veiled4allah

this ought to be a no-brainer

Retired general Anthony Zinni states what should be obvious: the Middle East is not a monolith:

The general who commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East from 1997 to 2000 says the nation's policy in Iraq has been characterized by a series of compounding mistakes and that too often Americans infer that the region's Islamic residents hate the West. In a keynote address to the 18th annual Camden Conference on Friday night, retired Gen. Anthony Zinni said the Middle East is best understood as a group of nations not always in agreement, dealing with rapid changes and great pressures from within and without. "We always seem to think there's some design, some monolithic purpose," Zinni said, but that misses the reality. Having lived in both the West and the Middle East, Zinni said, "I don't see anything that makes this an inevitable clash." The Middle East is more like Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, he said, with monarchies and quasi-democracies struggling to enter the modern world. "This part of the world wants to be involved in determining its future and feels it's being left out," leaving people confused and frustrated, he said. Generalities about the region bother him, Zinni said, because in his years observing the area, he has often uncovered "another layer I didn't know about before." The Islamic Middle East is not a unified bloc opposed to the West, Zinni said.

He had plenty else good to say too.

looking to Qatar

As a follow-up to the previous entry, Dilip Hiro in the New York Times argues that Allah and democracy can get along fine, using the example of Qatar:

Things are quite different in Qatar. As the Saudi men went to the polls, officials and the news media here watched with a mix of quiet approval at the idea and regret at the disenfranchisement of women. Most of all, it made Qataris feel proud of their own political system. After all, they had their first local elections, based on universal franchise, in March 1999. As in Saudi Arabia, the ruling family of Qatar is Wahhabi. And, here too, the Islamic Shariah is the main source of legislation - it states in Article 1 of the Qatari Constitution, which was ratified by referendum in 2003, that "Islam is the state's religion and the Islamic Shariah is the main source of its legislations." Nonetheless, Qatar has a relatively democratic political system. The Constitution created a 45-member Parliament, called the Advisory Council, with 30 elected members. It may not be a full legislature by Western standards, but it is authorized to approve the state budget and monitor the executive authority, which rests with the ruler, called the emir. Article 50 of the Constitution, which assures the freedom to worship, applies to all. The Anglican archdeacon for the Persian Gulf region is based in Doha. Christian groups can congregate in halls or private villas, where ministers, priests or pious laymen can conduct worship. Equally important is Article 48 of the Constitution, assuring freedom of the press. In March 1998 the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, abolished the Ministry of Information, thus ending censorship of print and broadcast media. The state-owned news media entities became independent public institutions. And, of course, the law widened the horizons of the most prominent Arab news source, Al Jazeera, which was established in 1996. Women in Qatar are free to drive and wear jeans and blouses; you even see them in bikinis at the beaches and swimming pools. Women have the same political rights as men. In the first local elections more women voted than men; in 2003 a woman won a seat on the 29-member Municipal Council. The minister of education is a woman. Alcohol is served in the guest rooms of all 5-star and 4-star hotels. In my 4-star hotel, there is a bar and a disco. Such an arrangement would be unthinkable in Saudi Arabia. Not that Qatar is perfect by any means. But if two homogenous Sunni nations, both with rulers belonging to the Wahhabi sect, can be so different, it is unlikely that Iraq, with its unique mix of religious and ethnic groups, will emulate an existing fundamentalist republic or monarchy. Instead of worrying about the mixing of faith and law, let us see how the emergent Islamic Republic of Iraq creates a category by itself among democratic yet religious states of the Persian Gulf.

speaking the right language

Steve Gilliard points to an article in the New Republic with an interesting point to make about America's attempts to win hearts and minds in the Arab world: we're not speaking the right language:

But there's a problem with these initiatives. Just as you won't win over a crowd of Mexican villagers by speaking Latin, the United States can't sell democracy and reform to Arab populations by speaking to them in modern standard Arabic--and ignoring the Middle East's more widely understood vernacular languages. The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites. Most everybody else prefers to speak a version of their country's vernacular. Ninety percent of Moroccans, for example, can only understand their unique brand of Arabic, which is heavily infused with Berber phonics and French vocabulary--testimony to the country's multiethnic and colonial history. The Moroccan language, in turn, is barely comprehensible to, say, Iraqis, whose unique idioms and usages reflect more ancient Mesopotamian tongues as well as the country's proximity to Turkey, Iran, and the Kurdish mountains. These vernaculars, derided by pan-Arab ideologues as "dialects," are in fact the region's major living languages. They are the contemporary Middle Eastern equivalent of Romance languages, which, of course, were all derived from Latin and were also once known as dialects--but now are known as Spanish, Italian, and French.

Linguists call this diglossia:

No discussion of Arabic is complete without at least a cursory discussion of diglossia. Charles Ferguson is credited with first using the term diglossia in an article which he wrote in 1959 called Diglossia. He identified four languages, Arabic, Greek, Haitian Creole and Swiss German as being prime examples of languages which fit into his definition of diglossia. Very simply stated, he said that diglossic speech communities have a High variety that is very prestigious and a Low variety with no official status which are in complementary distribution with each other, for instance the High variety might be used for literary discourse and the Low variety for ordinary conversation. His original definition of diglossia was that the two varieties which are in a diglossic relationship with each other are closely related, and therefore diglossia is not bilingualism. In his defining examples he points out that the High variety is always an acquired form, and that some educated native speakers might even deny that they ever use the Low variety. An important component of diglossia is that the speakers have the personal perception that the High variety is the "real" language and that the Low variety is "incorrect" usage. In Arabic people talk about the High variety as being "pure" Arabic and the dialects as being corrupt forms... ...From the 15th century on, most of the Arabic speaking world was under foreign domination, either Ottoman or European. The Ottomans produced all of their official documents in Turkish and their religious documents in Arabic. The French in Algeria, between 1830 and 1962, tried to actively suppress Arabic. The British in Egypt at one point tried to make the Egyptian dialect the official language. Literary Arabic stagnated during the Ottoman and colonial period. There are roughly four major dialect groups, a) Maghrebi (Morocco, Algeria, Tunis and western Libya), b) Egyptian (eastern Libya, Egypt and the Sudan), c) Levantine (Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine) and d) the Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE and Kuwait). These categories tend to ignore the split that has always existed throughout the history of Arabic between Bedouin, Rural and Urban varieties For instance the speech of a Cairene is closer to the speech of a Damascene than it is to the speech of a Bedouin dweller of Egypt, even though I have placed Damascus and Cairo into different dialect categories. There are also some dialect isolates and relic dialects in Central Asia and in the Sahara desert. All of the dialects share features which do not exist in Classical Arabic. For Arabs they are mostly mutually intelligible with the exception that the Maghrebi dialects are generally unintelligible outside of the Maghreb. For non-Arabs who have limited exposure to the dialects the difference between dialects can be startling... ...The academic community in the US calls the modern form of Literary/Classical Arabic "Modern Standard Arabic" or MSA for short. An American who has only studied Modern Standard Arabic will be well received but will not understand much of the spoken discourse going on around him in an Arabic speaking country.

The New Republic article concludes:

Meanwhile the natural evolution of new media in Arab countries is bolstering the use of local vernacular all by itself. The proliferation of Arabic-language blogs means thousands of webpages are updated daily in the versions of Arabic spoken in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Tunis, and so on. Rather than fall behind this curve, the United States should adjust and adapt its strategy for reaching Arab audiences. We stand to gain considerably from speaking to the Middle East in languages that Arab majorities, not just elites, can understand.

I wonder how many people involved in the Bush Administration's efforts are even aware of this issue.

meanwhile, in the UAE

Gulf News reports on the UAE's new family law:

A new law regulating the working hours of UAE national women and laying down that they have to be released from their duties at 4pm latest every day will soon come into force, said a senior official... ...The 4pm release rule will apply to public and private departments. It will help national women fulfil their role as mothers. Al Bah said another law will give national women the option to retire after serving an establishment for 10-15 years. This will enable them to spend time in the house with their husband and children... ...Al Bah said national women, who are married, should have at least six babies and this should be viewed as a national duty... ...He said the Council will also impose a law that will force establishments, which have a number of women, to set up nurseries. It will work on bettering the atmosphere at work, thereby reducing stress. UAE women shoulder all the responsibilities at home, leaving the men with little to do. This, he stressed, is a mistake committed by the women. He said some girls are married without their approval or after being shown pictures of grooms. The council will work on ensuring the couple see each other. It is against Islam to get a girl married without her approval or by force. Al Bah said the UAE may follow Kuwait's example by making it compulsory for a couple to attend court proceedings before finalising a divorce. Currently, men can divorce their wives without prior notice. Delegates at the conference called for regulating marriages to foreigners, especially between aged nationals and young foreign women. They said children from these marriage do not speak proper Arabic.

On the good side:

• Daycare established at work
• Steps taken to limit girls being married off to strangers without their consent
• Marriage arbitration before divorce

On the bad side:

• Women's working hours restricted
• Women should have at least six children
• Banning marriage between UAE national men and foreign women

A mixed bag indeed.

labor unions in the Arab world

Awhile ago, I posted about labor unions in Bahrain. As I noted in that blog entry, the Middle East is one of the worst regions for labor rights. A new organization, the Arab Federation for Democracy and Workers Education Associations, hopes to change that:

In a development that could contribute towards greater democracy to the Middle East, NGOs from five Arab countries have established a new regional organization to promote independent trade unions in the Middle East and lobby for more democracy within trade unions themselves. The Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions is one of three other organizations that have expressed interest in joining. The new organization is to be called the Arab Federation for Democracy and Workers Education Associations (AFDWEA). Hasan Barghouthi, General Director of the Democracy and Workers Rights Center - a partner of the Advocacy Project - will serve as the first coordinator. The DWRC is based in Ramallah, in the Palestinian territories. In a telephone conversation, Mr. Barghouthi said that protecting the rights of workers would improve democracy throughout the Arab world - something that is very much on the minds of civil society in the region and indeed the entire international community. "We believe the trade unions in the Arab countries face a crisis of identity, a crisis of direction, and a crisis of education," he said... ...The AFDWEA hopes to educate and train workers in collective bargaining skills, as well as lobbying for the right to organize independent unions. "[Workers] must call for accountability of government, for transparency, and for peace," said Mr. Barghouthi. "Our role is to strengthen citizenship and to organize the labor force to launch civil struggle against dictatorial regimes."

labor unions in Bahrain

The right to form a labor union is an important part of freedom of association, and is recognized in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Given that people spend half their waking hours at work, if they don't have the right to form a group there for the advancement and protection of their interests, how free are they really? Unsurprisingly, politically repressive regimes tend to ban labor unions or otherwise place severe restrictions on them. The Middle East being one of the most politically repressive regions in the world, it's also one of the worst regions for labor rights. In 2002, Bahrain took an important step towards democracy by recognizing the right to form unions. The unions that have been founded in the last year have now formed the General Federation of Bahrain Workers Unions (think of it as Bahrain's AFL-CIO). The next step for Bahrain's labor movement will be to win the right for government employees to form unions - a right, incidentally, that is denied under the law to government employees in some U.S. states such as North Carolina (scroll down to section X).