Brian Whitaker's blog, March 2013

Readers may have noticed that I recently added Disqus commenting tools to the blog. Until now it was simply an experiment but, starting with the next blog post, there will be a comment facility for each item posted.

To do this, the format of the blog will be changed slightly. Instead of grouping a number of posts on a single web page, as happens at present, each post will in future appear on its own separate page.

I have set up a test page here, where readers can see what it will look like. Readers' views on this are welcome; please post them in the comments thread on the test page.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 8 March 2013.

Islamists: a view from British Conservatives

"Don't panic" is the basic message of a report on engaging with Islamist governments, published by the Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC) in Britain.

"The once-imagined prospect of Islamist political forces playing a central role in the region's future is now a reality," it says, adding that "western governments now have little choice but to engage with democratically elected Islamists and whatever governments they form".

Well, yes – except that engaging with Islamist governments in the Middle East is nothing new. The report seems to forget that Britain and other western countries have been doing it for years.

Those rich and ever-so-friendly princes in Saudi Arabia are the prime example, though most Arab regimes can be considered "Islamist" to some extent. Almost all of them provide a constitutional role for Islam, whether as the official religion of the state, as a source of legislation (in some cases the main or only source) or by stipulating that the head of state must be a Muslim.

These, of course, are the old, undemocratic regimes that we know and sometimes love, and the CMEC report is talking about the new, democratically elected governments – especially the one in Egypt.

Here again, we shouldn't get over-excited. Although Islamists currently have a majority in Egypt, no single Islamist party has yet won an overall majority in free elections to an Arab parliament.

That said, and bearing in mind that the CMEC is an offshoot of the British Conservative Party (only party members can join), the report does make some interesting observations.

"If Egypt’s Islamist government continues on its current course, at some point it will likely falter and fall.

"Popular disillusionment and impatience with the apparent shortcomings of Islamist political solutions risks a desperate population abandoning democratic political processes in favour of more radical action, leaving open the possibility of an ensuing battle for ownership of Egypt’s revolution, as a swing to more radical solutions offered by religious fundamentalist forces is met by fierce resistance from their secularist opponents."

It suggests that the Egyptian military could eventually step in, though the military may also turn out to be just as divided as the rest of the country and unable to agree on a course of action.

Turning to western foreign policy options, it says:

"The fundamental challenge is to strike a pragmatic balance between on the one hand effective engagement that furthers western foreign policy and security objectives, whilst on the other avoiding domestic perceptions and accusations of essentially 'appeasing terrorists' and parties whose policies are anathema to current western values.

"The west also faces hurdles in overcoming the longstanding, negative popular perceptions of it in the Arab world that are now reinvigorated with Islamist triumphalism."

It warns against the "conflation of all Islamists – whether moderate 'liberals' who have been forced out of the Muslim Brotherhood or hard core militant Salafis – into a homogenous core of anti-western, bearded misogynists will rapidly erode western governments’ room to manoeuvre in successfully navigating and engaging with them".

"As alarmist commentary [in sections of the media] feeds a prevalent 'fear' narrative amongst western voting publics and also provides Muslim populations with evidence of the west’s hostility to them, the risk is that broad, populist generalisations will drown out the nuance and complexity needed to engage with the new regional realities."

In engaging with Islamist governments, the report urges less preoccupation with their ideology and and more emphasis on their competence (or lack of it). Thus, issues of human rights and the role of women could be "recast" as "primarily concerns over
good, effective government" rather than disputes about religion or local traditions.

It also proposes focusing on mutual interests and identifying "shared goals" which "could begin to redraw the client-patron arrangements, exemplified by EU grants and US subsidy programmes, that ultimately have sowed so much resentment and yet achieved so little in the region".

Nevertheless, the report says western governments should set "non-negotiable parameters for cooperation with Islamist political leaderships that establish how serious they are in pursuing courses of moderation and inclusivity that acknowledge international conventions on issues from human rights to free trade".

I would be interested to hear what readers think of this – and also to what extent it might reflect the views of Conservative voters in Britain.

The report's author is Charles Holmes, described as a foreign policy and security analyst who "spent a number of years working with the highest levels of the Egyptian government" between 2003 and 2011.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 7 March 2013. Comment.

Britain's friends in the Emirates

Undeterred by the banning of a British academic from the UAE, the British government is urging closer ties between universities in the UK and the Emirates.

David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, was in Dubai yesterday, attending a conference on "the role of higher education in developing successful international knowledge economies".

In an interview with Gulf News, Willetts said:

"I have brought with me to the UAE a delegation with a representation of almost a dozen British universities who are keen to do more here because this is one of the liveliest centres for international universities.

"Here in the UAE there are more foreign campuses than anywhere else in the world and we see the UAE and the Gulf as a crucial place where universities are setting up and I hope that there will be more universities established as a result of this visit."

In the Emirates, though, the meaning of a "knowledge economy" depends on what type of knowledge you are talking about.

Last month, the UAE authorities gave orders that the situation in neighbouring Bahrain could not be discussed at an academic conference in Sharjah on "Transition in the Arab world".

The conference had been jointly organised by the London School of Economics (LSE) and the American University of Sharjah. Dr Kristian Ulrichsen of LSE, who had been due to speak on Bahrain, was refused admission at the airport and sent back to Britain.

Rather than accept what it regarded as a restriction on academic freedom, the LSE pulled out, causing the conference to be cancelled.

The UAE is certainly a "lively" place as far as universities are concerned – but not in the way that British minister Willetts seems to imagine. The Emirati authorities want to be associated with prestigious universities (for the sake of their image-building) but without buying into the principle of academic freedom.

In an article for Foreign Policy written after his expulsion, Ulrichsen wrote:

"Universities now are caught in the crossfire of the Gulf rulers' growing intolerance of criticism. This latest example of attempted intervention in a university's affairs marks the culmination of a depressing pattern that has seen the UAE authorities take closer control of domestic academic institutions, close down branches of international think-tanks and research institutes, expel a US professor of media and communications, and – now – seek to control research and conference agendas."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 6 March 2013. Comment.

The double standards of Hugo Chavez

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who died yesterday, once had a popular following in the Middle East.

In an opinion poll conducted in 2009, Arabs were asked which leaders they most admired outside their own countries. Chavez was named by 36% – placing him top, and a clear 18 points ahead of his nearest rivals.

As al-Arabiya notes today, he "enjoyed popular support for his often critical stances against Israel and the American policy in the region".

In January 2009, Chavez strongly denounced Israel's military offensive in Gaza, expelling the Israeli ambassador and some of the embassy staff.

At a meeting in Qatar in March 2009, he also proposed setting up an oil-backed currency to challenge the US dollar. "A new world is being born," he said told Arab leaders. "Empires fall. There is a world crisis of capitalism, it's shaking the planet."

These moves probably explain his popularity in the poll which was published the following May.

Meanwhile, though, Venezuela had been developing close relations with Iran, forming what Chavez described as an "axis of unity". In 2007, for example, both countries announced a joint fund of $2 billion to invest in countries "attempting to liberate themselves from the imperialist yoke". Chavez also received Iran's highest honour – the Islamic Republic Medal – for supporting "Iran's stance on the international scene".

Almost inevitably, this led to Chavez backing the regime when protests broke out following the suspect presidential election in June 2009. Some of the demonstrators' chants attacked Chavez as an "enemy of the people of Iran".

Chavez later supported other corrupt regimes – in Libya and Syria – when they too faced popular uprisings. This, of course, conflicted with the "man of the people" image that Chavez cultivated at home, but Chavez saw it as a way of resisting imperialism.

Assessing Chavez's Middle East policy, Juan Cole describes it as "contradictory and hypocritical". He writes:

"Iran is a right wing theocracy, not a left wing socialist state. If Chavez could embrace a repressive theocracy run for the benefit of wealthy oligarchs, merely because it is anti-American, then of what logical acrobatics was he incapable? ...

"Unable to perform a basic political-economy analysis that would demonstrate that Iran, Libya and Syria had abandoned whatever socialist commitments they once had (Iran of the ayatollahs had never been progressive), Chavez in his own mind appears to have thought that they were analogous to the Bolivia of Eva Morales or the Ecuador of Rafael Correa. Emphatically not so.

"He also imagined these countries as anti-American (only Iran really is), and appears to have believed that such a stance covers a multitude of sins on the part of their elites – looting the country, feathering their own nests, and authoritarian dictatorship and police states that deploy arbitrary arrest and torture."

Cole acknowledges that Chavez genuinely improved the lot of the Venezuelan working class and was popular in his own country ...

"But Chavez did sully his legacy as a progressive with his superficial reading of what 'anti-imperialism' entails and his inability to see the neo-liberal police states of the Middle East for what they had become."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 6 March 2013. Comment.

A royal welcome for Saudi tweeters?

I'm not sure what to make of the news that Saudi Arabia's first-ever "tweeters' forum" is taking place at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh today.

According to the Saudi Gazette, 500 of "the best young Saudi tweeters" will be gathering "to discuss the most pressing issues related to tweeting as well as the country’s development".

Female tweeters will be allowed to attend too, and will "have the opportunity to listen and interact with top tweeting experts and e-business leaders". Topics to be covered include censorship and self-censorship, along with "making and disseminating ideas on Twitter".

Saudi comedians will also be doing stand-up turns during the sessions, the paper says.

A note of caution may be in order, though, since the event is described as "an initiative" of the Prince Muhammad bin Salman Philanthropist Foundation.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is the same Prince Muhammad bin Salman who was appointed last week as head of the Crown Prince's court and special adviser to the Crown Prince with the rank of minister – a job for which he is obviously well qualified since his father happens to be the Crown Prince.

This makes me wonder if the tweeters' convention is quite what it seems.

The Saudi authorities have been getting in a flap over Twitter which is said to have three million users in the kingdom (and the number is rapidly rising). Last month the minister of culture and information admitted that censors can no longer keep pace with the huge volume of tweets and said "awareness in society must be upgraded to address the problem".

So it will not be totally surprising if today's Ritz-Carlton event turns out to be some kind of semi-official attempt to encourage the sort of tweets that don't give the authorities a headache.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 4 March 2013. Comment.

Clashes over 'religious kidnap' in Egypt

Sectarian clashes have broken out in Kom Ombo, in Upper Egypt, over the disappearance of a woman who is rumoured to have been kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity.

Ahram Online reports:

"The city's most central and largest church, Mar Girgis, has been under attack for the past three days from what residents described as "unknown assailants." Mostly in their teens, hundreds of young boys and men have been surrounding the church, showering it with rocks and Molotov cocktails.

"With Central Security Forces (CSF) trucks and soldiers fighting the assailants with teargas grenades, the church was relatively protected, although Molotov cocktails and rocks managed to reach its roofs and its open central courtyard.

"A field hospital was set up in one of the corners of the courtyard while many of the injured sat inside the church resting, others praying ..."

Despite all the rumours and speculation, as yet no one has produced any evidence that the kidnapping story is true. Claims of forced conversions with Muslims being abducted by Christians and Christians being abducted by Muslims are a fairly common occurrence in Egypt and they often result in violence. One of the most famous and controversial cases was that of Camillia Sehata, the wife of a Coptic priest, in 2010.

The most notable fact about these abduction tales is that they almost always involve women. Commenting on the Shehata case, Mariz Tadros wrote:

"It is a truism of study of patriarchal societies that concepts of honour are tied to women. The Coptic demonstrations in Upper Egypt upon the 'disappearance' of Camillia [Shehata] were driven by a sense of having lost a priest’s wife to a predatory Muslim majority.

"The phenomenon of abduction is thoroughly gendered in Egypt, since it is always a woman, and never a man, who is thought to have been abducted for the purposes of conversion.

"Certainly, there have been fierce sectarian clashes over land, places of worship and the commentary of religious leaders, but none have so fired the imagination of both Muslims and Christians like cases involving women in this intensely patriarchal society."

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 3 March 2013. Comment.

Sharmine Narwani: spinning the Assad line

Narwani appears on Press TV

Sharmine Narwani, an Assad apologist who can be found on Twitter denouncing British universities and the western mainstream media, managed to cast off enough of her principles last month to write an article for the mainstream media while citing Oxford University in her author's credentials.

Her article (for the Guardian) sought to downplay the number of civilian casualties in Syria and a biographical note described her as "a political analyst and commentator on Mideast geopolitics and a senior associate at St Antony's College, Oxford University".

The title of "senior associate" may sound rather grand but in reality it's just a loose association with the university rather than an academic post. The college website explains that senior associates "are usually academics on sabbatical leave, who wish to come to the college to work within the regional centres and/or with particular fellows for varying periods of time from one term to one academic year".

For reasons that are still unclear, Ms Narwani has been allowed to retain her "senior associate" tag at Oxford for well over two years – more than twice the normal time limit – and even though she disapproves of such institutions.

Last December, in one of her frequent outbursts on Twitter, she condemned Arab parents who send their children to British universities to learn from the "old colonials".

Narwani herself does not appear to have succumbed to what she calls the "westoxifying" influence of British universities and she advertises her Oxford connection at every opportunity. The effect of this is to give her published articles an aura of academic credibility they don't deserve, especially when they are simply spinning the Assad regime's line on Syria.

In the meantime, she continues to post vitriolic and offensive remarks on Twitter. This, for example, was her comment on the murder of the American ambassador and three others in Libya last September:

100s of 1,000s of Arabs & Muslims slaughtered by American troops. Tell me again why I should care about whatshisname-plus-three? #Libya

In addition to the Oxford connection, she advertises herself on her Twitter feed as a blogger for Huffington Post and the Lebanese al-Akhbar – though ex-blogger would be more accurate. Huffington dumped her well over a year ago and she doesn't appear to have written for al-Akhbar since last May.

Criticising Huffington's decision to "censor" her by refusting any more of her articles, Narwani claimed she had been offering material which had "an edge on the competition" and contained "exclusive information". Others have suggested she was dropped when Huffington's editors realised, rather belatedly, that her articles were mostly rubbish. (Readers can judge for themselves here.)

Bizarrely, Narwani's last article for Huffington praised Stratfor, the Texas-based commercially-run "intelligence" outfit, for challenging the "existing narrative" on Syria. This referred to a Stratfor report saying (on the basis of very flimsy evidence) that "most of the opposition's more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue".

The same Stratfor report also challenged "existing narratives" in another way by describing Assad's brother-in-law, the late Assef Shawkat, as a Sunni Muslim – an obvious error that Narwani repeated in her Huffington article without noticing.

In any case, no serious Middle East analyst cites Stratfor's "intelligence" to advance an argument since it's widely regarded as not very credible and a bit of a joke.

While trumpeting her work for Huffington and al-Akhbar, Narwani seems less eager to publicise other media activities such as her appearances on Press TV (the Iranian propaganda channel), Russia Today and the Voice of Russia. Some of them can be found here: