ENGAGING BOOKS SERIES
Cornell University Press Selections

On Lebanon

This is a new series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. The second installment involves a selection from Cornell University Press on the theme of modern Lebanon. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.

Table of Contents

Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon 

By Melani Cammett

About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews 

Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon

By Reinoud Leenders

About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews 

Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976

 By James R. Stocker

About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews

Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon

By Melani Cammett

 About the Book

In Lebanon, religious parties such as Hezbollah play a critical role in providing health care, food, poverty relief, and other social welfare services alongside or in the absence of government efforts. Some parties distribute goods and services broadly, even to members of other parties or other faiths, while others allocate services more narrowly to their own base. In Compassionate Communalism, Melani Cammett analyzes the political logics of sectarianism through the lens of social welfare. On the basis of years of research into the varying welfare distribution strategies of Christian, Shia Muslim, and Sunni Muslim political parties in Lebanon, Cammett shows how and why sectarian groups deploy welfare benefits for such varied goals as attracting marginal voters, solidifying intraconfessional support, mobilizing mass support, and supporting militia fighters.

Cammett then extends her arguments with novel evidence from the Sadrist movement in post-Saddam Iraq and the Bharatiya Janata Party in contemporary India, other places where religious and ethnic organizations provide welfare as part of their efforts to build political support. Nonstate welfare performs a critical function in the absence of capable state institutions, Cammett finds, but it comes at a price: creating or deepening social divisions, sustaining rival visions of the polity, or introducing new levels of social inequality.

Compassionate Communalism is informed by Cammett's use of many methods of data collection and analysis, including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis of the location of hospitals and of religious communities; a large national survey of Lebanese citizens regarding access to social welfare; standardized open-ended interviews with representatives from political parties, religious charities, NGOs, and government ministries, as well as local academics and journalists; large-scale proxy interviewing of welfare beneficiaries conducted by trained Lebanese graduate students matched with coreligionist respondents; archival research; and field visits to schools, hospitals, clinics, and other social assistance programs as well as political party offices throughout the country.

About the Author

Melani Cammett is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon and coeditor of The Politics of Non-state Social Welfare, both from Cornell. She is also the author of Globalization and Business Politics in Arab North Africa. www.melanicammett.net 

In the Media

Read an interview with Melani Cammett on Jadaliyya.

"Overall, Compassionate Communalism is the kind of work on non-state social welfare that fills a gap in the political economy literature. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics, political economy in weak states, ethnic politics and consocialism."

—Barea M. Sinno, International Affairs (March 4, 2016)
 

Scholarly Praise for Compassionate Communalism

"This book is a remarkable accomplishment—simultaneously a revealing look at the varied and complex dynamics of ethnic and sectarian politics in Lebanon, a profound reflection on the basic questions of political science—who gets what, when, and how—and an ingenious use of multiple methodologies in the search for nuanced, plausible, and valuable answers.  In examining the on-the-ground dynamics of welfare distribution by several sectarian parties and movements, Melani Cammett shows that the various configurations of political mobilization, participation, and competition shape political patronage in surprisingly predictable patterns—from very narrowly particularistic to very broadly distributive. These findings will prove instructive not only to those interested in politics in the Middle East but also to anyone concerned with the nature of political organization and exchange, as well as admirers of well-constructed social science research."

—Lisa Anderson, The American University in Cairo

"A theoretically compelling, carefully researched, and well-written study of the politics of service system provision by sectarian-based parties, Compassionate Communalism is a must-read for students of service provision, clientelism, and political parties in Lebanon and beyond."

—Ellen Lust, Yale University, author of Structuring Conflict in the Arab World

Additional Information

May 2014
336 Pages
$82.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8014-5232-1
$27.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8014-7893-2

Where to Purchase

Cornell University Press
Amazon

Excerpt

In June 2007, Hamza Shahrour, a twenty-four-year-old Lebanese man, died of heart failure in Beirut. Hamza’s death might have been prevented had he received timely medical attention, but the hospital where his family first took him refused to admit him. In Lebanon, examples abound of low-income patients who are turned away from hospital emergency rooms because they cannot cover the costs of treatment, and the Lebanese media periodically feature stories about patients who die in ambulances outside private hospitals that have refused to accept them on financial grounds (Al-Nahar Staff 1998; Balaa 2005). In the case of Hamza Shahrour, however, it was not poverty but sectarian identity that allegedly compelled the hospital staff to refuse to treat him. A Shiʿi Muslim, Hamza was taken to the Rafiq Al-Hariri Hospital, which is officially public but which at various times has been controlled by the Future Movement, a predominantly Sunni Muslim political party and an important force in Lebanese politics. After his death, Hamza’s mother lamented, “I wish my son had been a Sunni. Maybe he would be sitting next to me now instead of dying, having been turned away from the Hariri hospital” (IRIN News 2008). This account of Hamza’s treatment suggests that the Future Movement allocates social benefits along sectarian lines. But this claim is surprising in light of the history of the Future Movement. For years, the organization was seen as relatively open to all Lebanese, regardless of sect, even though its founder was a prominent Sunni leader. Thus, the interpretation by Hamza’s mother suggests that Lebanese citizens view the organization as “sectarian,” despite its history of cross-sectarian generosity.

The Future Movement is hardly the only political party in Lebanon accused of discrimination along sectarian lines in recent years. Doctors from the Rasoul al-ʿAzam Hospital, a hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut run by the  Shiʿi  Muslim  party Hezbollah,  admit that Hezbollah  members and their families receive priority treatment (IRIN News 2008). Although their own welfare institutions are currently far less developed than those of their Sunni and Shiʿa counterparts, Christian political parties  use  connections with religious charities and other provider organizations to ensure that their supporters receive preferential access to social services. Christian leaders with bases of regional support, such as Nayla Moawad or Suleiman Franjieh, both of whom come from important political families in North Lebanon, run welfare networks that are widely perceived by Lebanese citizens to favor their own supporters. Long-standing Christian political parties, such as the Lebanese Forces and Kataeb, whose welfare programs were largely dismantled after the end of the fifteen-year Lebanese civil war in 1990, are resuscitating and building their social service wings at present. Political leaders of these parties openly acknowledge that they must reward their supporters with services as they rebuild party institutions; “We know we need to help our sup- porters, especially now that we are constituting ourselves into a real political party,” explained one Lebanese Forces official.

Social welfare, then, not only concerns the ways in which people meet their basic social needs; in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and other regions of the Global South, where public welfare functions are underdeveloped and identity-based organizations provide social protection, it is a lens through which to study sectarian and ethnic politics. At its core, sectarianism refers to processes of constructing and maintaining the boundaries of a religious community, demarcating who belongs and who is excluded. Social welfare, too, entails processes of inclusion and exclusion, shaping both the constitution and experiences of membership in a political community. At the national level, for example, access to social services and benefits is at the heart of contests over citizenship, a status that determines one’s rights and obligations and their entailments within the polity. Similarly, who benefits from the provision of social services by sectarian organizations—whether based on formal or informal eligibility criteria— effectively constitutes membership in these groups. Through the direct pro- vision of social services or through indirect access to benefits provided by other public and private organizations, these organizations aim to build sup- port, consolidate their control over territory and people, and present them- selves as protectors and guarantors of well-being. A focus on the relationship between provider and beneficiary exposes the kinds of linkages—material and immaterial—that sectarian organizations construct with ordinary people, enabling identity-based groups to lock in their control over social and political life.

In light of standard expectations of sectarian politics in academic and jour-nalistic accounts, the story of Hamza’s death told by his mother is tragic but not surprising; sectarian or ethnic groups generally favor “their own”—in access to social services, jobs, the distribution of patronage, or other forms of resource allocation—especially when resources are scarce and a larger, cross-cutting sense of solidarity is absent or underdeveloped (Alesina et al. 2003; Easterly and Levine 1997; Habyarimana et al. 2007; Lieberman 2003; Tsai 2007). Far more puzzling, then, are instances when sectarian organizations purposively serve people from other sects. Sunnis and Christians attest that they receive medical care, financial assistance, and even educational scholarships from Hezbollah institutions,3 and Hezbollah emphasizes that it welcomed Christian business owners and residents in neighborhoods located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, such as Shiyah and Baabda, after the civil war (Harik 2004). Likewise, Shiʿa Lebanese report that they benefit from similar services provided by Sunni institutions linked to political parties and religious charities. Even their harshest critics in Lebanon attest that sectarian parties make deliberate efforts to serve members of out-groups.

This book takes these apparently anomalous cases of cross-sectarian welfare provision as a starting point for studying the broader phenomenon of sectarianism: How does sectarianism affect the efforts of ordinary people to meet their basic needs? This broad concern points to more targeted questions about the behavior of sectarian parties: Why do some sectarian providers dis- tribute welfare goods broadly, even to out-group members, while others concentrate service provision within their associated communities? Similarly, why do sectarian organizations purposively cater to members of out-groups to a greater or lesser degree in different time periods or geographical areas? The book also poses a second set of questions about what it means for organizations to serve their own communities: Even if sectarian organizations primarily serve in-group members, are all treated equally or are some favored over others? Given resource limitations, sectarian organizations are compelled to distribute welfare goods unevenly among different categories of in-group members.

Excerpt from Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon by Melani Cammettpublished by Cornell University Press. ©2014. All rights reserved.

Call for Reviews

If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com

Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon

by Reinoud Leenders

About the Book

In Spoils of Truce, Reinoud Leenders documents the extensive corruption that accompanied the reconstruction of Lebanon after the end of a decade and a half of civil war. With the signing of the Ta'if peace accord in 1989, the rebuilding of the country's shattered physical infrastructure and the establishment of a functioning state apparatus became critical demands. Despite the urgent needs of its citizens, however, graft was rampant. Leenders describes the extent and nature of this corruption in key sectors of the Lebanese economy and government, including transportation, health care, energy, natural resources, construction, and social assistance programs.

Exploring in detail how corruption implicated senior policymakers and high-ranking public servants, Leenders offers a clear-eyed perspective on state institutions in the developing world. He also addresses the overriding role of the Syrian leadership’s interests in Lebanon and in particular its manipulation of the country’s internal differences. His qualitative and disaggregated approach to dissecting the politics of creating and reshaping state institutions complements the more typical quantitative methods used in the study of corruption. More broadly, Spoils of Truce will be uncomfortable reading for those who insist that power-sharing strategies in conflict management and resolution provide some sort of panacea for divided societies hoping to recover from armed conflict.

About the Author

Reinoud Leenders is Reader in International Relations with a focus on Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. He is coeditor of Middle East Authoritarianisms: Governance, Contestation, and Regime Resilience in Syria and Iran. 
www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/warstudies/people/readers/leenders.aspx 

In the Media

Read an interview with the author on Jadaliyya.

"One of the most disturbing legacies of the post-civil war experience in Lebanon has been the persistence of corruption in the country's sociopolitical institutions. In this well-researched book, Leenders . . . examines the myriad causes of corruption in the country . . . . [and] convincingly demonstrates how Lebanon's archaic political system perpetuates corruption. . . . Although the book's focus is on Lebanon, the author's theoretical arguments can be applied to the study of corruption in many other Arab countries. Summing Up: Highly recommended."

—Choice (June 2013)

"Here is the most remarkable study day on the Lebanese political system and its operation since the end of the Civil War and the Taif Agreement . . . . This reads like a fascinating detective story except that it is real people who find themselves without care and without electricity, millions of dollars disappear into private pockets and a country that participated in sixes and sevens."

— Élizabeth Picard, Journal of the Worlds Muslims and Mediterranean (April 2014)

 "Through rich descriptions of select postwar institutions, Spoils of Truce advances our knowledge of corruption beyond existing aggregate survey indicators and anecdotal evidence. The result is a more‐complete understanding not just of the magnitude and dynamics of corruption, but also of how crucial institutions evolved between 1989 and 2005. . . . . The demand for an alternative theoretical framework originates in the intriguing possibilities offered by the book's carefulinvestigation of corruption cases and how they interact with these struggles. It is above all a testament to Leenders’s success in arguing that public institutions deserve a central place even in contexts where they are especially vulnerable to political manipulation."

-–Julia Choucair‐Vizoso, Political Science Quarterly (April 2014)

 "...Reinoud Leenders' 'Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon' not only offers an interesting read for the general reader, but would also provide excellent material for students in international and political sciences at bachelor and master level, as well as for researchers, experts, consultatnts and politicians."

—JIRS Editorial Board, Journal of Intercultural and Religious Studies (December 2013)

Scholarly Praise for Spoils of Truce

"At last we have a thorough, insightful study of corruption in an Arab country that is theoretically grounded, empirically rich, and convincing in its fundamental premise that corruption is the inherent by-product of a defective political system. Sadly, Reinoud Leenders's book is also highly relevant to Arab politics more generally for, like Lebanon, more than 50 percent of the Arab countries rank in the bottom half of the Corruption Perception Index. His insights are eminently transportable."

—Robert Springborg, Naval Postgraduate School, coauthor of Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East

 "In using the issue of corruption to address questions about the development and effects of state institutions, Reinoud Leenders usefully highlights the often overlooked role of the Lebanese state in shaping economic behavior. He offers a compelling and richly theoretical argument about the centrality of the Lebanese state in explaining the prominence of corruption in Lebanon and its effects on patterns of economic and political governance. In the process, Leenders has produced the most important work on Lebanon's political economy in a generation."

—Steven Heydemann, Senior Advisor, United States Institute of Peace

 "Spoils of Truce is based on a wealth of information about corruption in postwar Lebanon. Reinoud Leenders convincingly links corruption to the nature of state institutions, thus rehabilitating the study of the state and its role in shaping Lebanese politics."

—Marie-Joëlle Zahar, Université de Montréal

Additional Information

September 2012
312 Pages
$46.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8014-5100-3
 

Where to Purchase

Cornell University Press
Amazon

Excerpt

The Backdrop to This Book

This book presents an assessment of political corruption in postwar Lebanon and offers an explanation for its pervasiveness. In this respect it engages with a growing body of literature on the study of comparative corruption, bribery, rent-seeking, and crony capitalism, primarily in less developed countries (LDCs). Until the late 1970s, social scientists working on corruption in LDCs routinely complained about their colleagues’ lack of interest, prompting one of them to talk about a “conspiracy of silence” (Andreski 1978, 347). Such complaints are no longer justified. An overwhelming quantity of studies has transformed the onetime “conspiracy of silence” into a cacophony of views, models, and opinions dealing with corruption. A great deal of this relatively recent academic interest in corruption evolved out of concerns that in many LDCs, efforts to boost “modernization” or “development”—repackaged and made pertinent by the World Bank and the IMF’s “structural adjustment programs”—had failed to deliver.2 Against this background, it has increasingly been asserted that corruption raises serious obstacles to economic growth and associated “good governance,” and that the phenomenon constitutes a drain on emerging economies.3 Most economists have focused on assessing or demonstrating the economic costs of corruption or—using an inverse logic—highlighting the economic virtues of corruption’s assumed antitheses: transparency, accountability, and “good governance.” Other analysts have taken a moral or more overtly political interest in the subject, driven by outrage over a host of other disastrous effects attributed to corruption.

In Lebanon, politicians, activists, intellectuals, journalists, and the public at large have echoed such views, primarily in search of an explanation for the country’s unsatisfactory economic performance and mounting debt burden since its supposed “recovery” from war in the 1990s.4 In 2004 the Lebanese economist Samir Makdisi succinctly summarized Lebanon’s economic slump in reference to a series of indicators showing that “the economy [is] relatively stagnant, fiscal deficits [are] running high, the public debt burden [is] rapidly mounting, the [Lebanese] pound [is] under pressure, and the Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves [are] under pressure” (2004, 107). My research is not designed to support or to take issue with those who blame poor economic performance on endemic corruption, either in Lebanon or generally. Nor do I necessarily agree or disagree with a range of political activists who denounce corrupt politicians when, for example, conflicts of interest and corrupt transactions damage the environment or perpetuate socioeconomic disparities. Such arguments certainly increase the relevance of any study on corruption. Yet I must emphasize that my own interest in political corruption originated in a different set of considerations.

In their zeal to condemn corruption, Lebanon’s activists appear intuitively to underscore a way to analyze and understand the fundamental roles and qualities of the Lebanese state.  Challenging corruption can be seen as a first step  toward a reappraisal of state-society boundaries and accepted standards of political behavior. Not coincidentally, the still inconclusive debate in comparative political thought about fundamental questions pertaining to the state has interrogated “the paired opposition” between public and private (Weintraub 1997, 4). A focus on corruption condenses some of these questions by exploring whether, how, and where this supposedly clear dichotomy is maintained when state institutions are being built, altered, and put into operation. It is this background that prompted me to look at the extent and causes of political corruption in postwar   Lebanon.

A focus on political corruption and Lebanon’s state institutions promises an added value: in contrast to the lively debates raging in Lebanon, academic research on the country’s society, economy, and politics seems to suggest that the state is of little relevance and not worth further analysis. The result, as one Lebanese economist put it, is that “generally speaking, the Lebanese [state] administration is a victim of clichés and remains largely unknown” (Nahas 2005, 109). Studies of Lebanon have pointed out a vast range of interesting aspects of its turbulent politics and political economy, and many of them contributed to my own understanding of the country. But I found no detailed characterization of the contemporary Lebanese state or its institutions, and especially none that covers the postwar period. This relative lack of interest in the Lebanese state also marks much of the literature on Lebanon’s sectarian or confessional politics. Thus the Lebanese state is virtually absent in studies evolving out of the school of “consociational democracy,” which cast Lebanon, particularly in the prewar period, as one of its major examples in the “Third World.”5 This is less of a surprise when we realize that this comparative and essentially normative approach to conflict management rarely showed much interest in the state anywhere, not just in Lebanon.6 In sum, the virtual absence of the state in the study of Lebanese politics may simply suggest that others do not share my research interest in how the state in Lebanon has manifested itself and why. Yet while the literature implies that the Lebanese state was of secondary importance, the fierce political battles over the role of the state indicated quite the contrary. To find guidelines for studying political corruption in postwar Lebanon, I had to look elsewhere. I found some consolation in the fact that Lebanon is not the only country believed to sustain high levels of political corruption.

The Perils and Pitfalls of “Corruptology”

Hard facts are a rare commodity in most research on the politics of developing countries, and fully reliable data on corruption are even harder to obtain. Lebanon is sparsely endowed with information on its political, economic, and social life that in many other countries is often taken for granted. This hampers an investigation into corruption, particularly one that insists on disentangling real manifestations of corruption in full detail. Yet a focus on corruption, typically concealed from the public eye and constituting at least a significant part of Lebanon’s omnipresent non-formal economic transactions, can help to address the data gap and, in turn, become the basis of a more detailed, more comprehensive, and better understanding of the country’s state-society relations and politics.

This is not to play down the contentious nature of corruption and the problems this may cause the researcher. Indeed, no indicator of corruption goes uncontested. Moreover, on the one hand, state officials and politicians do not like to advertise shady deals that others may classify as corruption. Their opponents and critics, on the other hand, may have a clear interest in exaggerating reports of corruption or fabricating them altogether in an attempt to discredit rivals. The tasks for the researcher on political corruption are made even more difficult as he or she (or his or her informer) is confronted not only by the standards regarding verifiable analyses prized by academic colleagues, but also by real or potential actions (including threats, intimidation, violence, or libel suits) taken by politicians, senior officials, and their sympathizers who feel called to account. Indeed, at least a dozen Lebanese whistleblowers about real or alleged corruption have been subjected to such sanctions.

Readers accustomed to countries where the rule of law is commonly upheld may suggest that, in order to circumvent the problems associated with politically informed slander and untrustworthy allegations, research on corruption is better limited to cases that have been proved in court. Anyone familiar with Lebanon’s largely defunct judiciary and legal process will know that putting one’s faith in the Lebanese courts, for research purposes or indeed with the aim of seeking justice, is not a viable option. Perhaps most tellingly, the number of politicians and/or state officials brought to trial on corruption charges is negligible; actual convictions have been even less frequent. This is not for lack of relevant legislation. The country’s Penal Code (art. 351) makes corruption and related misconduct a criminal offense. In December 1999 the Lebanese Parliament amended a largely defunct law, the “Illicit Wealth Law” (Legislative Decree 38 of 18 February 1953, commonly referred to as the law on “where did you get this from?”—min ween lika haida?), purportedly to ensure more effective enforcement of existing anti- corruption legislation. It obliged ministers and senior public servants to declare their personal wealth prior to taking up and immediately after leaving office. In addition, the Lebanese constitution (art. 80) allows for establishing a Supreme Court, composed of members of Parliament and senior judges and invested with the authority to revoke the political immunity of presidents, ministers, and members of Parliament and try them for offenses ranging from treason to corruption. Yet a host of factors—including loopholes within existing legislation, persistent political interference in the judiciary, judicial mismanagement and inefficiency, and indeed judicial corruption—has consistently worked against the use of these legal tools (Taqi ad-Din et al. 1999; Takieddine 2004; Mugraby 2000; UNDP 2001; World Bank 2005a; CDL 12 March 1998).

In the absence of one comprehensive and reliable indicator of corruption, I concur with David Kang’s observation that only “a variety of indicators can give us a sense of the size and pattern of corruption” (2002, 19). In the period under study, many allegations have been raised in a wide range of sources: local and regional media, a few books, reports by NGOs, private consultancy agencies, and the World Bank, and reports prepared by various ministries, the state’s auditing and inspection agencies, lawyers, and, albeit to a lesser extent, the judiciary. I make use of all these sources, in addition to unstructured interviews and available state documents. Yet even when immense caution is taken in interpreting and contextualizing such sources, data obtained from informers and written sources are still likely to reflect the always controversial and often risky nature of debating corruption. For this reason, all the corruption cases referred to in this book come with such obligatory adjectives as “allegedly” and “reportedly,” thereby testifying to the sorry state of “corruptology” as a science. In addition, the names of directly accused politicians and officials have largely been withheld.

Excerpt from Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanonby Reinoud Leenders published by Cornell University Press. © 2012. All rights reserved.

Call for Reviews

If you would like to review the book for Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com

Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976

By James R. Stocker

About the Book

In Spheres of Intervention, James R. Stocker examines the history of diplomatic relations between the United States and Lebanon during a transformational period for Lebanon and a time of dynamic changes in US policy toward the Middle East. Drawing on tens of thousands of pages of declassified materials from US archives and a variety of Arabic and other non-English sources, Stocker provides a new interpretation of Lebanon's slide into civil war, as well as insight into the strategy behind US diplomatic initiatives toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. During this period, Stocker argues, Lebanon was often a pawn in the games of larger powers. The stability of Lebanon was an aim of US policy at a time when Israel’s borders with Egypt and Jordan were in active contention.

Following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the internal political situation in Lebanon became increasingly unstable due to the regional military and political stalemate, the radicalization of the country’s domestic politics, and the appearance of Palestinian militias on Lebanese territory. US officials were more deeply involved in Lebanese affairs than most outside the region realized. After a series of internal crises in 1969, 1970, and 1973, civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. The conflict reached a temporary halt after a Syrian military intervention the following year, but this was only an end to the first stage of what would be a sixteen-year civil war. During these crises, the US sought to help the Lebanese government in a variety of ways, including providing military aid to the Lebanese military, convincing Arab countries to take measures to help the Lebanese government, mediating Lebanon’s relations with Israel, and even supporting certain militias.

About the Author

James R. Stocker is Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Trinity Washington University. https://jrstocker.wordpress.com 

Scholarly Praise for Spheres of Intervention

"As we survey the current turmoil in the Middle East, we are all the more in need of careful, dispassionate, and insightful historical scholarship on US interactions with that region, and particularly  
with the small but pivotal nation of Lebanon. James R. Stocker gives us that, and more. Spheres of Intervention is a richly researched, perceptive, and skillfully crafted book about a diplomatic relationship that has powerfully shaped Middle Eastern politics down to our own day. Resourcefully mining recently declassified US government documents, and incorporating Arabic- and French-language sources seldom found in Anglophone accounts, Stocker provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment we have of official US involvement in the Lebanese civil war of 1975–1976."

—Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East

"Spheres of Intervention is a necessary and very valuable contribution to our knowledge about Lebanon's recent history, Lebanese-American relations, and US Mideast foreign policy. This book is a must-read for those with a special interest in Lebanon and for historians of US policy in the Middle East. In the first book to take extensive advantage of the declassified US diplomatic cables of the period, James R. Stocker fills an important gap in our understanding of Lebanon’s foreign relations during the decade and a half leading to its collapse in 1975."

—Paul Salem, Vice President for Policy, Middle East Institute, author of Bitter Legacy: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World

"Before the collapse of the state in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen there was Lebanon's descent into prolonged and costly civil war. James R. Stocker has meticulously examined the record of US involvement in Lebanon’s drift toward war in the years 1967–1976. He rightly concludes that Lebanon per se was rarely central in the thinking of American policymakers, especially Henry Kissinger. But what the United States did or did not do in the surrounding region had important spillover effects in Lebanon. The unwillingness of the United States to tackle the Palestinian issue, which was of key importance to the Lebanese, meant that it was very hard to stabilize Lebanon once the civil war began in earnest in 1975. This is a sobering account of the destruction of a country on the margins of American grand strategy. Today’s crises in the Middle East have far too many resemblances to the story told so authoritatively in these pages."

—William B. Quandt, author of Peace Process  

Additional Information

May 2016
296 Pages
$45.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-5017-0077-4

Where to Purchase

Cornell University Press
Amazon

Excerpt

On Martyr’s Day, November 11, 2010, speaking live over an Internet video connection, Hizbullah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah gave a history lesson. At the time, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the murder of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was expected to soon issue criminal indictments for numerous suspects, including Hizbullah members. In his speech, Nasrallah repeatedly asserted that the tribunal was a US and Israeli plot to undermine the stability of Lebanon. Then, announcing that he was addressing his opponents in the March 14 coalition, particularly the Christian youth, the party leader proceeded to trace the origins of contemporary US policy back to the days of Henry Kissinger. In June 1976, Kissinger sent a response to an open letter written by Maronite Christian politician Raymond Edde. Edde’s letter had accused Kissinger of attempting to destroy and partition Lebanon. In his response, according to Nasrallah, Kissinger explained that Lebanon’s formula of coexistence threatened US interests in the region, which depended on “sectarian states” such as Israel. For this reason, Kissinger allegedly wrote, the United States had manufactured the Lebanese Civil War. This admission, Nasrallah proclaimed, should be “taught in the educational curricula in Lebanon and the Arab world” and “printed and circulated so that every Lebanese man, child and old man reads it.” After all, he continued, “this is America and this is the American policy.”

Soon after his speech, reporters and political opponents of Hizbullah in Lebanon pointed out that the Kissinger letter was not real, but rather a 1976 satirical piece published in the pages of al-Hawadith, a now-defunct Beirut-based leftist newspaper. A few days later, the author of the fake letter, journalist Salim Nasar, told the story of its creation. At the height of the Two Years’ War, just a few days after the Syrian military intervention in June 1976, Nasar was at his home in the mountains. A journalist from al-Hawadith came to Nasar’s house, needing material for the latest edition of the paper and carrying editions of several local papers to discuss. In one of these was Edde’s open letter. Nasar then decided to write a response based on what he thought Kissinger would answer. However, thirty-five years later, Nasar still insisted that the information that he put in the fake letter came from Lebanese officials and a former White House translator, and that Nasrallah’s characterizations of US policy in his speech were “100% true.”

The interesting part of this story is not whether the Hizbullah leader had all the details correct in his speech. Rather, it is that it illustrates how widespread the viewpoint is that the United States played an important role in Lebanon’s nearly sixteen-year-long civil war. Not only did a major Lebanese political figure tout this letter as a real historical document, but he also weaved it together with current political developments into a larger narrative of the history of US-Lebanese relations. The fact that the letter’s author confirmed Nasrallah’s analysis, even as he acknowledged that the document was made up, suggests not just the influence of Hizbullah in contemporary Lebanon but also the power of the narrative itself. Many who have spent time in Lebanon have heard some version of this interpretation of US policy. But with a few exceptions, most Western accounts of the Lebanese Civil War ignore this narrative and its implications.

Rather, accounts of Lebanese history in the years between 1967 and 1976 usually portray a period of destabilization culminating in civil war. Internal tensions, already running high in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, erupted in January 1969 following an Israeli attack on the Beirut airport. Within a few months, the Lebanese army clashed with Palestinian militias present on Lebanese territory, sparking a crisis that would last until November, when an agreement was signed in Cairo between the Lebanese government and the fedayeen, as the militants were known. The country was again thrown into crisis by clashes between Christian militias and fedayeen in the spring of 1970. The political conflict dragged on throughout the summer, abating only after the Palestinians were defeated in September 1970, not by the Lebanese security forces, but by the Jordanian army, hundreds of miles away. Fighting broke out again in May 1973 as the Lebanese army confronted the fedayeen once more. Finally, the country entered a continuous state of conflict from April 1975 until the achievement of an Arab-brokered peace accord in October 1976. These eighteen months of bloodshed, often called the Two Years’ War, set the stage for nearly fifteen more years of civil war in Lebanon.5 Estimates of the number of lives lost during 1975 and 1976 alone range between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand.

These years were also a transitional period in US relations with the Middle East. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, the Johnson administration refused to press Israel to withdraw from territory it had occupied without some concessions from Arab states. In January 1969, President Richard Nixon took office, marking the start of an era in which the United States would become more deeply involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict than under any previous US administration. During 1969 and 1970, under Secretary of State William Rogers, the State Department launched two diplomatic efforts to broker a settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as another failed attempt in 1971. Beginning in 1971, US Middle East policy was increasingly dominated by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who sought to prevent any new diplomatic initiatives. This changed after a regional war broke out in October 1973. Kissinger, now secretary of state, undertook his own diplomatic initiative, which achieved two initial disengagement agreements between Israel and the Arab states in the first half of 1974. Following Nixon’s resignation later that year, Kissinger continued to pursue Middle East initiatives during the administration of Gerald Ford, achieving a second disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel in September 1975. This agreement brought Egypt decisively into the US orbit, while excluding the Palestinians and the Syrians. Ford’s electoral defeat in November 1976 put an end to the Kissingerian period of Middle East diplomacy, leaving behind a region transformed but still far from at peace.

This book examines the intersection of these two processes: the collapse of the Lebanese state and the evolving US role in the Middle East. At its core are two related arguments. First, US policy toward Lebanon was sub- ordinated to strategies toward the Cold War and the broader Middle East. During this period, both strategies would undergo changes that would have a great impact on US-Lebanese relations. At least during the early part of the period, Lebanon was still seen as a strategic asset for the United States within the broader context of the Cold War and regional politics. Over time, as Kissinger took over the reins of Middle East policy from the State Department, Lebanon became more marginalized, particularly as the United States became involved more deeply in mediating between Israel and the Arab countries following the October War. Lebanon would only resume its  importance after conflict broke out in 1975, though this time in a negative manner: no longer viewed as an asset, Lebanon had now become a potential threat to US interests in the Middle East that needed to be isolated from broader regional affairs.

Second, the United States played a role in the process of Lebanese state collapse. Throughout this period, US policymakers attempted to walk a fine line between contributing to Lebanon’s stability and taking sides in a complex conflict that involved many different sects, ideologies and nationalities. This was not easy. Numerous parties within Lebanon solicited US support, including money, weapons, diplomatic assistance, and promises of military intervention. Most of the time, US officials refused their entreaties, but not always. The United States intervened in internal Lebanese politics in a variety of ways, from providing assistance to the Lebanese state to helping Lebanese militias arm themselves. Through these actions, US officials hoped to have an impact on the balance of power in the country. Beyond this direct role, US policies toward the Middle East, particularly toward the Palestinians, also indirectly contributed to the crisis.

This study sheds light on a number of disputed aspects of the history of US foreign policy and of Lebanon’s national history, including the role of Lebanon in US Middle East policy, the impact of US policy on the Lebanese state, and the origins of the Lebanese Civil War. Three main questions drive the book’s narrative: First, what factors motivated US policy toward Lebanon during this period? Second, how did US policy relate to the origins and outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War? Third, once the conflict broke out, how did the US react to it? The answers to these questions are complicated, but in short, while there is no evidence to support conspiracy theories like Nasrallah’s, US behavior did, in more subtle and indirect ways, profoundly shape Lebanon’s internal politics in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Excerpt from Spheres of Intervention: US Foreign Policy and the Collapse of Lebanon, 1967-1976 by James R. Stockerpublished by Cornell University Press. ©2016. All rights reserved.

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[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

Regional and International Relations 

Abu Dhabi-owned City merely a pawn in sheikhs’ game of self-protection Are rich Gulf shaykhs buying football clubs in Europe for national rebranding or is it merely a show of power and unimaginable wealth?

Saudi Arabia makes plea for Britain not to ban arms sales  In light of UN claims that British weapons were used to conduct indiscriminate attacks in Yemen, the Saudi foreign minister has urged British MPs not to ban UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

Canadian Woman Was Jailed In Abu Dhabi Over Trace Amounts Of Weed In Her Bag Heather Augustyn was arrested and detained at Al Wathba Prison, where the 27-year-old teacher was asked to sign a statement in that she could not understand.

Gulf states condemn law letting 9/11 families sue Saudi Arabia The US House of Representatives passed the "Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act," but the White House has threatened to veto it.

Revealed: the £1bn of weapons flowing from Europe to Middle East Authorities have identified a new pipeline funnelling arms from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula and countries bordering Syria.

Kuwait warns citizens on carrying extremist materials to US Kuwaiti news outlets reported that three Kuwaitis were refused entry to the United States earlier this year.

Obama to veto 9/11 victims bill Victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks will not be allowed to sue Saudi Arabia.

Qatar announces biggest loss of life so far in Yemen war Three Qatari soldiers have been killed in Yemen since Qatar joined the Saudi-led coalition in September 2015. According to the United Nations, more than 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since last year.

Saudi, Iran hike oil production before talks on output freeze In the last week of September, OPEC and other producers will hold an informal meeting in Algeria.

Saudi prince warns Iran against using force to pursue rivalry Mecca governor Prince Khalid al-Faisal urged Iran to end “wrong attitudes” toward Arabs and warned against any use of force against the kingdom.

Amina Al-Jeffery: Deadline to return 'locked up' woman A British judge has ordered the return of Amina Al-Jeffery. Aged 22, she was born and brought up in Swansea and was taken against her will to Jeddah in 2012 by her father.

Obama administration offered $115b​n in weapons to Saudi Arabia: report The report has been issued at a critical period regarding the United Kingdom’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia and their implication in potential war crimes in Yemen.

Headscarf emoji proposed by 15-year-old Saudi girl Rayouf Alhumedhi’s proposal comes with discrimination increasing across Europe against the Muslim headscarf.

Top Saudi cleric 'to skip annual hajj sermon for health reasons' Abdul Aziz al-Shaykh, who was appointed Grand Mufti in 1999, announced recently that Iranians are "not Muslims".

Reports and Opinions

How many Yemenis need to die before we stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia? What will it take for politicians in the United Kingdom to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia?

9/11 families could sue Saudi Arabia soon — unless Obama stops them A small investigative online newspaper in Broward County, Florida continues to press for the release of documents that they claim may point to the possible Saudi role in the September 11 attacks.

Saudi Oger faces huge debt restructuring as rescue talks collapse Oger, the construction giant owned by former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, is now facing the prospect of a multi-billion-dollar debt restructuring to stave off collapse.

Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors Saudi Arabia contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. The list of donors includes the authoritarian regimes of Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

Crisis in Yemen

UN Says Airstrikes on Yemen Water Well Reportedly Kill 30 The victims of Saudi-led airstrikes on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha included first responders and children.

UK Government refuses to give MPs a vote on arms sales to Saudi Arabia as US Senate discusses boycott Saudi Arabia managed to buy £3.3 billion worth of arms from the United Kingdom since the war began, despite accusations of war crimes in Yemen, where it has bombed schools, hospitals, and wedding parties.

Inside Saudi Arabia’s Yemen war rooms While calls to stop the Saudi-led war on Yemen increase, concerns are nowhere to be seen in Saudi Arabia, where the line is that the war is for, not against, the Yemeni people.

It’s Not the Bullets Forcing Yemeni Troops Off the Battlefield. It’s the Pay Yemeni soldiers are walking off the job for lack of salaries and payment.

Tankers seized in Yemen port, risking deeper import crisis Reuters reports that with the humanitarian emergency already critical in Yemen, this dispute may prevent other ships from landing.

Western capitals (in the name of capitalism) accessories to murder in Yemen There are signs of change regarding media coverage of Yemen.

Shocking images of starved kid show horrors of Yemen’s civil war UNICEF estimates 320,000 children facing starvation, while over two million need urgent assistance.

Yemen’s rebels say they captured post inside Saudi Arabia According to military officials, Houthi rebel forces have captured a Saudi military post in the border region of Jizan.

Human Rights

Punishing Dissent in Bahrain Charges against Nabeel Rajab illustrate how far the Gulf nation’s leaders are willing to go to crush dissent.

A Call From Beyond the Prison Walls: Support the Bahraini People’s Demand For Equality And Social Justice One of Bahrain’s most prominent prisoners of conscience Shaykh Ali Salman addressed the 33rd Session of the Human Rights Council being held in Geneva.

Human rights groups urge countries to call for Nabeel Rajab's release Human rights groups urged fifty states to call on the Bahraini authorities to release Nabeel Rajab, who is facing fifteen years in jail for comments he made on Twitter.

Torture victim loses fight to bring Bahrain attorney general before court Jaafar Al-Hasabi suffered electric shocks, prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of his feet, and other attacks while imprisoned in Bahrain.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, Calls on the Bahraini Government for Compliance with the Human Rights Mechanisms He also criticised the Bahraini legislation that enables the revocation of citizenship.

Bahraini Authorities Sentence More Activists to Prison Terms for Criticising the King Bahraini authorities convicted social media users for the crime of insulting the King of Bahrain or the Kingdom’s authorities.

Event in Geneva: Closing Civil Society, Religious & Political Space in Bahrain Sectarian discrimination against Bahrain’s majority Shi‘a community continues to be a key dimension of Bahrain’s governing strategy.

Islamic Art Now, Part 2: Contemporary Art of the Middle East. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 24 January – 23 October 2016.

Interest in Islamic art—a label that became popular in Western museums after World War II—has substantially increased since 11 September 2001. Some of the biggest and wealthiest museums in Europe and North America, including The Louvre, Benaki Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, have expanded, renovated, and highlighted their collections of Islamic art. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection of Islamic art, which began purchasing works in 1973, has seen major acquisitions since 9/11. Middle Eastern museums have also joined the race. The Kuwait National Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha have become major competitors in this market. The controversial openings of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Louvre Abu Dhabi are scheduled for the next few years.

All these museums hope to boost profits in the tourism and culture industries by playing on a renewed fascination with Islam. Moreover, they hope to introduce visitors to a softer, more tolerant side of Muslims by educating them about the history and culture of regions that have become associated with war and religious fundamentalism. As Sophie Makariou, head of the Louvre's Islamic art department, said, “I like the idea of showing the other side of the coin.”

Unfortunately, such gestures are still unable to move beyond two sides: the inevitable binary of the good, cultured Muslim and the bad, terrorist Muslim. In their attempt to show that Muslims are not all radicals and fundamentalists, but also artisans and artists, the curators and collectors forget that identity is interminably shifting, always in flux, impossible to flatten into a coin with only two sides. Instead of defining Muslim identity as a changing, diasporic identity, the museums paralyze it by ignoring the pitfalls of translating culture.

LACMA’s “Islamic Art Now, Part 2: Contemporary Art of the Middle East” (January 24, 2016 – October 23, 2016) is an important reminder that Muslim identity is dynamic and syncretic. It cannot be reduced and compressed into xenophobic packages. Though it has become fashionable to pit Muslim fanaticism against American secularism and liberalism in a hopelessly simplistic dichotomy of good and bad, especially since 9/11, the artworks in LACMA’s exhibition show how hard it is to delineate such lines by displacing and mixing “Western” and “Islamic” symbols.

Entering the exhibition, the viewer is immediately confronted by Sherin Guirguis’ trio, Untitled (Subbak V), Untitled (Subbak II), and Untitled (Subbak VI). The artworks depict designs of Egyptian windows but overlay the architectural geometry with abstract strokes of paint, gold powder, and gold leafing. The result is a bold burst of color that reconfigures the Egyptian windows, resisting their reduction to purely documentary representations of exotically gendered and racialized Islamic art. Another work that de-familiarizes an established symbol of Islamic art, opening routes for its dialogue with secular developments, is Illumination Diptych (Ottoman Waqf) by Ahmed Mater. The artist employs margins and borders that bring to mind heavily decorated manuscripts of the Quran, but instead of using them to present the sacred script, he inserts X-rays of a human head and chest set face-to-face inside them. The juxtaposition of the heavily illuminated frames with X-rays, a late-nineteenth century scientific discovery, asks important questions about the imbrication of religion and science, Islam and modernity.

Two other works that provocatively subvert traditional relations between visual and textual motifs in Islamic art, unsettling the long and rich history of calligraphy, are Subhan Allah by Lulwah Al Homoud, a silkscreen that uses the standard materials of calligraphy – ink and gold – on archival paper, and Grid 30 by Hadieh Shafie, an ink and acrylic drawing on Arches paper. Both Subhan Allah and Grid 30 arrange sacred texts within austere geometric models. The works fluctuate between rigid abstraction and the sinuous, flowing forms of Arabic and Persian scripts. The reticulation provides a strict outline to the works, but the curvilinear religious and mystical texts strain against their linear confines, creating a mesmerizing interplay of fixed and fluid forms. The result is a dialogue between the sacrosanct texts representing the modern calligraphic tradition in Islamic art and the abstract geometric patterns of post-cubist European artists.

Building on the experiments of earlier Asian and African artists who were looking for new potentialities in calligraphy, particularly artists working in the aftermath of decolonial movements, Al Homoud’s and Shafie’s works can be understood as “calligraphic modernism.” The term is used by the art historian, Iftikhar Dadi, to describe the work of artists like Ibrahim El Salahi and Anwar Shemza, who formed the foundations for “a critical engagement with metropolitan modernism and cosmopolitanism,” in whose art the “Arabic script was not simply utilized in a classical manner to render beautifully a religious verse or endow it with ornamental form; rather, the script was often imbued with figuration and abstraction to a degree that resisted a straightforward literal or narrative meaning.”

The aforementioned artworks take traditional practices in Islamic art as their beginning, notably architectural and calligraphic designs, and improvise on the given theme in a way that reconfigures established paradigms and creates discrepant fissures in time-honored conventions. However, there are other pieces in the exhibition that trouble the very certainty of “beginnings.” Instead of denaturalizing the symbols associated with Islamic art, they question the very practice of signifying Islam through recognizable symbols.

A work that engages with the Arabic script without any reference to the orthodox tradition of calligraphy is Hassan Hajjaj’s Feetball. Hassan’s photograph – a group of feet vying for a football, all of them wearing babouche slippers emblazoned with the Nike logo – is framed by a wooden border that contains colorful plastic blocks, reminiscent of the learning tools used by children, all of them inscripted with Arabic letters. The photograph is an apt representation of the way global sports and fashion cultures impact children and youngsters in the Middle East and North Africa. Hajjaj, a Moroccan artist, captures a dizzying array of cultural referents in a vibrant palette, reminding us that identity cannot be imprisoned within ethnicized motifs. His art brings to mind the energy and imagination of street photographers and studio portraitists like Dennis Morris, Jamel Shabazz, and Malick Sidibe – an unapologetic dive into the world of diasporic popular culture.

Another artist who uses the medium of photography to interrogate relations of identity is Ammar al-Beik. Al-Beik uses found and archival photographs in Maximum Alert and The Strong Believers: old black-and-white photographs of soldiers and bodybuilders striking brash poses that are framed by rows of ultra chromatic thumbnail prints of ancient goddesses preserved in the National Museum of Damascus. The nude representations of ancient models of femininity, printed in bold colors, make a compelling counterpoint to the dull and faded black-and-white portraits of the men and their hyper-masculinist poses. In their interrogation of the difference between men and women, color and black-and-white, the photographs also incite thoughts about the relationship between pre-Islamic deities and modern Syrians. Contemporary representations of the Middle East are often exclusively concerned with Muslim identities, erasing the long, ancient history of the region and its people and their various, nuanced engagements with religion. Ammar al-Beik’s photographs are an important intervention. They create a space for themselves outside the narrow definitions of Islamic art. 

While LACMA’s exhibition does a commendable job of focusing on works that trouble the easy dichotomy between secular and religious, good and bad, it doesn’t, in the final analysis, go nearly far enough. It succumbs to the lure of conveniently simplifying the complexities of the works it has exhibited under the reductive identity of “Islamic Art.” It is significant for a progressive politics of representation to construct platforms that privilege the risk of difference rather than the stable grounds of identity. Or perhaps we are too scared to admit that there is no conclusive reply, no closed and final answer to the question that has everyone on edge: Who is a Muslim?

لا يتابعون قناة "سبيستون" ولم يسمعوا بمسلسل "ماشا والدب" ولا يلعبون "البوكيمون غو" ولا يقرأون مجلات "ماجد" و "العربي الصغير". يحتفل أطفال العالم بأعياد الميلاد ويتلقون الهدايا وباقات الزهور، ويحتفل السكان في شمال اليمن بـ "استشهاد الأطفال" الذين يُقتلون في الحروب. لا يحصلون على شهادات ميلاد ولكن يوثَّق تاريخ مقتلهم ومكانه أسفل صورهم، التي تتزاحم في مجالس منازل المواطنين في المحافظات إلى أقصى الشمال، التي تُواري جثامين الأطفال في مقابر صارت تعرف بـ "رياض الشهداء"، لتتراجع الأرض المزروعة بالعنب والرمان وتتوسع المساحات المغروسة بالقبور والألغام.

الأرض المنسية

على امتداد الطريق بين صنعاء وصعدة، يتوزع الكثير من الأطفال في نقاط التفتيش التابعة لـ "الحوثيين". محمد حزام أبو شوصا - 15 سنة - ترك تعليمه في الصف السابع بمدرسة النهضة في مديرية حوث بمحافظة عمران ليلتحق بـ "مسيرة أنصار الله". يقول إنه لا يحب مادتي الرياضيات واللغة الإنكليزية، لكنه يجيد استخدام بندقية Ak107 ويستوقف السيارات والشاحنات للتفتيش في نقطة حواري شمال مدينة حوث، كواحد من حراس الضاحية الشمالية للحوثي التي لا يوجد فيها حدائق للألعاب، فيما شاشات التلفاز تشاهَد في بعض المنازل لساعات محدودة، في مجالس الكبار المنهمكين في تعاطي "القات" ومتابعة أخبار الحرب. ومصدر الطاقة الكهربائية ألواح تخزين الطاقة الشمسية التي يحرص الأهالي على توفيرها للإضاءة.

كل الطامعين في السلطة، منذ قرون وإلى اليوم، يتعاملون مع السكان في الشمال كمخزون ذخيرة، وكل الفئات العمرية تروي سير الحروب والصراعات في طفولتها. يقابلك الصغار هنا في محافظات شمال صنعاء ببنادق خشبية اقتطعوها من أعواد الاحتطاب، يصوّبونها إلى الأعلى لحظات سماعهم صوت طائرات التحالف الذي تقوده السعودية، والتي قال مدير مكتب التربية والتعليم في صعدة إنها دمرت 156 مدرسة في المحافظة.

وعند سماع أصوات أبواق بائعي الآيس كريم، يخرج الأطفال من منازلهم لا يحملون نقوداً ولكن يقدمون الرصاصات الفارغة وشظايا صواريخ الطائرات ثمناً لقطعة حلوى مثلّجة. بسام المصعبي يبيع شوكولاتة الآيس كريم بـ 5 أغلفة فارغة لرصاص الكلاشينكوف، والعلبة بـ 20 عبوة فارغة. يبدأ يومه مع عشرة من زملائه بالقدوم باكراً من مدينة عمران، والنزول في مدخل مدينة صعدة، كل واحد منهم يقصد عزلة وفق خارطة عمل متفق عليها. يقول بسام: الأهالي هنا فقراء ونضطر للتعامل مع محلّات شراء المعادن المستخدمة وعلب البلاستيك الفارغة، كما نشتري شظايا القذائف من الأطفال. الكيلو بـ 200 ريال يمني، وعند تجميع كمية منها نبيعها لمحلات الحدادة بأرباح بسيطة.

الموت حدث شائع

موت الأطفال في هذه الرقعة حدث شائع. الناشط الحقوقي يوسف المفتي يقول إن الحروب منذ العام 2002 وحتى العام 2016 خلفت في محافظة صعدة أكثر من 100 مقبرة، معظم الضحايا فيها من الأطفال. كما يموت العديد منهم هنا بسبب سوء التغذية والإسهال والحصبة. يقول الدكتور خالد ناصر البكري، طبيب الأطفال في المستشفى الجمهوري بصعدة، إن المستشفى يستقبل في اليوم الواحد منذ بدء "العدوان السعودي" ما يقارب عشر حالات من الأطفال المصابين بسوء التغذية والذين يحتاجون إلى رقود وعناية مركزة. وأكّد أنه وفد إلى المستشفى خلال شهر تموز/ يوليو الماضي ما يقارب 320 حالة، استقبل منها 123 حالة، وتمّ إرسال البقية إلى المحافظات المجاورة أو جرى تأخير استقبالهم حتى يحين دورهم، فضلاً عن استقبال 130 طفلاً مصابين بمرض السعال الديكي، لافتاً إلى أن القدرة الاستيعابية لقسم الأطفال في المستشفى لا تتجاوز 42 سريراً ويعاني من انعدام الكثير من الأدوية بعد تعليق منظمة أطباء بلا حدود عملها في المستشفى ووقف الدعم الذي تقدّمه احتجاجاً على استهداف طيران "التحالف" لمستشفى عبس في محافظة حجة وقتل وإصابة عدد من المدنيين. وفي منتصف آب/ أغسطس، قصف طيران التحالف الذي تقوده السعودية مدرسة دينية في مديرية حيدان بصعدة، أودت بحياة 14 طفلاً اختلطت أشلاء أربعة منهم فتمّ وضعها في طربال من البلاستيك يستخدمه المزارعون عادة لحفظ محاصيلهم من الأمطار، ودفنت في قبر جماعي بـ "روضة الشهداء" ووضعت أحزمة من الزهور القماشية على الضريح الذي يسمى هنا "المعفدة". ندّد عدد من المنظمات بالجريمة ودعت يونيسيف في بيان لها أطراف النزاع إلى التمييز بين المدنيين والمقاتلين في جميع الأوقات، واحترام التزاماتها بموجب القانون الإنساني الدولي.



لكن أطراف الصراع لا تكترث كثيراً لسقوط الضحايا، فالجميع شارك في قتل الأطفال. ناطق "التحالف" قال إن الطيران استهدف "مجنّدين أطفال". والحوثيون الذين نددوا بالجريمة قاموا باستغلال الأطفال الذين لم تتجاوز أعمارهم الـ16عاما بإلحاقهم في مدرسة الإمام الهادي بحيدان، لا لتلقي علوم العصر ولكن لتلقينهم "مَلازم السيد حسين الحوثي" مؤسس الحركة، وهي مجموعة محاضرات ألقاها قبيل مقتله في العام 2004 وتمثل المنهج الفكري لأنصاره، وهي في مجملها تحريض على القتال وترغيب في الموت و "الشهادة " في سبيل غاية لا يعرفها الأطفال.

أحلام مؤجلة

بسبب وطأة الحرب وكثافة غارات الطيران، لم يذهب الكثير من التلاميذ الى مدارسهم خلال العام الدراسي 2015 – 2016، لكن قاعات الامتحانات في محافظة عمران اكتظت بالتلاميذ النازحين من صعدة، وغالبيتهم من المديريات الحدودية مع السعودية حيث القصف البري والجوي دمر عشرات القرى التي لا تصلها المنظمات الإنسانية. ولم ينقشع غبار المعركة بعد حتى تنكشف جرائم الحرب التي ارتكبت بحق المدنيين في تلك البقاع. يشكو التلاميذ تعذر انتظامهم في التعليم ويتطلعون للانضمام إلى الدولة التي لم تضع هذه الجغرافيا على خريطتها طوال العقود الماضية. في وقت لا تخلو مديرية في المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرة الحوثيين من "مركز ثقافي" يستقطب الأطفال ويزودهم بـ "المَلازم والزوامل" والمطبوعات المحشوة بخطب الحرب وأخبارها.

تبحث في رفوف المنازل عن كتاب أو مجلة قد تُساهم في كسر طوق العزلة عن السكان، فتجد مخلفات حقبة نفوذ السلفيين والإخوان المسلمين: إصدارات "مركز دماج" السلفي وفتاوى ابن باز وابن عثيمين، و "آيات الرحمن في جهاد الأفغان" و "الخميني في ميزان الإسلام".. وجميعها أدلة إدانة على تناوب الجماعات والحركات الدينية في استغلال الإنسان هنا، حيث تحتفظ الكثير من الأسر الفقيرة بالزيّ المدرسي لأبنائها من عام لآخر، ويتشارك في الكتاب الواحد أكثر من تلميذ في المدارس الحكومية.

[يعاد نشرها ضمن اتفاقية شراكة وتعاون بين "جدلية "و"السفير العربي"]

 "أي تشابه بين أحداث هذه القصة وبين ما حدث فعلاً في أحد بيوت دوما في دمشق الشام في الخامس عشر من شهر أيلول /سبتمبر عام 2011 مقصود للغاية ! "

1

(جاني دياب بالمنام، لابس قميص سماوي مقلم بخطوط ناعمة. كتيييرلابقلو القميص. قال لي: "شلونا ست الحبايب؟. قبل ما يموت كان إذا بدو مني شي يبدا بهالسؤال. وكنت قلو: "قول شو بدك دغري.. بلا زعبرة" هالمرة قلتلو:"اطلب وتمنى حبيبي" طلع فيني، وابتسم هديك الابتسامة اللي بتسبي القلب. وقلي: "حابب آكل صحن فتوش من تحت إيديكي الحلوين!" وغاب. اليوم الصبح تطلعت بالصورة وقلتلو: نازلة جيب عدة الفتوش. رجعت من السوق وقلت: ما إلي غير أم سامي. أحكيلها المنام وأعزمها ع الفتوش).

2

بدأت المرأتان بإعداد الفتوش للشاب الذي مات منذ شهرين. وفي مساء ذلك اليوم كتبت أم سامي على حائطها الفيسبوكي:"أفكر بالضيوف الكثيرين الذين نعد لهم موائد وأغاني ورقصات قلب ولكنهم لا يأتون، بل يؤكدون غيابهم القاسي. تذكرت اليوم ملامح القصائد التي قرأتها عن الغياب والحضور، ثم انهمكت في إعداد الفتوش لدياب الذي لم ألتق به. أعرف كيف قتل، وأعرف ملامحه من خلال صورتين إحداهما معلقة على حائط في بيته، والثانية يحتفظ بها ابني سامي.

3

سمت بكرها سامي تيمناً بأخيها الذي نقل إلى سجن تدمر الصحراوي في أوائل الثمانينيات من القرن الماضي، تخيلت مراراً سامي الكبير وهو يرفع سامي الصغير عن الأرض، ويأخذه في جولة في الحارة، وفي عام 1998 (بعد مضي أربعة عشر عاماً وأربعة أشهر وثلاثة أيام على اعتقال سامي الكبير) جاء من يمحو أي أمل بقوله: "العمر إلكن" ... مات سامي بلا جنازة ولا كفن ولا قبر ولا تاريخ محدد ولا شاهدة ولا نظرة وداع . تجمعوا يومها في مجلس عزاء صغير، ساده النشيج . بدا سامي لها وكأنه تحول إلى بخار أزرق سماوي وصار جزءاً من زرقة السماء فوق بيتها. وعندما استشهد دياب لم تكن تعرفه ولم تكن تعرف أمه، ذهبت مع صديقتها لتقديم واجب العزاء لأم الشهيد، بدا لها وجه دياب قريباً من وجه سامي، تولت الترحيب بالنساء، صبت القهوة لهن ، غنت بصوت تجمع فيه حنان الدنيا، طلبت من النساء أن يزغردن للعريس، تحدثت عن بطولته لأنه لم يمتثل لأمر الركوع لصورة الحاكم. زغردت ... زغردت النساء معها، بدا لهن الله نفسه منشغلاً عن الدنيا كلها وهو يصغي لزغاريد الأرواح المجروحة ، وبدت الزغاريد صلاة صادقة تغطي الدنيا. اعتقدت النساء الوافدات من مناطق مختلفة من دمشق، واللواتي يساهمن في تشييع الشباب الذين يقتلهم الرصاص أن أم سامي أخت الشهيد، وكثيرات قلن لأم دياب مشيرات إلى أم سامي: "البركة بأختو، أخت الرجال"!

4

"شوفي يا أم سامي... إنتي اللي علمتيني إنو ابني عمل اللي بيعملوه الأبطال، وإنتي اللي زفيتيه ع السما ...الناس كانو عم يقبروه وإنتي كنتي عم تحييه،أنا حبيتك ... إنتي أختي ... أنا مالي أخت من أمي وأبي" ...  حدثتها عن طفولة دياب ومراهقته، عن قمصانه، وسهراته مع أصدقائه، عن ...وعن ...أشياء كثيرة. أتمت المرأتان إعداد طبق الفتوش، وضعتاه على المائدة، كانتا تسترقان النظر إلى الصورة المعلقة على الحائط وتأكلان. قالت أم سامي: يسلمو إيديكي ... كتير طيب هالفتوش. ردت أم دياب: "مجاري الهنا.... ألف صحة. شوفي دياب ما أكل . وقت كان عايش كان كتير يعملا فيني، يطلب أكلة، ولما إعمّلو ياها دور عليه وما لاقيه"
صمتت المرأتان. كان وجه الغائب يحتل الفضاء.

نظرت أم دياب إلى أم سامي وقالت بارتباك تلميذة: "أم سامي... أنت تعلمتي بالمدارس ، أنا ما تعلمت. بدي أسألك، خديني على قد عقلي وجاوبيني: بالجنّه فيه فتوش؟ "

قصة: جمال سعيد

دمشق تشرين الأول 2011

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.] 

Political Rights

Freedom for the Black Gown: New campaign calls for release of detained rights lawyers Egyptian activists have launched a campaign dubbed “Freedom for the Black Gown” to call for the release of human rights lawyers detained in politically-motivated charges.

Cairo court orders release of activist Zizo Abdo with conditions A Cairo court ordered the release of April 6 leader Zizo Abdo on Sunday, pending investigations into charges of belonging to an outlawed organization and inciting protests, according to lawyer Mokhtar Mounir.

Court orders release of rights activist Ahmed Abdullah for second time A North Cairo court ordered late Sunday the release of the director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms Ahmed Abdallah and four others for the second time.

Military court postpones verdict against Alexandria workers over strike A military court in the coastal city of Alexandria postponed on Sunday to 18 October its verdict against twenty-seven workers of a state-owned ship building company over protests for better work conditions in May.

Egypt court freezes assets of Hossam Bahgat, Gamal Eid, other rights defenders The Cairo Criminal Court accepted on Saturday the prosecution's request to freeze the assets of a number of human rights defenders and organizations in connection with case number 173 (2011), known as the “Foreign Funding Case.” 

Egyptian human rights defenders vow to continue work after asset freeze A request to freeze the assets of some of Egypt’s most prominent rights organizations and rights defenders was accepted in court on Saturday, in a long-running investigation into receipt of foreign funds with the aim of endangering national security.

Foreign powers aim to discredit Egypt's leadership - State newspaper Terrorist attacks in the Sinai Peninsula will intensify in the coming period to serve a plot by foreign powers against Egypt.

Sectarianism strikes again in Minya, police arrest Coptic man hospitalized in ICU Sectarian violence erupted in the village of Ezbet Assem, in the governorate of Minya on Monday following a traffic dispute and subsequent brawl.

Egypt's church building law upholds restrictions over church construction - HRW Human Rights Watch described Egypt's recently adopted church building law as discriminatory against Christians due to various stipulations that maintain "restrictions over the construction and renovation of churches."

Presidential pardons disappoint political prisoners While supporters of the Egyptian government have praised the decision to pardon 759 prisoners by presidential decree; opponents have criticized the fact that all of those released had been jailed for criminal charges, continuing to leave political prisoners behind bars.

Egyptian probe into Russian plane crash yet to find its causes - sources  The Egypt-led committee tasked with investigating the causes of the Russian airliner crash last October in North Sinai, has yet to reach any results on its causes, sources within the aviation ministry said on Tuesday.

Egypt's ministry says has no reports of TNT traces in EgyptAir MS804 wreckage Egypt's civil aviation ministry said on Saturday that the Egyptian committee investigating the crash of EgyptAir plane in May over the Mediterranean did not receive any new evidence from French investigators, a day after a French newspaper reported that their side found traces of TNT in the plane's debris.

Regeni's family say they 'will not stop' until they learn the truth of his death The family of slain PhD student, Guilio Regeni, said that they "will not stop working for the investigations to uncover the truth of his killing.”

Economy

Hard currency shortage weighs heavily on Egyptians travelling abroad Driven by shortage in hard currency, several Egyptian banks were prompted to impose restrictions on foreign currency withdrawal and purchase limits abroad to alleviate the pressure on the Egyptian pound, placing it instead on travelers. 

Wheat suppliers shun Egypt's purchase tender over ergot policy Egypt was expected to cancel its second consecutive international wheat tender on Friday after it failed to receive any offers from suppliers due to its strict ergot fungus ban which could cut off its access to grain supplies from abroad.

Egypt's hotel rates rise despite struggling tourism sector Despite the tremendous drop in occupancy rates, revenues and tourist arrivals in the past few months, hotels across Egypt saw major rate increases during the Eid vacation.

Foreign Relations

US Congressmen call for Aya Hegazy’s release from prison Two United States Congressmen have called for the immediate release of Aya Hegazy, a dual citizen of the US and Egypt who has been in prison for over two years on what her family say are false charges.

Egypt’s Foreign Ministry denounces US calls for Aya Hegazy’s release Egypt’s Foreign Ministry urged the United States to respect the rule of law after calls for Aya Hegazy’s release, claiming allegations against her have been ignored by the US because of her American citizenship.  

Russia bans imports of Egyptian fruits and vegetables Russia announced it would temporarily ban the import of all Egyptian fruits and vegetables on Friday.

Powerlifting success lifts Egypt to 26th in medal ranking at Rio Paralympics Egyptian Paralympic athletes have turned in notable performances this week at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro summer games, racking up three gold, five silver and three bronze medals.

KLM to suspend all flights to Cairo starting January 8 Royal Dutch Airlines KLM announced that it will temporarily suspend flights to Cairo starting January 8 “for economic reasons” on Wednesday. 

Egypt to receive second French Mistral helicopter carrier on Friday Egypt is set to receive the second French Mistral helicopter on Friday.

Egypt to participate in 17th Summit of Non-Aligned Movement in Venezuela Egypt's deputy Foreign Minister for Multilateral Relations and International Security Hesham Badr will participate in the seventeenth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, which is set to take place on 17 and 18 September on Venezuela's Margarita island.

El-Sisi calls for combating terrorism, spread of nuclear weapons in Venezuela summit Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday called on the international community to work towards curtailing the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction as well as combating terrorism during a meeting of a large Cold War-era bloc in Venezuela.

Egypt, Turkey FMs meet in Venezuela on sidelines of non-aligned summit A meeting was held between Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu in Venezuela, the official Twitter account of the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman said on Saturday.

Sisi to present vision on 'solving regional crises' to UN General Assembly Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi is set to present Egypt’s vision on efforts being made to settle regional crises in front of the UN’s General Assembly, according to Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry.

Hillary Clinton to meet Egypt's Sisi next week: Campaign Democratic US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will meet with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi next week during the UN General Assembly, her campaign announced Wednesday.

A parliament delegation to visit New York to rally support for Egypt's reforms Twenty Egyptian MPs will head to New York on Sunday to participate in the upcoming UN General Assembly meetings.

Domestic Security

Recently formed militant group claims responsibility for 3rd operation A recently formed group claimed responsibility for the killing of a low-ranking policeman in 6th of October City on the outskirts of Cairo last Thursday.

Haytham is a war child who lives with his family in Khan Eshieh camp, home to some nine thousand Palestine refugees and one of the most embattled areas of the Syrian capital, Damascus. 

His story is increasingly common among UNRWA students in Syria. "I had to escape and hide when rockets fell near the school," he says. "It was horrifying. The fighting intensified and we lived in constant fear of bombing and violence. I studied in a state of high anxiety with the sounds of bullets and shelling."

As world leaders gather today in New York at the Summit on Refugees and Migrants, I am struck by how often in recent months I have been confronted with the question of why the world should continue to care about Palestine refugees when there are so many other pressing issues to deal with.

The world needs to care because the situation of Palestine refugees has never been as critical since 1948 and 1967, because the lack of political horizon and personal opportunities is draining them of their hope, creativity and resolve. The world should also care because a young generation of Palestine refugees is growing up losing faith in negotiation and diplomacy. In the West Bank and Gaza, most young people were born after the Oslo Peace agreement. They were told by the world that if they opted for moderation and a negotiated path, justice would be served. But it was not.

Palestine refugees experience every single day the gap between rights and principles and their personal realities, be it as a result of the disastrous Syrian conflict or the occupation and blockade in the West Bank and Gaza. Often Palestine refugee students will say to the foreign visitor: "We learn about human rights in UNRWA schools, we feel strongly about them, but we ask the world, why do these rights not apply to us?"

The Summit will endorse the “New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants” which focuses on the need to protect the human rights and dignity of these vulnerable people in accordance with international law, to uphold international humanitarian law and humanitarian principles, to ensure the welfare of refugees and to address the root causes of their displacement.

The summiteers are clear that “no one must be left behind” and I urge that this must include the 5.2 million Palestine refugees registered with UNRWA. They represent fourty-four percet of the world’s long-term refugees, the largest in scale and most protracted in duration of any refugee situation today.

Through six-and-a-half decades of supporting these refugee populations, UNRWA has accumulated a vast body of expertise and capacity, which is invaluable to the international community as it strives to achieve the outcomes of the summit.

Specifically, UNRWA has been a frontline responder helping to mitigate shocks and trauma of five Middle East wars in the last ten years alone – one in Lebanon, one in Syria and three in Gaza -- while working with host governments and donors to provide long-term development programs in education, health, relief and social services.

The New York Declaration also emphasizes the importance of providing quality education to refugees in safe learning environments within months of initial displacement. UNRWA has demonstrated its ability to meet this objective time and time again through our pioneering Education in Emergencies program, most recently in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, as part of our commitment to provide quality and inclusive education for all 500,000 Palestine refugee children in our seven hundred schools.

UNRWA draws strength from the courage and perseverance of young refugees like Haytham who are prepared to go to such great lengths to study and keep some basis for a better future alive. Despite his situation, he still dreams of being a surgeon.

We are determined to do everything it takes to preserve the access of our students to their schools and education.

I therefore strongly welcome the call in the New York Declaration for Agencies, such as UNRWA, to be provided with sufficient funding so that we can carry out our UN mandated activities effectively and in a predictable manner. But we are currently facing a significant shortfall in our operational budget. This is because need is growing and the refugee population is increasing.

Last year, we came perilously close to having to delay the start of our school year for half a million children in the Middle East because of insufficient funding. It is imperative that UNRWA’s shortfall is seen against a background of our positive contribution towards stability and human dignity in the Middle East – a prime locus of much of the displacement with which the international community is currently grappling.

The risks of radicalization of isolated and desperate young people are huge. Extremists are on the constant outlook for new recruits. We have a collective responsibility to protect Palestine refugees from such risks.

I am therefore convinced that renewed attention to Palestine refugees and Palestine refugee youth is urgent. It is a matter of humanity. But it is also a real investment in the stability of many areas of the Middle East. Overlooking that is a risk UN member states should not be taking.

We can close our eyes on the denial of dignity and rights of Palestine refugees today but it will only be worse, more dramatic and more dangerous when we reopen them a few years from now.  And the pressure on host countries and UNRWA will have further intensified.

Decisive action, on all fronts, to address the roots causes of their displacement and the needs engendered by repeated crises and protracted refugee-hood is called for; because the life and future of Haytham matters.

Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Madawi Al-Rasheed (MA): My interest in Islam and politics in Saudi Arabia has been ongoing for a couple of decades. The project engaging this focus started with a historical account about how the relationship gave birth to several attempts to create a state. From history, I moved to a more social science approach to look at the contemporary period. Most observers of Saudi politics assume that Wahhabiyya, the eighteenth century religious movement, was simply a pretext to establish the Al-Saud rule and grant them Islamic legitimacy. While this is taken for granted, I wanted to go beyond this and investigate how religion and state are often two totalizing regimes that do not have a smooth relationship. In a previous book, I examined the fragmentation of Wahhabiyya under state control, which led to the emergence of radical Jihadi trends, often in conflict and cooperation with the state. I identified three modus operandi between the two sides of the relationship: cooperation, appeasement and repression.

Muted Modernists was related to the Arab uprisings and their impact on Saudi Arabia. I wanted to engage with a relatively new intellectual mutation among Saudi Islamists and non-Islamists, namely the emergence of a modernist intellectual trend. This trend is labelled asrani (contemporarians), or tanwiri (enlightened). I use the term modernist to analyze the discourse and strategies of a limited number of `ulama, activists and intellectuals who are stretching the limits of interpretation of foundational Islamic texts in order to promote new thinking about politics and society.

The immediate trigger for writing the book was a very sad story. In 2012, Sulayman al-Rushoudi, an eighty-year-old human right activist and judge in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. According to Amnesty International, “he was convicted on charges including possessing banned articles by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed, an academic at a UK university.” I felt a strong responsibility to understand why a Salafi judge was reading my articles and I hoped that my book will contribute to documenting the struggle of many activists who became known as the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA) or HASM in Arabic.   

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MA: The book focuses on two main issues: a) the discourses that inspired the emergence of a civil and political rights movement. This included the intellectual productions of `ulama such as Salman al-Awdah and Islamist intellectuals such as Abdullah al-Hamid, and Muhamamd al-Ahmari. They were all concerned with a central question: how to establish al-dawla al-madaniyya, civil state. I also looked into the intellectual production of a younger generation of Saudi Islamist intellectuals such as Abdullah al-Maliki and Muhammad al-Abd al-Karim, both were concerned with the question of how to apply sharia and how to deconstruct the religious roots of authoritarian government. Both are critics of the Islamist movement in Saudi Arabia, although they are both a product of it.  I also wanted to map the activism of those who acted on the ideas and put them into practice. So I examined the activism of HASM and the plight of their founders and followers. By doing this I combined my intellectual history with a social scientific focus on experiences and practices.

I interviewed activists and also followed their trials in court. I found Saudi courts transformed into a theatrical performance where the discourse on human rights, civil society and democracy became strong with followers tweeting about the events and sending messages from the floor. Saudi Arabia has never seen anything like this but social media allowed this to happen. The official press had to respond and name activists and report on their trials, something that had never been on the agenda. 

I engage with the vast theoretical literature on Islamism in both the social sciences and the humanities (religious studies). I also try to critically assess the Western tradition that gave rise to the social sciences especially that which deals with religion. Our categories are sometimes not so helpful when it comes to studying Muslim society, with Islam and Muslims are still accused of being resistant to secularization. I am very skeptical about such essentialist approaches and I hope my book contributes to revising and refining such assertions.  

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MA: It was refreshing to embark on this project because I began to explore how, from within Islamic tradition, we come across serious attempts to find solutions to urgent problems that occupy people in the Arab world. My interlocutors are all a product of the Saudi Salafi-Wahhabi context, yet each one tried to infuse the tradition with modern concepts such as civil society, just government, human rights, and many other global concerns. I found a hybrid discourse that engages with Western intellectual tradition and also Arab modernist thought. While most people still believe that Saudi Arabia has only exported a radical religious tradition, namely Salafi Jihadi ideology, I found that Saudis themselves are influenced by a world intellectual heritage and history. The novelty of this research within the Saudi context was a refreshing departure from the bigoted and misogynist fatwas and opinions that I had worked on in my previous books. After writing the book, I was shocked by how threatening these modernists can be from the perspective of the Saudi government. Most of them are still in prison serving ten to fifteen years in prison, followed by bans on any travel after their release. I realized how governments oppress the most peaceful thinkers and activists, both called for peaceful mobilization, dubbed as civil Jihad, and criticized those who want to apply sharia by force after the Arab uprisings. I came to the conclusion that those modernists are more threatening than violent Jihadis, as far as government is concerned. The government does not need to justify shooting Jihadis and in fact gets the full support of society when it prevents their violence. However, peaceful activists are a different category; they provide a peaceful way out of persistent authoritarianism, and may precipitate a social movement against oppression. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MA: As all academic books, the first audience is probably the academic community of scholars and students in Middle East Studies, Religious Studies, and the social sciences. But I wrote the book in such a way to make it accessible to a wide audience, for example NGOs, policy makers, journalists and the general public. I hope the book is translated into Arabic so that it can reach an even wider audience.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MA: After the fall of several Arab presidents, some scholars began to theorize why only the Arab republics experienced severe upheavals that led to toppling presidents while monarchies are considered by some as innately immune from such upheaval. This concern increased after the Arab uprisings and started building on an earlier political science literature about the resilience of Arab monarchies. When the findings of this important literature is appropriated by Think Tank consultants and lobbyists they become hostage to other agendas, trying to project Arab monarchies, especially GCC states as islands of stability in a turbulent Arab sea. Now monarchy is reinvented as a stable, caring and not so oppressive political configuration, unlike the nasty republics of the Arab world. I want to engage in this literature and test its application on the Saudi case. I have already published working paper to see whether I am on the right path to pursue this project. 

This week's Jadaliyya "Media on Media" roundup covers topics ranging from government-sponsored Facebook censorship to the relationship between language and national identity.

Facebook’s recent cooperation with the Israeli government to censor content deemed violent has stirred controversy when it was uncovered that Facebook has complied with 95% of the Israeli government's demands for removal of “inciting content,” bringing into question how free speech is affected when private corporations collaborate with governments.

In Algeria, a teacher is being criticized by the country's Education Minister for using an Arabic-only approach in the classroom, highlighting Algeria’s ongoing national identity crisis and its impact on education.

Meanwhile, a teenage girl from Saudi Arabia designs a Hijab-wearing smiley and a new study warns from the dangers of “the secret world” of online pornography in Egypt.

In more news, a new report has recently been published that aims to highlight the risks taken by regional journalists who work in the midst of conflict and endure constant attacks in war zones.

All of these stories, and more, are available below in further detail.

Media and Politics

Facebook is collaborating with the Israeli government to determine what should be censored
Source: The Intercept
This article investigates recent announcements of cooperation between Facebook and Israel, bringing into question how for-profit interests converge with government censorship.

Sisi, spies and video tape
Source: Middle East Eye
A video of an Egyptian security official telling US Secretary of State John Kerry that cell phones and cameras are forbidden when meeting Sisi has gone viral in Egyptian social media circles, with ironic implications.

How Egypt's state TV is trying to soothe popular anger
Source: Al-Monitor
This article questions the efficiency of the efforts made by the Egyptian state TV in influencing public opinion in the context of the recent campaign to ease the impact of the economic crisis on Egypt

Former Tunisian president blocked from appearing on TV
Source: Middle East Monitor
Former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki on Thursday accused the government of pressuring a local TV channel to stop an interview of him from airing, saying it was a case of state restrictions on media freedom.

Culture

Hijab emoji proposed by Saudi teenage girl
Source: The Independent
Emojis have long been the subject of commentary regarding their racialized and gendered representation. This article discusses a teenage girl from Saudi Arabia who has designed a hijab-wearing smiley face.

Saudi TV to air love story on Shia-Sunni couple to be shown in Ramadan
Source: Samaa
A brief synopsis of three TV serials to be aired throughout next Ramadan, one that tells a Shia-Sunni love story.

Media Industries

Saudi Press Agency to boost translation into other languages
Source: Gulf News
This article outlines a number of changes in the Saudi Press Agency, which aims to reach a larger audience by providing the news in ten languages, and to provide further training to its staff on the use of modern reporting technologies.

Ministry to have a new center for Haj coverage
Source: Saudi Gazette
The Saudi ministry of culture is setting up a new media center, for the purpose of giving foreign journalists easier access to "report accurately" on the pilgrimage.

Freedom of Journalists/Expression

Sudanese cartoonist reminds Colby audience of value of free speech
Source: CentralMaine
A profile of Khalid Albaih, a Sudanese political cartoonist known for his controversial approach to contemporary issues, highlights the role of cartoons in shedding light on topics that are considered taboo.

Israeli forces shoot Palestinian journalist in head with tear gas canister
Source: +972
Journalists like Nidal Eshtayeh continue to be directly targeted while covering clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli military forces. This article provides additional context to the recent attack against Eshtayeh, who is still recovering from a head injury caused by a helmet-wrecking projectile.

Journalists at risk in Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and Yemen for their human rights reporting
Source: Gulf Center for Human Rights
“Risking Their Lives: Ongoing Attacks Against Journalists in Bahrain, Iraq, Syria and Yemen” is a new report that aims to highlight the risks taken by regional journalists, who work in the midst of conflict and endure constant attacks in war zones.

Watchdog: Violations against Palestinian journalists in occupied territory hit peak in August
Source: Ma’an News Agency
This is a brief roundup of the increasing number of violations against Palestinian media, which have peaked during the month of August according to Palestinian press freedom watchdog MADA. Violations varied between closure of outlets, attacks on journalists, and detention of media employees.

Social Media

A classroom video has sparked a debate about language and identity in Algeria
Source: Quartz
In a recent Facebook live-stream from an Algerian classroom, the teacher used Arabic as the students’ main language of instruction. The video soon spread across social media, garnering criticism from Algeria's Minister of Education and underscoring the country’s post-colonial national identity crisis in relation to language.

Media Practices

Why does the media insist on using the term ‘Islamism’?
Source: Middle East Monitor
This article criticizes the media’s reckless categorizing of Islam as an ‘ism’, claiming that it demonizes an entire religion and equates it to terrorism. It raises the question: When does being a Muslim end and when does being an ‘Islamist’ begin?

Terrorism’s history lesson for political reporters
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
An analysis of the convergence of media coverage in relation to terrorism, and how that in turn influences public opinion in the formation of public/foreign policies. The article cites a number of incidents in recent history where such media practices directly affected how the public reacted to acts of terrorism.

Kurdish 'Angelina Jolie' devalued by media hype
Source: BBC News
This article discusses media attention paid to Asia Ramazan Antar, a fighter with the YPJ who was recently, and cites Kurdish sources who say that she was into a glorified poster girl by Western media

متىنتحرر.. منسوقالجواري!
المصدر: البوابة نيوز
تناقش هذه المقالة التحديات المستدامة التي تواجه المرأة العربية وتعيق تقدمها، وبالأخص الانتهاكات التي تمارس في الطريقة التي يتم تمثيلها في وسائل الإعلام.

BBC Persian anchor accused of anti-Kurd bias
Source: Middle East Monitor
A BBC host accused of turning a TV interview into a hostile interrogation, proving that previously-made assumptions made by journalists can affect their reporting.

Others

Video surveillance market analysis by types, application, software, hardware and forecast 2016 to 2022
Source: MENAFN
This report segments the world video surveillance market on the basis of system type, hardware, software, services offered, application, and geography.

العالم السري ل"المواقع الإباحية" في مصر
المصدر: البوابة نيوز
تبحث هذه المقالة في مخاطر الادمان على المواقع الإباحية في المجتمع المصري على مختلف الأصعدة، طارحة بضع الخطوات العملية للحد من هذه الظاهرة.

From Jadaliyya Media Roundups

اتفاقبين"فيسبوك" واسرائيل
المصدر: Palestine Media Roundup
قالت وسائل اعلام اسرائيلية إن اتفاقا جرى بين "وزيري الامن الداخلي والعدل غلعاد إردان وأييلت شاكيد" مع مسؤولين كبار من شبكة "فيسبوك" لتوطيد التعاون بين سلطات الاحتلال وشبكة فيسبوك من اجل شطب ما اسمته "المضامين التحريضية" من صفحات الشبكة.

إتهاماتلناشطحقوقيبارزبسببرسالةنشرتهاصحيفةنيويوركتايمز
المصدر: Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup
نبيل رجب هو رهن الإعتقال بتهم تتعلق بحرية التعبير عن الرأي على الإنترنت منذ 13يونيو حزيران ويواجه أحكام بالسجن تصل إلى 15عاما.

[The "Media On Media Roundup" is an initiative to survey published material in the news and broadcast media that deals with journalism, coverage, or mass communication practices about the region. These roundups are produced and curated in collaboration with theAmerican University of Beirut's Media Studies Program. The items collected here do not reflect the views of Jadaliyya or the editors of the Media Page] 

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]

Regional and International Relations

Bahraini Authorities Confiscate Passports of Shiite Citizens Returning from Iran’s Holy City of Mashhad and Hajj Bahraini authorities have confiscated the passports of some citizens returning from Saudi Arabia after performing their Hajj.

How a new youth movement is emerging in Jordan ahead of elections Parliamentary elections in the region’s most fragile kingdom, where more than half of its population is under thirty, puts its autocratic regime to the test.

Gunmen kill two policemen in Saudi Eastern Province Two policemen were shot dead by unknown assailants while they were on patrol in Dammam.

Clinton Aides Complain About Double Standard, But Media Also Went After Bush Foundation Criticism over Clinton’s close relationship with Saudi financiers dubbed by loyalists as “anti-Clinton conspiracy.”

Saudi 'royal allegedly involved in terrorism', claims Guantanamo prisoner Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi has claimed that a member of the Saudi royal family was part of an effort to recruit him for violent acts.

Saudi Arabia to establish company to upgrade capacity of holy sites Saudi Arabia, in its latest money-making scheme, has formed a company to invest in the holy sites as tourist attractions throughout the year.

UK Secretary of State for International Trade Visits Bahrain, Meets Crown Prince & Prime Minister British Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox visited Bahrain to discuss opportunities to increase economic and trade cooperation.

 Clinton’s Bahrain Problem Has Nothing to do with Clinton Foundation Hillary Clinton supported the regime while it cracked down on protesters as part of the Obama administration's overall response to the Arab Spring.

Bahraini Interior Ministry: NYPD Ready to Exchange Expertise with Bahrain The New York Police Department is open tosharing expertise and knowledge with their Bahraini counterparts.

400 Students Remain Detained with Launch of Academic Year As the school year starts in Bahrain,four hundred students remain in jail, deprived from their right to education.

Reports and Opinions

New Texts Out Now: Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life“This book is the culmination of nearly ten years of research on Kuwait’s urban social history, which I began working on in 2006 for my doctoral dissertation.”

UK-Saudi arms sales: Rival reports argue over legality The British government is facing mounting pressure to stop its billion-dollar arms trade with Saudi Arabia. 

Last Tango in Riyadh Saudi Arabia is reportedlyon the brink of implosion due to its economic dependence on oil and its failure to implement political reforms.

City in the sky: world's biggest hotel to open in Mecca The cradle of Islam turns into a “Las Vegas for pilgrims.”

Saudi Arabia says arrests 17 Islamic State attack plottersFourteen Saudi nationals, three Yemenis, an Egyptian, and a Palestinian are accused of plotting attacks according to the interior ministry.

Saudi hospital staff strike over months of unpaid wages Nurses and staff complain that they have not been paid for months.

Crisis in Yemen

One in three Saudi air raids on Yemen hit civilian sites, data showsThis report from The Guardian refutes claims made by the Saudi government and its American and British allies that Saudi has sought to minimise civilian casualties.

Arms for Houthis found in Yemen trucks with Oman plates  A Saudi-owned daily newspaper reported that trucks with Omani license plates were found by allies of Yemen's deposed president Hadi, carrying weapons bound for Houthi forces.

Over 3,000 Saudi strikes on Yemen 'hit civilian areas' This survey focusing on Saudi’s bombing campaign listed 942 air raids on residential areas, 114 on markets, 34 on mosques, 147 on school buildings, 26 on universities, and 378 on transportation infrastructure.

Yemen: As armed conflict intensifies once again, seeking medical care is dangerous Yemen’s economy has collapsed, leaving many people with little or no income and the choice between buying medicine and buying food.

Yemeni Army Destroys Saudi Arabia's Spying Aircraft, Military Vehicle in Najran Province The incident came as Saudi Arabia continues air raids on the civilian population across Yemen.

Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan - Funding Status (As of 11 September 2016)An infographic from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Dozens killed in clashes around Yemen's besieged Taiz Aid agencies have warned of a humanitarian disaster in Taiz, where more than two hundred thousand civilians have been caught up in the fighting.

What is happening in Yemen and how are Saudi Arabia's airstrikes affecting civilians - explainer Analysis of a comprehensive open source data survey shows that the Saudi-led bombing campaign has regularly hit civilian, economic, and cultural sites.

Ravaged by conflict, Yemen's coast faces rising malnutrition Estimates by the United Nations show that around one hundred thousand children under the age of five in the city of Hodeidah and the surrounding province are at risk of severe malnutrition.

From the Margin of Life, into the Heart of War  A documentary by Mwatana Organization for Human Rights about the suffering of people in Yemen.

Human Rights

Bahraini Authorities Refer Al-Wefaq S-G to Prosecution over his Address Delivered to UNHRC in Geneva Last week, the authorities questioned the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights Nabeel Rajab over an article he published in the New York Times.

Journalist Ahmed Radhi Denied Leaving Bahrain The Bahraini authorities have banned dozens of opposition members and activists from leaving the country, preventing them from attending the UNHRC session in Geneva.

9 Shiite Bahrainis Arrested in Saudi Arabia during Hajj Rituals Saudi security authorities interrogated nine Bahraini nationals as Hajj season started and detained them several days later in an unknown location.

Unprotected by Law, Children Could Face Execution in Saudi Arabia Saudi courts have sentenced people to death for crimes committed when they were as young as thirteen years old.

The women tweeting for their freedom in Saudi Arabia Saudi women attempt to break free from abusive male guardianship.

BCHR at HRC33: arbitrary detention The Director of Advocacy at the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy delivered an intervention at the 33rd Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council to raise concerns over increasing arbitrary detention.

Authorities Release Boy Mostafa Al-Motghawi, Arrest Another The Bahraini authorities arrested, interrogated, and held Mostafa, aged sixteen, in solitary confinement in the Criminal Investigation Department.

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Maghreb and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Maghreb Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to maghreb@jadaliyya.com by Tuesday night of every week]

Algeria

Obstacles to ISIS Expansion Dalia Ghanem-Yazbeck breaks down the reasons for the Islamic State's unsuccessful expansion in Algeria.

Algeria: 2-Year Sentence for Facebook Poem Despite the constitutional right to freedom of speech, a journalist was imprisoned for two years due to a Facebook poem deemed insulting to the president.

Algérie: un homme de confession chrétienne poursuivi en appel pour “outrage à l’islam” A Christian Algerian man imprisoned for a series of Facebook postscriticizing Islam in 2014.

L’hyène rayée ressort des bois Striped hyenas, previously classified as endangered, have been spotted more frequently in the past few months.

الجزائر ترسل شحنة نفط إلى كوبا Algeria prepares to send a crude oil shipment to Cuba for the first time.

Libya

Power struggle rages in Libyan oasis town A conflict backed by local and international forces in Ubari, Libya displaces the town’s inhabitants.

Libyan Desert An enchanting photo series depicting life in the Libyan desert.

Libya’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ William Denver’s political analysis of Libya’s current crisis state.

Libya’s prison and detention system is in chaos: report A large number of Libya’s inmates have been detained in overcrowded and underfunded prisons, without prosecution or sentence.

قفزة غير مسبوقة لمعدل التضخم في ليبيا خلال 6 أشهر (تحليل) Libyan inflation rates have risen immensely since the beginning of the ongoing conflict.

Mauritania

Mauritanie: la police interrompt une manifestation des ressortissants Sénégalais Senegalese immigrants in Mauritania protest against the many injustices they face, only to be ignored by the Senegalese embassy in Mauritania.

Mauritania: visite polémique de parlementaires français Members of the French parliament plan a controversial visit to Mauritania with the goal of improving relations between the nations.

Conflict Debunking Mauritania’s Islamist militancy mythology Chris Simpson’s critical analysis of Mauritania’s US-backed anti-radicalization and anti-terrorism efforts.

Mauritanie : les avocats de 13 militants anti-esclavagistes dénoncent le projet de transfèrement de leurs clients The lawyers of thirteen activists arrested for anti-slavery militancy speak out against the transfer of their clients to a different prison.

استعدادات العيد في موريتانيا: زحام وغلاء Mauritanian Muslims bustle to prepare for Eid Al Adha in their own way.

Morocco

Morocco: Trial opens for Islamist 'sex scandal' couple After their failure to appear in court, a trial is opened for the two members of the Movement of Unity and Reform--described as the ideological arm of the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Le Maroc à la traîne en matière d’éducation UNESCO reports conclude that Morocco will not be able to meet its primary school attendance goal by the end of the century.

Manifestation anti-Bongo devant l'ambassade du Gabon au Maroc A group of Gabonese people living in Morocco protested the re-election of Ali Bongo in front of the Gabonese embassy in Rabat.

African Ambassadors Meet in Morocco Ahead of COP 22 The African Development Bank and the UN Economic Commission for Africa met for an information session on 31 August in preparation for COP22.

المغرب: رفض لحصر الشباب والنساء في لائحة انتخابية خاصة Morocco moves to diversify its parliament by applying a quota regulation stemming from the aftermath of the 20 February ovement protests in 2011.

Tunisia

Tunisia parliament approves unity government of Youssef Chahed A new government including “Islamists, leftists, unionists and independents” with prime minister Youssef Chahed has been approved by the parliament, and will attempt to solve the country’s economic issues.

Tunisian president moves against party threatening to 'cut off heads' President Beji Caid Essebsi reacts urgently to Hizb at-Tahrir’s threat to cut off the heads and hands of “the criminal government and their English masters.”

Tunisie : élan de solidarité pour les victimes du drame routier à Kasserine Tunisians act in solidarity with the victims of the Kasserine road accident by donating blood and offering shelter.

Témoignage : être une femme féministe en Tunisie A Tunisian woman’s account on being a feminist in Tunisia.

تونس تحيي اليوم الوطني لحماية الصحفيين Human Rights organizations remember disappeared journalists Sofian Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari on the National Day for the Protection of Journalists.

Western Sahara

Sahrawi protesters recount recent abuses Sahrawis peacefully fighting for their independence discuss the many abuses encountered during protests.

Growing international recognition of Western Sahara offers new hope for Africa’s Last Colony As more and more nations recognize the Western Sahara’s right to independence, Sahrawi hope grows.

Inondations : Plus de 8000 enfants sahraouis regagneront l'école à El-Aiun (Unicef) Despite the destruction of many schools by recent floods in the Laayoune refugee camp,, Sahrawi children will be starting their school year on 6 September.

Les prisonniers politiques sahraouis du groupe de Gdeim Izik entament une grève de la faim Political prisoners protest against inhumane conditions with a forty-eight-hour hunger strike.

تقرير أمريكي: استمرار الجمود بشأن الصحراء الغربية أكبر عقبات التعاون في مكافحة الإرهاب An American political analysis describes the ongoing occupational conflict in the Western Sahara as the largest obstacle to the path toward a peaceful Maghreb.

Recent Jadaliyya Articles on the Maghreb

التراجيديا التي تحاصر مجالنا البصري Ahmed Jaride discusses the inspirations and themes of his abstract art.

الحركة النسائية في المغرب: مقابلة لبرنامج الوضع Naima Benouakram discusses the feminist movement in Morocco in an interview by Fateh Azzam.

The Western Sahara and Football: A Path toward Self-Determination? Aubrey Bloomfield and Sean Jacobs discuss the value of football in the Sahrawi struggle for independence.

A Brief History of Fortress Europe Hassan Ould Moctar points to Europe’s colonial and imperial history as a root for the ongoing European refugee crisis.

اعتاد الكثير من الرفاق في التقدّمية والطليعية، من أصحاب مطالب الحرية والعدالة والمساواة عامةً، على أن النساء يتوجّهن إليهم بالكلام لما يطالبن بحقّ من حقوقهن. اعتادوا، كما المسؤولين، لغةً تطالب وقد ترتجي، يجب أن تفنّد وتبرهن، تسوق الأمثال الدالّة على الأهلية، تعد بعدم الخروج عن "الإجماع والتوافق"، تتبنّى وتفاوض، ... لغةٌ، إذا حضر في عبارةٍ من عباراتها طفلٌ ذكرٌ بين مئة ألف أنثى، تنتقل إلى صيغة المذكّر. لغةٌ، إذا خرجت عن اللائق في المطالبة، تُدان بالعنف، وتساق كدليلٍ على عدم الأهلية، الخروج، والتطرّف.

المرأة التي تطالب بحقوقٍ وتصيح بها وتغضب لأجلها، لا تولد كذلك. هي تكون قد وضعت موضع المساءلة كميّةً من الإعتداءات اليومية التي تستهدف النساء حكراً، من المشي في الشارع إلى العمل في مكتب، ومن الفكر إلى الجنس. يتنبّهن لهذه الإعتداءات، لا لأنها بعضٌ من ظلمٍ يتشاركنه مع بقية المجتمع، وإنما لأنها تضاف إلى الظلم الذي يتشاركنه مع بقية المجتمع. الفقر، البطالة، الأميّة، المرض، ... كلها، يتشاركنها. أما الباقة الخاصة بهنّ فتتطلّب منهنّ عمراً لفكفكتها، ولا تفكّك كلها، إذ أنها تأتي مدعّمة بإسمنتٍ صلبٍ يقيها شرّ التشكيك: العادات، التقاليد، الموروث، الأخلاق، الدين، البيروقراطية، ... سلطات بأدواتٍ معمّمة، من "خطبة الجمعة" إلى برنامجٍ فكاهيّ على التلفزيون، ومن قانون الأحوال الشخصيّة إلى ناموس الحياة اليوميّة.

الذكوريّة ليست رأياً نتخفّف منه بمجرد إختلافنا معه، هي وعاءٌ يحتوينا جميعاً، جميع مخارجه مكهربة، تتربّص بالساعيات والساعين إلى العبور، تلقننا دروساً لن ننسانها.

"نحن الموقعات أدناه"

تستجمع المرأة كامل قواها، لتشدّ نحو تغييرٍ في وضعها. وإذ، في معترك "طلوع الروح" اليوميّ، يرتأي رجالٌ، وهم كثيراً ما يرتأون، أن يثبّتوا أنهم طليعيون، يساريّون، ليبراليّون، حداثويّون، يبحثون عن العدالة في كلّ سياقٍ ليناصروها، عبر الإدلاء بدلوٍ حول الطريقة الأمثل التي يجب على المرأة أن تعتمدها للمطالبة بحقّ. معظم هذه "النصائح" تأتي لترسم خريطة طريقٍ بين حالين يجهلهما هؤلاء الرجال. خريطة طريقٍ للخروج من مُعاشٍ لا يعيشونه، وخريطة طريق تقود نحو واقعٍ لا يملكون تفاصيل تخيّله، إذ لا يقيم في العناوين العريضة. وعندما تخرج النساء عليهم ليخبرنهم عن مروحة من المُعاش والطموح والسكّة، تراهم يصرّون على إمتلاك الصواب، وعلى ضرورة أن تتعلمه النساء منهم إذا أردن تحقيق العدالة. يعودون ليصبحوا محور خطاب النساء وهو يجاهد لينوجد، متسلّحين هذه المرة بأن القوامة على لغة النساء تأتي من مناصرٍ لهنّ وليس من ذكوريّ. هذه التجربة هي سائدٌ معمّم في المواجهة مع الذكورية، وقد فنّدتها النسويات الأكاديميات، وباتت من ضمن المنهاج المقرّر في أيّ دراسةٍ ذات صلة بالجندر. فـ"تصحيح الخطاب" و"تخطيط الرجل" يأتيان من تقليدٍ مترسّخ في الذكورية، عابرٍ للقارات والثقافات والأديان، حتى ما عاد النساء يخطئنه لما يسمعنه، أكنّ من النسويات الباحثات أو استندن إلى خبرة الحياة اليومية. فكثيراً ما وجدن أنفسهن في مواقف يشترط فيها "متضامنون" ذكور تغييراً في أسلوب القول أو مضمونه، تغييراً في خيار الفعل أو أدواته، ليمنحوا النسويات تضامنهم. وهم بذلك لا يتضامنون وإنما يستعمرون المقاومة. وقد شهدت بيروت مؤخراً تجربةً شبيهة، ترافقت مع حملة تدين الوزير إيلي ماروني لـ: 1- تحميله النساء مسؤوليةً في اغتصابهنّ، 2- رفضه إلغاء المادة 522 من "العقوبات" التي تعفي المغتصب من العقاب إذا تزوّج بضحيته، و3- تأييده لمنع المرأة من منح جنسيتها لعائلتها.

كتبت ناشطاتٌ نسويّاتٌ بياناً فنّدن فيه اعتداءات الوزير، وطالبنه بالإعتذار. وبينما انتفض حزبٌ سائدٌ كـ"الكتائب اللبنانية"، أبويّ البنية، شعاره يرسّخ المؤسّسات الذكورية الثلاث، "الله – الوطن – العائلة"، ليبرّئ نفسه من رؤى وزيره ويثبّت وجوداً يريده طليعيّاً في المعركة ضد المادة 522، أتت المساءلة من ناحية بعض "الرفاق". هذه المرة، شعروا بأن البيان استثناهم إذ أن لغته أتت مؤنثة ("نحن الموقّعات أدناه"). الحياة كلها، الأديان كلها، القوانين كلها، البيانات كلها، حتى تعليمات الإستخدام على المنتجات كلها (إلا الخاصة بالطبخ والتنظيف والتجميل) تأتي بالمذكّر. حيواتٌ بأكملها تراكمت وتمّ عيشها بالمذكّر. لم ينتبه "الرفاق" إلى ذلك، وإذا انتبهوا، فلم يمنعهم ذلك من المطالبة بتخصيص حيّزٍ للرجال في صوت البيان كي لا يشعروا بالإستبعاد. ما يعني أن اللغة إما تكون ذكوريّة كتلك البادية في الإستخدام السائد، أو تكون إقصائية إذا أتت بالمؤنث المتمرّد. لم ينتبه "الرفاق" إلى أنهم وضعوا على قاعدة المساواة لغتين، واحدة تثبّت ظلماً تاريخيّاً وأخرى تقاوم عبر رفع الظلم لا مفاوضته. ولم ينتبه "الرفاق" إلى أن التغيير الذي شعروا به عند سماع "نحن الموقعات أدناه"، يسبّب القلق لا لأنه "إقصائيّ" فقد سبقهم إلى توقيعه رجالٌ لم يشعروا بالإقصاء، وإنما لأن التغيير يترافق مع القلق. فالقلق يشير إلى خطر على الموجود، والموروث، والمسلّم به، فيدلّنا إليه. ويمكننا أن نستعين بالقلق لنستكشف ذواتنا. إذ لا نأتي من المريخ، وإنما من مجتمعاتٍ تقوم على التمييز (بين الرجل والمرأة، الغني والفقير، المسلمة والمسيحية، الشيعي والسنّي...). توقّف الرفاق عند تغييرٍ، وشعروا بأنه يأتيهم بما يقلقهم. لكنهم لم يراجعوا أسباب القلق، لم يشكّكوا في ردّ الفعل، وإنما بادروا إلى إسكاته عبر مساءلة البيان لا الذات، وصاروا "هم" محوراً في نقاشٍ حول الإغتصاب.

أساتذة وتلميذات

لا جديد تحت الشمس. هذه العادة مكرّسة في الذكورية، وفي المجتمع. وهي تُقرأ بلا جهدٍ من النساء، إن تماشين معها أو عارضنها. نحن يومياً يتم تلقيننا "الصح". من كيفية ركن السيارة إلى كيفية لصق الطابع على المغلّف. المستفيدون من التمييز صلبون في الدفاع عن مكتسباتهم وتثبيتها، عن وعي أو بلاه. ولذلك، تتأخر الحقوق (ما زلنا في مرحلة الدفاع عن الجسم، ولم ننتقل بعد إلى كيفية إستخدام هذا الجسم). شعر رفاقٌ بالقلق فبادروا إلى "تصحيح" البيان، والتلقين يأتي دائماً "لمصلحتكنّ". القلق أنبأهم بأن البيان لن يريح من "يجب" أن يتوجّه إليه كلّ بيانٍ نسويّ (الرجل الذكوريّ)، فصحّحوه. يقلقون، لمّا يظهر القول حرّاً. حرٌّ، يأتي من ندّية، يتمرّد ولا يتمنّى. فزعل الرفاق لمّا اتُهموا بالذكورية، كأنهم ولدوا خارجها ولا يفكّوا أحرفها. كأنهم سمكة اتُهمت بالطيران. وبدلاً من التفاعل مع ما ساقته النسويات من أفكار، فضّلوا الإستقرار في رأيهم، وبذل الغالي والرخيص في سبيل تأكيد صوابيتهم وخلوّهم التام من "فيروس" الذكورية.

إن تلقين الأطفال لغةً ينطقون بها هو واحد من سبل إدخالهم /ن إلى المجتمع وترويضهم /ن على علاقاته. والتعامل مع النساء كأطفال هو فعلٌ أصيلٌ في الذكورية، إن وعيناه أو ربطناه بالبديهيات. قاصراتٌ في العقل والمواطَنة، يقول المرجع المدنيّ للذكورية. القانون يمنع المواطِنة الأنثى من منح جنسيتها لعائلتها، على عكس المواطن الذكر الذي يقدر على منجها حتى لأولاد زوجةٍ أجنبيّة من زواجٍ سابقٍ لها. أما المعجم الدينيّ فلا يبخل عليهن بالدلال: ناقصات عقلٍ ودين، لا تتوجّه إليهن الكتب المساوية حتى بالتحيّة. الله لا يتوجّه للنساء بشكلٍ مباشر في أيٍّ من نصوصه، وإنما يخاطبهن عبر الأسوياء مكتملي النمو. خارج الكتب وفي موقعٍ أقرب من اليوميات، يلوح مشهد هؤلاء الرجال الذين يقفزون دائماً من الغيب ليشيروا بالأيدي لإمرأةٍ تركن سيارتها، يكرّرون النصيحة مرتين لكي تفهمه تلك التي تعاني من قصورٍ طفوليّ، "يمين يمين"، "ارجعي، ارجعي"، .. هم لا يأتون من كوكب الصدفة السعيدة، وإنما من تقليدٍ عميقٍ وطويلٍ صار ملتصقاً بالبديهيات، يوضح توزيع الأدوار، وعدم الرغبة بتغييره. ما يصحّ على السيارة، ينسحب على البيت والمكتب والشارع والبيان. هؤلاء الذين يقفزون عند كلّ قولٍ نسويّ ليصحّحوه، ينقّحوه، يدعّموه، يأقلموه، يشبهون رجال ركن السيارة. أفعالٌ كلها إيجابية تفيض منها رغبات المساعدة و/أو المساواة، لكنها، للأسف، لا تخدم هذه الرغبات. فمناصرة المساواة تقوم على مراجعة الذات. وُجهة الجهد داخليةٌ أولاً، فقد نشأنا في مستنقعٍ من الظلم، تنتشر فينا ترسباته. لذلك، لا أحد منا معصومٌ /ة عن الذكوريّة، ومن الذكوريّ عدم تقبّل ذلك.

النسويّات، في ردودهن على مصحّحي الصياغة، قدّمن مروحةً مختلفةً من ردود الفعل: بدءاً من استعراض نقاطٍ مفصّلة ومراجع نظريّة متاحة لمن تـ/ يشتهي، وصولاً إلى السخرية التهكميّة التي لا تتكلّف حتى عناء العصبيّة، مروراً باستغرابٍ غير بريءٍ من اللؤم. بدا الحوار كتمرينٍ تطبيقيّ يدلّ على أشدّ مراحل النقاش بين النسويّة والذكوريّة تقدّماً وطليعيةً في مجتمعنا. فقد دار بين نسويّاتٍ ورفاقٍ يطالبون بالمساواة، ولم تجرِ بين السائد والبديل. جميعنا في البديل، لا غرباء في النقاش. ولذلك، كانت مناسبةً للرصد والتفكيك. فواحدٌ من أمضى الأسلحة في يد الذكورية هو العنفوان الذي يأبى التراجع والتفكّر، والثقة المطلقة بصوابية الذات. وهي تكافئهما في الرجل "العنيد" الذي "لا يبدّل تبديلاً".
من هنا، وعند كلّ لحظةٍ تستفيق فيها الثقة المطلقة بالذات، يبدو من المجدي أن يتوقّف المرء أمام نفسه، ويسألها: من أين تأتي هذه الصوابية، ونحن نعيش في هذا المستنقع؟

Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Jonathan Wyrtzen (JW): This book was deeply influenced by my experiences over the course of a decade that began in 2001. A few weeks before 9/11, my wife and I moved to Morocco to teach at Al Akhawayn University, up in the town of Ifrane in the Middle Atlas Mountains. That initial period shaped a set of questions for me about Moroccan identity.

Anyone who drives around the country quickly becomes of aware of the ubiquitous national motto,  “Allah, al-Watan, al-Malik” (God, Nation, King), emblazoned on the hillsides. Living close to the king’s mountain palace in Ifrane, we frequently saw the huge royal motorcade—a modern, motorized version of the traditional mahalla—roll into town, with crowds lining the street and waving Moroccan flags. Those first two years in Morocco made me increasingly intrigued by how Moroccan identity came to be defined around the core pillars of Islam, a territorial and communal sense of the nation, and the Alawite monarchy. Perhaps most puzzling was how the monarchy had survived colonization and then survived decolonization, when so many other dynasties had been eradicated.

In those first years of Mohamed VI’s rule in the early 2000s, several significant shifts with regard to national identity were happening. Just after we arrived, the king traveled in October 2001 to the Middle Atlas to announce the creation of a Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture tasked with developing and promoting Berber language and culture. This move responded to pressures exerted by the Moroccan Berber Cultural Movement since the early 1990s and represented a historic shift by the monarchy from an official promotion of a singular Arab and Islamic Moroccan identity to a bi-ethnic framing of national identity. Two years later, in 2003, the king announced a substantive reform of the conservative Personal Status Law (mudawana) enacted after independence in 1957, this time responding at last to pressures exerted by Moroccan women’s rights groups from the 1980s. The mudawana reform explicitly signaled the king’s prerogative as “Commander of the Faithful” to define Moroccan Islam in the wake of the May 2003 Casablanca bombings and against prior Islamist opposition to the reforms. 

When I came back to start a History PhD at Georgetown in 2003, months after the US invasion of Iraq, these interests in collective identity shaped by my time in North Africa became entwined with questions about the effects of Western military intervention in the region including resistance and counterinsurgency, the politicization of ethnic and sectarian boundaries, debates over gender and identity, and the political and social role of Islam. The combination of my experiences in Morocco and what was happening in the Middle East in the wake of the US invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq drew me to look at the legacies of an earlier episode of Western intervention in the region.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JW: The fundamental question the book addresses is how four and a half decades (1912-1956) of French and Spanish colonial intervention transformed notions of identity in Moroccan society. It examines how particular ethnic, religious, and gendered boundaries were politicized during this critical period with long-lasting effects. Today, we see these legacies in debates about Morocco’s Arab and Amazigh (Berber) identity, the idea of “Moroccan Islam,” the position of Morocco’s Jewish minority, and reforms focused on women’s rights.

The book engages with several academic literatures including area studies work on North Africa and the Middle East; colonial studies and post-colonial studies; and historically-oriented sociology and political science work focused on empire and colonialism. There are two broad tendencies across these literatures. One is a top-down focus on colonial structures, policies, and administrators and how colonial power reorders, represents, and produces knowledge about the colonized. The other option is a bottom-up focus on resistance (nationalist or subaltern), subjectivities, accommodations, and interpretations of colonial rule within the colonized society. 

I was interested in a “both/and” framework for analyzing colonial intervention that, instead of emphasizing one side or the other, could capture the complex and dynamic interactions among colonial and local actors, bringing elites and non-elites into the field of view. In the book, I propose the concept of a colonial political field as a heuristic to help do this. It clarifies the Moroccan context but also provides an apparatus for asking comparative questions about other colonial cases.

The basic idea is that colonial intervention creates a new type of political field with three characteristics: physical and social space, ordering forces, and competition. Military conquest defines the territorial space of the field, and colonial symbolic and classificatory logics shape the organizing forces constituting the rules of the game in that physical and social space. These two dimensions don’t dictate outcomes though. Rather, they establish the space for a playing field in which collective identities are transformed through interactive struggles among multiple actors.

The book starts with a quote by the first French resident general, Hubert Lyautey, about the French “making Morocco,” (see excerpt below) but the argument is that making Morocco involved the French, Spanish, and a wide constellation of Moroccans. This included the Moroccan elites typically represented in histories of this period (like the king, Mohamed V, and the Arabic-speaking urban nationalist leaders), but the main contribution of the book is to turn attention to the critical role of rural and urban non-elites—including Berber-speakers, Morocco’s Jewish community, and women—that were both at the center of struggles over Moroccan identity and themselves actively engaged in these struggles. By looking at complex interactions among these groups during the colonial period, the book demonstrates why and how four fundamental dimensions of Moroccan identity—religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy—became indelibly politicized and have subsequently been focal points for ongoing struggles over Moroccan identity.   

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JW: I hope it is read by people interested in how major political transformations like colonial intervention interact with notions of collective identity. This would include area-specialists working on North Africa and the Middle East, scholars working on colonial history and postcolonial studies in other areas, and social scientists working on empire and colonialism. For these audiences, I think this study of Morocco is accessible and opens up lines of comparison with other former colonial units regarding the politicization of ethnic and sectarian boundaries; the importance gendered legal and educational policies for marking social boundaries; the position of religious minorities; and the trajectories of different regime types after independence.

While I hope this proves a helpful model outside of the Moroccan case, I also really want this book to be read by specialists working on Morocco and North Africa. My goal in Making Morocco was to write a new type of colonial history that is both post-colonialist and post-nationalist, that captures the contingencies and complexities of this pivotal period. This is an extremely exciting time to be working on North Africa, as there is a new cohort of scholars reengaging older questions in the literature and breaking new ground. I hope one of the book’s primary contributions is to provide a framework for integrated this new work into a larger narrative about Morocco’s colonial history. Though I turn attention to marginalized histories outside established narratives, I also wanted to keep the big picture in view. Finally, for similar reasons, I hope the book can be translated so a wider audience of Moroccans can read this modest attempt at a new, inclusive historical synthesis that incorporates the multiple perspectives and tensions about Moroccan identity that are still getting worked out today.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JW: I am currently completing a book titled, Reimagining Political Space: Jihads, Empires, and the Interwar Making of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. This project attempts a different type of transnational history of the post-WWI period focused, not on stable units of analysis like nation-states or empires, but on sites of friction and conflict on the still undefined postwar political map.

I got the idea while working on chapters in Making Morocco focused on anti-colonial resistance movements in the Rif and Atlas Mountains in the 1920s. I realized the processes at work in Morocco—namely, attempts to enclose state-governed territorial space and opposing efforts defending alternative structures of local autonomy—were happening synchronically from northwest Africa to the Zagros mountains in the decade after World War I as new forms of political order were defined and came into conflict. The book thus brings the Maghrib and Mashriq together into the same frame of analysis, looking at linkages from Morocco to Iraq among anti-colonial jihads and colonial and local state-formation projects in the interwar period.

The idea of reimagining political space works on two levels. First, it refers to how postwar political space was actively reimagined over and over again through the 1920s and into the 1930s, not only by European diplomatic and military officials, but also by a wide arrange of local actors like Abd al-Krim al-Khattabi, Omar al-Mukhtar, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Shaykh Said, and a range of others. The second level is a theoretical intervention about conceptualizing political space that shifts from a static to a dynamic conception of political units, incorporates political orders above and below the nation-state, and focuses on interactions within and across these scales of political space. My substantive argument is that, against the dominant “Sykes-Picot narrative” that the British and French imposed artificial boundaries on the region, political orders in the MENA region were (and continue to be) forged through these interactions between local, regional, and transnational fields of power.

After this book, I plan to return to the theme of the influence of colonial legacies on identity politics that I engaged in Making Morocco. I would like apply the idea of the colonial political field in a multi-country comparative study that looks at different frameworks of colonial rule in the Middle East and North Africa and outcomes related to regime type and the varied salience of ethno-linguistic, religious, and gendered identity markers in post-independence national contexts. 

Excerpt: From the Introduction

The Politics of Identity in a Colonial Political Field

Et maintenant nous allons faire le Maroc.
And now we are going to make Morocco.

—Comment by Hubert Lyautey, the first French resident general, as he watched Mawlay ʿAbd al-Hafiz, the sultan he had just deposed and replaced, board a ship taking him into exile in August 1912
(Rivet 1996)

In late September 1930, after three months of weekly demonstrations in Morocco’s northern cities, a delegation of eight men traveled from Fes to Rabat to meet with the young sultan, Mohamed ben Youssef. The petition they presented him protested how the French, in the phrase Lyautey used eighteen years earlier, had been “making Morocco.” The catalyst for the discontent was France’s so-called Berber policy, a colonial politics of recognition that reified an ethnic distinction between Arabs and Berbers. Since 1914, French authorities had installed a system of tribal courts in the middle and central High Atlas Mountains after these regions, which the French designated as “of Berber custom,” had been “pacified” (conquered militarily) and brought under French administration. In the 1920s, they also began to install a fledgling separate educational system of Franco-Berber schools in these same areas, which offered little to no instruction in Arabic or Islam. These ethnically based juridical and educational distinctions provoked little response from the Moroccan public until 1930, when the residency promulgated a decree (dahir), which the sultan signed on May 16, that put the Berber customary legal system on an equal footing with other jurisdictions and channeled criminal cases into the French courts. 

This effort to further formalize a policy of ethnic differentiation catalyzeda firestorm of popular protest that roiled many of Morocco’s cities for weeks that summer. In June, a group of young, urban, Arabic-speaking activists began to campaign against what they called the Berber dahir. In their eyes the May 16 decree was a fundamental threat to the unity of the Moroccan umma, or Muslim community: they claimed it removed the Berbers from the jurisdiction of shariʿa and was part of a broader French strategy to Christianize the Berbers. To publicize the danger and rally crowds against the decree, they improvised on the Latif, a traditional prayer used in times of trouble or calamity, standing up in mosques and chanting, “Oh Allah, the Benevolent, we ask of You benevolence in whatever fate brings, and do not separate us from our brothers, the Berbers” (Brown 1972; Lafuente 1999, 190–91). In July, the protests spread from Salé and Rabat to several interior cities, and on August 7, 7,000 Moroccans gathered to chant the Latif at the Qarawayn mosque in Fes (Ageron 1972, 138–39). In response to the escalating protests, the French authorities officially prohibited the prayer throughout the country. The next week, the sultan, under pressure from the French, ordered imams to publically read a letter defending the policies expressed in the May 16 decree and castigating the protestors for politicizing the “religious space” of the mosque. By the end of the summer, the issue had been picked up by Chakib Arslan, a Geneva-based pan-Islamic propagandist, who railed against French neo-crusaderism in his La Nation Arabe and began to make the “Berber Crisis” a cause célèbre, energizing anti-French demonstrations and petitions across the Muslim world, from Cairo to Surabaya.

In late September, protectorate authorities allowed a delegation of protest leaders to meet with the sultan. Their demands, which they presented in a petition to the sultan and resident general, were clear. Speaking in the name of the Moroccan people, they emphasized the significance of the Berber Question for the country’s religious unity, recounting the history of the Islamization of Morocco’s population, including the Berbers, from the ninth century. They also reiterated the sultan’s sacred obligation, as the duly constituted Muslim ruler, to ensure that Islamic law was uniformly applied in Moroccan territory. Appealing to the promise France had made in the 1912 Treaty of Fes to respect the sultan’s temporal and spiritual authority, their concrete policy demands protested France’s divide-and-rule legal, educational, and administrative policies and insisted instead on state-led policies of Arabo-Islamic national assimilation. These included a unified judiciary that would apply Islamic law to all Moroccans (with the exception of Jews, who would keep their own courts), a unified educational system that would teach Arabic and Islam in both urban and rural areas, the adoption of Arabic as the protectorate’s official language, and a prohibition against any official use ofBerber “dialects” or their transcription into Latin characters. Reflecting intense anxieties in the early 1930s about Christian proselytization, the protestors also called for an end to missionary activity, for Muslim control of orphanages and schools the Franciscans had established in the Atlas Mountains, and for an end to the protectorate’s financial support of the Catholic Church. Finally, the protestors demanded an end to internal travel restrictions in the French zone and the replacement of obligatory travel permits with identity cards that would allow free movement between city and countryside (Lafuente 1999, 196). After reading the petition, the sultan communicated his sympathy, but the delegation returned to Fes empty handed, and the protests petered out that fall. Although it seems to have been a failure in terms of immediate goals, the so-called Berber Crisis catalyzed the birth of an urban nationalist movement that developed over the next decade. This cycle of protest also forged a cultural agenda—an insistence on Morocco’s Arab and Islamic identity (and the concomitant suppression of its Berber patrimony)—that eventually shaped the identity politics of the post-independence Moroccan state when the nationalist movement leadership came into power in 1956.

This cycle of protests against France’s infamous Berber policy in the early 1930s captures key elements of the interactive politics of identity that played out during the country’s protectorate period (1912–1956). First, this episode demonstrates that the “we” Lyautey referred to at the onset of the protectorate in his pretentious comment about “making Morocco” did not just include representatives of the French colonial power such as himself. The making of Morocco also involved a constellation of Moroccan actors: the Alawid sultan, the nominal ruler; an urban Arabic-speaking elite that was beginning to mobilize popular support and to make claims about the trajectories of state and nation-building; and, less obviously, groups including Berber speakers and Jews whose marginal ethnic or religious position in society put them at the crux of identity struggles. Second, the 1930 “Berber Crisis” reveals what was at stake. After just two decades of colonial intervention, a set of identity-related issues had become profoundly politicized, including categories of ethnicity such as “Arab” and “Berber,” the function of language and religion in educational and judicial systems, the state’s control over territory and internal movement, and the appropriate temporal and spiritual roles of the sultan. From this point forward, contention over these concerns dominated political struggles throughout the rest of the protectorate, and they continued to do so after independence.

In this book I address an underlying question brought to the fore by the actors, issues, and interactions linked in the “Berber Crisis” of the early 1930s: How did four and half decades of European colonial intervention in the twentieth century transform Moroccan identity? As was the case for other places in North Africa and in the wider developing world, the colonial period in Morocco (1912–1956) established a new type of political field in which notions about and relationships among politics and identity formation were fundamentally transformed. Instead of privileging top-down processes of colonial state formation or bottom-up processes of local resistance, my analysis focuses on interactions between state and society that occurred in this field. By looking at the formal and informal rules of the game, different styles of play, and the stakes of struggle in this field, I demonstrate how interactions during the protectorate period among a wide range of European and local actors indelibly politicized four key dimensions of Moroccan identity: religion, ethnicity, territory, and the role of the Alawid monarchy. These colonial legacies are significant because these arenas of identity formation continue to be at the center of struggles to defend, contest, and negotiate the legitimacy of Morocco’s political order.

In its focus on the politicization of identity in the colonial period, the book makes two substantive interventions. First, it demonstrates that the anti-colonial nationalist definition of Moroccan identity centered on Arabo-Islamic high culture (Gellner 1983) and Alawid dynastic rule—expressed in the cultural agenda of urban nationalists and supported later by the post-independence Moroccan state—was a contingent outcome. It problematizes the notion that this definition of identity represented a direct continuity with precolonial identity configurations and instead demonstrates that it was an outcome of spatial, classificatory, and symbolic struggles that occurred in the colonial political field.

Second, in tracing how and why religious and ethnic markers of identity—Muslim, Jewish, Arab, and Berber—became politicized and how gender was often at the center of struggles over these categories, this book brings to light a plurality of other identity configurations in play in protectorate Morocco—subnational and supranational, ethnolinguistic and non-ethnolinguistic, Muslim and non-Muslim, and nonmonarchic—that were eventually marginalized or elided in the process of anti-colonial nation building. The book examines literate and text-producing Moroccan and European elites, but it also integrates non-elite groups in Moroccan society into its central analysis. By analyzing hitherto neglected primary sources, it brings forth the unique perspectives of rural Berber speakers, Jews, and women who were marginalized by the political elite even though they were symbolically at the center of identity struggles. By locating the origins of an Arabo-Islamic configuration of Moroccan national identity and those it marginalized in the colonial period, this study sheds new light on perennial questions in Moroccan historiography, including the salience of the Arab-Berber distinction, the status of Jews, the position of women, and the survival of the monarchy.

These interventions historicize dominant post-independence narratives of Moroccan national identity and depict the central importance of subaltern, or subordinated, groups in forging this identity. These findings are relevant because they help demonstrate a more complex and nuanced view of Morocco’s colonial past. Equally importantly, these four axes of identity—religion, ethnicity, territory, and the monarchy—that were activated during the protectorate period remain the focus of contemporary Moroccan political struggles. This is reflected in ongoing debates over the public role of Islam, religious tolerance, and the memory of Morocco’s Jews; recent reforms regarding women’s legal status; the monarchy’s multiculturalist recognition of Tamazight (Berber) as a national language alongside Arabic; the still-unresolved territorial dispute over the Western Sahara; and the monarchy’s continued symbolic and practical dominance, as Commander of the Faithful, of the Moroccan political field. Finally, by examining linkages among colonial and postcolonial political developments in Morocco, this book isolates and clarifies historical processes that are relevant to numerous other postcolonial contexts.

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Palestine and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Palestine Page Co-Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each roundup to Palestine@jadaliyya.com.]

The Occupation Forces

Israeli Forces Close Checkpoints Around East Jerusalem And Detain Palestinian Youth The young man has yet to be identified, but Israeli forces had been looking for him over suspicions of reportedly planning an attack on Jerusalem.

Israeli Soldier Declares That He Will Impose Collective Punishment On Residents Of Hebron Hariz Safadi, Director of the Hebron office of Israel's Coordinator of Israeli Government's Activities in the Territories says that punitive measures can't be ruled out and that they "plan to impose punishments and security arrangements."

Israeli Forces Kill Jordanian Youth After Stabbing Attack In Occupied East Jerusalem The young man, identified as Said al-Amr was twenty eight when he died after an attempted attack outside the Damascus Gate. A witness reported that al-Amr had not attacked anyone before he was "neutralized" by Israeli forces.

Israeli Sniper Shouts "Where Do You Want It" Before Shooting Palestinian Youth 4 Times Muhammad al-Amsi was just standing on his roof, talking on his phone when he was shot dead by the sniper. Al-Amsi was shot multiple times in the legs and once in the hand.

Family Of Man Killed By Israeli Forces In Hebron Claims Soldiers Executed Their Son They claim that their son was on his way to work, but Hatim Abd al-Hafeeth Shaludi was killed by Israeli forces after an alleged stabbing attack in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in the Old City of Hebron.

Israeli Forces Raid And Close Off The Village Of Bani Naim In Hebron After Alleged Attacks Raiding several homes and delivering notices to others, Israeli forces surrounded the neighborhood as a collective punishment for the alleged car ramming attacks by Fares Khaddour and his fiancé.

Palestinian Man Shot Dead After Alleged Stabbing Attack, Brings Death Toll To 5 In Last 24 Hours The unfair balance of deaths between Israelis and Palestinians has become quite evident recently. Since 2005 at least two hundred and fifteen Palestinians, both attackers and civilians, have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2015.

Israeli Soldiers Detain 12 Year Old Palestinian Boy For Alleged Possession Of Molotov Cocktails And A Knife Taken into custody for questioning, the boy was also carrying a Palestinian flag. This is just another instance in a recent spate of Israeli claims of Palestinian knife-wielding as justification for lethal action.

Two More Young Palestinian Men Shot And Killed As Collective Punishment Is Escalated There has been no independent confirmation of the Israeli claims that the two men approached the military checkpoint near the Ibrahimi mosque with knives.

Over 40 Palestinians Detained and At Least Two Shot By Israeli Forces After Raids Across Occupied Territory In the early morning raids across the occupied territories, Israeli forces detained numerous youths and refuses to release locations for three of the prisoners. Among those detained were three bothers of Ayman al-Kurd, who stabbed and mildly injured two Israeli soldiers.

Domestic Politics

Birzeit University Officials Angry With Israeli Government Over Deportation Of UK Academic Senior lecturer Dr. Adam Hanieh had been invited to speak at the university, but was detained at Ben Gurion airport and elsewhere overnight then deported back to London. The University sees this as a direct attack on Palestinian academic freedom.

Israeli Minister Of Defense Commands Boycott Of UN Envoy Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's actions come after critical remarks made by the UN special envoy over the illegal settlement-building in the occupied territories by Israel.

Israel Uses Fake Pretexts As Justification For Shedding Of Palestinian Blood According To PA Hamas calls for escalated resistance after claims of Israeli war crimes. A spokesperson for the PA said that the recent killings of three Palestinians amount to executions, and just another incident in a long line of war crimes.

Foreign Policy

All Female Group Of Activists Will Crew Boat To Ceremonially Break The Siege Of Gaza Two ships will leave from Barcelona, Spain and traverse the waters of the Mediterranean and attempt to breach the naval siege of Gaza. The group hopes to raise awareness of the struggles women face from the occupied territories to the wider world.

Israel And United States Land Largest Ever Military Aid Deal At 38 Billion Dollars Over 10 Years Even when the American government somehow is unable to afford healthcare for its citizens, the United States has signed the largest aid agreement in history. This leads many to wonder what the priorities of the United States are in the peace process.

Netherlands Government Investigate Harassment Of Lawyer At Pro-Palestinian Rights Group Al-Haq Nada Kinswanson, the lawyer, claims that she received intimidating phone calls and threats against the lives of her family. She believes the attacks are in response to preliminary examinations of Israeli war crimes committed in the Gaza war of 2014.

Israeli PM Netanyahu Defends US Aid Package Despite Criticism, Will Meet Obama At The UN The Israeli Prime Minister claims that the deal "proves the depth of the relationship, and the strength of relations, between Israel and the United States." Netanyahu will meet with President Obama to discuss the likely topic of a two-state solution. 

These Are Seven Messages The American-Israeli Aid Deal Sends To The World With messages ranging from Israeli impunity to the lack of regard for the American citizenry by its own government, the US-Israeli arms deal signifies to the world that its leaders don't care about public opinion.

Settlers and Illegal Settlements

To Make Room For Israeli Settlers, Palestinian Family Evicted From Home In East Jerusalem In order to make room to build a new Jewish-only settlement, Israeli forces evicted the family in the neighborhood of Saadiya in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem. The family's lawyer claims that the family's property falls into a "protected status."

Woman Shot By Israeli Forces After Car Ramming Attack Still In Dangerous Condition eighteen years old Raghad Khaddour's lawyer claimed that his client remained in "difficult" and "worrying" condition. Her fiancé Fares Khaddour was killed in the same attack.

Group Of Settlers, Escorted By Israeli Soldiers And Members Of Parliament Raid Village Of Susiya And Assault Palestinian Residents According to the local Susiya council head, the Israeli settlers "physically and verbally assaulted Palestinians." No spokesperson for the Knesset has been reached to identify the members present at the event.

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions

Women's Studies Professor Harassed By Israel-Backed Group Over Comments On BDS Movement And Feminism Simona Sharoni, Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at State University of New York at Plattsburgh, says that she has been the target of a targeted harassment campaign. She believes that her comments on the relevance of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement with the international feminism movement are to blame for the harassment.

Suspension Of Course On Palestine At UC Berkeley Linked To Israel The University is renowned for its progressive attitudes so it came as quite a shock when the administration shut down a class-run course on Palestine. Israeli-aligned organizations forced the Chancellor of the college to suspend the course, and make for a dangerous infringement on the freedom of speech on American campuses.

Suspended Course On Palestine At UC Berkeley Reinstated After International Protest In a major win for the BDS movement, the course has been allowed to continue, though only after a revision of the course description.

Law

Over 100 Palestinian Prisoners Begin Mass Hunger-Strike In Support Of Treatment Of Malik Al-Qadi To protest the arcane policy of administrative detention, the holding of Palestinian prisoners for months on end without charges, over one hundred prisoners begin hunger strike.

When Palestinians Are Punished For The Crimes Of Israel When the Israeli government defines the blame for their own murderous actions, can the world just sit back and listen to it? Most recently a Palestinian man killed by Israeli forces has been charged with manslaughter after his brother was shot and killed by Israeli forces.

Domestic Politics

Birzeit University Officials Angry With Israeli Government Over Deportation Of UK Academic Senior lecturer Dr. Adam Hanieh had been invited to speak at the university, but was detained at Ben Gurion airport and elsewhere overnight then deported back to London. The University sees this as a direct attack on Palestinian academic freedom.

Israeli Minister Of Defense Commands Boycott Of UN Envoy Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman's actions come after critical remarks made by the UN special envoy over the illegal settlement-building in the occupied territories by Israel.

Israel Uses Fake Pretexts As Justification For Shedding Of Palestinian Blood According To PA Hamas calls for escalated resistance after claims of Israeli war crimes. A spokesperson for the PA said that the recent killings of three Palestinians amount to executions, and just another incident in a long line of war crimes.

Economy and Development

Despite Having Toy Factory Raided, Palestinian Toy Maker Is Not Stopping Production Of Dolls That Celebrate Palestinian Heritage The mere symbols of Palestinian culture and identity are being systematically targeted for destruction and elimination by the Israeli occupation machine. These dolls are one woman's way of dealing with and protesting against the occupation, all the while preserving and celebrating her beloved culture. 

Arabic

قوات الاحتلال

ثلاثةشهداءبرصاصالاحتلالبالقدسوالخليل
قتلت قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي شابا فلسطينيا في حي تل الرميدة بمدينة الخليل بزعم محاولته طعن جندي إسرائيلي، وذلك بعد ساعات من استشهاد شابين آخرين أحدهما أردني والآخر فلسطيني في كل من القدس والخليل.

اصابةمواطنبرصاصالاحتلالفيالقطاع
أصيب مواطن جراء إطلاق زوارق الاحتلال الاسرائيلي النار تجاه مجموعة من الصيادين في بحر شمال قطاع غزة مساء اليوم الاثنين.

الاحتلاليعتقل 15 مواطنافيالضفة
اعتقلت قوات الاحتلال الليلة الماضية وصباح اليوم الأحد، 15 مواطنا من عدة محافظات في الضفة.

الاحتلاليعتقلطفلاعلىالمدخلالجنوبيلمدينةأريحا
اعتقلت قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي مساء اليوم الأحد، طفلا يبلغ من العمر 12 عاما، على المدخل الجنوبي لمدينة أريحا.

إصاباتبالاختناقواعتقالاتخلالمواجهاتمعالاحتلالغربجنين
أصيب عدد من المواطنين بحالات اختناق، واعتقل أربعة آخرون، مساء اليوم الأحد، خلال مواجهات مع قوات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي في قرية زبوبا غرب جنين.

الاحتلاليسلمجثمانالشهيدسعيدالعمروالىالسلطاتالأردنية
سلمت سلطات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي عصر اليوم الأحد، جثمان الشهيد الاردني سعيد هايل العمرو (28 عاماً)، للسلطات الأردنية عبر جسر " اللنبي".

الاحتلاليجبرمقدسياعلىهدممنزله
أجبرت سلطات الاحتلال مواطنا مقدسيا على هدم منزله بيديه في بلدة جبل المكبر جنوبي القدس المحتلة اليوم الجمعة.

السياسة الداخلية

استمرارحملةاعتقالناشطينفيحزبالتجمعالعربيفياسرائيل
اعتقلت الشرطة الاسرائيلية صباح الأربعاء 13 مسؤولاً وناشطاً في حزب التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي، استمراراً لحملة اعتقالات بدأت الأحد بسبب تحقيقات حول تمويل الحزب، بحسب بيان للحزب.

عضولجنةحركةفتح: اتصالاتمعقطرلتحديدموعدجلساتالمصالحةمعحماس
قال عضو اللجنة المركزية لحركة فتح، عزام الأحمد، إن الاتصالات جارية مع قطر لتحديد موعد عقد الجلسة القادمة للمصالحة مع حماس.

أبومرزوقينفيوجوداتصالاتبشأنلقاءاتالمصالحة
نفى عضو المكتب السياسي لحركة حماس موسى أبو مرزوق وجود أي اتصالات متعلقة بترتيب لقاءات مستقبلية للمصالحة، بخلاف ما أعلنت عنه حركة "فتح".

المحكمةالعلياتؤجلالبتبالانتخاباتوحماستعتبرهقرارابـ"الإلغاء"
قالت لجنة الانتخابات المركزية الفلسطينية، إنها ماضية في إيقاف التحضيرات الخاصة بإجراء الانتخابات المحلية، إلى حين البت في القضية المرفوعة أمام محكمة العدل العليا الفلسطينية، للطعن في إجراء الانتخابات.

إسرائيلتسعىإلىشطب«التجمع»: اعتقالاتبوليسيةتمهيداً للحظر؟
لم تختلف اعتقالات العدوّ الإسرائيلي لكوادر «التجمع الوطني الديموقراطي»، عن التي تجري مع مشتبهين في قضايا أمنية، فهل يكون مصير الحزب هو الحظر؟

المئاتفيوقفةتضامنمع"التجمعالوطني" فيالناصرة
واصلت الأحزاب والحركات العربية الفاعلة في صفوف الداخل الفلسطيني، اليوم الثلاثاء، التفافها ودعمها لحزب "التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي" في وجه حملة الملاحقة السياسية التي يتعرض لها من قبل سلطات الاحتلال الإسرائيلي.

علاقات خارجية

الجامعةالعربية: إسرائيلترتكبإعداماتميدانية
اعتبر الأمين العام المساعد للجامعة العربية سعيد أبو علي، قتل إسرائيل 3 شهداء فلسطينيين في مدينة الخليل، وأردني في مدينة القدس بمثابة “إعدامات ميدانية”، مطالباً مجلس الأمن الدولي بوضع حد نهائي لها.

وزارةالتربيةالجزائرية"تحقق" فيوروداسمإسرائيلبدلفلسطينفيكتابمدرسي
فتحت وزارة التربية في الجزائر تحقيقا بشأن ورود اسم إسرائيل بدل فلسطين في كتاب مدرسي للجغرافيا: وأمرت "بسحب الكتاب من التداول فورا".

عباسيضعحجرالأساسلسفارةفلسطينفيموريتانيا
وضع الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس، حجر الأساس لسفارة جديدة لفلسطين في العاصمة الموريتانية نواكشوط، وفق ما ذكرت الوكالة الموريتانية للأنباء الخميس.

اجتماعثلاثيبينفلسطينوجنوبافريقياوفنزويلا
التقى وزير الخارجية الدكتور رياض المالكي وزيري خارجية جنوب افريقيا وجمهورية فنزويلا البوليفارية في اجتماع ثلاثي عقد على هامش اعمال قمة حركة عدم الانحياز.

فلسطينتوقعاتفاقيةمعالإكوادور
وقع وزير الخارجية رياض المالكي في فنزويلا، الجمعة، اتفاقية حول المساعدة القانونية في المسائل الجنائية لصالح النيابة العامة، ومذكرة تفاهم للمشاورات الثنائية، مع نظيره وزير الخارجية الإكوادوري.

الاردنيصفاعدامالاحتلاللمواطنهالعموربالفعلالهمجي
نددت وزارة الخارجية وشؤون المغتربين الأردنية بـ"الفعل الهمجي لجيش الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، بإطلاقه النار بشكل متعمد على المواطن الأردني سعيد العمرو أمس الجمعة في منطقة باب العامود بالقدس المحتلة، ما أدى إلى وفاته على الفور".

عنف المستوطنين

عشراتالمستوطنينيقتحمونالأقصىبرفقةحاخاماتيهودلتأديةصلواتتلموديه
اقتحم عشرات المستوطنين المتطرفين برفقة حاخامات يهود صباح اليوم الأحد، المسجد الأقصى المبارك من جهة باب المغاربة بحراسة مشددة من شرطة الاحتلال الخاصة لتأدية صلوات تلموديه.

مواجهاتفيسبسطيةبعداقتحامهامنمستوطنين
اندلعت مواجهات بين عشرات الشبان والفتية، ومجموعة من المستوطنين، تحرسهم قوات كبيرة من جيش الاحتلال، الليلة، في بلدة سبسطية شمال نابلس، شمالي الضفة المحتلة.

٩وزراءإسرائيليينيعارضونإخلاءمستوطنة"عمونا"
وقع 25 نائبا عن حزب الليكود بينهم وزراء في حكومة الاحتلال عريضة لمنع إخلاء مستوطنة عمونا المقامة قرب مدينة رام الله، والعمل على إقرار قانون "التنظيم" الخاص بمنع إخلاء أي مستوطنات مماثلة.

إصابةمواطنبجروحجراءطعنهمنقبلمستوطنينغربالخليل
أكدت مصادر محلية مساء يوم الاثنين, إصابة المواطن مراد طميزي, بجروح متوسطة بعد تعرضه لعملية طعن من قبل مستوطنين, غربي مدينة الخليل. 

قانون

الاحتلاليؤجلمحاكمةثلاثةمستوطنينمتهمينبحرقعائلةدوابشة
أجلت "محكمة العدل العليا" الإسرائيلية، مؤخراً، جلسة محاكمة للمستوطنين الثلاثة المتهمين بحرق عائلة دوابشة في قرية دوما جنوبي نابلس شمالي الضفة الغربية، قبل أكثر من عام، إذ كانت مقررة يوم غدٍ الأحد، مدعية بأن محامي أحد المستوطنين قدم استقالته.

اسرائيلترفضطلبهدممنازلقتلةالشهيدمحمدأبوخضير
ردّت حكومة الاحتلال الإسرائيلي على طلب المحكمة العليا حول القضية التي تقدمت بها عائلة الطفل المقدسي محمد ابو خضير، والتي تتعلق بطلب هدم منازل المستوطنين الذين أحرقوه حتى الموت، بإنه لا يجب هدم المنازل للتباين الكبير في حجم العمليات التي ينفذها الفلسطينيون عن تلك التي ينفذها المستوطنين، بحسب ما اوردت صحيفة "هآرتس" العبرية.

تحذيرمناستشهادالاسيرالمضربمالكالقاضي
حذرت مؤسسة مهجة القدس للشهداء والأسرى اليوم الاحد؛ من صعوبة الحالة الصحية للأسير المضرب عن الطعام مالك القاضي؛ والذي يستشهد في أي لحظة؛ محملة سلطات الاحتلال المسئولية الكاملة عن حياته المهددة.

إبعادالمقدسيشاديمطورعن"الأقصى" 6 شهور
أبعدت شرطة الاحتلال، اليوم الاثنين، نائب أمين سر إقليم حركة فتح في القدس شادي سعد مطور، عن المسجد الأقصى لمدة 6 شهور؛ بحجة أنه يشكل خطراً على حياة وممتلكات المستوطنين.

اقتصاد و تمنية

مؤشربورصةفلسطينيسجلارتفاعابنسبة 0.13%
استأنفت بورصة فلسطين تداولاتها، الأحد 18-9-2016، بعد عطلة استمرت خمسة أيام عمل لمناسبة عيد الأضحى المبارك، وسجل مؤشرها الرئيسي ارتفاع طفيفا بنسبة 0.13%، في جلسة تجاوزت تداولاتها مليوني دولار.

البنكالدولي: آفاقالاقتصادالفلسطينيتبعثعلىالقلق
أظهر أحدث تقرير للبنك الدولي عن الاقتصاد الفلسطيني أن بطء النمو الاقتصادي لفترة طويلة أدَّى إلى استمرار ارتفاع معدلات البطالة مع ركود متوسط دخل المواطن الفلسطيني

اضرابجزئيفيكافةمرافقالاونروااحتجاجاعلىتقليصالخدمات
خاض اتحاد الموظفين في وكالة غوث وتشغيل اللاجئين "أونروا" إضرابا جزئيا في كافة مرافق الوكالة، اليوم الاثنين احتجاجا على تقليص الخدمات وعدم إيفاء الإدارة بالتزاماتها لمدة ساعة.

حركة العالمية لمقاطعة إسرائيل و سحب الاستثمارات منها و فرض العقوبات عليها

من«قاطعوا» إلى«غوغلبلاي»
بيان صادر عن مبرمجي تطبيق قاطعوا إلى متجر غوغل بلاي بسبب حذف التطبيق.

إيقافمادةأكاديميةعنفلسطينبجامعةبيركلي
أوقفت جامعة كاليفورنيا -بيركلي- الأميركية تدريس مادة أكاديمية مخصصة لدراسة فلسطين "عبر منهج الاستعمار الاستيطاني"، الأمر الذي أثار جدلا عالميا حول حرية البحث الأكاديمي.

جماهيرانترتحملأعلامفلسطينقبلمواجهةهابويلالإسرائيلي
رفع بعض مشجعي نادى انتر الإيطالي الأعلام الفلسطينية، خارج ملعب "جيوسيبى مياتزا" الذى يستضيف هابويل بئر السبع الإسرائيلي، في المباراة المقامة بينهما الآن، ضمن منافسات الجولة الأولى لدور المجموعات بمسابقة الدوري الأوروبي "اليوروباليج".

السفينتانزيتونةوأمليغادرانميناءبرشلونةلفكالحصارعنغزة
انطلق أسطول الحرية المكون من سفينتين مساء أمس من ميناء برشلونة متوجها الى سواحل فلسطين، لفك الحصار عن قطاع غزة المنكوب، وكانت رئيسة بلدية برشلونة أدا كولاو وسفير دولة فلسطين في إسبانيا السيد كفاح عودة وعدد كبير من النواب والصحفيين والمتضامنين وأعضاء الجالية العربية والفلسطينية في وداع السفن.

The body of water now known as the Red Sea was surrounded for nearly four centuries by the Ottoman Empire's well-protected domains. During that time, it became a space of not only geological and geographic but also historical coherence. While the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and other maritime spaces have inspired their own fields of history writing, especially after the recent "oceanic turn," historians have been curiously silent about the Red Sea. In his new monograph, The Red Sea:In Search of Lost Space, Alexis Wick takes this silence itself as an object of analysis. He shows that we have much to learn about how history (and Ottoman history in particular) "makes its object" by studying the emergence of the idea of the Red Sea, Ottoman or otherwise, and also the surprising absence of such a history until now. 

In Episode #258 of the Ottoman History Podcast, we sat down with Wick to discuss how and when the Red Sea emerged as a coherent spatial concept and why it has had to wait so long for its historian. Through a close "overreading" of a single Ottoman document, Wick explores how Ottoman officials talked about the space of the sea prior to the nineteenth century. He describes a multiple, relational form spatial thinking in which the sea took on many and sometimes overlapping names after its port cities and trade routes, rather than appearing as a coherent unit pictured on a two-dimensional map. In the nineteenth century, the expansion of European imperial power and new forms of geographical knowledge production introduced a more familiar concept of the sea to Ottoman lands.

For Wick, it is no accident that historians have been silent about the history of the Red Sea until now. Rather, this silence reflects the spatial assumptions that have shaped both Ottoman history and the discipline of history writ large. The emergence of history as a discipline in the early nineteenth century, Wick argues, helped to forge a new concept of "Europe" partly by appropriating to "Europe" both historicity and maritimity. Imagined links between Europe and seafaring, particularly in the Mediterranean, helped to naturalize European conquest. Meanwhile, Europe's "Others"—the Middle East, the lands of Islam, and sometimes, the Ottoman Empire—became associated with the land, and with cyclical or stagnant temporalities. Despite all of the ink that has been spilled revealing complex relationships between Ottomans and Europeans, then, Ottoman history has largely focused on the land and avoided the sea as part of its burden of birth, leaving the Red Sea a "lost space."

The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space is a important contribution to Ottoman history and to ongoing conversations about history and theory. Wick's highly original account of the constitutive assumptions of Ottoman historiography should prompt Ottomanists to reconsider some of the core assumptions of their field. But his use of Ottoman history as a vantage point to raise critical questions about historical methodology, spatiality, and disciplinary formation will be of broad interest to anyone who is curious about how power and knowledge shape both our present and our past.  

الشاعر يحيى لبابيدي Yahia Lababidi

في فضاء التواصل الاجتماعي تعرّفتُ على الشاعر الأميركي من أصل عربي يحيى لبابيدي، وتعقبت أخباره. ونشأت بيني وبينه بداية صداقة دفعتني إلى قراءته والتعرف عليه أكثر، فهو شاعر عابر للحدود واللغات، ما تزال تصرخ في دمه لغة الأجداد بأصوات شعرائها ومتصوفيها ومشاهدها التي تنجبل مع مؤثرات أخرى وحساسيات مختلفة في أفق لغة شعرية يفتتحه باللغة الإنكليزية.

يحيى لبابيدي ليس مجرد شاعر ينشد رؤيته للعالم منطلقاً من رؤى ذاتية ونبرة غنائية، أو يعقّد تفاصيله بمطولات سردية تخلو من السحر والإيحاء وتنوء بالإحالات المرجعية، ليس شاعر مقاطع قصيرة تخلو من التكثيف، أو أكوام لغوية تخلو من روح الشعر، بل إنه شاعر الدلالات العميقة، يجمع بين الشعر والفكر، “بين الوردة وعطرها”، كما عبّر الشاعر أدونيس حين تحدث عن العلاقة بين الشعر والفكر.

يصدر يحيى لبابيدي عن خلفية شعرية مطعّمة بالفلسفة والتصوف، ساعدته على استكناه الأبعاد الغامضة للأشياء. وكما ينظر إلى الأشياء بعين جديدة، ينظر أيضاً إلى اللغة، فاللغة في النهاية هي كل شيء، وطريقة استخدامها، شعرياً، هي المهمة، وهكذا علينا أن نصارع كي نحصل على الكلمات، علينا أن نهيئها في مصهر الشعر الداخلي، قبل أن نطلقها على الورق، كي تتوهج هناك وتضيء للقارئ، أو تولّد لديه المتعة، أو تحدث كشفاً.

يرى لبابيدي أن هناك قاسماً مشتركاً بين الفيلسوف والشاعر، فكلاهما يصارع كي يبني جسراً بين عالمين، عالم المرئي وعالم اللامرئي، وهنا تصبح الكتابة، بحسب كافكا، ضرب من الصلاة، كي يتكشف المجهول ويتخبط في شباك اللغة، لكن هذا النوع من التصوف، لا يغرق في العوالم الماورائية، بل هل هو في قلب الواقع، حيث تنبض إيقاعات العالم في النص.

ألّف لبابيدي ستة كتب في أربعة أجناس. كتابه الأخير هو “أفعال موازِنة: قصائد جديدة ومختارة (١٩٩٣-٢٠١٥)، وقد تُرجمت أعماله إلى العربية والسلوفاكية والأسبانية والفرنسية والإيطالية والهولندية والألمانية والسويدية وغيرها.

وُلد يحيى لبابيدي سنة ١٩٧٣”، وهو من أصل لبناني ومصري. وقد اختارت جريدة الاندبندت البريطانية ديوانه “علائم لاتجاه آخر” (٢٠٠٦) كأفضل كتاب لعام ٢٠٠٨، كما حقق كتابه الجديد “أفعال موازنة: قصائدة جديدة ومختارة” المرتبة الأولى في المبيعات في “أمازون” لهذا العام.

ينشر لبابيدي المقالات والقصائد في أهم المجلات الأميركية والعالمية، وصدر له: “علائم نحو مكان آخر”، “محاكمة بالحبر: من نيتشه إلى الرقص الشرقي” (مقالات)، “أحلام الحمّى” (قصائد) و “الفنان متصوفاً” (أحاديث). كما رُشِّح لجوائز أدبية مرموقة كجائزة بوشكارت.

*****

القاهرة

دفنتُ وجهكِ في مكانٍ ما،
إلى جانب الطريق الجديد
كي لا أدعسَ عليه
كلَّ صباح، أو أثناء نزهاتي المسائية.

لكنني ما أزال مشدوداً بشكل لا يُقاوم
إلى مشهد هذه الجريمة
خشية نسيان
الأشياء التي تصنع روعتك

هناك أيضاً المطر
الذي يُخْصبُ التربة
كي يكشف سمةً ساحرة
تجيش بالعاطفة

ربما عيناً، ربما خداً هادئاً
شاحباً أو رقيقاً، فماً
ملتوياً من التقريع أو
شفتين مزمومتين في ابتسامة خالدة.

في أوقاتٍ أخرى يكتنفكِ الغموض
ويسوء الأمر حين أبدو كأنني أفقدك
حاكّاً الأرض كما أحكّ جرباً،
مسعوراً ووفيّاً ككلب.

*****

القلوب

ينبغي ألا نتلاعب بالقلوب،
لا أحد يمكنه معرفة
ما تستطيع فعله
أو ما يمكن أن يصيرَ عليه حالُها.

كيف تنزلقُ،
تُمارسُ النسيان والتطهير،
مقدمةً المتعة ممتزجةً بالألم،
كأعباء متبدلة للذاكرة.

أو كيف تُصبح متقلّبةً ومتوحشةً،
مجروحةً تتحول إلى جارح،
من أجل أن تواصلَ الحياةَ
ممارِسةً الخيانة في الخنادق

حتى أن أصحابها
ومالكيها، ووسطاءها أو محطميها
يصبحون جاهلين لها،
وما بدأ كخداع
يبرهن أنه خداع ذاتي

للقلب خياناته
التي يجهلها العقلُ:
لماذا يجب أن يخدع ويكذب ويموت
كي يكون له حظُّ أوفر في الانبعاث فحسب؟

*****
الكلمات

الكلمات كالأيام:
كتبُ تلوينٍ أو نشّالون،
علامات إرشادٍ، أو أعمدةُ خَدْشٍ
فقراء يتحلقون حول جمار متقدة.

ثمة كلماتٌ معيّنة يجب أن تُكتسب
تماماً كما تُعانَى العواطف
قبل أن يصبح من الممكن نطقها،
نظيفة كوعدٍ محفوظ.

الكلمات شهودٌ
يدلون بشهاداتهم
الحقيرة أو السامية
التي لا مفرَّ منها، وغير القابلة للدحض.

لكن الكلمات ينبغي ألا تُحمَّل
أكثر من طاقتها
هذا ليس جيداً لمظهرها
أو سمعتها.

لأنه سواء رقصتْ وحيدة
أو مع شريكٍ لامرئيٍّ
كل كلمة كون
يذيب كلَّ ما هو أخرسٌ.

*****
فنّ ركوب العاصفة

لم أستطع فكَّ شفرة اللغز الحيّ لجسدي،
أن أنوّمه حين يجوع وأتخمه
حين يحلم.

كدت أختنق من اللسان المتشعّب لروحي
بين الواقعي والمثالي أرفض واحداً ويرفضني الآخر.

لم أتقن بعد فنّ ركوب العاصفة ذاك،
دون آذان كي أتنبّه للرياح الزائرة
أو أعينٍ كي أنتبه للأمواج المتدحرجة

دوماً يباغتني الطقس، وتربكني
الخرائط والبوصلة والنجوم، الجهاز الكامل
للاتجاهات أو إشارات التحذير،

متمسكاً بقطع الخشب الطافية، بعينين مطبقتين، أرتجف
آملاً أن الليلة المخلّعة المفاصل ستمرُّ وأتذكر
كيف مرةً وقيتُ لسان لهبي.

*****
بماذا تحلم الحيوانات؟

هل تحلم بحيواتٍ ماضية، وأحلام لم تُعَش،
إنسانيةٍ بشكل لا يمكن التعبير عنه، أو وحشيةٍ بشكل لا يمكن تخيله؟

هل تُصارعُ كي تُمسك في سباتها
ما هو زلقٌ جداً لأصابع النهار؟

هل هناك علاماتٌ ليليّةٌ حاذقة
لإضاءة ساعاتها غير الحلمية؟

أهي مسكونةٌ بأطياف الندم؟
هل تزور موتاها في امتنانٍ خَدِرٍ؟

أم تعاود جرائمُها زيارتَها
منسوخة في لغة غامضة محيّرة؟

هل تتعقّب من جديد مخطّطَ جراحها
أم تحلم بالتحوّل؟

هل تشدُّ على العقد العنيدة
لحالات شوق مبهمةٍ، ومساعٍ معرقلة؟

هل ثمة هيجانات وجيشانات أو عصيانات
ضدّ ذواتها المدركة أو مصيرها؟

هل هي متحرّرة من نقاط قوةٍ وضعفٍ خاصة
بالحصان، الأيل، الطائر، العنزة، الثعبان، الحمل، أو الأسد؟

هل يمكن ألا تكون حيواناً أو بشراً
بل مجرد مخلوقات وكائنات؟

هل لديها لحظات مقدسة من الفهم
في جوهر كينونتها نفسه؟

هل تجرّب وجودها بشكل أكثر امتلاء
مرتاحة من عبء اليقظة؟

هل تشتبه، مع الشعراء، بأن كلّ ما نراه أو يبدو
هو مجرّد حلم داخل حلم؟

أو هو مجرّد موت صغير
طعم خفيف من العدم يتجمّع في أفواهها؟

*****
مفكرة

الأفكار تتردّد
في مغادرة الكهف
شاعرةً بوجود كمين.

*****

منذ

منذ أن فقدتُ صمتي
فقدتُ صوتي....

أبيع عملة أبدية
في سوق الحياة الصاخب

تقفز أنشودة غير قابلة للكبح
وتُخْنق غير مغناة.

*****

ألوان

الأخضرُ لونُ الأمل العنيد
الأبيض لون ما يؤمل نسيانه

الأصفر لونُ الإلهام
الرماديُّ لون المصالحة

الأزرقُ لون معاناة مقموعة
البنيُّ لون كل ما حولنا.

*****
صور فوتوغرافية

باقةُ توقعات:
أشكالٌ متجمّعةٌ ومعلقةٌ مع بعضها
كحزمةٍ من الأزهار الجميلة
موضوعة في أصيص خيالي

ترغب بإمساك ما ليس لها،
أن توقف قلب الزمن الخافق أو تسرق
إطاراً من فيلم ما يزال يُحَمَّض
صانعةً الوجوه في مرآة ذات وجهين

تحدق بتعجب إلى المستقبل
إلى ذكرياتها المتحجرة
تتدفق محتشدة من خارج قلب الألبوم
وتتبخّر كأحلام حية

دون دعوةٍ، كفواقات الذهن، تصعد
تلك الذكريات العاطفية المتجمدة
سواء كانت مخبأة بحذر في خزانة أدراج
أو عُثر عليها ي لحظات غير محروسة

تحافظ على ما لم يعد موجوداً:
على قصص حب ضاعت، على أوهام أو ذوات
تملأنا بدهشة خرساء أو ألم بليد
هل كان هذا حقاً أنا وما صار إليه حالي؟

*****
بزوغ

تمرُّ ساعاتٌ يصرُّ فيها كلُّ شيء
تمدُّ الكراسي أذرعها، والطاولات سيقانها
تُطقطق الخزانات ظهرها، دون حذر

ضجرةً من اضطرارها
للبقاء في مكان واحد
والتمسك بمحطاتها

وهكذا هم البشر، في العمل، أو الحب
يعرفون أوجاعاً كهذه، وآلاماً متنامية
حين يتبدل الأثاث الداخليّ بتحدٍّ

بحسمٍ، بصورة مبهمة، كقارة،
كشيءٍ ما سيُمنح أو يموت أو يفشل
كي يُعاد النظر بكل شيء آخر.

في فجرٍ مضطربٍ، غير قادرٍ على كبح
شهوة السفر والتجوال، ثمة باب ثقيل مفتوح جزئياً
بشكل شبه متعمد، وضوء جديد يتسلل

وفي الداخل قطعةٌ جامدة ستغادر في النهاية
وتدبّ فجأة برشاقة على أعضاء خشبية
سريعة كحصانٍ هارب من الاصطبل.

[ترجمها إلى العربية: أسامة إسبر]

فندق فخم من فئة 5 نجوم، ومركز تجاري ضخم يكلّف عشرات ملايين الدولارات، ومشاريع إسكانية
متعددة تنتظرها مدينة القدس الشرقية الآن. مشاريع انطلقت وأُخرى في طور التمهيد، اتُّخذت جميعاً بعد قرار صندوق الاستثمار الفلسطيني الاستراتيجي للاستثمار في المدينة المحتلة. وفي مدينة تنام وتصحو على أصوات جنازير جرافات إسرائيلية تهدم منازل فلسطينية، وتمهد لإقامة وحدات سكنية استيطانية، فإن مشاريع كهذه تبدو متواضعة، غير أن رئيس مجلس إدارة صندوق الاستثمار الفلسطيني، محمد مصطفى، يقول في حديث خاص إنها مجرد بداية.

ويضيف مصطفى الذي أمضى أياماً طويلة في زيارات للقدس تضمنت اجتماعات مع مسؤولين فيها: "إن جهات فلسطينية أخذت قراراً استراتيجياً للاستثمار في المدينة، وهذا ما يؤكده حجم الاستثمار المتزايد وتنوعه على الرغم من المخاطر، لكننا نعتقد أنها مخاطر محسوبة، فنحن نعمل من أجل مصلحة أهلنا في القدس، وهدفنا ليس سياسياً بالضرورة، لكننا نعمل من أجل حياة أفضل لمواطني المدينة، ومن أجل عروبة القدس ودعم أهلنا الصامدين فيها."

ويأتي هذا في الوقت الذي تتكثف مساعي الحكومة الإسرائيلية للسيطرة على المدينة، فجمعية "عير عاميم" ("مدينة لشعبين") الإسرائيلية الحقوقية تقول إن السلطات الإسرائيلية هدمت 111 منزلاً في مدينة القدس منذ بداية العام الجاري حتى نهاية تموز / يوليو، لافتة إلى أن هذا العدد يفوق كثيراً عدد المنازل التي جرى هدمها في المدينة طوال سنة 2015، والتي بلغ عددها 74 منزلاً. وبموازاة ذلك، فقد تبنّت الحكومة الإسرائيلية، خلال تموز / يوليو، مخططات لبناء أكثر من 1500 وحدة استيطانية قبل إعلان تسويق 323 وحدة استيطانية جديدة، وتركزت هذه المخططات في مستعمرات بسغات زئيف، والنبي يعقوب، وراموت، ورامات شلومو في شمالي المدينة، وغيلو، وهار حوماه في جنوبي المدينة.
وتقول "عير عاميم": "إذا نظرنا إلى المخططات الاستيطانية على أرض الواقع في جنوبي المدينة، نجد أنها تهدف إلى فصل القدس الشرقية من ناحيتها الجنوبية عن الضفة الغربية."

وفيما لا يقل عن هذا الأمر خطورة، قالت وزارة الخارجية الإسرائيلية في بيان لها: "إن مستوطنة غيلو هي حي سكني في القدس سيكون جزءاً من إسرائيل في أي تسوية سلام محتملة"، وذلك رداً على انتقادات دولية، بما فيها أميركية، لمخططات بناء استيطانية إسرائيلية أشارت إلى غيلو باعتبارها مستوطنة. وأضافت وزارة الخارجية أن "الادعاءات بأن البناء في غيلو يقوّض الحل القائم على أساس دولتين لشعبين، لا أساس له من الصحة."

لكن وسط هذه العتمة الإسرائيلية يقدّم مصطفى بصيص أمل إلى سكان القدس الشرقية من خلال كشفه، ولأول مرة، عن مشاريع في أربعة قطاعات رئيسية في مدينة القدس هي: السياحة والإسكان والخدمات والبنى التحتية.

فعلى مدى أعوام طويلة، جرى النظر إلى الاستثمار في مدينة القدس الشرقية على أنه محفوف بالمخاطر وصعب نظراً إلى التعقيدات الإسرائيلية، ذلك بأن تحويل الأراضي من مناطق خضراء يُمنع البناء عليها، إلى مناطق بناء، يستغرق أعواماً طويلة في مغامرة يكون النجاح فيها غير مضمون، وتمرير المخططات الهيكلية أشبه ما يكون بتحرير أرض من الاحتلال. وحتى في حال كان الحظ حليفاً لمخطط هيكلي، أو لطلب رخصة بناء، فإن التكلفة تكون باهظة الثمن، إذ تصل رسوم تصاريح الشقة السكنية البالغة مساحتها 100 متر مربع قرابة 50,000 دولار أميركي.

وفي هذا الصدد يقول مصطفى: "أغلب هذه المشاريع عملنا عليها منذ أعوام، ونعلم جيداً أن الإجراءات للحصول على التراخيص هي عملية طويلة جداً ومكلفة ومعقدة. وفعلاً، فإن الحصول على التراخيص لهذه المشاريع استغرق وقتاً طويلاً جداً، ثم إن الحصول على أراضٍ لمشاريع في القدس ليس سهلاً، فأغلبية هذه المشاريع عملنا عليها فترة لا تقل عن خمسة أعوام."

ويضيف: "لكن عندما نقترب من بدء التنفيذ، نكون قد وصلنا إلى مرحلة تسمح لنا بالإعلان بشأنها بعد زوال أغلب المعوقات." ولعل أبرز هذه المشاريع هو إقامة فندق فخم من فئة 5 نجوم سيكون الأول من نوعه في المدينة من حيث الضخامة والتكاليف، ويُتوقع له النجاح في مدينة تُعتبر السياحة رأس مالها الأول. يقول مصطفى في هذا الصدد: "معروف أن القطاع السياحي كان ولا يزال مهماً لاقتصاد القدس، لكن من المعروف أيضاً أن التحديات كبيرة. فوصول المواطنين الفلسطينيين والمغتربين الفلسطينيين والحجاج المسلمين إلى المدينة صعب، والذين يصلون هم الحجاج الغربيون الذين يمرون من خلال المطارات والمعابر الإسرائيلية حيث تتحكم إسرائيل في الأماكن المسموح لهم الوصول إليها، وفي عدد أيام الإقامة. ولا شك في أن هذه الصعوبات تشكل عبئاً كبيراً على قطاع السياحة الفلسطيني."

ويضيف: "وفي الوقت نفسه، فإن المنشآت السياحية في مدينة القدس هي في معظمها صغيرة وقديمة، وعليه، فإنها غير قادرة على تلبية الحاجات السياحية الحديثة، لأن قدراتها الاستيعابية في المواسم السياحية محدودة، وخصوصاً الغرف الفندقية الملائمة لاستيعاب السياح. ولذلك فإن أحد محاور عملنا هو تحسين البنية التحتية للقطاع السياحي في مدينة القدس من خلال إمّا تحديث الفنادق القديمة، وإمّا إقامة فنادق حديثة." ويكشف مصطفى أنه جرى حديثاً ترميم فندق ستراند وتحديثه في حي الشيخ جراح، وأنه أصبح يدار الآن من خلال شركة IBIC الفرنسية العالمية، وهو مشروع سياحي مهم يعمل الآن بإدارة حديثة، وبصورة جيدة.

ويجري العمل على إقامة فندق كبير يضم نحو 200 غرفة، ولن يكون له مثيل في القدس الشرقية من ناحية الحجم والحداثة، وقد بلغ الاستثمار فيه 45 مليون دولار أميركي. يقول مصطفى: "الأرض موجودة ورخص البناء موجودة أيضاً، وإن شاء الله سيجري خلال الأسابيع القليلة المقبلة إنجاز باقي التراخيص بما يسمح ببدء العمل."

وتوقعت مصادر محلية أن يكون المشروع في منطقة الشيخ جراح التي تُعتبر المنطقة الأكثر استهدافاً من طرف جماعات المستوطنين الإسرائيليين بعد البلدة القديمة وسلوان.

 ازدهار السياحة الدينية

تحتكر إسرائيل السياحة في القدس الغربية، وتنافس الفلسطينيين على السياحة في القدس الشرقية المحتلة من خلال ثلاثة فنادق أُقيمت قبل عدة أعوام في الشارع رقم واحد الفاصل بين شطرَي المدينة الشرقي والغربي. وأوضح مالك الفندق الوطني، أسامة صلاح، أن آلاف الحجاج الأتراك يصلون شهرياً إلى مدينة القدس الشرقية ويقيمون في فنادقها الفلسطينية، فضلاً عن الحجاج المسلمين من بريطانيا وجنوب أفريقيا ودول إسلامية في آسيا. أمّا مالك فندق الأمباسادور، سامي أبو دية، فأكد أن الحجاج الأتراك يأتون
أسبوعياً أيام الخميس لأداء صلاة الجمعة في المسجد الأقصى، ويغادرون أيام الأحد. 

 وفي هذا الصدد يقول إمام وخطيب المسجد الأقصى، يوسف أبو سنية: "إن عدد المسلمين الأتراك الذي يصلّون في المسجد الأقصى في بعض الأوقات أكثر من المقدسيين والفلسطينيين، فالرجل التركي المسلم يأتي من تركيا إلى القدس ولا يترك فريضة واحدة إلاّ ويؤديها في المسجد الأقصى. ويتراوح عدد المصلين من غير الفلسطينيين أيام الجمعة ما بين 3000 و5000 مُصلٍّ، معظمهم من تركيا."

البنية التحتية السياحية في القدس ضعيفة وتُضعف السياحة، وهي بحاجة إلى الأموال من أجل إنعاشها لتصبح قادرة على استيعاب السياحة الإسلامية المتوقع لها أن تزدهر.

استثمار عربي

يكشف مصطفى النقاب عن قرب التوصل إلى اتفاق بشأن استثمار عربي في أحد القطاعات في مدينة القدس، فيقول: "على الأقل هناك مشروع واحد بدأنا الحديث فيه مع شريك عربي وقد أبدى اهتمامه بالمشروع، ونأمل بأن يجري التوصل إلى اتفاق خلال الأسابيع القليلة المقبلة." ويقول مراقبون إن نجاح أي استثمار عربي في المدينة من شأنه أن يدفع نحو جذب مزيد من الاستثمارات العربية عبر شراكات مع فلسطينيين.

 مجمع ضخم للخدمات

ولفت مصطفى الانتباه إلى النقص في عدد المكاتب التجارية في المدينة مع وجود طلب كبير عليها، ولذلك يقوم الصندوق الآن بتطوير مشروع عقاري كبير لإقامة مكاتب ومحال بالشراكة مع بعض أطراف القطاع الخاص الفلسطيني في المدينة، الأمر الذي يتطلب الحصول على التراخيص اللازمة، وسيجري استثمار نحو 80 مليون دولار أميركي. وبحسب مصادر محلية فإن الحديث يدور عن مشروع قرب شارع صلاح الدين الذي يُعتبر المركز التجاري لمدينة القدس الشرقية.

مشاريع إسكان

القطاع الأكثر درّاً للأرباح بعد السياحة في مدينة القدس الشرقية هو قطاع الإسكان، ويعود ذلك إلى النقص الكبير والمتزايد للمساكن في المدينة، والناجم عن السياسات الإسرائيلية كمصادرة الأراضي وتقنين رخص البناء الممنوحة للمقدسيين شرقي المدينة.

ويلفت مدير دائرة الخرائط في جمعية الدراسات العربية، خليل التفكجي، الأنظار إلى حاجة مدينة القدس الشرقية إلى 20,000 شقة بشكل فوري، علاوة على 1500 شقة سكنية سنوياً لاستيعاب الزيادة الطبيعية في عدد السكان. ويعزو التفكجي سبب ارتفاع تكلفة المشاريع الإسكانية في القدس إلى شحّ الأراضي، وإلى التكلفة الباهظة لاستصدار رخص البناء من بلدية الاحتلال. غير أن مصادر محلية تعزو الارتفاع الحاد إلى الأرباح الباهظة التي يجنيها أصحاب المشاريع الإسكانية. وتُعتبر القدس الشرقية الأكثر ارتفاعاً في أسعار الشقق مقارنة بجميع المدن الفلسطينية في الضفة الغربية وقطاع غزة، إذ يبدأ سعر الشقة السكنية التي تبلغ مساحتها 100 متر مربع من 400,000 دولار، ليصل في بعض الأحيان إلى 800,000 دولار، بينما إيجار الشقة المشابهة يبدأ من 800 دولار شهرياً، ويصل في بعض الأحيان إلى 2500 دولار.

وللمرة الأولى منذ الاحتلال الإسرائيلي لمدينة القدس الشرقية في سنة 1967، بدأت ثلاثة بنوك عاملة في الأراضي الفلسطينية حديثاً بتقديم قروض للإسكان في المدينة بعد أن حصلت عليها من البنك الإسلامي للتنمية. ومعلوم أن البنوك العاملة في الأراضي الفلسطينية تمنح الفلسطينيين في الضفة الغربية وقطاع غزة قروض الإسكان، وتستثني سكان مدينة القدس.

وفي الوقت الذي تعاني المدن الفلسطينية تخمة كبيرة في المشاريع الإسكانية، فإن القدس الشرقية ما زالت بحاجة إلى مشاريع إسكانية على الرغم من ضخامة التكلفة. وفي هذا الشأن يقول مصطفى: "إن قطاع الإسكان مهم لتطور القدس من الناحيتين الاقتصادية والاجتماعية، علماً بأن أنظمة التخطيط والبناء تخضع للسلطات الإسرائيلية، وتتضمن قيوداً كثيرة على البناء، فضلاً عن شحّ القروض الممنوحة للإسكان في المدينة، وهذا يختلف عن المدن الأُخرى في الضفة الغربية، أو في باقي أنحاء العالم. لكن هناك جهود لحل هذه المشكلات من خلال الاستخدام الأفضل للأراضي، والحصول على تراخيص البناء على الرغم من القيود القائمة. فعلى سبيل المثال، هناك عدة مشاريع إسكانية قيد الإنشاء، بينها مشروعان مملوكان لشركة القدس القابضة التي يُعتبر صندوق الاستثمار مستثمراً رئيسياً فيها، فضلاً عن استثمارات تقوم بها شركات فلسطينية أُخرى في بيت حنينا وبيت صفافا." وإلى جانب ذلك، يعكف القطاع الخاص الفلسطيني حالياً على تنفيذ مئات الشقق السكنية في أنحاء متعددة من مدينة القدس الشرقية.

وأعلن مصطفى قيام شراكة استراتيجية بين شركة كهرباء محافظة القدس وصندوق الاستثمار الذي دفع ما نسبته 10% من رأس مال الشركة. وقال: "نعمل على دعم الشركات الوطنية الكبرى العاملة في القدس، وعلى رأسها شركة كهرباء محافظة القدس التي توفر خدمات الكهرباء ليس فقط لمدينة القدس الشرقية، بل لمنطقة وسط الضفة الغربية أيضاً، بما في ذلك رام الله والبيرة وبيت لحم وبيت جالا وأريحا وأماكن أُخرى. وتواجه شركة الكهرباء مجموعة من التحديات، لكن صندوق الاستثمار الآن هو شريك استراتيجي لها، وشارك في رأس مالها بما يضمن له دوراً فاعلاً في تطوير أعمال الشركة من ناحية توسيع أعمالها الحالية وتحديث أدائها وتوليد الكهرباء بالطاقة المتجددة وتوفيرها للمواطنين من خلال الشركة، والعمل على تطوير واستغلال شبكة الألياف الضوئية المرافقة للشبكات الكهربائية التي تملكها الشركة من أجل زيادة خدمات الاتصالات الرئيسية كي تقدم خدمات إنترنت أفضل إلى كل المواطنين، على أن يجري توسيعها لتشمل ترتيبات مع شركات الكهرباء في الشمال والجنوب حتى توفر خدمات الإنترنت لكل مواطن وللشركات والبنوك والجامعات وغيرها من المرافق التي تحتاج إلى سعات كبيرة من الإنترنت."

ويُذكر أن صندوق الاستثمار الفلسطيني هو الصندوق السيادي الوطني لدولة فلسطين، كما يقول مصطفى، وقد أنشئ في سنة 2003 كشركة مساهمة عامة محدودة مستقلة. ويعرّف الصندوق مهمته بأنها "المساهمة في بناء اقتصاد وطني قوي ومستقل ونابض بالحياة كأحد أركان الدولة الفلسطينية العتيدة. ويعمل الصندوق على تعزيز قدرته في جذب الاستثمارات، ويسعى لتمكين القطاع الخاص الفلسطيني وتعزيز دوره الريادي." ويتطلع صندوق الاستثمار الفلسطيني إلى تحقيق مهماته عبر الاستثمارات الاستراتيجية في مشاريع ذكية ومجدية ومسؤولة اجتماعياً، وقادرة على خلق الوظائف، وتدعيم نمو مستدام في قطاعات وطنية استراتيجية وحيوية.

[يعاد نشرها ضمن اتفاقية شراكة وتعاون مع "مجلة الدراسات الفلسطينية".]

On the morning of Sunday 25 September 2016, a gunman shot Jordanian writer and opposition figure Nahed Hattar outside of the Jordanian Palace of Justice. At the request of Prime Minister Hani al-Mulki, the government accused Hattar of “inciting sectarian strife” and “insulting religion” and issued an arrest warrant for him on 12 August. Hattar turned himself in the following day and was subsequently released on bail on 8 September. The evidence presented was his posting to social media of a cartoon depicting an Islamic State fighter in heaven, bedding two women, drinking wine, and giving derogatory orders to God. Shortly after the assassination, police had a man they allege is the shooter in custody. Initial reports indicate that it was members of the public that apprehended the alleged shooter and turned him over to police. Since then, a polarizing debate has characterized social media, private conversations, and very few public spaces in Jordan.

What precisely Hattar’s politics were is a subject of concern to some at this point. Such a topic is certainly worthy of consideration, given both his stature as a well-known public activist-intellectual in Jordan and someone who was varyingly counted as part of the Arab left. Yet it is the politics surrounding Hattar’s arrest, prosecution, and assassination that concern me more at this juncture.

There has been great polarization around Hattar’s killing. Some are celebrating Hattar’s murder as just punishment for his blasphemy, others are pointing to his assassination as yet another example of “Islamic extremism” in Jordan and the ways in which it serves as an obstacle to reform. Many people with a basic commitment to free speech and due process can easily dismiss his killing and its celebration as deplorable acts. They are also supportive of an objective and transparent investigation and prosecution of the alleged assailant. Yet where does the government, and the authoritarian political system, fit into the picture?

Officials and their spokespersons have both condemned the killing of Hattar and promised the fullest application of the law in prosecuting the alleged gunman. Soon, others will undoubtedly connect this incident to the ongoing debate on government attempts at “reforming” the educational curriculum as a means of curtailing “extremism.” Ultimately, regime figures, state media, and foreign journalists will portray dynamics in Jordan as such: a regime-led modernizing and democratizing process stymied by the ignorant impulses, conservative ideologies, and extremist views of a not-so-insignificant portion of the population.

There is no doubt that there are individuals and groups of citizens in Jordan who seek to impose (or keep in place) policies that restrict certain types of speech and affiliation, among other policies. There is also no doubt that some of those would turn to acts of violence to encourage or ensure that imposition. But lost in this representation—or rather, covered up by it—is the complicity of political elites in Jordan in creating the general context of Hattar’s assassination and its specificities as well. There will be ample time to elaborate on these points in the coming weeks. None of the below is original in that much of it has been researched, studied, and critiqued by a small but brave group of individuals in Jordan. For example, see the work of the 7iber collective. For now, a brief listing should suffice, if only to help serve as a framework for filtering official statements, news reports, and social media commentary: 

1. Hattar was killed in front of the courthouse, with the government’s full knowledge that several substantiated death threats were made against him. Why was he not given the type of protection that such threats merit.
2. There are several individuals that openly called for Hattar’s murder via social media and other communication means. Why were these individuals not investigated, put under surveillance, or prosecuted for inciting violence?
3. The government’s prosecution of Hattar was based on a Facebook post that satirized the Islamic State. Why was that act a prosecutable offense in the first place, and what message about freedom of speech does the government send by initiating such a case against him?
4. The laws regulating political speech, debates about religion, and public gatherings are numerous, and the punishments for their violation can be severe. What role do these very laws play in creating an atmosphere in which genuine public debate, productive discussions, and critical thinking are absent? 

Reporting and analysis on Jordan is in no short supply. Most of it is unfortunately celebratory, including much of what passes as research-based or scholarly. Few, however, effectively narrate and analyze the efforts of people with a very different vision of Jordan than that espoused by Hattar’s murderer. It is not a vision shared by the regime, given the latter’s role in repressing and marginalizing those people and their views. Whether it is through laws of association, laws of publication, or laws limiting what people are allowed and not allowed to say, brave activists, journalists, and laypersons in Jordan have struggled against repeated attempts to prevent an effective and alternative form of political affiliation and mobilization.

Yesterday, someone murdered Nahed Hattar because a cartoon Hattar shared on Facebook offended that person. Yes, there are those in society who would kill others for expressing different views. But there are those who do not allow different views to be aired in the first place. They give weight to the idea that speech should be regulated, criminalized, and silenced. How many people has the regime harassed, arrested, or imprisoned over the past decades for making statements it did not agree with or were critical of Jordanian official policy? How many student organizations did it disband, publications did it block, and individuals did it refer to the State Security Court for merely engaging in critical debate?

But why dwell on these issues? Let us instead join the media chorus of celebrating the elections for a parliament with no power, the endless reform initiatives without structural change, and the wonderful PR machine of stable Jordan. Let us champion the path that has been announced, without looking at the road that was paved by the very same people.

Update: As of 2:27pm (Amman time) on Monday 26 August 2016, the murder case against Nahed Hattar's alleged killer has been transferred from the Criminal Court to the State Security Court. In addition, at the request of the State Security Court Prosecutor, the state Media Commission has imposed a gag order on all news and information related to Hattar's murder, which includes sattelite television and radio channels, print media, websites, and social media. This means that the government has warned Jordanians and Jordanian media outlets against sharing any statements or information that are not directly issued by the State Security Court Prosecutor, with the risk of facing prosecution. More of the same!

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.]

Political Rights

World Council of Churches calls for journalist Hesham Gaafar’s release The World Council of Churches wrote a letter to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, urging him to use his authority to release journalist and researcher Hesham Gaafar from detention for humanitarian reasons.

Solidarity campaign over journalist Hesham Gaafar's prison conditions Journalists, bloggers and the family of Hesham Gaafar launched an online campaign Tuesday to demand better prison conditions for the detained journalist, whose health is slowly deteriorating.

April 6 co-ordinator continues hunger strike for fifth day April 6 Youth Movement coordinator Amr Ali has continued his hunger strike for the fifth consecutive day in protest against what the movement described in a statement on Wednesday as abusive practices and systematic maltreatment against him in Tora Prison. 

Growing int'l criticism of Egypt after asset freezes against human rights defenders and NGOs In the past few days, a host of statements have been issued by the United Nations, America’s State Department, and the European Union, along with several international human rights organizations, against the court-ordered asset freezes which were issued on Saturday against five prominent Egyptian human rights defenders and three rights non-governmental organizations.

Social media campaign launched for young men sentenced to death The No to Military Trials for Civilians initiative launched on Thursday a social media campaign for a group of young men sentenced to death in military courts.

Egypt arrests more than dozen people for creating a ‘negative atmosphere’ Egypt’s interior ministry said on Saturday that it arrested more than a dozen people for seeking to create “a negative atmosphere” through “creating crises.”

Egypt court authority recommends dismissal of case against govt surveillance programme Egypt's State Commissioners Authority recommended on Sunday that the administrative court dismiss a case challenging a controversial government decision made earlier this year to introduce a new security system designed to monitor social networking sites.

Court finally acquits last policeman accused of killing January 25 protesters Egypt’s Appeals Court has upheld a decision to acquit policeman Mohamed Abdel Moneim Ibrahim, known as Mohamed "al-Sunni," charged with killing protesters outside Zawiya al-Hamra police station on 28 January, 2011.

Egypt sentences minors to five years for protesting against Egyptian-Saudi accord Egypt sentenced five minors to five years in prison and a fine of 100,000 LE each, on accusations of illegally protesting against the Egyptian-Saudi maritime border demarcation agreement.

Egypt court sentences seven to death, five to ten years for killing top police officer An Egyptian criminal court sentenced on Saturday seven people to death and five people to ten years in prison over accusations of killing major general Nabil Farag in 2013.

Nine police officers sentenced to prison over assault on Matariya hospital The Matariya Misdemeanours Court sentenced nine low-ranking police officers to three years imprisonment late Tuesday over accusations of verbal and physical assault on doctors at a Matariya hospital earlier this year.

Dawn arrests of public transport labor leaders make planned strike unlikely At least six labor leaders employed by the Transport Authority were arrested on early Saturday morning after calls were made for public transport workers to strike.

Update: Boat carrying up to 600 migrants sinks off Egypt's coast, hundreds still missing A vessel carrying up to 600 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Rashid on Wednesday, with hundreds still missing amid fears the death toll will increase dramatically.

Death toll from migrant boat disaster reaches 162 The death toll from a sunken boat carrying hundreds of migrants reached 162 on Friday, according to Egypt's Health Ministry, as authorities continued to recover bodies from the water.

Victims of Rashid boat tragedy blamed for their fate Instead of being mourned, the hundreds of migrants who lost their lives in the capsized boat tragedy are the target of scrutiny and attacks, as they are blamed for the own demise. 

Nazra for Feminist Studies director wins ‘alternative Nobel Prize’ Nazra for Feminist Studies Executive Director Mozn Hassan has been named as one of the winners of the 2016 Right Livelihood Award, an honor often referred to as the “alternative Nobel Prize.” 

Economy

Egypt gov't 'lacks economic vision' in the face of mounting loans - ECESR As Egypt gears up for its second rescue package from the International Monetary Fund in twenty-five years, researchers and policymakers remain divided on both its necessity and impact.  

Egypt backtracks on zero ergot wheat policy as imports decline The Egyptian government has backtracked on its zero-tolerance policy on ergot in wheat imports after 540,000 tons were kept at international ports from entering Egypt, the cabinet said on Wednesday.

Foreign Relations

Sisi speaks of Egypt's role in regional conflict at UN General Assembly President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stressed Egypt’s role in fighting global terrorism and bringing peace to the Middle East in his address to the seventy-first session of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.

Sisi urges Israel to 'move toward peace', says Egypt is anchor of stability Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said during his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that the Arab-Israeli conflict continues to be the core of regional instability.

Coptic activists criticize church’s support of Sisi’s New York visit Coptic activists released a statement on Monday criticizing the Coptic Orthodox Church’s widespread support of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s visit to New York for the seventy-first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

Hillary Clinton calls for Aya Hegazy’s release during meeting with Sisi US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for the release of US-Egyptian detainee Aya Hegazy during a meeting with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Monday evening, according to a press release from her campaign team.

Donald Trump lauds 'peace-loving Muslims' during meeting with Sisi US presidential candidate Donald Trump said he has “high regard for peace-loving Muslims,” during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Monday night.

Clinton, Trump meetings with Sisi underline foreign policy differences Meetings held between US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Monday underscored foreign policy differences between the two candidates.

Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia sign on Renaissance dam impact studies The technical teams of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia signed the final the contracts for the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam technical studies on Tuesday in Khartoum.

Protests continue in Italy in solidarity with Egyptian worker killed on picket line Italian workers, unionists and labor activists continue protests two weeks after the death of Egyptian worker Abdel Salam al-Danf in the northern city of Piacenza and other locations across the country.

Domestic Security

Policeman killed, two others injured in Sinai A policeman were killed and two others injured in an attack by gunmen in Arish city, North Sinai governorate, on Thursday.

One civilian killed, 6 injured in North Sinai explosion One civilian was killed and six injured on Sunday after a roadside bomb exploded in North Sinai.

From Jadaliyya Egypt

The Red Sea in History: An Interview with Alexis Wick Alexis Wick, author of The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space, discusses in a podcast interview how and when the Red Sea emerged as a coherent spatial concept.