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It's heartening to finally see some uplifting, positive news in these depressing times. The march of around 10,000 women that has taken place today is precisely the type of unexpected turnaround that has made the Egyptian uprising a success at various points this year. It comes out of nowhere and recharges the depleted batteries of activists. It reminds the protestors that their rage will not be sated by throwing stones but only by seeing the solidarity of their fellow men and women. It is the type of event, once it percolates throught the late night TV talk shows and the newspapers, can actually deliver change and political pressure. For those who thought the protests went astray in the last few days by becoming more about revenge than demands, it is a welcome correction.
The SCAF of course rushed to produce an apology after its agents in the media began spreading rumors that the photo of the woman who was attacked by soldiers several days ago was doctored. Just like earlier today it suddenly announced it would punish officers involved in the "virginity tests" and the Maspero killings. But I doubt people will settle for show trials.
CAIRO (AP) -- Thousands of Egyptian women marched in the streets of Cairo on Tuesday, protesting abuse by soldiers who dragged women by the hair, stomped on them and stripped one half naked on the street while cracking down on anti-military protesters in scenes that shocked many in the conservative society.
The march was a rare protest by women and its numbers - about 10,000 by some estimates - underlined the depth of anger over the images from the fierce crackdown over the past five days on protesters demanding the ruling military step down immediately.
Even before the protest was over, the ruling military council issued an unusual apology for what it called "violations" - a quick turnaround after days of dismissing the significance of the abuse.
Thousands of women denounce military violence against female protesters:
CAIRO: Thousands of Egyptian women took to the streets of downtown Cairo on Tuesday denouncing the excessive use of violence and sexual abuse by the Egyptian army against female protesters, drowning out the relevance of an official apology to "Egypt's great women" published on SCAF's Facebook page four hours after the march started.
The march, which included about 6,000 women and around 2,000 men, began in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt's revolution, and headed to the Journalists' Syndicate. Protesters had a loud and clear message for Egypt's Supreme Council of Armed Forces: "Egypt's women are the red line."
Mothers, daughters and grandmothers marched hand in hand chanting against the military, calling for their fellow Egyptians on the streets and in their homes to join them in demanding that the military step down immediately.
All this sorts of reminds me of a column I wrote on January 1, about women leading the (then not happening) uprisings.
This week’s In Translation piece is a departure from the usual focus on commentary on current events in the Arabic press. I chose a piece recommended by As’ad AbuKhalil, aka Angry Arab, that takes a scholarly look at the key inspirations of the Salafi movement, the theologian and thinker Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328 AD), who was born in Harran in what is today Turkey and lived most of his life in what is today Syria. Ibn Taymiyya’s times coincided with the destructive Mongol invasions which razed Baghdad and, from his perspective, must have appeared as an end-times event. He is considered to be a key inspiration inspiration to the Wahhabi and contemporary Salafi movement.
Angry Arab wrote of this piece:
This is an interesting discussion of the thought of Ibn Taymiyyah and how it differed from Hanbaliyyah on some theological issues. Ibn Taymiyyah warrants a lot of academic attention (given his influence on today’s Islamists): French Orientalists of the 20th century did pay attention to him but the reason that he is not studied as, say, Sayyid Qutb, is because he left a vast body of literature and access to this text requires a deep understanding of Arabic. He was a dangerous but effective and sophisticated polemicist.
That’s an important point: a deep understanding of Qu’ranic exegesis necessitates advanced study as a grammatician and even etymologist. For more on Ibn Taymiyya and how the democratization of religion in the Arab world that has given rise to new forms of fundamentalist Islamic thought, I recommend reading As’ad AbuKhalil’s critical essay The Incoherence of Islamic Fundamentalism: Arabic Islamic Thought At The End Of The 20th Century [PDF 2.6MB]. It includes his usual verve against the late Saudi Mufti, Abdel Aziz Bin Baz, who counts among the handful of founders of contemporary Salafism.
This is a difficult piece, but I thought it might be enlightening not only for the learned (and unorthodox interpretation) the writer gives of Ibn Taymiyya, but also in the second degree as telling of some of the discussions taking place in the quality Arab press in reaction to the electoral success of the Salafis in Egypt and the rising intellectual and spiritual influence of the Salafi movement more generally.
As always, this translation is possible thanks to Industry Arabic, which provides multi-lingual translation of many different types — media, technical, legal, etc. — and really did a great job on this difficult piece.
The other side of Ibn Taymiyya – on the occasion of the political ascent of Salafis and Islamists
By Abdel Hakim Ajhar, al-Quds al-Arabi, 14 December 2011
The terms and concepts that have achieved wide circulation with the Arab revolutions – those such as democracy, tyranny, civil society, and citizenship – have no place in the writings of Islamist thinkers before the Nahda period. However, the writings of one such pre-Nahda1 thinker, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), contain material that could enable his followers to adopt a different mentality, one that would guide them – with a little effort — to these prevailing concepts of the age.
The Ibn Taymiyya whom we read about is not the real Ibn Taymiyya: he is a theoretical reproduction and refabrication that has made him into one of the authorities for religious extremists among both his supporters and detractors alike. The real Ibn Taymiyya, on the other hand, the one who needs to be read by Islamists ascending to the political forefront, is one who will help these Islamists adopt a flexible, rationalistic mode of thinking, and perhaps change many of the intellectual assumptions these forces still live by and consider to be fundamental tenets not subject to review.
Above, Jonathan Rachad's photography of the recent protests.
Some good narratives of the days of fighting:
Extremely graphic video of treatment of wounded, dying.
Al Jazeera English report by Sherine Tadros on the violence and SCAF's press conference.
Possibilities of a political solution:
There have been various initiatives to obtain a ceasefire between protestors and the armed forces, but to no avail. A number of public personalities are now gravitating towards another option: moving presidential elections even earlier to get SCAF out of power as soon as possible. A Facebook campaign has been started and obtained the backing of various personalities. The former prime minister, Essam Sharaf, is also backing earlier presidential elections (I say "earlier" because in mid-November, after the Mohammed Mahmoud St. clashes, they were just moved from sometime in 2013 to June 2012).
Most political parties have remained silent on this matter. The Muslim Brotherhood has issues a series of messages condemning the clashes and the military's behavior, but only issued a vague call for investigations. Mohammed Beltagi of the FJP has however gone further in his critique and suggested a handover of SCAF's power to parliament instead of a presidential election (obviously this benefits them). Abu Ela Madi, the head of the al-Wassat Party (MB dissidents), has resigned from the SCAF's consultative council (he was deputy head) along with 10 other personalities and is now joining calls for SCAF to step down as soon as possible.
Other links:
The picture of this girl has been a major topic of debate on Egyptian talk shows tonight — with some SCAF defenders arguing it was photoshopped — and is on the cover of tomorrow's Tahrir newspaper. Below is the video that shows her and a companion being chased, then beaten by soldiers.
Congress is going ahead with plans to make aid to Egypt, including military aid, contingent on Egypt’s relations with Israel and a successful transition:
Reflecting concerns about uncertainty within the Egyptian government, the bill would restrict $1.3 billion in security assistance to Cairo and $250 million in economic assistance until the secretary of state certifies to Congress that Egypt is abiding by a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, military rulers are supporting the transition to civilian government with free and fair elections and “implementing policies to protect freedom of expression, association and religion and due process of law.”
These and other restrictions — notably on the Palestinan Authority and Pakistan — carry “national security wavers” — meaning the Secretary of State can easily lift them. ( Read more: Congress moves to restrict aid to Egypt, Pakistan )
Meanwhile Mamoun Fendi says Egypt could be come worse than Pakistan and underlines Tantawi’s experience in that country during the abominable reign of Zia al-Haq:
The past experience of three major players on the Egyptian political scene ― the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the US Embassy and Islamists ― suggests that Egypt may soon come to resemble Pakistan.
Army officers beating protestors / watchers. (Stupid music unnecessary, particularly when in the background someone seems to be yelling “the journalist died” or something similar [1:20].
More beatings with truncheons, rock-throwing by soldiers.
Here you can clearly see uniformed troops throwing rocks from the top of the government building adjacent to parliament.
From the same rooftop, a uniformed soldier relieving himself on the roof — doing the Egyptian army proud.
The government would have you believe all of the above is untrue, did not happen, and was done by foreigners anyway: Ganzouri blames cabinet clashes on ‘foreign elements’:
Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri on Saturday accused “foreign elements” of stirring up riots outside Egypt’s cabinet building.
In a press conference, he also said military police have exercised self-control in dealing with protesters.
Eight people have died and at least 299 injured in the clashes, the Health Ministry reported earlier on Saturday.
“Elements that infiltrated the protest shot fire. Everything that is happening now has nothing to do with the revolution. This is intended to ruin the revolution,” Ganzouri said.
He went on to say that revolutionary youth are those who fight unemployment or seek to solve society’s problems, adding, “Those who carry out these acts are not revolutionaries and do not want the best for Egypt.”
“Once again I emphasize that military forces did not clash with them, and only guarded the parliament and cabinet building,” he said.
Someone — a behavioral psychologist perhaps — should do a study of the power of denial in Egypt, something I’ve long called the Egyptian Reality Distortion Field (ERDF — used in another with regards to Steve Jobs). The ERDF gives Egyptians, notably public officials, an uncanny ability to disregard what is plain for all to see and, with the utmost confidence, assure all comers of its opposite. Ganzouri today described people dying during the protests and then insisted “there was no violence” before storming out of his press conference. Last October the SCAF insisted no army truck ran over protestors despite much video evidence being available of exactly that.
The most incredible thing about the ERDF is that it seems to work on most of the population, giving many Egyptians the ability to assert one thing and then its opposite with no awareness of self-contradiction. You have to experience it to understand it. Much of it has to do with Egypt being the Blanche Dubois of the Middle East — a faded belle whose glory days have long gone but who keeps on pretending otherwise — and is all too often indulged (somewhat abusively) by those around her. Apparently, a country can suffer from post-menopausal hysteria.1
As Mohamed ElBaradei wrote on Twitter:
Since #Jan25, innocents continue to be killed & tortured while authority denies using force or violence. Orwell’s “Min. of Truth” reincarnated
I won’t recap here the events of this morning in which several protestors from the #occupycabinet sit-in on Magles al-Shaab St., where the prime minister’s office and parliament are located, were arrested, wounded and/or beaten. You can take a look at Aya Batrawy’s reporting for AP, excerpted at the end of this post, for context. Suffice to say that, from what appears to have been an accident (an activist entering the gardens of the parliament building to retrieve a football was arrested and mistreated) we now have a return to the kind of street warfare seen a few weeks ago on Mohammed Mahmoud St.
As you can see from the video above, which I shot this afternoono, it’s not quite as violent as that. But the battle is now blocking Qasr al-Aini St., one of Cairo’s major arteries, and has been stagnant for hours. No riot control police has been deployed, and you have a few hundred of protestors on one side vs. a few hundred plainclothes police and, possibly, some soldiers on the other. No decision has been taken all day to stop the violence, and those plainclothes police are engaged in the same rock-throwing and Motolov cocktail-throwing as the protestors. There does not seem to be any authority there, or chain of command, and my bet is that the SCAF are paralyzed about what to do. Send in Military Police or riot control police and you risk an escalation.
The most traffic this blog ever got was on January 28. Shortly after midnight, I posted that the internet had been shut down in Egypt. The news spread on technology sites like Slashdot and Reddit, eventually bringing down the site. I had internet because I was not in Cairo: I was in the middle of a reporting trip in Tunis, but was spending all my time after the curfew still in place then making calls to Cairo. I had landlines for friends, and quickly confirmed that at least three major ISPs had been simply shut off. It confirmed my gut feeling that something big was coming, and as I flew back to Cairo the next day what became an uprising had begun, defeating the police state.
I still feel that shutting down the internet (and mobile phones) was the key, pivotal tactical mistake of the Mubarak regime that pushed so many to join the protests. It took several days for the internet to be re-established, but in those few days a sense of urgency had been created, galvanizing the protestors' spirit and giving the whole Egyptian uprising story a new angle.
All of this was brought back to mind by this Wired story (via Boing Boing) about a State Department-funded project to quickly deploy, basically, the internet in a suitcase:
The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.
In those early days, even a rapidly deployable intranet would have been useful — especially if you were able to use a Twitter-like service that was decentralized, working like P2P, and advertise services on it so they would be found automatically (like a central repository of some sort that would act as the intranet's home page). Even more useful would be a suitcase satellite internet, like a Bgan on steroids, that could immediately deploy wifi over a sizeable area and handle, say, 100 simultaneous users.
Egypt's elections: Dirty tricks | The Economist:
FIRST came unsigned leaflets claiming that the candidate for the Egyptian Bloc, a secularist group, was a communist atheist. Then pamphlets accusing him of being a capitalist crony of the disgraced former regime appeared. Other rumours swirled around the parliamentary district in rural Upper Egypt where he was standing. Some said the Egyptian Bloc was backed by Freemasons and Jews. Others fingered the Coptic Church. On the morning of the vote, pick-up trucks mounted with megaphones fanned out to deliver a coup de grace. Congratulations to the Egyptian Bloc, they blared. Its candidate has been appointed a cabinet minister in Cairo and has withdrawn from the race.
Politics is a rough game everywhere. As it happens the Egyptian Bloc won that seat anyway. But one might have expected a gentler touch from the Islamist parties contesting Egypt's first free parliamentary elections in decades, which enter the second of three regional rounds of voting this week. The Islamists claim the high moral ground, saying they want a return to the principles and values of the pure faith. Yet Egypt's two main Islamist political forces, the Muslim Brotherhood and the puritan Salafists, which together look set to capture as many as two thirds of parliamentary seats, are playing electoral hardball not only against their secular opponents, but against each other too.
What strikes me is that not more dirty tricks have been used against Islamists. The former regime use to be pretty good at it, and they are vulnerable to charges of working for foreign interests (Saudi, Iran...) as well as (perversely) accusations of religious heresy: Salafis as against traditional Islam (the Sufi line) or crypto-al-Qaeda, Muslim Brothers as being a secret society with a bizarre worship of Hassan al-Banna (a frequent Salafi line of attack), use their morality against them by staging sting operations, alleging affairs, etc. Granted some of this has been done by secularists complaining about the Salafis being Saudi-funded, but that's pretty minor compared to the Salafis' (illegal) use of mosques for electioneering, etc.
This year’s uprisings have, in several countries, defeated the domestic spying apparatus, but there is yet little idea of how not only to reform these agencies, but what to do with all the data they collected (or indeed reveal the extent of this data collection).
In Libya, the chaos and sudden fall of Tripoli allowed, temporarily, access to files that revealed not only surveillance but collaboration with Western intelligence on various issues. The state of the intelligence apparatus in unknown, but it is likely that much of it collapsed alongside the Qadhafi state.
In Egypt, the very first days of the uprisings saw security agencies move to destroy many documents and recordings (this was seen in safehouses in different parts of Cairo, as well as in the offices of State Security), some capture of documents by protestors during the (possibly manipulated) break-in into State Security HQ in Nasr City, but no fundamental reform — indeed it appears that not only State Security is still operating as National Security (and lately returning to the streets), but General Intelligence is now at the peak of its powers, even without Omar Suleiman.
In Tunisia, in-depth police reform has yet to begin but the surveillance state has been partly dismantled already. They are now beginning to deal with the many years of work full accountability will take, as this fascinating post at Unredacted on the Tunisian debate of what to do with the former regime’s secret police files shows:
Operating out of the Interior Ministry and other federal agencies, the intelligence and security forces known collectively as the secret police, or political police, excelled in spying on citizens, infiltrating civil society groups, trolling emails and social media sites for information, and harassing, intimidating and torturing suspected opponents of Ben Ali’s regime. Conference participants agreed that no space, public or private, was safe from the surveillance state. As Farah Hachad, a lawyer and president of Le Labo’, recalled at the start of the conference, “Since I was born, even conversations inside our house would be silenced because of the fear inside our hearts that we would be heard and punished.”
Presenters at the conference and audience members had their own memories of the repressive power wielded by the political police. One man recounted how an agent showed up at his door to detain him, “And when I asked, do you have an arrest warrant?, he pulled twenty blank arrest warrants from his pocket, all signed by the Interior Minister, and said, I can have as many as I want.” Taieb Baccouche, the interim Minister of Education and president of the Arab Institute of Human Rights, remembered signing his name to a petition for democracy in the late 1960s along with dozens of other activists, artists and scholars. “That was the beginning of surveillance: they controlled my phone, my mail and all my movements from then on.” Everyone agreed that the political police still existed and still posed a danger to democratic change, despite the advances of the revolution.
More than the issue of disbanding the secret police, however, the conference was focused on how to seize their archives as a way of preserving collective memory and permitting informed public debate about the repressive past. There were strong differences of opinion about how to manage the archives. Some feared the impact on people’s lives of the release of personal information, whether true or invented by the regime. Others felt that Tunisia’s democratic transition could not be complete without access to the archives. As artist and activist Zeyneb Farhat put it, “These political archives were designed to devalue and damage the credibility of activists by spreading lies about them… They have to be opened now in order to create a justice-based relationship between police and citizens and to build trust, so that people understand the police are for protecting security, not for undermining change.”
The second round of Egypt's interminable elections for the People's Assembly, the lower house of parliament, began this morning with little trouble. Here's a few things to look out for, since the extended process means lessons are being learned from earlier rounds:
Good reporting from Tobias Buck in the FT on Hamas' predicament in Syria:
The Syrian leader is outraged that Hamas, a movement he has sponsored and nurtured for years, is refusing to back his regime against the uprising that started earlier this year. Relations are reportedly at breaking point.
Fearful of retribution, and alarmed by the collapse of order, Hamas has evacuated many of its lower-level officials from Syria. “We feel that the situation is very dangerous for Hamas in Syria,” admitted one Gaza-based Hamas official. “They [the Assad regime] are very angry with us, they want us to give support just like Hizbollah [the Lebanese Shia movement] did. But this is impossible for Hamas. The Syrian regime is killing its own people.”
Hamas leaders are keenly aware it can be dangerous to pick the wrong side. “No one wants to make the mistake that [former Palestinian leader Yassir] Arafat made in Kuwait,” said Mostafa Alsawaf, the editor of Alresalah, a pro-Hamas newspaper in the Gaza Strip.
Arafat backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and after Iraq’s defeat Kuwait took revenge by expelling some 450,000 Palestinian expatriate workers. Syria is home to about 500,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants – a potentially huge target for retribution.
The article goes on to note that neither possible alternative headquarters for the Hamas leadership, Egypt and Qatar, are ready to take them in. But that might change, in time, since the movement has friends there.
Last week, flying back from a trip in Rome, I noticed a group of of men dressed in suits with closely-cropped beards and Syrian flag pins on their lapels. Some seemed to be bearing Turkish travel documents — not a passport, but the kind of documents a country might give people without travel documents from their own countries, like political refugees. They spoke Shami Arabic. I suspect they were Syrian Muslim Brothers visiting Cairo.
One thing you can give Hamas credit for (unlike Hizbullah) is that they took a courageous decision not giving support to Assad. It's a dangerous one as the Syrian regime gets increasingly desperate.
On December 11 it was the centenary of Naguib Mahfouz’s birth.
Mahfouz was dragged into the news recently when Salafi parliamentary candidate (and reliable crackpot) Abdel-Moneim Shahat said the great novelist and Nobel Laureate “encouraged atheism and debauchery.”
Mahfouz nearly paid with his life for such views of his work. In 1994, a young religious fundamentalist approached him as he was getting into a car, pretended to want to shake his hand and instead slashed his throat. He just barely missed the writer’s carotid artery. The man had never read Mahfouz’s novels but had been told his work Children of our Alley (also known as Childen of Gabalawy) was blasphemous.
Halal tourism: summer fling anyone?
Read the passages below and you'll see a fundamental miscomprehension of what most European tourists (the bulk of those who visit Egypt) like to do on holiday:
"Tourists don't need to drink alcohol when they come to Egypt; they have plenty at home," a veiled Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Azza al-Jarf, told a cheering crowd of supporters on Sunday across the street from the Pyramids.
"They came to see the ancient civilization, not to drink alcohol," she said, her voice booming through a set of loudspeakers at a campaign event dubbed "Let's encourage tourism." The crowd chanted, "Tourism will be at its best under Freedom and Justice," the Brotherhood's party and the most influential political group to emerge from the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
. . .
Also, clerics like Yasser Bourhami, influential among hard-line Salafis, are presenting ideas for restrictions on tourism. Bourhami calls it "halal tourism," using the term for food that is ritually fit under Islamic law.
"A five-star hotel with no alcohol, a beach for women — sisters — separated from men in a bay where the two sides can enjoy a vacation for a week without sins," he said in an interview with private television network Dream TV. "The tourist doesn't have to swim with a bikini and harm our youth."
A leading member of Al-Nour, Tarek Shalaan, stumbled through a recent TV interview when asked about his views on the display of nude pharaonic statues like those depicting fertility gods.
"The antiquities that we have will be put under a different light to focus on historical events," he said, without explaining further.
If they truly feel that their religion really doesn't allow the sale of alcohol or use of beaches in swimsuits, fine — although I'd still like to see the whole religious argument for it, with sources, and particularly when it concerns non-Muslims. But at least be honest about the impact on a major source of revenue for the country. We are now at a point when the comfortable role of opposition no longer holds for Islamists, it's time to be serious about one's positions and their consequences.
A few years ago, for instance, the Muslim Brotherhood MPs in parliament opposed a law that would tighten the ban on Female Genital Mutilation (a practice that has absolutely no basis in Islam, it's largely a Nile Valley thing) and also opposed a law banning child beatings. If they are just traditionalists, let them say that. But if they want to invoke religion, they better make their case with full theological and scriptural backing.
This You Tube video of what appears to be a rap song for the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party has been making the rounds. The song's lyrics don't seem to be satyrical at all: "We hope you'll hear from us just as you've heard about us. We've suffered 80 years of defamation. I'm from Freedom and Justice. We'll protect freedom and we'll build justice." But many commenters nonetheless are convinced that it's all a mockery. They either think this is hilarious or they think it's very haram. Oh, and the creator of the video explains in the comments that the picture of Eminem "got in by mistake." Don't know what to think myself.
There's a small but burgeoning rap scene in Egypt these days. I haven't heard anything I'm crazy about yet -- nothing as good as North African rap -- but I'm intrigued by labels like Revolution Records.
The refrain of this song, "Down with Military Rule," goes: "It looks like you forgot who we are/You think we're still scared/We saw death and just smiled and stood there/Let me remind you since you've forgotten/We're the revolutionary generation."
Hossam reminded me with this post that today's is the seventh anniversary of Kifaya's (or to use its proper name, the Movement for Change's) first protest against the rule of Hosni Mubarak. I remember being in a cab Downtown and driving past the High Court when I noticed a crowd. I got out to see what was happening and saw well-known leftist activists (it's important to note these were practically entirely leftists and nationalists) singing together a funny version of the Egyptian national anthem, with the lyrics changed to poke fun at Mubarak and Gamal. I was stringing for the London Times at the time and had to convince the editors that it was worth filing a piece despite the small size of the protests.
I wrote this post at the time — I'm glad I called it a "significant milestone."
It was those brave few people, at a time when no one else would dare call for an end to the Mubarak regime, who began to roll the snowball that turned into this year's avalanche — not the Muslim Brothers, not liberal activists, not political or business leaders. That's worth commemorating.
#occupycabinet