Ahlan wa Sahlan min Amman!

After a fairly lengthy hiatus, I will begin updating this fine piece of the blogosphere again!

The Internet here at the American Center for Oriental Research is fairly screwy (typically I would link that to the descriptive web-page, but WordPress runs so slowly here it is not worth the trouble) but other than that all is well.

What the fatwa? volume II

Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of the Arab Republic of Egypt, the man who has had to cover for fatwas o.k.-ing adult breastfeeding at work and the beneficial qualities of drinking the Prophet’s urine, writes in the Washington Post’s OnFaith today on the need for those who issue fatwas to understand the times that they are writing about.

To set up the greater point of this piece, I will quote Gomaa at length:

The world has witnessed tremendous change over the last two hundred years. This change came in the form of new technologies and political ideologies. There were also new developments in communications allowing us to be aware of what is happening in nearly every part of the world the instant that it occurs, whereas in the past it would take months if not years for even the most urgent news to spread. This wave of change has caused a complete alteration of nearly every aspect of our lives. It is this modern occurrence that presents the greatest difficulty to Muslim jurists and Muftis. In the past there was little alternation of the way things worked and progressed. Even when things changed it was slow and isolated to a handful of fields. The change of the past 200 years, however, has made it necessary to re-examine how everything works. Meaning that the way in which Islamic law is applied must take into account this change.

The flexibility and adaptability of Islamic law is perhaps its greatest asset. To provide people with practical and relevant guidance while at the same time staying true to its foundational principles, Islam allows the wisdom and moral strength of revelation to be applied in modern times.

There are much better defenses for the lag in Muslim jurisprudence and religious instruction than, “Things were going along swell at 45 m.p.h for 1200 years but when we had to kick it up to 75 m.p.h. the engine fell out.”

(One might be: Our parishioners would cut us to pieces if we did anything other than crawl towards the modern world.)

While Muslims have been responsible for numerous inventions and innovations over the centuries – indeed, they served (and serve) as an incubator for engaged religious and political thought – the umma deserves better than this.

But could they get better right now?

The issue, quite plainly, is those muftis and other fatwa-makers have not been stridently “traditional” enough. That is to say that assuming Islam puts a high value on human dignity and freedom (which this blogger believes it does), Muslim clerics have not been pushing these ideas sandbagged by a vapid parochial propriety, to name one particularly annoying instance.

But aren’t they stuck? To attain religious authority, these Egyptian clerics are looking for a government job. Here I will echo the complaint of many a Christian pacifist with the contemporary evangelical Christian church: when you become a part of the system you lose your “prophetic” role, the ability to critique the system as stridently as God would ask of you.

In order to drone out the folks moving on a “dark path,” as Gomaa put it (see: Osama bin Laden), religious authority figures need to establish their bona fides. But unless a Muslim Gandhi is somewhere in the making, the world will have to accept the gradual grind of progress characteristic of a bureaucracy, not a dynamic religious movement.

Watch out, Jack

Because you’re the only name in the U.K. more popular than Mohammad. The name of the principal Muslim prophet beat out such go-to child names as “Oliver” and “Joshua.”

Bomb bomb, Iran

Oh John McCain. As the inimitable “Don’t Know” category passes you in the polls, perhaps you will find a career as a crooner more to your liking.

Your Egyptian Voter Registration: Make-up and a Mini

“If I had heavy makeup and miniskirt on, they would have allowed me to vote with pleasure,” said Safaa Hegazy, a veiled woman who was prevented by police from entering another station in Giza.

vs.

But Safwat el-Sherif, the speaker of the Shura Council, said Monday’s voting would be “free and transparent”.

Summoning this blogger’s best Bill Clinton: It depends what your definition of “free” is…

What the fatwa?

Operating on consular-like hours (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.), what might be called the Fatwa Desk of Al Azhar University in Egypt pumps out religious decrees. One can imagine a sort of DMV-esque scene, with weary patrons padding along Cairo’s streets to get to the university early, trundling to the front of the line to query the “conscience of the nation” (as one Al Azhar-ite put it) on marriage, female driving rights, and appropriate apparel (to say nothing, of course, of whether drinking the Prophet’s urine constitutes a blessing or whether female workers can breastfeed their male counterparts).

Plus, anybody else who feels the urge can drop a fatwa. “In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.”

And all of this is making Egyptians a little weary, according to this NYT piece. The part about the Fatwa Industry is on page 2.

While the Israeli’s are developing “Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images“, the Egyptians are squabbling over urine long-passed and asking old men about hymen-restoration surgery. Talk about a lack of individual imagination. This is the bastardization of the modern liberal state, a bizarre fascism in a religious module: we, the state, will buoy the “national conscience” with our selected members while brutally repressing opposition political groups. Jinkies.

To paraphrase Larry Diamond, elections doth not a democracy make.

In a culture heavy on propriety (perhaps “exclusively concerned with” would be a better phrase), the practice of getting a fatwa for even the most minute issue appears perhaps understandable, especially as a potentially powerful tool for women who would be unable to stand up to men without religious backing.

This is just too thorny to unpack completely here, but the end game is that the Egyptian nation is tugging itself in so many directions (yes, you can divorce your husband; yes, stone your cousin for converting to Christianity), is it any wonder that there appears no democratic traction?

UPDATE: Palestinian mufti issues a fatwa forbidding Palestinians from fleeing Gaza during the intense fighting detailed here. What the fatwa, indeed.

Good Reads

1. Whoops. The classified budget of the 16 national intelligence gathering agencies is secret no more – because a blogger right clicked a PowerPoint slide.

2. Speaker silenced. After three assaults on Shi’i members of Parliament during the last year, the speaker of the Iraqi parliament is getting the boot. For a general rant about Iraqi politics, see this. For a fight in the Alabama legislature, see below.

3. Egyptians Vote! …Sorta. If a nation throws an election, and nobody cares/nobody goes, does it make a sound? Like mid-terms in the U.S… but with police brutality.

Oil Wells and Being Arab

I was sitting in a wonderful Eastern Mediterranean restaurant in the District recently when I found myself momentarily distracted from my mezze. Aisha, an old friend and aspiring journalist (and as you might guess, an Arab), was recounting her experiences working against Arab discrimination. “(Arabs) are willing to talk about anything but when we want them show up and do something, they just stay home.”

“We (meaning Arabs) need to start taking care of ourselves. We love to complain and be mad but we don’t do anything… We’ve been victims for forever. Its pathetic.”

I am struck again by the point reading Thomas Friedman in today’s NYT (subscription req.): “This country has a culture that nurtures and rewards individual imagination — one with no respect for limits or hierarchies, or fear of failure. It’s a perfect fit with this era of globalization,”.

He’s not talking about the United States or India or even China. He’s writing about Israel, a nation with zilch in terms of natural resources but rich in the 21st century’s most important commodity: brain power.

My guess is that the flatter the world becomes, the wider the economic gap we will see between those countries that empower individual imagination and those that don’t. High oil prices can temporarily disguise that gap, but it’s growing.

Iran’s ignorant president, who keeps babbling about how Israel is going to disappear, ought to pay a visit to Ben Gurion and see these rooms buzzing with student innovators, with projects called “Integration Points for IP Multimedia Subsystems” and “Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance.” These are oil wells that don’t run dry.

Say what you want about funds the U.S. has pumped into the Israeli economy over the years. But imagination and the culture that fosters it can’t be shipped anywhere. Much of the “Arab malaise,” as Samir Kassir would be quick to point out, is due to the fundamental inability to see the world any differently than the proverbial “next guy.” While Aisha has the proximate cause of Arab frustration down – a strangling sense of victimhood, an indignant ennui – the greater demon is the inability to conceptualize a future beyond (usually religious) sloganeering.

This is the greatest tragedy at work in the Arab world today. When Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, tries to moderate simmering Muslim affairs, it is largely ignored. To get into the club of Muslim authority, Indonesia needs to sustain its current efforts, to be sure. But the sheer reticence of other majority-Muslim nations to hear the Indonesians is yet another sad example of the inability to dream, of bitterness cloaked as “realism,” of a people staring the greatest problems of their age in the face and, in Aisha’s words, “staying home.”

An Oversimplified List

Of Options In Iraq  

Cut and run.

Run, without cutting first.

Cut. Just cut. No running.

Stand very still, then run suddenly—without cutting.

Stay the course.

Alter the course—but only slightly. Without cutting and running.

Stay the course—for a while. Then cut and run.

(hat tip to Wittkower.)

“Can you understand now why we HATE U.S. politicians?” – H Con Resolution 152

Hundreds of pieces of legislation pass through Congress on a daily basis.

But, as Palestinian blogger Sabbah writes, H. Con Resolution 152 really has a special place in Arab hearts: “Can you understand now why we HATE U.S. politicians?”

Passed by a voice vote on the anniversary of Israeli’s victory in the Six-Day War, HRes. 152 has the following aims:

(1) congratulates the citizens of Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel defeated enemies aiming to destroy the Jewish State;(2) congratulates the residents of Jerusalem and the people of Israel on the 40th anniversary of the reunification of that historic city;(3) commends those former combatant states of the Six Day War, Egypt and Jordan, who in subsequent years had the wisdom and courage to embrace a vision of peace and coexistence with Israel;

(4) commends Israel for its administration of the undivided city of Jerusalem for the past 40 years, during which Israel has respected the rights of all religious groups;

(5) reiterates its commitment to the provisions of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 and calls upon the President and all United States officials to abide by its provisions; and

(6) urges the Palestinians and Arab countries to join with Israel in peace negotiations to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, including realization of the vision of two democratic states, Israeli and Palestinian, living side-by-side in peace and security.

There is so much to say about this, this blogger has no idea where to begin. It is simply disappointing. Let the Congress just admit that they care more about the good people at AIPAC than any other interested party in the foreign policy arena. Let any Arab who finds this feel like they’ve had a stick poked squarely in the eye.

One thing that needs to be mentioned. The first four paragraphs of the resolution read like this:

Whereas Israel has, since its founding, sought peace with its Arab neighbors;

Whereas in the weeks leading up to the Six Day War, Israel’s neighbors, without provocation, called for and implemented a blockade of Israel’s critical outlet

to the Red Sea, ordered United Nations peace-keeping forces out of the Sinai desert, massed their forces with apparent hostile intent in the Sinai and in the Golan Heights, and publicly threatened to destroy Israel;

Whereas in six days of war, Israel defeated those forces seeking its destruction and reunited the city of Jerusalem which had been artificially divided for 19 years;

1st bold section: Of course they have. Except with the Palestinians. And the Lebanese. And the Syrians. And Anwar Sadat had nothing to do with peace with Egypt. Nope. No way. Oh yeah, and about the Palestinians…

2nd bold section: Artificially divided? How about taken over by the Israeli’s and split in half in 1948? The U.N. didn’t split Jerusalem – they hoped to make it an international zone (which, of course, never happened). The Israelis TOOK WEST JERSUALEM IN 1948. Then they TOOK EAST JERUSALEM IN 1967.

If anybody “artificially divided” Jerusalem, it was the Israelis. Who are now being congratulated for unifying the city they divided.

Incredible.