The Day After

A quick holiday roundup of reactions from Egypt today: Al Jazeera English's live blog offers most of the main points of the day as the country reels from the carnage of Sunday and ponders its implications. Blog posts, some by eyewitnesses: Ursula Lindsey at The Arabist, Zeinobia's ongoing postings here and here, and Sarah Carr,who wrote an eyewitness account for English Al-Masry al-Youm, reproduces it at her  blog. Mahmoud Salem ("Sandmonkey") had trouble posting to his blog so he put his commentary on Facebook, here. I'd recommend reading them all. I haven't delved deeply into the Arabic coverage yet, but these English posts give you a good place to start.

The Egyptian Army: Turning to the Dark Side?

In the year of "the Army and the People are One Hand," in which the Army appeared to side with the Revolution, and only three days after Egyptian Military Day, the Egyptian Army appears to be openly fomenting sectarian hatred (see my earlier post); Egyptian state media are openly calling on people to defend the Army against (by all unofficial accounts unarmed) Christian demonstrators, and military police are raiding independent media yet again. If half of what is being reported tonight is true, it's a sad day for the Egyptian Army. Given the fact that US aid provides most of the Army's budget, I suspect the sentiment tweeted above by Blake Hounshell of Foreign Policy will not stand alone. SCAF needs to move very quickly to dissociate itself from what appears to be happening.

President Obama phoned Tantawi when the Israeli Embassy was besieged. Will he do the same now?

Black Sunday in Cairo

Though we're in the middle of a three-day weekend, I can't let today's events in Egypt go unremarked. A protest march from Shubra to Maspero, protesting the recent attacks on churches, dissolved into chaos afrer the marchers were fired upon. Something like running fights seem to have ensued, with military police reportedly firing on the demonstrators. At least 24 are officially dead and there are rumors of more. The Prime Minister has gone on TV in the middle of the night to warn of hidden plots against the homeland by unnamed influences, and has denied the clash was sectarian. All in all it seems to be the deadliest and most ill-omened day since the departure of Mubarak.

I think this is a critical moment for the hopes of the revolution. A descent into sectarian violence now could provide the Army with an excuse for slowing, rather than speeding up, the transition: and given the role of the military police today, one cannot rule out the idea that the Army is trying to provoke violence to provide just such a pretext. In any event, PM Sharaf's remarks about sinister influences has a disturbing undercurrent of suggesting the Copts are somehow alien to Egyptian society. I suspect things will be clearer by tomorrow, but as of now I see no silver lining to this particular dark cloud over the revolution. Unless it forces all the forces in society to realize that they are playing with fire in a dynamite factory. Not a good day.

As valuable as Facebook and Twitter may be, they also have a tendency to magnify and spread unconfirmed rumors or downright provocation. I'm going to be cautious till I have a clearer understanding of what happened.

Meanwhile, here are early takes by Issander El Amrani; by Zeinobia; and by Margaret Litvin. Some of the video:

Yom Kippur

Best wishes to my Jewish readers on the occasion of Yom Kippur, which begins at sundown.

There may be further posts today but if not, please note that Monday is the Columbus Day holiday in the US and so I won't be posting unless something major happens. See you Tuesday.

The Peace Prize

So: not to Arab Spring as such so much as to women's rights, but with an Arab woman prominent in the protests, Tawakul Karman of Yemen, sharing it with two Liberians.

If not exactly what many were expecting, it's also the first Arab woman to win, and that achievement deserves recognition.

It Was 30 Years Ago Today: Remembering the Sadat Assassination

As I already noted earlier today, October 6 is not only Egyptian Military Day, it is also the day on which Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981: 30 years ago today. I already reflected on Sadat's mixed legacies at home and abroad on last October 6, .but this excerpt from an unfinished novel by Maria Golia, consisting of memories of that day.is posted at The Arabist today, and it reminfded me of another such reminiscence,by an old colleague now in Burundi who blogs as Diana Buja, whow as working on a project in Upper Egypt at the time, where the security jitters were particularly intense. Her reminiscence was published last February when Mubarak fell, appropriate enough since that day also marked the beginning of the almost (but not quite!) endless Mubarak era.

One needs to remember, too, that this was before the wave of poltiicial assassinations by Islamist militants in the early 1990s. Despite occasional failed attempts in the Nasser and Sadat eras, in 1981 no senior official had been killed in a political assassinstion since the days of the monarchy.  Egyptians and foreigners living there were equally shocked.

Do read both of these accounts. I might as well tell my own. I was then in Washington, but preparing to go to Cairo for a military equipment exhibition scheduled for a couple of weeks later. The publications group I then worked for was a co-sponsor of some sort, and we had even prepared a bilingual program with me and some Arabic translator colleagues having to learn military equipment vocabulary in order to edit it. An old friend and fellow Cairo hand woke me with a phone call to tell me about the first confused reports coming in. In those pre-all-news-channel days we were dependent on television networks, and information coming out of Cairo was scarce.An old Egyptian journalist friend, Muhammad Hakki, had just become Sadat's spokesman a short time before and I saw him several times on television; then he disappeared. I later learned that though he was new in the job, Mubarak wanted his own man in and sacked him.

My own memories are more relevant if I move on to the stay in Cairo (about a week I think), which would have been around the third week in October, with the assassination still fresh. Field Marshal Abu Ghazala, the patron of the military exhibition and the Defense Minister, had been standing next to Sadat on one side (with Mubarak on the other), but was determined that the show must go on. However, since it was well within the 40-day period of mourning, the parties and receptions that defense firms usually stage for such shows were canceled or toned down. (Everything was taking place on an Air Base, so of course security was high.)

I remember seeing armored vehicles in Tahrir Square, which had for the moment been renamed Midan Anwar al-Sadat. Thankfully, that did not last (though the subway station s still Sadat Station). "Sadat Square" just would ot have worked as a rallying symbol.

A funny story made the rounds at the time and was pretty universally believed to be true among the attendees at the defense exhibition, though as usual in these cases there was no public record. In the confusion of the assassination's aftermath (or perhaps just because of an Egyptian bureaucratic turf war), the Gumruk, the customs authority, was holding up all the military equipment at the airport claiming the Defense Ministry hadn't cleared the paperwork. All the big defense firms were desperately greasing palms to get the equipment in the country.

As the story goes, due to the customs hangup, the French armored vehicle firm Panhard did not get one of their armored fighting vehicles cleared until sometime well after midnight. Though a wheeled vehicle, the Panhard had a turret with a gun and thus, while not a tank (it didn't have treads) most people would call it a tank. It was on a flatbed truck, or so the story went, and the drivers started into town from the airport looking for the military base where the show sas being held. They didn't know the way and everything was closed. Finally they saw a big building with lots of lights on in the wee small hours and decided to pull up to it and ask directions. So they pull up to the lighted compound with their armored fighting vehicle, complete with cannon, in plain view . . .

It was ‘Uruba Palace, where Mubarak was staying.

According to the various versions I heard, Egyptian security hit all their panic buttons and the French found their truck a subject of considerable excitement. Eventually, it sank in that it wasn't a coup attempt but some lost French.

Now, I wasn't there. I'm sure officially it never happened, and I didn't see it (though I had the vehicle in question pointed out to me several times). But that's my anecdote about the jitters the assassination provoked, even if his happened two weeks or so later.

No Prize for Adonis This Year

You can't really game the front-runners for Nobel Prizes, so despite the speculation that the Syrian plet Adonis was the favorite for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy has given it to . . . a Swede.

As they say in sports, maybe next year. Tomorrow we'll learn if the Peace Prize goes to someone associated with Arab Spring.

October 6 and a New "Crossing"

Once again it's October 6, Egypt's Military Day, which as I noted last year (when my post was about Anwar Sadat), and the year before, is a double anniversary, marking the crossing of the Canal on October 6, 1973, "the Crossing,"  (al‘ubur), seen by most Egyptians as the necessary step in the eventual recovery (through partial withdrawals and later full peace) of the Occupied Sinai. But it's also a mixed occasion, since it was on this date in 1981, while watching the Military Day Parade, that Anwar Sadat was assassinated.

The ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has invited the people to celebrate Armed Forces Day in Tahrir Square (with all its revolutionary symbolism) and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Nasr Ciry, where Sadat was assassinated and lies buried, and the symbolic center of the Egyptian military.

In a post yesterday the blogger Zeinobia regretted that some young revolutionaries are dismissive of Military Day, but I fear that may be a symptom of how far we have come since the heady days, beginning January 31 and culminating with the fall of Mubarak, when the chant was "the Army and the People are One Hand." The Army's refusal to fire on protesters, its openly facing down the Security Forces in some instances, and finally the final shove out the door by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) made the Army the hero of the streets.

Things have changed, of course. The isolation and aloofness of SCAF, the uncertainties about its real intentions, and suspicions that it is drawing out the transition, have soured some on the Army. But it still has a far cleaner record than the Interior Ministry Forces, however much it may also be protecting its own economic prerogatives and influence. I hope Military Day goes peacefully, and that the new Crossing leads to a different kind of liberation.

Juan Cole on Steve Jobs

Of all the obituaries likely to flood the media today for Steve Jobs, I'll bet nobody else matches Juan Cole's headline: "Steve Jobs: Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer."

In fact, I'm betting "Arab-American" appears least frequently of those descriptions, at least in headlines, but Jobs, who was adopted, had a Syrian biological father.

Israeli Takes the Chemistry Nobel

While I was speculating about whether Arab spring might produce Arab winners of both the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize, another Nobel has gone to the region, though not to an Arab: Israeli chemist Daniel Shechtman of the Technion in Haifa has won the Nobel for Chemistry.

Coptic Protests Spread to Cairo as Sectarian Clashes Escalate

Coptic Priests Lead Maspero March (Ahram Online)

Yesterday and last night Egyptian Coptic protesters marched and began a sit-in in Cairo to protest the most recent sectarian clashes and the reported burning of a church in Upper Egypt. The link includes a photo gallery from which the photo at left comes. The sit-in is at "Maspero," as the area around the Radio-TV building along the Nile Corniche is known; Maspero has become perhaps the second most popular protest venue (after Tahrir of course) since the revolution. Twitter reports last night indicated a very large presence of security forces.

These most recent demonstrations were provoked by an event in the town of Marinab, near the town and ancient Temple of Edfu in Aswan Governorate, in which Muslims and Copts clashed and a building described as Saint George's Church by the Copts was burned.  If my phrasing in that sentence seems labored, it's because there are conflicting claims: the Christians say they have documents proving the building had been a licensed church for 80 years; government officials claim it was a "Christian guest house" on which a dome and cross was added, infuriating Islamists who claimed it was being turned into a church since there was no church in the town; and some reports say the guest house was next to Saint George's (Mar Girgis) Church. Whether it was a church, a guest house, or something else again, it shouldn't have been burned down, but in the sometimes curious calculus of the Middle East, some people think this kind of hair-splitting justifies or at least mitigates the motives, but that has a blamethe-victim-too feel to it. See reports here and here.

Earlier attacks on churches, both before and since the revolution, have made Copts feel even more vulnerable, especially as Islamist groups feel more and more willing to agitate. Just last week, in the Middle Egyptian town of Bani Mazar in Minya Governorate, a Coptic schoolgirl was barred from her high school for refusing to wear hijab, though Egyptian law does not require it. (In France or until recently Turkey, of course, she could have been excluded for wearing it,nwhich I find equally unacceptable.) She's been allowed back in on a technicality, but Copts are seeing this as a further sign of Islamist strength and growing "Islamization" of Copts.

All of this has led to threats by Coptic activists, including threats to boycott the forthcoming elections, though Pope Shenouda III and the Coptic hierarchy (who supported Mubarak to the bitter end) continue to support the current regime.
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The Copts have long faced a dilemma: if they are too confrontational with the regime, they can face serious consequences (in 1981 Anwar Sadat deposed Pope Shenouda and sent him into monastic exile); but they can also suffer when Diaspora Copts in the US and Europe and Australia (the main Coptic diasporas) agitate in support of them.

And, while government attitudes toward the Copts wax and wane, the growing influence of Salafi Islam (not the Muslim Brotherhood but more extreme groups) has led to new confrontations. In Upper Egypt, in particular, where the Coptic proportion of the population tends to be higher, and the attractions of radical Islam greater, the clashes have been most severe. Also, complicating any simplistic analysis, they are overlaid with other social rivalries: clan and "tribal" allegiances; ancient family vendettas; resentment of Muslim fellahin of large Coptic landowners past or present; resentment of rural populations of shopkeepers (often Copts) in the village they frequent; and so on. None of this justifies anybody burning a church, nor does it excuse sectarian violence. I simply want to remind readers that Upper Egypt is not Cairo (though some neighborhoods of Cairo are pretty thoroughly from Upper Egypt), and there are older and more complex nuances that go beyond simple religious bigotry.

As the Egyptian revolution progresses (if it does), sectarianism is going to be one of the most threatening challenges it faces. So far, the current leadership is not meeting that challenge, and sectarian tensions are escalating seriously.

Saudis Blame Qatif Riots on "a Foreign Power"

On Monday evening, clashes broke out in a village near the city of Qatif in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, the Shi‘ite area of the country, which has frequently been an area of dissidence, including some incidents earlier this year. At least 14 people were injured (mostly police, according to the Saudis), but the situation remains unclear. Accounts from the BBC here, from Al Jazeera English, and for a Saudi version, Arab News.

Okay class: when the Saudis blame a "foreign power" for stirring up their Shi‘ite minority (the old "outside agitators" explanation), do you immediately think "it's probably Costa Rica" or "They must mean Finland"?  (No, the Finnish conspiracy is all concentrated in giving away Angry Birds free for our phones, aimed at destroying US productivity by making us all addicts. I think there was a Star Trek like that. Nokia probably has something to do with it too.) (Any Finnish readers: I'm joking. No one wastes their time playing Angry Birds.)

No, they are, of course, referring to Iran. Now, for all I know, Iran could indeed be involved, but as we've seen in Bahrain, a knee-jerk blaming of any Shi‘ite dissidence on Iran resonates well among other Gulf monarchies and the Sunni world generally.

A Guide to Egyptian Candidates

I had missed this so far, but it went the rounds in the wake of Field Marshal Tantawi's celebrated appearance on the streets in a civilian suit. I'm getting it from the blog Send Down the Basket, which I noted earlier today.  The title is "List of Candidates for the Presidency." They are listed as Miltiary, Civilian, Islamic, Coptic, Bedouin, and so on. They are all, of course, Field Marshal Tantawi.

Could Arabs Win TWO Nobels This Year?

There has been a lot of speculation that the Nobel Peace Prize could go to one or more figures associated with the "Arab spring," and several (Esraa Abdel Fattah, Wael Ghonim, and others from Egypt and Tunisia) are known to have been nominated; somewhat less attention has been paid to the fact that "Arab spring" and the uprising in Syria could also be driving the decision on the Nobel Prize in Literature, where the Syrian poet Adonis is considered a front runner.

We'll be finding out later this week; if Arabs take both prizes, the Arab world will doubtless be proud, but the message will also be that the Nobel committees are awarding the prizes for the changes taking place, not the old regimes. Previous Arab winners of the Peace Prize were both political leaders and shared the prize with Israelis (Anwar Sadat and Menahem Begin in 1978; Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1994); awarding it to a symbol of the youth movement would be a significant symbolic message to the established regimes still clinging to power. (I should probably root for Abdel Fattah, as she'll be receiving an award at the MEI Banquet next month.)

There is a political message as well if the Literature award does go to Adonis, as the great Syrian poet has been an outspoken critic of the Asad regime and has supported the uprising there. He is also an obvious candidate, as perhaps the most prominent living Arab poet. The only previous Arab winner of the Literature prize was the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, in 1988; Adonis is said to have been a contender back then as well, and, at 81, the window of opportunity may be closing. Like Mahfouz, Adonis is a symbol of modernity and a secularist. (The award to Mahfouz led to much more of his work being translated into English, making him far better known in the West.)

The Literature Award will be announced Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday, so we'll know soon.

The UAE's FNC Elections

The closest thing the United Arab Emirates has to elections is the elections to the 40 member Federal National Council (FNC), a purely advisory body, only half (20) of whose members are elected. Even Saudi Arabia at least votes for municipality councils with some actual local say. The UAE has long flourished through sharing its wealth with its citizens (a minority of its residents) rather than sharing power.

This year's FNC elections were a bit embarrassing due to their low turnout. see Jenifer Fenton's guest post at The Arabist.She analyzes the problems with trying to give the FNC more credibility when it has no legislative powers. It can't build trust if it can't really do anything. It's useful background for those of us who rarely look at politics in the Emirates, mostly because it's so hard to find the politics in the Emirates.

Also of interest is an article in The National in which outgoing FNC members offer advice for the new incoming ones. The first point of advice? "They need to read the Constitution." I guess the assumption is they haven't read it already.

A New Blog from Cairo

Qifa Nabki (whose blog is marking its third anniversary: mabruk) calls attention to a new blog from Cairo by a colleague of his, Send Down the Basket. The blogger, Margaret Litvin, is a Boston University Arabic professor living in Cairo for only a semester, but she's lived there before and has a good eye for topics of political and cultural interest. Qifa blogs about it here; and also flagged it to me in an e-mail, and after taking a look at it, I concur. It's a worthy addition; I wish she'd be staying longer.

Wave of Attacks on Religious Sites

Judaism, Christianity,and Islam all preach tolerance,but in the pressures of the Middle East all at least occasionally fail to practice it. Over just the past few days we've seen a surge of attacks against places of worship, perhaps the most provocative type of attack. Variously:0

•  Muslims and Copts have clashed in Aswan Governorate after a reported attack on a Coptic church and other Coptic-owned properties in the village of Marinab in Upper Egypt;

• Prime Minister Netanyahu has expressed his outrage after a mosque in the Israeli Arab village of Tuba-Zangariya in Upper Galilee was burned, by Jewish extremists who scrawled "price tag"on the walls,suggesting they may be West Bank settlers who've vowed to exact a "price tag" for restrictions on the settlements. Similar  attacks have occurred in the Occupied West Bank, but this is the first in Israel proper, in Galilee..

•  I noted early today that David Gerbi,who had hoped to restore the Synagogue in Tripoli, Libya, says he has been blocked by threats and locked doors despite being welcomed by the National Transitional Council.

None of these appear at this time to be acts of governments, but they are hardly good signs.

Did SCAF Put One Over on Egypt's Parties on Saturday?

A broad range of Egypt's political parties, from liberal to Islamist, protst4ed the changes int thee country's electoral law announced last week.  On Saturday, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) met with heads of 13 of Egypt's politicvl parties (including the Muslim Brotherhood's Party). None of the youth or revolutionary groups were present: just th4e parties, since SCAF was concerned at several parties' (including the MB) threats to boycott if the law were not changed. The poor turnout in Tahrir on Friday may have persuaded the SCAF that the youth groups are losing their clout, but a boycott by the political parties would undercut the credibility of elections.

The result was an agreed statement of eight points. SCAF agreed to some changes: changing article five of the elections law so that the one-third of the seats elected directly can be conteste4d by the parties; agreering to "consider" an early suspension of the Emergency Law and a possinble ban on old ruling party figures from running; and to end military trials of civilians "unless covered by military law."

Some early reports were rather positive. Then more people read the agreement. (Arabic text and English summary here.) Zeinobia's take here. The conditional nature of some of the concessions and the clarified but still lengthy transition that could push election of a President into 2013 began to seem less generous than at first glance. By Sunday, criticism was rampant. One signatory tweeted that he was suspending his signature; another found its adherence denounced by its own Presidential candidate.

Suspicion of SCAF's intentions are high. Field Marshal Tantawi is now making more public appearances, 
not to mention the continuing buzz about tht business suit.. And now Presidential contender Amre Moussa is calling for SCAF to step aside by mid-2012.

Marc Lynch, who's just back from Egypt, has some balanced and well-stated thoughts about all this. I suspect that, as he notes,there are positive and negative elements in the agreement. But most of all, the controversy in the aftermath makes it look as if the parties led themselves be played by SCAF. That may be unfair (SCAF has generally seeemd rather bumbling,not Machiavellian, up to now), but clearly the final electoral system is not so final after all.

Synagogue in Tripoli

Some Rights Reserved

UPDATE: A commenter notes a story in today's Guardian about David Gerbi, who has returned from the diaspora and hopes to restore the synagogue.

UPDATE 2: And now Ha'aretz is reporting Gerbi has encountered relocked doors and threats against him.

As I noted recently, the last Jewish resident of Libya left in 2003, though the revolutionaries have been in contact with the Libyan Jewish diaspora. 

Now here is a gallery of pictures (note: some rights reserved) of the Dar al-Bishi synagogue in Tripoli, post revolution, a last monument to a once significant community.

Thanks to several people who linked to this.

Salih Boasts of Cooperation with US Just Before ‘Awlaqi Announcement

Am I unusual in wondering if there is any connection between the fact that this morning's Washington Post front page featured an interview with Yemeni President ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih in which he emphasized how vital his cooperation was with US intelligence against Al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (he said the same to a Time reporter as well), and the fact that, in what was apparently the first drone strike from a new CIA Predator base "in the Arabian Peninsula", the US finally killed AQAP's Anwar al-‘Awlaqi?

If it was pure coincidence, the timing certainly played into making Salih's point.