Tag: Politics

BBC journalist Rageh Omaar's new documentary Inside Iran is worth watching. Omaar is friendly and respectful toward the subjects of his film; a refreshing change from the clinical anthropop approach often employed by reporters in documentaries like this one. The result is a very human portrait of what I like to call the Unfunny City.

An Iranian viewer commenting on the documentary at the BBC's Have Your Say points out that the title of the film is misleading; Tehran has its own unique urban culture and is not representative of Iran as a whole. I visited the country three years ago, when Khatami was still in power, and found this to be very true. Tehran seems to be one of those cities that remains inscrutable without a very clever chaperone, one who is not only part of the fabric of the city, but who can make you appear to be so. Having no such chaperone and being doubly foreign--and American and a Sunni--I found Tehran a bustling but paradoxically dull place, where laughing too loudly in public resulted in a volley of furtive stares. Hence, the Unfunny City. 

Unfunny as it was, the thing that struck me most about Tehran was its aura of normalcy. If normalcy is the ability to predict the consequences of your actions and the actions of others, then it is the secret to the success of the Islamic Republic: it is highly systematized, and the system is consistent. Method is everywhere. The stonings and the hangings and the bogus 'Islamic' justice happen out of sight, and remain out of sight because restaurants are open when you expect them to be open, banks are efficient about changing money, and there is just enough material wealth to pad the edges of an invented theocratic reality. I compare this to the undiluted chaos of Cairo, the political instability of Beirut, the violent streets of Baghdad, and I am not surprised that Iranians don't feel as oppressed as Omaar expects them to feel. They are presented with a very simple ultimatum: Comply, and we will make you just free enough to forget that you are not free. Refuse to comply, and we'll either toss you in jail or kill you. The choice is so concise that it disappears from view as soon as you've made it. This is the genius of the Islamic Republic. 

It was Azar Nafisi who first made the parallel between life in modern Iran and Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading; the hyperreality created by regimes so total that they remake and replace every facet of life. I use 'total' instead of 'totalitarian' because totalitarian is often used to mean visible brute force; there's very little of that in Iran. The totality of the regime arises instead from its seamless incorporation into the things you wouldn't normally notice. Take, for instance, the ubiquitous headscarf. These days you don't have to tuck in each tiny strand of your hair; there are girls in Tehran who would not, in any other Muslim country on earth, be considered veiled. Their ponytails hang out the back. Their bangs hang out the front. The brilliance is in the smallness of the method of control. The veil ceases to be a religious symbol. It ceases to be anything but a tiny square of cloth. It is important only because you must wear it. It becomes a little addition to your outer garments. It becomes normal. That, friends, is a manufactured reality.

Omaar seems to buy into this reality a little too easily. Yet his points are legitimate: within the context of your compliance, it is possible to live and thrive in modern Iran, to educate yourself, to have ideas, to create a life and a family. Monuments and traditional art and culture are lovingly preserved; cities are organic and inviting; and while a very specific interpretation of Islam dominates the state apparatus, religion seems to play a much more relaxed and integrated part of social life than it does in other parts of the Middle East. Iran is a country under stress, but it is not a country in decline. Its workforce is well-educated and dynamic enough to carry it into the 21st century--which means that when the oil dries up, Iran will have resources to fall back upon, unlike its neighbors in the Gulf. 

If nothing else, Omaar's journey through Tehran is a refreshing antidote to the endless round of flag-burning and wild-eyed frenzy one usually gets in mainstream media. (This stereotype about Iran and Iranians is in no way limited to the West, by the way. One sees plenty of slanted portrayals in media out of the Sunni Middle East.) It's a timely reminder that we are all mercurially and persistently human, and capable of adapting to the harshest of sociopolitical environments. It always comforts me to remember that this humanness has outlasted, and will outlast, the greatest and strangest of empires. 

Embattled Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman has been sentenced to 4 years in jail for insulting religion. A philosophically-minded person might observe that the thug regime which sentenced him is itself an insult to religion. In the Middle East, the pot is never afraid to call the kettle black. I doubt anyone expected a different outcome. However, kudos to the people at freekareem.org, most of whom are practicing Muslims, for giving it their best shot.

I don't particularly like Kareem. His ideas are cheap self-hating propaganda and his blog often reads like an imaginative anti-establishment effort to pick up girls. (Strangely enough, the Egyptian government has not yet managed to block it.) Kareem is a kid from an increasingly decrepit, impoverished Alexandria who has had a tough life and is angry--you can't blame him for that. But that doesn't make him a visionary or a reformer. 

However, the kid has guts. Real guts. I couldn't smile if I was staring an all-expenses-paid vacation in the infamous Tura Prison in the face, yet in his BBC photo, that's exactly what Kareem is doing. Now that is gravitas.

I don't like defending people I don't respect on principle. However, there are times when one has to suck it up and do so anyway, and this is one of them. Kareem does not deserve what will inevitably happen to him in that prison; this is not justice. Egypt does not even pretend to endorse freedom of speech, so it would be a little bit comical to rant about the lack of it--instead I will just say that a young guy who has had it rough his whole life is getting yet another tough break he does not deserve. God be with him. 

What follows is from January of last year.  I saved it.  I don't know why.  It's like fantasy or science fiction.  Totally unrealistic. 

AP reports that a leading Chinese dissident has been executed:

China executed an ethnic Muslim from the country's restive far western region for alleged separatist activities, a U.S. broadcaster said Friday.

China didn't confirm the execution of Ismail Semed, which human rights groups condemned because they said the prosecution's case against him lacked evidence and his confession may have been coerced.

Semed, a member of the Uighur minority group in Xinjiang, was shot to death Thursday morning after being convicted in October 2005 of trying to "split the motherland,'' and possessing firearms and explosives, Radio Free Asia reported.

Chinese authorities say militants among the Uighurs - Turkic-speaking Muslims - are leading a violent Islamic separatist movement in the region and are seeking to set up an independent state of "East Turkistan.''

Critics accuse Beijing of using claims of terrorism as an excuse to crack down on peaceful pro-independence sentiment and expressions of Uighur identity.

I'm almost back. Hopefully I'll really be back on Monday. In the meantime, we should all be paying attention to the Saudi-sponsored Mecca talks between Fatah, Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The agreement to form a unity government which the factions signed on Thursday could, if properly implemented, be a significant step forward for a people increasingly divided by sectarian infighting. The cynics will call it another piece of paper, but the swiftness with which the agreement was reached, along with the unusually pro-active role of the Saudi government in fostering it, suggests to me that this thing has legs. 

Let us hope it does, and that it will become tangible proof to the too-long stifled people of the Territories that diplomacy can translate into positive real-world action. Proving this will be key to putting a stopper in the civilian-on-civilian violence that plagues the region. 

The Telegraph reports:

One of the heroes of France's World Cup-winning football team yesterday accused Nicolas Sarkozy, the Right's presidential candidate, of having a "racial" view of society's problems.

The comments by Lilian Thuram, a key member of the multi-racial team that triumphed in Paris in 1998, will come as a significant setback to Mr Sarkozy's ambitions to unite voters of every ethnic background behind him.

Recalling a meeting with Mr Sarkozy, the interior minister, following riots in the suburbs of Paris in late 2005, Mr Thuram, 35, said: "He told me, you know, it's the blacks and the Arabs who create the problems in the suburbs.

The now-infamous Rand Report on strategies to promote 'civil democratic Islam' mentions Sufi Muslims as possible allies in the war against radicalism. Modern Sufism's tolerance of indigenous cultural norms; its rich tradition of poetry and song; and its emphasis on one's individual, emotional relationship with God, make it an appealing alternative to more rigid sects. But western patronage may actually be harming the ability of individual Sufi orders to counter extremist ideology in the Muslim world. Sufism itself, a more nebulous and imprecise idea than it first appears, may be too diffuse and complex to form a coherent pan-geographic resistance to Islamic radicalism.

There is no doubt in my mind--none--that Sufis form the first line of defense against radicalism in North Africa and the Middle East. In mosques all over Cairo, many of which have become little more than repositories of Wahhabi propaganda, one can find Sufi-made bumper stickers countering Wahhabi ideology with quotes from Imam Ali and alternative readings of popular Qur'anic verses. When Wahhabi evangelists preach on public buses and metro cars, the brave few who stand up and argue with them are nearly always Sufis, or come armed with Sufi rhetoric. In Isfahan, I met a group of young Sufis who had synthesized tawassuf, punk and traditional Persian music into one of the most astonishing subcultures I have ever seen; not exactly the sort of Islam the framers of the Revolution envisioned. On the Libyan Plateau, Berber Sufis staunchly resist the invasion of black head-to-toe polyester by flatly outlawing it in order to preserve traditional Berber dress. Yes, Sufis are doing the work most of the rest of us simply talk about. But is Sufism?

Given Neo-Labour's contempt for the legal traditions of Britain and the rule of law (e.g. constant attacks on judges), and the norms of international law (e.g. the recent decision to pull the plug on an investigation into a Saudi fraud investigation), I am not surprised the latest episode in the 'cash-for-peerages' scandal engulfing Neo-Labour has prompted leading figures from the party to attack the police in public:

Amid wild talk of a new Watergate, the big guns rolled out to defend [Ruth] Turner [Director of Government Relations] within hours of her release. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, criticised the nature of the arrest, the ex-home secretary David Blunkett said he was 'bewildered' by it, while the Labour peer Lord Puttnam said detectives were turning the inquiry 'into a version of Big Brother', a drama played out in public.

The complaints of someone like David Blunkett about police tactics is stupefying. This is a man who contemplated bombing al-Jazeera's offices, machine-guning prison inmates and approved of witholding 'secret evidence' from defendents. He even wanted to jail people if they were or had been friends with terrorist suspects and as Home Secretary resided over some of the most unprincipled laws in recent years (rather than tightening or using existing laws, Neo-Labour is obsessed with legislating).