A Tale of Two Statues

In my recent post on Zaytuna and the reopening of the ancient mosque-school in the Tunis medina, I ran a picture of Zaytuna alumnus Ibn Khaldun's statue at the entrance to the Tunis medina. There is an interesting story involving that statue, and its orientation.

First, you need to understand the geography. Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the great boulevard that runs through downtown Tunis like a colonial Champs Elysees, runs from the Lake of Tunis via Place 14 Janvier 2011 (formerly Place 7 Novembre 1987, formerly where Bourguiba's statue stood till 1987) in a grand European sweep to the old city. At the French Cathedral it becomes, for its last couple of blocks, the somewhat narrower Avenue de France, and then it reaches the old city, the medina, a typical warren of winding streets and allies. The entrance to the medina, the Bab al-Bahr (the gate toward the sea), thus marks the seam between the medieval Arab city and the French colonial European one.

The Since-removed Statue of Cardinal Lavigerie

In the French era, a statue stood at the Bab al-Bahr. It was of Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Carthage, founder of the Missionaries of Africa (known as the White Fathers, for their white clerical robes). He stood there, cross raised, right at the entrance to the street that leads to Zaytuna. When it was erected in 1925 it provoked demonstrations and protests by the Muslim students at Zaytuna, but it remained until independence.

In the Bourguiba era, another statue was erected at this end of the avenue: this time outside the gate, in front of the French Catholic cathedral. This was the statue of Ibn Khaldun. Not far from where the cardinal intent on converting Muslims had once stood in challenge to the nearby Zaytuna, so now the great Muslim scholar and product of Zaytuna stood by the Catholic cathedral. Of such dueling symbols post-colonial history often consists.

Zaytuna's Old Mosque-School Reopens in Tunis Medina

Zaytuna Mosque (Wikipedia)

This week the ancient mosque-school associated with Tunisia's Zaytuna mosque was reopened, after having been closed by Habib Bourguiba in 1964. Zaytuna, the Great Mosque of Tunis and the second oldest mosque (after Kairouan, also in Tunisia) in the Maghreb, was a great center of learning in the Middle Ages. Its religious university predated Cairo's al-Azhar, and was the preeminent theological and legal school in the Maghreb, a major center for the Maliki school of law. (Zaituna means "olive tree," one reputedly having once been growing in the courtyard.)

In the Bourguiba era the old school associated with the mosque at the heart of the Tunis medina (the old city) was closed and the name Zaytuna transferred to the Shari‘a Law School of the University of Tunis, while the ancient mosque itself remained the religious center of Tunis and Tunisia. Despite a pretense of continuity the modern university bore little resemblance to the ancient school,

Ibn Khaldun at Gateway to Medina

Now, Islamic learning will return to the ancient center in the Medina, apparently both to demonstrate a rejection of the excessive secularism of the Bourguiba and Ben Ali eras, but also to provide a government-sanctioned traditional Islamic counterpoint to the Islamist and Salafi movements that are growing in strength in Tunisia. More on the story here.

One of Zaytuna's products in the classical age was also perhaps the greatest mind to have been born in the city of Tunis, though later a fixture in many other places: Ibn Khaldun, The great historian (1332-1406) is sometimes acclaimed as the father of sociology, though he's a lot more readable than most later sociologists. Also, in what must be every author's dream of what they'd like to see as a book-jacket blurb, Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, referred to Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima as "undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place." (No qualifiers, but what you need to know about the "of its kind" is that Toynbee considered his own book a lot like Ibn Khaldun's.) Appropriately, Ibn Khaldun's statue stands at the gate of the Tunis Medina, just outside of the medina (his birthplace) and the way to Zaytuna. But that statue gives me an idea for my next post . . .

The AUC Strike

Today's theme at Midan al-Tahrir in Cairo was supposed to be a demand to end the State of Emergency, which instead was extended and strengthened a week ago after last Friday's violence and the attack on the Israeli Embassy. By most accounts, the turnout has been disappointingly low, perhaps due to fears of a crackdown.

Much of the twitter chatter among Egypt's young revolutionaries has been focused instead on events which occurred yesterday at the American University in Cairo (AUC). For some time now, students have been protesting high fees, and university workers have been protesting low wages; for the last few days AUC has been on strike. Yesterday two events drew considerable attention: University President Lisa Anderson walked away from a meeting with students that apparently turned confrontational, and protestors lowered an American flag. This apparently happened at the old campus on Tahrir Square, where the administration is, rather than at the new campus in New Cairo.

As some of the protestors have noted, these two events have perhaps been blown out of proportion, making the protests sound more anti-American and less about treatment of workers than they actually are. Many Egyptians see AUC as an elite school, which it certainly is, as well as a symbol of the US, but that really isn't apparently the core of these  protests. The students aren't taking a political stand but supporting university workers.

I have a certain fondness for AUC, having both studied there and, on one stay in Egypt, lived across the street from it, and I have little direct knowledge of the present protests. But it is one more indication that, whatever the next few months may bring in Egypt, the country remains a cauldron of shifting forces and new empowerment, which will be a challenge to the SCAF or any elected leadership.

On the AUC strike:  The Guardian has a piece here; Al-Masry Al-Youm here; and Zeinobia blogs her own useful perspective here, with many pictures. Activist Hossam al-Hamalawy collects links here, and this video comes via his site:

Egyptian Court Orders Cops Off Campuses

The last few days have been interesting ones for Arab court activism; besides the Iraqi Supreme Court telling Parliament to get serious, Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court has rejected a government appeal of a previous ruling and ordered the Interior Ministry to stop deploying police forces on university campuses, saying the practice violates constitutional guarantees of university independence. Other reporting here, here, and at greater length here.
The power of the police on campuses has been a major issue in recent months, as students have been roughed up and sometimes arrested for attempting political protest. During recent student council elections, candidates were reportedly vetted by the police.

Though the particular court case that led to the ruling is a couple of years old, the issue has been a hot one of late, with Parliamentary elections set for November 28. Police have intensified pressure on student activists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. Opposition forces recently distributed cell-phone videos showing police beating a young woman from the Islamic Religious Studies faculty at Zagazig University, and then ambulance atrtendants seeming to resist taking her to the hospital due to police pressure:





Again, though that incident only coincidentally was fresh in students' minds when the ruling came down, it shows the increasing tensions over police presence on the campuses, especially at the provincial universities.

So what happens now? There is plenty of precedent for te government and security forces simply invoking the Emergency Law and ignoring court decisions that seek to restrain the Interior Ministry but with those videos circulating and elections imminent, this might not be a time for flouting the court. On the other hand, State Security tends to do what it wants to. For the moment, though, student activists are savoring a victory.

American University of RAK Drastically Cutting Staff

UPDATE: In more positive news, a reader directs me to this NYT piece on NYU's program in Abu Dhabi.

In recent years there has been a huge boom in Western-curriculum universities in the Gulf; some are satellite campuses of US or European universities; others local foundations with US or European curricula and (usually) English medium of instruction. As with the overall Gulf boom, however, economic reality may be overtaking some of the newer efforts.

The American University of Ras al-Khaimah, in the UAE, is cutting much of its administrative staff and seeking to restructure. making huge cuts in administrative staff, faced with the fact that the university has a large administration but fewer than a hundred students.

The boom in Western-curricula schools in the Gulf has surely benefited both Gulf students hoping to gain Western credentials and also Western academics seeking English-medium opportunities in the region. It may well be that Ras al-Khaimah doesn't have the drawing power of Doha or Sharja, or it may be that the school simply moved too fast at a time of economic contraction.

Banning Niqab at Al-Azhar

I've been staying away from one Egyptian story because I initially thought the reports were a bit exaggerated. The background: A week or so ago, the Sheikh al-Azhar, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, asked a female student wearing the full niqab (in which the face is fully covered) why she did so, since it was not a part of Islam and was merely a traditional practice. Al-Masry al-Youm played this story up, but I suspected that it was actually exaggerating a bit since it wasn't clear if Tantawi's remark was merely off-the-cuff or indicated a plan to discourage the niqab.

Then the BBC picked the story up, indicating that Tantawi planned to ban the full niqab altogether, and then a Constituional Court Ruling held that institutions had the right to ban the niqab. Now Tantawi and the Ministry of Education have officially banned the niqab from classrooms and dormitories. For those who don't read Arabic, there's an English report here.

Tantawi's ban only applies to al-Azhar and related institutions, so the Ministry of Education also acted. The Education Ministry clarified that women could still wear niqab to classes, provided they show their face to male security guards, but that the niqab would be banned in dormitories.

While Tantawi and other Egyptian clerics have emphasized that niqab is not a requirement of Islam, the comments by the Education Ministry seem to emphasize security issues; certainly the security establishment is uncomfortable with any custom which completely conceals identity and, at the same time, tends to be adopted by the most radical Islamists. (This only applies to the niqab, which fully covers the face, not the hijab, the very widespread head-scarf covering the hair.)

KAUST: The Saudis' New Tech University

While we were all watching the Q and A (Qadhafi and Ahmadinejad) show yesterday, the Saudis were opening the King ‘Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Operated by Saudi Aramco, it's meant to be the tech school of the future, and it's coeducational (BBC calls it "mixed-sex" which may be a Britishism but probably exaggerates the mingling: only 15% of the students are female). But women won't be required to veil. Press coverage here and here and here and here and here and here and here. (And I'm being conservative: no Arabic sites, and for some reason the Saudi Gazette hasn't updated for several days.) It has the "world's 14th fastest supercomputer" according to one report. The new university is about 50-some miles/80 km north of Jiddah on the Red Sea Coast at a place called Thuwal. The 71 faculty members so far include 14 from the US, seven from Germany and six from Canada; I'm guessing that means English is the language of instruction.

It's an ambitious move and an apparently well-founded one, and the liberal approach to women seems innovative. Let's wish it well.