CAIRO, Egypt — The spasm of state violence here over the weekend marks one of two things: either an entrenchment of military dictatorship, or the long-deferred resumption of the January 25 uprising. The unusually large demonstrations that began on Friday in protest of the military’s tightening hold on power were met with violence from security forces and the military itself. Though the clashes are still ongoing, the nature of Egypt’s new military rulers and its struggling revolution appear already to have changed in fundamental ways.

The “Friday of One Demand,” orchestrated by the Islamists, who have sat out most of the year’s demonstrations, drew some of the biggest crowds seen in Tahrir since the original uprising that ousted Mubarak. Tens of thousands of the usual secular demonstrators joined hundreds of thousands of Salafis and Muslim Brothers.

“We are here to continue the revolution for a civil state,” said Adel Hamed, a former member of parliament for the Muslim Brotherhood. “No one is above the law, including the army.”

All year, secular liberals have accused the Brotherhood — the most powerful political party in the country — of playing footsy with the military. Finally, however, the Brothers broke with the military over the legal role of the armed forces, rather than, as many expected, over whether Egypt would be defined as a secular state.

Demonstrators from across the spectrum stayed on script on Friday, all demanding that the military honor its promise to leave power. Fringe elements, like the jihadis who waved photos of Osama bin Laden, were jeered even by fundamentalist Salafist protesters. When some zealous Islamists chanted for sharia, they were silenced by their peers.

Read the rest in The Atlantic.

Twitpic by @anjucomet

Force has been the ne plus ultra of the Egyptian regime, and only counter-force, by demonstrators, has proved effective at winning concessions. This weekend’s violence by the state seems like it could spark a full-fledged uprising like the one that began Jan. 25 and lasted 18 days. So far, there are 20 dead in two days, and at least 2,000 injured — enough to endow the protest in Tahrir Square with a logic of its own, beyond its original demand (transfer of authority from the military to a civilian president by April 2012).

The more demonstrators that are killed, the greater will be the popular fury: “the blood of the martyrs” was a potent rallying cry in January and February, and has been taken up again in Tahrir this weekend.

THE INTERNATIONALIST

Wanted: A grand strategy

In search of a cohesive foreign policy plan for America

[Originally published here in The Atlantic.]

CAIRO, Egypt — Mina Daniel’s mother slumped over his coffin, sobbing and imprecating him one final time.

“We were supposed to be going to your wedding,” she keened, slapping her face and thighs in grief. Before he was killed, her son had assured her he would fine. “Don’t be afraid of the shooting, they are just trying to scare us,” he told her.

Mina, 25, was killed on October 9 outside Maspero, the headquarters of Egyptian state television and the symbol of the dictatorship’s propaganda leviathan. According to his autopsy, one bullet smashed the back of Mina’s head while another entered his shoulder, ripped through his lungs, and exited his back. He died within moments, but has fast become the symbol of what Egyptian activists hopefully call “the second revolution.”

His mother, Nadia Faltas Beshara, grieved as any mother would. She covers her head and speaks with the inflection of Upper Egypt, where she lived before moving to a working-class suburb north of Cairo where many poor Christians live. She is a stark riposte to the false claim that Egypt’s revolutionaries are feckless bourgeois, armchair socialists.

The dominant storyline to emerge in the weeks after the Maspero Massacre is that it marks the beginning of the end of Tahrir Square. The military has shed its inhibitions about using violence against the people, according to this pessimistic view, while a great number of Egyptians has proved ready to believe official propaganda and willing to organize flash sectarian lynch mobs at the beck and call of state television.

There’s another way of reading these events though, and it’s the one favored by Nadia Faltas and by the many friends of Mina Daniel.

“The government engineered this to divide us,” Nadia Faltas said even in the freshest hours of her mourning. With no self-consciousness, she has embraced the galvanizing role of the martyr’s mother.

She has appeared in Tahrir Square and at other demonstrations with the mother of Khaled Said, the young man beaten to death by police in the summer of 2010, apparently in retribution for his efforts to publicize police brutality. The regime laughed off the weekly 2010 protests over Khaled Said’s killing, but within six months those small protests, and the Facebook pages connected to them, sparked the Tahrir Square uprising.

That is the model that Mina Daniel’s friends invoke as they contemplate his death and the sheer unmediated brutality with which it was meted out. In front of Maspero, 27 civilians were killed and according to the military some number of soldiers that it is keeping secret “in order to protect the feelings of the nation.”

“Mina’s death has now put a burden on us. His blood is on our necks,” his friend Kareem Mohammed, 20, said a week after the massacre, at a strategy meeting of the Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom, the grassroots group of which Mina was a member. “We have to achieve what he dreamed of, a united nation free of military rule.”

Religious Copts sometimes come across as parochial and chauvinistic, concerned primarily with the oppression of their church. But Mina transcended that narrow categorization. He fought against military trials for civilians, and took part in all the major stages of the uprising against Mubarak’s regime. During the initial uprising, he was shot in Tahrir Square and struck in the head with rocks. He contested the institutionalized discrimination that prevents Copts from freely building churches, but he exhorted members of his sect to engage in the broader political struggle against authoritarian rule.

Many of Mina’s close friends were Muslims. After he was shot but before he died, he said he wanted his funeral to pass through Tahrir. Late on Monday night, after his autopsy and a rousing mass at the Abbasiya Cathedral, several hundred of Mina’s friends marched several miles back to Tahrir Square with his coffin. They ignored a few toughs who pelted them with rocks along the way.

•       •       •       •       •That Sunday night has seared visceral, unforgettable images on the minds of Egyptians of a certain conscience. Slowly, indefatigably, it is steeling them for another revolution. Regardless of whether they succeed, the October 9 Maspero Massacre will mark a turning point in Egypt’s uprising.

On that Sunday, a march for the rights of Christians converged with a sit-in in front of Maspero, the squat concrete labyrinth that holds the headquarters of state television. Symbolically, it is the lungs of the regime, where its noxious but effective televised propaganda is authored. Among them were many revolutionary youth activists, hardly Coptic chauvinists, and Muslims who supported the protesters call for religious freedom and equality.

In short order, shots rang out. Plainclothes thugs milled among the demonstrators. Eyewitnesses saw men in civilian clothes shooting from passing vehicles. Military Police turned on the crowd. An armored personnel carrier drove over unarmed demonstrators, its driver appearing to hunt them down. State television reported — erroneously, without evidence, and possibly with malignant intent — that Christian mobs had attacked army conscripts. Announcers and officers summoned “honorable Egyptians” to Maspero to defend the army.

Lynch mobs quickly swarmed downtown. “The Muslims are here, where are the Christians?” they chanted. Christian men and women were beaten. The military police did nothing to control the murderous disorder for nearly six hours. Only after midnight did the army — which doesn’t technically need help from unruly thugs armed with swords and sticks — reestablished control of the streets, finally allowing Christians to take their wounded to the Coptic hospital on Ramses Street without fear of attack.

•       •       •       •       •The aftermath, as so often here, has begun to seem even more important than the event itself, with all the traumas it ignited and reignited. Egyptians hadn’t seen such violence against peaceful demonstrators since the Battle of the Camels on February 2, a farcical and deadly dispatch to Tahrir of poor, paid thugs, many on horseback and some leading the camels they normally plied for the tourist trade in Giza. The Camel Battle exposed the regime’s venality and turned the tide in favor of Tahrir: a mafia move that backfired. Activists hope that Maspero will do the same, although there are unanswered questions that are cause for a more generalized fear.

To the demonstrators, it’s clear what happened.

“Tantawi is dealing with the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis and it will hurt the Christians,” said Nabil Mansoor, a psychologist who accompanied his friends to the hospital to pick up their son, who had been beaten on Sunday but has escaped with scabs on his forehead and a sprained shoulder. “They want the Copts to leave Egypt. They want ethnic cleansing like in Bosnia.”

The military has been tightening the screws of censorship while peddling a brew of lies, delusion, paranoia and justification. General Adel Emara said it simply wasn’t military doctrine to run people over, even though Egyptian police have been known to do so as a crowd-control technique. At a briefing intended to exculpate the army, Emara and another general showed the video of the predator-APC chasing down and crushing people to death; most of the viewers already had seen photos of the young teenage boy, his skull crushed into a lopsided cartoon shape but his face still intact. General Emara had a cosmically diametric interpretation of the APC video; the driver, he said, was trying to escape the frightening crowds — not to kill them. Of course, the general added, it was possible that a Christian fanatic had hijacked the APC and then killed his fellow marchers in order to incite anger against the military leadership. Among such claims — which offend logic — the military sprinkled dark accusations of a “hidden hand” at work, a favored rhetorical trope of Mubarak’s time. It reeked of misdirection, or worse.

“We are not circulating conspiracy theories, but there is no doubt that there are enemies of the revolution,” General Mahmoud Hegazy said.

As testimonies are collected and documentary evidence is amassed, and as time passes and the details and chronology come more clearly into focus, there is the stark suggestion of a hidden hand at work, though: the old secret police and their legions of minions.

Thousands of angry armed men materialized almost instantaneously the night of the Maspero killings. Some of the bullets collected by protesters appear not to be of standard military type. It’s entirely possible that the protesters and the military both are telling the truth — and that the violence was orchestrated by the veteran provocateurs and thugs who for the last two decades have unleashed themselves, with police permission, on political dissidents time and time again.

If this is the case, the revolutionaries and the military rulers have a common enemy: the feloul, or “remnants” of the ex-regime, who would be just as unhappy to lose power to a military dictatorship as to an elected civilian government.

•       •       •       •       •Ola Shabha, a leader of Mina Daniel’s youth movement, helped organize a detailed rebuttal to the military presentation on Maspero. She’s collecting evidence, but more importantly, she’s using the incident as a catalyst for her peers.

“We can’t take our eyes off the bigger issue. The military is leading us toward fascism, especially by manipulating minorities,” Shabha told an emergency gathering of Youth for Justice and Freedom. Mina’s friends, most of them barely in their twenties argued about the most effective way to rebound from his death, and the murky massacre of which it was part. The room was filled with smoke, and some of the activists had tears in their eyes. After four hours of argument, they agreed to fight on in two arenas — within the system, they would run candidates for parliamentary elections; against the system, they would stage memorials as protests, hoping sympathy for the slain Che Guevara-look-alike would turn public opinion against the state and toward the revolution.

In the weeks since, Mina’s friends, and many who never met him, have held candlelight vigils across Cairo. Not just in Tahrir, but in other downtown squares like Talaat Harb, and far from the city center in rundown neighborhoods like Ezbet El-Nakhl at the end of the subway line.

“We have to go back to the streets and work with everybody, regardless of ideologies,” said Hossam Hafez, another Justice and Freedom activist. “Otherwise, tomorrow, the day after, we’ll all be Mina Daniel. Our nerves are strained, we’re empty handed nine months after the revolution. This is the only way to regain it.”

WBUR’s Here & Now did a segment today on the success of Islamists in Tunisia’s elections, and the stated intent of Libya’s transitional rulers to base their new constitution on sharia (just like Iraq did during the American occupation!). Robin Young asked good questions, and was interested in probing the real debate within the Islamist political spectrum, to get past the all-too-frequent binary of scary Islamists versus nice secularists.

Her question:

The leader of Libya’s transitional council says Sharia Law will be the basis for the country’s new democracy; a moderate Islamist party is claiming victory in Tunisia’s elections; and, the Muslim Brotherhood is poised to do well whenever Egypt votes. Should the West be concerned or is this just the natural course of moving toward democracy in these Muslim countries?

My sense is that as political space opens up in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab countries, there will be an increased fracture between a “liberal” pole, made up of religious parties that advocate secular and civic governance, and a “conservative” pole, led by fundamentalists interested in theocratic governance. The cleavage won’t precisely map traditional differences between liberals and conservatives, and all parties to the debate will define themselves as religious Islamists. “Islamism” will cease to be a meaningful distinguishing label. Already, it’s hard to rely on the term when it applies equally to parties as different as Turkey’s AKP party, Tunisia’s Ennahda, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Noor Party, Salafists in the Gulf, Hamas, Hezbollah, and so on.

 

It was supposed to be a master class in revolutionary activism: two stars of the Tahrir Square uprising visiting Occupy Wall Street to swap tactics and sass. It ended up more like an undergraduate teach-in.

For Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher, the visit to Zuccotti Park was an exhilarating – if surreal – break from the punishing workload of fighting the military dictatorship back home in Egypt.

“Where is the tear gas?” Maher asked with a smile, but he seemed genuinely puzzled by the cordial relations between the Wall Streeters and the cops.

Maher and Mahfouz both have been arrested before by Egypt’s notoriously abusive police, and Mahfouz recently was hauled before a military court martial for allegedly insulting her country’s military rulers.

Mahfouz had a question of her own. “Where are the organizers?” she asked. “There must be organizers.” No one knew. She ended up chatting at the welcome table with a young man wearing a straw hat.

“How do you sustain yourselves? How do you keep yourself energized?” he asked. “That’s our main problem.”

“You need a message,” she told him.

She inscribed an Egyptian flag (“From Tahrir Square to Wall Street”) with black marker and presented it to the hundreds who gathered to hear her and Maher.

Mahfouz, 26, spent years protesting when most Egyptians stayed home, and became a phenomenon with her self-produced YouTube editorials. She lambasted rulers with homespun humor, and exhorted people to join her at protests. Eventually they did, in the millions.

Maher, 31, worked with virtually every activist group in Egypt, and founded the April 6 movement, which was instrumental in organizing textile worker strikes in 2008. His grassroots political organization boasts the kind of street muscle and labor ties that Occupy Wall Street still only hopes to build.

People asked about the role of women in the Egyptian uprising, the connections between youth and labor movements, and the importance of social media. Some of the questions were well intended but astonishingly vague: “How do you overthrow a system?” one man asked. Maher politely replied, “It’s easier to overthrow a dictator than an entire system.” He didn’t belabor the point that the Egyptian revolutionaries, so far as they are concerned, have not yet won; they still are fighting their system. Egypt’s military rulers have staged a vicious campaign against Maher’s April 6 movement, accusing them with no evidence of working as American spies and subjecting them to a public inquiry.

The Americans wanted to know how they could help Egypt.

“Get your revolution done. That’s the biggest help you can give us,” Mahfouz said, expressing the hope that America would one day cut off the $1.3 billion yearly payments that sustain Egypt’s military.

She also advised Occupy Wall Street to select its own leaders and craft a simple message “that no one can change.”

On Monday evening at Zuccotti Park, Mahfouz was eager to model the fiery disobedience with which she’s inspired countless Egyptians. “Let’s march!” she said after an hour-long question-and-answer session, grabbing an Egyptian flag and flashing the victory sign with both hands.

A few hundred demonstrators fell in line behind her and Maher, who gamely joined the English chants. The police allowed the march onto Wall Street itself, and at each corner the American leaders consulted an officer about the preferred route. Weary of the somewhat stilted slogans, which lacked the umph and rhythm of Egyptian chants, Mahfouz and Maher taught the crowd the iconic cry of the Arab uprisings: “Al shaab yurid isqat al nizam,” or “The people demand the fall of the regime.” The crowd adopted its own hybrid: “Al shaab yurid isqat Wall Street.”

As they wound back to Zuccotti Park, demonstrators awaited a cue from the police before crossing Broadway. It was too much for Mahfouz. She stopped in the middle of the intersection, stopped traffic, pumped a fist in the air, and demanded the fall of Wall Street. Nervous demonstrators skittered to the sidewalk, leaving Mahfouz with just the cameras and a few dozen stalwarts who seemed willing to accept her invitation to be arrested.

For a few seconds, there was a palpable crackle of tension. But the police, it seemed, didn’t want the hassle. They stepped back, and without a confrontation, the moment subsided. Mahfouz joined her comrades back on the sidewalk.

“I wanted to show them that they need to be tough, even if they get arrested,” she said with her trademark toothy smile. With that she repaired for a private session with Occupy organizers – she finally had found them – and the long trip back to Cairo the following day.

[Originally published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, subscription required.]

Review of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square, By Steven A. Cook. Illustrated. 408 pp. Oxford University Press. $27.95.

On the morning of Feb. 11, 2011, hours before Hosni Mubarak submitted to the millions of his subjects clamoring for his resignation, a half-dozen retired generals sipped coffee poolside at the Gezira Club, kitted up for tennis and contemptuously dismissed the demonstrators in Tahrir Square. “Who do they represent?” scoffed a man who until recently had worked in state security. “They are loud, but don’t forget there are 79 million Egyptians who are not in Tahrir Square. They are the majority.”

It never crossed their minds that Mubarak might capitulate, as he would do later that day, or that the passivity of most Egyptians did not equal support for a regime that had squandered Egypt’s position at the head of the Arab world while excelling only at abuse and corruption. That rank incomprehension — one might less charitably call it arrogant cluelessness — stretched from the coffee klatch at the Gezira Club through the entire government. Yet Egypt had managed to remain a stable linchpin of American policy in the Middle East for decades, until suddenly it wasn’t.

This transformation, along with the internal decline from pride of the Arab world to shameful decaying autocracy, is the subject of Steven A. Cook’s “Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.” The book clearly was in the making long before the uprising.

Cook’s central contention is that since the military coup of 1952, Egypt’s leaders have never had an ideology. Instead, they have resorted to an increasingly complicated and cruel apparatus of coercion, bullying the citizenry into consent but failing to create any positive reason to support the state.

Cook isn’t trying to tell us why Egyptians revolted in 2011, or what might come next, although his perceptive analysis helps answer both questions. His real aim is to diagnose Egypt’s decline and directionlessness in the modern era, from Nasser’s charisma to Mubarak’s dead-man governing act, and to shed light on America’s role. With meticulous historical context and the acumen of a political scientist, Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, weaves together a narrative drawn from archives, interviews and his own firsthand reporting during a decade of visits to Egypt.

His story begins with a quick survey of Egypt’s modern political awakening, an excellent primer for the uninitiated. Egypt first revolted against its colonizers in 1882, ushering in an age of ferment that included a British-dominated monarchy and a religious awakening inspired by the pioneers of the Islamist revival. Corruption flourished, as did ego-driven power struggles within the elite. Disgust began to reach a boiling point in 1948, when Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officer compatriots fought in Palestine against the newly declared state of Israel. Between the king’s incompetence, the greed of the governing liberals and the Machiavellian scheming of the British, who humiliatingly still occupied the Suez Canal, Egypt’s leaders were doomed.

Nasser’s coup in 1952 threw all the bums out and placed power in the hands of a small group of young, unknown officers, who promised to advance the national interest as impartial technocrats. A charismatic orator, Nasser became the voice and conscience of Arab nationalism, and experimented with reforms that gave land, education and jobs to the peasantry.

Egypt’s people invested great hope in the idea of an apolitical, incorruptible military leadership — a comprehensible but unfounded reflex that prevails again today. The Free Officers tapped a deep and historically grounded wave of rage against foreign interference, a backlash that has never subsided.

Nasser flirted with the Soviets but never embraced Communism. He used the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve power, then ruthlessly crushed the organization when he realized it was becoming too popular to control.

By the time his mismanaged army collapsed in the 1967 war with Israel, Nasser’s reforms had stalled. Anwar Sadat, the weak officer who inherited the presidency in 1970, carved out a power base by gutting what remained of civil society. Sadat relaxed the restrictions on the Muslim Brotherhood and encouraged free enterprise, spawning a wealthy new elite that matured into Mubarak’s crony capitalist circle.

Cook does an excellent job telling the story of Sadat’s daring trip to Jerusalem, which quickly and unexpectedly led to the Camp David accords — a peace treaty almost universally reviled in the Arab world, including Egypt. With that one move, Sadat managed to become the darling of the West, while sacrificing almost all his domestic support. Few of his countrymen mourned when he lost his life to an assassin’s bullet in 1981, and his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, assumed power.

The lesson for Mubarak and Egypt’s ruling class was to risk nothing. Gone was Egypt’s sense of destiny as helmsman of the Arab world. Abandoned, too, was the confidence to imagine developmental leaps forward like the Aswan dam.

The joke goes that upon being sworn in, Mubarak took his first ride in the presidential limo. The veteran driver reached a fork in the road. “Nasser always turned left here,” the chauffeur said. “Sadat always turned right. What would you like to do?” After long thought, Mubarak decided: “Just stay where we are.”

Under Mubarak, poverty and inequality leveled off for a time but then began to increase again. The sacrifice of liberties ceased to be a Faustian trade-off for security and economic progress once the government could no longer deliver on bread-and-butter issues. Egypt became little more than a byword for a brutal security state — though one that was a stalwart ally to Washington and Jerusalem.

By the 1990s most of Mubarak’s energy was going into suppressing political dissent and fighting to preserve his special relationship with Washington. He deployed an army of secret police officers and informants that rivaled East Germany’s, infiltrating everything from the doormen’s union to student theater groups. But by 2011, spies, tear gas and heavy-handed repression were not enough to keep him in power.

Readers looking for a full account of this year’s uprising will have to wait for the spate of coming books by journalists, insiders and political analysts. What Cook has given us is a scholar’s well-informed, analytical history, which offers invaluable insights to anyone interested in how Egypt came to its present impasse. “The Struggle for Egypt” is at its best when delivering finely honed details, as when Cook explains the relationship among Egypt, America and Israel. He offers a surprisingly engaging disquisition on Public Law 480, the American “Food for Peace” program that was the progenitor of an unhealthy aid-driven relationship between Washington and Cairo.

But Cook’s storytelling is laced with clichés and hackneyed images (“jaw-­dropping,” “live wire”). This is the kind of book where “the mist off the Nile . . . creates an odd sense of foreboding and anticipation” on the morning of the 1952 coup. (Was it really the mist, or was it the tanks surrounding all the government buildings?) He awkwardly drops characters he has met into his account without any apparent connection to the narrative, only to allow them to disappear a few pages later.

These stylistic hiccups, however, are merely occasional irritants in a substantial and engaging book. Cook knows his material and gets the important points right. His account should be particularly sobering for American readers, who will find in these pages a damning exposition of why United States aid and political influence are currently viewed with such profound suspicion in Egypt.

History offers today’s Egyptian reformers many warnings, most importantly about the danger of an unaccountable, all-powerful military. Egyptians have long suffered from the gap between their leaders’ rhetoric and practice. Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak spoke the language of revolution, Arab pride and economic prosperity, but presided over a military welfare state that impoverished its people and ruled through systemic torture. This disconnect will plague anyone who tries to resuscitate Egypt after Mubarak. For if the man who ruled for 29 years, 3 months and 28 days is gone, the dysfunctional, Orwellian system he did so much to create and sustain lives on.

Libyan exile Shahrazad Kablan was teaching school in Cincinnati when the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi began in her hometown, Benghazi. She put her house on the market and within weeks had moved to Qatar, where she hosted a taboo-busting show on the pro-rebel Libya TV.

On Wednesday night she was in Manhattan, drumming up support among women’s rights activists for the long slog ahead as Libya rebuilds.

“We need help,” Ms. Kablan said. “I want people to remember that Libya is a story of hope, but we need the international community to play its part.”

Ms. Kablan had joined another Libyan diaspora activist, Sara Maziq, and New York Times reporter Anne Barnard (who is married to the author of this blog post) to discuss the role of Libyan women after Colonel Qaddafi’s ouster. During the uprising, women used their clandestine nongovernmental organization networks to smuggle weapons to rebel fighters and pass intelligence. Ms. Barnard’s reporting on Libyan women activists drew the attention of advocates in the United States, who organized Wednesday’s symposium in New York.

“The idea is to connect people who can bring attention to the cause and offer technical help,” said Jill Iscol, the philanthropist who hosted the meeting in her Fifth Avenue apartment. Ms. Iscol, a longtime patron of women’s causes, is the author of “Hearts on Fire,” a book scheduled to be published in November about social activism.

During the uprising, Ms. Kablan used her show to openly probe topics that normally went unmentioned in public forums, like systematic rape by Qaddafi fighters. Since then, she has been advising Libya’s National Transitional Council on education reform. Her small, mostly self-funded nonprofit already has recruited dozens of American teachers willing to spend next summer in Libya working with special needs children.

Ms. Maziq, a former investment banker, quit her job in Dubai to devote herself full-time to Colonel Qaddafi’s overthrow. She helped supply communications equipment to fighters in Misurata, her home city, and since the liberation of Tripoli her Libyan Civil Society Organization has been working to open women’s centers around the country.

“Most of us dug deep in our pockets. Now we’re tapped out,” Ms. Maziq said.

Ms. Iscol’s meeting, organized in tandem with the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit organization that promotes women leaders around the world, sparked some immediate connections.

An officer at a New York foundation volunteered to connect Ms. Maziq and Ms. Kablan with women judges and legal experts who could provide advice to Libyans drafting a new constitution; they agreed to meet the following day. A former prosecutor and a foundation head both offered support for programs helping victims of sexual violence. An official at the American mission to the United Nations invited the Libyans to give a presentation. A Dutch diplomat said his government had money available for women’s activists in Libya.

Ms. Kablan and Ms. Maziq are headed to Libya again in the next month. If they can raise enough funds, both hope to expand the fledgling nonprofits they currently run with support from friends and family.

“Libya has no infrastructure,” Ms. Maziq said. “People tell me, ‘We’ve done what we know how to do. Now, you need to come back and rebuild our country.’”

Thursday morning Ms. Kablan was woken up by a text message from a friend in Libya: Colonel Qaddafi, according to early reports, finally had been captured.

Still in her nightgown, Ms. Kablan smiled and restrained a shout of joy.

“We really needed this,” Ms. Kablan said as she read the latest news on her laptop. “This is a great boost for us.”

(Originally published on the The New York Times At War blog.)

Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have been released and Gilad Shalit is home. How will this deal shape regional dynamics in the years to come? I’ve been studying “engagements with hostile non-state actors” for several years (another name for the subject is “talking to terrorists”), and like the many scholars and diplomats who have written on the subject, I have plumbed the yawning crevasse between rhetoric and practice. Western nations don’t talk to groups they’ve designated as terrorists, unless those groups have something they want. Historically, the U.S. and Israel almost always talk to their enemies.

What can we expect as strategic payoff from the Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange?

1. Israel’s enemies know that hostages are their best investment. Hezbollah reaped an asymmetrical deal in 2008 that did wonders to consolidate its power in Lebanon, trading two dead Israeli soldiers for live prisoners and nearly 200 bodies. The Hamas trade values one living captured Israeli as equal to about 1,000 living Palestinian prisoners. Hamas, Hezbollah, and other resistance groups now have every incentive to capture Israelis, dead or alive, and barter them. It’s officially an established tactic. “If one episode of this epic is finished there are others that we will go through till all prisoners are realized,” Hamas said in a statement published on its website. Hezbollah was equally direct, listing three decades of prisoner swaps and declaring, “These deals, along with the accord achieved today, have taught Zionist entity that the Israeli troops are under the reach of resistance heroes, who proved that this enemy doesn’t understand but the language of power.”

2. Force is better than politics at kick-starting negotiations. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have gone nowhere for years. Mahmoud Abbas’ application for statehood was treated almost like a declaration of war. Meanwhile, the Palestinian faction that actually acts like it’s at war with Israel and denies its right to exist extracted a favorable deal for itself after five years of negotiating over its hostage.

3. Corollary: Israel responds to violence. Hamas has argued since 2005 that its rockets and other attacks from Gaza drove Israel to dismantle its settlements there. That argument has an echo in Israel’s withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 and disastrous battlefield performance against Hezbollah in 2006. Those, like Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who argue for a political rather an armed resistance, will have an even harder time now.

4. Egypt is more a bystander than a player on Israel-Palestine. There was some analytical hot air about the boost this deal will give its brokers in Cairo and Gaza, but let’s be pragmatic. Hamas is in trouble with its constituents in Gaza and the enthusiasm for the deal is unlikely to reverse the steady erosion of the Hamas government’s popularity in the strip. Similarly, the military rulers in Egypt were praised for spurring along the role, but their popularity depends on whether they secure Egypt. If Hamas moves its headquarters from Damascus to Cairo, then Egypt might gain some leverage.

Rather than a breakthrough, this should be perceived as historically continuous with previous deals, including the 2008 release of Samir Quntar to Hezbollah and previous swaps of Israeli corpses for prisoners in 1996, 1998, and 2004. In short, this deal makes quick shrift of the fiction that Israel “doesn’t talk to terrorists,” and it reinforces the conflict dynamic.

(Originally published here in The Atlantic.)

Next spring I’ll be leading a group of graduate students at Columbia in a comparative analysis of how Islamist parties fare in provincial governance. The study will build on a project conducted by a team of SIPA students last year. Their full report is available here. I’m including the abstract below. The question continues to be of relevance as concerns — founded or not — about how Islamists will rule continue to drive American policy. For the second stage of the project we’re looking for suggestions to make the methodology as rigorous as possible.

* * *

How do Islamists rule?

An analysis of Islamist provincial governance

April 2011

Executive Summary

In recent years, increasing numbers of Islamist parties have risen to power through democratic elections. Though much has been written about Islamists, very little work has looked broadly at the question of how governing – in particular at the local or municipal level – affects these movements and their ideology.

Very little work has taken an empirical approach to measuring the performance of these movements as policymakers, providers of public services and enforcers of law and security. Most writing has focused on Hamas, to the exclusion of the other Islamist movements that have acquired a growing share of local (and sometimes national) power, especially in Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon, the Gulf, and the Palestinian territories.

This report evaluates the success of two sub-national Islamist governments: the Muttahida Majilis-e-Amal (MMA) in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan, which held power from 2002-2007, and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly SCIRI) and Al-Fadhila in Basra province, Iraq, which held power from 2005-2009. By examining data on indicators of social, economic and cultural development, the research team compared the performance of Islamists to that of their counterparts in each country.

While confirming some commonly held beliefs about Islamist parties in political power, such as their negative effect on gender equality, the report calls others into question. Our case studies challenge the oft-stated rubric that Islamists are stealth dictators who rule by coercion and disrespect democratic transitions of power. In many ways, we found that Islamist parties behave similarly to non-Islamist parties in positions of political power: they are opportunists who will stray from their campaign platforms if they find it in their institutional self-interest.

The MMA, which came to power as an anti-American, pro-sharia coalition, remained faithful to its revivalist rhetoric throughout its rule. The rights of women deteriorated in the NWFP, and education was increasingly Islamicized. In terms of security, the MMA was able to keep the peace, but mainly because it refused to aid the government’s pursuit of militants. The MMA was able to deliver public goods at a level comparable to its counterpart in Punjab, but in the end the coalition was racked with accusations of corruption, the various parties that constituted its core fractured along ideological and policy lines, and it overplayed its hand with a controversial bill which would have established sharia in the NWFP.

In Basra, many of the areas in which the Shia Islamist parties appeared to fare well were beyond their control. Literacy levels in Basra were some of the highest in the country under their rule, but education policy is run out of Baghdad through a national ministry. Similarly, the improvement in public health cannot be linked to any local policy because Basra was flooded with medical aid from various NGOs. An increase in gender-based violence can be attributed to Islamist policies, however, as can the deterioration of minority rights, as Sunni Muslims were targeted by Shia militias.

Focusing on the provincial level allowed for a greater degree of specificity in measurements and the ability to discern more competing views than can be witnessed on the national level in most quasi-democratic states. The experience of each party was unique, and the report does not make cross-national comparisons. However, both cases were located in conflict zones, which made it equally difficult to draw conclusions independent of exogenous factors.

Some of the report’s other conclusions and hypotheses include:

• Islamist rule in immediate post-conflict situations quickly yields to less divisive political factions (if subject to electoral politics).
• Islamist parties are not less corrupt than their secular counterparts.
• We witnessed moderation in both cases, but on different levels. While the MMA moderated their policies, the Iraqi parties merely moderated their rhetoric.
• Islamist parties at the local level can be constrained within federal frameworks.

The wave of protest and revolution currently rippling throughout the Middle East is likely to bring more of these groups into governing roles. Now that Islamists have proved their staying power, policymakers are looking for policy tools to moderate change. This report can help provide an understanding of what the transition to Islamist governance might mean.

My latest column in The Boston Globe.

Fundamentalism’s rise just shows that the secular state has won, says political scientist Olivier Roy

If you read the news, it can feel impossible to escape the growing influence of religious fundamentalism. Christian evangelicals set the talking points of the Republican primaries, and America’s leaders speak about God with an insistence that might have made the authors of the Constitution blush. Religious parties have become steady players in the politics of secular Europe. Meanwhile, Islamists from Morocco to Malaysia campaign to eliminate all barriers between the mosque and the state. With religion so ubiquitous in politics, it sometimes appears that the world may be crossing the threshold from the age of secularism into one of religious states.

But what if all this religious activism and faith-based politics herald not a new dominance but a passing into irrelevance? That’s the counterintuitive assertion of Olivier Roy, a French political scientist and influential authority on Islam, who has now turned his eye on the growth of fundamentalism across all religions.

As Roy argued in the book “Holy Ignorance,” published late last year, old-line religions with organized power structures are in a global decline, overtaken by fundamentalist sects such as Islamic Salafis and Christian Pentecostals, which make a charismatic appeal to the individual. But in fact, Roy argues, this trend suggests that religion has effectively given up the struggle for power in the public square. Despite the extremist rhetoric of televangelists in the American Midwest or the Persian Gulf, these growing religions are really just a reaction to the triumph of secularism. They demand a total personal commitment from their adherents: abstinence, sobriety, frequent prayer. But, though their leaders may talk of making America an officially Christian nation or of establishing pure Islamic states in places like Egypt, they carry none of the real institutional or military weight of established religions in history.

“The religious movements are here, they have an agenda,” Roy says. “I never deny that. I say that political ideologies based on religion don’t work. You can’t manage a country in the name of a religion.” In other words, as he interprets it, the world is not in the grip of a clash of civilizations; religious movements are just growing more strident because they are detached from the culture of nations. An age of vocal religious fundamentalists, contrary to our expectations, may also be an age of safely secular states.

If Roy’s hypothesis proves correct, it stands to change international politics by making us much less concerned about religious extremism. It could give secular forces new power to deal with fundamentalist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood; since their religious agendas are not likely to dominate any nation’s political life, they could be dealt with on a purely material level. At home, American policy makers could rest assured that extreme fundamentalist positions on gay rights or teaching evolution in schools would inevitably be leavened by the political realities of a pluralistic, secular society. For those who treasure secular governance and separation of church and state, Roy’s hypothesis–if the 21st century bears it out–would mean there is far less in the world to fear.

In “Holy Ignorance,” Roy presents what reads like an alternate history of the last half century, narrating some familiar facts but drawing counterintuitive conclusions. Fundamentalist religion has been on the rise worldwide since the 1950s. In the Islamic world the fastest growing sect is the Salafis, who advocate a return to 7th-century piety. Among Christians, evangelical Christian sects like Mormons, Pentecostals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses are the fastest growing, while ultra-Orthodox Jews are gaining within the Jewish community. Almost nowhere, with the exception of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran, has the fundamentalist revival taken the form of a single religious group, unified behind one leader, trying to take over a country. Instead, ascendant fundamentalists are a fractious group. Moreover, their growth comes at a time when pluralistic, secular politics predominate, and religious institutions have less power than ever before. In a borderless, globalized world, the only religions that grow are exactly those that sever themselves from a specific national or cultural context, and appeal to universal humanity. Such religions might sound louder or more shrill, but they’re also by definition less significant to the political and cultural life of nations.

Roy’s argument has grown out of decades studying the interaction between religion, politics and culture. As a young man, Roy writes, he was jarred by the arrival of a born-again Christian in his religious youth group. It was his first encounter with charismatic religion. After he established himself as an authority on the Islamic world, Roy began to argue by the 1990s that Islamic fundamentalists would not manage to win over their own societies, despite their violent heyday; his 1994 book, “The Failure of Political Islam,” was criticized by some as premature, but now most scholars agree with its conclusions.

From today’s vantage point, religious politicians and commentators seem like a force to be reckoned with, but it’s instructive to compare them to the mainline religious institutions that used to wield power. During the Middle Ages, institutional religions possessed tremendous real-world power. The Catholic Church decided which leaders had legitimacy and triggered massive wars. With the Industrial Revolution, Christian missionary activity inextricably intertwined with European colonization. Even as recently as 1960, the Vatican held such sway that American voters feared John F. Kennedy would take orders from the pope; his edicts set the parameters of European social policy well into the 20th century. Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, until colonialism eroded the authority of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the supposedly all-powerful caliphs and their governors could be overthrown when religious scholars withdrew their support.

Gradually, however, secularism took root. After the French Revolution, the number of European leaders claiming a divine right to rule dwindled. Even the caliphate in Istanbul began to look like a secular empire with vestigial religious trappings. Modern nation states were more concerned with holding territory and controlling populations than with matters of faith. Roy argues that even when they invoked religion to gain legitimacy, modern states were engaged in an inherently political quest, in which religion was marginalized.

It was the loss of direct religious power that prompted the rise of what Roy calls “pure” religions: sects that appeal to the universal individual. Old-line religions talked explicitly about power and considered themselves more powerful than states. As they declined, Roy says, the public began to move to groups that were more charismatic and focused on faith in the private sphere–Mormons, Pentecostals, Tablighis, Salafis, ultra-Orthodox Jews. We call these sects “fundamentalist” because they claim to return to the founding texts of their faith, stripping out the practices that had accreted in the centuries since the founding of their respective religions.

This return to basics has visceral appeal to those seeking a faith. But millions of born-again evangelicals, seeking salvation from a mosaic of political backgrounds, are unlikely to develop the clout the Vatican once had. Look closely at the surge of Salafists around the Islamic world, and you’ll find extreme fragmentation, with rivalries between the followers of competing sheikhs often taking priority over concern with unbelievers. The religions that are actually growing and winning converts are resolutely not political monoliths in the making.

In Roy’s view, the pure new religions employ simplistic ideas that sound universal and appeal to new converts, but whose vigor can be hard to sustain generation to generation. These charismatic, fundamentalist religions depend on constant renewals of faith, Roy says, and depend on the zeal of new converts for their growth and dynamism. Fundamentalist sects can afford to take extreme positions on belief, Roy says, precisely because they have none of the constraints of governance and authority.

Not everyone is convinced by Roy’s interpretation. Even if there are hardly any real theocracies left in the world, religious hard-liners still influence political life directly in countless places. One need look no further than the role of born-again Christian activists in the Republican Party, or the growing enrollment of Salafist political parties in Egypt.

Karen Barkey, a Columbia University sociologist, argues that Roy has overlooked the resilience of fundamentalism. Yes, secular culture has largely taken the reins of power, but it’s a two-way process; religion has fought back, and tailors its message and approach to local constraints. Roy is too optimistic when he claims that fundamentalism always wears itself out, Barkey says. Religion is asserting itself within evolving cultures, including democratic ones, and will continue to have great influence. “Some forms of religious fundamentalism may well be disappearing into the ether of abstraction,” Barkey wrote in a barbed essay contesting Roy’s view in Foreign Affairs, “but in most cases, religion, culture, and politics are still meeting on the ground.”

For those watching that clash, too, it can be hard to credit Roy’s interpretation. In phenomena like the rise of the evangelical right in American politics and Islamic fundamentalists in the Arab world, Roy sees a sign of defeated religion that has been pushed from the political playing field. But others argue that religion crucially shapes politics in ways that scholars, most of whom are secular, don’t well understand. Grandees of political science recently convened an initiative to systematically increase their field’s study of religion, and published a volume through Columbia University Press this year called “Religion and International Relations Theory.”

Still many scholars agree with Roy that the importance of religious extremists has been overstated. Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, says that Roy provides a convincing riposte to those like Jerry Falwell, who called for religion to directly shape legislation. Wolfe believes Roy’s assertion that religious influence on politics will continue to wane.

The implications of Roy’s theory are stark. If he is correct, American policy makers can step away from the entire framework of “the clash of civilizations” and “the rise of Islam,” and finally begin to deal with political actors at face value. Iran’s ayatollahs, for example, are better understood as extreme nationalists rather than religious fanatics, Roy has written. While religion matters to Hindu nationalists in India, Shas Party members in Israel, and followers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, it’s their specific nationalist aims that have made them politically powerful players. In political terms, their faith is essentially irrelevant.

Most of all, Roy’s theory offers the possibility of no longer seeing our conflicts as religious wars. In 2003, Lieutenant General William Boykin scandalized secular Americans when he described battling a Muslim fighter and said, “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.” If Roy is correct, such rhetoric is simply beside the point; as our century wears on, extreme religious belief will more and more be just a fringe phenomenon, unworthy of the attention of governments.

Which way is Egypt’s revolution heading, and what is the ongoing military dictatorship doing? I wrote the following at the end of last week, before Sunday night’s killings at Maspero. Read with that in mind. The moment is a glum one, with the increasing evidence that the ruling junta won’t hesitate to use the most crude and violent methods of Mubarak and his predecessors. The military council has kept its goals opaque. None of this assessment is intended to be predictive. Egypt’s uprising already has defied unbelievable odds, and there’s no reason to think it will fail to change the system at this point, after only eight months. But there’s also no reason to think the old regime won’t fight for its own survival.

 

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CAIRO, Egypt — The enraged crowd had a target: the satellite television transmission truck parked at the edge of Tahrir Square, by the Hardees. “Get out, get out!” screamed a hundred men, while the most agitated swarmed the truck, pounding it with their open palms. A half-dozen toughs fended them off. One brandished a pocket taser. Why, I asked a bystander, did this mob want the television signal silenced?

“Some channel broadcast there were only a few hundred people in Tahrir,” he explained. “We can’t have that.”

Except, of course, that it was true. This past Friday, October 7, was “The Friday of ‘Thank you, now please return to your barracks.'” It was intended as riposte to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which of late has reinstated many of the most decried and oppressive practices of the late Mubarak regime, and capped off its assertion of junta power with a grand martial celebration on Egypt’s national holiday to observe the victory against Israel on October 6, 1973.

The activists are terrified and energized, but the wider public does not seem to share their fears. So Tahrir, from Friday to Friday, seems emptier and emptier. What that proves is an entirely different question, but it is an observable fact that elicits anxiety to the Tahrir revolutionaries and satisfaction among supporters of the military council.

Revolutionary demonstrators are angry, and afraid their gains are slipping away. And like many Egyptian political players, they are not all instinctively liberal, as evidenced by the flashmob that would rather tear up a TV truck than admit that, this one time, state television was telling the truth about the paltry protest turnout.

I saw similar explosions of anger from skeptics of the revolution (or maybe just average, apolitical citizens) irritated by the disruptions caused by labor strikes. Workers are demanding living wages, and some of them are overtly trying to keep the revolutionary spirit alive while pressuring the regime, which at most levels has preserved the exact same stifling policies and personnel that Mubarak put in place.

In downtown Cairo, stranded commuters cursed the bus drivers, who are on strike because they want to earn a base salary higher than $100 a month. I was stranded overnight at the Luxor Airport after air traffic controller shut down Egypt’s airspace, and I heard travelers rail against the pampered workers who, emboldened by the revolution, were now heedlessly and selfishly inconveniencing their fellow Egyptians.

 

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It’s hard to escape the feeling that Egypt’s January 25 Revolution is being eaten alive. It’s too soon to write it off, and too soon to predict that a full-fledged military dictatorship will rule the country for the foreseeable future; but that grisly outcome now is a solid possibility, perhaps as likely an outcome as a liberal, civilian Egypt or an authoritarian republic.

Eight months after a euphoric wave of people power stunned Egypt’s complacent and abusive elite, it’s possible to see the clear outlines of the players competing to take over from Mubarak and his circle, and to assess the likely outcomes. The scorecard is distasteful. The uprising — it can’t yet be fairly termed a revolution — forced the regime to jettison its CEO, Hosni Mubarak, in order to preserve its own prerogatives.

In the last two months, that regime has made clear how strong it feels. In September, in quick succession the military extended the hated state of emergency for another year, effectively rendering any notion of rule of law in Egypt meaningless; unilaterally published election rules that favor wealthy incumbents and remnants of the old regime, and that disadvantage new, post-Mubarak competitors; indefinitely postponed presidential elections, and refused any timetable for handing over authority to a civilian; reinstated full media censorship, threatening television stations and imposing a gag order on all reporting about the military; and the country’s authoritarian ruler, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, unleashed a personal public relations campaign on state television odiously reminiscent of Mubarak’s image-making. Furthermore, the government advanced its investigation of “illegal NGOs” that allegedly took foreign money, including virtually every important and independent dissident organization.

Taken together, these moves show a military junta fully confident that it can impose measures of control as harsh — or, in the case of widespread military trials for civilians, harsher — than those employed by Mubarak.

Politically, the military council might seem incoherent, habitually announcing extreme positions and then undoing them after the next street protest, but the overall arc is unmistakable, if hopefully not inexorable.

The soundtrack for the SCAF and its millions of supporters in Egypt (because let’s not forget, the old regime had its loyalists and there are many more who remain convinced by state propaganda that the January 25 uprising was a plot against Egypt) could be the song from the satirical film Bob Roberts: “The Times they are a-changing back.”

Former ruling party members have regrouped. They have lots of cash and experience, and plan to run aggressively in the parliamentary elections that begin in just seven weeks, on November 28.

Meanwhile, the opposition to Mubarak is as fragmented as ever. The revolutionary zeal of Tahrir Square has flagged. Many of the most determined activists from January 25 have invested themselves in electoral politics, which they know is a long game. They’ve committed to build real political organizations, but it’s not clear how good they’ll be at doing so, or how quickly they can accomplish it.

The Muslim Brotherhood and a few tarnished, coopted official opposition parties like the Wafd already had nationwide organizations when Mubarak fell. The rest — the people who actually took to the streets in January — are struggling to make meaningful inroads and to learn the business of politics.

The Revolutionary Youth Coalition, which includes all the most credible groups from January 25, is trying this week to forge a unified slate of parliamentary candidates. But even if they’re wildly successful they won’t convince the crucial Islamists to join them.

With no experience of participatory politics, the parties are having to learn much too quickly, in a burning crucible. In September, leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Coalition accepted an invitation to meet with the head of state intelligence. The official, they said, tried to explain the government’s efforts to both secure the nation and to improve basic rights, and that the activists responded with their own demands for more reform. They deliberately publicized the meeting — and were then roundly rebuked by many of their own followers as sellouts.

A more extreme exercise in political trial-by-fire occurred the last weekend of September. The leading political parties negotiated with the military council over the authoritarian and opaque election law. They wrested some key concessions from the junta, including limits on former ruling party members running for office and a rule change that will allow political parties to run candidates for “independent” seats. But the final communiqué signed by the party heads included nothing solid about ending the state of emergency, retrying the civilians convicted in military courts, or most importantly, transitioning to civilian rule. In fact, the agreement between the political parties and the military left open a scenario in which a new civilian president won’t take office until 2013, more than two years after the Tahrir Square protests began. More woundingly, it included a sycophantic blessing to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

As soon as the document was published, there was an uproar. The leader of the liberal Adel Party rescinded his signature. The Egyptian Social Democrats, who had only tentatively endorsed it, eventually signed but only after several influential members resigned in protest. The agreement was widely viewed with disgust. Some pundits suggested that the activists were struggling to adjust to the messy give and take of politics. A more accurate analysis would say that the party leaders got snookered by the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces, signing a document when they could have trumpeted the concessions they won while pushing for more. Even more importantly, the parties got a lesson in accountability politics that will mark the more adaptive among them like a cattle brand. Even revolutionary politicians aren’t used to representing real constituents, who speak up, and speak up loud, when they don’t like their leaders’ decisions.

The September fiascos are a snap clinic in electoral politics, and are taking place in hothouse where rule of law and liberalism are at best tenuous aspirations. Revolutionary activists who profess to value liberalism and rule of law see no irony, and no danger, in calling for the application of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1950s Treason Law to block the return of the Mubarakistas. They forget, or ignore, that Nasser used that law to shut down political life entirely, and that criminalizing the “pollution of public life” endangers anyone who disagrees with the powers that be.

Time is short until elections, and recent events have established that the military controls the process, whatever it might be. That process changes from week to week; the uncertainty and backtracking and vagueness increasingly look like a strategy by the junta to keep everyone else off balance and maximize the divisions among any pretenders to authority.

It’s possible that the military doesn’t want a return of the old regime — perhaps because it has begin to enjoy the prospect of keeping for itself all the power that it accrued when Mubarak went away.

Owen Bennett-Jones runs down the age-old debate, and in the process surveys lots of talking heads, including me.

The apparent contradiction may never be tested for two reasons. First, there seems very little prospect of a two-state solution being agreed at least in the foreseeable future. Secondly, even if there was a peace deal it is likely that some Palestinians would reject it and Hezbollah could simply align themselves with that strand of Palestinian thinking.

This was the view from the 6 October overpass, looking down at Ramses Street just before midnight. Reporters saw 17 (or 16) bodies in the morgue in the Coptic Hospital there, some shot dead, others killed by being run over. Crowds surging toward the hospital from the direction of Tahrir Square chanted “Islamiya, Islamiya!” Many were carrying truncheons. They threw rocks. The people in front of the hospital threw rocks back. A bus burned, its engine parts and tires exploding every few moments while black smoke belched upward. Four cars were burning as well. Around midnight, the warring sides merged and began chanting “Muslims, Christians, one hand.” It was near impossible to approach the hospital itself. After I left, the military apparently deployed to the street, more than four hours after violence broke out.

 

 

Lots of people here, usually supporters of the regime, like to claim the support of the “silent majority.” A week ago in Tahrir Square I met two women who could probably fall in that category. Hoda Aboulmagd used to run a school, and is now retired. She brought her friend Iman to Tahrir, because in her words, “If people don’t come out to protest today, when will they?”

Hoda isn’t a regular at the square, but she’s enraged at the moves by the military junta, and leaders of the former ruling party, to reassert control over political life. “Our revolution is not complete,” she said. “We want a civilian government, democracy, justice, an independent judiciary.”

Hoda’s sign, on orange posterboard, bore a verse from the Koran: “They plot and plan and Allah too plans but the best of planners is Allah.” Iman’s, on a yellow background, carried another injunction to the generals ruling Egypt, this one borrowing a saying attributed to the prophet: “Tell you what council, a free man’s promise is a debt on him.”

A group of young women stopped to admire their signs, and Hoda offered a piece of yellow posterboard so they could make a sign of their own.

Even after sitting in the sun for hours, Hoda and Iman were incredulous that the military council was still toying with the popular demands for a full handover to democracy.

“We do not trust the field marshal,” Hoda said, referring to Egypt’s head of state, Mohammed Hussein Tantawi.

“Their ways of fooling people are very stupid, as if the population is naive. Are we stupid?” Iman added. In this revolution we lost lives. So the population will never get tired from the revolution. We are tired from 30 years already.”

As encomia to Steve Jobs swamped my Twitter timeline last week, I felt acutely out of step with the zeitgeist. I love my Apple products, but I didn’t feel a direct emotional connection to Steve Jobs. And I had a slight suspicion that the heart rending tributes amounted to a sort of voluntary marketing blitz, or a final product rollout.

Hagiography versus biography — a clean assessment of a powerful figure who changed some things about the way we live versus a bleary eyed, sentimental tribute that sanitizes the human foibles. That difference came into focus when I read, in succession, the obituaries in The New York Times and The Telegraph.

My question here is about the media and culture. Why such a pronounced difference in tone and approach? Consider the leads:

Telegraph: Jobs never designed a computer in his life, but it was because of him that Apple products, even when they do largely what other products do, are perceived to be different and infinitely more cool.

NYT: Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of personal computers and then led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age, died Wednesday.

Or description of Jobs’ management style and catalogue of his faults:

Telegraph: He ruled Apple with a combination of foul-mouthed tantrums and charm, withering scorn and carefully judged flattery. People were either geniuses or “bozos”, and those in his regular orbit found that they could flip with no warning from one category to the other, in what became known as the “hero-shithead roller coaster”. Employees worried about getting trapped with Jobs in a lift, afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened.

NYT: It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

Telegraph: On his return to America Jobs resumed his work with Atari and was given the task of creating a more compact circuit board for the game Breakout. He had little interest in the intricacies of circuit board design and persuaded his 16-year old friend, Steve Wozniak, to do the job for him, offering to split any bonus fifty-fifty. Jobs was given $5,000 by a delighted Atari, but Wozniak only got $300, under the impression the payout was $600.

NYT: No mention of this anecdote.

Hamilton Nolan at Gawker does a nice sendup of the overwrought emotion,but is almost as exaggerated in his distaste as the mourners are in their shows of grief.

In time, we’ll either see this as a symptom of a pop culture that has lost perspective, or as an inflection point marking our transformation to a digital society.

Egyptian authorities are able to work with dispatch, it appears! Ahram Online reports the release of the four officers arrested for apparently electrocuting and slapping two detainees, in a widely circulated torture video. Why? The men were really, really nasty, a “security source” tells Ahram Online, and anyway, the video was fake.

Immediately after the release of the video the military judiciary announced that it would launch a “swift investigation” into the case. The four army officers who appeared in the video were transferred for military trial, but it was later announced that only two of the officers took part in the torture.

Now, however, the security source says that all four will be released and that an investigation into the matter has revealed that the detainees who appeared in the video were thugs and weapons smugglers, and had attacked homes and women in Daqahliya. Additionally, according to the investigation, the detainees had stolen the door of a prison cell and used it to protect their homes when they were being arrested and shot live ammunition at the officers who tried to detain them. One of them also slapped one of the army officers who were transferring him to the police station.

It is not yet clear why the video was deemed a fake.

Egypt Torture Video

If you’re interested in how torture and police brutality works in Egypt, take a look at this video, which is making the rounds this week and provoking a lot of anger. Allegedly, this torture session took place at a police station in the El-Kurdi police station in the El-Daqahliya governorate, and involves police as well as soldiers. What’s most striking here is not the violence and brutality, but the casual good cheer with which it is dispensed. These men are in an office, they know they’re on camera, and they’re not self-conscious in the least. The man who repeatedly electrocutes the detainees chuckles after delivering a shock. This appears to be what institutionalized torture looks like. Reliable accounts and the hard work of human rights researchers and activists suggest it’s as endemic as ever in Egypt, even since the revolution.

(Read the original story in The Atlantic here.)

CAIRO, Egypt — Strikes and protests are against the law in revolutionary Egypt, thanks to a March decree from the generals who run the country by fiat. Egypt’s electrified workers, however, seem to have gotten the opposite message. A cascade of strikes has gripped almost every major labor sector this month. And unlike political activists, who were driven out of Tahrir Square this summer and since have had trouble mustering quorum at Friday rallies, the workers are encountering some surprisingly unqualified success.

Organizers and political activists say that Labor’s momentum could finally curtail the former regime; they point out that paralyzing strikes in February of this year put the Tahrir Square uprising over the top and spurred President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. Now, they say, months spent organizing independent trade unions beyond the control of the corrupt old state-run labor federation have yielded millions of active, politicized Egyptian workers.

“The heart of the revolution is the workers,” says Kamal Khalil, a leader of the Workers Democratic Party. Since January, he has agitated for more independent labor unions; hundreds have been formed, while members of established unions like the doctors and engineers syndicate have pushed to replace mistrusted leaders and eliminate government control.

“The workers aren’t afraid of being dragged before military courts,” Khalil says. “If the strikes are strong, the military won’t be able to stop them.”

Right after Mubarak’s resignation, the government increased public sector salaries and bonuses. The question now is whether workers will join their economic demands to the calls for radical reform of Egypt’s political system – or whether labor unions will repeat modern Egyptian history, breaking ranks with political dissenters to negotiate a separate deal with the regime.

Egypt’s dictators developed sophisticated tools to thwart strictly political dissent, and the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has deployed those tactics regularly over the last nine months to discredit or silence critics, accusing them of taking foreign money or of sowing chaos, throwing some of them in jail.

Workers, however, are a harder target. Almost all Egyptians can relate to underpaid employees, whether in a factory or at a hospital. And the kind of corruption that really enrages the average Egyptian is the workaday sort that thrives in the centralized government bureaucracy and in the workplace, the kind of patronage and graft that saps the public treasury and leaves buses always breaking down, hospitals overcrowded, and basic goods unaffordable for working families.

There’s an unmistakably bold, anti-authoritarian streak among the striking workers, most of whom take home around $100 per month.

On Saturday, jubilant teachers assembled in front of the Egyptian government’s cabinet headquarters, demanding a minimum monthly salary of about $500 and the replacement of the Mubarak-holdover education minister.

The next day, the teachers decamped. “We’re giving the government a week, maybe a month, to meet our demands,” teacher and organizer Hala Talaat said. “I don’t think they will, so we’ll have to go back on strike.”

The labor avalanche wasn’t slowing though. Thousands of striking public transportation workers took the place of the teachers outside the cabinet building. All 47,000 of Cairo’s public bus drivers and support staff have gone on strike. They are demanding better pay, health care, and professional uniforms. A parade of workers brandished their pay stubs, showing take home pay ranging from about $60 a month for a rookie to $120 for a 19-year veteran.

“We’re just demanding our bread,” said Adel Mahmoud, a driver with a missing front tooth and a soft, diffident voice. “Wages and prices are out of balance in Egypt.”

Mahmoud and the cluster of striking drivers around him said they didn’t trust the government; already, the prime minister had promised wage hikes in June, only to renege because he claimed the government couldn’t afford it. The more simultaneous strikes, they all agreed, the greater the pressure on the government and the greater likelihood of success.

It’s a separate and complicated question whether the government can afford a major overhaul in its treatment of public workers. Wages have stagnated, but the government faces its own crisis as foreign reserves dwindle, skittish investors pull money out of the country, and an economy that has contracted since the January 25 uprising. There’s no doubt, however, that state enterprises were mismanaged and that nepotistic privatization deals distorted the balance sheets of companies that were made to appear money-losers so they could be sold to friends of the ruling elite.

Last week, lawsuits overturned the Mubarak-era privatization of three major state-run mills around the Nile Delta town of Mahalla, whose hard-scrabble strikes typically determine the fortunes of the nation’s entire labor movement, for better or for worse. Mahalla workers clashed with the government in April 2008, ushering in a new era of aggressive labor activism with an overt political flavor. This year, they joined the Tahrir Square revolutionaries with massive strikes and street protests.

Mahalla workers, who consider themselves the avant garde of Egyptian labor, say they’re finally enjoying the fruits of their efforts, not only in their own achievements but in the national wave of labor action.

Mill workers in Mahalla won concessions from management earlier this month. Last weekend, the Dubai Ports giant that runs the Suez Canal port of Ain Sokhna caved to worker demands. It’s a good thing, as Dubai Ports’ initial response was threatening to shut down operations for good, depriving Cairo of its main shipping point.

Teachers have put the ministry of education on the defensive. Doctors have gone on strike, treating only emergency cases and demanding not only better pay but better management of Egypt’s struggling health care system.

All this overtly political labor activism has its avatar in Mahalla. The Middle East’s largest textile mill, currently employing about 22,000 workers, still doesn’t have an independent trade union. But its workers are using their bully pulpit — and recent tactical victories — to encourage other workers across the country.

Kamal Fayoumi, a worker at the Mahalla power plant, has been working to organize a new union free from the cronyism of the official union, which still works in tandem with the government. Even after Mubarak’s fall, the official union has declined to hold internal elections until 2012.

Textile workers have proven fearless in confronting police, and earlier this summer the mere threat of a strike in Mahalla won major wage concessions. But Fayoumi says that the angry workers could play the pivotal role in unseating Egypt’s military regime, which so far has survived Mubarak.

“The demands of the workers are the same as the demands of the revolution: freedom, honesty, and social justice,” Fayoumi told me last week, before starting the evening shift. “Only the movement of workers will change the regime.”

With Owen Bennet Jones in Beirut: the segment about Syria and Lebanon begins around the 40:40 mark. For the next few days, you can find the Newshour program here.