Tag: Egypt

Embattled Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for insulting religion. A philosophically-minded person might observe that the thug regime which sentenced him is itself an insult to religion. In the Middle East, the pot is never afraid to call the kettle black. I doubt anyone expected a different outcome. However, kudos to the people at freekareem.org, most of whom are practicing Muslims, for giving it their best shot.

I don't particularly like Kareem. His ideas are cheap self-hating propaganda and his blog often reads like an imaginative anti-establishment effort to pick up girls. (Strangely enough, the Egyptian government has not yet managed to block it.) Kareem is a kid from an increasingly decrepit, impoverished Alexandria who has had a tough life and is angry--you can't blame him for that. But that doesn't make him a visionary or a reformer. 

However, the kid has guts. Real guts. I couldn't smile if I was staring an all-expenses-paid vacation in the infamous Tura Prison in the face, yet in his BBC photo, that's exactly what Kareem is doing. Now that is gravitas.

I don't like defending people I don't respect on principle. However, there are times when one has to suck it up and do so anyway, and this is one of them. Kareem does not deserve what will inevitably happen to him in that prison; this is not justice. Egypt does not even pretend to endorse freedom of speech, so it would be a little bit comical to rant about the lack of it--instead I will just say that a young guy who has had it rough his whole life is getting yet another tough break he does not deserve. God be with him. 

In a move that will stun the Muslim world, Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and one of the highest-ranking Sunni authorities, has said that hymen reconstruction surgery for women who have lost their virginity before marriage is halal (permissible) and that a man has no right to demand proof of a woman's virginity if he cannot provide proof of his own. In addition, the fatwa states that a woman who has had sex before marriage but has sincerely repented is under no obligation to inform her husband of her sexual status. 

The Daily Star has the full story.

This is brilliant: "It is not rational for us to think that God has placed a sign to indicate the virginity of women without having a similar sign to indicate the virginity of men," Gomaa says. (My emphasis.) For those who claim that logic is out of vogue in the corridors of Muslim power, prepare to revise. As far as I know, this is the first fatwa from a sheikh of this rank that declares the hymen an illegitimate 'sign' of virginity. Since the hymen of an active girl is often worn away by the time she reaches a marriageable age, this bodes well for millions of Muslim women around the world. Finally, reality-based physiology from the clerical class. 

The fatwa has been seconded by Azharite scholar Sheikh Khaled El Gindy, who, when challenged about 'traditional beliefs' which hold that a woman's virginity is sacrosanct while a man's is not, said "Islam does not care for the feelings of ignorant people, just as the law does not protect the idiots."

What is remarkable about this fatwa is that while it accepts the underground hymen-surgery racket, it does not endorse it; it considers the practice acceptable only because it protects a woman from potential violence. The real meat of the fatwa is in its de-emphasis of the need for proof of virginity--and in a region of the world where a woman is not considered a virgin unless she bleeds on her wedding night, this is a serious blow to entrenched un-Islamic misogynistic cultural practices.

In an interesting side-note, the hymen is mentioned nowhere in the Qur'an or the two commonly accepted books of hadith. Not once. The word for 'virgin' in Arabic--bikr--means simply 'unmarried woman'.  

Today is a very good day for women's rights in Islam. Alfa shokran, Sheikh Gomaa and Sheikh Gindy. 

Related: Azhar outlaws female circumcision. 

The Cairo Book Fair, held every winter in the Conqueress City, is the largest event of its kind in the Middle East. It is typically packed; according to this article on AJE, organizers expect 2 million visitors to crowd into the 1,800-square-foot North Cairo exhibition hall this weekend alone. Featuring booksellers from as far afield as Western Europe, Iran and China, the book fair is a high note in a region that accounts for 10% of the world's population but only 1% of its books.

Over the past ten years, the fair has become steadily dominated by deeply conservative religious books and booksellers. Alaa Al Aswani, author of the controversial novel The Yacoubian Building and the Arab literary world's newest agent provocateur, had this to say about the phenomenon: "[Peddling religious texts] has become a real business, but this fundamentalism comes from Saudi Arabia and stays with the cynical encouragement of the powers that be." 

It would be one thing if the religious texts in question were copies of the Qur'an and hadith and jurisprudence, but too often they are mere propaganda: texts that claim shaving one's beard is a worse crime than adultery, for instance; because adultery is a momentary offense, but habitual shaving accrues bad deeds for as long as you do it, potentially years and years. I have seen Wahhabi books devoted entirely to the supreme virtue of fear. Sadly, the moderate resistance--which does exist--to this plague of illogic is more or less limited to the rather spiritually cosmetic theses of televangelists like Amr Khaled. While I am glad figures like Khaled exist, I find myself wishing for more genuinely passionate and thoughtful centrist leaders, who bear a bit less commercial resemblance to Dr. Phil. 

But all is not lost; far from it. Recently a new Real Bookstore has opened up in Cairo, and this is cause for celebration, especially because it seems to be turning a reasonable profit. Al Kotob Khan (which means 'Book Bazaar') stocks titles in Arabic, English and French, and does not flinch from either the weighty or the controversial: I saw Professor Saad Gamal's masterful Arabic translation of Orientalism, a bunch of Hanif Kureishi's novels, and miracle of miracles, a considerable body of history texts and works of political analysis by Jewish scholars. What almost brought me to tears, however, was a copy of Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods. In a region where fantasy is deeply disliked and even feared as a genre--people here tend to have a complicated relationship with the unseen, and prefer not to see it embellished and celebrated--it was like a little ray of light. My husband and I spent a couple of blissful hours at Al Kotob Khan a few weeks ago, and I couldn't help thinking about how ordinary such a place would seem in the States, where there is a Barnes and Noble every twenty blocks. Let this be a lesson to everyone who takes books and the people who sell them for granted: they are precious, and in many parts of the world, rarer than they should be.

The first Egyptian blogger to be formally prosecuted for crimes against the state since the wave of blogger arrests began in 2005 will get his day in court on January 25. This comes on the heels of a very nasty dismissal of the role of Egyptian bloggers in local politics by one Mohammad Mossad Abdel Aziz, an Egyptian-American academic, at the Reform  and Resistance conference held at Ben Gurion University last week. Once again, the Islamademics are caught snoozing while real things happen to real people in the real world. An excerpt of Dr. Mossad's lecture, courtesy of the Herzog Center:

In Egypt, weblogging is thriving and is mainly political.  It has been argued that blogging gave a floor and voice to a large and previously silent sector, that used cyberspace to share information, raise significant but ignored issues, pose questions,create discourses, extend new political relations and affiliations and organize political campaigns and activities. I argue, nevertheless, that weblogs are dominated by urban petit bourgeois young activists, who reflect the dominant social hierarchical structures, tend to recycle tired discourses and turn the potentially creative cyber-space into a reflection of the traditional political public sphere in Egypt. This is not to say weblogging has had no value. Weblogging has undeniable political contribution. The paper will portray how political weblogging has failed to challenge traditional political structures and processes in Egypt.

What this man was doing when bloggers broke the story of the Eid sexual assaults in downtown Cairo while state media twiddled its thumbs, one can only guess. My hunch is: not reading Egyptian blogs. Where this man will be when indicted blogger Kareem Nabil Soliman goes to trial this week, I will predict with some confidence: not in Egypt.

Dr. Mossad's further complaint, according to Sandmonkey, who ran an analysis of his presentation, is that there are only about 100 bloggers in Egypt (the Egyptian Blog Ring lists over 1,000), that he knows them all personally, and that most of them are journalists for opposition newspapers who use new media to vent the frustrations their editors will not allow them to print. Off the top of my head, I can think of only 4 people who fit that description, and I am one of them. (I have not had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Mossad, however.) 

A few days ago I wrote a post about the increasingly unstable political situation in Egypt. Recent developments look likely to add fuel to the fire: first and foremost is the decision of the Ikhwan Al Muslimeen (Muslim Brotherhood) to circumvent Egypt's shura council (the upper house of its parliament) and form its own political party extrajudicially. Though banned, the MB has been unofficially operating as a political party for years; in the last parliamentary election, many of its members simply ran as independents. The audacity of this move is unprecedented. State-owned media have been quiet about the MB's announcement, suggesting that the Mubarak regime would rather sweep the issue under the carpet and deal with the irascible Ikhwan the old-fashioned way, by continuing to perform sporadic police raids on their residences and meeting places.

At the same time, the western press is waking up to the alarm bells that the continued broadcasts of the Al Zawraa Channel into Egypt must necessarily raise. The fact that the Mubarak regime has made no move to stop the broadcasts--beyond demanding that Al Zawraa not air the full Saddam execution video, which the channel claims it has--is extremely interesting, and to be quite frank I'm not sure what to make of it yet.  I do not think, as this article suggests, that this is a sectarian issue. After a disasterous suggestion that Iraq's Shi'ites were loyal to Iran rather than their own country, for which he was roundly condemned, Mubarak has remained fairly quiet about the Iraq conflict; recently he became the first Arab leader to tentatively suggest he would supply troops to Iraq should the US call for them, but this too has been downplayed locally, as it would certainly spark public outrage. We'll see what leading opposition paper Al Dostoor has to say in this week's issue, but state-regulated press is staying ominously mum. 

I am going to make a prediction: the next Middle Eastern dictator to go will not be Ahmadinejad or Bashir Al Assad. It will be Hosni Mubarak. 

Egyptian authorities released Al Jazeera journalist Hawaida Taha today on bail, after having detained and questioned her for two days. Taha was in Egypt making a documentary about torture in Egyptian jails, and her footage--some of which was dramatization based on eye witness and survivor testimony--alarmed the Mubarak regime sufficiently to  accuse Taha of "practicing activities that harm the national interest of the country; possessing and giving false pictures about the internal situation in Egypt that could undermine the dignity of the country." From a regime that bans even the Red Cross from some of its political prisons, this limp-wristed accusation seems almost farcical. Too late, ya ustez il ra'ees.

Like many authoritarian regimes, Egypt goes through periods of relative freedom of speech followed by heavy-handed clampdowns. 2004 and the early months of 2005 saw an unusual level of laxity toward Mubarak-baiting and general criticism in the press. So it is perhaps only natural that in late in 2005 Mubarak's chief opponent in the presidential 'elections' was jailed and has yet to be released; that 2006 saw an unprecedented number of arrests of Egyptian bloggers; and that only this week an Al Jazeera journalist and several prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood have been detained. 

This clampdown, however, has the added flavor of a set up; there has been speculation for months--ever since Gamal Mubarak took over leadership of his father's political party, the NDP--that the way is being paved for Gamal to become president. Some of the Cairo 500 (the 500 most culturally, politically, religiously and/or economically influential people in the Conqueress City) believe that the reins of power will be handed from father to son this year. If this is true, we can expect things to get worse for the country's journalists, artists and reformists before they get better. The question is whether Egypt's allies in the West are prepared to turn a blind eye on what has become a swiftly deteriorating political situation. 

In a recent piece for the Guardian's "Comment is Free", Brian Whitaker writes about Egypt's new tool to oppress religious minorities: idiot computers.

You heard that right--from now on, the computer database in which each citizen's religious affiliation is recorded (reporting this affiliation is mandatory and appears on one's national ID card) will only recognize the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A suit lodged against the government in protest by a family of Egyptian Baha'is was recently denied. (For the full story, see The Arabist--which by the by is a great source of alternative news on Egyptian and Middle Eastern politics, spearheaded by some of my old colleagues from Cairo Magazine.) 

The Egyptian government's rather manic relationship with religious labeling is something that everyone living here has a story about; being mislabeled can have either comical or disasterous results. You cannot choose not to be labeled--religion is mandatory. I remember vividly the first time I put 'Muslim' next to my name on an official form; it was for work papers I had to fill out shortly after I moved to the country. The act brought relief and fear at once: there it was, the faith I had adopted, in print next to my name. There was no turning back.  Or so I thought.

To my shock, when the processed forms were given back to me, I had been labeled 'Christian'. When I pointed out the mistake, the clerk who had processed my forms laughed in a kindly but patronizing manner--I couldn't just choose my religion. If I wanted to become a real Muslim, I had to register my conversion with the state. Until then, I, like all European and American foreign residents, would be considered a Christian.

I decided the divine lesson involved was not to take myself too seriously. Eventually I did undergo a state-sanctioned conversion, taking an extended Shaheda--on account of my Christian beliefs--before an Azhari sheikh. (Converts from Christianity are required, in Egypt, to declare not only that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet, but that Jesus born of the Virgin Mary, though a prophet, was not the son of God, and did not die on the cross but ascended to Heaven, etc, etc, such that the Shaheda takes about two full minutes.) It was, all things considered, funny: but for the unlucky, the increasing religious pressure of the state can result in disinheritance, forcible divorce, and fractured families.