Arab News Blog

“Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Judeh said Friday that relations between Jordan and Israel “are cold and will continue to be cold until real progress is made toward establishing a Palestinian state.” “

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Today I went to Dar al-Hilal, in the Mounira district of central Cairo. It’s a rather grand building that houses the publishing houses that puts out, among other things, al-Mussawar magazine. The picture above shows a stained glass window at the end of a long corridor where the fairly drab and depressing offices of the magazine are.

Al-Mussawar was once a great publication in the monarchy and Nasser eras, featuring fantastic photography, cartoons and articles. I have a small collection of old issues of al-Mussawar, some of which I found in Morocco. For instance, the one below dates from a few months before the October 1956 Suez Crisis and talks about war preparedness along the Suez Canal. 

 I can’t judge its editorial quality today — I almost never read it. But I did pick up the last issue, part of new wave of attacks on ElBaradei, which had the cover below, with the headline: “ElBaradei Pasha: Enemy of the Workers and Peasants.” I spoke to Hamdi Rizk, al-Mussawar’s editor about it. Rizk is an old-school populist-nationalist, critical of ElBaradei for essentially being a “khawaga” and a “pacha” with no knowledge of “people on the street.” It’s a critique I’ve heard from ordinary people and has much more resonance than the previous attacks focusing on ElBaradei’s alleged dual nationality. Rizk pointed to ElBaradei’s shoes on the cover, saying they are Clark’s, worth more than the monthly salary of an average Egyptian. Of course, I’m sure Mubarak and Gamal wear similarly expensive footwear, not shib-shib they picked up up in Sayyeda. I guess this is the equivalent of the perennial American debate about presidential candidates’ expensive haircuts.

Rizk was affable enough — not the terrible monster I’d imagined reading his violent attacks on the Muslim Brothers (his primary field of expertise alongside Sudan) over the years in al-Masri al-Youm, where he pens a column. What struck me is that, as much as he might be accused of engaging in ElBaradei-bashing on behalf of the Mubarak regime, he also represents something real.

Call it the populist false consciousness of a media that engages in relentless nationalist manipulation with occasional bouts of paranoid schizophrenia about the foreign conspiracy against the pure white hearts of the Egyptian people.

Or call it self-interest of the administrative class that has underpinned the regime for decades, the kind that obsesses with salary scales, bonuses, club memberships and safeguarding idea of state control over society and economy in an age of globalization.  

Or perhaps even call it a truly representative sample of a part of public opinion that resents (as Rizk does) Gamal’s team of economic reformists as much as it resents ElBaradei — these “khawagized” Egyptians who “think Egypt can be run from laptops” (Rizk’s phrase). Maybe Rizk is earnest about his opinions, and thinks he’s doing a public good by attacking ElBaradei. He makes no secret of his love for Mubarak and hope he will run again next year. He wants the next president to be like Nasser and Mubarak, to “come from the streets.”

Maybe we need to start thinking about this phenomenon as Egypt’s equivalent to the Tea Party movement, the manifestation of resentment against sinking purchasing power, culture wars with the elites, and a widening chasm of inequality.

P.S. I forgot to mention that the new issue of al-Mussawar’s editorial is by Mr. Egypt himself, Zahi Hawass. He also attacks ElBaradei, with the headline: “I am the most famous person in Egypt” in answer to ElBaradei’s similar recent statement to Austrian media. 

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I have been very critical of Haykal over the years but his episode yesterday about Nasser’s visit to Al-Ahram’s offices was most interesting. Let us face it (politics aside), Nasser is the only interesting Arab leader in the contemporary history of the region. I mean, can you imagine spending an hour with King Fahd and King `Abduallh? I mean, after discussing their knowledge of STDs, what can you talk about with those two? I really doubt that either of those two Saudi brothers ever read a whole book that did not require coloring.

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Fouad Zakariyya, a leading Egyptian philosopher and sophisticated critic of Islamist thought, passed away on Thursday after a long illness. Born in Port Said, he earned his doctorate in philosophy at Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1956, as the four-year-old Nasser regime took a sharp turn into nationalist populism. His career took him away from Egypt, to Kuwait University, for much of his life. 

While I am not very familiar with Zakariyya’s political involvement as a man of the left (Hossam perhaps can fill in), as a scholar he was a leading advocate for secularism in the Arab world. He saw secularism as a historical necessity for the Arab world, the only possible path to advancement, but was not anti-religious. At the core of his argument was that Islam was too pervasive in the public sphere, and should become a private matter. He was painfully of the way religion was manipulated by both the state and religious groups, whether by Azharites or movements like the Society of Muslim Brothers. He was also scathing about Sadat’s embrace of these groups, and accused him of giving them the false expectation that Egypt would turn into an Islamic state — indeed, by the late 1970s many Islamists were already disappointed with Sadat’s duplicity and would turn radical, eventually assassinating him.

To make his case, Zakariyya became a leading deconstructionist of the intellectual production of Islamists, and engaged in passionate debates with Islamist thinkers such as Hassan Hanafi, notably over the latter’s critique of the European origins of secularism. Not only did Zakariyya not see the European influence on modern secularism as a problem, but he argued that secularism had been an integral part of Islamic culture since its early days, and called for the revival of the secularist tradition in Muslim thinkers like the Mutazallites and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Without secularism, he argued, the Arab world would not catch up with modernity — and to do so, Arab intellectuals must treat standard Islamic history critically rather than with traditional deference.

Zakariyya leaves behind an oeuvre crowned by Myth and Reality in the Contemporary Islamist Movement, as far as I know the only book of his translated into English, which is one of the best books on Islamism I have read. I particularly appreciated his critique of groups like the Muslim Brothers, which he sees as authoritarian, closed to new ideas, and as promoting groupthink. He was unfortunately vindicated by the arrival of the Muslim Brothers to power in Sudan, where the Numeiri regime enacted the most retrograde policies in the name of Islam. He was also critical of the Islamism of the Gulf elites, which he saw devoid of social justice, and saw the combination of these elites and oil wealth as the “tribalization of Islam.” These local elites, he wrote, allied with the US to maintain power, but gave Westerners political hegemony over the Middle East in exchange. Most of the book, though, engages with the ideas of Islamists, their internal contradictions, and the vagueness of terms such as shura to denote democracy.

Zakariyya also took positions that, among some Arab intellectuals at least, were controversial. He defended Kuwait when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein, a position many saw as pro-imperialist. In 2004, he wrote that the Iraqi insurgency was no national resistance movement, but a bunch of violent ex-Baathists thugs. 

At a time when, against all odds, there is the inkling of a revival of secularist thought in the region, it’s sad to think that most of Zakariyya’s adult life was marked by an Islamic revivalism that, at times, has been terribly destructive. I am curious what Asa’ad AbuKhalil made of him — AbuKhalil shares Zakariyya’s critical take on Islamism (read for instance his The Incoherence of Islamic Fundamentalism [PDF] article) but probably not his politics.

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In TNR/ here

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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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“”The United States is determined to hold to account anyone who commits crimes against Iraqi people,” Mr Biden added.” (thanks Nasser)

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The best press reviewer, long before Slate, is Hasanayn Karrum in Al-Quds Al-`Arabi. He writes a one page review of the Egyptian press. Joseph Samahah used to tell me that he never missed a day. They are really good. He never refers to Nasser by his name: only as “the immortal leader”.

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Not too long ago I wrote about Lee Smith’s terrible book, The Strong Horse, which I noted is not just bad but actually hysterically racist in its essentialism. In the comments to the post, reader Lubnani alerted me that the Hudson Institute will be hosting the book’s launch tomorrow. Guess who the guests are:

For over half a century, the United States has established itself as the Middle East’s dominant “strong horse.” Yet, with war raging in Afghanistan and Iraq — and the possibility of conflict with the Islamic Republic of Iran — does America have the resolve and the resources to maintain its status?

 

Please join Hudson Visiting Fellow Lee Smith to discuss his new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday). Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, and Elliott Abrams, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy in the Bush administration, will offer commentary. Hudson Institute CEO Kenneth Weinstein will introduce the event. 

Now, I’m not surprised Abrams would endorse such a book by appearing at this event — it fits the bill perfectly. But how about a currently serving head of the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau? Does he share Lee Smith’s opinion that:

To be sure, a significant part of the Middle East, including Osama Bin Laden, is expressly at war with the US.

Or:

September 11 is the day we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a clash of Arab civilizations, a war that used American citizens as yet another venue for Arabs to fight each other.

Or:

The Arabs hate us not because of what we do or who we are but because of who we are not: Arabs.

Or:

[In the Middle East] Bin Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringes, but represents the political and social norm.

Or:

Anti-Americanism is an Arab constant, the region’s lingua franca, from Nasser to Nasrallah it has not changed in over 50 years.

These are all from Smith’s book. Now here’s the question:

Does Jeffrey Feltman feel these sentiments to be his own, or those of the administration he represents? Does he want his office to be associated with such spurious and incendiary material? 

I do not expect Feltman to only attend events for people or publications that he entirely agrees with. If he attends, I certainly hope he’ll at least speak out on the matter. The topic of the conference — US power in the Middle East — is excellent; its title and promotional material most unfortunate.

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Hussam Hussam anyone? ‘Zuheir-in-a-hundred-place-at-once’ Siddiq?

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