The Common Ground News Service, June 21, 2005
Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH)
June 21, 2005
The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) is distributing the enclosed articles to build bridges of understanding between the West and the Arab World and countries with predominately Muslim populations. Unless otherwise noted, all copyright permissions have been obtained and the articles may be reproduced by any news outlet or publication free of charge. If publishing, please acknowledge both the original source and CGNews, and notify us at cgnewspih@sfcg.org.
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ARTICLES IN THIS EDITION:
1. "Washington and lucky coincidences!" by Salama Nematt
Salama Nematt, Washington correspondent for the daily Al-Hayat, provides a counterview to the recent spat of articles crediting the U.S. Administration with the recent reform efforts in the Middle East and explains why.
(Source: Al-Hayat, June 2, 2005)
2. "Satellite TV and democracy" by S. Abdallah Schleifer
S. Abdallah Schleifer, director of the Adham Center at the American University in Cairo and publisher/senior editor of the journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies, looks at the evolution and impact of satellite television in the Arab world. The result: "Arab satellite television journalists are less likely to indulge their personal ideological takes on the news when they know a more detached...version of the same event is available on the TV screen just one click away on everybody's remote control." (Source: Bitterlemons-International, May 31, 2005)
3. "The rise of Islamist feminism" by Saad S. Khan
Saad S. Khan, an Oxford-published author and a widely read analyst on Islam, politics and governance in the Muslim world, takes about the not altogether new phenomenon of feminism in the Muslim world, particularly as it is playing out in the Western diaspora.
(Source: Middle East Times, May 27, 2005)
4. "Why Ridley Scott's story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema" by Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk, a Beirut-based journalist and author of several books on the region, gives a Beirut-perspective on the controversial movie Kingdom of Heaven. There have been many reviews that discuss how it was received in the West; now join Fisk in a Lebanese theatre to experience the reaction there.
(Source: The Independent, June 4, 2005)
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ARTICLE 1
Washington and lucky coincidences!
Salama Nematt
It seems that the opposite campaign in what was describes as "democratic expansion" in the Middle East was tenaciously launched and with a greater thrust than a Tsunami. The changes were celebrated early: repression, increasing arrests for the reformists and the opposition in the countries of the region, a greater control over the media and harder prohibition of public gathering etc...
The constitutional amendment in Egypt, considered to be one of the "achievements" of the reform process, became a weapon in the hands of the authority, granting the ruling regime a new legitimacy, after guaranteeing that the reformists will boycott the referendum, while the rest will be washed out from the competition, via some well-know means. In Lebanon, the feeble participation in the election and the traditional sectarian quotas, came to put out the heated enthusiasm of those yearning for change. In parallel, the Israeli maneuvers sought to evade from earlier commitments with regard to the implementation of the "Roadmap" by undermining the government of the elected PM Mahmoud Abbas and his peaceful agenda, despite all the hopeless efforts of the American President to support Abbas during his visit to Washington. In Iraq, the terrorists and their natural allies in the region joined efforts in order to amputate the Iraqi elections from its meaning and appeal to the peoples of the region. The Arab governments tell their people, who are thirsty for reform: "this is the democracy promised by America. Do you want more?"
As expected, this opposite campaign was opposed by a motionless reaction in Washington: motionless in facing the organized revolution against all what was achieved since Saddam Hussein's regime overthrown, the absence (or riddance) of Yasser Arafat and the assassination of Rafiq Al Hariri... A motionless reaction towards the commitments to Bush's promises of supporting anyone who dares to ask for democracy.
Most certainly, what is happening in the region today is considered to be a regression and a challenge facing Bush's administration, as well as anyone who believes that the most powerful state in the world is serious and sincere in pushing for the reform agenda in both the region and the world. It would bolster the convictions that the recent developments towards reform were only the product of unintentional coincidences by the American administration. The Iraqi elections took place because Saddam Hussein's regime was overthrown and after the insistence of Al Sistani on holding these elections to give the Shiite majority the legitimacy they deserve in assuming governance. Since Bush's administration launched its war to topple Saddam and his regime and not to establish democracy, the Iraqi elections came without any American drive. However, Washington saw certain benefits in these elections, not the least, since they bestowed legitimacy to the war, even though in a retroactive effect after the failure in finding any WMD. The Palestinian elections took place only after Israel removed the restrictions imposed on the process; after President Arafat passed away. Washington can not claim that "Bush's ideology" was the gearing power of these elections.
In Lebanon, the Syrian mistakes and the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, paved the way for the Independence Intifada, yet, one cannot take too lightly the importance of what happened in Iraq in encouraging the Lebanese opposition to take clearer stances in their opposition to the Syrian presence in Lebanon. In other words, one can say that Bush won the first round on the Middle East simply by coincidence. The organized movements, opposed to his ideology, seem to be on the brink to declare their victory in the second round, amidst a blatant American motionless.
Most certainly, after the second round, Washington will need more than just coincidence, should it be serious in pushing for its stated regional agenda.
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* Salama Nematt is the Washington correspondent for the daily Al-Hayat:
Source: Al-Hayat, June 2, 2005
Visit Al-Hayat, English.daralhayat.com
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 2
Satellite TV and democracy
S. Abdallah Schleifer
CAIRO -- Little more than a decade ago there was no such thing as television journalism in the Arab world. State-owned national television channels had news bulletins, but they were dominated by footage covering ceremonial occasions of state. This held true in both republics and monarchies. There were no television reporters, just a cameraman who recorded the event for the evening news, while a presenter read wire copy from the state or semi-official news agency that covered it.
Unlike radio, there was no comparison effect. Terrestrial television could be relayed the length of a country, but not beyond its borders. BBC Arabic Radio Service, on the other hand, was available to anyone.
Regional news - a coup, a civil war, a massacre - might take days to appear, because the channel would wait for the government to decide on its response . Most notorious was the failure of the official Saudi media to mention the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait for more than 48 hours.
What changed this - and here is a pertinent lesson of how benign foreign intervention by force of example can lead to change - was CNN coverage of the buildup and eventual combat between the American-led alliance and Iraq in 1991. Given the need to dispel outrageous Iraqi radio propaganda, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries in the alliance pulled down CNN Coverage and retransmitted it via terrestrial television. Suddenly, Arabs could see events in the Arab world significantly covered.
Saudi private interests with close ties to the palace sensed the importance of satellite news and the potential for mischief if placed in the wrong hands. They quickly moved after the war to establish a satellite channel with morning and evening news bulletins transmitting real reports - meaningful news stories by Arab correspondents in the field with their cameramen.
That channel, MBC, was based in London where there was already a cadre of expatriate Arab journalists trained to international standards. In such an environment, real news reports from the field, narrated in Arabic and available on television, were a stunning experience. MBC quickly acquired a large audience.
Other channels followed, notably in 1996 when the newly installed Emir of Qatar provided funds and facility to launch Al Jazeera, approximating the BBC model of publicly-owned but not state-controlled television. The core staff at Al Jazeera had all been trained and served as broadcasters at BBC.
By now, dishes and a number of entertainment satellite channels were proliferating across most of the Arab world. That provided Al Jazeera with a rapidly growing mass audience, now estimated at more than 50 million viewers. Because Al Jazeera is a 24/7 news operation, it quickly seized the leadership position in Arab satellite broadcasting: a position that would not be significantly challenged until just before the invasion of Iraq, when the MBC group gathered together a group of Arab journalists, including the first news director at Al Jazeera and a number of Al Jazeera reporters, and launched Al Arabiya.
The competition has had a positive effect. Arab satellite television journalists are less likely to indulge their personal ideological takes on the news when they know a more detached and reliable version is available.
It was an amazing historic reverse; the most servile, the most state-controlled, the least professional of all media in the Arab world, was suddenly refashioned in a satellite format, providing news reports more in accord with international professional standards than any other form of media in the region. And because those reports can be up-linked from Europe to a satellite that can download these reports to dishes anywhere in the Arab world, it is un-censorable.
Both Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya responded to widespread concern and anger in the Arab world with America's deepening involvement in the region - in particular the invasion and occupation of Iraq and what has appeared as continued US support for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories - by increasing coverage of American political life. This included intensive coverage of the 2004 US presidential elections campaign, resulting in extraordinary coverage of the American democratic process from the primaries onward.
In contrast to the usual confrontational talk shows, Al Jazeera's programs, "From Washington" and "The American Presidential Face," had a distinctly informative style. These shows were obviously designed to help viewers newly interested in American politics to better understand what was happening during the campaign, and to grasp the basic workings of the American democratic system.
The coverage deepened the Arab world's factual, rather than preconceived, understanding of America. As an additional side effect, it provided a familiarization with the operations of a functioning democracy. A similar effect has been underway in the intense reporting on political life in England by the Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya bureaus in London.
Two other elections have had a profound effect on stimulating the democratic process in the Arab world. On the one hand there were the Palestinian presidential and municipal elections. In the latter Hamas entered the political process and did quite well, suggesting that there is a price to be paid for the sort of casual corruption that characterized the Palestinian Authority's rule since Oslo.
And the election with the greatest impact of all was the one in Iraq, in which millions of Arabs watched millions of Iraqis braving terrorist threats to vote in highly competitive elections. The great question that those elections pose in the consciousness of every Arab everywhere is: If free, competitive elections can be held in Iraq, despite a violent insurgency and a foreign occupation, then why not here?
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* S. Abdallah Schleifer is director of the Adham Center at the American University in Cairo and publisher/senior editor of the journal Transnational Broadcasting Studies.
Source: Bitterlemons-International, May 31, 2005.
Visit Bitterlemons-International, www.bitterlemons.org.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 3
The rise of Islamist feminism
Saad S. Khan
Friday, the 18th of March, 2005, shall be remembered as a watershed in the Islamic discourse on the role of woman in religious life, as the first-ever Friday congregation was led by a Muslim woman scholar that day.
The woman prayer leader, Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at the Virginia Commonwealth University, was considered a heretic by many, as she challenged the halo of sanctity around the male-centric, and in some cases, misogynic constructions of Muslim religious teachings.
Right or wrong, Wadud went ahead with leading a Friday congregation of around 100 faithful, evenly divided into men and women, in Manhattan, New York. The venue of the prayers had been changed over and over again, as three mosques refused to host the event and the administration of an art gallery backed out for fear of a bomb blast.
Wadud did not budge and finally the congregation was held in an Anglican church hall, under heavy security. Some 15 demonstrators protested outside, calling the congregation a mockery of Islam.
There are many issues of jurisprudence involved in this issue: Can a woman lead the men in prayers? Can she deliver a sermon? Can she recite the azan (prayer call), and if so, can she do it without wearing the hijab (Muslim headscarf), as was the case in this event? Can men and women pray together, intermingled, instead of standing in separate rows for the two sexes?
Wadud's answer to all these questions is a clear affirmative. And the presence of scores of Muslims standing behind her in Manhattan alone shows that there is a significant minority opinion among Muslims in the West who share her understanding of the Koran.
As expected, swift was the criticism from a vast cross-section of the Muslim world. From the president of Libya to the shopkeeper in England, voices were raised in blasting the event. Many religious scholars also joined the chorus of disapproval. The Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) Academy, or the IFA, an affiliate of the Jeddah-based Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), came out of its slumber and strongly condemned the congregation as "religious heresy".
Many Islamic scholars have opined that special mosques for women can be built in which only women can lead prayers provided the azan is recited by a male Muslim. Others, such as prominent Pakistani cleric Israr Ahmad, believe that at an all-women mosque, there should be a woman muezzin.
Sheikh Mohammed Al Tantawi of Al Azhar, the Islamic world's leading institution of religious study in Egypt, wrote in Cairo's Al Ahram newspaper that Islam permits women to lead other women in prayers, but not a congregation with men in it, because "when she leads men in prayer ... it's not proper for them to look at the woman whose body is in front of them".
It appears that for Sheikh Tantawi the issue is more of men being able to look at a woman's body than woman being religiously or spiritually incompetent to be a prayer leader.
Wadud bases her case on traditions from the Prophet Mohammed. The issue of gender equality is a very important one in Islam and Muslims have unfortunately used highly restrictive interpretations of history to move backward," Wadud said before the service started. "With this prayer service we are moving forward. This single act is symbolic of the possibilities within Islam."
Asra Nomani, author of a widely-selling book on women in Islam, Standing Alone in Mecca, is another Muslim woman who is working to improve what she believes are women's rights in Islam. She began by trying to break a gender barrier by filing a discrimination complaint against the mosque founded by her father 23 years ago for asking women to enter by a side door.
Last year Nomani, 39, her mother and niece entered the mosque through the front door and began praying in the main room. Some men then broke off the service and tried to convince them to leave. She not only complained to the police but also involved the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She was then notified by e-mail that the mosque's executive committee has received a petition signed by 35 of 135 fellow members seeking her expulsion. She refused to accept expulsion.
Nomani, who is an Asian-American of Indian descent, is also a single mother. Although Islamic cultural and legal paradigms rate chastity very highly, for Asra Nomani, being a single mother is not something to conceal.
When Nomani traveled to Mecca she developed a strong antipathy to the Wahhabi school of thought. She claims that when she studied Islam, she found that the Prophet was the first feminist in Islam. She says that her love for the Koran and for the prophet grew as she learned more of the rights that Islam accorded to women 1,400 years ago.
Another outspoken Muslim feminist happens to be a proclaimed lesbian. Canada's Irshad Manji, also of South Asian decent, and the author of The Trouble with Islam, sees no contradiction in being a practicing Muslim and an overt homosexual at the same time. She is also a supporter of Israel.
Feminism in Islam is not an altogether new phenomenon. Tahira Qurat-ul-Ain of Iran, Fatima Aalia Hanim of Turkey and Zainab Al Fawwaz and Aisha Taimuria of Egypt all rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century.
The twentieth century saw the rise of Zainab Al Ghazali Al Jubaili of Egypt, the only female scholar in history who has written a tafseer (exegesis) of the holy Koran and Nazira Zain Al Abideen of Lebanon. But not all twentieth-century Muslim feminists invoked Islam. Actually, the views of such female writers as Tasleema Nasreen of Bangladesh, Nawal Saadawi of Egypt and Fatimah Mernissi of Morocco have often been so outrageous toward Islam that religious edicts have been issued calling for their deaths.
It is also a fact that most contemporary Muslim scholars who espoused traditional conservative views about women, such as Hassan Al Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Maulana Muwdoudi, Hassan Al Turabi, Imam Khomeini and Rachid Ghannouchi, were either Western-educated or had close exposure to Western societies. They considered Western society too permissive and decadent and felt that the future stability of Islamic societies depended largely on the preservation of Islam's traditional views on marriage, home and family.
Many Muslim feminists in the West now claim - with Nomani and Manji being exceptions - that they are not against traditional family views, but want to oppose patriarchal notions of shame and honor that have nothing to do with Islam. They also register their protests against forced marriages, restrictions on education and careers and female genital mutilation (FMG), as practiced in many Muslim communities.
There are also women who argue that the veil is not necessarily a means to protect women, being instead a cause of sexual excitement for male eyes.
Muslim feminists can no longer be written away as morally corrupt women who have no knowledge of Islam. This had been the modus operandi of some Muslim scholars to discredit women rights activists within the Islamist framework. This approach can hardly be expected to work any longer. After all, many of the women are making their case on the basis of arguments from the Koran and Sunnah.
"If the Koran is fully comprehended," Wadud writes in her book Women and Koran, "it will become a motivating force for women's empowerment".
One needs to recognize and underline the importance of rational and freethinking in Islam. No single school of thought in the wide spectrum of opinions about the status of women in Islam may be entirely correct.
A gender-neutral and gender-sensitive understanding of the text is, therefore, called for.
Muslim women in Europe are ethnically, culturally and ideologically diverse and complex groups, and so are the feminists among them. This is a time when we must put our heads together and find solutions through dialogue and, as the Koran stipulates: "argue with them in a way that is nice", that is, debate with people who see things differently.
Islamic feminism is now a reality, as is feminism in other religions, Christianity included, where the ordainment of female clerics has taken place in the recent past. The late Pope John Paul II was staunchly opposed to the ordainment of women priests as is the present Pope Benedict the XVIth. But the fact is that the women worldwide are now questioning the status that had been accorded to them by religion and culture throughout history.
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* Saad S. Khan is an Oxford-published author and a widely read analyst on Islam, politics and governance in the Muslim world.
Source: Middle East Times, May 27, 2005
Visit Middle East Times, www.metimes.com.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
Copyright permission has been obtained for publication.
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ARTICLE 4
Why Ridley Scott's story of the Crusades struck such a chord in a Lebanese cinema
Robert Fisk
Long live Ridley Scott. I never thought I'd say this. Gladiator had a screenplay that might have come from the Boy's Own Paper. Black Hawk Down showed the Arabs of Somalia as generically violent animals. But when I left the cinema after seeing Scott's extraordinary sand-and-sandals epic on the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, I was deeply moved - not so much by the film, but by the Muslim audience among whom I watched it in Beirut.
I know what the critics have said. The screenplay isn't up for much and Orlando Bloom, playing the loss-of-faith crusader Balian of Ibelin, does indeed look - as The Independent cruelly observed - like a backpacker touring the Middle East in a gap year.
But there is an integrity about its portrayal of the Crusades which, while fitting neatly into our contemporary view of the Middle East - the moderate crusaders are overtaken by crazed neo-conservative barons while Saladin is taunted by a dangerously al-Qa'ida-like warrior - treats the Muslims as men of honour who can show generosity as well as ruthlessness to their enemies.
It was certainly a revelation to sit through Kingdom of Heaven not in London or New York but in Beirut, in the Middle East itself, among Muslims - most of them in their 20s - who were watching historical events that took place only a couple of hundred miles from us. How would the audience react when the Knights Templars went on their orgy of rape and head-chopping among the innocent Muslim villagers of the Holy Land, when they advanced, covered in gore, to murder Saladin's beautiful, chadored sister? I must admit, I held my breath a few times.
I need not have bothered. When the leprous King of Jerusalem - his face covered in a steel mask to spare his followers the ordeal of looking at his decomposition - falls fatally ill after honourably preventing a battle between Crusaders and Saracens, Saladin, played by that wonderful Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud - and thank God the Arabs in the film are played by Arabs - tells his deputies to send his own doctors to look after the Christian king.
At this, there came from the Muslim audience a round of spontaneous applause. They admired this act of mercy from their warrior hero; they wanted to see his kindness to a Christian.
There are some things in the film which you have to be out here in the Middle East to appreciate. When Balian comes across a pile of crusader heads lying on the sand after the Christian defeat at the 1187 battle of Hittin, everyone in the cinema thought of Iraq; here is the nightmare I face each time I travel to report in Iraq. Here is the horror that the many Lebanese who work in Iraq have to confront. Yet there was a wonderful moment of self-deprecation among the audience when Saladin, reflecting on his life, says: "Somebody tried to kill me once in Lebanon."
The house came down. Everyone believed that Massoud must have inserted this line to make fun of the Lebanese ability to destroy themselves and - having lived in Lebanon 29 years and witnessed almost all its tragedy - I too founds tears of laughter running down my face.
I suppose that living in Lebanon, among those crusader castles, does also give an edge to Kingdom of Heaven. It's said that Scott originally wanted to film in Lebanon (rather than Spain and Morocco) and to call his movie Tripoli after the great crusader keep I visited a few weeks ago. One of the big Christian political families in Lebanon, the Franjiehs, take their name from the "Franj", which is what the Arabs called the crusaders. The Douai family in Lebanon - with whom the Franjiehs fought a bitter battle, Knights Templar-style, in a church in 1957 - are the descendants of the French knights who came from the northern French city of Douai.
Yet it is ironic that this movie elicited so much cynical comment in the West. Here is a tale that - unlike any other recent film - has captured the admiration of Muslims. Yet we denigrated it. Because Orlando Bloom turns so improbably from blacksmith to crusader to hydraulic engineer? Or because we felt uncomfortable at the way the film portrayed "us", the crusaders?
But it didn't duck Muslim vengeance. When Guy de Lusignan hands the cup of iced water given him by Saladin to the murderous knight who slaughtered Saladin's daughter, the Muslim warrior says menacingly: "I did not give you the cup." And then he puts his sword through the knight's throat. Which is, according to the archives, exactly what he did say and exactly what he did do.
Massoud, who is a popular local actor in Arab films - he is known in the Middle East as the Syrian Al Pacino - in reality believes that George Bush is to blame for much of the crisis between the Muslim and Western world. "George Bush is stupid and he loves blood more than the people and music," he said in a recent interview. "If Saladin were here he would have at least not allowed Bush to destroy the world, especially the feeling of humanity between people."
Massoud agreed to play Saladin because he trusted Scott to be fair with history. I had to turn to that fine Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf to discover whether Massoud was right. Maalouf it was who wrote the seminal The Crusades through Arab Eyes, researching for his work among Arab rather than Crusader archives. "Too fair," was his judgement on Kingdom of Heaven.
I see his point. But at the end of the film, after Balian has surrendered Jerusalem, Saladin enters the city and finds a crucifix lying on the floor of a church, knocked off the altar during the three-day siege. And he carefully picks up the cross and places it reverently back on the altar. And at this point the audience rose to their feet and clapped and shouted their appreciation. They loved that gesture of honour. They wanted Islam to be merciful as well as strong. And they roared their approval above the soundtrack of the film.
So I left the Dunes cinema in Beirut strangely uplifted by this extraordinary performance - of the audience as much as the film. See it if you haven't. And if you do, remember how the Muslims of Beirut came to realise that even Hollywood can be fair. I came away realising why - despite the murder of Beirut's bravest journalist on Friday - there probably will not be a civil war here again. So if you see Kingdom of Heaven, when Saladin sets the crucifix back on the altar, remember that deafening applause from the Muslims of Beirut.
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* Robert Fisk is a Beirut-based journalist and author of several books on the region.
Source: The Independent, June 4, 2005
Visit the Independent, www.independent.co.uk.
Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.
The Independent holds copyright permission. Please contact syndication@inuk.co.uk for reprint rights.
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