turn in attitudes of a betrayal of post-war European ideals:

Western Europe promised to confront its heart of darkness after the war and Holocaust. Zero tolerance against anti-Semitism was the ransom that had to be paid and was, rightly and properly. But other racisms have been allowed to grow and ancient enmities reawakened. Fresh hate victims have been found to fill the continent's gaping pits. Black migrants are treated like vermin, including in those EU countries known for easy charm; Muslims have had to accept institutionalised prejudice and Turkey has been treated as an abject and alien supplicant who must be kept that way. An essentialist, Christian definition of Europe has been settled upon, arguably one of the most self destructive of EU ideologies.

(More: Ginny.)

Last week, a woman and her husband were arrested for having sex on a beach in Dubai; this news made it to the front pages of at least one major British newspaper. The woman was (until she got the sack) employed by a publishing company in the emirate; she is now, allegedly, facing a six-year sentence.

I am sure some are thinking this is typical for a backward Muslim country, but actually, I think having sex in public would offend people in most countries, including many of those where western tourists go to get drunk and, well, whatever else. Everyone knows that if you go and live in a Muslim country, and one which does not even pretend to be a democracy, you have to be careful. People get paid handsomely for working there (although they may have to pay handsomely to live there) and while it's not Saudi Arabia - they do let people, non-Muslims at least, drink alcohol - there are limits.

I do think six years is excessive, but then, this is the country where people have been thrown in jail for having a few poppy seeds on their clothes or the remains of a joint they trod on back home still stuck to the sole of their shoe when they get to the Emirates. In the UK, public sex is known as dogging, and there are those who gather to watch people do it in such places as parks. I am sure the locals wish these people would clear off; how about giving them a one-way ticket to Dubai?

Having just watched a More 4 documentary of Malalai Joya, the woman who was elected to the Afghani parliament after getting thrown out of the Loya Jirga for standing up to condemn warlords, it struck me that she wore the notorious Afghan burqa, which she said she disliked, to conceal her identity and encouraged other women who were in danger to do the same.

Why has nobody thought to introduce the niqab to that country? I understand that some will not exactly see it is a huge leap for women's liberation, but a woman can easily pull up a niqab to show her face without showing the rest of her front, she can uncover her eyes or else choose between two levels of eye covering. You don't get any of this choice with the burqa, quite apart from the cumbersomeness of the garment itself and, doubtless, the heating cheap fabric used in it. I wonder why it persists when a vastly more practical method of covering the face exists?

Before the week begins in earnest, I thought I might offer a round-up of stories which caught my eye the past week:

Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian on the stupid, racist gibberish which has followed the discovery of the woman and her children in the cellar in Austria. Some nonsense has been printed about how there must be something rotten in the Austrian psyche or something like that, probably derived from its wartime record, and the perpetrator himself tried to blame his "sickness" on growing up under Hitler. In fact, Austria was ruled by the Nazis for only seven years, compared to Germany's twelve, so you would expect a plethora of such cases to have appeared in Germany, but no. There have been just two cases, involving about a handful of perpetrators out of several million. What does such a thing about any population?

Hassan Butt has been busted. At last, also, the Observer acknowledges that there are critics of Hassan Butt who are not fanatics issuing threats to his life. They print that some people think Butt is a fantasist or was an MI5 informer; my theory is that he turned tail when times got tough for an extremist.

Yet another alleged adviser to the Quilliam Foundation, Shaikh Babikr Ahmad (the imam at Islamia school), turns out to have nothing to do with them.

Recently there has been a flurry of stories about foreigners being jailed in the United Arab Emirates for unbelievably petty drug "offences" which would not be detected, yet alone prosecuted, anywhere else. The story of Raymond "Grooverider" Bingham, the Radio 1 "Xtra" DJ who got four years after mistakenly taking his supply of weed into the country, stands as a hard-luck case but much the same would happen in many western countries. However, some of those sentenced to the mandatory four-year term were not carrying drugs in the conventional sense at all, but merely had traces of it on their clothes or even the sole of their shoe.

Maureen Freely: Cover Stories from Comment is Free

Maureen Freely (translator of Orhan Pamuk's books, who has spent a fair amount of time in Turkey) on the politics behind the recent move by the Turkish parliament to remove the ban on women's wearing the headscarf in universities in Turkey:

There are many shades of secularism in Turkey. But the most dominant variety puts great faith in the army. It sees the army's involvement in the day-to-day running of the state as necessary, even essential, for only the army can protect the republic from its many enemies. For it is not just the Islamists the army keeps at bay. It is also the Kurds, and the Armenians, and (increasingly) Europe. Turkey's militarist-secularists have a very limited faith in democracy. They condone or even applaud laws that make it an offence to insult Turkishness or the memory of Ataturk. What they are defending here is not democracy or feminism but the state's right to decide what women wear.

She also notes that the women who are so scared about being "bullied" by scarf-wearing women may well be afraid of those women getting even on them, since many of them were spat on and otherwise harassed during the 1990s by secularists, and that no law has ever been passed to keep Islamist men out of the universities (same twisted brand of pseudo-feminism as was on display in France, then).

The comment from "WestToEast" is also worth reading.

This afternoon during my lunch hour, I had an MSN conversation with someone in Sindh, the home region and power base of the late Benazir Bhutto. Naturally, since I knew where she lived (not to name the place, but it's about a hundred miles from the Bhuttos' home area of Larkhana), I was interested in what the situation was there and what she thought about the whole situation. The brief conversation we had shocked me.

I'm not the most knowledgeable person about Pakistani politics, and I really have no opinion as to who is behind the murder of Benazir Bhutto, given that fingers are pointing in each direction right now - the government blames al-Qa'ida while Bhutto's supporters blame the government. Umar Lee and sister Baraka have perspectives on the event that are worth reading (also see these two entries at Muslim Matters: [1], [2]). From speaking to Pakistanis I know, it seems that the event is less distressing for some than what this means for the country: the likely repercussions in terms of civil unrest, and its reflection on the way politics works in Pakistan. Dr M and the person behind Progressive Muslims (formerly PMUNA Debate) are not getting sanctimonious.

Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons

In the further discussion of the Gillian Gibbons case on the radio this morning, the question of whether the teacher should be militarily rescued was discussed. Vanessa Feltz said she thought, and claimed that she discovered, from reading his column in the Telegraph today, that Boris Johnson had thought as well, of the Don Pacifico incident. Don Pacifico was a Portuguese Jew who served as the Portuguese consul in Athens, and his home was attacked and vandalised by a mob which included the sons of a government minister, while the police looked on and did nothing. As he was born in Gibraltar, he was a British citizen and appealed to the British government for assistance in 1848, whereupon Lord Palmerston initiated a naval blockade of the Greek port of Piraeus and seized Greek ships and assets to the value of Pacifico's claim. He spoke in the Commons of a time when a Roman citizen could say "I am a Roman citizen" and know that he could count on Roman assistance, and suggested that the same should be true for British citizens. (More: Austrolabe.)

Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons

Just when the latest round of knock-ons from the Undercover Mosque hatchet job were starting to fade away, the story of the British teacher jailed in Sudan for a supposed insult to the Prophet (sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam) brought "Muslim intolerance" back into the media. The teacher worked at a fee-paying school attended by wealthy Sudanese, and in September - two months ago! - invited the infant-school children to vote on a name for a class teddy bear. The children voted on Muhammad, which just happens to be the name of the most popular boy in the school. There are reports that the case may be linked to disputes over tax and that certain people want to get their hands on the school's land (see this Guardian report). (More: Osama Saeed.)

New Statesman - The talking cure

This is a review by Samir el-Youssef, a regular in the New Statesman, attacking a new book entitled Why Are the Arabs Not Free? by Moustapha Safouan (a slim volume at only 128 pages), which seems to blame the problem of repressive Arab world politics on the fact that the language of the educated people, standard written Arabic, is inaccessible to the masses:

The disparity between written and spoken Arabic is so great that talking to an audience is often a discouraging test for Arab writers. To use the vernacular, one would probably have to avoid sophisticated arguments and deep thoughts. But to talk in standard (written) language is to risk sounding pompous and rhetorical - and, worst of all, to fail to reach those who have had no school education. Given the high level of illiteracy in the Arab world, this means losing the attention of a great proportion of the public.

The dilemma is particularly daunting for those of us bilingual Arab writers who, through writing in English or French, have become used to the idea of written and spoken language being the same. The Franco-Egyptian writer Moustapha Safouan's solution to the problem is a call for writers to abandon standard Arabic and use the spoken dialects instead. Safouan claims that writing in rarefied standard Arabic is a major cause of the absence of freedom and democracy in the Arab world. He calls this the "politics of writing" - written language is the privilege of the elite, the educated few who are faithfully in the service of their paymasters: the despotic Arab rulers and their political regimes.

However, the reviewer has no time for Moustapha Safouan's proposal:

Arguing for writing in Arabic dialect, Safouan makes many refutable claims. He claims standard Arabic is a dead language - so how do we explain the fact that poets such as the Syrian Nizar Qabbani and the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, both elegant writers of standard Arabic, have been read and recited by millions of people across the Arab world? His claim that Arab rulers prevent the use of dialects is also absurd: many poets of the vernacular were and have been pampered by Arab regimes; the Egyptian Salah Jaheen was a star during the Nasser era, the Iraqi Muzafer al-Nouab has been a most welcome guest at the court of leaders such as Muammar Gaddafi and the late Hafez al-Assad.

Safouan's call for writing in dialect is familiar and has long been discredited; apart from using it in the performing and popular arts, attempts to write in spoken Arabic have proven to be a miserable failure. Above all, standard Arabic has for decades served as a potent means of political dissent for Arab opposition movements and individuals. Thousands of writers and journalists have been prosecuted in the Arab world not because they tried to write in the spoken language but because of what they have tried to say in, quite often, an eloquent standard Arabic.

Given that the peoples of Europe mostly speak derivatives of Latin, German or Norse and Slavonic which are far more divergent from each other than the various dialects of spoken Arabic are from each other or from written Arabic, and that all these languages have spoken variants which are distinct from the written (Geordie and Scots from written English, for example), and yet our politics (at least right now) are generally liberal and democratic, I do not see how abolishing standard Arabic could contribute to anything but the disconnection of Arabs from different parts of the Arab world from each other. I'm not familiar with this Moustapha Safouan and don't know what his attitudes to religion are, but proper Arabic is a vital key to maintaining access to Islamic knowledge. Surely the key to fostering understanding among Arabs is improving education, not dumbing-down their language.

The other, invisible suffering of Burma « Islam, Muslims, and an Anthropologist

In the recent rush to support the monk-led uprising against the military junta in Burma, the situation of the long-suffering Muslim minority, particularly in the state bordering Bangladesh where they make up 50% of the population but do not enjoy the rights other Burmese citizens enjoy. The country's monks have also played a role in the Muslims' suffering, for example attacking mosques on the basis of rumours of Muslims raping Buddhist girls; there have also been pamphlets circulated "glorifying race purity and Buddhism and actually reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiments".

Chicken Yoghurt » Public Service Announcement

Yesterday, several British political blogs were pulled down, including Bloggerheads, that of the former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray, Bob Piper and Boris Johnson, when their web host gave in to threatening letters from lawyers acting for the Uzbek/Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who is trying to buy Arsenal football club. The threats were in response to allegations posted on Murray's blog, which were reproduced here among other places. I can't testify that what Murray says is true, of course, but Murray himself says has not received any correspondence from Usmanov's lawyers. They have gone for the easy option of simply censoring his claims by leaning on his web hosts. (The whole article is still available at Indymedia. More: Pickled Politics, Serious Golmal, David T @ Harry's Place, Iain Dale.)

A new edition of Islamica Magazine is on the shelves in London now (try Borders) and there's a disturbing article about a plan to demolish large areas of the old city of Damascus involving a company with links to the Asad régime; the mayor calls the buildings "garbage". They include the second-oldest mosque in Damascus, Jami' al-Tawba, and a number of ancient residential districts are under threat also. Among the schemes is to clear residential properties in order to expand a mosque of particular interest to Shi'ites, who come in large numbers on pilgrimage from Iran, and to build a car park and a big road to it from the airport.

Old Damascus: A Plan to Destroy Paradise by Rana Kabbani

A friend of feudalism (the Guardian, yesterday)

William Dalrymple (of White Mughals fame) on the depressing spectacle of Benazir Bhutto trying to cut a deal with Busharraf in order to get back in power in Pakistan. This is apparently what "democracy" means. He points out that Benazir's first term of office was notorious for incompetence, corruption and brutality, far more so than the early period of Busharraf's. (More: Umar Lee [1], [2], [3].)

muslimmatters.org » Beware the Do-Gooders in Body Armor: The True Motives of those in Support of Divestment in Sudan

A number of articles and blogs recently have picked up on the inconsistency of those calling for divestment in Sudan on the grounds of the ongoing atrocities in Darfur. Ahmad alFarsi at Muslim matters above picks up on this article by John Walsh at Counterpunch; I noticed a similar article in the Guardian by Roger Howard, contrasting the clamour over Darfur with the silence over worse atrocities in the eastern Congo.

The American divestment campaigners, Walsh notes, have among their targets the Chinese oil companies who trade with Sudan. Sudan is not the only country in which government tenderness to Chinese interests have had a disastrous effect on the local population; this report (PDF), partly written by the Zimbabwean Catholic archbishop Pius Ncube, notes that the notorious "Operation Drive Out Trash", in which people were cleared out of major cities in Zimbabwe on the grounds that their homes and market stalls were illegal, removed competition to Chinese businessmen selling cheap and poor quality goods, and that formerly white-owned farms had ended up in the hands of Chinese farmers who grew tobacco for export to China.

So, it seems that not all atrocities are equal for these people - Darfur only matters because the aggressors are Arabs, not just any old black people. I must say, though, that similar hypocrisy exists among some black westerners, who refuse to condemn Robert Mugabe's atrocities essentially because, even though the worst-affected people are black, Mugabe is supposedly fighting "Whitey" (see this article, which may go paywalled). I have even heard such talk from a black "salafi" Muslim, who had earlier told me I should not vote because it implied a bay'ah to the system. What he'd have said if Mugabe's victims had been Muslims, of course, I never found out.

I was going to blog on this BBC article when I saw it a few days ago, but sister Nzingha in Saudi Arabia has done so for us: My Fellow Swimming Sisters In Saudi.

I am actually thinking of complaining to the BBC about the stupid article, not only because of its ignorance of Saudi life but on account of its presentation of Tunisia as an example of 'Muslim' modernity, when in fact only the non-religious have rights in that benighted country. The complaints procedure starts here.