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Common Ground News Service
Partners in Humanity for constructive & vibrant Muslim-Western relations
06 - 12 May 2008
The Common Ground News Service – Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) aims to promote constructive perspectives and dialogue about Muslim–Western relations. CGNews-PiH is available in Arabic, English, French, Indonesian and Urdu. To subscribe, click here.
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Inside this edition
1) Fiction meets reality in Egypt by Andrew Masloski
Looking at the example of Esra Fattah, an Egyptian woman arrested in April for encouraging a protest against rising prices over Facebook, Andrew Masloski, senior research assistant with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, considers the role this online forum plays in Egyptian politics.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 6 May 2008)
2) Carter’s trip: boon or bungle? by Paul Scham
Paul Scham, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute, analyses what the former President Jimmy Carter’s recent trip to Damascus means for the Middle East peace process.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 6 May 2008)
3) Are conditions ripe for negotiating with Iran? by Steven Kull
Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, discusses the surprising results of a new public opinion poll in Iran and the United States and its implications for greater interaction between the two countries.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 6 May 2008)
4) Understanding Pakistan’s tribal areas by Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
American University graduate Frankie Martin and Georgetown University senior Hailey Woldt highlight the misperceptions surrounding tribal and ethnic peculiarities of Northwest Pakistan that are hindering the fight terrorism in the region.
(Source: Common Ground News Service (CGNews), 6 May 2008)
5) Arab literature takes centre stage in London by Susannah Tarbush
Freelance journalist Susannah Tarbush looks at the West’s recent interest in Arab authors and literature, as evidenced by the panels and events highlighted in the three-day London Book Fair in mid-April.
(Source: Qantara.de, 30 April 2008)
1) Fiction meets reality in Egypt
Andrew Masloski
Washington, DC - Thirty four years ago, Egypt’s most celebrated author, Naguib Mahfouz, published his novella Karnak Café. Set in Egypt during the late 1960s, it tells the story of a group of young, idealistic students who become acutely aware of the gap between the ideals espoused by Nasser’s pan-Arab socialism and the realities of Egyptian daily life. The students are arrested and intimidated for calling attention to this gap, alternately accused of belonging to the Communist party or the Muslim Brotherhood.
Today, the nightmarish scenario depicted by Mahfouz threatens to become a reality. On 12 April, the government arrested a young Egyptian woman for creating a group on Facebook (the widely popular social-networking website) that encouraged people in the factory town of Mahalla to protest for higher wages.
This Egyptian woman’s name is Esra Abdel Fattah. An intelligent and socially aware 28-year-old, she has witnessed first-hand the suffering of Mahalla’s residents due to the rising cost of food staples such as bread and cooking oil.
Last March she created a Facebook group encouraging people to go on strike for one day to show the factory – and the government – the extent to which the Egyptian people are suffering from soaring prices and stagnant wages. The strike was set to take place on 6 April but was violently suppressed by the government, which deployed large numbers of security forces in the streets. Six days later, Fattah was arrested, accused of masterminding a plot to foment dissent.
Despite her lawyers’ insistence that the accusations against her are baseless, the court refused Fattah an appeal. The Egyptian newspaper ad-Dustur reported that Fattah claimed she received information about a strike on 6 April and merely sought to discuss the idea with others over the internet.
The Facebook group she created still exists and has been updated, presumably by a colleague or friend, to reflect the events that have taken place since. The group currently has more than 73,000 members, or roughly 17 percent of the 440,000 people who make up the Egypt network on Facebook.
Fattah’s arrest is significant for two reasons. For starters, her reaction to the injustice of her neighbours’ suffering was completely non-violent in nature, despite the government’s treatment of the strike as though it were a bloody coup attempt. Regardless of whether Fattah encouraged people to strike on 6 April or merely discussed the idea, nothing suggests that she sought anything more than to help the people of Mahalla to live in dignity.
The second and even more important reason that Fattah’s arrest is significant is that the means she chose to publicise the strike was remarkably effective. Only a small minority of Egypt’s 80 million citizens are familiar with Facebook. And yet her online group, calling for the strike, quickly caught the attention of Egyptian Facebook users – some of whom undoubtedly were already conscientious activists, some of whom were not.
From there, word of the planned protest spread so extensively that Cairo was largely quiet on 6 April, with many people staying at home, either out of solidarity or fear. Just as satellite television and cell phones with cameras and SMS capabilities did before, social networking sites like Facebook have exposed a crack in the government’s ability to prevent its citizens from organising and publicly demonstrating their dissatisfaction.
Fattah’s arrest and detention spurred her mother to publish a successful open letter to Mubarak on 21 April in the popular Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Yowm asking the president to intercede and release her daughter. She was released on 23 April.
The nightmare recorded by Naguib Mahfouz more than three decades ago is still looming, and yet the end remains unknown. It remains to be seen if the government will continue to mimic the role it played in Mahfouz’s novella, or if the Egyptian people will succeed in writing a different, better ending for their reality and future.
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* Andrew Masloski is a senior research assistant with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Common Ground News Service, 6 May 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
2) Carter’s trip: boon or bungle?
Paul Scham
Washington, DC - It is unclear what Jimmy Carter thought his recent meetings in the Middle East with Hamas leaders would actually accomplish. Given his political experience, he could not have believed that his trip to Damascus was likely to succeed in jumpstarting a process that would quickly include Hamas in actual peace negotiations. More probably, he decided that he was in a unique position to focus western attention on the possibilities of engaging Hamas, and concluded that provocation was his most effective tool, just as he had when he entitled his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The furore resulting from both actions was similar. Now, he has helped provide a clearer perspective of Hamas’s current red lines, which future attempts at engagement will necessarily build on.
It is notable that few of Carter’s critics seem to be able to put forward a realistic alternative to dealing with Hamas. None seems to believe that Hamas will disappear, or that military action will destroy or tame it. In fact, some readily admit that sooner or later Israel will have to deal with Hamas – that there is no choice. So why do some people attack Carter so ferociously?
The ostensible reason is that he broke ranks with the existing international consensus that defined Hamas as a terrorist organisation; that his trip provided Hamas with de facto international legitimacy. Carter’s laying a wreath on Yasser Arafat’s grave and his public, physical embrace of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal, provided grist for claims that he is anti-Israel and truly supports Hamas. Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz has also alleged that money Carter’s centre receives from Arab sources is motivating his “anti-Israel” initiatives. However, a surprising number of his detractors seem only able to recycle insults based on pure dislike of the man.
What is more important is that a number of significant Israelis – including former heads of the security services – have been urging the government to accept the reality of Hamas and find a way to engage it. In a recent poll, 64 percent of the Israeli public indicated a willingness to engage Hamas. Only in the United States does opinion seem almost uniformly negative.
So where are we with regard to Middle East peace progress?
It now seems to be a fact that Hamas will not disappear, no matter what Israel, the United States or the international community does. Hamas’s popularity is due to several factors, including Palestinian disgust with Fatah’s corruption, the rise of political Islam throughout the Middle East, the perception (shared by most observers) that the post-Annapolis process will not succeed, and a general Palestinian conviction (whether right or wrong) that Israel will never peacefully agree to a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.
In addition, Hamas’s success in its confrontations, political and military, with Fatah and the growing international impatience with the Israeli blockade of Gaza have helped Hamas establish a role from which it cannot be easily dislodged.
Hamas has given tentative indications of wavering from its traditional insistence that formal recognition or acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy is theologically forbidden. It seems to be genuinely trying to develop theological and political mechanisms to enable it to deal with the powerful and inescapable reality that is today’s Jewish state. This constitutes progress in the current context.
The inescapable fact is that Hamas has already established its “legitimacy” in the way every new political force does: by amassing political and military power that makes it impossible to ignore. It is no longer an option to deny this; the question for Israel, the United States and the West is in what manner to come to terms with it. This is not amoral Machiavellianism; it is recognition of reality.
There are times that even the powerful must bite the bullet and this is one of them. While Carter’s trip continues to provoke political posturing, realities are being recognised. On 30 April, Egypt announced that Hamas and 11 smaller Palestinian factions had agreed to honour a six-month truce with Israel. It now covers only Gaza, but may expand to the West Bank. Egypt’s powerful Intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, is currently trying to obtain Israel’s acquiescence.
If this cease-fire takes hold, then other possibilities are likely to open, even if a formal peace agreement cannot now be reached. There are significant precedents for co-existing with sworn enemies. In 1948, Israel’s four neighbours vowed to destroy it, but today two have signed peace treaties and a third insists it is ready for one. Similarly, the USSR and the United States (and their allies) faced off in the Cold War for decades and, to the surprise of many, avoided a general war.
When the killing stops, possibilities open.
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* Paul Scham is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and co-editor of the book Shared Histories: A Palestinian-Israeli Dialogue. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Disclaimer: Assertions and opinions in this writing do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Institute, which expressly does not take positions on Middle East policy.
Source: Common Ground News Service, 6 May 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
3) Are conditions ripe for negotiating with Iran?
Steven Kull
College Park, Maryland - A number of serious voices are saying it is time for a new approach on Iran. Senator Diane Feinstein and former high-level US government officials have called for the United States to enter into negotiations with Iran without preconditions, at the same time proposing ideas to surmount the current impasse over Iran’s nuclear program. Combined with new polling suggesting that public opinion in Iran and the United States echo these views, conditions appear to be ripe for renewed efforts to improve US-Iran relations.
A poll conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org in partnership with Search for Common Ground in February found that substantial majorities in Iran (57 percent) say they favoured Iranian and American “direct talks on issues of mutual concern”, and 69 percent say they also favour talks focused on stabilising the situation in Iraq.
Iranians also support various other steps for improving Iran-US relations, with large majorities favouring greater trade (64 percent), “more access for each others’ journalists” (70 percent), and “greater cultural, educational, and sporting exchanges” (63 percent). All of these numbers were up sharply from just over a year ago.
While views of the United States are still quite negative, the poll found some signs of thawing. Those with a very unfavourable view of the United States have dropped from two-thirds to half. And a growing majority (now 64 percent) believe that it is possible for “Muslim and Western cultures” to “find common ground”.
These results may be related to the release of the US National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran is not currently building a nuclear weapons program. Several poll findings suggest that Iranians appear to have interpreted this as a decline in the US threat to use military force against them.
The American public shows a corresponding readiness to enter into closer relations. Large majorities in WorldPublicOpinion.org polls conducted by Knowledge Networks express support for all of the steps mentioned above, with 82 percent of respondents favouring direct talks.
When Americans were asked how the United States should deal with the Iranian government, only 22 percent favoured “implied threats that the United States may use military force against it” while 75 percent favoured “trying to build better relations.”
Of course, the thorniest issue is Iran’s nuclear program, with its growing capacity to produce nuclear fuel that can be used for nuclear energy and, with more advanced enrichment, for nuclear weapons.
Eight in 10 Iranian respondents are quite determined that Iran should have the capacity to produce nuclear fuel for nuclear energy. However, most endorse the government’s position that it should not produce nuclear weapons. More significantly, six in 10 say that producing nuclear weapons would be contrary to Islam – consistent with fatwas, or legal opinions, that have been issued by a number of prominent Iranian clerics.
This does not disprove the idea that some members of the Iranian government may have aspirations for such weapons. It does reveal, however, that in the moral and political environment of Iran today, a prohibition of nuclear weapons has been generally established and changing this position would likely encounter some public resistance. Similarly, proposals predicated on Iran not having nuclear weapons, while still being able to produce nuclear energy, may be difficult for the government to simply reject.
A proposal endorsed by US Senator Diane Feinstein has been put forward by former government officials William Luers, Thomas Pickering and Jim Walsh, calling for a multi-national enrichment facility inside Iran under extensive international supervision, which would give Iran the capability to produce nuclear fuel for energy but not for nuclear weapons.
Iranian respondents in the poll were presented a possible deal whereby Iran would have a limited right to produce nuclear fuel provided that the IAEA has full and permanent access to ensure that Iran is not producing nuclear weapons. Fifty-eight percent said they supported such a deal while just 26 percent were opposed.
Such a deal was also endorsed by Americans and others in a recent 31-country BBC World Service poll, conducted by GlobeScan and PIPA. The deal was endorsed by 55 percent of Americans, 71 percent of the British, 56 percent of the French and a majority of other nations polled. The BBC poll also found that tougher options for dealing with Iran, such as economic sanctions or military strikes, receive very low levels of support.
The George W. Bush administration has limited time left in office, and faces widespread disapproval of its foreign policy. A new approach to the Iranian challenge may be one of the last and best options for the administration to shore up its legacy at home and abroad by contributing to a more stable world.
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* Steven Kull is director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, an international research project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Common Ground News Service, 6 May 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
4) Understanding Pakistan’s tribal areas
Frankie Martin and Hailey Woldt
Washington, DC - The vows of the new Pakistani coalition government to begin a dialogue with militants has turned many heads. To Washington’s dismay, the new government led by Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari seems to have a different perspective on fighting terrorism. Here’s why we should pay attention.
Today we find ourselves in a disastrous cultural and military muddle in Waziristan, the volatile tribal area of Northwest Pakistan. American demands of the Pakistani military to use greater force on the area have so far gone nowhere, despite President Pervez Musharraf’s compliance. Suicide bombings are out of control and the violence has spilled out of the tribal areas to cities like Lahore and Islamabad.
The dismal results have been interpreted as a reflection of the softness of the action, but really it is the approach itself that is to blame.
We are told by policymakers in Washington that we must choose between surrender and victory in the tribal areas. With surrender, the Taliban would reign over a new caliphate, and with victory, the whole country becomes a mass of rubble with Osama bin Laden buried somewhere within.
Yet this is a false dichotomy created by an inability to learn from past experience or conduct a simple cultural analysis.
The tribal areas in Pakistan, which are populated by ethnic Pashtuns, have been greatly misunderstood by the West and even by many urban Pakistanis for years. Few understand that the Taliban is a very recent group in the history of that area, and that it is seen as an overpowering, unwelcome entity in local traditional culture.
Historically the religious leaders have been kept in check by tribal chiefs and government officials, but after 9/11 this already decaying system was dealt a final devastating blow by Musharraf and the United States in the form of constant bombardments. As a consequence, the old civil service government presence in Waziristan is absent – having been dismantled by Musharraf in favour of the army – and the traditional tribal leadership sidelined.
Taliban mullahs have charged into the vacuum, using their fire and brimstone speeches to arouse the passions of a people that has lost all faith that the Pakistani government will ever understand their concerns.
The United States has also helped stoke tribal flames by backing governments run by non-Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pashtun tribesmen feel under siege on multiple fronts – attacked, they think, simply because of their ethnicity. Because they are Muslim, they also feel Islam is under attack and seek to defend it.
Problems have been exacerbated by our confusing labelling of the enemy. Today the line between Pashtun tribesmen and Taliban and Al-Qaeda remains dangerously ill-defined.
The United States and its allies are in deep trouble. With every day that passes without understanding the position of the tribesmen and what they are fighting for, the goal of capturing bin Laden and securing the border with Afghanistan becomes more elusive.
This doesn’t mean “appeasing” those who would seek to do America harm but rather “administering” more effectively. This means combining the threat of force with efforts to gain the respect of the tribes, reaching out to them and working within their cultural and religious framework. The situation could also improve immensely if large sums of American aid were devoted to education and development instead of failed military expenditures which have cost the United States more than $10 billion since 9/11.
History shows that officiating the tribal areas has proved impossible – whether for the British or Pakistanis – when these methods are not pursued. This approach must also be applied to other tribal societies where the United States is engaged, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia.
If a new course is not plotted, the United States will continue its global march towards disaster. Bombing Muslim tribesmen incessantly without understanding who we are actually attacking and why is not “realism”, it is bad policy.
This simplistic “steamrolling” of its enemies has devastated the global reputation of the United States and, if continued, will persist in destroying our very future. As young Americans concerned about the future we cannot allow these failed policies to continue to blight the coming century.
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* Frankie Martin is a graduate of American University and research assistant at the university’s School of International Service. Hailey Woldt is a senior at Georgetown University. Both did field work for the book Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization by Akbar Ahmed (Brookings, 2007). This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Common Ground News Service, 6 May 2008, www.commongroundnews.org
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
5) Arab literature takes centre stage in London
Susannah Tarbush
Bonn, Germany - When Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz became in 1988 the first (and so far only) Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was hoped that this would lead to a major breakthrough for Arab literature in the West, including Britain. But for years such a breakthrough remained elusive.
True, a few Arab authors achieved some success in English translation, but there was nothing comparable to the love affair of British readers with, say, Latin American magic realism, Russian and East European literature, and novels by writers originating from the Indian sub-continent.
Now the picture regarding the publication of Arab literature in English is dramatically changing. This was evident at the recent three-day London Book Fair (LBF), which took place 14th-16th April this year and chose the Arab world as its market focus.
Some 100 Arab publishers and cultural institutions exhibited at the fair. In addition, the LBF, together with the British Council, organised a programme of seminars at which more than 60 Arab writers, publishers and scholars, most of them invited from abroad, were panellists.
Other treats on offer included a “Breakfast with Bahaa Taher” in the English PEN Literary Cafe, during which journalist Maya Jaggi interviewed the veteran Egyptian novelist who recently became the first-ever winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for Sunset Oasis.
The IPAF, worth a total of $60,000 to the winner, is funded by the Emirates Foundation of Abu Dhabi and was inaugurated in association with the Booker Prize Foundation. The LBF and British Council brought all six authors short-listed for the IPAF to the fair. The IPAF is providing a fresh impetus for translation, for the award guarantees translation of the winning entry into English.
As well as highlighting translation from Arabic, the LBF showcased two ambitious new projects in the United Arab Emirates to translate works into Arabic. Kalima, an initiative of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, aims to translate 100 volumes a year. The Tarjem programme of the Mohammad Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Foundation in Dubai intends to translate 1000 bestsellers into Arabic over three years.
At the LBF, the presence of the Egyptian novelist (and dentist) Alaa Al-Aswany aroused much interest. Al-Aswany has enjoyed phenomenal success in the Arab world and beyond with his novel The Yacoubian Building and the film made of it. He was the “author of the day” on the second day of the fair. Publication of the English translation of a second novel by Al-Aswany in September is much anticipated.
Al-Aswany studied dentistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago, as did the young Saudi Raja Alsanea, another best-selling Arab novelist who attracted much attention at the LBF. Her first novel, Girls of Riyadh was a runaway success in Arabic, and has been translated into 23 languages. The paperback English edition will be published by Penguin in June. Publishers, whether Arab or Western, long to find the next Al-Aswany or Alsanea.
Margaret Obank, editor of a magazine of modern Arab literature, Banipal, notes: “There is now an expanding number of UK publishers publishing Arab authors in translation, plus a brand new one, Arabia Books, jointly founded by Arcadia Books and Haus Publishing to specifically focus on literary fiction from the Arab world, with special attention to the huge list of the American University of Cairo (AUC) Press.”
One reason for the growth of Arab literature in translation was the launching of Banipal ten years ago. Banipal has set up a book arm to publish translated fiction, and established the Saif Ghobash-Banipal prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Its latest project is to set up with the Arab-British Centre in London a library of modern Arab literature.
A striking indication of the rising presence of Arab literature globally is that the largest and most comprehensive international literary prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, has no fewer than three novels by Arab authors on its recently-announced shortlist of eight. The prize, worth 100,000 Euros, is open to novels written in, or translated into, English.
One of the shortlisted novels, De Niro’s Game by Canadian-Lebanese Rawi Hage, was written in English. The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra (the pen name of Algerian former army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul), was translated from French, while Palestinian Sayed Kashua, who lives in Israel and is shortlisted for Let it be Morning, writes in Hebrew. All this goes to show just how rich and varied Arab contemporary literature actually is.
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* Claudia Isabel is a freelance journalist. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org .
Source: Qantara.de, 30 April 2008, www.qantara.de
Copyright permission is granted for publication.
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The Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity (CGNews-PiH) provides news, op-eds, features and analysis by local and international experts on a broad range of issues affecting Muslim-Western relations. CGNews-PiH syndicates articles that are constructive, offer hope and promote dialogue and mutual understanding, to news outlets worldwide. With support from the British, Norwegian, Swedish and US Governments, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy and private donors, the service is a non-profit initiative of Search for Common Ground, an international NGO working in the fields of conflict transformation and media production.
This news service is one outcome of a set of working meetings held in partnership with His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan in June 2003.
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The views expressed in these articles are those of the authors, not of CGNews or its affiliates.
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