The Tears of Isis: Wafa' al-Nil

Last spring I did a post on the Egyptian holiday known as Sham al-Nassim, noting that it was one of only two Egyptian holidays still celebrated that (arguably at least) are survivals from Pharaonic times, and which are celebrated with equal enthusiasm by Muslims and Copts (other than purely secular days like National Day).

Now we're at the other one. August 15 traditionally represents the beginning of the celebration (which lasts for two weeks) of Wafa' al-Nil. Wafa' al-Nil literally means something like "Fullness of the Nile" and refers to the Nile flood. (In earlier times the feast was celebrated whenever the Nile reached a certain height.)

Every summer, since the beginnings of human civilization (and long before), the Nile flooded. Until 1964,when the floodgates of the Aswan High Dam were closed. If you follow the above link on Sham al-Nassim you'll find a comment by my former boss, former MEI VP Ambassador David Mack about his posting in Egypt in 1964-65, when he saw the last Nile flood. I came to Egypt the first time in 1972 — antiquity for many of my readers, no doubt, but after the end of the cycle that created Egyptian civilization. The old-timer expats recounted many tales of flooded basements to us young whippersnappers who'd never see the Nile in flood.

Herodotus said that Egypt was the gift of the river, and the Egyptian dating system was based on the heliacal rising of Sirius because Sirius rose with the sun as the Nile began to rise, and thus had a profound symbolism for Egypt. (Some say we still call August the "dog days" because of the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, in August.)

The annual rise and fall of the Nile — a mystery to the ancient Egyptians, who had little rainfall and knew nothing of the rains of Equatorial Africa, though by Ptolemy the geographer's time there was a vague tradition of the "Mountains of the Moon," an early echo of the Ruwenzori, or perhaps the Ethiopian highlands — was the lifeblood of Egypt. The silt deposited when the river rose irrigated and fertilized the arable lands of the Delta. The rhythm of the Nile flood was the heartbeat of Egyptian history. The Pyramids were built at floodtime: farmers were unemployed because their farms were inundated, and the broader Nile allowed stones from Muqattam to the east to be carried by boat to Giza in the west. (The usual word for river in Arabic is Nahr, with one exception: historically the Nile has been classically referred to as Bahr al-Nil, the "Sea of the Nile." In flood, with much of the arable land under water, it must have seemed more like a sea than a river.)

Anyone who has seen the Nile valley from the air knows how dramatically the desert is delineated from the sown: where the water goes, there is richness; where it does not, there is arid barrenness. And the flood deposited the silts that made Egypt the granary of the Roman Empire.

The Nile flood until 1964 was the pulse of Egypt, and the pulse of Egypt was the pulse of the ancient world. While I'm not an adherent to Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic" interpretation of the ancient world, there is truth in the power that the flood gave to a unified monarchy and a common religion: someone had to be in charge of making sure the river flooded. The traditional beginnings of Egyptian history are the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, symbolized in Egyptian art by the lotus (Upper Egypt) and the papyrus (Lower Egypt): both plants intimately associated with the Nile.

The Egyptian God of the Nile, Hapi, was closely linked to the flood. (So perhaps I should wish you a Hapi Wafa' al-Nil. Sorry.) And, of course, there was the mythological explanation of the flood as the river rising from the tears Isis shed for her brother/husband Osiris. And the resurrection of Osiris is itself a symbol of the renewal of life through the flooding of the river.

The flood and its relationship to political power is a common theme. One of the many great Mamluk historical compendia on Egypt, Ibn Taghri Birdi's Nujum al-Zahira fi Tarikh Misr wa'l-Qahira, is a year-by-year chronology of Egypt from the Muslim conquest to his own day, and for every single year, he gives the height of the Nile flood.

Two of the great historical artifacts of Egypt are the Nilometer at Roda Island at Cairo, and another Nilometer at Elephantine Island in Aswan. The Nilometers are just what they sound like: they measured the rise of the Nile each year. One of the great historical compendia of the early 20th century is the multi-volume work by Amin Sami called Taqwim al-Nil, a book theoretically on the measurement of the Nile (the meaning of its title) which gives the level of the Nile flood for each year and describes the river and its dams, barrages and other controls in detail, but also links them to the annalistic history of Egypt's rulers. It recognizes the genuine links between political power and the Nile.

The feast of Wafa' al-Nil has all sorts of pre-Islamic and pre-Christian artifacts related to it. The Copts call it the "Finger of the Martyr" (isba‘ al-shahid) because they once tossed a saint's relic into the Nile each year to assure the flood would occur, to placate the river gods, though as good Christians they would not have put it that way. Some legends say virgins were drowned in the Nile at flood time in ancient Egypt, and Egyptians have continued to drop small paper dolls, called brides of the Nile, into the river at the feast. (Islamists do not approve of this pagan survival of course, and the practice is said to be in decline since the end of the flood.)

For an account of the festival in the early 19th century, there is the classic work by Edward William Lane, in his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, and through the generosity of Google Books you can read it online; with the Wafa' al-Nil account beginning on page 496 of the Everyman Edition at the link.

The rhythm of the flood created Egypt; the richness of the river's silt sustained its civilization. There is much fertility symbolism involved with Wafa' al-Nil, of course; the River God Hapi is depicted a male God with female breasts, and the Isis-Osiris-Horus trinity is intimately linked to the river. While Sham al-Nassim is at least arguably a survival of an Ancient Egyptian religious ceremony, there is no question about Wafa' al-Nil.

From the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under either King Scorpion or Menes (Mina) in about 3000 BC until 1964 AD, Wafa' al-Nil was not just an annual excuse for a holiday. It was the country's lifeblood. For the past 45 years, it is merely a symbolic remembrance of an annual event that will not return until, in some hopefully far distant future, the High Dam fails. But Egyptians still celebrate., though the Nile no longer floods.

Backgrounder: The Rafsanjani Factor

There are enough all-Iran all-the-time blogs these days that I haven't felt obliged to comment on every rumor that circulates. For one thing, with the normal media suppressed and the foreign press either expelled or shut up in hotels, rumors become the primary coin of the realm, and many of them are just that: rumors.

A theme of sorts has seemed to emerge over the past week, however, that may deserve comment. This is the speculation about what Iran's former President, ‘Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, is up to. Now, Rafsanjani is a very powerful man. For one thing, he is probably the richest man in the country, a wealth initially based on pistachios but over the decades since the Revolution much expanded through other ventures. He is no friend of Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who beat him to win the Presidency in 2005 when Rafsanjani tried to stage a comeback, and Ahmadinejad attacked him during the election campaign as a symbol of the corruption of the old guard.

But Rafsanjani's power extends to other things as well. During the Iran-Iraq war he served as the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, deputized to that by Khomeini himself, and still has good ties with both the regular Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Guards Corps. He serves on both the Expediency Council (the oddly named*[see end of post] but powerful institution that can mediate between the Parliament and the Council of Guardians), and — this is what is helping spur a lot of speculation — the Council of Experts. The Council of Experts has only one, or arguably two, functions: it chooses the Rahbar, the Supreme Religious Leader. And, theoretically, it could remove him.

Rafsanjani is also someone who seems to prefer functioning behind the scenes. Not too surprisingly, he has been absent from the public stage during the current troubles, though several members of his powerful Hashemi family have been arrested and later released, including his daughter Faeza Hashemi. It's no secret he doesn't like Ahmadinejad: their bad blood is public. His attitude towards the Leader is more circumspect, but it's widely believed he's very unhappy with the election results.

As a result there has been a persistent rumor that has cropped up several times over the past week, and it generally goes like this: Rafsanjani has been meeting in Qom with senior clerics and/or the Council of Experts (which is composed of senior clerics) and there may be sentiment emerging that could lead to the Experts deposing Khamene'i. Now again, these are rumors: this sort of thing doesn't get announced publicly. One version of the rumors turned up in an Al-‘Arabiya story a few days ago; another version, emphasizing that Rafsanjani is likely to bide his time and only move when ready, is summarized here. I had posted earlier about this Al Jazeera analysis early on interpreting the whole crisis as a Khamene'i/Rafsanjani rivalry. This may not be the only paradigm for understanding what is happening, but I think it's a potentially credible one.

As a little background, when the Constitution was originally written, it was assumed that only occasionally would there be consensus on a single religious leader to practice velayat-e faqih, Khomeini's doctrine of rule of the religious leader, and that more normally, a committee of senior clerics would carry out the function. Khomeini's first chosen successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, had a falling out with Khomeini, and many assumed that when the Imam died there would be a collective religious leaderhship, but the constitution was actually changed to call for a single religious leader at all times. Khamene'i, a fairly junior cleric and certainly not a Grand Ayatollah, got the post, and some eyebrows were raised because it was argued his scholarship had never risen to the level of a marja‘, a "source of emulation" in Shi‘ism. Neither Khamene'i nor Rafsanjani rank at the top of the religious hierarchy, though they dominate the Revolutionary hierarchy.

Now if any of this is true — and let me emphasize that's a very big if — it would amount to a constitutional coup, though arguably one against the constitutional coup the opposition claims has been mounted by Ahmadinejad. I'd be more inclined, I think, to buy the version that says Rafsanjani will bide his time but will continue to work against the President. But if there were to be a renewal of violence — if the present lull is just a calm before another storm — or if, as some are threatening, the government moves to arrest Mousavi, then I think some intervention might be likelier. What is clear is that Ahmadinejad and Khamene'i will have a fight on their hands if they try to marginalize Rafsanjani, who has the clout to fight back.

[*The Expediency Council is really more oddly translated than oddly named. Something like "Council for Determining the Interests of the State" would be a better translation, but "Expediency Discernment Council" got established early on. And that was before Google translator.]

Backgrounder: Google's Arabic Efforts and the Diglossia Issue

An interesting piece in yesterday's Financial Times on Google's attempts to increase Internet and web penetration in Arabic (requires a free registration to read) has set me off on a range of musings on the Arabic language and the issue known as diglossia.

First, the article itself. As the article states the challenge:

When it comes to the internet, the Arab world punches well below its weight.

Less than 1 per cent of the internet’s content is in Arabic, while the world’s approximately 370m Arabs form more than 5 per cent of the global population.

Internet usage has jumped 1,000 per cent over the past seven years in the Middle East, yet it still lags well behind other regions. Overall internet penetration has reached 10 to 12 per cent, although with the region’s large number of shared connections, up to 50 per cent of the population is estimated to have access to the net.

Among other Google innovations, they mention ta3reeb, a cool application I've played with before which lets you type Latin transliteration characters (they call them "English characters" but you know what they mean) and it then gives it to you in Arabic script. The "3" character is a popular Internet way of transliterating ‘ayn (ع), and sure enough if you use ta3reeb to convert its own name you get تعريب, just as you should. [NOTE: I've discovered these are showing up as separate letters on some browsers, though just fine on the laptop I posted from. I obviously am doing something wrong. If it doesn't look like a connected word, I'll keep working to fix it.] (On this blog I follow the scholarly convention of transliterating ‘ayn with the little single open quote you see here, but 3 is seemingly catching on. It looks a bit like a reverse of the Arabic character, using 3 for ع.) (Transliteration is a whole different issue, and I'll address it another time.)

This is great stuff. Back in the 1970s, I typed my doctoral dissertation on a manual typewriter and had to write the Arabic text by hand, though later I acquired an East German Arabic typewriter cheap. (Good thing I don't need it anymore as I imagine finding East German ribbons is hard these days.) You young whippersnappers have so many cool tools available today . . . why when I was a boy . . .

Although most Google applications, plus Facebook and other media now have Arabic language front-ends that allow people to blog, e-mail, etc. in Arabic, there are still many challenges to fuller Internet penetration. One is the simple one of illiteracy in the Arab world, which is still high by global standards, especially among women. Another is the problem the linguists call "diglossia": the fact that Modern Standard Arabic, the language of newspapers, university instruction, public speeches, etc., is actually no one's first language; Arabs grow up speaking their own local dialect (usually referred to as ‘amiyya or lahja in the East and darija in the Maghreb), which they learn at their mother's knee. They don't just have to learn to read the language they already speak: they have to learn a related but more complex and formal language that no one speaks today, or may ever have spoken as such. It's a deterrent not only to literacy but to entering the public sphere as a journalist, politician, or academic expected to perform in Modern Standard Arabic.

There are some parallels to the European situation in late medieval times when Latin was the language of scholarship, but the romance languages were the spoken language of Western Europe. The differences are considerable though, because the Qur'an's influence is so great that Modern Standard (essentially a simplified classical Arabic) enjoys enormous prestige over the spoken dialects, which lack a standard spelling system and are, in fact, usually taught using Western transliteration or the International Phonetic alphabet. The late Tawfiq al-Hakim and others have written plays in dialect, but they had to invent their own ways to spell things. (Other than some TV soaps, the one printed medium that routinely uses dialect is the political cartoon, interestingly enough.)

The Egyptian author and psychologist Mustapha Safouan, (writing in French to underscore the irony), has argued that diglossia contributes to why the Arabs are "not free," in that only the elites can handle the learned language of power. Here's an article about his work, and here's an excerpt; I haven't read his work other than what you see there. Here's a more scholarly treatment of the subject of diglossia.

Which allows me to mention that MEI's Language department plans to hold a conference on diglossia this fall. I'll post more as the schedule firms up.

I was fortunate to learn a spoken dialect (Egyptian) quite early on, and am an enthusiast for learning the language people actually speak to each other, though a serious student must also know the literary language, of course, and I also had to learn the classical/Qur'anic form, though I'm rusty in it now. When I know how to say something in the local dialect, I do so; when I don't, I'll use Egyptian first, before Modern Standard, because Egyptian films and TV, and Egyptian expatriate workers, mean most Arabs have heard Egyptian. I think everyone learning Arabic should learn both a spoken dialect and the literary language, but that view is not universal. There is an added problem here: it's often hard for Westerners to learn a specific dialect because the Arabic teachers often disdain teaching them: I've had Egyptians tell me that Egyptian dialect is not Arabic, it's just "slang." If so then most people speak "slang" at their mother's knee. If you speak only Modern Standard you're going to have trouble conversing with taxi drivers, doormen, and others who may not be the most literate.

And I have a "flipside" anecdote as well: while many Egyptians are startled when an American or other Westerner uses colloquial instead of Modern Standard to them, and they disdain (officially, while speaking it) the dialect, I once took a newly-arrived scholar in Egypt out for a drink. The waiter, a galabiyya-clad baladi sort who looked remarkably like the mummy of Ramses II, knew me well, and I introduced him to the newcomer, a Ph.D. who hadn't spent much real time in the region. I told the waiter, "my friend can read Arabic but doesn't speak it." The response from the waiter, who probably had the reverse problem, was mish ma‘'ul ("unbelievable": itself colloquial: ma‘'ul is Classical ma‘qul), since to him the literary language was a mystery but the spoken language a necessity of daily life.

For non-Arabist readers, it's hard to explain how much the "dialects" differ, but it can be as much as between Romance languages (and I don't mean Spanish and Catalan here; I mean Spanish and French.) But let me try to offer some examples.

I remember many years ago standing in line at a newspaper kiosk somewhere in Morocco. A Saudi — or other Gulf Arab in full Gulf regalia — was ahead of me in line. He asked the Moroccan how much something was, and the Moroccan replied "kham-SIH," to which the Saudi responded "Khamsin?" ("Five," and "fifty," respectively. The Saudi would say "five" as KHAM-sa.) Since even Arabs can't always understand each other's dialect, it's hardly surprising diglossia is a problem for them and for foreigners learning the language. (Morocco and Algeria long have been wrestling with a different problem: the generation who grew up under French colonial rule spoke only the local dialect and a bit of French: only the post-colonial generation grew up with a capacity for Modern Standard. Time and age are slowly eliminating this problem.) [UPDATE: Check out the first comment below, from the Algerian Blogger The Moor Next Door, on the contemporary Algerian situation].

Consider something so simple as asking, "How are you?" In Modern Standard Arabic, which no one would ever actually use except in an international meeting or a language course, it would be Kayfu haluka? An Egyptian will say, izzayak?; a Lebanese Kifak? or Kifak inta? or Kif Halak?; an Iraqi may ask Shlonak? and a Moroccan La Bas? (Forms will differ if addressing a female or a group: these are singular male forms.) The answer could be kwayyis, zayn, mnih, tayyib (that one is cognate with Hebrew tov), or in Morocco, La Bas again, not to mention lots of other possibilities. Practically every dialect has a different way of saying "what do you want?" as well, and even such a seemingly essential word as "now" can vary from dilwaqti to hala to the classical al-an. The differences are actually greater for the simplest greetings and daily conversation; when one is talking about computers or political economy, the literary language naturally gives a certain unity, but when one is talking about ordering a meal, the words may differ. Even so basic a vocabulary word as bread (khubz versus ‘aysh) or milk (halib or laban, with the added complication that in halib countries laban means yogurt) varies.

"Isn't it so?" that essential question that French handles with n'est-çe pas?, Spanish with ¿Verdad?, German with Nicht Wahr?, and American English with "idnit?," would be a laysa ka-dhalika? in Classical Arabic, but mush kida? in Egyptian, mush hayk? or mu hayk? in Levantine, and so on.

One of the reasons there are so many ways of tranlsliterating Mu‘ammar al-Qadhafi's name is that Libya itself straddles a dialect line, with eastern Libya (Benghazi and surroundings) tending towards Egyptian, western Libya (Tripoli) tending towards Tunis and the Maghreb, and the area in between (where Qadhafi comes from) tending towards a Saharan dialect. So it can be pronounced as Gazafi or Qaddafi or several other things even in his own country. (Many of us call the cultural line that divides Libya the "couscous line," since it's also where the standard grain changes from bulghur wheat to couscous.)

In the Levant and elsewhere, the cities' dialects are similar to each other, but the rural and bedouin dialects are quite different. Someone from ‘Amman and someone from Damascus will sound pretty similar, but a tribesman in a black tent in between them will speak something quite distinct.

I imagine this subject will come up again. It's one that some Arab scholars (such as Safouan cited above) are becoming more cognizant of. It isn't limited to Arabic — diglossia is also a problem for Greeks, Chinese, and a number of other peoples — but it's one that isn't usually well appreciated by Westerners who don't know Arabic, in part because Arabs themselves don't talk about it that much.

Backgrounder: Some Thoughts on Iraqi and Iranian Shi‘ism and Misperceptions

The attacks on the shrine of Al-Qazimiyya in Baghdad on Friday and on other Shi‘ite targets on Thursday and Friday threaten a renewal of sectarian conflict, as I noted at the time, but also spur me to talk a little about the role of Shi‘ism in Iraq, which is often misunderstood.

One fundamental misunderstanding is the idea that Shi‘ism is somehow intrinsically "Persian," because of its contemporary association with Iran. Misunderstood by whom? I can think of at least three major groups:

1. Westerners who know enough about Islam to understand the differences between Sunni and Shi‘a, but who have a fairly superficial knowledge;
2. Most Sunni Arabs, at least those from countries without a large Shi‘ite population;
   
3. Most Iranian Shi‘a.

The last one may be a bit unfair, and the second needs to be qualified, as it is above, to note that Sunnis from countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain or Kuwait usually have a more sophisticated understanding of Shi‘ism. But this is not just a rhetorical point: Shi‘ites in largely Sunni countries are sometimes portrayed as a pro-Iranian fifth column because of this misperception.

Shi‘ism was, in its origins, as Arab as Sunnism. It was born in Medina, nurtured in Kufa and had its great martyrdom on the field of Karbala'.

Of the 12 Imams of Twelver Shi‘ism, only one, ‘Ali al-Rida (‘Ali Reza), the eighth Imam, is buried in Iran (at Mashhad). The twelfth Imam disappeared in Iraq, and the other ten Imams are buried in Saudi Arabia or Iraq: ‘Ali, the central figure of Shi‘ism, is buried in Najaf, Iraq; Hasan, the second Imam, is buried in Medina; Husayn, the third, is buried where he fell at Karbala' in Iraq; the fourth, ‘Ali Zayn al-‘Abidin, is buried in Medina, while the fifth and sixth are also buried in Medina; the seventh and ninth are buried at the Qazimiyya shrine attacked last Friday in Baghdad; the tenth and eleventh are buried in the al-‘Askari shrine in Samarra' (blown up in 2006, starting a wave of sectarian killing); the twelfth disappeared in Samarra' as well.

The reason there were so many Iranian pilgrims killed in the attacks in Iraq (leading Iran to blame them on the US and Israel, though clearly Sunni radicals were responsible) is that most of the major shrine mosques of Shi‘ism are in Iraq, final resting place for six of the twelve Imams.

The close identification of Iran with Shi‘ism really only dates from the 16th century, when Safavid Iran officially adopted Twelver Shi‘ism as its faith. While there had been earlier Shi‘ite dynasties there, Shi‘ite dynasties of one kind or another flourished in many Arab countries. Cairo's ancient Fatimid gate, the Bab al-Nasr, even has an inscription reading "There is no God gut God; Muhammad is the Prophet of God and ‘Ali is the wali of God," the Shi‘ite formulation of the Muslim shahada. (The Fatimids, though, were Isma‘ili Shi‘ites, not the Twelver variety found in Iran, Iraq, etc.)

Until Saddam Hussein began really cracking down on the Shi‘ite clerical establishment during the Iran-Iraq war (again, the suspicion of Shi‘ites as a fifth column), Najaf was the most important scholarly center for Shi‘ite theology; it was where the Ayatollah Khomeni himself taught in exile from Iran. With the Iranian Revolution and Saddam's crackdowns, the importance of Najaf declined and Qom, Mashhad, and other Iranian clerical schools became suppliers of clerics to Shi‘ites in other countries; with that came some genuine Iranian influence (such as with Hizbullah in Lebanon), but most Arab Shi‘ites are Arabic-speakers, not Persian-speakers.

As I said though, many Sunnis assume Arab Shi‘ites are somehow more Persian than they are, and many Iranians are surprised when Arab Shi‘ites do not avidly follow the Iranian model of clerical rule. Iraqi Shi‘ites rightly and proudly consider their country the seedbed of Shi‘ite Islam.

Backgrounder: Egypt's 6 April Movement

Now that we've reached the beginning of April, the threat of a major general strike in Egypt on April 6 looms nearer. This gives me an opportunity to mention one of the most vigorous online opposition groups to emerge in the age of Web 2.0, the Facebook group known as the 6 April Movement. Begun last year as a youth movement formed to support the striking workers at the big textile complex in Al-Mahallat al-Kubra, the movement has been harassed and its leaders arrested more than once, but it has blossomed into an opposition group primarily communicating through social networking, particularly its eponymous Facebook group, which currently has some 73,000 members (and is currently reporting a wave of arrests). I've commented previously on Web 2.0 and Authoritarianiam, after Egyptian police were attacked by Armed Forces cadets and video was up quickly even though there was a ban on all reporting of the incident. I've also noted that some young, web-savvy Egyptians have even found ways to make fun of the security police on Twitter.

Despite the fact that Reporters Without Borders recently listed Egypt as one of the top twelve "Internet Enemies" in the world — (my report here, the full Reporters Without Borders report here, with the section on Egypt on pages 11 and 12) — the 6 April movement has continued to grow. From the Reporters Without Borders report (punctuation in original):

"Unlike its Saudi and Syrian neighbours, Egypt is a country in which freedom of speech does still exist. An independent press has developed and criticism is permitted.

"More than a space for expression, the Web has become a space for action, particularly through social networks, which little by little have started taking on the role of trade unions, which were banned under the state of emergency law. In force since 1981, the emergency legislation banned trade unions from political activities. But the most active Internet users call virtual rallies that can give rise to genuine political demands. One group, created on the social networking site Facebook, and boasting more than 65,000 members, [Today it's showing 73,000 — MCD] was used to channel protests in April 2008. Calling on Egyptians to “stay home”, it contributed to a general strike and one of the largest expressions of unrest in several years. Since no law regulated this space, the interior ministry in 2002 set up a department responsible for investigating online offences. As a result, security forces arrested around 100 bloggers in 2008 for “damaging national security”.

"One of the members of the 6 April Facebook group, Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed spent two weeks in prison for being a member of this group. Its creator, Ahmed Maher, a 27-year-old engineer, was detained and beaten for 12 hours by police in Mahalla, north of Cairo, who wanted to identify the rest of the group. Shortly afterwards, another blogger, Kareem El-Beheiri, spent 73 days in custody in connection with articles posted on his blog (http://egyworkers.blogspot.com/), dealing with workers’ rights and official corruption."

And it gained a fair amount of attention worldwide. Among background reports on the movement, see this New York Times Magazine article; a writeup on Wikipedia; a feature story from Wired; and a page on the movement's website explaining themselves in English. Another mostly English website is here, but hasn't been updated since January. Those who read Arabic can consult the Facebook page, this Arabic website and its "About" page, and links from there. The genius of the blogging medium is that I can point my readers to lots of background information without having to repeat the information here: click away.

The efforts to pull off a general strike last year were met with heavy-handed security presence, a sealing off of the textile plants at Mahalla from Cairo to prevent protestors from the capital reaching them, and a heavy presence throughout Cairo as well; but Twitter and YouTube and other such services soon had plenty of firsthand accounts of events. The security forces prevented an explosion, but the social networking sites made sure the opposition knew what was going on.

The 6 April Movement has been calling for a new general strike and "Day of Anger" this April 6. You can even download your anti-Mubarak posters from Flickr. So expect a reasonably tense day of protests next Monday.

The future of social networking sites as hotbeds of protest or even revolution remains to be proven, and certainly the North Koreas and Burmas of the world can shut out the sites by keeping computers and Internet access limited, but countries that are part of the global information system will find it harder and harder to suppress the use of social networking.

The interesting thing is that until quite recently, Facebook did not have an Arabic-language "front end"; there were plenty of Arabic pages and Arabic groups, but one still had to have some knowledge of a Western language to navigate the buttons, etc. Last month it became available in a fully Arabic format. Perhaps to show evenhandedness, a Hebrew front end was launched at the same time. (To switch to either, in Facebook one goes to "Settings," then "My Account," then you have to scroll down as the languages are listed in their own alphabets after the Roman-Alphabet languages. Except for East Asian languages which are in the proper alphabetical place. Consistency is hard in cross-language matters.)

And I just followed some links and discovered this Arabic-language website explaining Web 2.0 step by step and service by service: a sort of introduction for the masses; it seems to have been around since January.

Saint Patrick's Day Special: Patrick and the Irish-Egyptian Connection

Happy Saint Patrick's Day everyone, an appropriate wish here since the Irish Church Patrick founded seems to have been the religious and monastic daughter of the Church of Egypt (the Coptic Church).

Ah, you're thinking: he's really reaching this time, trying to find a way to work Saint Patrick's Day into a blog on the Middle East. My name is, after all, Michael Collins Dunn, and I'm therefore rarely assumed to have Greek or Japanese ancestry, but actually it's not a reach to find a reason for a Saint Patrick's Day post on the Middle East, since Irish Christianity has ancient, if somewhat hard to document, links to Egypt, and Saint Patrick himself may have studied alongside Egyptian monks. They say everyone's Irish on Saint Patrick's Day, but I'm going to explore how Egypt and Ireland have links dating back to the earliest days of Christianity in the West. And while some of the evidence is a bit hazy, none of this is crackpot theory. I warned you that I started out as a medievalist, and still have flashbacks sometimes. Forgive me if I can't footnote every statement here.

Anyone who has ever seen one of the standing crosses that are a familiar feature of medieval and post-classical Irish Christian sites will know what the Celtic Cross or "wheel cross" looks like; anyone who has ever set foot in a Coptic Church will know what a Coptic Cross looks like; unfortunately the illustrations at Wikipedia's Coptic Cross site don't include a precise example, but the wheel cross is common among Egyptian Copts as well, and can be seen on many churches in Egypt today. The wheel cross is not an obvious derivation of the Christian cross, and many think it is an adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Ankh symbol, so what is it doing on those Irish standing cross towers?

Sure, iconography can repeat itself: both Indians in India and Native Americans used the swastika long before Hitler did, and so on. But the Celtic Cross/Coptic Cross similarity is not the only link. There is pretty decent evidence that Christianity in Ireland, if not immediately derived from Egypt, was closely linked to the Egyptian Church. An ancient litany in the Book of Leinster prays for "the seven holy Egyptian monks, who lie in Desert Ulaidh." The place mentioned is somewhere in Ulster, with many placing it in Antrim: perhaps suggestively, "desert" or "disert" in Irish place names meant a place where monks lived apart from the world as anchorites, modeled on the Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria. "Ulaidh" just means Ulster.Who these seven holy Egyptian monks were is unclear, but they died in Ulster and were sufficiently venerated to be remembered in a litany.

It is often said (I haven't got a firm cite though) that holy water bottles found in Ireland carry the twin-camel emblem associated with the Shrine of Saint Menas west of Alexandria. (Menas was one of the major patron saints of Egypt, his shrine a major pilgrimage center, and his cult extended far beyond Egypt.) If so, I don't think the Irish were using local camels as models. There are also said to be tombstones in old Irish ogham writing that refer to the burial of so-and-so "the Egyptian." The earliest Irish forms of monasticism included anchorite communities who withdrew from the world and venerated the tradition of Saint Anthony of Egypt; the early Irish church used an Eastern rather than a Western date for Easter; some aspects of ancient Celtic liturgy resemble eastern liturgies, and there are archaeological evidences (mostly probable Egyptian pottery in Ireland and British — Cornish? — tin in Egypt) of trade between Egypt and the British Isles. "Double" monasteries — where a monastery for monks and a convent for nuns were adjacent — first appeared in Egypt, and were common in Ireland. The evidence may be circumstantial, but there's a lot of it.

I've also heard (but can't Google up the reference just now) that somewhere in the Irish monastic literature there is a pilgrimage guide to the Desert of Scetis, the Egyptian desert region of Coptic monasteries today known as the Wadi Natrun. That, along with the Saint Menas holy water bottles, suggests Irish monks made pilgrimages all the way to Egypt. And obviously those seven holy Egyptian monks in Ulster made the trip the other way.

But do these connections between Egypt and Ireland, tenuous as they may seem, really connect in any way with Saint Patrick, justifying this as a Saint Patrick's Day post? I'm glad you asked.

Saint Patrick's life has been much encrusted with mythology (the snakes, the Shamrock, etc.) and all we can really say for certain is what he himself told us in his autobiographical Confession: he was born somewhere on the western coast of Roman Britain (so the Apostle of Ireland was British, but before there was such a thing as an Englishman since the Angles and Saxons were not yet present: he probably spoke old British, an ancestor of Welsh), was kidnapped and enslaved in Ireland, later escaped and joined the church, and returned as the apostle of Ireland. But very ancient biographies (though not his own autobiographical account, one of the few vernacular Latin works to survive from the period) say that he studied for the priesthood at the Abbey of Lérins off the south coast of France. This was a Mediterranean island abbey much influenced by the church of Egypt and the rule of Saint Anthony of Egypt, and according to some accounts, many Coptic monks were present there. There's no certainty that Patrick ever studied there, but then, he studied somewhere, and this is the only place claimed by the early accounts. So Patrick himself may have had direct links to the Egyptian church. (And remember that until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD — by which time Patrick was already a bishop in Ireland, himself dying in 461 by most accounts — the Coptic Church and the rest of Christendom were still in full communion.)

There may be even more to it than this. A few linguists believe that the Celtic languages, though Indo-European in their basic structure, have a "substratum" of some previous linguistic element that is not found in other Indo-European languages, only in Celtic, but some aspects of which are also found in Afro-Asiatic languages, particularly Berber and Egyptian (of which Coptic, of course, is the late form). I'm certainly not qualified to judge such linguistically abstruse theories, and know neither Irish nor Coptic, and they seem to have little to do with the question of Egyptian-Irish Christian influences. But it helps remind us that the ancient world was more united by the sea than divided by it, and that the Roman Empire stretched from the British Isles to Mesopotamia.

While the links are tenuous, they appear to be real. Irish historians accept some level of Egyptian influence in the Christianization of Ireland, and Coptic historians love to dwell on the subject, since it lets them claim a link to the earliest high Christian art and culture of Western Europe. If Irish monasticism preserved the heritage of the ancient world and rebuilt the West after the barbarian invasions, and if the Irish church is a daughter of the Egyptian church, then tbe West owes more to Egypt than most would imagine.

I first heard a discussion of this in a presentation by the Coptic Church's bishop in charge of ecumenical outreach, Bishop Samweel, back in the early 1970s. I later ran across several references to it in British orientalist literature (Stanley Lane-Poole seems to have been particularly fond of it, and I think he places Desert Ulaidh near Carrickfergus), and continue to find it intriguing, if never quite clear enough to nail down precisely.

Bishop Samweel, mentioned above, met an unfortunate end by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, by the way. When Anwar Sadat deposed Coptic Pope Shenouda III in 1981, Sadat named Samweel — considered one of the Coptic church's leading figures after Shenouda — head of a council of bishops to run the church while the Patriarch was in exile. Due to this appointment, Bishop Samweel was seated on the reviewing stand behind Sadat on October 6, 1981, and died in the volley of fire which killed the President.

Like much of the earliest history of any culture or country, the links between Irish and Egyptian Christianity are fairly well-delineated but their precise origins are untraceable, but tantalizing. Since this is little known to most Westerners or even to Egyptians who aren't Copts, it seemed appropriate to mention it on Saint Patrick's Day.

Erin go bragh. Misr Umm al-Dunya.

Backgrounder: Reflections on the Diversity of Christian Minorities in the Middle East

While browsing around for blogging subjects I came across this account of the installation of the new Syrian Catholic Patriarch in Beirut earlier this week, and it started me reflecting, first, on just how varied and complex the Christian churches in the Middle East are, and, secondly, how little known they are to Westerners, even those who spend a lot of time deploring the fate of Christians in some Middle Eastern countries. I'm pretty sure that most Catholics in the West aren't even aware there is a Syrian Catholic Church, let alone who the Patriarch is (though this one is the former Syrian Catholic Archbishop of North America). (And as a footnote, the Church's name in English is now officially the Syriac Catholic Church, though this Lebanese report uses the earlier form, which was common till just the past few years. I think the church wanted to play down the equation of "Syrian" with the modern state of that name, though they only changed the English, not the Arabic or Syriac names.)

Christianity, of course, is not a Western faith by origin, but a Middle Eastern one. Palestinian Christians often joke about being asked by well-meaning Western Christians, "which missionary group converted your people?" (to which the answer is, of course, Jesus and the 12 Apostles). Middle Eastern Christian populations are in decline, as I think is well known; the hardships of the West Bank and the hostility of political Islamists have led many Palestinian Christians to emigrate; towns like Bethlehem, which had been Christian since, rather literally, the beginning are now majority Muslim. Assyrian and Chaldean Christians in Iraq have also been fleeing in the face of violence. But while there are certainly pressures coming from radical Islamist movements in some countries, the sheer diversity of the Christian communities in the Middle East, and the real if not always visible role Christians play in a number of countries is often unappreciated by Westerners.

I'm reminded of a story that a former chief Arabic translator for the US Department of State liked to tell back in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a Syrian Assyrian -- a Syrian national by origin and a member of the Assyrian Church of the East from the Dayr al-Zor area -- and since he traveled with the Secretary of State when going to the region, he was well known to reporters traveling along. When Western news media were trying to get up to speed on the factions in Lebanon and the Sunni-Shi'a split during the Iranian Revolution and after, they would ask, "are you Sunni or Shi'a?" and he'd say, "neither, I'm a Christian," The Lebanese war being in high gear at the time the reporters would often follow with, "so you're a Maronite?", and when informed that no, he was an Assyrian, the teaching moment would arrive . . .

As an example of this diversity: Wikipedia says that there are currently five churches whose heads use the title Patriarch of Antioch. (Three are based in Damascus, one in Beirut and one in Bkerke, Lebanon: in other words, none of them in ancient Antioch, current Antakya in Turkey.) The Patriarchs of Antioch represent the Eastern (Antiochene) Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox (sometimes called "Jacobite"), Maronite, Melkite, and Syriac Catholic Churches. The last three are all in union with Rome, the Antiochenes are "Eastern Orthodox" in communion with Constantinople, and the Syriac Orthodox are Oriental Orthodox in loose communion with the Copts and Armenians. There are at least three Patriarchs of Alexandria (Coptic, Eastern Orthodox, and Catholic). Nor do these exhaust all the Christian communities of the Middle East: Iraq has the Assyrian Church of the East and the Chaldean Catholics; Lebanon, Palestine and other areas with an Armenian diaspora have the Armenian Apostolic Church (two main branches) and the Armenian Catholics, and there are significant indigenous Protestant communities in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere. The leading historian of modern Lebanon, Kamal Salibi, is a Presbyterian.

For all the problems that Christian minorities face, ironically one reason for this diversity is that Islam not only tolerated Christianity but did not tolerate the internal Christian feuding which elsewhere tended to eliminate dissident sects: as Rome and Constantinople consolidated their religious authority, Catholicism and Orthodoxy became uniform in the Western and Eastern Roman Empires and their successor states, but in the Islamic world the old "heresies" (in the eyes of Rome and Constantinople) endured. The Copts, Armenians, Syriac Orthodox and Ethiopian/Eritrean churches are the heirs of what the Western world called "Monophysite" churches (though they reject that term themselves), and are often referred to today as "Oriental Orthodox" in distinction from "Eastern Orthodox," those in communion with Constantinople; the Church of the East and the Malankara Church of India are those once dismissed in the West as "Nestorians," another term rejected by those to whom it is applied by others, the Church of the old Persian Empire that once evangelized as far afield as India and China. Some offshoots of many of these churches have split and given their allegiance to Rome, though they retain their Eastern Orthodox or "Oriental Orthodox" liturgies and married priesthoods; they are the Eastern Catholics, or the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church. (The Maronites of Lebanon are the one Eastern Catholic rite that has no Orthodox or Oriental analogue.) There are Eastern Orthodox churches in communion with Constantinople (the city may be Istanbul but the Ecumenical Patriarch is still "of Constantinople") in most Middle Eastern countries as well.

Some of the Christian minorities of the Middle East are waning fast, due to the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq, but the Maronites remain a major force in Lebanon (the President and Army Commander must both be Maronites, and I've already noted the political clout of the Patriarch). The Copts are a significant population in Egypt, though the exact percentage is itself a matter of controversy, and have produced some well-known figures, Boutros Boutros-Ghali most prominent among them.

In the more nationalist/secularist states and movements, Christians have been prominent, often seeing Arab nationalism as a way to find a role for Christians in a majority-Islamic polity. For years one of the highest-ranking Christians in the Middle East was Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, a Chaldean by upbringing though not, I somehow suspect, a devout churchgoer. One of the co-founders of the Ba'ath Party, Michel Aflaq, was Greek Orthodox, as were such other radical nationalist leaders as Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) founder Antoun Saada and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) leaders George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh. (Saada certainly and Aflaq arguably were virtual fascists and Habash and Hawatmeh Marxists, so the common ground is secular radicalism, not ideology.)

Sometimes prominent Middle Eastern Christians deliberately conceal their origins to succeed in a Muslim environment. Tariq Aziz was born Mikhail Yuhanna. The actor Omar Sharif was born Michel Chalhoub of Maronite parents from Egypt's then-prominent Lebanese community (though he did convert to Islam when he married). For many years I was a friend -- I thought a pretty good friend -- of the late Hamdi Fuad, Washington Bureau Chief for Egypt's Al-Ahram for a great many years. Yet it was not until his obituary appeared that I learned his real name was Ramses something, born a Copt; his funeral was in the same Washington church in which I was married. None of these men chose an unambiguously Muslim name like Muhammad Ahmad; they were not so much hiding their Christian roots as obscuring them a bit for professional reasons. I know of one or two other cases like this, but they involve people still working and I see no reason to "out" them: their friends know their backgrounds anyway.

Often we only hear of Middle Eastern Christians when there are clashes with their Muslim neighbors or when some outrage occurs; I thought it worth noting the diversity and antiquity of these ancient churches because they are in fact a real presence in the region. And there is more interaction than one might think: in some localities local Muslims come out for certain Christian saints' days and Christians may occasionally venerate the tomb of a Sufi sheikh; at the level of popular practice there is often less division than at the level of official ideology.

Backgrounder: Iran-Bahrain Flap Threatens Gas Deal

Iran is trying to defuse a sudden storm in the Arab Gulf states over a prominent Iranian cleric's remarks implying Bahrain had been Iranian territory, after Bahrain put a major natural gas deal on hold over the issue. Ayatollah 'Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri reportedly made remarks referring to Bahrain as having formerly been Iran's 14th province, seemingly reviving long-latent claims to the island.

Such assertions are made from time to time by Iranian nationalists; in 2007 an editorial in the newspaper Kayhan made the claim and provoked demonstrations in Bahrain. But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a visit to Bahrain later that year and the gas deal the Bahrainis have now put on hold was the result of that rapprochement; now it may be a victim of a renewed Iranian provocation. This time the remarks were attributed to Nateq-Nuri, former Speaker of Parliament, former Presidential candidate (defeated by Mohammad Khatami), and current member of the powerful Expediency Council. Nateq-Nuri is a senior figure from the conservative wing of the clerical establishment; Bahrain has won support from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the present dispute.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has reasserted that Iran has no territorial claims on its neighbors and recognizes Bahraini sovereignty; it claimed Nateq-Nuri's remarks had been misrepresented and he was not talking about Bahrain, though as quoted he certainly seemed to be.

Various accounts of the flap are here, here, here and here. It is perhaps worth filling in the background a bit, since as noted, this is not the first eruption of Iranian claims against Bahrain.

Bahrain has had human settlement since prehistoric times and was probably the Dilmun referred to in Sumerian texts; in short the islands have been at the center of trade and politics since earliest times and, not surprisingly, at one time or another Bahrain has been ruled by many different hands, including the Portugese, Omanis, and British. During the 17th and 18th centuries the islands were generally under Iranian suzerainty, often ruled indirectly through Hormuz or Bushire. Bahrainis generally trace their throwing off Iranian rule to 1783. In the 19th century the islands, already ruled by the Al Khalifa who are still the ruling family, came under British protection.

Bahrain has a Persian-speaking merchant minority, but the majority of the population speak Arabic; the majority are, however, Shi'ite, though the ruling family is Sunni. Iranian nationalists sometimes use the Shi'ite majority as a reason to claim that the Bahrainis are really Iranians, despite their Arabic speech.

In 1970, as Bahrain approached independence with the withdrawal of Britain from east of Suez by 1971, the late Shah of Iran asserted a claim to Bahrain and to other islands in the Gulf, including Abu Musa and the Tunbs, also claimed by Sharja (Abu Musa) and Ras al-Khaima (the Tunbs), two of the later constituents of the UAE. In complex negotiations Iran cut a deal with the British over Abu Musa and the Tunbs and promised it would "not pursue" its claims to Bahrain. In a referendum, Bahrain chose independence and has asserted its Arab identity through membership in pan-Arab organiztions.

After 1971 the Shah dropped his "pursuit" of the claim, but since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic has alternated between expressing a claim and recognizing Bahrain's sovereignty. Ahmadinejad's 2007 visit to Bahrain was seen as a means of burying the hatchet and assuaging hurt feelings from the Kayhan editorial that same year. But the old wound has been reopened with Nateq-Nuri's attributed remarks.

The Foreign Ministry's scramble to defuse the situation -- Iran's current economy cannot afford scuttling the natural gas deal -- suggests that this will prove a momentary diversion rather than lead to a new crisis, but it also shows how sensitive the Arab Gulf states are towards Iranian power at the moment, in the shadow of Iran's nuclear program.

The Gulf is riddled with latent territorial disputes, a handful of which have been resolved in recent years (the Hawar Islands dispute between Qatar and Bahrain by the World Court; the Saudi-Yemeni border by bilateral negotiation) but others still linger, including the aforementioned Abu Musa and the Tunbs, occupied by Iran but claimed by the UAE. Iraq's intermittent claims to all of Kuwait, of course, led to the invasion of 1990 and the war of 1991.

Backgrounder: Israel and Electoral Reform

Since during the elections I commented several times on the Israeli electoral system and its distorted results, I thought this commentary in Haaretz made some of the points I have made. The problem is it is easy to editorialize on the need for a change in the system -- in the past Labor and Likud, and today Likud and Kadima, both say they want change, because of course the big parties want to be less beholden to the extortion of the small parties when it comes to coalition building.

But expressing the desirability of reform is one thing. How do you implement it? And here the answer seems to be, you can't get there from here. The author of the linked piece, Nehemia Shtrasler, notes that even David Ben-Gurion himself, by the time he realized the problems in the system, couldn't bring about change. And no one since Ben-Gurion has had his clout, and of course, in the end, even Ben-Gurion found himself at odds with the system and retreating, De Gaulle-like, to his farm. The problem remains that since any party that wins 2% of the vote can win seats in the Knesset, the incentive is there to create small, special-interest parties like the Green Leaf Graduates/Holocaust Survivors Party in this election, though that marijuana legalization/holocaust survivor rights party did not make the 2% cutoff. And from the beginning, the Orthodox religious parties have been a bloc sufficiently large to demand a seat in coalitions and thus to protect their own interests.

Later this week, the political parties will inform President Peres of their recommendations for who should be entrusted with the first chance to form a coalition. While Netanyahu is still clearly in the stronger position, Livni is stubbornly insisting she won, and seems to be trying to cajole Lieberman with promises of civil marriage and other issues. But Labor is saying that if Kadima makes a deal with Lieberman, it won't endorse Livni -- but then Ehud Barak already said Labor intended to rebuild from opposition, not from within the coalition.

The dealing and demands that have taken place over the past week reinforce the problems inherent in the electoral system. Such a fragmented system may work in, say, Belgium or the Netherlands, where small parties and broad coaltiions are traditional, but it doesn't work very well in a country as polarized, and as much in perpetual confrontation with its neighbors, as Israel.

Israel's strongest supporters always claim that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. I hafve to wonder if about now, Tzipi Livni is wondering, is this supposed to be a good thing?

A few years ago, you may recall, Israel went to direct election of the Prime Minister. This was supposed to be an attempt to create something more like a US-style directly-elected executive. But the directly-elected Prime Minister still had to create a Cabinet within a certain amount of time, and rejection of his or her cabinet would amount to a vote of no-confidence. So, while the choice of Prime Minister was directly made by voters, he/she still had to cut deals, and was still subject to extortionate demands, with the various parties and factions.

The direct election system worked for Netanyahu, who won the 1996 elections in something of a surprise. In 1999, Ehud Barak beat him in the second direct election, but his Labor-led three-party bloc (called One Israel) won only 26 seats, at that time the lowest number ever won by a winning party, suggesting that the result of direct elections was actually to further fragment the Knesset. Apparently, voters who were now free to vote separately for Prime Minister (one of the two big parties) did not have to vote for Likud or Labor to vote for Netanyahu or Barak, so now they voted for even more fissiparous special-interest parties.

In 2001, after the failure of Camp David II and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, for the first time elections were held only for Prime Minister, with no Knesset elections. Ariel Sharon beat Barak comfortably, but since Labor outnumbered Likud in the Knesset, he had to form a national unity government. Clearly, the direct election experiment had backfired in several ways, and one of them was that increased, rather than decreased, the factional fragmentation of the Knesset. The major parties voted to return to the earlier system, and the 2003 elections returned to the pre-1996 system, with a few minor tweaks.

So Israel's one major experiment with electoral reform in recent years suggests that the law of unintended consequences still applies: the results were the opposite of those intended. So long as the smaller parties still have an effective veto over government formation, the system is hard to reform. And so long as they have that veto, they are unlikely to give it up.,

Backgrounder: Playing the Numbers Game

I'm doing what I suspect most Israelis are doing right now, playing with the preliminary numbers and trying to figure out what a coalition would look like. Bearing in mind that the prelminary results are from exit polling and that since military encampments aren't exit-polled, the soldiers' vote might alter the trends slightly, let's assume for argument's sake that these exit poll numbers hold more or less true.

One of the pleasures of editing The Middle East Journal has been working working with Don Peretz, who has been analyzing Israeli elections for us since the 1950s and is the author of the classic The Government and Politics of Israel. Don is retired now and doesn't use E-mail much, so I haven't had a chance to talk to him about these results. But maybe reading Don's work all these years has rubbed off on me a little, and I did used to analyze Israeli politics in my newsletter, The Estimate.

The first observation is that the body politic is increasingly fragmented. This has been the trend for some time. Labor no longer dominates the left-center (or much of anything else) and Likud no longer has a monopoly on the secular right. Kadima has managed to hold a narrow lead as the largest party, but Kadima is something of a hybrid itself, made up of ex-Likud and ex-Labor figures, some quite far to the right. While it is seeking to be the long-predicted, but very slow to emerge, centrist party in Israel, it was really created as a vehicle for Ariel Sharon, and with Sharon in a coma the past three years, the party is still struggling for an identity.

The emergence of Yisrael Beitenu (Israel is Our Home) has raised alarm, especially on the left and among Israeli Arabs. Partly this is due to the sometimes outrageous comments made by its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldova-born immigrant who has called Israeli Arabs a fifth column. It started as a party for immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union, but its appeal has grown. I suspect one reason for Yisrael Beitenu's strength as well may be that many Israelis on the right would vote Likud but just don't like Binyamin Netanyahu. He has a reputation for abrasiveness.

As I noted, Lieberman's party started out as a party of ex-Soviet immigrants. Israel's electoral system favors the emergence of small parties with highly specialized agendas, such as a party of pensioners or, my personal favorite this time, a party of proponents of marijuana legalization and Holocaust survivors. (Don't believe me? Follow the link.) This list of Israeli parties at Wikipedia gives a sense of the chaotic scene.

The reason for the proliferation of small parties, by the way, is that the threshold to enter the Knesset is only 2% of the vote, which I believe may be the lowest of any democracy of any reasonable size. I think maybe the Netherlands has a similar threshold, but 5% or more is more common in proportional-representation systems. When I was first getting acquainted with Israel back in the 1980s, I naively asked an Israeli colleague, a Laborite who complained about the power of the religious parties, why they didn't just raise the threshold and thus have fewer fringe parties. He was appropriately bemused by the question. The answer, of course, is that the fringe parties control the swing votes necessary to change the electoral law, and they like things just as they are, thank you very much. All the major parties criticize the present system from time to time, especially because the smaller parties and the religious bloc in particular bargain hard and make many demands before joining a coalition. Both Livni and her Kadima ally, Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik, have called for reforming the political system just today. Don't hold your breath: the little parties will be presenting their demands in the next days and weeks.

So, back to the numbers game. Both Tzipi Livni and Netanyahu have said they would like to form a unity government or at least a centrist coalition including Likud, Labor, Kadima and Yisrael Beitenu, though in the latter case there is the question of what post Lieberman could hold without international alarm: Netanyahu has already promised not to to make Lieberman Defense Minister. It's difficult to imagine such an undiplomatic figure in the Foreign Ministry. But he heads the third biggest party, and if it joins the coalition he's going to want a major job.

The first question is who will be given the first chance to form a government. In an earlier post today I linked to a Jerusalem Post article on the dilemma facing Israeli President Shimon Peres. The post of President of Israel is mostly a ceremonial one, but it does have one major prerogative: entrusting a potential Prime Minister to form a goverment. Traditionally, the head of the party that wins the most seats gets the first chance. But the President is supposed to consult with the various parties in the Knesset and then entrust the task to the person with the likeliest chance of forming a coalition, and Likud is already insisting that Netanyahu has the math on his side.

It is indeed much easier to put together a 61-seat majority on the right-hand side of the ledger rather than the left. (And complicating matters on the left is a traditional taboo, violated only rarely and for short periods, on having a coalition dependent on the votes of "non-Zionist" parties, meaning the Communists and the Arab parties.)

For example, a hard right coalition of Likud, Yisrael Beitenu, National Union (which is even farther to the right) and the religious parties would come close to the total even without Kadima or Labor. It's much harder for Livni to form a coalition without including Likud, which she has said she would like to include. But if Peres offers Livni the first chance to form a government, all Likud has to do is decline to join and she probably will fail to get a majority -- which is what happened last year after Ehud Olmert stepped aside.

Whoever is given the first chance to try -- and Livni and Netanyahu are loudly insisting that it must be she/he -- the designee will have 28 days to put together a coalition. The President may extend this an additional 14 days, but if after 42 days the designee hasn't put together a coalition, the President will designate someone else, who gets 28 days. So even if Livni gets the designation, because she won the most seats, all Likud would have to do to stymie her would be to decline to join, and in effect run out the clock. (For a backgrounder on the rather baroque electoral system try this page at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website.)

The obvious answer would seem to be a unity government including both Likud and Kadima, which would come within three or four votes of a majority and perhaps need only one other party to form a coalition. But with the numbers so close, it becomes difficult since if Livni is to be PM, Netanyahu may well balk at joining, and vice versa.

Something analagous happened back in the 1980s, when Labor had a narrow lead. Shimon Peres agreed to a rotation system in coalition with Likud; from 1984-86 Peres was Prime Minister and Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir was Foreign Minister; then from 1986-88 they traded places. That was a different era and the two parties were much stronger then; putting something similar together now might be hard.

When the numbers of seats have hardened a bit more we'll do the math again, but it looks like a lot of wheeling and dealing is in store.

Backgrounder: Iraqi Election Results, Part 1

Some Things to Keep in Mind in Reading Analyses of the Iraqi Elections

The Iraqi provincial election results will not be official for quite some time and the early returns are still incomplete, but since everyone else is commenting on them, both newspapers and bloggers, I thought I'd express a few early thoughts. I'm not going to post a bunch of links here since anyone can Google the rather widespread coverage and it is a moving target anyway. I really hesitate to draw vast conclusions from early and incomplete returns, and I hate oversimplifications of complex issues, but even so, I'll both have to jump to a few conclusions and oversimplify a bit here. But let me make several points for now:

1) I do not hold myself out as an Iraq expert. So I should explain why I think I have standing to comment here. These explanations, caveats and justifications will also apply to later posts on Iraq and its elections. My only visit to the country was in 1989, and several things seem to have changed since then, as you may well have heard somewhere. On the other hand, in favor of my talking about Iraq: in my newsletter days I followed Iraq pretty closely, and I continue to follow both newspapers (including Iraqi newspaper coverage) and the wide range of Iraq-oriented bloggers from Juan Cole on the leftish side to military bloggers on the rightish side and some key Iraqi bloggers as well, though not daily, and not in enormous detail. (I'll review some of them in time. If you ever read Riverbend, I'm sure you miss her. Read her archive at the site and I think she has a book but can't find it on Google just now.) I've had the good fortune to know several former (and the occasional current) US Ambassador to Iraq; at least two of the Embassy Public Affairs Officers (perhaps more if I think hard about it) were good friends; just today I saw a former boss, David Mack, an old Iraq hand, and former Ambassador (and ex-head of Radio Free Iraq) David Newton to drop two names whose connections with MEI make it obvious; I've known three or four of the most prominent historians and political scientists (both US and British) dealing with modern Iraq as personal friends and have published many of the others, but won't drop names though I guess I just did. Also, because of my interest as a historian in the World War I and post WWI era, I'm probably more familiar than the blogger-in-the-street with the British experience in what they (charmingly) called "Mespot" (for Mesopotamia) back when they had their go at it. I also have a track record on military issues in Iraq and am right now trying to find a link to something I wrote in 2002 which, when I find it, I plan to post. I hope I have standing to comment on the place even if I have only spent about a week there. (And unlike most commentators, I'm glad to state my credentials, and lack thereof, up front.)

2) One headline that has been fairly frequent on both blogs and newspapers is a variant of a) parties supporting the central government have done well and/or b) the parties currently in power have done well. I am trying to think of a good, thoughtful, scholarly and dignified way to say "well, duh!," as my (third grader) daughter would put it, but right now I can't come up with a better comment. In Arab countries (and not just there by any means) the dawla, the folks in power, always do well, even in the most genuinely free and fair elections*, because they have control of the patronage. This is not a complicated concept. Anyone over 35 from Chicago should understand it. I'm not trying to be flip here, but one did not need a crystal ball to predict that the people already in office would do well. [Update: See Ambassador David Mack's note in the comments making the point that it's worth noting this time because the folks in power did not do well in 2005.] A side effect of this is probably going to be that centralization wins big and that those seeking an extremely loose federation (as suggested famously by now-US-VP Joe Biden and supported by most Kurds and some Iraqi Shi'ites) are going to be disappointed. The idea of a unitary Iraqi state is not as evanescent as some came to believe, but the results themselves don't seem surprising.

[*We always say "free and fair" elections. Can they be one but not the other? Maybe so, in fact I might be able to come up with examples each way, but I'd welcome comments for now if anyone is reading this yet.]

3) I've seen some articles suggesting the " Islamist" parties have lost a lot of power. I think this is a question of definition. Many of the commentators seem pleased that the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (ex-Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and Muqtada al-Sadr's people seem to have lost at least some of their support. These are certainly Shi'ite Islamist movements, and what I suspect the commentators really have in the back of their minds is that they are pro-Iranian Shi'ite Islamist movements. The Supreme Council's front has also been pushing for an autonomous Shi'ite region on Kurdish lines, and thus runs counter to the general tilt towards centralization. The point I want to make for now is that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law List (there are alternate translations) is winning, and its two core member parties are the two branches of the Da'wa (Call) Party. Both wings of the Da'wa began as, and remain, Islamist in orientation and ideology (the "Call" of their name refers to proselytization to Islam), though less fully committed to the Iranian political formula than the two previously mentioned. Some of the American commentators I think, when they say that the Islamists lost ground, mean Iran's Islamists lost ground, while the US' Islamists did just fine, thank you. And in some provinces the Shi'ites are losing ground to Sunni groups because this time the Sunnis are actually voting, and some of those Sunni groups are Islamist as well. I think some of these analyses are more influenced by an "Islamist=Iran" equation than a real look at the parties' platforms.

4) Somewhere I saw, or perhaps heard on the radio (sorry, can't find it right now, but I'm not setting up a straw man here: I did hear or read it somewhere), someone saying that the Kurds had done more poorly than in the past. That may well feed into the accepted meme that centralization is winning. But please, folks, consider the context. These provincial elections only took place in 14 of the 18 provinces of Iraq. They did not occur in Dahuk, Irbil, and Suleimaniyya provinces, which constitute the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), nor were they held in the province Saddam Hussein renamed Ta'mim (Nationalization) Province but which most people (and as near as I can tell all Kurds) still call Kirkuk. These are the four provinces with the most Kurdish population, and weren't in play. There are Kurds in some other provinces, most notably Ninawa (Nineveh), Diyala, and of course Baghdad. As far as I can tell, all the "Kurds did poorly" reports relate to Ninawa. Now I may be wrong here: the early numbers are very incomplete. But Ninawa is the province around Mosul (and used to just be called Mosul province, until Saddam started naming things after ancient Mesopotamian sites), and in the previous provincial elections in 2005, the Sunni population mostly boycotted. This time around there were several Sunni Arab parties contending, including one specific to Ninawa called al-Hadba after a famous minaret there, and so naturally the Sunni Arabs (most Kurds are Sunni too, so the real division is ethnic) increased their share vis-a-vis the Kurds. But this may be specific to Ninawa/Mosul. And most of Iraq's Kurds weren't even voting this time, and the real hotbed of Arab-Turkmen-Kurdish conflict, Kirkuk, wasn't either.

5) As near as I can tell no one can really read the tea leaves in Baghdad yet. Perhaps I've missed it. But please keep in mind that the city of Baghdad is about 6.5 million and the Governorate (province) somewhat bigger, and that Iraq's overall population in the last census was something like 29 million. The capital province is a fifth or more of the country. The results will matter. Just as American election reportage always starts with (I think its name is) Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, where the whole town of a dozen or so vote at midnight, so analysts of the Iraqi vote are using what numbers they have so far. But unless Baghdad's numbers are in, we aren't there yet. I'll write more when we are.

That's about it for now. I'll continue to comment as we learn more, and if any true Iraq experts are reading this go right ahead and comment, please. We're slowly letting the world know that this blog exists.

Backgrounder: Ibadi-Sunni Violence in Algeria

Okay, I said I won't normally post weekends, and now I've gone and done it both days. But when something catches my interest, I may decide to get my ideas down while they're fresh. While the Iraqi elections seem (on first report) to have gone off fairly well, with decent turnout, there's been an outbreak of violence in the Algerian Saharan Mzab Valley. It's a bit hard to tell from some of the reports what exactly started the trouble, but it seems to have both ethnic and sectarian content. The Mzab area includes one of Algeria's concentrations of Berbers, but the Berbers of Mzab, unlike those of the Kabyle region, are Ibadi rather than Sunni Muslims.

A few of the current reports can be found here, here, and here, to provide some links in English. The troubles have been concentrated so far in the town of Berriane, and there were similar outbreaks there last year, as noted here.

There would seem to be two aspects to the tensions: one an ethno-linguistic one, between Berbers speaking the Mzabi Berber language and Arabs speaking Arabic; and the Ibadi-Sunni religious division. (The "Malekites" referred to in some of the linked articles are followers of the Maliki madhhab or legal rite of Sunnism; Maliki Islam is the dominant form in much of North Africa west of Egypt and, at least formerly, in parts of Upper Egypt.)

The Ibadis are an interesting survival in their own right: they are the only Islamic sect left over from the Khariji (Kharijite) movement of the first century of Islam. The Kharijis broke with both the Sunni and emerging Shi'i groups, insisting that the Imam of the community could come from any background so long as he was pious. At a time when most Muslims were debating whether the Imam had to be a direct descendant of Muhammad or merely o the tribe of Quraysh, the Khariji said the Imam could be any, Muslim, "even an African slave." If that were not politically incorrect enough for the first Islamic century, there are claims that some Kharijis were (according to their enemies, who wrote most of the history) that even woman could serve as Caliph. Today they may seem modern and politically correct, but their tactics and approach to their fellow Muslims made them the radical jihadis of their day.

I must note, at this point, that the Ibadis themselves reject the name "Khariji" because they do not see themselves as outside the greater Muslim umma, and do not share with the mainstream Kharijis (all dead centuries ago) the idea that non-Kharijis are kuffar or unbelievers and must have war waged against them. "Khariji" means "those who withdraw, or go out" and does not apply to the Ibadis, who are prepared to live with non-Ibadi Muslims, whereas other Khariji sects preached jihad against both the Sunni and Shi'a. This is one of those positions that, whatever its religious base, doesn't work well in the real world: all the hard-core Khariji sects, being minorities, fought to the death and, being outnumbered vastly, are no longer out there.

Kharijism started as a sort of "third way" movement in a sense, but like absolutist minority groups anywhere, they vanished. The Ibadi variety (and again they don't call themswelves Khariji) was the only one to survive into our time.

Kharijism in its Ibadi form lasted longest on the peripheries of the Caliphate, particularly in Oman and the Maghreb. Ibadis are still found in both places: Ibadism is the majority faith among Omanis, though the expatriate population and the fact that the Sunnis are concentrated in the cities means that Sunnism is also important there today. In North Africa, Ibadism was once dominant, under the Rustamid dynasty and some earlier Khariji/Berber mountain kingdoms, and there are islands of Ibadis scattered about the Maghreb today: in the Mzab and Ouargla oases of Algeria (these troubles are in Mzab) , the island of Djerba in Tunisia, and the Jabal Nafusa in Libya. They are found virtually nowhere else besides Oman and the former Omani empire, such as Zanzibar and other Indian Ocean ports where Omanis long traded.

The Omani and North African Ibadi groups were out of touch with each other for 1000 years or so, but I understand Oman has sought to create links in the late 20th century and beyond. Today, Ibadism isn't that distinguishable, for most adherents who aren't clerics or theology professors, from Sunnism except in some obscure theological points (such as whether the Qur'an/Koran is created or existed from eternity), and thus doesn't make a lot of difference in most people's day-to-day practice of the faith. In Oman both Ibadis and Sunnis are Arabic speaking (with some asterisks about minor language groups), but in Algeria the split is along the Berber/Arabic line.

Berber-Arab troubles are hardly new in Algeria, where the government's post-independence Arabization program, aimed at eradicating the dominant cultural role of French, was seen as eroding Berber-speaking elements. Ironically, the Berbers, resisting Arabization, became the great defenders of French, and the government became insistent on the dominance of Arabic: in the past Berber radio broadcasts, publications etc. were banned or strictly regulated, though much has been liberalized in recent years under President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. (And of course most educated Algerians, Arab or Berber, are still very comfortable in French. And Arabic is essential for Berbers if they're going to be anything other than rural peasants. But there's also a revival (or first blossoming) of Berber literature, both in Algeria and in France. Trouble in the Kabyle -- or Kabylie, as the area is called in French -- area erupts from time to time, but there there is no added sectarian element, except that most of the Berber population are a bit more secular than their Arab neighbors.

If you want more background, just Google "Tamazight" and follow on from there. "Berber" being just the French variant of the Arabic form (barbar) of the Greek barbaros (non-Greek people all of whose language sounds -- to Greeks -- like bar-bar) and thus related to our "barbarian," the Imazighen peoples would rather not be called Berber, or have their Tamazight language called that, but then it's going to take a long time for the man in the street to start using "Imazighen," or the various tribal/linguistic names, or "Tamazight," even among Arab Algerians (though I think the word "Tamazight" appears in the new Constitution's discussion of national languages).

The Algerian media are not very clear on what started the latest round of troubles in Berriane ("troublemakers" have been mentioned), and there have been allusions to gang elements in both ethnic groups, but I've also seen press reports of attacks on the party headquarters of the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), which is essentially a Berber political party, so the ethnic element may be more important here than the sectarian one.

And a caveat: it's always a little unclear in these incidents whether the rivalry is purely ethnic/religious or something else, and since this seems to involve young men attacking other young men, it may be little more than plain old street gangs that happen to divide along linguistic lines. I know there were cases during the troubles in Upper Egypt in the 1990s where the fighting between the police and the Islamists happened to divide along tribal or family lines and sometimes reflected old vendettas. I don't intend to overemphasize ethnosectarian violence in the region: there is no need to throw oil on already troubled waters, or to encourage ethnic and religious rivalries. But some of these issues, especially those involving Berber-Arab issues, are little known in the West, or at least the English-speaking West. (France, with its large population of Algerian-origin residents, is more familiar with them.)

An Aside on the "Plague" Story

As an aside: there is probably no connection, but the odd story that made the rounds a week or so ago about an alleged "biological warfare" incident which supposedly killed some 40 members of Al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) due to an accident (here's one account from Stratfor here or Google will turn up many more), supposedly took place in the Tizi-Ouzo area. Though as far as I know AQIM is almost entirely an Arab organization (the Berbers tend to be more secular), Tizi-Ouzo is also the heart of the Berber Kabylie. (It's also a mountainous region and thus a good place for radical movements to hide.) I have no reason to believe there is any connection, but there are two stories out of two rather different Berber regions of Algeria in a short time.

On the plague story let me empathize, at least for now, with those who think there is something fishy about the story. Though first reported in some (non-government) Algerian papers, it was broken in the West by Britain's The Sun, usually better known for its Page Three Girls (and no, I won't link) than its intelligence connections. The Washington Times claimed to have a confirmation from the US intelligence community, but the original reportage was from unusual sources and the international health organizations have said they've had no reports of an outbreak of plague. And plague, I'm told by those who know something about biological weapons, isn't easy to weaponize. Bubonic plague needs rats or fleas to spread, and pneumonic plague usually requires close personal contact. Plague is native to Algeria though, and a localized outbreak that had nothing to do with weaponization might be more credible than the "experiment gone wrong" version that's making the rounds. But the story may prove to have more to it.

Backgrounder: Egypt, Gaza and Omar Suleiman

One of our goals with this MEI Editor's Blog is to provide solid background for analysis of the Middle East; in the cacophany of polemical debate, it is easy sometimes to lose sight of the facts.

In all the reams of commentary about Israel's recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, only peripheral attention has often been paid to Egypt's difficult quandaries and efforts to maintain a ceasefire. About a year ago I wrote a commentary for the MEI webpage that touched on some of these issues, at the time of the breach in the Egyptian-Gaza border fence, but the situation has been exacerbated by the Israeli operation and the worsening situation on the ground. Many in the Arab world blame Egypt for not opening the border crossing at Rafah, while many in Israel blame Egypt for looking the other way as arms were smuggled into Gaza through a network of tunnels. The quandary faced by Egypt is a difficult one, since the Egyptian "street" is itself unhappy with the government's position. This is intended as an introduction to the background of the issue, and a look at the man who handles Egypt's security relations with both the Israelis and the Palestinians, Omar Suleiman. It's the first of a series of backgrounder postings I hope to do on this site.

Gaza and Egypt

Historically, Gaza has long had links with Egypt. It is the traditional gateway to Palestine from Egypt, as the Egyptian town of al-`Arish is the historical gateway to Egypt from Palestine. From 1948 to 1967, Gaza was administered by Egypt under the ceasefire agreements ending the Israeli War of Independence, and many Egyptian educational institutions founded branches in Gaza.

Despite the historic links, Egypt has never been comfortable with Gaza. The reasons are simple enough: there are 1.5 million people in Gaza's 350 square kilometers, versus perhaps half a million in the whole of Egypt's Sinai peninsula, with some 60,000 square kilometers. Egypt sees Gaza as a potential threat to the security of the Sinai, and there are suspicions that the terrorist bombings in the "Sinai riviera" resort towns of Sharm al-Sheikh in 2005 and Dhahab in 2006 were carried out by infiltrators from Gaza aiming at Israeli tourists.

Add to this the fact that Hamas's dominance in Gaza has never sat comfortably with the Egyptian government, since Hamas sprang from the Gaza Muslim Brotherhood, itself founded by the Egyptian branch of that group, which the government considers subversive. Leaving aside the judgment on the Egyptian Brotherhood, Hamas' interests in Gaza rarely coincide with Egypt's.

Israeli commentators and their allies sometimes blame Egypt for the arms smuggling that has certainly taken place into Gaza, and the network of tunnels is well known. There are no doubt solid grounds for criticism, and Egypt could probably do better, but it is important to recall that under the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, "Area C," the eastern Sinai, is demilitarized. In 2005, preparing to withdraw from Gaza, the Israeli Knesset amended the peace treaty to allow Egypt to station 750 border guards along the Egypt-Gaza border. Since those guards must sleep and have time off duty, perhaps a third of that number is available on any given watch. Although there are indications that Israel has tacitly allowed Egypt to further increase the numbers, the peace treaty itself limits the forces Cairo can deploy.

Nor can even an authoritarian state like Egypt completely ignore the public opinion of the Egyptian populace. When the barrier wall was breached in early 2008 and hundreds of thousands of Gazans crossed into Egypt, there was much popular support for keeping the crossings open. And during the long siege since Israel blocked most access to Gaza from the Israeli side, there has been growing sentiment in the Arab world for opening Rafah. The pressures are real and create a quandary for the Egyptian government, which fears the impact of an open Rafah crossing on the security of Sinai and perhaps Egypt proper.

Omar Suleiman

The man tasked with dealing with this Solomonic quandary is Lt. Gen. Omar ('Umar) Suleiman, head of Egyptian General Intelligence and Minister without Portfolio in the Egyptian Cabinet. Suleiman is rarely profiled by the Western media, though he is a key player in Israeli-Palestinian security issues. A week ago the Israeli daily Haaretz profiled him in the context of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, and occasionally there have been interviews or profiles elsewhere, but he has not a well-known figure. He gave a briefing here at MEI a while back, but it was off the record, and I respect that here.

The Haaretz article captures the main points about the man: he has been head of Egyptian General Intelligence since 1991, but only since he began to shuttle between Israel and the Palestinians, and between Hamas and Fatah, has he been publicly mentioned in the Egyptian media or had his photograph published.

Since President Husni Mubarak credits him with saving Mubarak's life during an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa in 1995 (Suleiman insisted on using an armored limousine), he has become a senior confidant of the President. He is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Mubarak if Gamal Mubarak does not succeed. (On the succession issue, see this piece at the MEI website.)

Appropriately for a intelligence professional, not a lot is known about his military career, as the gaps in his Wikipedia biography indicate; he fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars, but no one seems to know in what capacity. The Haaretz article quotes his Israeli intelligence interlocutors as being uncertain whether he started out in the artillery or another branch. He rose to head Military Intelligence and then, in 1991, became head of General Intelligence, the powerful civilian arm; he is believed to be the first man to hold both (sometimes rival) posts in succession. As a member of the Cabinet he holds a rank not held by intelligence chiefs since the Nasser era. And in a government in which the President and many other senior figures come from the Delta, he is from Qena in Upper Egypt, a traditionally neglected and underdeveloped part of the country (and, often, the subject of regional jokes in the rest of Egypt).

Intelligence Links

The nature of the intelligence field and the natural secrecy of Middle Eastern governments have combined to keep an air of mystery around the intelligence cooperation among governments in the region -- especially when cooperation with Israel is involved -- but it is clear that Egyptian Intelligence, and particularly Suleiman personally, has worked closely with Israel's intelligence services -- Mossad, the General Security Service or Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence -- as well as with the US CIA, DIA and other agencies and, in recent years, with the multiple intelligence services of the Palestinian Authority (which followed the Middle Eastern model of multiple, competing, and often overlapping security agencies). By default, Suleiman has also become the main intermediary between Fatah and Hamas, though he is known to be personally opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood at home and, by extension, no friend of Hamas in Gaza.

If the Gaza ceasefire holds, and that probably depends more on Israel and Hamas than on any Egyptian player, Suleiman's diplomacy will probably be one of the conduits through which deals are made and understandings reached. (It should be acknowledged that, whatever Suleiman's accomplishments in international diplomacy, many Egyptians fear Egyptian General Intelligence and its power at home, where it has wielded much influence since the Nasser era.)