Arab News Blog

I’m a sucker for colonial era hotels of the late British Empire. I usually can’t afford to stay in them, but they’re fine for tea or drinks; I regret that the original Shepheard’s in Cairo was burned down back in 1952 when I was not yet in first grade, but I’ve enjoyed visits to the King David in Jerusalem, the Old Winter Palace in Luxor, the Old Cataract in Aswan, and, much farther afield, the Peninsula in Hong Kong and Raffles in Singapore. At the Writer’s Bar at Raffles there are, or at least were in the late 1980s, pictures or caricatures of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and other folks who sat there writing while nursing their drinks (I suspect something like a Pimm’s Cup, though I don’t think I’ve ever tasted one, and the article linked below notes that the Singapore Sling was invented at Raffles), and at the Long Bar, you can picture the British Empire’s satraps at their peak. (Kipling: “Send me somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, where there ain’t no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst . . . “)

Well, it looks like the Qataris, or at least a Qatari investment firm, are about to buy a majority share in Raffles. And, if I understand the report correctly, they’re buying it from a Saudi investment group that has the controlling interest currently. The Saudis have owned the Long Bar and the Writer’s Bar? Who knew? It’s Waleed ibn Talal, or one of his many enterprises, apparently.

What would Kipling think?

And I know, those friends of mine who claim I blog too much about bars will feel justified again, though of well over a thousand posts, this will be only the sixth on bars. So there.

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As part of the 50th Anniversary of the Aswan High Dam the Egyptian media has been writing a lot about the period. Here’s an interesting interview in Al-Masry Al-Youm’s English pages with a Nubian displaced by the High Dam, remembering the lost villages of Nubia and showing distinctly mixed views of Nasser.

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Those of you who subscribe to the hard copy of The Middle East Journal should have gotten your copies of the Winter 2010 issue in January, but due to technical issues, our web hosts for the electronic version, Ingenta, have just now gotten it up. So it’s time to link to it. The main page for the issue is here. If you are a subscriber and have not used the electronic version before, this link explains how to activate the electronic subscription for individuals or institutions. (Non-subscribers may purchase individual articles for download.)

The articles are:

1. Hashem Ahmadzadeh and Gareth Stansfield, “The Political, Cultural, and Military Re-Awakening of the Kuridish Nationalist Movement in Iran.” We hear a lot about the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, but since the Iranian Revolution information on Kurdish movements in Iran has been sparse. This article helps fill that gap.
2. Dawn Chatty, “The Bedouin in Contemporary Syria: The Persistence of Tribal Authority and Control.” An anthropologist’s work on Syrian tribes today.
3. Ioannis N. Grigoriadis, “Friends No More? The Rise of Anti-American Nationalism in Turkey.” The title tells the story.
4. Caroline Montagu, “Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector in Saudi Arabia.” Adding information on an important but still little-documented aspect of Saudi society.
5. Silvia Borzutsky and David Berger, “Dammed if You Do, Dammed if You Don’t: The Eisenhower Administration and the Aswan Dam.” Applying modern theories of policy formation to an old standby of the modern Middle East.
6. The Book Reviews, with the main essay by William Hale, “Nationalism, Democracy and Islam in Turkey: The Unfinished Story,” reviewing six books on Turkey.

Plus, as always, the Chronology of the quarter, and other departments.

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Fifty-eight years ago today, January 26, 1952, fell on a Saturday. The day before, Egyptian police had clashed with British troops at Ismailia in the Suez Canal Zone, as noted in my post on Police Day yesterday. I have in fact posted previously on Black Saturday back in September. That post has videos and slideshow links which I recommend you check out. I can’t figure out how to embed the Movietone newsreel Zeinobia has if you follow the links, but it’s British imperial arrogance at its peak. The photos here are from her collection, as well, though they appear in many books on the subject.

The burning of Shepheard’s Hotel (before and after views at left) is the most-remembered event of the day, but other British symbols such as the Turf Club, various cinemas (Cinema Metro below right), and bars were also attacked. The old Shepheard’s was one of those old colonial hotels that symbolized empire and the survivors of which can still evoke it (the Old Winter Palace in Luxor and the Old Cataract in Aswan were others, as were the King David in Jerusalem, the Peninsula in Hong Kong/Kowloon, and of course Raffles in Singapore), so its destruction was highly symbolic. (I’m sure there are others: those are ones I know personally.) The attack on the King David Hotel by the Irgun in 1946 wasn’t precisely a precedent since it was bombed not as a symbol of colonialism but as the headquarters of the British Army in Palestine. Shepheard’s was a pure symbol. (Not to defend in any way the bombing of the King David, though.)

Black Saturday has been blamed on the Palace, the King’s Iron Guard, the Muslim Brotherhood, the British (who had no visible reason to burn down Shepheard’s), the Communists, or just the angry populace. It was, however, the first real rebellious outburst seen in Cairo since the Revolution of 1919, and left its mark on the city for decades. My earlier post may be sufficient, but I thought I should mark the anniversary.

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The BBC is reporting that clashes are continuing into Monday morning between protesters and the regime security forces in Tehran and perhaps other cities, marking the first decisive failure of the basij paramilitary to control the streets by early morning of the day of a big demonstration. The number of protesters allegedly killed by security men rose to 9, with dozens wounded and 300 persons allegedly arrested.

This video is allegedly from Monday morning and shows protesters freeing others taken prisoner in a basij van:

The chanting on Sunday turned against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself, not just against President Ahmadinejad. He was castigated as the Dictator and as worse than the old shah, and the very ideological basis of the regime, the doctrine of clerical rule, was chanted against in the streets. The legitimacy of the regime, profoundly shaken by the events since early June’s presidential election, is now being shredded further.

Another remarkable dimension of Sunday’s events was the sheer number of cities where significant rallies and clashes occurred. Some of those allegedly killed are said to have fallen in Tabriz, a northwestern metropolis near Turkey. Even conservative cities such as Isfahan and Mashhad joined in. Shiraz, Ardabil, the list goes on. The attempt of some analysts to paint the disturbances as a shi-shi North Tehran thing has clearly foundered.

The most ominous sign of all for the regime is the reports of security men refusing orders to fire into the crowd.

But for the movement to go further and become truly revolutionary, it would have to have a leader who wanted to overthrow the old regime and who could attract the loyalty of both the people and elements of the armed forces. So far this key revolutionary element, of dual sovereignty, has been lacking, insofar as opposition leaders Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi have tried to stay inside the Khomeinist framework while arguing that it is Khamenei who violated it by making it too authoritarian. Saying you want slightly less autocracy within a clerical theocracy is not a recipe for revolution.

Najmeh Bozorgmehr reports from Tehran for the FT that on Sunday in the capital, crowds– bigger than even some of those that assembled in June– maintained their discipline and proved unassailable by the basij motorcycle and other crowd control techniques. She quotes people in the crowd urging demonstrators to stick together for this purpose. She must be suggesting that the crowds were several hundred thousand strong in the capital.

Here is a typical Youtube video of Sunday’s demonstrations in Tehran:

Richard Spencer of the Independent reports from Dubai on the darker side of Sunday’s events, as crowds went on rampages, setting fire to banks, government buildings and even a local police station in response to the use of live ammunition on them by security forces. They threw up barricades and set fire to them, as well as to basiji motorcycles, filling the streets with shooting flames and hovering smoke.

The report of attacks on banks makes me think that there is an economic dimension to this uprising. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s profligate spending had provoked very high inflation last year, up to nearly 30%. Although the government maintains that inflation is now running 15%, that is still a hit that average families are taking, on top of the high prices of last year. And, many economists suspect that the true rate is higher than the government admits. Inflation hurts people on fixed incomes or people who cannot easily raise the price for the services they offer. Since much of the economy is locked up in government-owned companies or semi-public ‘foundations’ (bonyads), some controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and others by elite pro-regime clerics, there may be a monopoly effect operating from the huge public sector that limits private merchants’ and entrepreneurs ability to raise prices. Being 15-20 percent poorer every year would make a person angry.

Moreover, as as Robert Worth recently reported, the government has been threatening to remove subsidies from staples. I was in Egypt in January of 1977 when President Anwar El Sadat stopped subsidies under pressure from the IMF, and it threw the country into 3 days of turmoil from Aswan to Alexandria. Iranians have been upset by this talk of no more subsidies and it may have fed economic anxieties already inflamed by the high inflation (in fact, removal of subsidies is essentially a form of price inflation for consumers).

But values come into it, too. Farnaz Fassihi of the WSJ points out that the first month of the Muslim lunar calendar, Muharram, has been considered a month for truces and non-violence. The very name of the month means ‘sanctified.’ Even the brutal troops of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah or king overthrown in 1979, had not fired on crowds during Muharram. Opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi openly said that even the shah’s regime had not behaved on Muharram as clerical Leader Ali Khamenei’s had. Hint: in revolutionary Iran, that is a slam.

The regime therefore violated crowd norms, helping account for the vehemence of the pushback.

In Isfahan, security forces are said to have badly beaten and cursed the brother of Abdollah Nouri, the minister of state under the reformist government of former president Mohammad Khatami.

The killing of Ali Mousavi, the 34-year-old nephew of former presidential candidate Mir Husain Mousavi, was also a violation of Shiite values. The Mousavis are putative descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, a sort of caste in Muslim societies called ‘sayyid’ or ‘sharif.’

In fact, in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, one of the complaints of the crowd was that the Qajar monarchy had had sayyids beaten. So if beating a scion of the House of the Prophet can help spark a revolution, what about shooting one? And, oppositional film maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf maintains that Mousavi was killed by a death squad that came for him in a van rather than just falling victim to random police fire.

Killing a sayyid is a blot on any Iranian government. Doing so on Ashura, the day of morning for the martyred grandson of the Prophet, Imam Husayn, borders on insanity.

End/ (Not Continued)

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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.

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