The Skeptic الشكاك

1134 What Europe Should Tell Mohammed Morsi

By Elijah Zarwan and Issandr El Amrani, The European Council on Foreign Relations

The inaugural European trip of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, should be an occasion for reflection. The relationship between Europe and Egypt is one complicated by colonial history, silence on and even complicity with many of the abuses conducted by Hosni Mubarak’s regime, unease at the rise of Islamists as a dominant political power, as well as many binding cultural, economic and political ties. Mr Morsi’s visit is thus an occasion to clear the air and reset the relationship.

The basis of that relationship should be a frank and open conversation between partners with a shared interest in Egypt’s stability and prosperity. Europe should make clear that it believes decisions taken by an inclusive democracy based on broad consensus and respect for each citizen’s equal rights stand the best chance of enduring to produce the stability Egypt needs to rebuild its economy.

The message is particularly timely as tear gas clears in Tunis and the families of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff grieve following violent protests that began in Cairo after Egyptian hosts of a religious talk show on a Saudi-owned satellite channel took exception to an amateur YouTube clip that defamed Islam.

Morsi’s visit affords an opportunity to have a quiet, frank conversation about whether he and the Muslim Brotherhood intend to cede the far right to the Salafi Nour Party, potentially alienating an important part of the president’s electoral base, including within the Brotherhood, to govern from the centre and to be a “president for all Egyptians”, as he put it in a campaign speech, or whether he will try to maintain an alliance of religious parties. The question is above all relevant as critical constitutional questions are being settled. Constitutional articles are more enduring than campaign promises.

European foreign policymakers such as French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who had the luxury of being part of a newly elected government, have expressed regret at past European complacency towards Arab dictatorships. His country, France, was alongside Italy and the United Kingdom among those who had the closest ties with Mr Mubarak and were the least inclined to take positions against the excesses of his rule. Others have expressed similar contrition, and have spoken of a need for change and even atonement, and voiced the hope of helping a fledging transition to democracy.

The question is now, as the head of state of the Arab world’s most populous and most influential country visits, what will Europe do about it?

Mr Morsi is making this trip to signal – as he recently has to GCC countries and China, and will shortly do with the United States – that Egypt needs help to get its economy back on track. Pledges from the May 2011 Deauville summit remain unfulfilled, and Europe like many potential donors (or debt-relievers) and investors has remained cautious about proceeding while chaos prevailed under the military-led transition. But that situation is changing, even if Egyptians still have some way to go, as Mr Morsi’s recent assertion of his power and the forced retirement of military leaders has shown. He and his new government are sending the message, in every way they can, that Egypt is once again open for business.

With Egypt soon set to ink a deal with the IMF, which should commit it to greater fiscal prudence in exchange for budgetary support, international donors should move to disburse their own loans and aid packages. Of course, Europe going through its own economic pain – governments may not feel so generous as they did in early 2011. Yet there is money in the pipeline – the €6.9bn earmarked for the European Neighborhood Policy for 2011-13 is one source, another are the promising infrastructure programmes envisaged under the politically damaged, but essentially sound infrastructure programs of the Union for the Mediterranean.

In addition to funds, Egyptians are also looking for a vote of confidence – trade missions to encourage investment in their country, a thumbs-up as a tourist destination, and a roadmap for greater trade integration into the eurozone, Egypt’s first export destination. There is no better way to help stabilise post-revolution Egypt than helping the new government generate jobs and growth.

A second question Europe must deal with is that Mr Morsi is an Islamist. For much of Europe’s political class – which until recently frequently backed dictators precisely because they feared their alternatives would be religious – this is a source of concern. But it is more important to see Mr Morsi as a democratically elected leader – and a politician who has pledged to be a democrat in more than a strict, majoritarian way.

In the past, Europe often bowed to the Mubarak regime’s wishes and demoted human rights concerns in its relationship with Egypt. Mr Morsi may have been democratically elected, a fact that should be celebrated. But there is no reason to give him a free pass on those issues where Europe, and many Egyptians, have concerns – today or in the future.

Finally, Europeans should be aware that as the Middle East is changing, so is Egypt’s position within it. Mr Morsi, in his early foreign policy forays, has signaled his desire for good relationships with multiple actors, moving away from the single-minded focus on the US-Egypt relationship that existed under Hosni Mubarak. His most innovative initiative thus far in regional affairs – creatinga channel, alongside Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to engage Iran on the Syrian crisis – is worth heeding.

The new Egyptian president, in other words, is not merely visiting foreign capitals to ask for help to face his country’s immediate problems. He is also reforging his country’s relationship with its traditional partners. Mr Morsi now presides over a fast-changing country in a region undergoing its biggest strategic transformation in decades. To hesitate now, to play a game of wait-and-see, to hedge one’s bets — to be satisfied, as Europe has all too often been towards a part of the world with which it has rich ties, with playing second fiddle – could very well be to miss a historic opportunity.

1082 Amitav Ghosh on Egypt and Xenophilia

Amitav Ghosh, writing in Outlook magazine, fondly remembers his time spent in the Nile Delta as a young man, reflects on the non-aligned movement, and hopes that people from far-away lands will meet each other face-to-face more often:

The other principal association that rural Egypt had with India was the matter of water-pumps, which were of course very important in rural communities. In those days Egypt imported so many water pumps from India that in some areas these machines were known as makana Hindi – or simply as Kirloskar, from the name of a major pump-manufacturing company. The purchasing of a water pump was a great event, and the machine would be brought back on a pick-up truck, with much fanfare, with strings of old shoes strung around the spout to ward off the Evil Eye. Long before the machine made its entry into the village, a posse of children would be sent to summon me: as an Indian I was expected to be an expert on these machines, and the proud new owners would wait anxiously for me to pronounce on the virtues and failings of their new acquisition.

Now it so happens that I am one of those people who is hard put to tell a spanner from a hammer or a sprocket from a gasket. At first I protested vigorously, disclaiming all knowledge of machinery. But here again, no one believed me; they thought I was withholding vital information or playing some kind of deep and devious game. Often people would look crestfallen, imagining, no doubt, that I had detected a fatal flaw in their machine and was refusing to divulge the details. This would not do of course, and in order to set everyone’s fears at rest, I became, willy-nilly, an oracle of water-pumps. I developed a little routine, where I would subject the machine to a minute inspection, occasionally tapping it with my knuckles or poking it with my fingers. Fortunately no machine failed my inspection: at the end of it I would invariably pronounce the water-pump to be a makana mumtaaza – a most excellent Kirloskar, a truly distinguished member of its species.

Yet, even as I was disclaiming my relationship to those water-pumps, I could not but recognize that there was a certain commonality between myself and those machines. In a way, my presence in that village could be attributed to the same historical circumstances that introduced Indian pumps and Indian films to rural Egypt. Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War.

It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers – a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism.

These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased. Even in the 19th century, the high noon of Empire, people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere, sought each other out, wrote letters to each other, and stayed in each other’s homes while traveling. Lately, a great number of memoirs and autobiographies have been published that attest to the depth and strength of these ties. It was no accident therefore that Mahatma Gandhi chose to stop in Egypt, in order to see Sa’ad Zaghloul before proceeding to the Round Table Conference in London. This was integral to the ethos of the time. [Full Essay…]

Thanks, SP

1080 The Truck Driver and the Atom Bomb

I’m enjoying this, from the latest New Yorker:

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling and meticulous book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” But the most accurate account of the bomb’s inner workings—an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree. [Read on…]

1033 Riots, Detentions, Harassment, and Hashish

Busy with work, but wanted to flag a few items from the past few days:

* Two thousand people rioted in Aswan after police mistakenly killed a bird-seller in the southern Egyptian city.

* Egyptian activists yesterday staged protests to call for the release of 16 people detained in the southern city of Samalout in mid-October. Police used tear gas and batons to disperse an angry crowd that gathered when police killed a pregnant woman on October 8 as they searched her house.

* The protesters also called for the release of two activists, Mohammed Adil and Mohammed Khairy, suspected of trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. State Security officers raided Mohammed Adil’s home in the early hours of November 21. State Security officers have detained Mohammed Khairy twice since October, and prosecutors have twice ordered his release, yet the latest reports I’ve seen indicate he is still in custody. Both are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, and both maintain blogs. Noha Atef is doing a great job covering this for Global Voices.

* An Iranian reader wrote in to chastise me for writing about Hossein Derakhshan’s possible detention while ignoring two less ambiguous detentions. I am much ashamed.

* Egyptian police announced last Wednesday that they had arrested 550 boys in Cairo on suspicion of sexually harassing schoolgirls. The police reportedly focused their raids on Internet cafes near schools.

This drives me nuts. If there is an appropriate security response to sexual harassment, it is ensuring that women and girls feel comfortable reporting incidents and ensuring that police follow up on the reports. Rounding up boys by the hundreds for using the Internet is not the answer. Educating them from an early age to treat women with respect is.

* By the hash-o-meter, Barack Obama may be the most popular foreign leader in Egypt since Saddam Hussein. Wael Abbas reports that dealers are selling Obama-brand hashish in the Mediterranean town of Marsa Matrouh. 3arabawy recalls that “in 2003, a quite popular brand of hash that appeared in Cairo was named ‘Saddam’ coz it was ‘stronger than chemical weapons.’ “

1011 ‘The Way You Mecca Me Feel’

London’s Sun and the slightly more reputable Telegraph report that Michael Jackson has converted to Islam. Both papers run photos of Jackson out and about in Bahrain, dressed in drag.

I think Run CMD said it best over email: “It’s obviously all part of a devious American plan to destroy Islam from within. Michael Jackson is working for Dick Cheney. It all makes sense now.”

994 The Future Is Bright

This is very well done. I particularly like the ad for American Apparel. And “The End of Experts,” by Thomas Friedman.

992 Kilcullen’s Afghanistan Brief

David Kilcullen gives the New Yorker‘s George Packer what must be one of the best, most concise briefs on Afghanistan available from a Western perspective:

Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:

(1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people. That is, we have failed to deliver them a well-founded feeling of security. Our failing lies as much in providing human security—economic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the future—as in protection from the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and terrorists. In particular, we have spent too much effort chasing and attacking an elusive enemy who has nothing he needs to defend—and so can always run away to fight another day—and too little effort in securing the people where they sleep. (And doing this would not take nearly as many extra troops as some people think, but rather a different focus of operations).

(2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary that forms the political base and operational support system for the Taliban, and which creates a protective cocoon (abetted by the fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan) around senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

(3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level—with the emphasis on good governance. In some areas, we have left a vacuum that the Taliban has filled, in other areas some of the Afghan government’s own representatives have been seen as inefficient, corrupt, or exploitative.

(4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things (secure the people, deal with the safe haven, and govern legitimately and well at the local level)—partly because of poor coalition management, partly because of the strategic distraction and resource scarcity caused by Iraq, and partly because, to date, we have given only episodic attention to the war.

So, bottom line—we need to do better, but we also need a rethink in some key areas starting with security and governance. [More…]

Via Abu Muqawama and SWJ.

988 Muslim Scholar Concludes Prophet Mohammed Never Existed

Andrew Higgens for the Wall Street Journal:

Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany’s first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn’t like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.

So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed. [More…]

966 Bedouin Affairs

• First, on a very serious note, an Egyptian security official has said that Bedouin shot and wounded an Egyptian policeman in Sinai today. The news follows days of unrest sparked by the alleged killing of a Bedou man by police. It’s hard to imagine the security forces will leave it at that, though they can still opt for a negotiated resolution as the quickest means of restoring calm. Establishing stability will take longer.
• On a much lighter note (and there’s no way to make this transition without its being jarring and tasteless), from The Times of London via Kafr al-Hanadwa, a Bedou sheikh is sure Obama is his cousin. You must see the video attached to this article:
  

  He has a host of relatives in exotic locations from Hawaii to Kenya, and during his run for the American presidency he discovered that he had an aunt living in Boston.

  Now Barack Obama is being claimed by not one but as many as 8,000 Beduin tribesmen in northern Israel.

  Although the spokesman for the lost tribe of Obama has yet to reveal the documentary evidence that he says he possesses to support his claim, people are flocking from across the region to pay their respects to the “Bedu Obama”, whose social standing has gone through the roof.

  “We knew about it years ago but we were afraid to talk about it because we didn’t want to influence the election,” Abdul Rahman Sheikh Abdullah, a 53-year-old local council member, told The Times in the small Beduin village of Bir al-Maksour in the Israeli region of Galilee. “We wrote a letter to him explaining the family connection.”

  Mr Obama’s team have not responded to the letter so far but that has not dampened Sheikh Abdullah’s festivities.

  He has been handing out sweets and huge dishes of baklava traditional honey-sweetened pastries to all and sundry, and plans to hold a large party next week at which he will slaughter a dozen goats to feed the village.

  It was his 95-year-old mother who first spotted the connection, he says. Seeing the charismatic senator on television, she noted a striking resemblance to one of the African migrant workers who used to be employed by rich sheikhs in the fertile north of British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s.

  The Africans would sometimes marry local Beduin girls and start families, though, like many migrant workers, would just as frequently return home after several years. [Continues…]

• Also via Kafr al-Hanadwa, and only tangentially related to Bedouin affairs, a photograph from Al-Watan that crams all of my stereotypes about Saudi Arabia into one image. (And I know this is stretching it the Bedouin connection: Egyptians like to scoff at Saudis as Bedouin, but no one would suggest the people of Jeddah were Bedouin.) You must see this large to fully appreciate it. Unfortunately, Al-Watan doesn’t credit its photographers. If you’re reading, sir, I would like to talk to you. You deserve a prize.

956 Some Good News

• The Egyptian consul in Saudi Arabia is taking action on behalf of two doctors sentenced to jail terms and lashings for enabling a princess’ morphine addiction. News of the sentence caused a scandal in the Egyptian press. The consul says he hopes for a royal pardon. Too late for the Egyptian the Saudis executed for sorcery a year ago this time, but better late than never.
• Gamal Mubarak has proposed giving all Egyptians over the age of 21, whether they live at home or abroad, shares in Egypt’s public companies. Al-Masry al-Youm reports:
  

  The project aims to raise the financial efficiency of companies, preserve workers’ rights, distribute a package of free shares among citizens and create new entities, such as the Future Generations Fund and the apparatus for managing state-owned assets.

  Alternatively, shareholders could sell immediately. This truly is “new thought.” Perhaps America could learn from Egypt and distribute GM shares among the populace. I’ll leave the question of whether the analogy holds or whether this idea would work in Egypt to the economists. I have my doubts on both scores.

• As a side note, I’m glad to see more politic people have stepped in to express what I was too winded to say after that swift kick to the bidan. Scott MacLeod spells it out at his blog for Time. And the good Prof. Lynch says not to worry, Emanuel won’t influence policy, though the reaction to his appointment should have been anticipated and managed better.

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