To Clash or not to Clash

Timely novel: a Pakistani jihadi turned American businessman

2011-11-14T12:51:00.002-05:00

by David Lepeska
for The National

Salahuddin Khan seems an unlikely literary figure. A kindly, grey-bearded businessman raised in Pakistan and England, he had carved out an impressive career as a technology and marketing executive when, at the age of 57, the idea for a narrative struck him like a thunderbolt.

It was the day after Christmas 2009 and Khan fell into 14-hour days of research and writing. By mid-February he'd churned out an epic 550-page novel that offers complex, sympathetic main characters and a timely retelling of Pakistan's recent history.

"The story erupted from me in six weeks," says Khan, who had never written before. "It felt a little like going downhill on a slalom: there were posts in different places, I began to design a path through these posts and, as I got up to, like, 100 pages of this, the characters themselves began to design it for me. It's something of a blur. I was completely possessed."

Possession may be an unusual route to literary success, but in this case it worked. Since its release in July last year, the self-published Sikander has earned a handful of awards, the interest of a prominent publisher and praise from a former Pakistani ambassador.

Khan was born in 1952 in Burewala, Pakistan, to a middle-class Pashtun family forced to leave Delhi during Partition. A few years later the family relocated again, to Karachi, and from there to Doncaster, in the English county of Yorkshire, where Khan went on to study aeronautical engineering.

During a visit to Florida in April 1972, to witness the launch of Apollo 16, he fell in love with the US. He moved to Boston in 1998 and, a decade later, accepted a top marketing and strategy position in Chicago and settled with his wife and six children in the cushy suburb of Lake Forest.

That leafy, wealthy community may have reminded Khan of England, where, as the only non-white student in every one of his schools until university, he had been very aware of his outsider status, had heard the slurs and insinuations. The attacks of September 11, 2001, brought those experiences rushing back.

"9/11 raised the notion of branding," says Khan. "Everyone I think rationally understands that not every Muslim is a terrorist. The brand aspect that bothers me is the perception that Islam itself has a DNA of violence, which is a more insidious undercurrent that runs through the culture."

In the years that followed, Khan became more engaged with the Muslim community, hoping to undermine that perception. He joined the board of a local Islamic school system and the trustees of the Human Development Foundation, a non-profit group focused on development, health care and education in rural Pakistan. He became the publisher of Islamica magazine and began hosting Radio Islam, the lone US talk show focused on Muslim issues. He co-produced a short film called The Boundary, in which a Muslim man, played by the Sudan-born British actor Alexander Siddig, is stopped and interrogated by US immigration officials at New York's JFK airport.

Sikander could be seen as the culmination of those efforts. The story opens in 1986, when Sikander Khan runs away from his Peshawar home at 17 to join the mujaheddin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He falls in with a group of insurgents working with the Haqqani militant network, the British military and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.

Having helped to defeat the Soviets, Sikander returns to Peshawar with his Afghan bride. After 9/11 he goes back to Afghanistan to rescue his wife's relatives and former mujahedden comrades, some of whom had become Taliban. He winds up in the hands of the Americans, who ship him to Guantanamo Bay, where he is tortured during long, intense interrogations. Finally, Sikander gains his release through a family connection to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and returns to Pakistan.

After finishing his novel, Khan sent the manuscript to Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani ambassador to the UK and the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, in Washington, DC. One of the world's leading authorities on Islam, Ahmed has advised the likes of CIA chief David Petraeus and written several dramas about Islam, the US and South Asia. He said Sikander was bold and ambitious, a "Muslim Gone with the Wind".

"Most Muslim writers and scholars have made a mistake by approaching this issue in a defensive and monochromatic matter, arguing we are a people of peace," says Ahmed. "Here we have a multidimensional, multicoloured, multi-generational, multinational picture of modern-day Muslims, with characters that have all the warts and mistakes of real people, and that excited me."

Self-published by Khan's Karakoram Publications, Sikander attracted little attention upon its release. But from March to July of this year it won top honours at book festivals in Los Angeles, Paris, Hollywood and New York, as well as the National Indie Excellence Award for Multi-Cultural Fiction. Khan has trimmed and tightened the novel considerably for the 420-page fourth edition, which has a foreword from Ahmed and is being sent out this month to top review publications and leading publishers, including Little, Brown and Company.

The attention "feels phenomenal", says Khan, who hopes to write another novel, about Partition. But first he hopes Sikander pushes people to think. "Not enough is being done to affect the perception of Muslims through entertainment, or literature in particular," he says. "It's a commentary on today's news, particularly America's news, that everything now has to be squeezed between two commercials."

One name in the US news of late is Jalaluddin Haqqani. The Pashtun mujahideen was a US ally and CIA asset during the Soviet days, which is how he comes into the orbit of Khan's protagonist. Today, Jalaluddin still leads the Haqqani network, a bloody-minded militant group based in Pakistan's tribal region and suspected in the bombing of an armoured Nato bus in Kabul last month that killed 17, including 12 Americans, in the deadliest attack on the US-led coalition in the Afghan capital since the war began. US drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal region in late October killed two Al Qaeda senior planners and a deputy in the Haqqani network.

Despite being an enemy of the US, the Haqqanis still work with Pakistan's ISI. "All that happened in Pakistan is that we became a victim of circumstances in the region," said Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's former president, during a lecture at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month.

US officials have begun meeting with Haqqani representatives, including Jalaluddin's brother, Ibrahim, in an effort to negotiate a resolution to the Afghan war. "We have to turn our attention here on the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani and other terrorist groups and try to get them into a peace process," US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a recent visit to Islamabad.

Because of its long-term relationship with the Haqqanis, the ISI is instrumental in organising the peace talks. But US-Pakistan relations have deteriorated considerably since American troops invaded Pakistan airspace to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in May. Observers worry that the ISI and Pakistani military leaders may see little advantage in bringing about legitimate negotiations.

Khan recently delivered a lecture on US relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan at the American Islamic College in Chicago. He accepts that the Pakistani military may still be working with the Haqqani network, as a hedge against future instability in Afghanistan - a real danger with the coming departure of US troops. Pakistani leaders, he says, do not feel the US is acting in their interests; in not pushing for a settlement with India regarding Kashmir, and in working towards a stable Afghanistan, the US is failing to ensure Pakistan's security.

"The American perspective is 'How do we got out of there?'," says Khan. "The strategy is an exit strategy, rather than a strategy strategy. You're really encouraging Pakistan to think independently about its strategic needs, and therefore you are not going to get a solution."

Towards the end of the book, Sikander moves to North Carolina with the help of a cousin and buys a local electrics company, where the head of security turns out to be his Guantanamo tormentor. Rather than succumbing to hate and firing him, Sikander keeps him on, becoming his friend.

"To us in the West, the Taliban and the Haqqani, they're villains and that's it, like comic-book characters," says Ahmed, who hopes to see Sikander made into a film. "But the novel gives you a much more accurate depiction, with all its complexities."

Khan intended the book as a study in the thin veneer of civilisation, an examination of the circumstances that push people towards inhumanity. When Sikander kills for the first time, shooting down a Soviet helicopter, he's shocked at how easy it is. When later faced with his Guantanamo tormentor, he is reminded of this.

"I think a willingness to be cruel and brutal is in me, in you, in us all, really," Sikander tells his torturer. "Once a system encourages operating beyond the reach of law, well then, as you so amply demonstrated, that brutality will only be limited by the forces at our disposal, no matter who we are."

-----
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/sikander-a-pakistani-militant-turned-american-business-owner?pageCount=0

With Fears of Asian Carp Fading, a Sleek Campaign to Revive Concern

2011-11-14T12:47:00.003-05:00

by David Lepeska
for The New York Times

There was a time, not long ago, when environmentalists could arouse fears of invasive Asian carp by highlighting videos of four-foot-long fish leaping out of downstate rivers or the discovery of carp DNA samples a stone’s throw from Lake Michigan.
But a recent event in Chicago suggested that sparking public panic about Asian carp these days requires more pizazz.

In a spacious antique furnishings store, Architectural Artifacts, on the North Side one evening last week, dozens of well-heeled guests mingled near the open bar hoping for a brush with genius: Jeanne Gang, the Chicago architect and new MacArthur fellow, was introducing her book about transforming Chicago’s waterways. Later, Second City took the stage to perform “Carpocalypse!” a hand-wringing ditty about Asian carp.

“There’s a real threat, and there are clear solutions,” said Henry Henderson, Midwest director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which organized the event, collaborated on Ms. Gang’s book and commissioned the song.

Two Asian carp species, silver and bighead carp, imported from China in the 1970s, escaped from their pens at fish farms in Arkansas and Kentucky. Disrupting ecosystems thanks to their voracious appetite for plankton and algae that other species need to survive, the carp swam up the Mississippi River, crowded the Illinois River and other regional waterways, and zeroed in on Chicago and the Great Lakes.

To combat these and other invasive species, which could threaten the Great Lakes ecosystem and its $7 billion fishing industries, the resources defense council has proposed physical barriers to separate Chicago waterways and Lake Michigan from the Mississippi. Ms. Gang’s book, “Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways,” sees the barriers as an opportunity to remake the city’s riverfront.

The barrier proposal, Mr. Henderson said, “is just a step toward advancing the broader discourse.”

But times are tough in the carp-fighting business. State and federal officials say they are controlling Asian carp and keeping them out of the Great Lakes. Anecdotal evidence from a surging carp harvest in the Illinois River seems to indicate that fishing for and selling the carp as food or processing them into fish meal or fertilizer might significantly reduce their numbers, and thus their pressure on waterways in the Chicago area.

In any case, no major action can be taken before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers releases its comprehensive study into the blockage of aquatic pathways between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. The findings are due out in 2015.

Given all that, public fears seem at an ebb. Last month, an environmental group in Milwaukee organized what it hoped would be the first anti-Asian carp rally, in a downtown park. Only a handful of people turned out.

Enter the resources defense council and other groups aiming to keep the high-flying fish on the public radar. Next week, Ms. Gang and Mr. Henderson will be interviewed by the public-radio personality Steve Edwards at the Harold Washington Library in the Loop. Separately, a handful of Michigan tourism groups last week rolled out “Stop the Carp Now,” an online and radio ad campaign.

Several regional scientists, including Konrad Dabrowski, an aquaculturist at Ohio State University, argue that the Great Lakes are not conducive to Asian carp reproduction. Anti-carp agitation merely muddles the debate, Mr. Dabrowski said.

Events like the recent book party “serve no purpose other than to increase public fear,” he said. “I think we need a serious discussion on these issues.”

Days after scientists found Asian carp DNA in North Dakota and in the Mississippi River near Minneapolis last month, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin petitioned the Supreme Court to force the corps to speed its study.

The resources defense council event suggested a more honeyed approach. For their $250 cover, attendees snacked on chicken satay and carp-shaped chocolates, and chatted with Ms. Gang as she signed copies of her book.

The Second City performers sang from the perspective of Asian carp, proclaiming that the corps’ underwater electric barrier, just outside Chicago, “tickles every time we swim through it.”

“Leave us alone,” they urged the crowd. “Let us call the river and the Great Lakes home.”

-----

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/us/with-fears-of-asian-carp-fading-a-sleek-campaign-to-revive-public-concern.html

Why $1 Billion Doesn't Buy Much Transport Infrastructure Anymore

2011-11-14T12:41:00.002-05:00

by David Lepeska
For TheAtlanticCities.com

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently announced a $1 billion plan to overhaul the city's L trains, which are run by the Chicago Transit Authority and began operations in 1892. "The public will get a new CTA," he said at a press conference.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. In reality, the money will be used to lay new rail tracks between 18th and 95th streets on the Red Line to eliminate “slow zones," replace ties on the Purple Line and improve underground ventilation and electrical substations. In addition, nine stations will receive modest technical upgrades and—finally, the most significant addition—two stations on the North Side will be rebuilt.

It seems $1 billion doesn't go very far in subway construction these days. Look at New York, where the 8.5-mile Second Avenue subway line is expected to cost more than $17 billion.

Internationally, subway construction costs remain considerably lower. Sao Paulo's new 11-km Yellow Line, completed last year, cost $1.6 billion, with fully automated trains and free high-speed wireless Internet at each of 11 stations.

Singapore's new Circle Line runs 22 miles with 28 stations and cost $4.8 billion, or $130 million per kilometer. Upon completion next year, it will become the world's longest fully automatic underground transit line, and among its most advanced.

In Europe, too, subways cost less. Madrid's recently-opened Metrosur line is 41 km long, with 28 stations, yet was completed in four years at around $58m per km. Recent expansions in Paris and Berlin cost about $250 million per km.

New York, meanwhile, is building the most expensive subway line of all time, at $1.7b per km. This figure makes London's 16-km-long Jubilee line and Amsterdam's 10-km North-South line, which both faced delays and controversy and cost $350m and $400m per km, respectively, seem reasonable in comparison.

New York's astronomical subway costs are partially explained by pricier real-estate and labor and the expense of tunnel boring into Manhattan bedrock. Blogger Benjamin Kabak thinks exorbitant consultant and design fees and stunningly over-priced construction contracts also play a part.

Another concern is age. Robert Paaswell, engineering professor at the City College of New York and director of the University Transportation Research Center, says costs are so high in Chicago and New York because their systems are the country's oldest and thus the most expensive to upgrade. The New York City subway, which began operations in the 1870s as an elevated system, has experienced three derailments in the past six months.

This helps explain why Washington, D.C., where the Metro opened in 1976, laid more than three new miles of track and built two new stations, a 2,200-car parking structure and a rail car storage facility as part of a subway extension into Prince George's County, Maryland, all for $456 million.

Paaswell also cites New York's higher regulation costs, over-conservative labor laws and financing via bonds, which lead to longer-term debt plans. Finally, Americans and Europeans generally hold different views of major public transport projects. The latter see the expense as justified, even necessary, while the former tend to embrace driving and view major construction projects as a potential hassle.

“There's no urgency by governments or citizens here to get subways done, and when it finally happens the construction causes so much inconvenience that people don't like it,” said Paaswell, a former CTA executive director. “In Europe, they don't care too much about it, they just blast right through and get it done.”

For this reason, less dense U.S. cities often prefer light rail, which averages about half the cost of subways and can often dovetail on highway projects. The new SouthEast rail line portion of Denver's T-Rex transport project cost $970 million for 19 miles of new lines and 13 stations.

And Minneapolis' 19km, 17-station Hiawatha, or Blue Line, which opened in 2008 and connects the Twin Cities' international airport and the Mall of America to downtown, cost $715 million and has far exceeded its ridership targets.

City officials still looking to justify exorbitant spending on subway expansion might want to cite a 1918 essay by Julius Glaser, a design engineer for the city of New York.

Why do we build subways? They're expensive. They cost several times as much, mile for mile, as elevated railroads, and their construction entails more inconvenience to the public and to business, and for a longer time. They interfere with and endanger the sewers, gas pipes, water mains, electric conduits, and other subsurface structures, for an extended period, and then, when finally completed, many people dislike to ride in them.

Yet we build subways, because, when finished, unlike elevated railroads, so far as street conditions are concerned, they are noiseless, invisible and do not obstruct light, air or traffic. Train operation is never interfered with by weather conditions, and real estate along the route is enhanced in value. The permanent advantages of underground railroads far outweigh the temporary inconveniences during the construction period.

The Best Solution for Shrinking Cities?

2011-11-14T12:35:00.004-05:00

by David Lepeska
for TheAtlanticCities.com

Going from blight to blots, that's the latest DIY solution for shrinking cities.

Across a handful of troubled Midwestern cities, homeowners in failing neighborhoods are snapping up adjacent vacant lots for their own use, creating block-lots, or blots. The term was coined by the Brooklyn-based urban planning and design firm Interboro as part of a winning entry into Archplus "Shrinking Cities" 2006 International Ideas Competition.

Blotting, previously known as sideyard expansion, is an opportunistic response to urban decline that has been around for decades. The city of Chicago launched its adjacent land purchasing program in 1981; Cleveland did the same a few years later. But it has gained traction in recent years as cities have been depopulated and residents, planners and policymakers have sought redevelopment solutions.

Today, Cleveland and Chicago both have thousands of abandoned buildings and tens of thousands of vacant lots. Large swaths of New Orleans were emptied by Katrina. Yet no place is more ideal for blotting than Detroit, where the basic building block is the single-home lot. The city's population has fallen 60 percent since 1950 and nearly a third of its 139 square miles are vacant.

Residents like Jean and Michael Anderanin refused to wait for the city to launch a redevelopment plan. From 1992 to 2002, the mother and son purchased five lots adjoining their home, creating a six-lot garden blot that is enclosed by a fence and furnished with a gazebo, basketball court and several bird houses, according to Interboro's study, Improve Your Lot!

The result, according to University of Michigan urban planning professor Margaret Dewar, is a better, safer neighborhood. Vacant lots are breeding grounds for crime and illegal dumping. They place a strain on city police and fire resources and reduce surrounding property values and public safety.

"When people take over another lot they put in a patio, a garage, play equipment, a swimming pool—this improves quality of life because the lot is cared for," says Dewar, who published the first academic study on adjacent lot purchase in 2006. "It's become more and more common."

Blotting dovetails with a plan Detroit Mayor Dave Bing outlined to reduce population density in neighborhoods that have failed. Detroit planning director Rob Anderson recently told Changing Gears reporter Kate Davidson that the city's program to sell lots, for $200, has sold more than a thousand adjacent vacant lots.

In Chicago the price is $1,000, while in Cleveland lots go for as little as $1. A spokeswoman for Cleveland's Community Development Department had no readily available data on blotting, but said the practice had been increasing.

That would be a good thing, says Dewar, though she cautions against visions of urban paradise. In reality, blotting is one-part redevelopment and two parts de-urbanization, remaking the city as more green and less dense: a neo-suburb (it's the "new suburbanism," according to Interboro). Blotting won't create idyllic New Urbanist neighborhoods or return shrinking cities to their former glory, but it will reduce crime, add green spaces and improve safety. It's smart shrinkage for the recession-era Rust Belt, among the best of a handful of poor options.

Next June, New Orleans will host the Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference, following Louisville, Pittsburgh and Cleveland as previous host cities. Among speakers and attendees, blotting is likely to be a hot topic. "This is a good way to approach the re-use of vacant land," says Dewar. "I think officials in cities where there's been a lot of this loss should think 'How can we encourage this and celebrate it?'"

Possible Resurrection for Chicago's Nastiest Waterway

2011-11-07T18:14:00.003-05:00

by David Lepeska
for Atlantic Cities

In The Jungle, his searing, 1906 expose of Chicago's meatpacking industry, Upton Sinclair described a particularly fetid southern stretch of the Chicago River. "Bubbles of carbonic gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide," he writes. "Here and there the grease and filth have caked solid, and the creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across and vanished temporarily."

Though spiffed up in the intervening years, Bubbly Creek, named for the gases released during the decomposition of animal parts strewn there from nearby stock yards, remains a place Chicagoans generally avoid. Area rowing teams occasionally practice on its surface, but the creek's still, gray-brown water emits a stench in summer and, since 2007, the city has been considering a major restoration.

In her new book Reverse Effect, Chicago-based architect and recent MacArthur “genius” grant winner Jeanne Gang looks to transform the still-bubbly stretch of water into an urban destination to rival Millennium Park.

"We're a city that has these waterways, and they've always been used by industry," Gang says. "But how can we reclaim that river's edge and bring people and public uses to the water?"

Chicago remains the only major American city that merely dilutes its sewage, without disinfecting, before dumping it back into nature (the city's wastewater management body decided in June to begin disinfecting sewage before dumping, but implementation may take years). Other cities lack an outlet like the Chicago River, which was reverse engineered a century ago to carry sewage downstream towards the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.

In certain areas, the Chicago River is now more than 70 percent partially treated sewage – and a public health risk, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Another problem is that invasive species, such as round gobies, zebra mussels and the most current threat, Asian carp, have had little trouble migrating up or down this watery pipeline to imperil eco-systems at either end.

In 2010, the Natural Resources Defense Council proposed the creation, at three sites in the Chicago area, of physical barriers to separate the city's waterways and Lake Michigan from the Mississippi River basin and stop invasive species, yet still allow sewage to pass downstream. One proposed site is near the north end of Bubbly Creek.

The NRDC's barrier proposal appealed to Gang, who grew up outside the city and has always been fascinated by water and sustainability. Her most well-known building, a billowy, 82-story skyscraper that rises from the spot where Lake Michigan spills into the Chicago River, is named Aqua.

Gang sees the construction of the NRDC barriers as an excellent opportunity to make Chicago area waterways more green. In Reverse Effect, she investigates design possibilities for the barrier and the city's water infrastructure along with students from Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where she taught earlier this year. The book also includes input from the NRDC and residents who regularly use the Chicago River.

One student draped a land bridge across the creek that would also serve as an arts park. Another incorporated the nearby coal-burning Fisk Power Plant, remaking it into a facility that helps clean the river water to support urban agriculture that can serve a nearby food desert.

"We decided to create these inland water lagoons, that would add water-cleaning facilities using green-friendly treatments," Gang says of her firm's design for the barrier. "The water in the sewer system would go to the lagoon, where it's cleaned, and then back into the lake to be re-used by the system. And you can build up the city around these lagoons, with boats and beaches that are clean enough to swim in."

It's a design that embraces one of Gang's favorite dictums: nature is technology. "In the past we always thought about using technology to overcome nature," she explains. "Now we're learning how to harness the activity of nature – like the cleansing of water using plants, algae or bacteria, instead of creating more gray infrastructure with bigger and bigger pipes. I just read about a new kind of concrete made from seawater in a process similar to coral. Or using heat from the ground, geo-thermal, to power buildings. That's nature as technology. We're in an exciting time right now because we're starting to understand these kinds of things."

For Gang, improving quality of life involves creating a dense urban fabric where people can live and work alongside dynamic green spaces. "We have to take care of nature," Gang explains, citing the world's ever-rising rising human population and an ongoing mass extinction of plants and animals. "Animals move along corridors, birds migrate, so as cities get larger it's important to create paths they can pass through. At the same time, people need outdoor space to enjoy: many inner-city kids don't have any experience with nature. So instead of just designing green lawns, the spaces can be designed to engage both people and diverse species."

Other examples of Studio Gang's effort to incorporate nature into the city include its stunning, multi-use design for Northerly Island, a 91-acre peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan near downtown, and a boardwalk and pavilion at Lincoln Park Zoo's South Pond, completed last year. Her latest vision may necessitate a new name for the stretch of water long known as Bubbly Creek. "This barrier could be the catalyst for that post-industrial riverfront to become something new for the city," says Gang.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2011/10/new-life-chicago-least-popular-waterway/391/

Hisham Matar and Libya's Awakening

2011-10-28T10:49:00.001-04:00

By David Lepeska
For The National, Review magazine

One morning in late September, as Libyan rebels launched their final advance on Sirte, Muammar Qaddafi's hometown, Hisham Matar explained to a small, rapt audience at the century-old Chicago Club why the removal of repressive long-time dictators, though great, had not been the most meaningful achievement of the Arab Spring. "Our collective imagination - a whole array of expectations about our governments, our institutions, our dreams - has just shifted," he said. "The horizon has moved much further than even the most audacious of us would have suggested."

Matar speaks softly, but with confidence and precision. "You can see it on people's bodies, in their eyes and their faces, hear it in their voices," he adds during an interview in the lobby of his downtown hotel later that morning. "It's as if these regimes were sitting literally on top of us. There's a new ease, a new optimism, a new sense of ownership of the future. That tiresome record of complaining with resignation at the end of it - that's gone, and it's quite an extraordinary thing to lose so quickly."

***

Little-known outside literary circles before this year, Matar seems to have surfaced at precisely the right moment to herald a new Arab modernity. Born in New York City in 1970, he moved with his family to Tripoli three years later when his father, Jaballa, resigned from a United Nations posting in objection to the Qaddafi regime. In 1979, Jaballa found himself on a Libyan government watch list and again moved the family, this time to Cairo. He wrote articles calling for democracy, and became a leader of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya. In the mid-80s, Matar was sent to boarding school in the UK, where he stayed to study architecture at university.

On the afternoon of March 12, 1990, Jaballa was taken from the family's Cairo home by Egypt's mukhabarat, handed over to the Libyan government and deposited in Abu Salim prison. Two letters, smuggled out by fellow prisoners in 1992 and 1995, relayed stories of interrogation and torture. The family has not heard from Jaballa since. His fate remains unknown.

Matar's twenties fell away in a decade of hate for the Egyptian and Libyan governments. By 2004, he had moved to Paris, met his future wife and begun work on a novel. In the Country of Men, published in 2006, is the story of a sensitive Libyan boy experiencing the quiet panic of a childhood under despotic terror. The book made the Man Booker Prize shortlist and won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize, honouring a work that evokes "the spirit of a place".

Released early this year, his second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, is also narrated by a sensitive Arab youth and has received strong reviews. The story pivots around his father's mysterious abduction and the long-held secrets it reveals. A "chronicle of the dead years", is how the poet and critic Luke Kennard described the book in his February review for this publication. "Moving and impressively concise," Kennard wrote, "what ultimately sets Anatomy of a Disappearance apart and makes it something of a modern classic is not just the universality of loss, but the deep humanity of Matar's prose." Written in English, that prose is simple, declarative, and all the more forceful as a result of his great care.

"Every word we utter betrays us, says a little more than what we think we are saying, reveals more than what we anticipated, exposes us further," Matar said during a recent lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Few better expose the long, dark reach of dictatorship than Matar, which is something of an irony, as Anatomy's publication coincided with the uprisings sweeping the region. Suddenly, Matar was everywhere: writing about Libya and his father in the New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker; interpreting the Arab Spring at think-tank discussions and literary festivals; chatting with the BBC, NPR and other news channels.

All at once, and despite spending more than half of his life in the UK, Matar emerged as the new Arab world's unofficial interlocutor to the West. "It's not so much translating or communicating things, but it's dispelling the presumptions that we are quintessentially different," he says of his new role. "I'm very glad to be one of the people in the army of artists that are doing that on both sides. I do think this opportunity is a fantastic moment for anyone interested in culture, to start to define this relationship."

***

The Arab Spring did not begin with Tunisian fruit-seller Mohamed Bouazizi. Nor did it begin with Iran's green movement in 2009, or Lebanon's so-called Cedar Revolution of 2005. It began more than a century ago, with scholars, writers and revolutionaries who sounded the region's first modern-day clarion call for unity and self-determination.

Soon after Khayr al-Din, a reformist Circassian legion of the Ottoman Sultan, became prime minister of Tunisia in 1873, he founded Sadiki, a liberal university that taught secularism and emulated European politics. The new college became a breeding ground for the political elite that later built the institutions of an independent Tunisia. Around the same time, Muhammad Abduh, a prize pupil of the bold religious and political thinker Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, gained a pulpit as professor of history at Cairo's Darul Uloom. He denounced unjust rulers, sought harmony among religions and sects and argued that every society should be allowed to choose the form of government best-suited to its era.

And on a June 1880 night in Beirut, a small band of Muslim and Christian men snuck out under cover of darkness and posted placards at street corners and public squares, as co-conspirators did the same in Damascus, Tripoli and Sidon. The message on their poster "rebukes the people of Syria for their lethargy," writes George Antonius in his masterful 1946 history, The Arab Awakening, "incites the people to sink their differences and unite against their tyrants under the inspiration of their 'Arab pride'."

Included were verses from Arise ye Arabs, and Awake! Written by Ibrahim Yazeji, the poem is a call to unity and insurgence that appealed to students and gained a wide following despite being too treasonous to print.

Using the social media of their day, 19th century Arab youth spread the word. "The notion of concerted action to throw off the detested yoke is gradually shaping itself," the French writer Barthelemy Denis de Rivoyre wrote after visiting Beirut in 1883. "An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance."

***

The distance was further off than he thought; the nahda sparked several uprisings and an extended surge in Arab nationalism and expression, particularly in Egypt and the Levant, but ultimately fell short of its goals. Word of its demise, however, may have been premature. A century on, the Arab Spring seems to have brought the Awakening to fruition. The movement has ousted three leaders and pushed others to the brink- and more than 90 per cent of Tunisia's 4.1m registered voters turned out for the first election of the Arab Spring last week - yet the real coup may have been more social and cultural.

"Regardless of the political outcome in particular countries, this has already heralded a new chapter in Middle East history, one of those epoch-making moments," says Charles Kurzman, sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and co-director for the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is guest-editing a forthcoming issue of the journal Mobilization focused on the region's uprisings. "We've seen this in a variety of ways, particularly in regards to empowerment."

The Arab Spring has shattered the old order. A wealthy Cairene man complained to Matar of a recent outing to buy the newspaper from an old man who'd been selling him the paper for decades. "He drove to the newsstand and said: 'Hey, boy, bring me the paper!'" says Matar. "The old man brought the paper over and said: 'Don't ever talk to me like that again.' That never would have happened before the revolution."

It has unleashed cultural ferment. In 1977, the Qaddafi regime organised a festival of literature - then threw all of the writers who participated in jail. Yet mere months after overthrowing their despots, Egypt and Libya are enjoying an explosion of new periodicals, including 150 new journals and magazines in Benghazi alone. "Most of them aren't very good, but that's alright," says Matar, who is discussing collaborations with Egyptian writers. "It's an exciting time to be an artist in this part of the world."

It has fostered religious and regional unity. In February, the revered Sunni scholar Yusuf al Qaradawi returned to Cairo from Qatar - the first time he'd been in his homeland for 50 years - and delivered a Friday sermon to one million Egyptians of all creeds. He began with: "O Muslims, O Christians," - the second phrase a stunning departure from Islamic tradition, particularly for a conservative imam - and went on to speak in favor of secularism and democracy. Bahrainis recently organised a protest in support of the Syrian opposition. And when Matar arrived in Egypt in August, an immigration official, on learning he was Libyan, told him: "Come on, hurry up. Get rid of that tyrant."

Perhaps most importantly, it has burnished the region's international reputation. Arabs willing to risk their lives for freedom and dignity have gained the moral high ground, particularly on American and Western leaders who colluded with the likes of Qaddafi and Mubarak for decades. For the first time in centuries, the West is looking to Arab nations for lessons on civic responsibility and courage.

Witness the Occupy Wall Street movement. It began in September with a couple of hundred young protesters camping out in Lower Manhattan to protest ineffective governance and the yawning gap between rich and poor but has since swelled to a mini-revolution, inspiring copycats in a hundred other cities worldwide, from Los Angeles to Berlin to Hong Kong. The weak global economy has played a role, as in Arab countries. But the success of uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya has been the spark. "This was absolutely inspired by Tahrir Square, by the Arab Spring movement," Tyler Combelic, a web designer protesting in Lower Manhattan told the New York Times last month.

*****

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the highest praise probably came from the Swedish Nobel committee in awarding a share of this year's Nobel Peace Prize to 32-year-old Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman. The choice of Karman, a liberal Islamist, highlights how Arab women have asserted themselves socially, politically, like never before - and underlines a key international concern.

"From a Western perspective, there's been much hand-wringing about instability, particularly about an Islamist government, in Egypt, in Libya," says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, who joined Matar at the Chicago Club breakfast, which had been organised by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "This is the wrong question. Our goal is to bring about democratic institutions... but we have to keep in mind it's the right of the people in these countries to shape their futures, so it's also in some sense their right to fail."

For Libya, some degree of political failure seems likely, at least in the short-term. It has no Khayr al-Din or Muhammad Abduh in its past and, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, is woefully short of the building blocks of modern governance. Under Qaddafi, Libya had no political parties, parliament, or civil society. The only government ministry worthy of the name was the state oil company. To make matters worse, Italy's fascist colonisers limited Libyans to a third-grade education until the 1950s. "The first educated generation was my father's," says Matar. "Our institutions are really basic."

Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of The Spirit of Democracy, estimates Libya might be able to cobble together the rudiments of a democracy in a few years. Libyans returning from abroad, like Ali Tarhouni, who gave up a comfortable economics professorship in Seattle to support the revolution, may help speed the process. Either way, Matar sees the coming period of instability as constructive. "We Libyans need to live through a stage where we don't know what's going to happen," says Matar. "We need to mature through uncertainty. I've always known what I'm supposed to say, supposed to think, and suddenly I don't, and it's very exciting."

Matar has some of the grace often born of suffering and contemplation, and his thoughts echo those of another writer who came to prominence with the overthrow of an oppressive regime. "People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom," Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright, said in a 1990 speech in London, months after the Velvet Revolution ousted Czechoslovakia's communist leadership. "Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go."

After teaching a literature course at Columbia University's Barnard College this autumn, Matar plans to return to Libya for the first time in more than three decades. His first mission is to find his father - though hope has diminished in recent months as rebels have opened most of the country's prisons with no sign of Jaballa. Next up is building a new Libya. For Matar, the revolution and its success could hardly have been more personal: with the help of friends, he set up a communications centre for the uprising in his London apartment; watching demonstrations on TV, he saw protesters holding photos of his father; and in August, his 22-year-old cousin, a rebel named Izz al-Arab Matar, was killed in the assault on Qaddafi's compound in Tripoli. "I want to know what it's like to have a country again," says Matar, envisioning a cultural role for himself. "This will be a new opportunity for me to engage with Libya in a way that is fuller."

Matar, who has begun batting around ideas for a new novel, says he has no interest in politics or public service. Yet in his UCLA lecture he highlighted the balancing acts performed by Andre Malraux and Mario Vargas Llosa, writers who late in their careers embraced public life. Malraux became a French minister of state and cultural affairs, while Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru. "Both were too good and too honest to let this contaminate their art," Matar said. "They were allowed to be both artists and citizens, to be selflessly committed to their craft but also to critically engage the current issues of their time."

****

Now that Qaddafi is dead, Libyans are moving forward. Anger at the corruption, cronyism and mismanagement of the old regime is widespread. Diamond warns of a "policy of vengeance" in the new Libya. To Matar, the legacy of "brother leader" represents a singular hurdle. "Qaddafi is a real challenge to Libya's conception of itself," he says. "You can't tell me he's been dropped from Mars, and you can't tell me he did this on his own. What does that say about us? What does that say about our history? Without addressing personal responsibility and accountability we are in great danger of replicating elements of the past."

In the years that followed the Velvet Revolution, President Havel's decision not to chase down and prosecute the two and a half million members of the Czechoslovakian communist party helped the country maintain greater stability than some of its neighbours. "It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last 40 years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us," Havel said just days after assuming the presidency, on New Year's Day, 1990. "On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone, to do something about it."

The task for Libyans is much greater. Tribal divisions remain, caches of thousands of weapons are scattered across the country and the rebellion created a handful of powerful militia commanders, like Abd al-Hakim Belhaj, who may have difficulty laying down their arms. Back in March, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worried about Libya "becoming a giant Somalia." Just days before Qaddafi's death, Clinton spoke during a surprise visit to Tripoli University. "One of the problems you will face is how to reconcile different people, how you will bring people into a new Libya and not spend your time trying to settle scores from the past," she said.

Recent reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented armed militias backed by Libya's Transitional National Council arbitrarily detaining, beating and even torturing Qaddafi loyalists. Rebel fighters are reportedly keeping lists of such loyalists, including up to 10,000 from Sirte alone. And indeed, several mobile-phone videos strongly suggest Qaddafi's killing was an act of vengeful passion committed by angry rebels and Libyan citizens. Few understand the need for retribution as well as Matar, who cautions against it.

"Even as the son of someone who has disappeared, who has been tortured, I don't want revenge," he says, pausing in thought. "What I want is accountability: I want the torturer to know what he's done, to know that he understands the magnitude of his actions. And that's not out of the desire to punish him, but out of the desire to try to see - and it's a big risk to the heart - whether it is possible for me and him to come to regard ourselves as brothers. What it provides as a possibility for the future of Libya is bringing these people from the brink of inhumanity, of savagery, back to society in some way - that respects the suffering of the victims, that respects the desire for accountability, but refrains from revenge and from reprisals and from inflicting pain, and is motivated by the desire for brotherhood."

This sense of creativity, unity, ownership and responsibility Matar praises is not irreversible. The killing of two dozen Copts by Egypt's increasingly powerful military leadership during recent clashes in Cairo has sparked renewed religious animosity. Nationalist and Islamist groups have been energised across much of the region, threatening to change the tenor of events and the thrust of governance. In Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, uprisings have stalled in the face of suppression or turned increasingly violent. New governments in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia are likely to disappoint those hoping for mature democracy. That old malaise could creep back.

Towards the end of the breakfast discussion, Matar urged patience. Outside the second-floor windows of the Chicago Club, a shelf of grey clouds loomed over Grant Park and Lake Michigan beyond. "History moves at such a glacial pace much of the time, and moments like this it seems to move at the speed of light," he said. "But we can't expect it to continue to move at that pace. A hundred years might be a good distance to judge whether this has been a good idea. It's going to take that long for these events to reverberate."

Originally ran in Oct 28, 2011, National
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/hisham-matar-on-libyas-awakening?pageCount=0

City Bike Plan Is Accused of a Neighborhood Bias

2011-10-16T10:47:00.001-04:00

By DAVID LEPESKA
nytimes.com

Mayor Rahm Emanuel plans to spend nearly $150 million to make Chicago “the bike-friendliest city” in the United States. That challenge is considerable, given Chicago’s slow start compared with Portland, Ore., and other bike-centered cities, and Mr. Emanuel’s initial plan is drawing complaints about an inequitable distribution of the investment.

The Chicago Department of Transportation’s $18 million bike-share program is expected to begin next summer with 3,000 bicycles and 300 rental stations, to be located in areas with dense employment, residential development and retail. The Bloomingdale Trail, to be built in an unused two-and-a-half-mile rail line that runs from Wicker Park to Humboldt Park on the North Side, is expected to cost around $50 million over several years. The city planning commission recently approved designs for a $50 million flyover bridge at Navy Pier, the busiest section of the 15-mile lakefront trail.

But so far, the city’s lower-income areas include just one project: a protected bike lane on 18th Street in the 25th Ward, though more such lanes could be added in the spring as part of a four-year, $28 million construction plan. The alderman for the 25th Ward, Daniel Solis, is also the chairman of the City Council’s zoning committee, and he is traveling to Amsterdam this month at the expense of Bikes Belong, an advocacy group based in Boulder, Colo.

Oboi Reed, a lifelong Chatham resident and founder of the Pioneers Bicycle Club, said Mr. Emanuel is pursuing a good objective, but is on the wrong path.

“I definitely support getting more people on bikes because a lot of the common health problems African-Americans face are a result of not getting enough exercise,” Mr. Reed said. “My concern is that the lion’s share of the resources are going to go downtown and to the North Side — the South and West will only see a sprinkling.”

With the city facing a budget deficit of nearly $640 million and a double-digit unemployment rate, Mr. Emanuel may find it difficult to justify spending large amounts on bike facilities.

“It probably isn’t going to help many low-income and out-of-work folks,” said Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who analyzes poverty and inequality. “You can’t spend all your money on a single priority, ignoring transportation or anything else. Given the situation in Chicago, this much spending seems a bit out of whack.”

From 2000 to 2009, the percentage of Chicagoans commuting by bike increased from about 0.5 percent to 1.1 percent. The growth is similar to that seen in other industrial cities like Milwaukee, Detroit and Oakland, Calif., but still lags behind Portland, which tops the United States with 6 percent commuting by bike.

Mr. Emanuel has set a goal of installing 100 miles of protected bike lanes — at a cost of $28 million — by the end of his term in 2015. Protected bike lanes are separated from car traffic by cones, curbs or other impediments. Chicago’s first protected bike lane opened in July on Kinzie Street. The second lane is to be installed this month, on Jackson Street, with another 20 to be built in the spring — all in locations chosen by the city.

Sam Schwartz Engineering, a firm based in New York that was hired by Chicago to design a 150- to 250-mile bike lane network, will hold a series of meetings over the next eight months to help determine the best locations for all future bike lanes.

“There’s been zero public outreach on where the bike lanes should go,” said Steven Vance, a former transportation department consultant on bike planning issues and co-founder of GridChicago.com. Mr. Vance said he approved of the city’s efforts to increase ridership but questioned the first few bike lane locations.

The lack of outreach could be a concern, according to Alan Berube, research director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “If it’s done without public education and public input, there could be some real resistance,” he said.

Ben Gomberg, the Transportation Department’s bike program coordinator, said the city chooses wide streets that either see a lot of bike traffic or connect main arteries. To save money, the department also tries to piggyback on current roadway projects. The city has applied for state support and for federal clean-air financing that could total $50 million.

Mr. Berube said the bike initiatives could help in a city where the unemployment rate is more than 10 percent and nearly one in four residents live in poverty. “It can connect people to services, to work, and improve their health,” he said. “We need more jobs, but we need accessible jobs, too.”

-----
ran in Oct 16, 2011, NYTimes, www.nytimes.com

Preparing for 2012, Chicago Police Create Counter-terrorism Unit

2011-09-14T09:05:00.002-04:00

By David Lepeska
September 9, 2011, NY Times

As the city prepares to host two international summits next year, and with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks approaching, the Chicago Police Department is creating a counterterrorism unit, which will bolster security and incorporate lessons from academic research and from New York City’s counterterrorism tactics.

The threat of terrorism is a real concern for Chicago officials, with world leaders expected at both the Group of Eight and NATO summits here next year. The city has been home to violent extremists and the target of terrorist plots: David C. Headley of Chicago helped to plan the deadly November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, and documents taken from Osama bin Laden’s compound in May included plans to attack the city.

Last month, the police department quietly started the counterterrorism unit, which is expected to be fully operational by the end of the year,. The move is the brainchild of Garry McCarthy, the city’s new police superintendent, who was in New York with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sept. 11, 2001, and later helped develop the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism strategy.

Mr. McCarthy intends to bring various counterterrorism functions under a single unit, a spokesman for the department said. The new unit will also act on intelligence from the regional Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Mr. McCarthy hopes to take a page from New York’s innovative program, though on a smaller scale. The New York Police Department has more than 1,000 officers working on terrorism, with detectives in foreign cities and with officers who speak Pashto, Arabic and other languages monitoring communication channels. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he had added nearly 750 additional officers, yet the department still has 700 fewer officers than five years ago, according to city records.

A 2008 report from the RAND Corporation, a policy institute, said local police were the most effective units in fighting terrorism because their relations with local Muslim communities could enable them to gain information and foster cooperation.

Muslims in Chicago seem willing to work with the police and to help avoid early mistakes that could undermine the new unit’s efforts. Muslims for a Safe America, a Chicago group led by Kamran Memon, seeks to address tensions within Muslim communities about American policies in this country and abroad. And the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest advocacy group for American Muslims, is active here.

The city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communication is spearheading security planning for the NATO and G8 summits, scheduled for May 15-22, and the new Chicago Police Department counterterrorism unit is likely to play a key role. Antiwar activists have already called for protests during the gatherings, and the police department has begun training thousands of officers in tactics for mass arrests and containment.

Facing the Enemy Within

2011-09-14T09:03:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
From September 9, 2011, Review, of The National

Just as the attacks of September 11, 2001, proved a watershed event in the fight against international terrorism, the targeted killing of Osama bin Laden by the US on May 1, 2011 may come to mark another. Months after the Arab Spring had begun to eat away at his political stance, bin Laden's death shifted the focus of US counter-terrorism officials away from Al Qaeda and its international affiliates.

"This is the first counter-terrorism strategy that designates the homeland as a primary area of emphasis," John Brennan, President Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser and deputy national security adviser for homeland security, said at the June release of Washington's new plan.

Though the recent bombing of the United Nations compound in Nigeria by Al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram is a reminder of the still-real threat, it is clear that, with bin Laden dead and some 1,200 of his soldiers, lieutenants and commanders killed in recent years by CIA drone strikes, Al Qaeda is on the decline.

Domestic terrorism, meanwhile, is on the rise, particularly in the US and UK. From September 11, 2001 to May 2009, US authorities uncovered 21 plots, according to the Congressional Research Service; in the past two years they have made arrests in connection with at least 33 more. Since 2008, no western country has arrested more people for terrorist-related activity - some 200 a year, although most suspects were subsequently released without charge - than the UK. Little surprise, then, that both countries have reoriented their security policies to focus on domestic radicalisation - how to detect it and how to stop it.

Counter-terrorism is, in essence, about killing bad guys. Counter-radicalisation, which is mainly an attempt to keep the young and disaffected from embracing extremist ideas and violence, is much more complicated. The difference is akin to the gap between rooting out Al Qaeda from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and building a secure and stable Afghanistan in order to eliminate present and future terrorist safe havens.

The former is tangible and easily measured, the latter complex, multi-faceted and difficult to quantify. So how do authorities identify potential violent extremists and break-up terrorist plots before they happen? And how do they know whether such strategies are working? For the most part, they don't.

Spurred by the July 2005 London bombings, Britain put in place the world's first modern-day counter-radicalisation strategy two years later. Called Prevent, it sought to address Muslim grievances, undermine extremist ideology with moderate ideas and support vulnerable individuals and communities - objectives also recommended in Preventing Violent Radicalization in America, a report published by the Bipartisan Policy Center in June.

Yet Muslim groups soon attacked Prevent for sponsoring spying in their communities. Other critics saw a cash cow that provided thousands of pounds in handouts for rap workshops, basketball and cricket clubs and youth singing groups - with little to show for it.

In a review released in June, the British Home Office acknowledged that Prevent had mostly failed and that some of the money had even ended up in the hands of extremist groups. Counter-radicalisation programmes, said the review, were "comparatively new and evidence of impact is correspondingly limited".

Indeed, Prevent was essentially a shot in the dark. "There is really no precedent," said Peter Neumann, author of the Bipartisan Policy Center report and founding director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College in London. "It was very experimental and they changed it this year because by and large it didn't work."

Britain plans to build on one aspect that did work. The Channel programme encourages teachers and community leaders to report potential extremists to the authorities, who then offer guidance or instruction to those at risk.

Some have accused the programme of backing spying, and 7,500 British schools opted out because they perceived an anti-Islamic bent. But of the 1,000 people who have gone through the programme voluntarily in four years, none has ever been arrested in a terrorist case.

"These close, fine-grain initiatives are really important and effective," says Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has analysed counter-radicalisation efforts in the US and UK. "I've yet to see any similar programme in the US."

The US finally dipped its toes into the counter-radicalisation pool last month, with the release of the country's first paper on the subject, Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism. The White House report urges authorities to build relationships at the local level, promote immigrant integration and avoid blaming certain communities or confusing strong religiosity with extremist tendencies. Religion, says Huq, "is not playing the role many believe it to be playing". Indeed, a recent Gallup poll found that among Muslim Americans who reported they "seldom" went to a mosque, 22 per cent were politically engaged, while nearly 40 per cent of those who attended a religious service at least once a week were politically active.

Though the White House paper gets this one point right, at eight pages it is short on details. After its release, US senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins pointed out that it failed to name a lead agency or individual, provide an action plan or present a means to assess the programme's success.

"It's not a policy paper, it has no concrete plan of action - and that's the disappointment," says Neumann. "I would call it a statement of intent."

Ten years after 9/11 and nearly two years after Nidal Hasan, a US army major inspired by Al Qaeda-affiliated cleric Anwar al-Awliki, killed 13 in a shooting at Fort Hood, the US is still without a coherent strategy to stop people from embracing violent extremism. What's more, efforts to gain co-operation from Muslim communities are undermined by local and national informant programmes.

The FBI has built a nationwide network of up to 15,000 informants, many in Muslim communities, according to a report in the current issue of Mother Jones magazine. Agents use these informants to assist in sting operations.

"FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists, but tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity," writes Trevor Aaronson. "And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity."

The New York Police Department maintains an extended regional surveillance network within mosques and Muslim community centres and receives support from the CIA. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim advocacy group, has called for an investigation into the legality of the NYPD programme and is not alone in its lack of faith in local authorities.

On average, Muslim Americans are about 25 per cent less confident than other Americans in the FBI, according to a recent Gallup poll. Some 52 per cent believe they are singled out for terrorist surveillance and 43 per cent say they have personally experienced harassment in the past year, according to a Pew poll released last week.

The end result is less co-operation and decreased overall security. "If people believe the police treat them and their community with respect and don't behave on the basis of racial and ethnic priors, they are more likely to co-operate than if they believe they are procedurally unfair," says Huq, referring to the findings of his studies among Muslim communities in New York and London.

At the same time, he adds, "people who engage in discrimination are imposing a cost on society as a whole, and that cost is a loss of security".

Yet the US might learn from British mistakes, embrace less coercive policies and work from the ground up. Dwight Holton, a federal attorney in Oregon, may have created one promising effort last year.

After Holton indicted a 19-year-old Somali-American for attempting to bomb Portland's 2010 Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, he met with a local imam and leaders of a refugee organisation to find out what had inspired the youth. As a result, he learnt the concerns of incoming immigrants and built solid relationships with the local Muslim community.

Neumann urges the US government to help attorneys across the country to launch similar initiatives. The federal government could then share information among these programmes and promote the most effective practices.

"Unlike in Britain and much of Europe, there's no point in uniform federal policies in the US because Muslim-American communities are so diverse, so different," says Neumann, citing Somalis in the US, who tend to be quite poor and may need to be taught English. "The recipes need to be different for different communities."

Both US and UK authorities must be willing to engage a diverse array of community partners in difficult and hard-to-reach environments and address concerns about counter-terrorism and foreign policies, he says. They also need to be able to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and violent Islamist extremists.

Most of the literature says radicalisation can occur in a variety of ways but generally involves: the perception of grievance, such as oppression; the jihadist narrative used online by Al Qaeda and other organisations, that western countries are waging a war against Islam and all Muslims are called to defend the religion; and the presence of a social group, often led by a charismatic leader, to nurture such ideas.

Other specifics, including the role of religiosity and key instigating factors, are more difficult to grasp, but politicians and top officials are working to find more answers.

In July, the House sub-committee on terrorism examined the Bipartisan Policy Group's report, with Neumann as the primary witness.

On Tuesday, the House intelligence committee plans to hold public hearings with its Senate counterpart, the head of the FBI, the national counter-terrorism director and other top intelligence officials to examine the US position on combating the growing domestic threat.

And in Britain, the updated Prevent strategy has shifted its focus to education, identifying 40 universities where students are at risk of exposure to extremist views, to healthcare, hoping to train doctors to identify vulnerable youths, and to the internet.

As such efforts continue, British and American attempts to counter and interrupt the process of radicalisation are likely to improve. Yet considering the complexity of the problem, finding solutions may take some time.

"Counter-radicalisation is about trying to inoculate communities against the appeal of violent extremism," says Neumann. "In order to do that you have to first understand what drives people to this choice, and there's no clear-cut answer to that."

----------
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/as-organised-terror-wanes-focus-turns-to-the-enemies-within

Muslim activist puts his faith to work in Chicago's troubled Southside

2011-09-03T16:58:00.006-04:00

By David Lepeska
Cover story in May 20, 2011 Review, The National

On a cool, grey April morning on Chicago's South Side, Rami Nashashibi walked purposefully into the conference room of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (Iman) and sat at the head of a rectangular table, where four of his charges awaited instruction.

"I can't explain how much you have on your shoulders," Nashashibi, wearing loose-fitting jeans, a knitted skullcap and a comfortable sweater, told his men. "What we have right now is a little seed, and if we want that seed to become a great forest, we've got to cultivate it."

Nashashibi has been cultivating Iman for nearly 15 years. Today the organisation provides just about everything to those in need in Chicago Lawn, a predominantly African-American neighbourhood with a mix of Latinos and Palestinians. Its free clinic serves the sick from across the city. A computer lab offers technical training. Tens of thousands of people go to its annual concert benefit, Takin' It to the Streets, while its bimonthly music and arts gatherings are well attended. One project supports healthier eating alternatives for the area; another reduces gang violence. A new initiative, Green Reentry, builds eco-friendly houses for Muslims recently released from prison.

Iman's work has earned plaudits for its leader. In 2007, Islamica magazine placed Nashashibi among the 10 Young Muslim Visionaries Shaping Islam in America. The next year he was named one of the world's 500 most influential Muslims by Georgetown University and described as "the most impressive young Muslim of my generation" by Eboo Patel, chairman of President Barack Obama's interfaith task force. Last autumn, the US state department sent Nashashibi on a diplomatic speaking tour of Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this year, Iman received another honour: Imam Habib Umar, the director of Dar Al Mustafa, based in Yemen's Hadhramaut Valley, and among the world's top institutions of Islamic education, spent an afternoon in Chicago Lawn as part of his first North American tour. He visited the organisation's Transitional House, where Muslim men recently released from prison stay until they can get on their feet, and delivered a speech on spirituality and community accountability. "The most beloved of God's creatures are those who are most beneficial to others," Umar had said, thanking Iman members for "fulfilling a communal obligation upon all Muslims".

Nashashibi balances a commitment to Islam, an intellectual rigour and an unstinting morality with the style and mannerisms of the street. He has a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he teaches, and has worked in high-security prisons and some of the city's roughest neighbourhoods. On the South Side, he is friendly with shopkeepers, businesspeople and political and religious leaders and trusted enough by school administrators to be called in to mediate student disputes.

"We must serve humanity by serving the creator in the most humble way possible," Nashashibi advises the men in the conference room. "What we do on all levels continues to represent the larger project. You're being watched now by Habib Umar. People around the city, around the country, around the world, are hearing about our work."

***

Nashashibi was born in Amman, Jordan, where his father, Ali Maher Nashashibi, produced a show for a local radio station. His mother - born as her family fled Palestine in the Nakba of May 1948 - grew up in Chicago, the eldest daughter of one of the first Palestinian families on the South Side. She met Ali Maher at university. The couple soon married and moved to Jordan.

Shortly after Nashashibi's birth, Ali Maher became a Jordanian diplomat and moved the family again, this time to Romania. The couple had a second son but divorced when Nashashibi was nine years old. He lived in Spain, Saudi Arabia and Italy with his mother and stepfather during his teenage years, until moving, at 19, to Chicago. Yet he remains connected to Jerusalem, where his family name has been highly regarded since at least 1469, when Sultan Qatbay of the Memluk sultanate appointed Naser el-Deen Mohammed al-Nashashibi to guard Palestine's two holiest mosques, Al Aqsa in Jerusalem and Al Haram Al Ibrahimi in Hebron. A general in the Memluk army, Naser al-Deen is said to have built an arcade in the Al Aqsa courtyard that still stands today.

About a century ago, Uthman and Raghib al-Nashashibi, second cousins of Rami Nashashibi's grandfather, represented Jerusalem in the Ottoman parliament. In 1920, the British governor appointed Raghib as mayor of Jerusalem - a post that threw his Palestinian nationalism into doubt. He fled to Egypt amid assassination attempts in 1938. But in December 1948, shortly after Israel had become a state, Jordan's King Abdullah named Raghib his first governor of the West Bank.

After graduating from Chicago's DePaul University in 1995, Nashashibi went to Birzeit, just outside Ramallah, to work with local youth for a year. His visit was illuminating and inspiring, but Nashashibi knew what he wanted to do and returned to Chicago.

His work on the South Side had begun two years prior, soon after he met Abdul-Malik Ryan, another DePaul undergraduate. Originally an Irish Catholic from suburban Oak Park, Ryan was studying African-American history and had recently converted to Islam. "From the very beginning Rami was very charismatic," says Ryan, now DePaul's Muslim chaplain. Nashashibi asked him to help out at the Arab-American community centre in Chicago Lawn.

They started working there, providing odd jobs for teenagers and daycare for younger children. "From there it was a step to have our own organisation, identified as Muslim," says Ryan, who co-founded Iman with Nashashibi.

Iman's reputation grew quickly. Its inaugural Takin' It to the Streets concert, held in Marquette Park in 1997, raised $15,000. "We thought we were millionaires and started nine programmes, with only one staff member," Nashashibi recalls.

"When we first started we were all young, we didn't know that much," adds Ryan. "We were kind of basing it all on enthusiasm."

Nevertheless, they began to make an impact on the neighbourhood, although, even today Chicago Lawn is no urban oasis. In early May, a 17-year-old Iman intern was shot in the back just a few streets away from the organisation's office. "We're not working in Disneyland," says Nashashibi. "This place, it'll test your mettle."

***

Metropolitan Chicago, with a population of nearly 10 million, has long been one of the US's most racially sensitive cities. In the so-called Great Migration, from the early to mid-20th century, millions of black Americans moved from the South into northern cities.

By the Sixties, organised white opposition groups viewed these new arrivals as competition for jobs and residential areas and barred them from some communities, worsening racial tensions across the city. The neighbourhoods around Marquette Park - at that time, a patchwork of Polish, Irish and Italians alongside newly arrived blacks and some Palestinians - were a tinderbox. In 1966, Martin Luther King led a peaceful march through the area as part of an effort to integrate the city's neighbourhoods. Counter-protesters threw bottles, rocks and bricks, one of which hit King on the head.

A few decades earlier, a young Chicagoan born of Russian Jewish immigrants named Saul Alinsky had begun working to improve living conditions in the city's slums and ghettos. Starting in the 1930s, Alinsky organised community movements in Back-of-the-Yards, a rough and tumble district that served as the setting for Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Over the years Alinsky developed a set of rules, which ultimately became the principles of modern community organising. Today they read like an instruction manual from Otpor, the Serbian-run pro-revolutionary movement that has informed many of the Arab Spring protesters: hide your numbers to look larger; focus on what you know; remind your opponent of their own rules and claims; use ridicule, which is infuriating and hard to counterattack; remember that a good tactic should be enjoyable; identify a responsible individual, attack him and ignore attempts to shift the blame; maintain the pressure.

"In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organisations to seize power and give it to the people," Alinsky wrote in his 1971 manifesto, Rules for Radicals, "to realise the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace."

Barack Obama never met Alinsky, who died in 1972, but as a community organiser in Chicago's Altgeld Gardens he worked under an Alinsky protégé. On his first day organising, in 1986, Obama's boss handed him a long list of Gardens' residents to interview.

"Find out their self-interest, he said," Obama writes in Dreams from My Father. "That's why people become involved in organising - because they think they'll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power."

A quarter of a century later, in a cramped second-floor office a few blocks from Marquette Park, Nashashibi met with the leaders of local Christian and Jewish organisations looking to generate the power of cooperative action for an issue gripping the neighbourhood: foreclosures.

According to one estimate, Chicago house prices dropped almost 30 per cent between 2006 and 2010, close to the national average. But over the same period, median home prices in Chicago Lawn plummeted by 70 per cent, from $220,000 to $63,000. The area surrounding Marquette Park has seen 8,700 foreclosures in the past three years.

Not far from Iman's offices, a one-block stretch of Washtenaw Avenue underscored how abandoned homes led to increased drug use, gang violence and neighbourhood instability. The organisation owns two previously abandoned homes here: one is its Transitional House, the other its first Green Reentry home. Work on the latter began in 2010. Ma'alem Abdullah, the tall, soft-spoken head of Iman's Green Reentry, expected his first tenant later this month and hoped to have six to eight men - all Muslims just released from prison, who must undergo a screening process - living in the house by the end of the year.

On a recent morning, two young men loitered on the pavement just up the road from the retrofit house. "See these guys down the street selling drugs?" asked Abdullah, shaking his head.

He pointed out two other abandoned homes nearby, one of which no longer had a front door. "This is an insult to the work we're trying to do, a slap in the face," Abdullah said, strolling in and finding a soiled living room carpet and scattered trash.

The trio of leaders at the foreclosures' meeting hoped to devise a plan to reclaim abandoned homes and turn them into housing for troubled local families. Their first target was an abandoned two-storey house on Fairfield Avenue. In early April, the front door and windows were boarded up. Iman hopes to legally acquire the home and put a family on the second floor, an office on the first, and perhaps house another family in the basement.

On July 28, a district court judge will decide whether to award Iman custody of the home. Meanwhile, Iman planned a demonstration event in front of the house with a diverse group of community leaders in late May. "We're testing the law," says Nashashibi. "It may be a bit of civil disobedience."

It's a familiar subject for him. In Theorising the Global Ghetto, the course he teaches at the University of Chicago, Nashashibi links urban underclasses in cities around the globe. During a recent class he told his students how, in the 1990s, rap music, hip-hop style and protests against authority became "the cultural export of the ghetto" and, ultimately, "vehicles for solidarity and emancipatory practices".

In his own life, he discovered a straight line from urban oppression to protest, to the religion of his ancestors. As he worked with inner-city communities he learnt more about the African-American narrative, which led to meetings with black nationalists and civil rights activists and finally to Islam.

"I wasn't brought up in any way a conscious Muslim. I don't think I even walked into a mosque until I was around 19," says Nashashibi. "Then I started meeting brothers who had become Muslim and who then started challenging me about where I was spiritually. The first time I opened the Quran was to debate these people, trying to disprove them ... That was my first real engagement with Islam and I think somewhere along the line I just came to a point where I had to accept a really profound spiritual shift. It was very much a conversion-type process, and like an early convert there were moments when I was hard to be around, I had that zealotry ... I was just blown away, discovering this new world."

Combining that zealotry with his years spent studying urban culture and working with ex-convicts has earned Nashashibi undeniable street cred. His interest in gang violence, urban social history and the language and motivations of hip-hop is no stylistic pose, but a major part of his life and work.

Take Rafi Peterson, who stole drugs and ran with gang members as a teen. He was convicted of first degree murder in 1985 and sent to prison. By the time of his release, in 1997, he had converted to Islam. A year later he met Nashashibi and the two began visiting Chicago area prisons to talk about religion. They noticed that many prisoners had difficulty reintegrating into society when they were released. The duo launched Project Restore in 2005, which helped write a bill that sought to divert non-violent drug offenders towards treatment and away from the downward spiral of reoffending. After much wrangling, it was passed by the Illinois legislature in April 2007. [Today Peterson also sits on the Iman board and runs CeaseFire, a highly successful anti-gang violence programme, independent from Iman.

That same year, Project Restore started welcoming tenants to its Transitional House in a renovated Chicago Lawn home. Green Reentry goes one step further, looking to help rehabilitate and reintegrate former prisoners, address the housing crisis and create sustainable urban living spaces

***

In March, after a year of widespread controversy over several major mosque proposals and more than a dozen anti-Sharia bills across the country, US congressional hearings into radicalisation among American Muslim communities began. Led by New York Representative Peter King, a Republican, the hearings are seen by many progressives and Muslim leaders as something of a witch hunt.

"Muslims now are being held up to intense scrutiny, and it's unfortunate," says Nashashibi. "More than ever, we've got to be proactive. It's gonna get ugly, with the King hearings, the 10th anniversary of September 11, and the 2012 election coming up. We have to continue to demonstrate how we are working for good, working for change and creating facts on the ground that speak louder than any attack."

A December study from the World Organization for Resource Development and Education, a Washington-based think-tank, found that building a strong national network of moderate Muslim leaders could help counter radicalisation. Further, the report argues that strong Muslim leaders who work to discourage violence and promote pluralism offer a positive alternative for Muslim youth, one the government would be wise to promote.

This might explain the increased interest in Iman from the highest office in the land. In April, Nashashibi and an Iman team met with officials from the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to discuss a possible collaboration.

Nashashibi is always on the lookout for bridge-building opportunities, in part because Iman measures its effectiveness through the community connections it helps foster. When news of the killing of Osama bin Laden by US forces broke, for example, many US residents celebrated openly. Yet in a Twitter post the next day, Nashashibi cited an opinion piece written by a rabbi, who referred to Moses leading his people in celebrating the death of the pharaoh and his army. "The rabbi recalled God scolding the angels after they too began to dance and sing. "'We must not rejoice at their deaths!'"

***

"Rami is like a synergy," says Rabbi Capers Funnye, who runs a synagogue a short distance from Iman, and who has known Nashashibi for seven years. "He really is able to bring people together from diverse backgrounds, diverse needs, and show people how their needs relate to others and relate to the work of others."

This might sound like the recipe for a successful politician. Indeed, the parallels between Nashashibi and the US president are striking: Obama's father and grandfather were tribal chieftains, while Nashashibi comes from a long line of prominent Palestinians; their parents divorced at an early age; both moved around a lot and struggled with identity before working as community organisers on Chicago's South Side in their twenties and teaching civil rights-related courses at the University of Chicago in their thirties.

"There's a lot of familiar territory," says Nashashibi. Though he has supported a few city council candidates in the neighbourhood, he doesn't see himself running for office. "People have brought it up, but I don't think so."

Nashashibi prefers to do more of what he's doing now. Iman recently bought a 15,000-square-foot space across the road from its headquarters, and hopes to turn it into a clinic, arts centre, garden and classrooms. After organising events in New York and Washington, Iman also plans to establish a network of affiliates.

"Iman has kind of chartered a new model, a new course for Muslims working in urban America, addressing critical needs in the community," says Amir al-Islam, a history professor at Abu Dhabi's Zayed University and chairman of Iman's board of directors. "Young people are most vulnerable to the ideas of radicalisation, most prone to being recruited. We think we have something that young people can engage in and capture their imagination, get involved in civic engagement - and it's a way to manifest their faith that serves humanity."

International engagement may be next. Nashashibi has twice visited Abu Dhabi to meet with officials from the Tabah Foundation, which advises the government on Islam-inflected civil society projects, to discuss the possiblity of an Iman affiliate in the UAE. He has also met officials from Msheireb Properties (formerly named Dohaland), which is overseeing the construction of a new downtown for Doha, and the Doha International Centre for Inter-faith Dialogue.

Nashashibi argues in his University of Chicago course that the denizens of today's densely populated, low-income areas of Chicago, Chongqing, Cairo, Mumbai, Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro are linked by common concerns and shared responses. And their numbers are growing. A recent report from McKinsey estimated that the world's urban population is increasing by more than one million people every week - and the majority of that expansion occurs in slums and ghettos.

Saskia Sassen, the Robert S Lynd professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York, says the DNA of cities is not conflict, but commerce and civics. Two decades ago she popularised the term "global city," to refer to metropolitan areas creating and responding to the trends of globalisation. Now, she sees the rise of "a global network of all kinds of weak actors, but very interdependent nowadays, that can actually raise hell, if you want, and contest what is happening".

Sassen, who has sat on conference panels with Nashashibi and is familiar with his ideas, thinks he is ideally placed to take a lead role in this network. "Powerlessness can become complex," she writes in an e-mail. "Rami's capturing of ... a strategic encounter in what is a devalued space for the larger society, the ghetto ... is for me akin at some deep structural level to Tahrir Square and Benghazi."

-------
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/muslim-activist-puts-his-faith-to-work-in-troubled-chicago

Fighting the Syrian Regime from a Chicago Office

2011-08-22T10:19:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
nytimes.com

Yaser Tabbara may live half a world away from Syria, where he grew up. But as the uprising there continues, the Chicago lawyer has mounted a one-man legal and diplomatic assault against the Syrian regime to highlight the brutality of its response and help depose President Bashar al-Assad.

In recent weeks, Mr. Tabbara, 35, attended opposition conferences in Turkey and Belgium, and spoke at policy forums in Qatar and Washington. He also built a case for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to charge the Syrian government with crimes against humanity, and he helped draft a letter to the United Nations Security Council calling for urgent action — all while communicating with protesters inside Syria and occasionally representing his law firm’s clients in Chicago courts.

Few people would seem better qualified to lend external support to the uprising. A human rights lawyer born in Chicago and raised in Damascus, Mr. Tabbara has a long history of activism and is practiced in Western justice as well as in the ways of international courts and Syrian politics.

Since mid-March, Mr. Assad has turned his security and military forces loose on the protesters; activists say some 1,400 Syrians have been killed. Watching from afar, Mr. Tabbara said he had been motivated by “a very objective sense of outrage and a sense of responsibility that this country cannot be led by this Mafia-esque gang.”

Such views represent a shift for a man who last year worked with an international organization to improve Syria’s judicial and legal systems. Just months ago, he had been scheduled to meet with Asma al-Assad, the president’s wife, to discuss the creation of a Syrian version of Teach for America, which trains prospective teachers who commit to spending two years in classrooms in cities and rural communities.

That meeting was canceled after the protests began, and Mr. Tabbara said he had changed his mind about trying to reform the system after he saw Syrian security forces shoot peaceful protesters and listened to the “insulting, conspiracy-minded” speeches of Mr. Assad.

“I’ve always been a firm believer that democracy doesn’t happen overnight,” Mr. Tabbara said. But the uprising in Syria, coming on the heels of the more peaceful regime-toppling revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, has convinced him that the process can be expedited.

“A lot of these gradual reforms, which had never been fulfilled, now have a chance,” he said.

Ammar Bayrakdar, a Syrian physician who moved to the United States in 1990 and has been active in the sizable Chicago-area Syrian community, approves of the shift.

“Now he’s trying to organize the opposition effort, and we support him,” Dr. Bayrakdar said. “He’s very knowledgeable and eloquent, and a sincere individual.”

Local Syrian groups have organized forums, protests and rallies, and have backed e-mail campaigns to the White House, the Syrian ambassador and representatives in Congress.

Such activism is old hat for Mr. Tabbara, who moved back to the United States to attend college in the mid-’90s. After earning his law degree from DePaul University, he provided legal representation to Chicago-area Muslim and Arab communities after 9/11. He also spent a year teaching international human rights law at the University of Kalamoon in Damascus and working with local organizations to improve education in Syria.

Back in Chicago, in 2008, Mr. Tabbara was a founder of Zarzour, Khalil & Tabbara, a law firm started with fellow DePaul alumni that mainly assists nonprofit organizations and immigrants with legal issues. Last year he rolled out Project Mobilize, an organization that supports Muslim political candidates in the Chicago area.

Since the antigovernment protest began in Syria on March 15, the movement has spread across the country and has faced increasingly bloody suppression. Mr. Tabbara said he had been in regular contact with the leaders of groups organizing protests, as well as with friends, family and former students. Some among the latter three groups have been wary about supporting the movement, in part because many middle-class families have long relied on the regime for their welfare.

But that may be changing. “These groups will join the movement in large numbers soon,” Mr. Tabbara predicted. “I know people that belong to that class who have been working very hard trying to mobilize people.”

Some analysts believe that with dwindling financial resources and increasing international pressure, the Assad regime may be teetering.

At a news conference on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “It is absolutely clear that the Syrian government is running out of time.”

Mr. Tabbara said he is confident the rebels will succeed. “These are not people willing to back down,” he said. “They will not accept anything but a complete regime change.”

He added that he is unsure of the impact he and others have had on the movement for change in Syria but that the effort is nonetheless worthwhile.

“I’d like to think we are raising awareness, spreading correct information about the revolution, informing governments and officials about what’s taking place on the ground,” Mr. Tabbara said. “It definitely counters the diplomatic activism the regime has been engaged in.”

---------
ran in July 3, 2011 NY Times, in partnership with the Chicago News Cooperative.

Locust Souffle, Anyone? It's a Start

2011-08-22T10:17:00.004-04:00

by David Lepeska
nytimes.com

Grasshopper fajitas, mealworm fried rice, Bee-LT’s and similar delicacies will be on the menu for a public tasting buffet in October at the University of Chicago. The insect-dominated bill of fare is the idea of Matthew Krisiloff, a sophomore from California who last year founded Entom Foods, a start-up that seeks to make bugs a staple of the American diet.

“I really want to establish a dialogue about insects as a serious food possibility,” said Mr. Krisiloff, 19, who runs the company with four classmates. “We want to show that these are very acceptable flavors and tastes.”

The idea, Mr. Krisiloff said, came to him last fall in a course on contemporary global issues when he learned that by 2050 the world’s population is expected to reach nine billion, doubling the demand for meat.

“I remembered reading an obscure fact when I was younger that insects are extremely resource-efficient, and that they are eaten by many populations all over the world,” he said.

Some 80 percent of humanity eats insects, and raising them would cost the environment a fraction of what it does to raise pigs or cattle. Ten grams of feed produces one gram of beef or three pounds of pork, but it can yield nine grams of edible insect meat, according to Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands who has been studying entomophagy, or insect consumption, since the mid-90’s.

Ten times less methane and 300 times less nitrous oxide are emitted in the breeding of many edible insects compared with livestock, Mr. van Huis said. Nutritionally, most insect meat has about the same amount of protein, iron and vitamins as beef, but less fat.

Insects can be legally raised for human consumption because the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act categorizes insects as food, if that is their intended use.

“I’m seeing a lot of people getting onto this bandwagon of eating bugs, as the environmental aspect has given it another boost,” said David George Gordon, author of “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook,” who has advocated edible insects for 15 years.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has begun promoting edible insects around the globe and categorizes 1,700 species of them. A company near Amsterdam sells pesto-flavored bug nuggets in Dutch grocery stores, and grasshoppers and other insects, usually ground, appear in appetizers and specialty cocktails in a handful of American restaurants.

For now, Entom Foods is looking to develop insect-based animal feeds, particularly for aquaponics. But Mr. Krisiloff’s primary goal remains getting processed insect meat cutlets, or a similar product, into American grocery stores.

Mr. Gordon said: “I think there would be a small segment of the American public that would be interested in such a product, largely because of the environmental benefits. If Entom can build a case for why it’s good for you, they could find some success.”

--- ran in the Aug 21, 2011, NY Times, in partnership with the Chicago News Cooperative

Negative Image Aside, Asian Carp Are a Boon

2011-08-22T10:12:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
nytimes.com

When federal and state environmental regulators spent a few days at Lake Calumet in Chicago earlier this month fishing for Asian carp with stun guns and half-mile-wide nets, their hunt seemed to underscore the carp’s status as the Midwest’s ecological enemy No. 1.

The subject of endless debate over the best control strategies, Asian carp, an invasive species, have earned a place of dread in local lore. None, however, were found in the Lake Calumet search, and some scientists say the ecological concerns may be overblown.

For many people, Asian carp are proving more boon than bane. Bolstered by government support, the Asian carp harvest has leapt thirtyfold in the past decade, creating a new industry, attracting fishermen and entrepreneurs, and feeding people all over the world.

“We’ve been ramping up for years,” said Mike Schafer, owner of Schafer Fisheries.

In 2010, the company sold some 20 million pounds of Asian carp to clients as far-flung as Turkey and Indonesia, up from two million pounds in 2006. “We’re out in front,” Mr. Schafer said, “and it’s going to get bigger.”

In the last year, Illinois has handed out nearly $6 million to increase the catch of Asian carp in the Illinois River, including a $2 million grant to the Big River Fish Corporation, of downstate Pearl, to expand operations and ship up to 50 million pounds a year to China.

A separate $3 million state program aims to further increase the harvest of bighead and silver carp, the two Asian carp species that have infested the Mississippi, Illinois and Ohio Rivers and are nearing the Great Lakes. Both species reproduce quickly, gorge on plankton, a key food for native American fishes, and grow up to 100 pounds.

Kirby Marsden, former president of the Illinois Commercial Fishermen’s Association and a part-time consultant for Big River Fish, estimates that the carp harvest, less than half a million pounds in 2000, could grow to an annual catch of 100 million pounds that creates up to 200 new jobs in the next few years.

“It’s a chance to get rid of this invasive fish, boost the local economy and increase employment in this area,” Mr. Marsden said.

Imported in the 1970’s by fish farmers and government agencies to keep Southern fish ponds clean, bighead and silver carp escaped their enclosures during flooding and migrated to the Mississippi River, then on to the Illinois and Ohio River basins.

Though they now represent 8 out of every 10 fish in some stretches of the Illinois River, said Greg Sass, director of the Illinois River Biological Survey at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, scientific research has yet to establish a direct connection between the Asian carp proliferation and the decline of any native species.

While scientists debate whether Asian carp could spawn in the Great Lakes and imperil the lakes’ $7 billion fishing industries, environmental groups and politicians from six states have called for re-separating Chicago area waterways from the Mississippi River.

The Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee, a task force of more than 20 state, federal and regional officials, is exploring a less drastic measure: increasing the harvest on the Illinois River in sufficient quantities to slow the carp’s advance toward Lake Michigan.

“It’s no panacea,” said Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. “But in the short run it makes sense. Getting those fish out of the water reduces that northward pressure on Lake Michigan and buys us some time to come up with a permanent solution.”

Jim Garvey, director of the Fisheries and Illinois Aquaculture Center at Southern Illinois University, runs the $3 million state program to increase the carp harvest and develop commercial markets. He says Asian carp, though a hard sell for human appetites in the United States, are among the most widely consumed fish in the world, with China the biggest market.

“It would be silly for our country to have us spend taxpayer dollars to eradicate these things and throw them in a landfill,” Mr. Garvey said. “We might as well make some money out of them.”

Orion Briney, a third-generation Illinois River fisherman, agrees. While Mr. Briney hauls in up to 20,000 pounds of Asian carp six days a week, the fish industry has shrunk from a few decades ago, when hundreds of commercial fishermen fished the Illinois. Today, maybe a couple dozen fishermen work full-time.

Mr. Garvey and his team are hoping to double that number with a pilot program set to begin next month. After as many as 25 fishermen are trained to properly catch and handle Asian carp, the state will pay cash awards to those who haul in a certain amount.

A few hundred yards from the Mississippi River, in Thomson, Ill., Schafer Fisheries had dealt solely in catfish for most of its 55 years. Now, Asian carp represent 80 percent of the company’s business, Mr. Schafer said.

Schafer ships frozen, filleted, and minced carp mostly to international markets and Asian communities in the United States. It also offers Asian carp jerky, hot dogs and bouillabaisse, and converts waste material into liquid organic fertilizer.

One of Mr. Schafer’s main competitors, Stoller Fisheries of Spirit Lake, Iowa, ships about two million pounds of Asian carp each year. The owner, Larry Stoller, says he hopes to increase that number by half next year.

Inland Processing, a start-up in Grafton, Ill., is pitching the state and investors on plans for a plant to process up to 15 million pounds of Asian carp a year.

Big River Fish, meanwhile, is using its state grant to build an 80,000-square-foot plant to open this fall and increase its processing capacity to 2.5 million pounds a month by 2013 from the current 180,000 pounds a month.

Competitors have questioned the state award to Big River Fish because the company’s director of international marketing, Ross Harano, was state director of trade from 2003 to 2005. A state official said Mr. Harano’s background with the state did not influence the grant decision.

Select Logistics Network of Clinton, Ill., recently won its own state contract: $1 million to remove about three million pounds of Asian carp from the Illinois River and process it into fish meal. Heartland Processing, a start-up in Havana, Ill., is looking to turn carp waste into Omega 3-rich fish oil.

Demand and processing capacity are growing so fast that the Asian carp industry may be working toward its own demise. A state-backed study, to be published at year’s end, should reveal whether the increased harvest is reducing carp numbers.

“We want to crash the population,” said Kevin Irons, aquaculture and aquatic nuisance manager for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “We’re not trying to find a sustainable yield.”

--- ran in the Aug 12, 2011, NY Times, in partnership with the Chicago News Cooperative.

Return of Islamic College Raises Questions

2011-05-29T13:56:00.002-04:00

By David Lepeska
nytimes.com

The American Islamic College, closed since 2004 when the state revoked its operating authority, is expected early next month to win approval to reopen.

Supporters see the opening of the Chicago college, founded in 1981 in the Lakeview neighborhood, as an important step for Islamic instruction in the United States. But its detractors point to the college’s ties to a secretive and far-reaching international movement that has been accused of Islamism in some countries and of an overuse of non-immigrant work visas to hire foreign teachers in its schools in the United States.

The movement, led by Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish religious leader living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania, supports scores of charter schools that have gained a reputation for academic achievement and a commitment to spreading Turkish language and culture.

Yet the Gulen schools have caused widespread concern about possible manipulation of immigration laws and misallocation of taxpayer dollars. Mr. Gulen, an extremely wealthy and well-connected Turkish spiritual and political leader, fled Turkey amid charges of plotting to overthrow the secular government. He was acquitted of all charges in 2006.

The college would become the second Islamic educational institution in the country to offer college-level credit. For Muslims in the area, it would be a rejoinder to those who depict followers of Islam as prone to extremism.

“It looks like a resurrection of the college, which is great,” said Zaher Sahloul, head of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. “It’s very important to have an institution of higher learning run by the Muslim community.”

Top officials at American Islamic College have been linked to Mr. Gulen’s movement. In a cable obtained by Wikileaks, the United States’ former ambassador to Turkey characterized the Gulen movement as a potentially destabilizing influence in Turkey that more secular Turks see as an effort to bring about an Islamic state.

The Gulen movement, called Hizmet (a Turkish word meaning “service”), promotes public service and education and oversees research institutes, universities, media outlets and one of Turkey’s largest banks. The movement seeks to spread Gulen’s influence internationally through an informal network of 1,000 schools in 130 countries.

Hizmet operates more than 120 publicly financed charter schools in 25 states, in addition to a handful of private schools, like the Science Academy of Chicago, run by Niagara Educational Services, a Mount Prospect firm associated with the Gulen movement. Like many of the movement’s American schools, the Science Academy focuses on math and science.

Administrators of the schools often deny any official connection to the movement, which has no formal organization or official membership but operates through a network of followers, according to Hakan Yavuz, a political science professor at the University of Utah and co-editor of a 2003 book on the organization.

“It’s safe to assume that A.I.C. will be influenced by the Gulen movement,” mainly through the selection of the college’s instructors and administrative staff, Mr. Yavuz said.

“It makes sense for them to hire people from the Gulen community,” he said, “as they have much more knowledge and experience in the American education system.”

According to recent news reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of Labor and Education are investigating accusations that as many as 100 of the movement’s American schools have used taxpayer money to pay for the immigration of teachers’ families from Turkey and provide other financial support for the Gulen movement.

Federal officials declined to comment.

Ali Yurtsever, head of the executive committee setting up the American Islamic College, denied any connection with Gulen. The school will have to generate its own income, unlike Gulen schools in the United States that are supported by the movement, he said.

Mr. Yurtsever has long been a follower of Mr. Gulen and serves as administrator of Niagara Educational Services. He previously was president of the Gulen-backed Rumi Forum, a Washington research institute whose honorary president is Mr. Gulen.

Attempts to contact Mr. Gulen through his Web site and through Mr. Yurtsever were unsuccessful.

School officials say the college will present what Mr. Gulen has long stood for: a more moderate form of Islam than the extremist version that has often dominated public debate in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. The school plans to offer more than a dozen courses in the fall and hopes to attract up to 400 local and international students in the next few years.

The college was established 30 years ago by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a Saudi Arabia-based association of more than 50 predominantly Muslim countries. In 2004, the Illinois Board of Higher Education revoked its operating authority, citing a failure to comply with state regulations.

Now, after spending $500,000 from the Islamic Conference to renovate its library, dorms, mosque, and 1,000-seat auditorium, the college is reopening under new management. It is led by Mr. Yurtsever, a mathematician with a Ph.D. from Ege University in Turkey who taught at Georgetown University.

College officials expect to receive authority to offer for-credit courses from the Illinois Board of Higher Education on June 7. The college has applied for full accreditation, which would allow it to confer four-year degrees.

Mr. Gulen, 70, has lived in the United States since 1999, when he left Turkey. In a widely circulated video from that time, he advised his followers to “move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers.”

In the United States, Gulen schools often import Turkish teachers using H-1B visas, which allow American employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in specialty jobs.

The federal government places a strict limit on the number of H1-B visas it issues, and corporations often complain the cap restrains their ability to transfer highly qualified workers from foreign countries. Yet Gulen-backed schools received 839 H-1B visas in 2010, a 65 percent increase from 2007, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Teachers unions and education reform groups in several states have spoken out against the spike in foreign-born teachers at Gulen schools. “There is no reason to bring teachers in from other countries under the guise of lack of staffing,” said Jenni White, president of Restore Oklahoma Public Education.

Mr. Yavuz, the political scientist, said he did not see the movement as a danger, “but I don’t see it as productive. “

“I think their main goal is to improve the image of Islam in the U.S.,” he said, “but even there, I don’t know if they can be successful.”

-----
originally ran in May 29, 2011 NY Times, with Chicago News Coop

Farrakhan Using Libya Crisis to Bolster his Nation of Islam

2011-04-11T09:45:00.003-04:00

by David Lepeska
nytimes.com

Chicago, IL: When Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Chicago-based Nation of Islam, staunchly defended Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi recently, he seized headlines for an organization that has made little news in recent years.

In an often-fiery speech on March 31 at Mosque Maryam, the group’s South Side headquarters, Mr. Farrakhan recalled the decades of friendship and millions of dollars Colonel Qaddafi had lent the Nation of Islam over the years.

“What kind of brother would I be if a man has been that way to me, and to us, and when he’s in trouble I refuse to raise my voice in his defense?” Mr. Farrakhan said to cheers and applause from hundreds of the faithful gathered at the mosque.

Mr. Farrakhan, 77, sounded sincere in his efforts to come to the aid of the embattled Libyan leader. But amid a significant drop in Nation of Islam membership, waning popular interest in the movement he leads and growing concerns over succession, Mr. Farrakhan may also be using the conflict in Libya as an effort to return to relevance.

Nation of Islam membership has fallen by as much as half from its estimated peak of 100,000 in 1995, when Mr. Farrakhan rallied nearly a million men, most of them black, to the Million Man March in Washington, according to Lawrence H. Mamiya, professor of religion and Africana studies at Vassar College. (The Nation of Islam does not give out membership numbers.)

Over the past decade, Mr. Farrakhan’s calls for slavery reparations and his denunciations of the Iraq war and President George W. Bush have gained little attention. In the post-Sept. 11 world, the American news media have focused instead on other Muslim groups led by immigrants to the United States. And in January 2007, Mr. Farrakhan had abdominal surgery to correct damage caused by treatment for prostate cancer, which raised concerns over his succession. He appears to have recovered.

The Nation of Islam in recent years seems to have lost appeal even among black Americans with an interest in Islam. Most who already embrace Islam are likely to join traditional sects led by Arab and South Asian immigrants. Some 35 percent of the American Muslim population of six million to seven million are black Americans, according to a Gallup poll from 2010.

To a core group of supporters, though, Mr. Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam still resonate.

“He does not need to get back into the spotlight,” said Edward E. Curtis IV, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and author of “Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam.” “He has never left it in black America.”

Nation of Islam officials did not respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

The Nation of Islam, which was founded in Detroit in 1930 by W. D. Fard, is both a black separatist movement and a unique religion. Its theology spurns traditional Islam, and its organizational goals — compiled by Elijah Muhammad, its leader from the mid-’30s — include freedom, equality and a separate nation for blacks.

That message struck a chord during the civil rights era, and celebrity converts like Malcolm X, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali further raised the group’s profile.

Chief among its beliefs is that Mr. Fard was an incarnation of God and that Elijah Muhammad was his prophet. The foundation of the Muslim faith is the incantation, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.”

“The theology of the Nation contradicts the basic tenets of Islam,” said Ihsan Bagby, a professor of Islam at the University of Kentucky.

The Nation of Islam under Mr. Farrakhan has other practices that set it apart. It does not follow sharia law, the sacred rules of Islam based on the Koran and the Sunnah, or sayings of the Prophet. Further, it teaches that black scientists created the universe and the Koran, that Earth is over 76 trillion years old and that a great U.F.O. called the Mother Plane will come to destroy the United States.

Those teachings continue to put the group outside mainstream Islam, said Zaher Sahloul, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.

Mr. Farrakhan’s re-emergence since the fighting erupted in Libya is a reminder that in the public domain he is seen as a nationalist leader as much as a religious one, Professor Mamiya said.

“Farrakhan has a different claim on the black community,” Mr. Mamiya said. “He’s never been beholden to the broader Muslim community.”

Mr. Farrakhan’s goal has long been “black liberation,” a choice of words that mirrors Colonel Qadaffi’s pan-African vision. The Nation has been aligned with the colonel for decades, since it received a $3 million loan from him in 1972 to remake a Greek Orthodox church on the South Side into Mosque Maryam, the group’s current headquarters.

The rebellion against Colonel Qaddafi has given Mr. Farrakhan a chance to bring his own agenda back into public debate. During the speech in which he defended the colonel, Mr. Farrakhan also expressed his hope for “a state or territory of our own.”

The speech was a reminder of Mr. Farrakhan’s continued appeal. At the group’s annual conference in 2009, the rapper Snoop Dogg praised Mr. Farrakhan’s speeches and all but converted. “People are still attracted to the charisma,” Mr. Mamiya said.

The question facing the group now is whether Mr. Farrakhan has laid adequate plans for succession. He has mandated that official control of the organization will shift to the Council of Leaders after he departs or dies, but there is no single leader who seems capable of matching the charismatic leadership of Mr. Farrakhan and his predecessors.

Ishmael Muhammad, a council member and son of Elijah Muhammad, is sometimes considered the most likely successor.

“The Nation has always been attracted to charismatic figures,” Mr. Mamiya said. “Whether it’s going to hold or another leader will emerge from the council is a big question.”

That question has become a matter of interest to the federal government. In December 2009, the Justice Department revealed that the Department of Homeland Security monitored the Nation of Islam in 2007, and that its Office of Intelligence and Analysis had prepared a document, “Nation of Islam: Uncertain Leadership Succession Poses Risk.”

Charles E. Allen, who was then the under secretary for intelligence and analysis at the department, later softened this view. “The organization — despite its highly volatile and extreme rhetoric — has neither advocated violence nor engaged in violence,” Mr. Allen wrote in 2008. “Moreover, we have no indications that it will change goals and priorities, even if there is a near-term change in the Nation’s leadership.”

Professor Curtis said he believed that in the long term the Nation of Islam would become more about black empowerment and less about Islam.

“Even if parts of its unique theology are abandoned,” he said, “its emphasis on self-help, black pride, economic independence and political self-determination are likely to be incorporated in whatever denominational forms emerge from the Nation of Islam movement.”

Most congregants declined to comment as they left Mosque Maryam on Stony Island Avenue after a recent meeting. But Maurice Mohammad, a longtime member, responded when asked what he thought of the defense of Colonel Qaddafi. “I agree with what our leader says,” he said.

Then a Nation of Islam representative approached, and escorted him away.

------
originally ran in the NY Times, 10 April, 2011

Muslim Cultural Center Appears Near Approval

2011-03-18T13:31:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska, for New York Times, 3/18/2011

A long battle over a proposed mosque in DuPage County is approaching a turning point, and although anti-Muslim sentiment and resistance to mosques in the Chicago area are hardly going away, Muslims appear to be winning this time.

The Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America, or Mecca, wants to construct a 47,000-square-foot building in Willowbrook, one that includes a school, a recreational center and a 600-person prayer hall. The plan has been scaled back since a county committee rejected an earlier proposal in January, and the smaller building is considered likely to be approved by the DuPage County Board, which has the final say.

The Mecca proposal is one of four mosque-related plans to come before the DuPage Board in recent years as the Chicago-area Muslim community has grown significantly. The rhetoric that has followed has highlighted tensions about development of the rural and suburban county and has exposed anti-Muslim sentiment.

More than 400,000 Muslims live in the Chicago area, the majority of them in the suburbs. Zaher Sahloul, chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, an advocacy group, said many Muslims had to drive 40 minutes or more to attend Friday prayers at one of 120 mosques in the area. “There is a real need to accommodate this growing community,” he said.

In DuPage County, the battle over the proposals underscores a broader demographic shift. The DuPage Federation on Human Services Reform, a collaboration between government and community groups, said the number of foreign-born residents in the county had increased to 171,000 in 2009, from 71,000 in 1990. Foreign-born residents now make up more than 17 percent of the population of nearly a million in an area long dominated by Caucasian, mostly rural residents.

Accommodation has been hard to come by. In the past year, the DuPage Zoning Board of Appeals has taken advisory votes against the Mecca proposal and another from the Islamic Center of Western Suburbs. The DuPage County Board has rejected a mosque plan from the Irshad Learning Center.

The tensions in DuPage reflect wide-ranging antagonism toward Muslim-Americans. Last year, local residents battled mosque proposals in Tennessee, Wisconsin, California and other states. There was a contentious nationwide debate over a proposed Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan.

Rhetoric intensified last week at a congressional hearing, led by Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, into the radicalization of some American Muslims. Mr. King, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has put forward unsubstantiated claims that more than 80 percent of American mosques are run by radical clerics.

“Negative views of Muslims have been increasing in the last 10 years, and the King hearings will likely add to that,” said Mr. Sahloul. “But putting a lot of limitations on where mosques can be built is against our values as Americans.”

In the Chicago area, residents in south suburban Bridgeview voiced opposition over the Bridgeview Mosque Foundation’s expansion of its mosque, partly because of concerns about the presence of radicals within the mosque leadership. Last year, the City of Chicago rejected a plan to build a mosque on the site of a vacant hot dog restaurant in Rogers Park.

The DuPage mosque proposals can be seen as litmus tests — with uncertain results so far. Although the Irshad Learning Center was rejected last year, Mecca appears to be headed for approval of its plan to build on a five-acre wooded plot near 91st Street and Highway 83 in unincorporated Willowbrook. Mecca leaders have cut the size of their plan several times, added underground containment tanks to address flooding concerns and expanded parking space.

“It’s clear that Mecca has gone above and beyond what’s been requested by the board and by their neighbors,” said Amy Lawless Ayala, lead organizer of DuPage United, an umbrella group of local churches, mosques and community associations that backs the proposal.

Mark Daniel, the lawyer for Mecca, said he was optimistic the board would approve the proposal. “At this point there is no legal basis for denial,” he said.

Some Muslims see a proposed DuPage ban on new places of assembly in unincorporated residential areas as a further anti-Muslim act. But one board member, Grant Eckhoff, described it as an attempt to preserve the county’s rural character.

People who live near the Mecca site say they would oppose the plan even if an Ikea store were being proposed. “No one on this block has expressed any worries about religion that I know of,” said William Gerow, 64. “This is a rural neighborhood and that’s an urban development. We have a clash of lifestyles here.”

Constance Gavras, who heads the Kane County chapter of Act! for America, a group known for its anti-Muslim protests, has rallied opposition to DuPage mosque proposals for two years. “A lot of these mosques are directly connected to terrorist organizations,”she said.

When Irshad’s proposal for a three-acre mosque site near Naperville was before the county board last year, Ms. Gavras distributed I.R.S. documents showing that the Alavi Foundation, a New York nonprofit and the subject of an F.B.I. investigation into its ties to the Iranian government-run Bank Melli, contributed $450,000 to Irshad in 2007.

Mahmood Ghassemi, Irshad’s chairman, confirmed the Alavi donation and said Irshad was still repaying an additional $300,000 loan. “We applied for the money and received the money at a time when Alavi was not under investigation,” Mr. Ghassemi said. They were perfectly legal.”

The county board rejected Irshad’s proposal last year even after the group amended it to address community concerns about traffic, hours of operation and parking.

Anti-Muslim activists are “vocal and powerful, and we feel they were the driving force for the county to reject our application,” said Mr. Ghassemi. “We fulfilled all the requirements, so I don’t see any other reason besides being Muslim.”

Still, Mr. Ghassemi said, he has seen very little religious bias during his 13 years living in DuPage.

The Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim support group, filed a federal lawsuit against the DuPage Board over the Irshad rejection, alleging discrimination and violation of constitutional rights. According to the filing, a board member, John Hakim, asked at one hearing if “animal sacrifices” would be part of the services. The board has moved to dismiss the case. Mr. Hakim did not return a call for comment.

“We think there is a bias against the Muslim institutions,” said Kevin Vodak, the lawyer for CAIR-Chicago. He noted that the board rejected the Irshad proposal without explanation, which is highly unusual, and that last fall the county took up an amendment to prohibit any new religious institutions in residential areas. “Most of the new proposals are from Muslims,” Mr. Vodak said.

Unusual Suspects

2011-03-18T13:28:00.002-04:00

Indian-Americans, hailed as a ‘model minority’ in the US, are all over the news for a variety of wrongdoings. Is Indian culture to blame?

By David Lepeska, for Open magazine, 3/18/2011

NEW YORK - The news early this month hit the Indian-American community like a thunderbolt: Rajat Gupta—iconic, trailblazing executive; philanthropist friend of Bono, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton—had been charged in connection with the biggest case of insider trading in US history.

“One is shocked to learn about Rajat Gupta,” says Sunil Adam, editor of Desi Talk, the leading English-language weekly for South Asians in the US. “He made it big in a sector that is not really known for Indian genius, which makes this all the more tragic.”

The reputation of Gupta and so many other Indian-Americans has long been one of hard work, intelligence and high-profile success, primarily as doctors, engineers, executives and journalists. Picture CNN commentator Dr Sanjay Gupta, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, filmmaker M Night Shyamalan, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri or Time magazine editor-in-chief Fareed Zakaria, and you begin to get an idea of how most Americans see their smarter, browner, wealthier and often better-looking compatriots.

Now that legacy may be tarnished. A rash of news-making criminal activity, from theft to embezzlement and financial and journalistic fraud, has Indian-Americans seeming more human, more fallible, than ever before. No tale hits harder than Gupta’s.

Born in Calcutta in 1948, Gupta earned his mechanical engineering degree from IIT Delhi, then an MBA from Harvard Business School. He rose swiftly through the ranks at McKinsey & Co, and in 1994, aged 45, became the prestigious consulting firm’s first foreign-born managing director—and the first India-born CEO of a global US corporation, paving the way for current Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and PepsiCo Chief Indra Nooyi.

Advising powerful executives and inspiring ambitious Indians worldwide, Gupta held the post as the world’s leading business consultant until his retirement in 2003. Today, he chairs the boards of Harvard Business School, the American India Foundation, Gates Foundation’s Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, which he helped found in 2001.

But on 1 March, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US stockmarket watchdog, filed a civil complaint against Gupta, alleging that he passed confidential financial information about Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble to his friend and business associate Raj Rajaratnam while he sat on the boards of those two firms. Gupta’s lawyer has denied any wrongdoing. “It seems very strange for a man of this stature to fall into this way of getting into trouble,” says Adam. “If it’s true, it has something to do with the almighty hubris that seems to have infected Wall Street.”

The SEC has charged more than 40 defendants in the case, which centres around Galleon, Rajaratnam’s multibillion dollar New York hedge fund. Rajaratnam, a 53-year-old Sri Lankan-American, was arrested in October 2009 and his trial for securities fraud and conspiracy began recently. At least four others involved in the Galleon case are also of Indian heritage. Rajiv Goel, formerly a director at Intel capital, and Anil Kumar, formerly of McKinsey, have both pleaded guilty to insider-trading. Sunil Bhalla, senior vice-president at the billion-dollar tech firm Polycom, has been charged with the same offence. And Samir Barai, head of the now-defunct Barai Capital, has been charged with conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud.

But the recent bout of Indian-American malfeasance goes well beyond the financial sector. Calcutta-born Anjan Dutta-Gupta, 58, has been charged with paying $10 million in bribes over a 12-year period to secure US naval contracts for his Georgia-based technology firm.

Military engineer Noshir Gowadia, 66, was convicted last year of selling secrets to China about a US stealth fighter jet and sentenced to 32 years in prison. Allegations of suspect bank deals have trailed Sant Singh Chatwal, a well-connected Indian-American hotelier, for more than a decade. And just last month, two Indian-American jewellers in New York City were charged with carrying out a fake heist inspired by the 2001 film Snatch. Authorities say that in December 2008, Atul Shah and Mahaveer Kankariya hired gunmen to dress up as Hasidic Jews and pretend to steal from their safe in an attempt to claim $7 million in insurance money and stave off bankruptcy.

This rash of tabloid-friendly transgressions arrives a year after a promising young Indian journalist in New York, Mona Sarika, was found to have plagiarised large portions of stories she wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and The Huffington Post.

It’s mostly unfamiliar territory for a community that Forbes magazine dubbed ‘The New Model Minority’ in 2009. Although America’s 2.6 million Indian-Americans constitute just 1 per cent of the population, they represent 3 per cent of the country’s engineers, 7 per cent of its infotech workers and 8 per cent of its doctors, not to mention an outsized portion of its media personalities.

Median household income among Indian-Americans is more than $97,000, highest among all major US immigrant groups, and more than 40 per cent have a Master’s degree or better—five times the national average.

So, why have these intelligent, successful professionals been committing such lapses in judgement? Some, as Adam suggests, are acts of desperation linked to the Great Recession that began in 2008.

Yet, critics also point to ethnicity-related issues such as the absence of an all-eyes-watching village culture from back home, or, conversely, the lingering influence of India’s infamous culture of corruption. Amy Bhatt analyses the South Asian diaspora as a PhD candidate at the University of Washington who has done field work in India. She’s not buying either of these reasons. First, says Bhatt, sizeable family networks have been re-created in the US in large part because familial re-unification is the primary driver for Indian immigration. Second, most of the businesses involved in these cases were started in the US.

“I don’t know if that culture of corruption could be translated across international borders,” says Bhatt, who was among the victims of Sarika’s plagiarism. “The recourse to culture as an explanation does a bit of harm.”

But another Indian-American observer disagrees. “Maybe there is a certain cultural component to this,” says Adam. For most Indian-Americans, “this Western business culture is relatively new, business ethics are still relatively new,” he elaborates. “In India, the private sector is as corrupt as the state sector—it’s all hand in glove, that is the culture that they come from.”

Adam acknowledges that only a minuscule percentage of the community engages in such crimes, and to stereotype them would be a mistake. But as more Indian-Americans achieve success, there are going to be a few bad apples.

And it’s not the first time. In 2000, Alpna Patel, a Maryland dentist, was convicted of killing her husband in Baltimore, while Kamal Lal, a property owner from Fresno, California, was accused of trading sex with homeless women for discounts on rent.

Today, Indian-Americans have achieved the kind of prominence that draws national media attention. They may be victims of their own success more than of a culture that’s seen to tolerate corruption. “I think the reason these crimes are getting attention is the strong affiliation with the model minority myth,” says Bhatt.

Either way, Indian-Americans, or for that matter anyone ever tempted to manipulate her job to get ahead illegally, might be wise to recall what Gupta, in a 1994 interview, called the fundamental philosophy of India: “Worship work and do it for its own sake.”

Osama and the Arab Spring

2011-03-18T13:24:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
thenational.ae

In recent months, many observers have viewed the wave of protest sweeping the Middle East as indicative of an increasing drive toward democracy and a repudiation of religious extremism. Not former US intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer -- who is convinced that al Qa'eda and other radical Islamist groups plan to fill the vacuums of power left behind.

"Get rid of the tyranny and take advantage of the aftermath," says Scheuer, referring to Egypt in particular. "I think that's what the Muslim Brotherhood is going to do, and that's what al Qa'eda will try to do. I think it's a situation that benefits them enormously."

Contrarian, Cassandra, or a bit of both, Scheuer seems most comfortable going against the grain. In recent weeks he has been promoting his new book, Osama bin Laden, which argues that Washington's misunderstanding of the al Qa'eda leader has the US fighting the wrong war, the wrong way. The Financial Times called it "a needed corrective to most of the airy generalisations about bin Laden and his followers".

The 59-year-old led the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, then advised his successor from September 2001 until the November 2004 publication of Imperial Hubris. Published anonymously, the book critiqued US counter-terrorism policies and became a bestseller. Found to be its author, Scheuer was thrust into the spotlight and relieved of his CIA duties.

He has since become an equal opportunity offender: denouncing neoconservative nation-building, the invasion of Iraq and the US-Israeli relationship; blaming the Clinton administration for repeated failures to neutralise bin Laden; and criticising fellow authors such as Steve Coll (Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens) and Lawrence Wright, (the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower) for inexpert analyses of Islamic societies.

Sitting in a Chicago hotel, bespectacled and grinning through his grey beard, Scheuer seemed more jolly uncle than monkish analyst. Then he turns to the war on terror. "We're clearly losing," he says. "And it's been through American and western obtuseness, primarily … It's almost like the Marx Brothers are in charge, but the Marx Brothers are smarter - they always win in the end."

For Scheuer, the bungling begins with bin Laden. Most observers believe the al Qa'eda leader and his second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, are hiding in the badlands along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Yet continued search efforts have yielded minimal results.

Scheuer offers a litany of reasons. After 25 years in hiding, bin Laden has become an expert fugitive. It also helps that he is pious, generous, patient, deliberate - and highly successful. "There's no one in the last 50 years who has affected American life more negatively than Osama bin Laden," Scheuer adds.

Yet the CIA closed its bin Laden unit in 2005. This office had previously brought the agency's antiterrorism work under one roof, allowing an agent studying al Qa'eda in the Far East to regularly confer with a colleague looking at the Islamic Maghreb. "Now they're across the hall or in another building," Scheuer explains.

He also believes that inadequate troop numbers further undermine Western efforts to snuff out al Qa'eda. In a country bigger than France, the US's 100,000 soldiers "have to keep Karzai in power, help build a democracy, develop the economy, create a transportation and communications infrastructure from scratch, defeat the Taliban, eradicate heroin and go after Osama in their spare time".

Yet since September 11, al Qa'eda's platform has spread from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia and North Africa. Western forces have reportedly killed thousands of al Qa'eda militants over the years, but these casualties have been replaced by fresh, young fighters. According to Scheuer, insurgencies by their very definition are always pitted against a more powerful enemy. Thus, they place tremendous emphasis on succession.

"The next generation of al Qa'eda is likely to be a little bit more religiously extreme, certainly better educated, more savvy with the tools of modernity and perhaps a little bit more bloody-minded … And we're seeing increasing inroads among young Muslim males, especially in English speaking countries, of al Qa'eda's propaganda."

Scheuer blames two key areas of American foreign policy for continuing to inspire anti-western sentiment. "To say that Israel is a terrible burden and a costly ally for us in the Muslim world is not an opinion, it's a fact," he said.

Controversial in some circles, this view is nothing new for Scheuer. In an April 2009 episode of the Doha Debates, he blamed the Iraq War on "the American fifth column that supports Israel". His opponent, the lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz, called him a bigot.

He is also extremely sceptical about America's dependency on foreign oil imports, which he believes compromises the nation's relationship with Saudi Arabia.

"I don't think we can break the status quo of our policies in the Middle East until we do something about energy," adds Scheuer. However, he considers that Obama is unlikely to make that shift with elections looming next year. "In my old age I'm beginning to fear that the only thing that brings change in America is calamity."

His other fear is that this change of policy might come soon. The number of terror plots in the US has increased exponentially. Only last month the FBI arrested a Saudi citizen studying in Texas for plotting to bomb the home of George W Bush). "We're really going to be surprised how many Muslim men in the West turn to violence," says Scheuer.

As for the millions of Arabs turning to nonviolent protest, the received wisdom is that in barely two months they have offered dissatisfied Muslim youth a new path and successfully marginalised al Qa'eda. The leading terrorism analyst and Harvard professor Peter Bergen believes "al Qa'eda is irrelevant" to recent events on Arab streets. The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu has said that, for al Qa'eda, "it's not just a defeat, it's a catastrophe."

Yet, Scheuer notes, elections and upheaval across the region have often led to a stronger presence for Islam. Islamists won Algeria's 1991 elections (only to be blocked from taking power by the military). Hamas and Hizbollah gained strength through elections in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, respectively, while Iraq's governing coalition also has Islamist leanings. And of course the 1979 revolution in Iran resulted in an unbending theocracy.

Scheuer sees Islamism again creeping across the region. Already in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, violence has returned to the streets and a political party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood has begun to regroup. Support for the Islamic Action Front, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, has increased considerably in recent weeks. In Yemen, where a bloody al Qa'eda affiliate has put down roots, the radical cleric and former bin Laden mentor Abdul Majid al Zindani called last week for the departure of the nation's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

And a recent Pew poll found 95 per cent of Egyptians believed Islam should play a large role in politics, while 85 per cent thought it had positive impact. Add to that, Scheuer contends, the Muslim Brotherhood's experience, deep roots and better organisation than any of the political parties forming in Mubarak's wake and the future appears to be set.

"Do you think 80 million Egyptians, mostly Muslim, in a time of violence, turmoil and chaos, are going to reach for an alien ideology like secular democracy?" asks Scheuer.

------
appeared in the 18 March 2011 The National, www.thenational.ae

A Quest to Add Sophistication to Beer's Appeal

2011-02-21T09:25:00.003-05:00

By David Lepeska
nytimes.com

Like soaring architecture, wily crooks and hard-hitting sports, a good beer is something Chicagoans love. Ray Daniels has gone one further: He wants to know exactly what makes a good beer good and use that knowledge to improve the beer-drinking experience.

Mr. Daniels, 53, is on a quest to set up universal standards with the goal of instilling a greater respect for the taste and dining possibilities of beer. His effort has earned raves from brewers, critics and chefs.

“Trying to set some standards for beer sommeliers is a wonderful thing for enhancing the reputation of beer in fine dining and in America in general,” Karen Page, the James Beard Award-winning co-author of “What to Drink With What You Eat,” said of Mr. Daniels’s work. “Beer’s definitely being taken more seriously.”

Since falling in love with craft beers in the 1980s, Mr. Daniels has studied beer-making at the century-old Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago; worked as an editor for the Brewers Association, the country’s largest beer trade group; and wrote several books on brewing, including the highly regarded “Designing Great Beers” (Brewers Publications, 2000).

As he watched the production and popularity of artisanal microbrews grow over the past decade, Mr. Daniels noticed that most bars were simply adding new draft beers to their offerings with little concern for presentation or taste. Seeking “a better-tasting beer and a better beer experience,” he devised standards for beer knowledge and presentation. In January 2008, he began offering certification exams.

Today, his organization, the Craft Beer Institute, offers three different tests: certified beer server, certified cicerone and master cicerone, in ascending level of difficulty. Mr. Daniels wants to make a cicerone — literally, a guide for sightseers — the beer equivalent of a sommelier. The certified beer server exam costs $69 and can be taken online (at cicerone.org). The certified cicerone exam costs $345 and focuses on the history, production, serving, styles and tastes of beer from around the world.

“He is one of the most credible people in the beer industry,” said Julia Herz, head of craft beer at the Breweries Association, which represents craft brewers. “He’s the perfect one to spearhead this.”

Test takers might be asked to name a Belgian-style ale flavored with Curaçao, orange peel and grains of paradise, or to describe a salad and a beer that make a good pairing and the specifics of why they work together.

Though Mr. Daniels is trying to equate his certifications with those for wine, he is put off by stuffiness.

“In the wine world, people get all snobby about their knowledge,” said Mr. Daniels, who lives on the North Side. “We’re trying to avoid that. I want the cicerones to be guides, not gods.”

About 3,500 people have passed the beer server exam, and 200 have become certified cicerones, Mr. Daniels said. Small brewers like Sierra Nevada and Lagunitas support his program; Samuel Adams weaves cicerone standards into its internal sales training.

More than a dozen restaurants and pubs in the Chicago area have a cicerone-certified bartender or manager on staff, including the Bristol, a chic bistro in the trendy Bucktown neighborhood.

On a recent Friday there, Erin Phillips, the front-of-house manager, recommended the braised pig tail and a Belgian-style brown ale to a customer looking for a hearty food-beer pairing.

“The Rochefort 8 would stand up to the richness of the sauce and pull down the spiciness of the pork broth,” said Ms. Phillips, who is cicerone-certified. “And there’s a lot of earthy notes to the beer that I think would play off the pickled mustard greens as well.”

Chris Pandel, the Bristol’s executive chef who was named Rising Chef of the Year in the 2010 Jean Banchet Awards, Chicago’s highest culinary honors, said he appreciated Ms. Phillips’s knowledge.

“Her ability to take the nuances of what a beer could do and pair it with food, as you’d do with wine, is outstanding,“ he said.

The Bristol offers about 60 beers and the same number of wines, and Mr. Pandel thinks the two deserve equal billing.

“They really have the same purpose in the meal,” he said. “Beer’s not just for guzzling anymore.”

-------
Originally appeared in Feb 20, 2011, New York Times, www.nytimes.com

Qaradawi toes a more radical line in Qatar

2010-12-02T09:11:00.002-05:00

By David Lepeska
ft.com

Doha// During a recent Friday sermon, Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, arguably the world’s leading scholar of Sunni Islam, uttered a few lines that drew little notice internationally but could have big implications for future relations between Christians and Muslims.

“I was for the possibility of bridging the gap between the east and the west but recently I have changed my mind on this issue, especially since the west wants to impose its values and traditions on us,” Mr Qaradawi told his congregation at Doha’s Omar bin Al Khattab Mosque in a televised sermon in October.

“West is west and east is east. They do not recognise or follow our traditions and customs, so we should not follow theirs,” Mr Qaradawi said, echoing Rudyard Kipling, the British author.

Mr Qaradawi, 84, emigrated to Qatar in 1961 to avoid persecution in his native Egypt. His many fatwas, or religious decisions, are passed on to millions of Muslims worldwide via his long-running Al Jazeera talk show and Islam Online, a website. In 2008, Foreign Policy magazine ranked him the world’s third most influential intellectual.

In his first book, published in 1960, Mr Qaradawi instructed Muslims on how to maintain their religion while living in the US. But he has subsequently denounced secularism, capitalism and Zionism, and these statements mark a further hardening of attitude, observers say.

“He has never been one to build bridges with the west but this marks a great change,” says Bettina Gräf, author of Global Mufti, a 2009 book on Mr Qaradawi. “It is highly significant ... because it makes a difference if a very popular figure calls for divisions between Islam and the west and therefore manifests a dichotomy which is not there in reality. He considers himself a moderate in the many different meanings of the word, but being moderate would – in my opinion – include not to call for such divisions these days.”

As Qatar looks to burnish its Islamic credentials, the views of Mr Qaradawi are also increasingly at odds with the emirate’s growing reputation for progressiveness and engagement.

Aside from diplomatic initiatives in Lebanon and Darfur, Qatar is home to the US al-Udaid airbase and has hosted an Israeli trade mission.

“This sort of thing could begin to eat away at the carefully constructed brand that Qatar has been forging in recent years,” says David Roberts, who is writing a dissertation on Qatari foreign policy. “Qatar certainly wouldn’t want any kind of ‘Islamist’ stigma.”

To enhance its status as an international centre, the Qatar Foundation, which is run by the emir’s wife Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Misned, manages a campus on the outskirts of Doha that hosts branches of six US universities.

Last year, the foundation opened the Qaradawi Center for Islamic Moderation and Renewal at an Islamic graduate school on the same campus. And this autumn the foundation brought in Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim intellectual based in Europe, to teach a course on civil society and democracy in Islam.

Prof Ramadan, 48, is perhaps more in keeping with the image that Qatar is trying to build. He was raised in Switzerland and came to prominence thanks to his writing on Islam and the west and an Oxford professorship.

“This will enhance Qatar’s role as a leading centre of Muslim discussion and knowledge,” says Mr Roberts. Qatar may also be trying to gain on its neighbour Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest mosques in Islam, he says. “Reaching for Islamic legitimacy is a tactic that has a long history in the Middle East.”

But even Prof Ramadan has not escaped controversy. From 2004 to 2010, he was not allowed to travel to the US on “ideological grounds”, according to the US State Department.

Today, his books focus on how to be Muslim in western society. “We need to shift the mindset of what we can do,” Prof Ramadan said in a talk in Doha to promote his latest book, Radical Reform. “We should be critical while remaining faithful.”

He has called for a new international economic system and in a televised 2003 debate with the then future French president Nicolas Sarkozy he called for a moratorium on stoning in order to debate the merits of the punishment.

Such sentiments are unlikely to appeal to Mr Qaradawi. This year, Islam Online, the website with which he is associated, took a more conservative turn. Its Qatar-based management dismissed most of its Egyptian employees, who had gone on strike. Observers say that latterly Mr Qaradawi had little hand in day-to-day operations.

Where Mr Qaradawi has particularly riled his critics is in ruling that suicide bombing is acceptable for Palestinians because, he says, all Israelis are soldiers. A few weeks ago, he boycotted a Doha interfaith conference because he opposes discourse with Jews. As a result of his views on suicide bombing, Mr Qaradawi is barred from travelling to the US and the UK.

But he can also be pragmatic. He has said Islam supports democracy and last week called for more women in politics. Shortly after September 11 2001, he declared it legal for Muslims serving in the US army to fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Yet if Qaradawi repeated his “west is west” statements on his weekly Al Jazeera show they would reach up to 40m people. Many millions more would get the message by word-of-mouth, online video and other means.

Ms Gräf says Mr Qaradawi’s new perspective could have a significant impact on young Muslims in Europe. “The majority would be more reflective,” she says. “But, of course, there is a minority that may become more radical.”

-------
originally ran in the Dec 2 Financial Times,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/01d19166-fd65-11df-a049-00144feab49a.html#axzz16xVjoFAO

Gag Time in Cairo: Interview with Egyptian Journalist Ibrahim Eissa

2010-11-19T10:33:00.003-05:00

By David Lepeska
Columbia Journalism Review, Oct 2010

Few leaders stay in power for thirty years without occasionally embracing their inner gangster. So it is that the aging, possibly ailing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, facing the end of his reign, has again all but eliminated the space for free expression in the run-up to this month’s parliamentary polls and next year’s presidential vote.

In the past few months, authorities shuttered nearly twenty satellite TV channels, a top judicial council banned media coverage of court cases, outspoken columnists Hamdi Qandeel and Alaa Aswany suddenly stopped writing, and the state began monitoring mass text messages and curbed the independence of NGOs. Nobel Peace Prize winner and possible presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei has spoken of the “culture of fear that the regime has created.”

Last month’s firing of Ibrahim Eissa, editor-in-chief of Egypt’s leading Arabic language opposition daily, Al Destour, has been the most high-profile gag action. Eissa was forced out of his post shortly after the arrival of new ownership led by Sayed al Badawi, president of the opposition Wadf party. Most observers believe Badawi and his partner purchased Destour and dismissed Eissa as part of a deal with Mubarak, who presumably promised more parliamentary seats for Wafd in return.

The ouster is nothing new for Eissa. Over the past couple decades the forty-five-year-old has regularly tangled with the Egyptian government, including a seven-year stint as a media outcast after authorities shuttered the original incarnation of Destour in 1998. On a recent Saturday at his home on the outskirts of Cairo he spoke amiably about his dismissal, the wiliness of the Mubarak regime, and policy differences between Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Why were you fired?

Destour is the only newspaper in Egypt that is owned by a publisher. Others are owned by businessmen and are part of conglomerates that are involved in industry, oil, and other concerns. For this reason the government could not control us, so they had a few options. The first was to threaten me; there have been sixty-five lawsuits against the newspapers where I’ve worked, four times I was put in jail, once I was given a presidential pardon. That did not work, so they threatened my publishers with 12 million pounds in taxes. That did not work either, so they got their pet opposition party to buy the newspaper for 20 million pounds. After one month the ownership transfer was complete, they had taken charge, and they immediately changed the editors.

And so this is the end of Al Destour. The Destour that is being published now is phony, it’s a voice of the government, it’s a pet newspaper.

Was there an agreement between Wafd and the government?

Absolutely, I’m confident there was a deal. I have no proof, but I know. Everybody now knows the real Wafd party, the real Badawi, they know they’re not good for the people. You can see that on Facebook and on Twitter everybody is now saying that the Wafd party is not an honest party.

After a period of restraint, it seems the Mubarak regime is again suffocating the media.

The growth in satellite channels and greater freedom in newspapers began shortly after George W. Bush started pushing Mubarak to liberate the media in Egypt, maybe around 2002, 2003. So people started writing more openly, broadcasting more satellite channels and stuff like that. This created a political movement and woke up the people and gave them more courage, and people started to stand up for their rights and protests. Now the Egyptian government seems to have gotten the green light from the Obama administration to go back to the way they were before. As a result, we are now collecting the corpse of the Egyptian media.

You feel Obama is not supporting the opposition in Egypt?

Obama is not pressuring Mubarak at all, and I think the intelligence of Obama is overrated. He thinks that by petting the alligators, the Arab dictators, he can win their friendship and their love. But he’s not realizing that society is going to implode on itself and destroy those regimes.

Is the media crackdown here harsher this time around?

The sad thing is that we are going backwards—that is the real loss. People like us should fight for their right to speak, because this is our right. Years back it seemed like a Christmas gift given to us by Mubarak, and now he’s taking it back. That’s what people see. But the truth is that freedom of speech is not a gift but a right.

In a column published just before you were fired you wrote that as part of this crackdown, “understandings will be arrived at with representatives of the western media in Egypt.” What did you mean?

What I meant is that even CNN, BBC and those stations are going to have a hard time covering these elections, because they will probably not be allowed to shoot at polling stations and all the papers will be governmental or semi-governmental. They just won’t have access. And what’s more, this is an experiment for the big event next year. If this experience with the parliamentary elections works, the regime will continue with the same strategy for the presidential elections.

What’s the objective of this experiment?

The satellite channels and the newspapers have taken on the role of the opposition parties in Egypt, because the opposition parties here do not speak out. So they’re trying to shut us up for these coming elections. My sense is there’s going to be a lot of fraud.

The regime said they were shutting down the satellite channels because of religious violations.

It doesn’t matter what reason they give. They closed those satellite channels for two reasons: to gag the press and to put fear in the channels that were not closed. Plus, since a lot of them have relations with Muslim Brotherhood, this is an attempt to close off an avenue of campaigning for candidates from the Muslim Brotherhood.

What are Egyptians going to miss in their media coverage?

A lot. They won’t know what happens in the presidential palace, what’s behind political agreements between the regime and the opposition, the backgrounds of the people that make decisions, the stories behind companies that include politicians, government, and businessmen.

How well have foreign journalists covered these issues?

A lot of their reports are translated into our newspapers, and they often offer deep insight into events here and the Egyptian regime. But I will say that the foreign reporters that just come for a few days or a week and leave write better than the ones that stay here in Egypt. It’s because living in Egypt they become used to the garbage piles, the corruption, and these things begin to seem more normal.

Would you say that Egyptians are apathetic?

When you’re talking about Egyptians you’re talking about people that fifty-eight years ago, just a couple generations ago, lived under a military system. And Mubarak has been running emergency rule for thirty years now. So it’s understandable that it’s a society with ideas and ideologies different from the U.S. and other places. But the people thirst for change. They read newspapers, they go online and make it known that they want change. So, the people want change, and the media calls for change, but we are missing the key third part: politicians who are fighting for change. This is why Mohammed ElBaradei has stirred great hope.

Hosni Mubarak used to tell foreign governments, ‘If I go away, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to take charge.’ Now they are scared, because ElBaradei gives us an option for a leader that is neither Mubarak or the Muslim Brotherhood. The regime realizes this and is trying to shut down all variety of media before the elections. ElBaradei is a man with the knowledge, with experience, with the people behind him.

What’s the chance he will run for president next year?

You can’t say. Elections can happen any time and the rules would have to change for him to run. But I’m confident ElBaradei is going to be the one that makes this change happen.

You’ve been working for change for a long time. Is that why you and this government don’t seem to get along.

(Laughs) It’s because I represent the true opposition. I do not feel this pressure, I don’t fear people. The government is what it is. Mubarak is Mubarak, I am a journalist. When the regime changes I will change.

Do you write whatever you want?

I don’t censor myself ever. I’m the only one who wrote about Mubarak’s health and who told him he was going to die eventually. This is my job.

You say you’re the true opposition. How large is this true opposition?

There are many: Alaa al-Aswany, Mohammed ElBaradei, Ayman Nour, the kiffeyeh movement, people protesting on Facebook and other places. These are the true opposition and they are the ones who are keeping me going.

So what’s next for you?

I am going to sit in my garden (laughs). No, I’m not going to give up, I’m used to this regime. Whenever we have a disagreement they close the fire exits on me, but I can take it. I was just talking a few minutes ago on Skype with a friend about launching a new newspaper.

Being a journalist in Egypt, has it been what you’d hoped?

You are here in my home, you see it’s a nice place, it’s comfortable. I have my kids, I have my family. There’s nothing that I regret. Whatever the sacrifices, it’s always worth it.

-----
originally appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review,
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/gag_time_in_cairo.php

Qatar begins to buzz

2010-10-25T00:29:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
The National, Oct 25, 2010

Performers prepared their jokes, audience members tossed red squishy-balls and a film crew jostled through the jam-packed upstairs room of the Colombiano Coffee House last Sunday as the pre-show chatter reached fever pitch.

"This is amazing," said Mahmoud El-Achi, 27, crouching in his chair amid the hubbub of the Doha Tweet-Ups' comedy night. A Lebanese telecoms manager, he was born and raised in Doha. "There's almost nothing to do here, compared to Beirut," he added. "So I wasn't expecting this kind of turn-out and energy."

A small, roiling sea of students, artists, academics and professionals had successfully injected the event with that most rare and precious quality in Qatar: buzz.

Maybe it's a sign of things to come.

"The scene is young, but it's maturing," said Tariq al Jaidah, a Qatari entrepreneur and the founder of Doha's first private gallery, Waqif Art Center. "The Arab Capital designation has been a good inspiration and put Qatar on the map for these activities."

Doha is the UN-backed Arab Capital of Culture for 2010. But as recently as a few years ago this city had no major museum and hosted only the occasional small art exhibition. Now, a government vision that views cultural development as integral to national growth has begun to take root.

In 2007, a couple of small galleries opened in Souk Waqif, the faux traditional Arab market in downtown Doha. Late 2008 saw the debuts of IM Pei's Museum of Islamic Art, a cubist masterpiece regarded as an arts anchor, and the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. And last year the inaugural Doha Tribeca Film Festival put Qatar on the international movie map.

In addition to the second edition of the film festival, which kicks off this week, consumers of culture should have a full plate over Doha's final months as the cultural capital, including an Oriental music festival, a major musical production, an exhibition of Ottoman art, a series of national cultural weeks and the launch of the much-anticipated Arab Museum of Modern Art, called Mathaf.

Opening on December 30, Mathaf will house a collection of 60,000 works spanning 170 years. The Qatar Museums Authority has been promoting the museum on a regional road show. Antonia Carver, the director of Art Dubai, was among the speakers at a recent stop in Beirut. She believes it will be the world's largest public collection of modern Arab art.

"There's been a major shift of international attention towards the Arab world over the past 10 years, and it's been a phenomenon, really," Carver said during a recent interview. She appreciated how Mathaf officials had amassed their collection methodically and incorporated an educational aspect.

"What's really exciting is to be able to trace back through history and find those threads that pull out on the whole development of the Arab world and the Gulf and the connection between the two," she said.

Al Jaidah was also looking forward to Mathaf. "The new museum will change art in the Middle East because it will change the perspective and take Arab art to another dimension," he said.

Mathaf's opening is among the more promising events of an autumn schedule that, since the end of Eid, has seemed relentless. Qatar's National Theatre has hosted a steady stream of cultural weeks involving dancers, musicians and singers from countries such as India, Syria and Sudan. Still to come are Venezuela, Lebanon, Iran, Tunisia and the UAE.

In Souk Waqif, Al Markhiya Gallery is hosting the Lebanese artist Ginou Choueiri's solo show, For Your Eyes Only, a series of paintings exploring the veil and the women behind it. It's part of the gallery's ongoing survey of Arab artists under 40 years old.

As of last Wednesday, four new galleries at the Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al Thani Museum began showcasing Islamic art and works of Qatari heritage. On that same day, the gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar launched New York Chronicles, a month-long exhibition featuring eight Arab artists' creative responses to New York City.

Christie's, the leading London-based auctioneer, recently hosted a two-day exhibit of paintings from the collection of the Egyptian collector Dr Mohammad Said Farsi at Doha's Four Seasons Hotel. At the opening gala, the director of Christie's Middle East, Isabelle de la Bruyere, said the Middle East art market was the world's fastest growing.

The show, called Journey Through Modern Art, included works by modern Egyptian, Iranian and Lebanese artists worth up to $400,000 (Dh1.5million). "People in Qatar are starting now to see art as a symbol of status," al Jaidah said.

The Museum of Islamic Art remains the defining symbol of Doha's cultural status. This autumn, MIA is hosting a series of arts and historical lectures. In December, Bruce Lawrence, MIA's scholar-in-residence, will speak about Ibn Khaldun, the father of sociology.

The Orientalist Museum, which has no physical home and no plans for one, is launching an exhibition of Ottoman art there on Friday. Most works are from its own collection, but several are from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and private collections. The show will conclude with a two-day international conference at which scholars from around the world will discuss the exchange between Ottoman and European cultures.

New cultural education developments include Doha Kalakshetra, a secondary school for Indian classical music and art that opened this month. It will instruct students in dance forms including Kathakali and Bharatnatyam, and in musical instruments such as guitar, tabla, piano and flute.

And the Qatar Foundation is set to open the Qatar Music Academy in January. It will focus on Arab music, highlighting links to American jazz and European composition.

This year's DTFF will, naturally, shine a spotlight on Arab film, and it's not alone in Doha. The $200 million Al Noor Film Fund is one of the region's largest film production firms. The executive director Raja Sharif says the fund has received hundreds of film ideas and plans to make several movies each year.

The Doha Film Institute, which aims to build a sustainable film industry in Qatar, launched this May. DFI has been helping a handful of local filmmakers make 10-minute films that are likely to be shown at DTFF. DFI also manages the Doha Film Fund, which will provide financial backing to up to 10 films per year.

DFI's camera crews are regularly seen at events around Doha, including last week's Tweet-Up comedy night, where Mohammad Kamal, a Qatari student at Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar, made light of his compatriots' foibles. "The first thing a Qatari says in a fight: I cancel your visa!" he said to a burst of laughter.

Hannadi Hassan, another Qatari student, explained how she could always tell a Khaleeji in London. "They wear their jeans too high," she said to titters.

Still, the road to cultural prominence is not always smooth. Earlier this year, Qatari officials promoted the Qatar Marine Festival at press conferences and in newspapers. A programme was announced and a website set up. Suddenly, the event fell off the radar, never to be heard of again.

"They promoted it and then it was just cancelled," said George Ayache, general manager of International Fairs and Promotions' Qatar, which organises conferences and exhibitions. He expressed disappointment in the number of events this year. "There's really nothing major here, in terms of cultural exhibitions."

Optimists call for patience. "This is a very young country, with very young minds," said al Jaidah. "They cannot immediately jump and make themselves equal with major players, there needs to be time to progress, and it is happening."

Next year will see the completion of five new theatres, according to cultural minister Hamad bin Abdulaziz al Kuwari. The highlight will be the Cultural Village, or Katara, which is hosting DTFF during its forthcoming soft opening. When completed, the 100-hectare arts compound is expected to include an opera house, an enormous state-of-the-art amphitheatre, a cinema/theatre, souk, bookshop and beachfront, in addition to the offices of theatre, music and fine arts organisations.

QMA is to begin construction on the Jean Nouvel-designed Qatar National Museum this autumn, aiming for a 2013 opening. With 40,000 square-metres of exhibition space, it will be larger than the MIA. Also next year, production is set to begin on Al Noor Film Fund's $150m epic on the life of the Prophet Mohammad.

For now, though, Doha residents and visitors are focusing on other films, as they dust off their tuxedos and ready themselves for the red carpet.

-------
originally ran in 25 Oct 2010, The National, www.thenational.ae

Reality TV show spotlights Arab science stars

2010-10-25T00:26:00.002-04:00

DOHA // The pan-Arab reality show Stars of Science named its 16 second-season finalists on Sunday night, setting the stage for a six-week battle for hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and a spot among the top young innovators in the region.

The finalists hail from Algeria, Oman, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar and beyond. They tinker with diesel engines and robot joints, motorised trolleys and air-conditioned clothes, devising new approaches to common yet complex problems and hoping to make their names and inspire others.

Fouad Mrad, a long-time engineering professor at the American University of Beirut and one of the show's two permanent jurors, said: "This is a lifetime opportunity and these innovators are very anxious, hoping to prove to the world that their idea is valid, is scientifically sound and can be packaged into something useful to society. As long as they work hard, stay on track and are committed to their goal, we should see an exciting competition."

The Qatar Foundation-produced Stars of Science is shown in 15 countries and aims to promote education and interest in science and technology in the Arab region. An initiative of Sheikha Mozah bin Nasser Al Misnad, the wife of the Qatari emir, the show is filmed in Qatar Science and Technology Park and receives support from the universities of Education City.

The winner receives US$300,000 (Dh1.1million), second place $150,000, third place $100,000 and fourth $50,000. The first season, which ran in the spring 2009, was won by Bassam Jalgha, a Lebanese mechanical engineer who created "Dozan", an automated tuning device for stringed instruments.

The current season began on October 3 and will end with on November 28. During its first few weeks, the show went from Tunis to Cairo to Jeddah to Doha, whittling 7,000 applicants, including Eric Suleiman, whose project involved simplifying cable installation, down to 125 semi-finalists and then to 16.

In the coming episodes they will be judged on proof-of-concept, engineering, design and marketing as their numbers drop to four for the live 90-minute finale. Starting October 25, the show will also broadcast daily 30-minute episodes from Monday to Saturday, following the progress of each project.

Some of the innovators from the first season are already reaping rewards. One of last year's finalists, the Algerian computer engineer Wahiba Chair developed a calorie-counting software for the iPhone that scans barcodes and retrieves health information. Her application CarrotLines launched in June. Ms Chair says the show helped her improve the design and gave her the confidence and credibility to pursue her idea.

Mazen Salah from Jordan, also a finalist last season, developed Staticap, a non-rotating hubcap for cars that can display a team logo, flag, or whatever the owner would like. "In today's world the need for uniqueness and related self-expression has never been stronger," he said. "StatiCap fulfills this need."

Mr Salah received his patent earlier this year, launched his company in August and aims to exhibit at the Riyadh Motor Show in December.

This year's finalists include Abdullah Abou Zeid, of Egypt, who co-invented a new robot rotational joint; Ahmad al Khater, a Qatari who devised a means to harness magnetic energy to use as power; and Maha al Amro of Saudi Arabia, who developed an air-conditioning vest for outdoor workers.

This season Stars of Science added guest jury members from each of the countries visited during the tour for contestants. Suaad al Shamsi served as a juror at the Al Ain stop. She said: "I was looking for projects that don't exist on the market, creative ideas and the ability to implement the idea during the programme period."

Though no Emiratis are among this season's finalists, Ms al Shamsi sees an increase in scientific inquiry in the UAE, thanks to the country's of new universities, Masdar City, and the Sheikh Rashed and Al Owais scientific awards.

For Mr Mrad, the show is a beacon of light. He said he has long been "disappointed in what we do with our research, who we do research for, who uses our outcomes".

"When I saw the opportunity, this vision of QF [Qatar Foundation], I felt, 'My God, this is a vehicle I'd like to be a part of.' And I'd like to drive, not just be a passenger, and have a say in how it goes," he said.

Arab countries mostly lack the technology networks and hubs that foster progressive thinking and innovation, according to Mr Mrad. This is crucial, he said, because technology is key to developing a civilisation.

"I don't believe any such programme by itself is going to be able to change the economics or the cycle," he said.

"But all of these viewers will see and believe, 'Yes, we can take our ideas and transform them into useful products, and we can apply what we learn in school.'"

------
originally ran in the National, www.thenational.ae

Prison Time in Iran

2010-10-02T06:59:00.008-04:00

By David Lepeska
The National's weekly Review magazine, Oct 2010

Most of us can’t imagine what it’s like to be Shane Bauer or Josh Fattal, the American hikers stuck for more than a year in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

But for Roxana Saberi the experience is all too real. An Iranian- American journalist, she’d been living in Tehran six years when Iranian intelligence agents burst into her apartment on January 31, 2009.

They threw her into a car and, after hours of questioning, drove her to Evin and deposited her into a 7’ X 9’ cell with blankets for a bed and the screams of unseen prison-mates for company. During all-day interrogation sessions, her questioners pushed her to “cooperate,” or rather, admit she’d been working as a spy.

“They’re threatening you with the death penalty, life in prison, or finding and harming your family,” she said. “When you’re in that situation every threat is very real. They make you believe they have complete power of your life. Nobody knows where you are, and you know the history of Evin prison.”

She spent 100 days there, but during a recent interview at Doha’s Grand Hyatt hotel, looked none the worse for wear. Elegant and poised, the 33-year-old Saberi retains the ivory skin and mile-high cheekbones of a beauty queen (a former Miss North Dakota, she was among ten finalists in the 1998 Miss America pageant).

After earning two master’s degrees, including one from Cambridge, she moved to her father’s homeland in 2003. She’d carved out a good life in Tehran – freelancing for the BBC and National Public Radio, writing a book about modern Iran and dating a highly regarded Iranian Kurd filmmaker – before the trip to Evin. Her book about the experience, Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran, has received mostly positive notices since it was released in March.

Saberi’s Doha visit was organised by her alma mater, Northwestern University, to meet journalism students at NU-Qatar and deliver a lecture about human rights and Iran. On her first trip back to the region, she felt safe because she was “being looked after.” Sitting in the Hyatt's spacious atrium, she spoke openly and comfortably about her ordeal.

“I gave in pretty early,” Saberi admitted with a sheepish grin. After two days at Evin she confessed, falsely, to spying for the CIA. “I was so ashamed. I thought why couldn’t I at least put up more of a fight.”

Transferred to another cell, Saberi met Silva Harotonian, an Iranian-Armenian health worker who had refused to fold for her interrogators. Saberi became disgusted with herself and decided to speak the truth. “‘What kind of life do I want to live?’” she recalled asking herself at the time. “‘The life in which I know what I did is right.’”

She recanted her confession and later defied her bazju, or lead interrogator, but not before being allowed a phone call to her parents. She told her father she’d been detained for possessing alcohol, as directed by her keepers. Suspicious, he contacted the press, and within days Saberi became a minor international cause celebre: supportive stories appeared on the BBC, The New York Times and elsewhere; the president of the European Union requested proper treatment; the US State Department called for her release. Yet at the end of a classic Iranian “show trial,” she was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison. It was just the push she needed.

Saberi, realising she would never get justice, found a new sense of purpose. She appealed her sentence and began a hunger strike. After nine days without meals, she stopped adding sugar to her water.

“Mentally everything’s a little shady and you can’t concentrate and you just wait for the days to pass by,” she said of her two weeks without food. On May 11 her sentence was suspended and she was released, frail and 15 pounds lighter. “What helped me was the feeling of defiance.”

That feeling motivates her work today, as a campaigner for human rights and media freedom. She’s confident the media coverage played a key role in her eventual release, just as international support led to the suspension, last month, of the stoning sentence for Iranian widow Sakineh Mohammadi.

“Even if the international outcry-- governments, organisations, also individuals – doesn’t always lead to the release of prisoners,” she said, “it does at least raise awareness about what is happening and empowers those people in prison and helps them tolerate the harsh conditions.”

Due to her severe treatment, Saberi understood the anger and frustration of the protesters that filled the streets of Tehran a month after her release, in the wake of the contested presidential election.

“I think that the people in power have lost a lot of legitimacy for much of the population,” she said. Because of Iran’s armies of informed, tech-savvy youth and the leadership’s internal bickering, Saberi sees change as “inevitable.” “I think the majority want a democratic government that respects human rights.”

Yet the regime is said to regularly deny those rights. Human Rights Watch has documented dozens of cases of sexual assault, beatings, torture and other forms of abuse in Iran’s prisons. Reporters without Borders recently expressed concern that Iranian prosecutors will request the death penalty for two leading Irani- an bloggers who have been in Evin prison for two years.

And then there’s Fattal and Bauer. The third American hiker, Sarah Shourd, was released from Evin last month after the sultan of Oman took care of her $500,000 bail. Shourd maintains she’s only “one-third free” because her fiancé and friend remain in Evin.

“She is in a very sensitive position because the Iranian authorities are paying attention to what she says,”
said Saberi, who directed the interested to visit www.freethehikers.org.

With the right kind of international support, Fattal and Bauer, like Saberi, might soon be able to appreciate the everyday freedoms most of us take for granted. “To make a phone call when I want,” said Saberi, thinking of things that feel new and precious to her post-Evin, “to eat when I want, to eat what I want, to put my head on a pillow, to turn off the lights at night, to write an email, to surf the internet, to read what I want, to go jogging in the streets, to talk about what happened to me and what’s happened to so many others.”

-----
an edited version appeared in The National's Review, on Oct 1, 2010, www.thenational.ae

Qataris return majlis to its roots

2010-09-10T06:49:00.003-04:00

DOHA // The majlis has played a central role in Arab society since pre-Islamic times, when groups of tribal elders would sit and discuss important community concerns and make decisions. In Qatar, though, the majlis in recent decades has become more of a simple social gathering or informal business meeting than an earnest consultation.

Now a handful of young Qatari men and women are returning this tradition to its roots, taking up urgent social and political issues and adding a dash of activism and diplomacy.

“There is a need to have serious discussion about some topics here in Qatar,” said Hamad al Ibrahim, 30, who, along with his brother, hosts a majlis where topics of debate have included freedom of speech, democracy and Islamism. “What we are trying to do is get people to think about their current situation.”

An Arabic term meaning “a place of sitting”, the majlis is an integral Ramadan tradition, in part because the Prophet Mohammed consulted regularly with an inner circle of friends and advisers.

In the centuries that followed, majlises spread across the Muslim world. Today it is the name for parliaments in Iran, the Maldives, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and other countries.

On any given day a dozen or so majlises take place across Qatar. Few are as open and thoughtful as the al Ibrahims’, which meets every Saturday and holds a monthly discussion on a pressing issue.

Guest speakers have included David Kerr, the former head of Sidra Medical Centre and now a healthcare adviser to the British prime minister, David Cameron, and Tim Sebastian, host of the BBC’s Doha Debates.

On a recent Saturday in a warm, carpeted space on the edge of Doha, a dozen Qataris and a few guests sat on couches set against walls covered with striped wallpaper. A visitor spoke of the floods in Pakistan: the displaced, the lethargic government response, the looming starvation.

At the majlis a week earlier, the al Ibrahims asked members for donations for Pakistani flood relief, to be handed in at the next majlis. In the first day they received commitments totalling 40,000 Qatari riyals (Dh40,360).

“This is the worst disaster in Pakistani history,” said Abdul Ghaffar Aziz, an official with Al Khidmat Foundation, the charitable arm of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest Islamic political party.

Al Khidmat is building camps for the displaced and providing food, clothing and medical attention. By the end of Mr al Ghaffar’s talk the majlis had raised more than 265,000 riyals.

“People really contributed generously,” said Mr al Ibrahim, who works as an analyst at Rand-Qatar Policy Institute. “It’s one of the things that we are proud we could achieve.”

Majlis members feel the same way. “This is good for Qataris,” said Jaber al Mosallam, 23, referring to the al Ibrahim majlis.

At his own family majlis, which Mr al Mosallam attends almost nightly, the talk is of business, football, the latest news. Some issues remain taboo. “It’s not that you’re scared of it, but it’s very difficult to talk about certain issues,” Mr al Mosallam, who works at Qatar Petroleum, said. “Honesty has a price.”

Maryah al Dafa is trying to do something good as well. Returning to Doha last year after getting her master’s in the United Kingdom, she launched what most believe is the first women’s majlis in Qatar.

“We needed a place to vent and talk about anything, from girly issues to politics and other topics,” said Ms al Dafa, 24, the daughter of a Qatari diplomat. Members of her majlis include a handful of US citizens and other westerners. For Ms al Dafa, the majlis is as much about cultural exchange as it is about expressing opinions and discussing life in Qatar.

“It’s comfortable but also critical – of everything, even ourselves,” she added. “Even if you don’t say anything you leave having heard three to four views on society in Qatar or politics in the United States.”

Such discussions represent a shift, according to Hiba Khodr. A visiting fellow at the Doha branch of the Brookings Institution in Washington, she has studied majlises in the Gulf.

“In Kuwait they are more organised, more involved in political discussions and policy making,” Ms Kodhr said, adding that in Kuwait there are several women’s and even mixed-gender diwaniyat, as they are called. In Bahrain, majlises are similarly open.

“Here [in Qatar] people don’t talk about these issues,” Ms Khodr said. “They simply don’t speak politics, at least not yet.”

This reluctance to talk politics is what inspired Ms al Dafa to carve out a space for real discussion. “There’s only, what, 300,000 Qataris, and most of them are apathetic about all this,” Ms al Dafa said. “I’m not a revolutionary, but it’s about being critical and constructive and making positive change.”

Many Qataris believe the country’s current leadership has allowed for greater openness. They point to mixed-gender higher learning at Education City and thoughtful public discussion on the Doha Debates. “The more educated people get, the more willing they are to break boundaries and express themselves,” Hassan al Ibrahim said.

His brother Hamad is hopeful that a new generation will be perfectly comfortable talking politics, free speech, and the direction of Islamic society in the modern world. For now, he just wants to get the ball rolling.

“In order to change people’s mentality it takes some time,” he said. “I think if we can replicate this in more majlises, it would be great.”

-------
originally appeared in the 10 Sept 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Glittering Gulf states' dark labor secret

2010-09-07T05:45:00.003-04:00

By David Lepeska
Christian Science Monitor

Doha, Qatar: The rise of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf is a now-familiar tale. Tiny societies of pearl divers, coastal merchants, and nomadic Bedouin were transformed in the last half of the 20th century by oil and natural-gas wealth. Sparkling office towers and hotels sprang into the muggy air, the monarchs that rule these tiny emirates became bywords for financial excess, and newspapers described the region's economic "miracle."

Now, countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are seeking to polish all that glitter, spending hundreds of millions on universities in association with the likes of Harvard and on museums with organizations like France's famed Louvre.

But as they do so, one fact about their astonishing economic success has remained largely unchanged: The vast majority of the workers who have built these states are foreigners who are often exploited, rarely protected by local laws, and frequently return home after years of work as poor as when they got here. Promises have been made in recent years to protect the migrants, but labor advocates say millions are still being abused.

"It's breathtaking hypocrisy," says Azfar Khan, with the International Labor Organization (ILO). "They flout the most basic laws protecting the rights of workers."

Tiny Qatar is just one of the examples. The leading exporter of liquid natural gas is smaller than Connecticut, but state-funded Al Jazeera News is a powerful regional voice, and Education City, built in association with Georgetown, Northwestern, and four other US universities, is seen as a beacon of progress for the Arab world.

But not far from the futuristic campus, Rajan Sapkota and many like him are working in conditions that activists liken to indentured servitude.

The young Nepali shares a room with nine of his countrymen. More than 140 Nepali laborers have died in Qatar this year, according to the Safety Awareness Center, which tracks deaths among Nepalis. And in a country where the average wage for citizens is $83,000 per year, the world's highest, according to the International Monetary Fund, he is paid about 60 cents an hour.

Mr. Sapkota can't quit or leave as his boss has taken his passport. "Work here is not so good," said Sapkota, his eyes heavy-lidded after a 12-hour workday in 116-degree F. heat. "Sometimes we get tired and thirsty; it is very hot here."

So hot that leading Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi called for construction in Gulf states to be halted for Ramadan, the holy month during which Muslims fast in the daytime.

Because it is illegal in these countries to consume food or water in public during daylight hours during Ramadan, construction workers are compelled to fast, to a certain extent.

The number of expatriate workers in the Gulf has nearly doubled, from close to 9 million in 1990 to 17 million today. In Qatar and the UAE, foreign workers are more than 90 percent of the workforce.

In recent years, workers in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE have protested conditions, with many complaints stemming from the system of kafallah: Foreign workers are sponsored by an employer and barred from changing jobs, leaving the country, or renting a home without his approval. A 2009 State Department report said the law leads to "forced labor activities and slave-like conditions."

Qatar has created the National Office to Combat Trafficking in Persons and boosted labor camp inspections. The UAE moved to improve conditions and Kuwait announced a reform of labor laws. Yet Kuwait's new minimum wage for laborers of about $209 per month excludes 500,000-plus domestic workers.

"Reforms often encounter stiff resistance from employers fearing higher costs and fewer entitlements, labor brokers profiting off a poorly regulated system, and government officials who view migrants as a security threat," Human Rights Watch wrote in May.

"We must ensure that the laws are enforced strictly and fairly," says Hasan al-Mohannadi, head of Qatar's Permanent Population Committee. Yet Qatari sponsors still hold workers' passports, despite a prohibition, and laborers regularly work more than the legal limit of 10 hours a day.

"The UAE and Qatar have definitely regressed," says the ILO's Mr. Khan.

For Nepalis in Qatar, the situation is bleak. Most take high-interest loans to pay a recruiter $2,000 for a visa and a job. For Bharat Bika, a father of four, his $216 monthly salary is inadequate. "It is so difficult to pay my loan," said Bika, who still owes more than $1,400 after a year. "I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it."

Thousands of workers in the UAE have gone unpaid for six months or more because indebted employers fled the country. In Kuwait, activists say worker suicides are common. In Qatar, activists say deaths among the migrant Nepali workforce are rising. "They do not have enough doctors and the health care is extremely poor," said Radha Krishna Deo, president of the Safety Awareness Center.

Qatar says it plans to build three clinics and two health centers for male laborers. "They have health problems that are difficult to address and they impose problems with their huge demand on hospitals here," said Jamal Khanji, of the Supreme Council of Health.

Yet Qatar's progressive reputation may suffer as abuses continue and the worker population grows. "The world community has to bring pressure on the governments to redress the situation," said Khan. "You can only fool people so many times."

------
originally ran in Sept 3, 2010, Christian Science Monitor, with photo:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/0906/The-glittering-Gulf-states-dark-labor-secret

Cultural exchange program smashes stereotypes on both sides of divide

2010-08-27T10:54:00.004-04:00

By David Lepeska
The National, Aug 2010

DOHA // “Arabs are dangerous" -- that's what high-school pupil Leah Ogawa heard as her Arabic-language class was preparing for a spring break trip to the Gulf.

“Some kids in our school were saying ‘Be careful!’ when we were going to Qatar,” recalled Ms Ogawa, 17, a senior at Boston Arts Academy. “Because of 9/11, many people have negative images of Arabs.”

In the end, she had no reason to be nervous about meeting her Qatari counterparts. “They are so nice,” she said. “I got close to most of them.”

As the controversial leader of a proposed Islamic centre near where the World Trade Center once stood in New York City visits Doha on a US-backed diplomatic tour, the success of a less touted cultural exchange program highlights the possibility for smashing stereotypes and building bridges between the the West and the Arab world.

“I was expecting that they weren’t going to be open to us, but that was one of the shocking things I discovered there,” said Jawahar al Mal, 16, a senior at Al Bayam Independent Secondary School for Girls, referring to a Qatar Foundation International (QFI)-backed trip a couple dozen Qatari students took to the US last month. “They were very open to our religion, treating us like close friends, not the way the movies portray.”

Founded in Washington in 2007, QFI is one of only a handful of Gulf nonprofits based in the West. Others include the Mohammed bin Issa Foundation in London and the Washington-based Oasis Foundation.

Though independent, it is part of an effort by the Qatar Foundation, its main backer, to foster understanding and facilitate international collaboration through education, health, technology and community-service initiatives.

QFI’s main initiative is its Arabic-language and culture program, which supports Arabic courses in US high schools – providing funding for qualified teachers, books and computer labs, and developing an Arabic-language teacher-training program.

The course incorporates traditions, holidays, cuisine and bits of religion. “We started this with a bit of trepidation. We were not sure how well it would be received,” the QFI’s executive director, Maggie Salem, said in a recent interview.

The ongoing storm over the proposed Islamic community centre has some American politicians and commentators denouncing Muslims just as the centre’s leader, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, passes through the Gulf on a mission funded by the US State Department. He is in Qatar this week.

But the timing of QFI’s Arabic programme could hardly be better. The number of US college students studying in Arabic-speaking countries jumped six-fold from 2002 to 2007, according to the Institute of International Education.

“We’re fighting wars there, there’s a lot of interaction with the region that kids can’t ignore,” said Ms Salem. “We would love to create a generation of fluent 18-year-olds, but what we’d like even better is if they appreciated something about the richness of the people and the culture.”

They seem headed in the right direction. Students at Boston Arts Academy and Washington Latin High School shower praises on QFI’s Arabic language pilot programme, launched last year.

“The Arabic programme in my school was phenomenal,” said Damon Mallory, a recent graduate of Boston Arts Academy. His class saw the film Amreeka, went to an Arabia exhibit at a Boston museum and attended a concert by the Palestinian rap group DAM. “The more I engaged myself into this new culture,” he said, “I fell in love with it.”

His schoolmate had a similar experience. “The programme was amazing,” said Ms Ogawa. “I just enjoyed everything that we did.”

A highlight was the April trip to Qatar to meet students at their sister schools. “Meeting the Qataris was by far the best thing I have done,” said Mr Mallory. “I have made life-long friends, and even best friends.”

During the US students’ visit a Qatari teacher suggested a US trip for his students. Within a couple weeks, the QFI chairman, Sheikh Jassim bin Abdulazia al Thani, had approved the idea. By July, the Qatari students were on their way to the US.

The 10-day tour included visits to the American capital and the Nasa Space Center and a beach clean-up in Florida. But the Qataris most enjoyed spending time with American students. “If they wanted to ask us about anything, we answered them; if we wanted to ask them, we did,” said Essa al Malki, 15, a sophomore at Doha Independent School for Boys. “There was no boundaries between us. It was very comfortable.”

Mr Mallory and his new friend Fahad al Nahdi, a senior at Doha Independent School, hope to build on the connection established this summer. They are developing their own QFI initiative, an online network and social forum for students that aims to improve relations between cultures, starting with the Arab and American communities.

“Damon and I fell in love with what QFI was doing and wanted to get involved,” said Mr al Nahdi. After receiving approval from QFI, they submitted their idea – called QFI Step-Up – to the Clinton Global Initiative for funding.

“We believe that it is important to display to the world how alike we are,” said Mr Mallory, “as opposed to how the media present us to each other.”

-------
edited version ran in the 27 Aug 2010 The National ( www.thenational.ae)

Dongria Dodge Vedanta Dig

2010-08-25T13:02:00.002-04:00

Great news from India this week, where Environmental Minister Jairam Ramesh rejected the planned alumina mine of London-based mining giant Vedanta resources on the basis that it represented an existential threat to the local Dongria Kondh tribe.

Activists and journalists have been saying as much for years, including yours truly -- here's a story I wrote about the the Dongria's love for Niyamgiri just over a year ago.

Ramesh's decision suggests that Delhi may be starting to realize that all development is not good development, and that major extraction projects like the Niyamgiri mine often lead to more recruits for the Maoists that have been waging a rebellion across the Indian heartland for decades, but with greater intensity of late. No surprise, however, to find that Congress is already using the Dongria victory for political mileage.

A Ramadan where old meets new

2010-08-20T05:15:00.002-04:00

DOHA // This is not your grandfather’s Ramadan.

Thousands of visitors strolled through the Doha Summer Fun Park one evening this week, stopping to nibble on cotton candy and ice cream, check out some Islam-themed television serials or watch their children smash into each other on bumper cars.

Organised each year by the Qatar Tourism Authority, the amusement park is larger than ever in 2010, and starting this year, has been extended to include Ramadan and Eid.

It is all part of a new, more festive commemoration of the holy month.

“When I was little we played simple games for Ramadan, or packed up a picnic and went to the beach,” said Hamad Salman, a Doha native and marketing executive for Qatar Petroleum. He had come to the fun park with his teenage son and daughter for the second time, and planned to come again.

“This is much better,” added Salman, looking around the colourful, brightly lit, 12,000 square metre space, children shouting and laughing as they were spun around, up and down. “All these games and rides make a big difference.”

Droves of Qataris and other Doha residents attend similarly lively affairs late into the night across the city, from malls to hotels to cultural centres. Gondolania, the indoor amusement park at Villaggio mall, has extended its opening hours past 2am, so kids can bowl and ride go-karts and roller coasters late into the night.

Qatar’s only water park is set to open its doors in the coming weeks, and host Ramadan events. Fanar, the Qatar Islamic Cultural Centre, has organised an evening to teach expatriates more about Ramadan and its traditions this weekend.

Doha’s four- and five-star hotels are hosting lavish nightly iftar and suhoor events, some with Egyptian dancers, Lebanese bands, henna tattoos, falconry exhibitions and up to 50 dishes for tasting. As part of its Ramadan celebrations, the W Hotel Doha is giving away airline tickets that enable the holder to fly anywhere in the world on Qatar Airways.

The fun park is one of the more popular events, with some 4,000 nightly visitors to the cavernous Doha Exhibition Centre. “Breaking away from past events, which were held in shopping malls, Doha Summer Fun Park takes full advantage of the space,” said Lahdan al Mohannadi, head of internal exhibitions at the Qatar Tourism Auhtority and lead organiser of the fun park. “In addition, this year the event is free for all.”

Buoyant Arab and carnival music fills the space. At one end is a souk, filled with shops offering Yemeni honey, leather purses, perfumes, jewellery and more. At the other a food court offers doughnuts, hot dogs, pizza, fried chicken, and shawarma. In between are a couple of dozen rides, including a choo-choo train and caterpillar coaster for toddlers, and dodgems, video games and a dozen more active rides for the bigger kids.

The al Mannai brothers – Hamad and Ahmed, 10, and Mohammad, 13 – enjoyed the Tilt-a-Whirl so much they got right back on and did it again. “That was a lot of fun,” said Mohammed as the trio walked away dizzily.

These events, most of which aim to entertain the whole family, may be bringing a sense of community back to Ramadan in Qatar. “We’ve lost some of our traditions, of course,” said Moza al Malki.

A family therapist and commentator, she has seen Ramadan change several times in recent decades, from more to less strict and back again. “But nowadays we are going back to some of these old traditions.”

For the first couple weeks after the fun park opened, on-stage performances included clowns, magic shows and games. Starting with Ramadan, the stage has been re-made into a traditional Qatari house with garden, and programming includes a series of plays, a theatre group performing folklore tales and a Syrian band playing traditional music.

“Several new activities were added to instill traditional values during the holy month,” said Mr al Mohannadi. The fun park and Doha’s Heritage Village are both hosting Garangou (also known as Karankou) events for families.

Garangou is a traditional Gulf children’s festival held on the 14th day of Ramadan. Children will play heritage games and sing traditional songs, along with other activities and competitions.

“We are staying together more, families going out together,” said al Malki. “Also generosity, giving food to our neighbours, this is also returning.”

In Al Mansoura, on the edge of Doha, the W Hotel Doha and the Islamic Bank of Qatar have set up an air-conditioned tent to provide iftar to the underprivileged.

More than 150 male labourers turn up daily to break their fast with dates, laban, fruits, rice, bread, chicken and lamb.

“These are the people that really need the full meal,” said a spokesperson for Islamic Bank of Qatar, which has done the charity tent for three years running. “A lot of the staff from the bank also volunteer – everybody pitches in.”

Back at the Doha Exhibition Centre, Mr Salman watched his children on the City Hopper ride. “Ready to come down yet?” he shouted to his son, whizzing past overhead.

The teenager smiled and shook his head.

------
Ran with photos in the 20 August 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

"Ground Zero mosque" imam readies for Gulf mission

2010-08-20T05:12:00.003-04:00

Doha// The furore over a planned Islamic centre just blocks from Ground Zero in New York City mounted as the imam behind the proposal readies for a US-backed diplomatic mission to the Gulf.

As Feisal Abdul Rauf prepares to visit Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE on a State Department-sponsored trip, debate is raging in the US about whether he is moderate enough to explain American views of Islam to the world.

“This radical is a terrible choice to be one of the faces of our country overseas,” two Republican Party members of Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Peter King of New York, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Mr Rauf’s speaking tour was planned before the proposed Islamic centre controversy erupted. It was organised as part of the President Barack Obama’s effort to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world.

Officials at the US State Department have lauded the imam’s record of moderation, noting that he has participated in two previous diplomatic tours, including one during the administration of George W Bush. PJ Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said Mr Rauf would “discuss Muslim life in America and promote religious tolerance” during the visit. Exact dates and venues have not been announced.

The controversy erupted in May when the proposed $120 million (Dh440.7m) Islamic cultural centre, to be located three blocks from the site of the felled World Trade Center towers, received approval from a local community board. In addition to a domed prayer space, the facility is to include a 500-seat theatre, culinary school, swimming pool, library and art studios.

Opponents of the complex complain that it is a symbolic victory for the September 11 hijackers.

Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, has compared supporters of the facility to Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League, which says it fights “anti-Semitism and all former of bigotry”, worries the mosque “will cause some [9/11] victims more pain”.

Proponents point out that Mr Rauf, who holds a physics degree from Columbia University, is a follower of the moderate Sufi form of Islam and has a reputation for attempting to build interfaith ties with Christian and Jewish groups. He also set up the Cordoba Initiative in 2004 to improve western relations with the Islamic world.

Calling it a “weapon of mass construction”, talk show host Stephen Colbert lampooned the politically conservative perspective, saying, “Every permit granted to a mosque is one denied to an American house of worship – a mall.”

Mr Rauf, who has been barred by the State Department from using government-funded travel to solicit financial support for the project, has said he sees the planned mosque as a way “to amplify the moderate voices that reject terrorism and seek mutual understanding and respect with all faiths”.

Mr Obama voiced support for the mosque project during the annual White House Ramadan dinner on Aug 11. A week earlier, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered a speech in support of Mr Rauf’s plan.

The president later clarified his comments, suggesting that while Muslims have the right to build a house of worship, it did not mean that building a mosque near Ground Zero was the right thing to do.

Abdulaziz Al Mohannadi, an engineering student at Texas A&M University-Qatar, thought Mr Rauf might be able to provide an answer to a nagging question for many Gulf natives: what do Americans think of Muslims and Islam?

“When we think of America we only get ideas from the media, from news and the movies,” he said. “To have a true Muslim-American come to us and explain how Americans see Muslims, how they interpret us in their country, that would be great.”

------
originally ran in 19 August 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Qatar's extraordinary boom

2010-08-13T09:45:00.002-04:00

DOHA // It's probably time to add Qatar to the list of great modern-day growth stories.

Its GDP and population have doubled since 2004, and as of June, there were 18,000 buildings under construction – more than one for every 100 people in the country.

Most of that construction is taking place in Doha, which has exploded from a population of 500,000 people in 2004 to 1.3 million today, blossoming from a small, quiet burg to a buzzing, polyglot city of business, research and progressive thinking.

“The rate of growth in Doha is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Robert Puentes, an urban growth analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, adding that no major American city had ever grown at this pace.

Labourers, scientists, academics, designers and financiers have come knocking. According to the World Population Bureau, Qatar’s net migration rate of nearly 10 per cent is nearly double those of its nearest competitors – Bahrain, Singapore and the UAE.

As its natural-gas fuelled economy zips along – one of the world’s fastest growing at an estimated growth rate of 16 per cent this year – the good times are likely to continue for Qatar.

“Its incredible, but it’s expected in Qatar,” said Hatem Samman, the head of Booz & Company’s Ideation Centre, a thinktank based in Dubai.

“The trend for Qatar is headed in the right direction, given that there is economic and population growth to rival any country in the world,” he said.

Masraf al Rayan, a financial analyst, estimates Qatar’s population will reach 2 million by 2013, which means Doha will grow by an additional 20 per cent in the next three years.

This explains the capital’s construction boom, which includes a major airport, the US$20 billion (Dh73.45bn) Pearl Qatar residential and retail development, the $5.5bn Musheireb urban-renewal project downtown and the $14bn Lusail City residential and commercial waterfront development. The number of hotel rooms in Doha is set to double in the next two years even as new financial centres, exhibition facilities and housing complexes appear.

Landlords might argue the city has enough housing. The number of units has increased by nearly 150 per cent since 2004, outpacing the population boom. Doha has become a tenants’ market, with rents down 50 per cent or more in the past 18 months, including 11 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to Asteco, the property advisory firm.

Ibrahim Ibrahim, an economic adviser to the Qatari government, expects economic expansion to slow by more than half in the next two years as major energy and infrastructure projects are completed and tens of thousands of labourers return home.

“Part of this new population will eventually leave, in the short term,” said Mr Samman. “But still many people are going to stay, maybe two thirds will stay and it should be fine.”

One government estimate has the country’s population growing as little as 500,000 by 2030.

Mr Puentes said, “Unless a comprehensive approach is taken to managing growth there is certainly a risk of overbuilding.” He spoke of the problems the vacation hotspot of Las Vegas and other American cities have faced because of a glut of housing in the economic downturn.

“There are more vacant homes for sale now than at any time in our nation’s history,” he said, referring to the US. “This is a problem because it can breed crime and disorder, and also accelerate a process of further disinvestment from certain neighbourhoods.”

He urged Qatari leaders to find a way to make vacant properties productive and also to be mindful of carbon reduction and the demands of climate change.

“The world economy is rapidly moving away from carbon-based fuels and towards new sources of energy,” he said.

For Qatar, this would mean altering construction and building methods, as in other countries, but also great economic diversification. This is not news to Qatari leaders.

Qatar’s domestic expansion is in line with its rising international profile. It is the world leader in exports of liquid natural gas, but it also wields the increasing reach and influence of al Jazeera TV and promotes peace, education and charity via diplomatic conferences and the Qatar Foundation.

Some might argue Doha has wrestled the title of world’s fastest growing city from Dubai. But Mr Puentes sees the regional centres as allies.

“A co-operative network would make sense,” he said. “They must remember that they operate in a global marketplace. Metros that are able to grow and attract globally-connected, high-value service firms can access, and benefit from, a worldwide array of customers, workers, and contracted services, ultimately boosting quality growth at home.”

---------
originally appeared in the 13 Aug 2010 The National.

Qatar's healthcare crisis

2010-07-09T04:59:00.002-04:00

DOHA // Feeling ill? You might not want to be in Qatar.

The country has about 1.4 hospital beds for every 1,000 people – the lowest total in the GCC, one-fifth as many as Turkmenistan and Slovakia and fewer than poor countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“It’s not a good situation,” said Moza al Malki, a writer and family therapist. “Sometimes people go to be hospitalised and they can’t find an open bed.”

Despite a spike in government spending and the hiring of thousands of health-care workers, Qatar’s few hospitals and clinics are under severe strain because of a tripling of the population in the past dozen years.

“This huge increase in the population has put a huge load on our public health facilities,” said Jamal Khanji, head of the government’s medical licensing department. “There is a definite need for expansion, and that expansion is happening.”

Qatar has four public and five private hospitals, but the lynchpin is Hamad Medical Centre. The country’s primary health facility, it receives more than 80 per cent of public health-care spending.

Since 1999, that spending has risen from QR850 million (Dh858m) to QR4.3 billion, and the number of both nurses and doctors has tripled. Yet no major new health facilities have opened since 2004, and relative to population, the numbers of doctors, dentists, nurses and pharmacists fell anywhere from 15 per cent to 40 per cent during the past five years.

On a recent afternoon in Hamad’s emergency room, dozens of workers sat waiting for medical attention. Several limped, two held their stomachs and one held a bandage to his bleeding face.

Hamad’s bed occupancy rate, in the low 70s a decade ago, has hovered around 90 per cent for two years. A March study from the University of Michigan Health System found that occupancy rates above 80 per cent increase the risk of in-patient death by nearly six per cent.

Qatar’s foetal death rate, at 4.8 per 1,000 births in 2005, is now near eight per thousand, its highest in a decade. This is similar to rates in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Many residents have turned to pricey private providers or travel outside Qatar for health care, abandoning essentially free services at government-run facilities. Zakia Ali Malallah, a Qatari poet and commentator, recently wrote a column in the local Arabic language daily Al Watan about her three-hour wait to see a doctor at Hamad, vowing to never return.

And when Ms al Malki’s son was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident, her family sent him to Germany for treatment despite the high costs. “Nobody trusts Hamad now,” she said. “Even if I had to sell my house I would’ve sent him.”

The government is spending billions to alter that mindset. Set to come online in the next few years are paediatric and orthopaedic hospitals, a cardiac surgery centre and, at a cost of US$3 billion (Dh11bn), the Sidra Medical Centre. Construction is to begin this year on three hospitals exclusively for male labourers.

Qatar’s 2.25 doctors per 1,000 people is higher than Germany (2) and the UK (1.8) and just below the United States (2.43), according to the Organisation for Economic Development’s annual health data report. Yet specialists are rare.

Qatar has one specialist in tropical medicine, for instance, despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of people who hail from and regularly return to the Philippines, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The Supreme Council of Health recently gave all primary health centre employees a five-per-cent salary rise, in an effort to increase retention, and began a recruitment drive for doctors and other health staff from across Arab countries.

“If you look at the need for nurses in this country, I would like to tell you we are talking about thousands,” Mohammad Fathy Saoud, the president of Qatar Foundation, said at a recent event.

A new policy allows the wives and adult children of resident healthcare professionals (except physicians) to work as trainees until the fulfillment of the experience required for licensing.

Last month, the government created the Qatar Health Practitioners’ Council to monitor medical licensing. The new body appeared shortly after the licences of 32 general practitioners were revoked because they were found to be practising without medical doctorates. All were given three years to earn a post-graduate degree, failing which their clinics would be closed permanently.

Health-care staffers could also use certification training. As a western expatriate was being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance this week, an emergency medical technician tried to take his blood pressure but failed to use the electronic machine properly. The machine constricted the patient’s arm until his fingers turned blue.

“The nurses and some other staff, we have to admit it, are mostly unqualified,” said Ms al Malki. “They don’t know what to do.”

That may be starting to change. Last month, the University of Calgary-Qatar graduated the country’s first university-trained nurses, the result of a programme nurtured by Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned.

“There is a huge move to improve health services here,” said Mr Khanji. “The leadership of this country wants Qatar to be a hub for medical services in the region and you cannot achieve that without competent staff, a high level of safety, and recognised accreditation systems.”

------
originally appeared in the july 9 2010 The National (www.thenational.ae)

Building an art culture from the sand up

2010-07-02T03:40:00.002-04:00

Doha// Call it the fourth power.

Along with diplomacy, media and sport, Qatar is promoting culture as another facet of its budding regional and international reach, and as part of a long-term plan to diversify its economy.

This small, wealthy emirate has in recent years organised successful negotiations on Darfur and Lebanon, built Al Jazeera into a leading global news source and, after hosting the Asian Games in 2006, is now bidding to host the 2022 World Cup.

Spearheading its cultural ambitions is the Qatar Museum Authority. The brainchild of Sheikha Mayassa, the US-educated, 26-year-old daughter of Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani and his second wife Sheikha Mozah bin Nasser al Missned, QMA was created in December 2005 to oversee the museums of Qatar, rediscover the country's national heritage and transform Doha into a regional arts hub.

“They see culture as a leading aspect of their vision for the growth and development of this country,” Roger Mandle, QMA executive director since July 2008, said in a recent interview.

Their flagship is the Museum of Islamic Art, a $1.6 billion, I.M. Pei-designed, cubist masterpiece set on its own island across from the skyscrapers of Doha's West Bay. The museum's 700-object collection is worth hundreds of millions and includes an amulet of Mughal ruler Shah Jahan and a 9th century white earthenware bowl from Iraq.

In the 18 months since it opened the museum has had more than half a million visitors, or nearly a third of the country's total population. Half of them have been Qatari. “We've established a very high level of quality and expectations,” said Mr Mandle. “Out of that is a challenge, in that every building we build has to be that good or better.”

Up next is the Qatar National Museum, set to begin construction later this year. Designed by another Pritzker-winning architect, Jean Nouvel, the building reflects a strong sense of place: its shape mimics that of a desert rose, small, naturally occurring formations of gypsum found in arid deserts.

When the museum opens in 2013, interactive displays will detail Qatar's history, geology, and cultural life, from Bedouin times to seafaring and pearl diving, and from contemporary Qatar to the near future. At 40,000 sq metres, it will be larger than the Museum of Islamic Art.

QMA is looking to build a dozen new museums and expand its cultural education efforts. There has been talk of photography and contemporary art museums, but plans have yet to be finalised.

With the future museum designs Mr Mandle hopes to move away from international names and nurture young local talent. “They're not limiting their search to exclude well-known architects,” said Mr Mandle. “But surely one of our responsibilities is to promote artists, architects and designers from this region.”

Qatar has some company on that score. Abu Dhabi is spending billions to create its own cultural mecca on Saadiyat Island, with four museums and a performing arts center. Local versions of the Louvre and the Guggenheim designed by Jean Nouvel and Frank Gehry, respectively, are set to open in 2013.

Wooing similar crowds, the two cities often appear headed in the same direction. Phillipe de Montebello, the former director of New York's Museum of Modern Art who is now a special adviser to New York University Abu Dhabi, has been in talks with Mr Mandle, an old friend, about contributing to QMA in some capacity.

And while Mr Mandle has often described his mission as “building a Smithsonian from the sand up,” the Smithsonian Institute, based in Washington, DC, is a key adviser to Abu Dhabi's Bedouin Heritage Museum.

Yet rather than competition, QMA sees opportunity. It has hosted two conferences for Gulf arts and cultural leaders. The most recent, held last month, was attended by cultural representatives from all GCC countries but Oman. “We've taken the initiative to invite our colleagues to discuss how we can work together, not how we're competing but how we can cooperate,” said Mr Mandle.

The group hopes to create a joint cultural calendar so events complement rather than collide and develop joint training and education programs.

“Anywhere in the world, you have the best result if people collaborate rather than compete,” said Antonia Carver, who has been working in the UAE art world for nearly a decade and will take over Art Dubai next month.

“There's a huge difference between Doha and Abu Dhabi,” she said. Doha has focused on heritage and Islamic art and uses the emir's family collections, says Ms Carver, while Abu Dhabi's museums reflect greater international influence.

She envisions Western tourists visiting museums in both Doha and Abu Dhabi on a single trip. “If they start to replicate then it's maybe self-defeating,” said Ms Carver.

One advantage Abu Dhabi might have over Doha is the proximity of major arts shows like Art Dubai and the Sharjah Bienniale. Still, despite the presence of highly regarded international universities like NYU and Carnegie Mellon, the two cities have few art schools, curators, writers and studios.

“Building a complex and beautiful building is nothing compared to connecting to the local population and building a vibrant arts community,” said Ms Carver. “That's infinitely more challenging.”

--------
originally ran in the July 2, National, www.thenational.ae

Education City gives Qataris second chance

2010-06-12T04:31:00.000-04:00

Doha// Muneera Al Qahtani spent most of high school socializing and enjoying herself. She was a “screw-up,” she says, and her teachers told her she was unlikely to amount to much.

But she summoned the will to graduate, zipped through a preparatory program and now earns top marks in engineering at Texas A&M University-Qatar. When she has time, the 20-year-old visits Doha secondary schools, using her turn-around as inspiration.

“You may not be a great student in high school, but you can change and do well in university if you work for it,” she told the students of Al Bayan Independent School for Girls this week. “Basically if you plant a seed it will grow.”

Nearly a decade old, Education City recruitment efforts are starting to bear fruit – sparking greater local interest, drawing young women into engineering and shaping Qatari success stories.

Over-achievement may be in Ms Al Qahtani's blood. Her father, Saad Saeed Al-Qahtani, grew up in a Bedouin community outside Doha and worked as a shepherd for years. When learning the alphabet, he used charcoal for a pen and stones for paper.

At 25, he started attending night school at the sixth grade-level. He graduated at the top of his class, received a government scholarship and earned his law degree at age 38, in 1993. Today Mr Al Qahtani is chief prosecutor in the government Office of Public Prosecution and the father of 13 children.

One of Ms Al-Qahtani's older brothers is a judge, while two others have law degrees. Two sisters have engineering degrees and work for RasGas.

Yet Muneera appeared to be the black sheep. Throughout primary and secondary school she rarely opened a book. “I saw school as a place where I go and play and see my friends,” she said. “It was like a picnic all day long.”

The shift began toward the end of her junior year, when she chose science as her future major. Her teachers advised her against it because it might too difficult for her. “That is the moment that told me there is no one who can say what I can and cannot do,” she said.

Around that time came another push. “My father told me, 'Either you choose a pencil or a broom,' which is basically you go study or you become a maid,” she recalled. “He said if you want respect you should finish, and I wanted that respect.”

She graduated and went into Qatar Foundation's Academic Bridge Program, which prepares students to attend Education City universities. She asked questions in class, visited her professors during office hours and dedicated herself to learning English.

“I started rebuilding myself, letting go of my childish ways,” she said. She scored so well on her English as a Foreign Language exam that Texas A&M invited her to attend a special engineering course for top students.

Last month, she completed the second year of a four-year program in electrical and computer engineering, a major she chose because she likes math and physics and wants to build something that helps people communicate.

She has become so committed to her field of study that she watches Japanese anime to steep herself in the culture of the world leader in electronics.

“She's quite enthusiastic, very interested and everything is done on time,” said Dr Hussein Al Nuwiri. The head of the electrical and computer engineering program, he taught Ms Al-Qahtani's classes in digital system design and computer architecture. “She's like an ideal student.”

She's not alone. In the US, Canada and most western countries, about 18 percent of undergraduate engineering students are female. At Texas A&M-Qatar it's more than twice that, at 40 percent.

The result is an empowering environment for young women. Though she wears the niqab, Ms Al-Qahtani has the confidence to speak up for herself and lead group discussions. When she heard last November that an Education City outreach program planned to visit her old school, she asked to come along.

She spoke about her father, her struggles as a student and her future career. “I want them to know they can do whatever they want,” she said of the high school students. “And I added a little flavour about the money you make as an engineer – most people like to hear that stuff.”

At least one observer came away impressed. “When we're speaking they hear us, but not completely,” said Maha Al Thani, recruitment and outreach coordinator at Education City. “When Muneera is speaking everybody is quiet and listening and giving their full attention.”

Ms Al-Qahtani has since come along on several other school visits, including the one to Al Bayan on Thursday.

“I thought her presentation was really good,” said Loolwa, a Qatari and Al Bayan 11th grader. “I'm definitely interested in Education City, I think I'll go to Carnegie Mellon and study business.”

Mariam, an 11th grader from Egypt, earns top marks at Al Bayan and wants to study medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. “I would love to go there,” she said. “But I'm worried I won't get in because of the competition.”

Other girls asked about the co-educational system at Education City. They had never taken classes with boys and their parents were unsure it was a good idea. “Don't worry, the boys are not always flirting and throwing their numbers,” Ms Al-Qahtani said. “They are here to study, just like you.”

She plans to earn a master's degree in engineering, then return to work for Qatar Foundation, which is sponsoring her education. For Ms Al Qahtani, it's an organisation that understands that dress is not destiny and that everyone deserves a chance.

“Whatever you wear, it does not say who you are,” she said. “If you don't go after your future, you won't get any respect.”

-------
an edited version appeared in the 11 June 2010 National, www.thenational.ae

One organisation's efforts to bring orphans into the family

2010-06-04T04:51:00.001-04:00

DOHA // Western-style adoption is prohibited within Islam, which allows only a guardianship that confers neither family name nor the legal status of a natural-born child. But Khaled Kamal wanted the orphans in his care to have the same rights and privileges that other children enjoy.

He made inquiries. He travelled the region. At a conference last month in Beirut, he secured a verbal fatwa from a leading Sunni scholar, Salman al Auda.

“He said it is no problem to give the child the family name, in Sharia it’s OK,” Mr Kamal, the general manager of the Qatar Orphan Foundation, said during an interview this week in his office. “You can’t imagine how important it is to be named according to the family.”

Since its creation three years ago by the Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the Qatar Orphan Foundation, known as Dhreima after a violet flower that grows in harsh conditions, has steadily gathered steam.

Today its waiting list is growing, its average orphan stay is shrinking and its officials are working to broaden the concept of family and expand the fostering experience, traditionally seen as an important charitable act in the Muslim world.

“Yateem is a big thing in Islam,” said Mr Kamal, the Dhreima general manager, using the Arabic word for guardianship. “It helps you get to paradise.” The Prophet Mohammed said those who took care of orphaned children would be close to him in heaven, according to a well-known hadith.

But Sharia generally recognises only inheritance claims based on blood or marriage and does not allow full adoptions because they are considered relics of the pre-Islamic era of jiyaliyyah, or ignorance.

Thus Mr Kamal’s efforts to expand the concept of family. He said that the widely respected Doha-based scholar Youssef al Qaradawi had voiced a view similar to Sheikh al Auda’s. Dhreima is drafting documents for these scholars to sign into fatwa and hopes to institute the new policy by the end of the year.

If confirmed, this new stance would mark an uprecedented shift. “I do not see how such an opinion would be judged valid according to Islamic legal methodology as it would contradict the clear verses in the Qur’an concerning this very issue,” said Sheikh Musa Furber, a mufti who studied Islam for more than a dozen years in Damascus and Cairo and is now a researcher at the Tabah Foundation in Abu Dhabi. “Without seeing the actual text of these fatwa I cannot comment on their contents or evidence.”

Mr Kamal also hopes to help foster the passing down of family wealth via wasiya, or bequests, rather than meerat, or inheritance. But these proposals are in their early stages and still have to work their way through Islamic jurisprudence and various bureaucracies.

Meanwhile, Dhreima continues to assist Qatar’s most needy, focusing on four kinds of at-risk children: those with a mother but no father; those who have lost their father or both parents; the socially orphaned, which refers to financially incapable or broken homes; and finally babies whose parents are not known.

The first three, which represent the majority of children Dhreima works with, are supported with money, health care, rides to school and more. Only the last category can be fostered.

Dhreima’s facilities include three orphanages – one for newborns to seven years old, another for 7-18 year-old boys and a third for 7-18 year-old girls – and two guesthouses for those older than 18.

A key goal is integration. Dhreima’s in-house children attend normal government schools and regularly play with non-orphan children. If a local public school asks to bring their students for a visit, Mr Kamal refuses. “This is not a zoo where anybody can come to see them,” he said.

According to a Qatari law issued in 2007, police and other authorities are legally required to contact Dhreima whenever a newborn of unknown parentage is found or brought to them.

Origin is not an issue. “We don’t deal in colours, we don’t deal with income, language or religion,” said Mr Kamal. “We see orphans as human beings, and anyone within the borders of Qatar is accepted.”

Dhreima soon begins the search for a new home – such as that of Muna al Mutawa, who married in 1997 and learned over the ensuing years that she and her husband were unable to have children.

They heard about Dhreima in early 2008 and decided to apply to foster a child. Within a month they received a call that the orphanage had received a baby girl born two days prior – the same day Ms al Mutawa’s mother died.

She was one of five applicants for the newborn, but the others fell away in the rigorous screening process. The foster family must be Qatari nationals and include a mother and spouse (except in rare cases) between 25 and 45 years old. Dhreima visits the applicants’ homes and reviews family income and finances. Potential foster families also meet with a psychologist several times.

During Dhreima’s first year of operations, children stayed an average of four or five months before being placed, but now the average stay is a month or less. The last arrival was placed within 10 days. Now nearly a dozen families wait for the next orphan to arrive.

In May 2008, Ms al Mutawa took her baby girl, now named Reem, home for the first time. “Totally, completely, right away she was my baby,” she said, showing a photo of a smiling brown-eyed girl on her phone. “Now she is two years old, very naughty, very funny and very intelligent.”

Dhreima requires each foster couple to sign a contract committing to tell the child of its provenance. In the past, many families waited until high school or later to tell their children their family circumstance. “At that age, when they find out they are shocked and leave home,” said Mr Kamal, who advises foster parents to tell the child as soon as possible.

Ms al Mutawa plans to tell Reem soon. “It will happen in the coming months and years, Insh’allah,” she said. “But not until she gets a little older.”

Ms al Mutawa applauded Dhreima’s efforts to move towards full adoption. Her foster daughter is not a full Qatari citizen, like her and her husband, but rather a naturalised Qatari – a lesser standing that is reflected on passports and other official documents.

She hoped the passing on of the family name, if legally approved, would change that. “This would be great,” said Ms al Mutawa. “It was not possible when we adopted.”

Doha summit aims to adapt tools of global cooperation

2010-06-02T01:18:00.003-04:00

DOHA // The World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative could hardly be more ambitious. Its main objective is to adapt the tools of international co-operation – the G20, UN bodies, the World Bank, World Trade Organisation and the like – to the complex challenges of the 21st century to ensure the long-term security of humanity.

It also aims to create a more inclusive global system.

“Legitimacy comes from people,” Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a former Singapore ambassador to the UN, said during the opening session of this week’s Global Redesign Summit in Doha. The report the WEF prepared for the event is titled Everybody’s Business.

“We have to learn to listen to the voices of 6.8 billion people,” he added. “The real purpose of this meeting is: let’s figure out how we can get the whole world involved in this, and not just some parts of it.”

Backed by the governments of Qatar, Tanzania, Singapore and Switzerland, the WEF launched the redesign initiative more than a year ago, in the depths of the financial crisis. A key aim was to move away from the so-called Washington Consensus and Bretton Woods-style institutions, created and led by industrialised countries, in the hopes of avoiding future catastrophes.

“The world has gone through a heart attack,” Arif Naqvi, founder of the Dubai-based Abraaj Capital, the region’s largest private equity firm, said during the opening plenary. “We have to work very carefully through this moment to make sure everyone acts in concert to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

The GRI tasked more than 1,000 analysts, officials and policymakers to re-envision international institutions to better address global health, security, sustainability, development and the financial system. At a series of meetings over the past year, their ideas matured into proposals, which Doha participants sought to put into action.

“We have lots of ideas that now need spouses,” the WEF vice chairman, Mark Malloch-Brown said, advising government officials to choose a proposal and work to implement it.

Inclusion may be easier said than done. Despite the call for innovation and bold rethinking, many speakers at the event held fast to traditional institutions of co-operation.

Richard Samans, the WEF’s managing director, explained that the redesign initiative did not intend to replace the existing system for international co-operation, but rather augment it.

“We are not here to overthrow the system,” agreed He Yafei, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. “Global redesign of the system is not a revolution; it’s more an evolution.”

Few of the 58 proposals, which are to be finalised at Davos, Switzerland, in January, are revolutionary. They include strengthening the financial safety net, the creation of an international financial risk monitor, expanding the capacity of the International Labor Organisation and improving a UN-supported programme called Education for All.

“A lot of the proposals are what you might call ‘punting’,” passing the problem on, said Parag Khanna, the director of global governance at the New America Foundation, who previously worked for the WEF. He sat in on several meetings over the past year and attended several sessions during the Doha summit. “It’s not quite redesign yet.”

In addition, one sizeable demographic was mostly absent.

“For everything, whether it’s financial or climate change, we should look at the poor as part of the process, rather than beneficiaries,” said Harish Hande, the founder and managing director of Selco, a provider of sustainable energy solutions to rural India.

He was speaking on Davos Debates in Doha, a YouTube channel set up for the event. “Redesign needs to happen where the poor become part of the implementers, designers and thought processes,” Mr Hande said.

In the end, the GRI may be less redesign than makeover. In calling for change, one prominent observer complained of a hidebound system dominated by inertia.

“International deadlock is the norm; cynicism and mistrust are common currency,” said Queen Rania of Jordan, who is on the redesign council for education. “If just enough people are happy, there’s no need to change it.”

Mr Khanna acknowledged that the GRI is in part a branding exercise. But it could still effect change. “I think we might see in a couple years’ time that international organisations move towards sharing resources and collaborating more with NGOs and corporations,” he said. “And it will partially be attributable to WEF.”

------
originally ran in 1 June 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Diplomacy works, so to speak

2010-05-29T04:04:00.002-04:00

OHA // On a trip to Malaysia in 1989, Thabo Mbeki and his delegation from the African National Congress were forced to find new lodgings after the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, refused to share her hotel with “terrorists”.

Yet South Africa’s apartheid leadership had already opened a dialogue with the ANC – the political party of resistance, which decades prior had a militant wing – one that would ultimately bring an end to more than four decades of racial segregation.

Mr Mbeki went on to become president of South Africa. “In the end,” he said, during his keynote speech at the Fifth Annual Al Jazeera Forum on Monday, “the regime understood that even if it continued to resist change, ultimately it saw the negotiations as the only way with which it could bargain for some share of power.”

That theme ran throughout the forum here this week: when a conflict bogs down, talks are often the best route to peace and a share of the spoils for all. The hard part is deciding when, how and with whom to parlay.

“We need to move away from the notion of whether to engage to what kind of engagement,” said Robert Malley, Middle East and North Africa programme director for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict analyst. He urged the US to talk with supposedly unsavoury elements such as Hamas. “You can’t create peace by self-selecting those with whom you’ll engage.”

Discussion during the three-day event centered around some of the Muslim world’s most pressing problems, including Israel-Palestine and Afghanistan. A Monday session sought alternatives to the great tangle that is the peace process, but delivered mostly denunciations.

South African journalist and commentator Allister Sparks extended the parallels with his homeland, comparing Israel to the apartheid regime and the Palestinian territories to the camps where it kept South Africans from the black majority. “Like the bantustans, they are phoney homelands … used to deny them citizenship,” he said.

Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, attacked the other side. “It is staggering to see, despite the constraints around them, how badly the Palestinian leadership has done,” he said.

Daniel Levy, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, was an equal-opportunity offender. He denounced Hamas for attacking civilians, said Israel’s international backers could be seen as supporting an occupation and called out the Arab world.

“Progress has been achieved neither by a charm offensive, such as the Arab Peace Initiative, or an offensive offensive,” he said.

A few possible solutions were presented. Mr Levy envisioned progressives from both sides uniting to create “a coalition, not even cooperation, but all rowing, perhaps, in the direction of 1967 de-occupation”.

Arguing that Palestinians have proven they will never give up their land, Basheer Nafi, a historian and Middle East analyst, said the one-state solution “offers the only genuine resolution to this conflict”.

Many felt that first the fighting had to cease. Ibrahim el Moussaoui, the head of Hizbollah’s media relations, said Hizbollah would not engage the US until it stopped supporting Israeli aggression.

Similarly, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, a former Taliban foreign minister, saw the country’s upcoming peace jirga, concurrent with the launch of the US forces’ campaign in Kandahar, as problematic. “Just imagine I’m talking to you but at the same time your men are attacking my home,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the forum. “This does not work – it has a negative psychological impact.”

Yet precedents abound. Oliver McTernan, the director of the conflict resolution consultancy Forward Thinking, said British officials were in direct contact with the Irish Republic Army throughout most of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Mark Perry, a US foreign affairs analyst, argued that negotiations with Sunnis intensified during the peak of violence in Iraq. “It wasn’t the surge that defeated the insurgents in Iraq, it was talking to them,” he said.

Sparks pointed again to South Africa. “If you wait until terrorists lay down their arms to begin negotiations, you’ll never get started.”

The United States refuses to negotiate directly with the Taliban, Hamas and Hizbollah, in part because it perceives them as terrorists, though others might call them freedom fighters.

Yet the Obama administration has voiced support for Afghan government negotiations with the Taliban. In February, the US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said: “We are talking to people.” That did not include direct contact with Taliban leaders because they had yet to renounce al Qa’eda, he said.

“The agenda of the Taliban is only a national agenda, not an international agenda,” Mr Muttawakil said during a panel discussing the issue of talking with the Taliban. The distinction distances the Taliban from other caliphate-seeking, pan-Islamist jihadi affiliates of al Qa’eda.

Last week, a Hamas official said the group wanted to establish “open and stable ties” with the United States. “The US and others, they give a distorted image of the resistance,” said Osama Hamdan, a spokesman for Hamas.

Several analysts urged the United States to alter its image of the Taliban and begin talks. The current US plan in Afghanistan is focused on peeling off and “reintegrating” moderate low- and mid-level soldiers in the hopes of weakening the Taliban’s negotiating position.

“Losers cannot be choosers,” said Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, referring to the US.

“This cannot be part of the solution,” Mr Muttawakil agreed. “There are no moderate or hardline Taliban, there is only one Taliban, under Mullah Omar, and they must talk to them.”

This may explain why gains have been minimal.

“Reintegration is not going particularly well,” said Robert Grenier, a consultant and former CIA station chief in Islamabad. “Momentum is building for some sort of political reconciliation that involves the leaders of the insurgency.”

Just last week, Taliban representatives and Afghan government delegates met in the Maldives. Mr Muttawakil dismissed these talks. “There’s a lot of money out there, and some are just using this as a business.”

To negotiate sincerely with Mullah Omar, Mr Muttawakil said, the US and Afghan governments must halt military operations, release Taliban detainees in Guantanamo and Bagram, remove the blacklist of Taliban to be captured or killed and allow the Taliban an office, an address where they can be reached.

“The Taliban don’t trust all these people,” he said. “They don’t believe all the talk.”
The Taliban might be willing to accept the Afghan constitution, which incorporates elements of Sharia. Key negotiating points would involve the system of governance and a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

“It is time to end this war,” said the former Taliban foreign minister.

----
first ran in 28 May The National, www.thenational.ae

Gulf states getting jump on stem cell research

2010-05-20T08:59:00.002-04:00

DOHA // “Countries today are not measured by their wealth,” said Dr Fathy Saoud, the president of Qatar Foundation, opening a stem cell forum hosted by Weill Cornell Medical College-Qatar on Monday. “They are measured by what they produce, including research and ideas.”

Among medical researchers, stem cells are hot. Leading scientists are closing in on breakthroughs and lauding the cells’ potential to treat, even cure, some of the world’s most serious medical problems, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

“Stem cells have opened new and broad horizons,” Mr Saoud said, promoting the foundation’s nascent research programmes. “This is a noble purpose and we all have to seek to achieve it.”

Stem cells are found in all multicellular organisms and are marked by an ability to differentiate into various cell types. Unlike adult stem cells, stem cells taken from an embryo are completely unspecialised and can develop into any kind of tissue – to treat a variety of ailments or even replace a failing liver or heart, in theory.

But the harvesting of such cells destroys the embryo, which some see as a human life. This is why the then-US president George W Bush banned funding for embryonic stem cell research in 2001. Research continued in the UK, Japan, China and France.

The following year, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa declaring the practice consistent with Shia Islam, kick-starting Iranian research. In 2003, Saudi scholars sanctioned the use of embryos for therapeutic and research purposes, further opening the gates for Muslim stem cell research.

Turkey, Egypt and Malaysia have since launched stem cell research initiatives.

But ethical questions linger. Last July, scientists at the UK’s Newcastle University were able to produce sperm from embryonic stem cells. Several scholars, including Hassan Mohammed al Marzouqi, a professor of Sharia at UAE University, denounced the practice as prohibited by Islamic law.

The 2003 fatwa by Saudi Arabia’s Fiqh Council of the Muslim World League allowed for the use and growth of stem cells for research if obtained from a permissible source, which includes the placenta or umbilical cord, embryos or foetuses that have been miscarried or aborted for medical reasons and leftover embryos from in vitro fertilisation.

Cloning and the use of any intentionally aborted embryos are haram, according to Ali Qaradaghi, a Sharia professor at Qatar University. “The Sharia verdict for stem cells is undoubtedly that preserving human life and human generations is the main aim,” he said during the forum. “Anything that achieves this objective in a way that does no harm is considered acceptable.”

Concerns about embryos may soon be irrelevant. Researchers in Japan, the UK and the US, where President Barack Obama overturned the Bush ban last year, have had some success genetically reprogramming adult stem cells to act like embryonic stem cells.

Such advancements are likely to boost the Gulf’s nascent programmes. The three-year old stem cell therapy programme at King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh has published several papers, filed a handful of patent applications and established a collaborative project with Harvard University.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid, the UAE Minister of Finance and Industry, has set up a Dh20 million (US$5.4m) institution in his name that focuses on genetics and stem cell research and presents major regional and international awards every other year.

In Doha, the Qatar Foundation is the nexus. The government-backed non-profit made its interest in stem cell research known in 2006, with a US$2.5m donation to support stem cell research at Rice University’s James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy in Texas.

The Qatar Foundation plans a stem cell laboratory within the $3billion Sidra Medical Centre, as well as a biomedical research institute that is slated for completion in 2014 and will include a genetics and stem cell unit. In addition, the foundation has held a series of workshops and partnered with Virgin Health Bank, which is set to open a stem cell storage facility in Doha by next spring.

“One of the main goals of the programme is to be oriented toward the Qatari population,” said Dr Jeremi Tabrizi, who leads stem cell research at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Leading medical challenges in Qatar and across the Gulf include diabetes, leukaemia and serious blood disorders – all potentially treatable with stem cell therapy. Weill Cornell Medical College has the core capabilities in place and has begun working on cancer stem cells, but is awaiting government policy and legislative decisions before working with embryonic stem cells.

“Stem cell research is one of the highest priorities of the emir and Qatar Foundation,” added Mr Tabrizi, speaking just after the forum. “All of us are expecting the science to grow here.”

Some analysts argue that Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are mainly importing the talent and trademarks from abroad, not building indigenous capacity. But two doctors from Rice University’s James Baker Institute, which maintains its stem cell partnership with the Qatar Foundation, believe these programmes hold the potential to not just heal the sick, but also build diplomatic bridges.

“We conclude that the national governments of countries within the greater Middle East,” Jesse Flynn and Kristin Matthews write in the March 2010 Stem Cell Review, “have the unique opportunity to establish stem cell research policies which confer interoperability between nations to foster crucial international collaborations throughout the region.”

----
originally ran in the National, www.thenational.ae

Detailed Gulf demographics coming soon

2010-05-09T02:07:00.004-04:00

DOHA // A small army of enumerators took to the streets of Qatar and other Gulf countries a couple weeks ago, knocking on doors and asking each head of household a battery of questions about personal technology use, health, employment, residential status and more.

Armed with handheld computers, these foot soldiers in an unprecedented regionally synchronised census are helping compile a detailed and potentially invaluable portrait of Gulf demographics.

“For the longest time in the GCC, we have had this problem with planning; we always seem to be caught by surprise," said Hatem Samman, a Saudi national and director of the Ideation Centre, a Dubai-based think tank run by Booz and Co.

“Given that the GCC is heading towards economic union, they want to know the make-up of their populations,” he added. “It’s very important, very helpful to have data of all sorts, to know the characteristics of your people. You can respond to whatever factors that affect you.”

Of late, those factors have been considerable. The population of the GCC has increased nearly 45 per cent in the past decade and, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, is set to increase by an additional third within the next decade, tipping 53 million.

Qatar’s growth has been the most rapid. As of the end of March, the Qatar Statistics Authority estimated the country’s population at 1.68 million. If accurate, this would represent a 125 per cent increase from the most recent census – in 2004.

“Our country development moved very quickly,” said Hassan al Mohannadi, the director of the government’s permanent population committee. “We need frequently to readjust the levels of our development to cope with the surging needs.”

For the census, the QSA divided the country into more than 100 areas, each of which it then subdivided into a couple dozen blocks. In the past few months census takers gave every building in each of those blocks a number, then recorded the surnames and number of occupants in each unit and distributed pamphlets detailing the personal interviews to come.

Then they began knocking on doors and entering info into their specially programmed personal digital assistants. “If the enumerator tries to enter info that’s inconsistent, like a three-year-old female who is also a mother, it won’t allow him to do that,” said Mark Grice, a statistical expert from the United States who has been working with QSA for two years.

The survey includes questions about the number of wives and children, education and type of drinking water used.

“I have nothing to hide,” Rafik Boushlaka, a British national of Tunisian origin said after completing his census interview. He was standing outside the front door of his Doha home as his five-year-old daughter, Elaa, ducked under and out from his legs. “They will analyse the data and use it to make decisions. Any modern state needs information such as this.”

At the end of their shift, enumerators dump the data onto a desktop, which uploads it to a central server. As a result, preliminary data is available almost immediately. The entire census, from first phase to final results, is scheduled to take eight months.

Still there have been bumps in the road. One enumerator, Abdulaziz Abdulrahman, working in Doha’s Bin Mahmoud area, said residents are not home on the majority of his initial visits.

“I have to come back three, sometimes four, times,” he said, suggesting that the initial completion date of May 15 may not hold. “I don’t think even a month will be enough time to finish our work.”

Further, despite an official dictate mandating cooperation with the census, certain respondents have been less then forthcoming. “It’s been easy to get the information from foreigners,” said Naser Aideen Ahmed, a census inspector. “But the locals, sometimes they’re not telling us everything.”

Privacy of the family is a pillar of Qatari and Khaliji culture, so the withholding of some personal information may be understandable. Such hurdles are not unexpected.

“If anyone doing a census tells you there are no problems, they’re lying,” Mr Grice said. “But it’s nothing we can’t handle.”

Mr Grice said home absences had been built in to the census plan and that inquiries and complaints could be made online or to a census hotline.

Barring major delay, a wealth of detailed information on nearly the entire population of the Gulf should be available to the public by the end of the year. The joint 2010 census, with each Gulf country taking part and using the same questionnaire, is the realisation of a commitment made by Gulf leaders at a GCC summit in Muscat in 2001.

Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain began surveying last week and Kuwait’s census is set to kick-off this month. The UAE scaled back its national census, which will now be done mostly at the federal level. But Abu Dhabi recently began recording the occupants of each residence, and will roll out the survey phase of its census in October.

Qatar plans to release its census data that same month, offering more than 130 tables and charts on its website. Ideally, businesses will use the data to move towards potential clients, developers will find and respond to the greatest housing needs and governments will provide better infrastructure and services, perhaps even before they are needed.

“This census will provide all of our various decision-makers with detailed information on demographic, economic, technological and social indicators, by block and by zone across the whole country,” Nasser al Mahdi, census director within the Qatar Statistics Authority, said in an interview. “This new data, inshallah, will inform and help them implement their plans in education, in health or any sector.”

Some of those plans are likely to embrace tradition. In the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, nationals represent less than 30 per cent of the population. Depending on the data, results from the current census may exacerbate Gulf concerns about the eroding of national culture and identity.

This week, the Qatar government ordered all private schools to teach Qatari history, Islam and Arabic. The UAE has launched a major effort to increase the use of Arabic. Qatari officials have also nurtured the Musheireb project, a downtown development costing US$5.5 billion (Dh20bn) that incorporates traditional architectural and social elements, as well as the Museum of Islamic Art, which opened last year, and the coming National Museum of Qatar.

“There has been a lot of talk lately about the identity of nationals and the Arabic language and the effect on culture,” Mr Samman said. “What you have to do is stress certain aspects of your culture that you can promote, perhaps a linguistic policy, or local-oriented education and development.”

-----
originally appeared in the 7 May 2010, The National, www.thenational.ae

Where the streets may soon have names...

2010-05-01T03:18:00.001-04:00

Doha // The directions for a recent party at the residence of Edward Noriega ran to nine sentences and included references to a furniture store, three roundabouts, two fast food restaurants, a Montessori school and a speed bump.

“It’s a nightmare telling people how to get to my apartment,” said Mr Noriega, an investment manager from New York who moved to Doha in December. “I’d much rather say 75 West 20th street.”

He may get his wish.

In Qatar, as in much of the Gulf, most streets have no name, postal services require PO boxes and residents identify their location via landmarks and other topographical points of reference.

But a decision by the Qatari cabinet last week empowers the Central Municipal Council to name all streets, avenues and public parks. The move should ultimately simplify party hosting, pizza delivery and parcel distribution and pave the way for a western-style addressing system throughout the country.

“Its all part of the desire to become a world-class city,” said Rami el Samahy, an architecture and urban design professor at Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar.

Prof el Samahy, who teaches a seminar on contemporary Middle Eastern cities, pointed out that the population of Doha is estimated to have doubled since 2004. The challenge now, he said, is "to make sense of it all.”

While the streets of Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman remain mostly nameless, Qatar’s initiative dovetails with addressing systems being considered or implemented in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

The reasons for the trend are clear. Western expatriates see the lack of a street system – being made to draw a map on a delivery form, rather than write an address, is a popular reference – as a time-consuming throwback from the Middle Ages. Businesses suffer as a result of slow or failed parcel deliveries and daily trips to the post office to retrieve mail.

Taxi drivers suffer, too. “My dispatchers tell me backside, but it’s not backside – it’s beside,” said Daniel Ali Mukhtar, an Indonesian who has been driving a taxi in Doha for four years. “They give incorrect directions all the time.”

More seriously, firefighters and police often have to navigate unfamiliar areas to find their destination, inevitably putting lives at risk.

Yet addressing systems are time-consuming and expensive. The Abu Dhabi initiative is costing an estimated Dh200 million and completion is set for mid-2012. The Dubai programme, now on hold, is said to have been budgeted at Dh900m.

No estimate has been made for the Qatar initiative as it is still in its early stages. The ministry of municipal affairs and urban planning will soon create a street naming committee, comprised of representatives from the Supreme Education Council, the ministry of culture, arts, and heritage, the Public Works Authority and the private sector.

With help from the Central Municipal Council, that panel will build a list of thousands of possible street names appropriate for Qatari culture, history and geography. Finally, municipal constituencies will hold public hearings to review and approve the new names.

That’s just the first step. After naming more than 9,000 roadways, for instance, Abu Dhabi’s Department of Municipal Affairs, which is overseeing the address programme, must install uniform signage. It has hired the Australian Road Research Board Group to develop a street signs manual to determine where signs will be placed, their lettering, coloring and other specifics.

Qatar authorities have yet to decide how each building might be numbered and whether to adapt the postal system. “Are they going to deliver mail?” asked Prof el Samahy. “That could be a boon.”

In the end, the system may fail to take root. Prof el Samahy cited an address system in Caracas installed several years ago. Locals never learned the street names and the system fell out of use.

Juma Mubarak al Junaibi, the director general of Abu Dhabi Municipality, has acknowledged that the main challenge is getting the public to make use of the new system.

Indeed, navigation by landmark appears deeply ingrained into the Gulf psyche. More than two years into Saudi Arabia’s programme, which incorporates geographic co-ordinates and mail sorting systems that can read English and Arabic, businesses still use PO boxes and residents generally navigate by topographical references and large thoroughfares.

Most Abu Dhabi streets have had names or numbers for years, but locals generally prefer to use landmarks because the names are little-known. Doha, where some 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the streets have names, has a similar problem.

“If the customer gives us street names and numbers than it’s very, very difficult to find their place,” said Mohammad Shabab, the sales manager at the Garden Centre, a popular Doha flower shop. “But if he gives us landmarks and good directions than we are fine.”

Mr Mukhtar, the taxi driver, recalled incidents in which the use of a street name proved more difficult than topographical navigation. The transplanted New Yorker, meanwhile, felt confident.

“People are not used to addresses here, so there’s going to be a process of education,” said Mr Noriega. “In the end it’ll be a much safer, more efficient way to get from Point A to Point B.”

------
an edited version ran in the 30 April The National, www.thenational.ae

The fresh voice of youth at Aljazeera film fest

2010-04-25T04:52:00.002-04:00

DOHA // Many of the nearly 200 films screened during this week’s Aljazeera International Documentary Film Festival offered a glimpse into the unsettled lives of youth across a region experiencing great and sometimes violent change as it opens up to, and crashes against, the modern world.

“Young people today are more likely to be bicultural and travel a lot,” Hamid Naficy, a film professor at Northwestern University-Qatar, said after watching several shorts by young filmmakers at the free four-day event.

“They experience different languages and ideas, and are no longer seeing the world through the national perspective, but a personal one,” he added. “They are constructing their own identities, and we’re seeing a shift from roots to routes.”

Launched in 2005, the festival has grown steadily. This year’s films, from more than 90 countries including the United States, China, Russia, Yemen, Japan, Senegal, Argentina, Spain, Iran and the UAE, were chosen from nearly 1,000 submissions. They competed for awards in four categories: full-length, medium, short and New Horizons, for young and first-time directors.

The festival theme was Freedom, but a number of films highlighted the hardships of where they were made. Sons of the Sun, made by the Doha-born Egyptian filmmaker Ahmad Abdul Nasser, examined the marginalisation of albinos in Egypt.

Petty Dreams, by the Qatari film student Tariq el Makki, addressed the increase in suicide among expatriate workers in Qatar. The story focused on South Asian labourers but also presented two Arab expatriates painfully recalling how deceptive recruiters destroyed their lives.

“The underbelly of the Qatari economy is blue-collar workers,” said Prof Naficy, who has written three books on exile and diaspora issues. “One part of globalisation is this incredible displacement of people, resulting in a ‘labour diaspora’ that covers a gamut of motivations and social classes.”

One social group with a strong presence in this year’s festival was women. They directed more than 50 of the selections, including Breast Cancer, a New Horizons short made by two second-year journalism students at Northwestern University-Qatar.

The film, for which Thouria Mahmoud and Zainab Sultan received top marks in their visual media class, details how despite advances in modern science, the illness remains a taboo subject across the Gulf.

“It’s always blamed on the woman here,” Ms Mahmoud, 19, a Palestinian born and raised in Qatar, said after the film’s screening. As a result, no locals were willing to speak about their experience on film. The young filmmakers instead focused on the difficult experiences of expatriates.

“Qatari women are involved in activist programmes,” said Ms Sultan, 21, an Indian raised in Saudi Arabia. “But they may not want to come out in such a public forum.” In the end, the film seemed to suggest that only by bringing the illness into the light could it be defeated.

The Syrian filmmaker Su’dad Kaadan, meanwhile, sought to upend gender roles. Looking for Pink tells the story of four Syrian women who excel in professions generally reserved for men in the Arab world, including a musician, a kickboxing champion and a pilot.

“They are in different fields and living distinct personal lives,” Ms Su’dad told the Qatar Tribune. “But they face the same kind of pressure from their families and society.”

Other films held fast to deeply rooted traditions.

Abdel Rahman El Bazanji’s A Tale from Mesopotamia uses Iraq’s narrative tradition – the birthplace of writing; the oft-told tales of Baghdad; the popularity of poetry – to frame the effect of the US invasion.

In making The Falcon, meanwhile, the veteran Australian wildlife filmmaker Lyndal Davis zeroed in Qataris’ centuries-long love for falcons.

Riham Assi also examined nature, but from a different angle. In her short film Forgotten Flower, which she made as her graduation project at St Joseph University in Beirut, a tobacco plant expresses abandonment and neglect as it is cut, dried and packaged for shipping.

“In the Middle East and beyond there has been a real emergence of women filmmakers, and along with that there is a new experimentation with style,” Prof Naficy said. “This is essentially an autobiographical story told from the point of view of the plant, and it’s told with great sensitivity and environmental consciousness.”

With bold thinking, cheaper equipment and the ease of online distribution, such experimentation among Arab filmmakers is leading to a blossoming akin to that of Iranian cinema in the 1970s, Prof Naficy said.

One hurdle, however, is that most major film and television ventures in the Gulf, such as Alnoor Holdings’ film fund, worth US$200 million (Dh734m), have their eyes turned to the West.

“Going towards Hollywood is one way, but going local is another way that can be equally exciting,” he said. Prof Naficy teaches students from 15 countries. He envisions them returning to their homelands to work, yet keeping in regular contact with their former classmates.

“A sort of lateral network will develop that might replace the national,” he said. “Governments would do well to create more venues and events like this festival to increase the opportunities for their creative youth.”

That is not to say there are no opportunities today. While leaving the screening of their film on Tuesday, Ms Mahmoud and Ms Sultan were introduced to a producer from Al Jazeera News. Prof Naficy advised the two journalism students to apply for jobs.

“We will,” said Ms Mahmoud, smiling.

-----
originally appeared in 23 April 2010 The National (www.thenational.ae)

Lone Qatari professor offers a woman's perspective

2010-04-10T03:21:00.000-04:00

DOHA // After earning her doctorate in comparative literature from the University of London five years ago, Amal al Malki arrived at a career crossroads. She returned to Doha and came across an advertisement for professorial positions at Carnegie Mellon University-Qatar, which had just opened.

“I always planned to be a writer, a novelist, but I said I’m going to try for a year and see where I go from there,” she said. “It was only when I started teaching that I realised, ‘Oh, this is where I should be.’”

In late 2005, Prof al Malki accepted a full-time position at CMU-Q, becoming the first – and to this day, the only Qatari faculty member out of nearly 300 professors within the six American universities of Education City, the showpiece of Qatar’s higher educational system.

“It’s very prestigious and a privilege, but it’s a great responsibility,” she said. “I would like to model myself as a good example, someone who is educated, who is modern, who is tolerant and flexible.”

Born and raised in Doha, Prof al Malki earned her bachelor’s degree from Qatar University before heading to the UK for further studies. Upon accepting the job at CMU-Q, she received no local opposition, in part because Qatari women have a long history in research and education. That history is continued today by the Qatari first lady, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, the chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation and the driving force behind Education City.

Prof al Malki's forthcoming book, The Veil in Arab Media, extends that legacy. For more than three years, she and several colleagues studied the portrayal of Arab women in English and Arabic language media.

Their findings suggest that Arabic language media portray Arab women as modern and active, while English-language media appears biased, extending stereotypes about the oppression of women in this part of the world.

“‘Any woman who is veiled is most probably oppressed by her religion or her culture,’” said Prof al Malki, parroting the western perspective. Her own view is that the hijab, which she wears, is rooted in religious custom, while the abaya is a cultural or tribal tradition.

“Their reduction of women into one single heterogeneous entity is wrong,” she explained. “There are other factors that determine who we are, it’s not just religion. Just being labelled a ‘Muslim woman’ reduces us, in a way.”

Prof al Malki, who recently married, believes Muslim women should be seen as equals to men in business, politics and society. She teaches a course on Islamic feminism, a movement that grounds its ideas about female equality in the Quran, which has predominantly been interpreted by male scholars.

“They are men, interpreting verses about women,” she said. “So each one would interpret reflecting his own prejudices and his era’s prejudices against women.”

This era is not free from those prejudices. Of 134 countries ranked in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Report, which measures opportunity for women in health, politics, business and education, all 14 Arab countries included placed in the bottom 30.

Hissa Hilal, a Saudi mother and a poet, earned death threats for calling for greater freedoms for Arab women on the popular television show Million’s Poet. Many Arab women have a different perspective.

Last month, hundreds of Yemeni women marched in opposition to a proposed law banning child marriage. In Syria, an all-female Islamist group, Qubaysiyat, promotes piety and conservative Islam in its popular and well-funded schools, mosques and nurseries.

Prof al Malki sees progress in the Gulf – where Saudi Arabia is building a top-notch university for women and Kuwait recently elected its first female parliamentarian – but acknowledges that challenges remain. Even in Qatar, with Sheikha Mozah as a role model, young women have difficulty finding their way.

“Our female students are going through an identity crisis because they see western education in a very conservative, traditional setting and they don’t know how to negotiate between both,” Prof al Malki said. “There’s no need to be one or the other – there’s nothing wrong with being hybrid, being a fusion of different cultures.”

Prof al Malki hopes to draw more students, male and female, towards careers in higher education, and has spoken with the Qatar Foundation about creating a process to funnel more Qataris into teaching at Education City. But each American university there – Texas A&M, Georgetown, Carnegie-Mellon, Weill Cornell, Northwestern and Virginia Commonwealth – is responsible for hiring its own faculty, independent of the Qatar Foundation.

Robert Baxter, communications adviser for the Qatar Foundation, said: “We have chosen our university partners because they apply such high standards in all their activities. The young people currently passing through our universities are gaining an education upon which they can build an academic career, should they choose to do so.”

Prof al Malki is optimistic about Muslim youth, but she worries that too few young people in the Gulf appreciate their own culture and language. She hopes that, like her, they might learn from the West, take what they need and return home.

“It’s really nice to be modern and educated but you have to still have some grounding and know where you came from,” she said. “It would be really sad if we have a generation that has no history.”

Visa row over, Muslim scholar to visit US

2010-04-05T08:33:00.004-04:00

Just as Tariq Ramadan was preparing to take up a professorial post at the University of Notre Dame in August 2004, the United States government revoked his visa, denying him entry on ideological grounds.

The US State Department lifted the ban in January, and the Swiss scholar is set to arrive on American soil later this week for a series of speaking engagements – his first visit since losing his visa.

“It was a mistake by the Bush administration, to prevent intellectuals from being critical,” Ramadan said during a recent interview in Doha. “The main thing is for me to go there and build bridges.”

It can sometimes be difficult to tell if Ramadan – rigorous scholar, champion of Islam and outspoken advocate for the rights and assertiveness of Muslims in the West – is building bridges or burning them.

Born and raised in Switzerland, the 47-year-old is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He is often named among the world’s most influential public intellectuals yet regularly excoriated in both Muslim and Western media for a seeming lack of commitment to their respective values: he regularly denounces global capitalism, for instance, and says women should decide for themselves whether to wear the veil.

Last week he lectured in Doha at the request of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, where he will teach a course on contemporary Islam later this year. Before delivering his speech he considered the tensions within Gulf societies.

“You have some people that are very reactive to anything that has to do with the West, saying ‘this is the end of Islam,’” he said. “And you have some others saying, ‘No, we have to follow in the footsteps of the West because this is the way to be developed and modern,’ and in between you have people trying to find their way.”

In his next book, to be titled The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy for Pluralism, Ramadan writes about the shared values between Islam and the West.

“My understanding of Islam makes it clear that there is no contradiction in the Islamic values and the Western values,” he said. “To deal with modernity doesn’t mean that you lose your Islamic background.”

Yet since Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in September 2001, signs of a clash have been near-constant. After a unanimous parliamentary vote last week, Belgium inched closer to becoming the first nation in the world to ban the full Islamic veil in public. Ramadan's home country, Switzerland, recently voted to prohibit the construction of minarets.

And in the wake of Farouk Abdulmattalab's attempt to blow up an Amsterdam to Detroit flight on Christmas Day, the United States has increased background checks on visa applicants from Muslim majority countries.

But in US President Barack Obama, Ramadan sees a leader with a considerable grasp of the situation. Though impressed by Obama's speech to the Muslim World in Cairo last June, he thought the time for words had passed.

He pointed to Iraq, where despite elections terrorist attacks, such as Saturday's massacre of two dozen members of a single family in Baghdad, are still common and society remains fragmented along sectarian lines. He cited the lack of progress with Israel, which has continued to announce settlements in East Jerusalem despite the Obama Administration's repeated calls for a freeze.

“Netanyahu is sending a very strong message: 'we don’t care,'” said Ramadan.

Despite what he sees as Palestinians' continued suffering and the marginalization of many Muslim communities in the West, Ramadan believes Muslims must look forward, not back. “We need to stop nurturing the victim mentality,” he said.

This is among the key points of Ramadan's 2009 book, What I Believe, that Muslims living in the West need to engage positively and work to become full partners in Western democracy.

“As citizens it is our Islamic duty to abide by the law of the country as long it does not contradict with our religious beliefs,” he said during the Doha lecture. “We must criticise the government while remaining loyal to the law – this is critical loyalty.”

Dr Basma Abdelgafar, a professor of public policy at the Faculty of Islamic Studies who has read several of Ramadan’s books, attended the lecture and came away impressed.

“It’s a very useful type of contribution to our understanding of Muslims in the West,” said Abdelgafar, a Canadian of Egyptian heritage who was looking forward to having Ramadan as a colleague. “It has nothing to do with a person’s creed or belief, it’s that they are representing something that’s right.”

Ramadan's critics, however, see him as a dangerous radical. “I don't see anyone today who is as effective as Tariq Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France,” French journalist Caroline Fourest, the author of an anti-Ramadan book, said last year. She accuses him of double-speak – saying one thing to Muslims and another to Western audiences.

Paul Berman, a journalism professor at New York University, goes further. “The problem lies in the terrible fact,” he wrote in a lengthy 2007 article, “that Ramadan's personal milieu -- his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition -- is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical justification for religious suicide.”

That may be going too far. Ramadan has distanced himself from Al-Banna's political opinions and denounced radical violence. His website prominently displays a large banner ad supporting non-violent resistance in Palestine.

Still, he does have some views unlikely to sit well with some Westerners.

“The neo-liberal economy, the way it’s now impacting lives and killing people every day because of the injustices of the economy, this is a'anam al harb (the world of war),” Ramadan said during the interview in Doha. “This economic order is killing people, and this is why we need ethics in our economy, and this recent global crisis is telling us exactly this.”

Taking an anti-capitalist, even socialist, stance is neither illegal nor in opposition to the West. But his position on certain huddud punishments may be more problematic.

Ramadan was asked if he saw any contradiction between his stated commitment to Western values and his calling, on French TV in 2003, for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers in order to debate the merits of the punishment.

“As long as we don’t have answers to these questions we have to open a debate,” he said last week in Doha. “It’s not a contradiction, because Amnesty International, a Western organization, is calling for the same thing on the death penalty. So why is it not a contradiction for them and it is for me?”

In truth, the New York-based rights advocate takes a rather less equivocal stance on legal executions. “Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases and under all circumstances,” according to their website. “The organization works for an end to executions and the abolition of the death penalty everywhere.”

-----

an edited version appeared in 5 April 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Arabic death throes in the Gulf?

2010-03-26T02:41:00.002-04:00

DOHA // Abbas al Tonsi sees something wrong in a future where citizens of Gulf countries wear dishdashas and abayas but are unable to speak Arabic.

“How can you say ‘I am an Arab’ if you don’t know the language?” said the professor of Arabic at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.

For Mr al Tonsi, who has written several Arabic textbooks and has been teaching the language for almost 40 years, the crisis is personal. “I am afraid that after 20 years,” he said, “Arabic will just be a language of religious ritual.”

The native tongue for more than 300 million people and used regularly by 1.6 billion Muslims, Arabic is in no danger of extinction. But because of the dominance of English, its usage in everyday life is under threat in several of the Gulf’s smaller states.

A senior official at Qatar’s ministry of culture, arts and heritage recently acknowledged Arabic’s decline and underscored the seriousness of the problem. “Language is the key issue for the identity of a society,” Marzook Basher Binmarzook said last month.

Mr al Tonsi’s forthcoming study of Arabic instruction reveals how Qatari schools are helping to erode that identity. Standards are vague and not communicated well to the teachers, he said.

“It’s easy to say, ‘Meet this level of efficiency’. But how do you guide the teachers to get the students there?” said Mr al Tonsi. “What exactly are the main ideas? In these standards, there are no indicators of intent, no uniform lesson plans or content.”

Secondly, he said, most of the Arabic teachers were inadequately trained and relied on outdated methods.

“The teachers mainly teach grammar, and it’s mainly teacher-centred,” Mr al Tonsi said. “They lecture rather than engage the students.”

Finally, schools use a wide variety of textbooks, which complicates proficiency testing. They also lean too heavily on grammar, according to Mr al Tonsi, and use simplistic drills that fail to develop critical thinking. Further, most books are overly proud and authoritarian, he said.

“‘We are the best, we are the bravest’ – you feel this is nonsense if you’re a young person,” said Mr al Tonsi, who co-authored Al Khitaab, an Arabic textbook used in about 700 universities worldwide.

Similar problems exist in the UAE. Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority recently found that Arabic in private schools was poorly taught by underqualified teachers using inadequate resources.

In addition, fewer Gulf nationals are opting for teaching careers because of low pay and a lack of cultural respect. And a major reform programme in Qatar has instituted a more westernised curriculum.

“Westernising the curriculum, per se, is not necessarily bad,” said Hatem Samman, the director of the Ideation Centre, a think tank based in Dubai, where Arabic has also lost ground in most primary schools. “But if you bring in English in mathematics, geography and science, that definitely has an effect on Arabic, on the language and the culture as well.”

Gulf culture has in recent decades shifted towards the West. Arabs represent a minority population in Qatar, as in the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain. English dominates business, and is more common in many public places, such as malls.

Many schools now favour English as the primary medium of instruction. And Education City in Doha, American University in Dubai and Sharjah and New York University in Abu Dhabi point to a higher educational system that is embracing English.

Many students and their parents see it as the best route to success.

“Many Arab families now want their children to learn English before they learn Arabic,” said Jinanne Tabra, the founder of Araboh, a producer of contemporary Arabic learning materials. “There is this ridiculous impression that English is somehow superior to Arabic.”

But instead of becoming bilingual, most students in Qatar lack fluency in any language. In the past four years, only five to seven per cent of primary and junior high school students in Qatar achieved acceptable standards in national tests for Arabic and English.

“Unless you have a very solid system of your first language you cannot progress in a second language,” Mr al Tonsi said. “Learning Arabic is important for learning English well – it’s very clear.”

As a result, the cultural winds may be shifting again. Last month the UAE announced a new national plan to help Arabic “re-emerge as a dynamic and vibrant language”. Qatar has organised seminars and festivals to celebrate Arabic language and culture.

Mr al Tonsi has more concrete recommendations. He would like to see all courses from preschool to middle school taught in Arabic and English. He cited the example of Lebanon, where most students were fluent in three languages by the time they reached their adolescence.

He urged schools to improve teacher training and create extra curricular activities in which students could converse in Arabic – book clubs, speech groups, drama clubs and poetry readings. He also thinks schools should use audio and video as the main texts, and teach an Arabic that is challenging, enjoyable, respectful of young minds and develops critical thinking.

Maybe learning Arabic could even be fun. “You will never learn a language unless you are willing to learn it,” he said. “No one learns a language by force.”

Muslim world lags in aid and development

2010-03-26T02:11:00.001-04:00

Doha // Muhammad Yunus may have kick-started modern microfinance, won the Nobel Peace Prize and inspired the current vogue for social entrepreneurialism. But across the Middle East and North Africa, his Muslim brethren seem to have dropped the baton.

Of the thousands of social businesses around the world, Arabs founded less than 75, according to a study by the Middle East Youth Initiative. Of those, five were launched in the wealthy nations of the GCC: three in Kuwait and one each in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; none in Qatar and the UAE.

“Social entrepreneurship is a nascent field here,” said Ehaab Abdou, an adviser to MEYI, a partnership of the Brookings Institute and the Dubai School of Government. “This is a big gap that we need to address.”

One after another, officials, academics and industry experts speaking at the third annual World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists (WCMP) here underscored how the Muslim world – which represents nearly a quarter of humanity – has been failing to pull its weight in responding to poverty, hunger, humanitarian emergencies and the radicalisation of youth.

In bringing philanthropists and aid organisations up to speed, they may need to start with the basics.

“Very few people in the field in Saudi Arabia even know what development is,” said Saudi Princess Banderi Abdul Rahman Al Faisal, the director general of the King Khalid Foundation (KKF), which works with Saudi non-profit organisations to train their staff, design projects and improve effectiveness and monitoring.

Ms Faisal likely hit on the key problem: inadequate education.

“The way to jannat [Arabic for ‘paradise’] is not just building mosques,” said Atta-ur-Rahman, a former education minister of Pakistan who now heads the science and technology body of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). “You have to build schools, you have to build research and innovation centres and knowledge parks.”

Ten years ago, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr, crown prince and deputy ruler of Ras al Khaimah, helped launch the Arab Science & Technology Foundation. Today the organisation has 15,000 member scientists and regularly links international businesses with entrepreneurial Arab scientists.

“We try to match those who have some knowledge with those who have some money to develop something really good,” said Abdallah al Najjar, the foundation’s president and CEO. Out of 90 start-up concepts the organisation has presented to investors, 22 have received financing.

Yet more needs to be done, particularly within Muslim countries. Nearly one billion people in OIC-member states are below the age of 25, according to Mr Rahman. Due to a lack of training and opportunity, many are unable to access the advantages of a globalised economy.

A study by the International Council on Security and Development found that more than 85 per cent of young men in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia say there are not enough jobs and that greater numbers are joining militant groups.
Similar problems exist from Algeria to Indonesia. ISOC works to minimise such discontentment by providing homes, jobs, marriage and education.

“We could turn this group of young men, this demographic time bomb, into married men with jobs, a house, a commitment to their community, a sense of identity, a sense of enfranchisement,” said Norine McDonald, ISOC director. “All these things we work on should be given the same political and financial support as we give to military and police actions.”

Such support is undermined by a lack of information and suspicion about aid efforts. In a recent YouGov survey, nearly 40 per cent of respondents across the Middle East said they had not donated to Haitian earthquake relief because they did not know where or to whom to contribute.

Further, 35 per cent said they did not trust local non-profits and 36 per cent believed it was easier to donate to international organisations.

KKF has partnered with the Columbia Business School, Acumen Fund and the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. Yet most Saudi donors still view non-profits as ineffective or unaccountable and prefer to give directly to the beneficiary.
“We have to build non-profit capacity because the donors must be able to trust their abilities,” said Ms Faisal. “We’re actually looking to shift the mindset, shift the culture, and that’s very difficult.”

Another hurdle is a lack of commitment from those in a position to help.

The Islamic Development Bank is one of the world’s largest and most innovative international aid institutions and many of the more developed Muslim nations have significant aid agencies. As a percentage of GDP, in fact, wealthy Gulf states are among the world’s leading providers of aid.

And while philanthropists gathered in Doha, Arab leaders met in Cairo hoping to net US$2 billion (Dh7.3bn) for a new Darfur reconstruction fund.

Yet only a small percentage of the more than $100 billion in zakat payments collected annually by OIC member states goes to help the needy, said Mat Hassan Essa, head of the International Zakat Organisation. He proposed a cooperative effort to collect and disburse these funds to projects for the poor.

Islamic bankers, too, generally ignore the base of the pyramid. Globally, Islamic finance is set to reach $10 trillion this year, yet out of 77 million microcredit loans worldwide, some 380,000, or about 0.4 per cent, are Sharia-compliant.

“Right now Islamic financing is geared towards serving the haves of the world,” said Ali Ibrahim, a law professor at Georgetown University in Bahrain.

Many of those haves might be unaware that one-sixth of humanity remains hungry and that food production in Africa is set to drop one-fifth by 2050. Tarik Cheema, CEO of the WCMP, is not among them.

At the conference’s opening session he announced the Hasana Fund, a microfinance initiative that will provide interest-free loans to small-scale farmers across more than 20 poorer nations, including Bangladesh, Ghana, Ethiopia.

“As human beings and Muslims,” said Mr Cheema, “it is our duty not just to give food but also to help the poor produce their food so that they are not dependent.”

Five years after terror, Doha Players play on

2010-03-19T01:02:00.004-04:00

DOHA // The players were nearing the climax of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night when an unexpected guest interrupted the show.

“I’d been on stage for 10 minutes when I heard this crashing noise,” said Sherwynne O’Grady, an Australian schoolteacher who played a mother in the production.

An SUV smashed into the theatre lobby. Then it exploded.

“There was a tremendous boom,” Ms O’Grady recalled. “The concussion was amazing, everybody was deaf for a few minutes and parts of the ceiling started falling down.”

Five years ago today, an Egyptian suicide bomber struck the Doha Players Theatre. A dozen people were injured and the show’s director, Jon Adams, who had hurried towards the auditorium doors to investigate the initial crash, was killed.

The attack – Qatar’s first and, as yet, only, terrorist bombing – pierced the nation’s veneer of security.

“My first reaction was to get out of the country,” said Elaine Potter, the Doha Players’ secretary at the time, now theatre administrator and producer. She attended the show with her nine-year-old daughter, but they left at the interval.

Ms Potter was not alone in her fear. In the days after the bombing embassies and international schools erected concrete barriers. Luxury hotels installed metal detectors to scan all guests and visitors.

Worried about repeat attacks, a handful of Doha Players’ members left Qatar, moving to Dubai or back home to Australia or the UK.

Most returned within a year, according to Ms Potter, and resumed their former lives. Yet the Doha Players remains adrift.

Founded by a group of mostly British expatriates in 1954, the troupe performed irregularly at a variety of locations over the next quarter century, and its following grew. In 1979, the Emir, reportedly impressed with the members’ commitment, offered them a permanent home at a 340-seat theatre on Al Wabra street.

By the turn of the millennium the Doha Players had hit its stride, selling out productions of Shakespeare and fairy tale musicals, organising readings and community events and hosting well-known performers such as the Scottish actor and comedian Billy Connolly.

The bombing doused that momentum, took away one of the theatre’s most prominent members and destroyed its home. In the next day’s edition, The Gulf Times, Qatar’s most popular English-language daily, declared “the end of the Doha Players”.

The theatre board convened an emergency meeting. “The decision to rebuild and continue was made very quickly and very unanimously,” said Chris Evans, a former board member who attended the meeting. “We were quite determined to establish the fact that we were not dead.”

Donations poured in from prominent local backers and ex-members overseas. Qataris and expatriates organised a peace rally on a vacant area next to the theatre. It was attended by hundreds of students and religious leaders, including Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi.

Another prominent backer emerged. Before his death, Jon Adams taught for years at the Qatar Academy, a primary and secondary school operated by the Qatar Foundation, which is run by Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned. “After the bombing, Sheikha Mozah said anything you need, we will help you,” said Ms Potter.

Together with the Qatar Foundation, the Doha Players organised a fundraiser, with the proceeds helping the theatre get back on its feet. In December 2005 the troupe returned to the stage, with production of Cinderella for a short run at the National Theatre.

The show was a success, but the Doha Players remained homeless. In recent years they have scraped by and performed wherever they could – school auditoriums, the lawn of the Sheraton Hotel, even in gardens and living rooms.

“That’s going back to the way they performed over 30 years ago,” Ms Potter said. “Before they had the theatre, they performed in an old house.”

Since the September 2001 attacks on the US, Gulf nations have been mostly terror-free, outside Saudi Arabia. And with two American military bases, Qatar appeared secure.

It may still be. Qatar has not suffered any more attacks in the ensuing years, and Qatari authorities believe the Doha Players’ bomber, an engineer employed at Qatar Petroleum, acted alone. They have been unable to link him to al Qa’eda or another terrorist group.

Yet the attack occurred on the second anniversary of the start of the Iraq War and a week after an al Qa’eda leader in Saudi Arabia called for attacks against western targets in the Gulf. “My sense is that this was an independent operation by someone who was inspired by al Qa’eda ideology,” said Thomas Hegghammer, a research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment whose book, Jihad in Saudi Arabia, will be released next month.

The Doha Players recently moved into a temporary home on land owned by the Qatar Foundation. The villa will provide offices and storage space but the troupe must look elsewhere to house productions such as Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, scheduled for May.

On a recent afternoon, several dozen actors auditioning for next production seemed unconcerned about any potential terrorist attacks.

“The show must go on,” said Ms Potter. “Nothing ever is going to stop the Doha Players … No matter what happens, there’s still going to be enthusiastic actors who will do anything to find some place to perform.”

-------
originally appeared in the 19 March 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae

Story of the artist as a...Qatari

2010-03-12T10:12:00.004-05:00

DOHA // Indian-born artist MF Husain has been seeking sanctuary for a long time. “Since my wife passed in 1996 I had no home,” Husain said during an interview at his West Bay villa in Doha.

Barefoot and wearing a loosefitting Arab kandoura, he tapped and twirled an oversized black paintbrush as a servant poured tea. “At this stage of my life, my mission is to work,” he said. “And I like to work in maximum peace and comfort.”

Realising these are two things he might never find in his homeland, Husain, 94, relinquished his Indian passport this week and accepted Qatari citizenship. With that, India lost a national treasure and Qatar gained a living legend.

“The arrival of a world-renowned artist like him, it will be a blessing for Qatar,” said SAM Bashir, an Indian businessman who has lived in Qatar for 20 years and is the former president of the Kerala Muslim Cultural Centre in Doha.

Husain’s paintings hang in museums from New York to Shanghai and controversy has mostly brightened his star. Today his works sell for up to US$2 million (Dh7.3m) at auction – as pricey as the work of any living non-western artist.

“But it is a national disgrace for India,” added Mr Bashir. “I don’t know why anyone from the Indian government didn’t make any attempt to solve the problem and bring him back to India. It’s a total failure of our democracy and secularism.”

Born in Pandharpur, near Bombay, in the fall of 1915, Maqbool Fida Husain had a rather progressive upbringing. “Nobody was religious, we were nationalist,” he said. “We were very secular right from the beginning.”

He began painting when he was six years old, and later attended art school. In 1947, the year India gained independence, Husain cofounded a progressive artists’ alliance.

He had a well-received solo show in Munich a few years later, followed by exhibitions in the United States and Europe. He moved into filmmaking, and his first film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, won the Golden Bear at the 1967 Berlin Film Festival.

The Indian government honoured him with top civilian awards in 1955, 1973 and 1991.

The trouble began just months before Husain’s wife died in 1996, when an Indian magazine published images of naked Hindu deities he had painted decades prior. With religious sensitivities running high in the wake of several communal clashes, Hindu nationalist groups responded angrily, filing lawsuits, burning effigies and threatening his life.

Husain left, bouncing between Europe and the Middle East for years. He spent a lot of time in Dubai. He visited Doha and struck up a friendship with the royal family, who bought dozens of his paintings for their new Museum of Islamic Art.

New works continued to spark controversy. In 2006 he painted India as a naked woman (Mother India). After the November 2008 terrorist assault on Mumbai, he depicted that woman being raped (The Rape of India), whipping right-wing Hindu groups into an anti-Husain lather. Returning home seemed out of the question.

Around this time, Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned learnt he was working on a series about Arab civilisation and offered to serve as his patron, promising housing, facilities and creature comforts.

“I wanted a sponsor, so I accepted,” said Husain.

More than 1,200 court cases have been filed against him in India, mainly for impugning religious and nationalist beliefs. Hindu extremists threaten to chop off his hands or gouge out his eyes if he returns.

Husain blames the government’s lack of response to the venom of Hindu nationalist groups such as the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena, which are linked to India’s leading opposition political party, the BJP.

“The government was weak, and it’s still weak,” he said. “The whole thing is political, it has nothing to do with art or religion – they only want to get some votes.”

The sacred and the profane have mingled in Hindu iconography for centuries. Examples include the erotic carvings at Khajuraho and certain engravings within the Ajanta and Ellora cave complexes not far from Husain’s birthplace.

Though he has not set foot in India for five years, the decision to renounce his Indian citizenship was not an easy one. “I still love my country,” said Husain, who is working on a series of paintings on Indian civilisation.

Like Sheikha Mozah, many Doha residents look forward to his future contributions to the Gulf.

“This is the first time a big Indian celebrity is taking a passport from the GCC, from an Arab country, so I think this is very good,” said PN Baburajan, an Indian property agent who has been living in Qatar for 25 years. He also works as a correspondent for a Malayalam TV news channel. “Now he loves Qatar and he’s going to do some work for Arab culture and civilisation.”

Earlier this week, several dozen large, completed works were scattered about Husain’s villa, clogging the hallways and leaning against the walls and furniture. Most had never been publicly exhibited. They included a sombre work called Palestine Blue and a large, disjointed painting entitled Yemen.

In addition to his thousands of paintings, Husain has six children, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Most of his family remains in India, where some observers see the artist’s decision as a defeat for free speech.

“A large body of people stood up and spoke for you in the confidence that you are with them in this struggle,” analyst Shazi Zaman wrote in open letter to Husain in the Calcutta Telegraph this week. “We thought that a person as privileged, as loved, liked and respected as you would certainly fight. But you took a flight out to Qatar.”

Sipping tea in his new home, Husain had a different perspective. “I am not a leader, I am a painter,” he said. “My job is to paint.”

-----
first appeared in 12 March The National, www.thenational.ae

Al Bashir and Darfur rebels sign peace deal

2010-03-01T05:59:00.002-05:00

DOHA // The Sudanese president, Omar al Bashir, and the leader of the main Darfur rebel group signed a ceasefire agreement in Doha last week, paving the way for talks intended to bring peace to Sudan’s war-ravaged western region weeks before the nation’s first national elections in decades.

“We are taking a very important step towards ending conflict and war in Darfur,” Mr al Bashir said before the signing.

The 12-point accord represents a ceasefire between the government and the largest rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (Jem). It also marks the start of bilateral negotiations on a final deal, which is to be signed by March 15, and a list of provisions to be included in those negotiations.

They include the integration of Jem troops into the armed forces and the release of Jem prisoners of war. Further, the pact immediately transforms Jem from rebel group to political party, stipulating “participation of the Jem at all levels of powers”.

Since ethnic rebels in Darfur took up arms against the mostly Arab Sudanese government in 2003, some 300,000 have been killed and 3 million displaced, according to the UN. Violence has waned but never halted. Without the backing of regional players, key rebel groups or the international community, several previous peace deals failed to hold.

But the presence of Mr al Bashir and the Chadian president, Idriss Deby, who also attended the signing, highlighted a considerable improvement in relations. The leaders of Chad and Sudan have in the past exchanged bitter accusations about supporting rebels operating on each other’s territory.

The deal is the most far-reaching yet. Greater international scrutiny, the support of Chad and Sudan’s first national elections in 24 years, scheduled for April, should further bolster the agreement.

Still, the Sudanese government appreciates the need for a more broadly embraced settlement.

“We believe that Darfur can’t be solved bilaterally,” Amin Hassan Omar, the government negotiator, said on Monday. He called the Jem truce an “important breakthrough”, adding, “we hope we can negotiate with the other groups to reach a final and comprehensive agreement.”

A dozen smaller rebel factions have fused into two main groups to narrow their demands. After meeting with the lead negotiator for the UN-African Union team in Doha, they hinted yesterday at the possibility of joining the talks.

Another provision in the pact is the return of all displaced people and government compensation for all victims of the conflict. The world’s first leader charged with war crimes by the Hague-based International Criminal Court while still in office, Mr al Bashir may be seeking to burnish his image at home and abroad.

The Qatari emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, who also attended the signing, said he planned to establish a $1 billion (Dh3.67bn) fund for reconstruction in Darfur.

The agreement may herald a peacemaking coup for his government. The tiny but wealthy Gulf state has in recent years carved out a reputation for helping to settle international disputes.

The US state department has praised the deal as an important first step towards a peaceful Darfur. Yet shortly after preliminary commitments were made on Saturday, Jem field commanders in Darfur reported skirmishes with government troops.

Arab world facing brain drain

2010-03-01T05:55:00.002-05:00

DOHA // As millions of young people across the Arab world reach the age of employment, many Arab economies are likely to lose a good number of their most prized human resources.

“The young folks that are most educated, most connected and most employed are the ones who want to emigrate more,” said Ahmed Younis, a senior analyst at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.

Nearly a third of young employed Arabs surveyed would like to leave their country permanently, while only 17 per cent of the unemployed felt the same way, according to the Silatech Index, released here on Tuesday.

Just over a quarter of those who have some college education, meanwhile, are interested in moving abroad, versus 16 per cent of those who never finished high school. These are also the people most likely to start a business.

“Brain drain is the kind of phraseology that’s used,” said Mr Younis, who is also the director of strategic partnerships for Silatech.

“But we’re seeing an SME [small and medium enterprises] drain, an entrepreneurship drain, and there will be less innovation, less enterprise development and less ability for these economies to create an atmosphere that convinces ambitious young people to stay in the future.”

The Silatech Index is the first survey to comprehensively gauge young Arabs’ views on opportunity and the job market. Silatech, founded in 2009 by Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, seeks to foster job creation and entrepreneurship for young people in the region.

Partnering with Gallup last year, surveyors asked more than 40,000 15- to 29-year-olds across 21 Arab countries a battery of questions about their economy, job prospects, education and governmental support. With two-thirds of the Arab world’s population under 30, their perspective is vital.

The first data set came out in June 2009, highlighting three key metrics: mindset, which gauges society’s support for the economic contributions of youth; access, focused on access to skills training, entrepreneurial assistance and job placement services; and policy, measuring the government’s ability to increase employment opportunities.

The findings of the second Silatech Index suggest that Arab economies often fail to meet the needs of their increasingly informed and ambitious youth.

One key question concerned how to reduce “waithood”, the sometimes-lengthy period between college graduation and full-time employment in one’s chosen line of work. The overwhelming response was the need for more quality jobs.

But creating jobs is not a simple proposition. Just ask US President Barack Obama, whose economic stimulus package, enacted a year ago and aimed primarily at job creation, has mostly failed to stem the tide of job loss.

And most Arab economies face a much steeper climb. One of the key problems is that launching a business is so taxing, with stacks of forms to be filled out, endless red tape and weeks of waiting. According to the survey, nearly a quarter of all Arab youth would like to start a business in the next year. But the number that will actually do so is considerably lower.

“Policy structures are not encouraging for young people to start their own businesses,” said Mr Younis. “There needs to be a public discourse about how policymakers present the options to young people to join economic life in their country.”

Such entrepreneurialism may help build a stronger society, according to the index. The youngsters most likely to start a business are also those who know a reliable person who could serve as their business partner. They are also those most likely to have helped a stranger in the past week.

“This suggests that those who perceive a community are those that seek to start a business,” said Mr Younis. “We need to communicate to policymakers and developers that economic development and community development are intimately linked.”

The social and economic development of a country is also linked to the degree to which its youth are sanguine about their prospects. Thus, the index’s highest scores were found in the Gulf countries, which maintain the highest GDP and the best security and living standards in the Arab world; although about two-thirds of all young Gulf nationals remain outside the workforce, either as students or unemployed.

Qatar topped the mindset and access categories, while the UAE led in policy.

The lowest scores were in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon, three countries mired in conflict. Some 15 per cent of Iraqi youth believe enough is being done to increase the number of jobs, and less than a quarter believe the government is maximising the nation’s youth potential. In Lebanon, just one in five young people think now is a good time to find a job and 88 per cent believe the government is not maximising youth potential. Less than a third of young Palestinians believe that children learn there every day – the lowest among all countries surveyed.

It is not only the war-ravaged economies that have problems. About a third of Algerian youth are unemployed, and only slightly more are confident about the job market. Morocco scored among the lowest on quality of education, with just 42 per cent of respondents saying the country’s schools were adequate. Only one in four Egyptians believe the economy is headed in the right direction, while nearly 70 per cent believe the West can help their country’s economic situation.

Amid the dark data, Mr Younis sees a silver lining. Those surveyed called for more education and training, better access to job placement and business development services, and a more responsive government.

“Young Arabs know exactly what they need, they just can’t find what they’re looking for,” said Mr Younis, who recommended greater co-operation among the 22 Arab nations surveyed. “If young people are given the resources to succeed in the economic life of their country, they would rather stay in their home country than leave permanently.”

Neighborhood watch

2010-03-01T05:36:00.004-05:00

The rough-and-tumble streets of Jaffa’s Ajami neighbourhood probably seasoned Scandar Copti for the Herculean task of making his first feature film, and also lent the film its propulsive realism. But it was his parents’ effort to keep him away from danger that pointed him towards his future career.

“They wanted to keep us off the streets, so they brought us a lot of films,” says the 34-year-old Palestinian. He remembers watching Bruce Lee and French movies on Betamax with his brothers as a child.

“I would try to understand, ‘How did they do this? How did they make this funny?’” he recalls. “So I would rewind them and watch them again and again.”

If his first film is any sign, Copti is a quick study.

Ajami, which he co-directed with Yaron Shani, has drawn large crowds and lavish praise, won a special mention for Best First Feature at the Cannes Film Festival and become the first mostly Arabic-language film to sweep Israel’s top film honours. Last month, the film received an Oscar nomination for the year’s Best Foreign Language Film.

Getting it to the screen was a fraught ordeal that took plenty of time. The idea of an urban crime drama filmed with non-professional actors first came to Shani, who grew up in a seaside village south of Tel Aviv, the Israeli capital, about a dozen years ago.

By 2002 he had put it on the back burner to organise a student film festival, where he came across Copti’s 12-minute mockumentary, The Truth. “‘He approached me and said, ‘Let’s work together, I like the way you think,’” says Copti, who gravitated to film after earning a degree in mechanical engineering from a prestigious Israeli university. “I said, ‘Whoa. What – a movie?’”

The two began working on a jigsaw puzzle of a script set in Ajami, a neighbourhood that offered a glimpse into the life of the roughly 1.5 million Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. Today a part of much larger Tel Aviv, Jaffa is an ancient seaport that dates to the eighth century BC. Most of the city’s Arab residents fled with the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, and Jaffa now contains some 40,000 Jews and about 18,000 Arabs.

Nestled against the Mediterranean, Ajami is the city’s only predominantly Arab quarter. Some 25 per cent of its residents are Jewish, but with recent gentrification that number has been increasing – along with tensions.

Socio-economically, the neighbourhood is diverse. Judges live above criminals and doctors next to those on the margins. Shacks with no electricity sit near restaurants with gorgeous sea-views, like the one in the film. Copti worked there as a waiter and cook while he and Shani pounded out the script.

“It’s so hard to create something from nothing,” he says, citing scriptwriting as the most difficult part of making Ajami. “Sometimes you feel stupid, sometimes you have nothing to say and you lose your self-confidence.”

Finishing the screenplay took three and a half years. Then the two inexperienced filmmakers strolled into Israeli production houses peddling a movie that called for dozens of non-professional actors who would never see the script. It would be made mostly in Arabic and shot in chronological order, using two cameras simultaneously.

“‘What, are you nuts? Please close the door on your way out,’” Copti recalls one producer telling them. “We were knocking on the doors of producers and nobody wanted to get in.” Eventually they raised nearly $1 million (Dh3.7m) from German and French backers as well as an Israeli film fund.

Next they put the word out in the neighbourhood that they were looking for non-professional actors. Some 300 people turned up, from high-school kids to ex-convicts, mothers, sisters and former police officers. After several workshops they’d trimmed the group to a few dozen and began role-playing.

The goal was to move the participants – not actors – away from performing and towards reacting with real emotion. They were asked to crawl on the floor like serpents, to scream at the top of their lungs or chase each other with chairs. “We start with this and you are liberated, you don’t see the camera any more,” Copti explains. “Then, bit by bit we add emotions and start to see which participant would fit into which character.”

After 10 months of workshops and rehearsals, the cast was set. Filming began, with one unusual condition: none of the actors got a screenplay. “They had to trust us and we had to build this trust,” says Copti.

The shooting of one scene reveals the power of that bond. Three policemen are cruising around Jaffa one afternoon when they pull up along a curb. A scruffy man in torn clothing approaches their window. Mumbling, he offers them a pair of bright red boots. The policemen examine the boots and pass them back to the junkie, telling him off.

“He was a real junkie,” says Mr Copti, laughing. “He wasn't a part of our movie, he was just walking on the street, he didn't see the camera.” The incident was fitting, and stayed in the film, because seconds later the officers receive a call to arrest a drug dealer nearby. They soon pull up behind the dealer's car and start to yank him from the vehicle.

Dozens of young boys and men – placed there by the filmmakers and told to help their friend – pop out of nearby buildings. They swarm the police, striking the officers and wrestling with them and ultimately freeing the drug dealer. “It's real violence – it happened,” said Mr Copti. “We had to stop it, we had to jump from the monitor and say 'OK, cut. Kiss each other and let's do another take.'”

The filming took a brisk three weeks. All of Ajami pitched in: cars and locations were provided free of charge; and seeing the cast and crew working late into the night, residents brought Arabic coffee to the set.

Seven years after their first meeting, the co-directors had a film (both filmmakers got married in that span, Shani also became a father and learnt Arabic). But before its release, there was a final hurdle.

“We showed it to people, to sell it for distribution, and they said, ‘Look, it’s an amazing film, but nobody will watch it,’” Copti recalls. “‘It’s in Arabic, it’s complicated, it’s not pleasant. It will never make any box office.’”

In the end it was seen by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. That’s just one long-standing myth the film upset. Another is that Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and Christians are homogeneous groups. A third is that each side automatically blames the other for its predicament.

Harsh and gritty, Ajami follows the criss-crossing lives of a handful of neighbourhood residents. Omar, a young Muslim, tries to repay a family debt while wooing the Christian Palestinian daughter of a restaurateur. While working illegally in Ajami, a Palestinian teenager from the West Bank turns to crime to pay for his mother’s surgery back home. A combustible Israeli police officer desperately seeks answers about his brother’s disappearance.

Shani has said, “The film is about a society that is segregated, where people live in bubbles.”

Even so, the lives of the characters often paralleled the lives of the actors playing them. Copti’s brother Tony, who played the drug dealer in the film, was arrested earlier this month after coming to the aid of kids getting harassed by the police. The violent Israeli policeman whose brother goes missing is played by Eran Naim. A month before filming began, says Copti, he was dismissed from the police force after being caught on camera putting his fingers into the nostrils of an Israeli settler who was lying on the floor to protest at his evacuation from Gaza.

And the husband of the first-time actress Nisreen Siksik was chased for years by a gang of killers – once they shot him eight times, another time they bombed his car – before finally being ambushed in his shop. In the film, her son is stalked by a violent clan. Siksik, a 45-year-old mother of four who still lives in Ajami, has acknowledged how all of the old worries flooded back during the filming. Yet she has since acted in two more films.

Critics have given high praise to Ajami’s journalistic feel for daily life in a vendetta-fuelled district, its intelligence and even-handedness and its subtle approach to the most tangled of conflicts. “This is Ajami’s moment,” said The Wall Street Journal.

The most significant compliments might have come from an unlikely source. “What Ajami shows, in continually surprising revelations, is the essential core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: people on both sides trying to protect their loved ones and keep them alive, often with heartbreaking consequences,” wrote Bradley Burston, the film critic for the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Days after that review was published last September Ajami won best picture, best screenplay and best direction at the Ophirs, the Israeli version of the Academy Awards. Its nomination for an Oscar seemed inevitable.

Indeed, a film from Israel or the Palestinian territories has been nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar in four out of the last five years. The streak began in 2006 with the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now.

Copti condemns the Israeli government for exploiting the film as a promotional tool. He says Palestinians living in Israel have no equal rights, are treated with racism and not allowed to teach their history or culture. He hopes the film calls attention to their plight. “Acknowledging a group of people exists is the beginning,” he said. “When you know that something exists, you know it has problems. When you know that it has problems, it’s the first step in finding a solution.”

Oddsmakers say Ajami’s Oscar chances are slim. But if it were to win, Shani would be the first Israeli to win the Oscar, and Copti the first Palestinian. “I never made this film to get awards or nominations,” says Copti, who is taking a break from filmmaking to work as the director of community outreach and a programming official with the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. “Getting Israelis to watch it, in Arabic, and to identify with a Palestinian character – to cry when his mother is crying, to humanise him again after 60 years of demonising Arabs and portraying them as terrorists, as inhuman – that’s been the most rewarding thing.”

------
An edited version of this story appeared in the 26 February The National, www.thenational.ae

T time in Qatar

2010-02-21T02:59:00.003-05:00

Style is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind of when you think of Qatar, but that might be about to change.

When The New York Times launched T magazine in the autumn of 2004 it was something of a revelation for the oft-stodgy daily. A hundred-plus pages of rich, seductive photography and articles focused on the hip and stylish: a look at the “under-the-radar cool” of Brussels, the style choices of Lenny Kravitz and his daughter Zoe, and Pedro Almodóvar’s favourite red carpets, to name a few.

The European demimonde gave its official seal of approval a few years later. At a lavish and ultra-exclusive gala for the launch of T’s International Herald Tribune edition, held in a cavernous Milan exhibition space, editors, designers and contributors mingled with the likes of Domenico Dolce, Stefano Gabbana, Donatella Versace, the Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz and the ubiquitous Mischa Barton.

The old grey mare of American journalism – with its black and white graphics and substance-heavy content – had become the belle of the ball.

Now that same smart style has come to the Gulf, in the form of T Qatar, a partnership between The New York Times and the Doha-based Oryx Advertising, which will publish the local edition. Time will tell whether the new publication will give Doha the same sort of makeover, but inside sources say the idea took root fast.

“They were looking to deploy in the Middle East, scouting the market, and came across us,” says Ravi Raman, the vice president of Oryx, talking about his company’s first meeting with the Times last April. “Both sides were immediately on board.”

The pairing is not a complete shock. T Qatar represents the second major New York-Doha cultural tie-up in the past year. The Doha Tribeca Film Festival imported Big Apple buzz, cinema and celebrity with its inaugural event last October. And T magazine’s raison d’être has always been the advertisements – glossy appeals for the latest Ferrari sunglasses, Yves Saint Laurent fragrance or Girard-Perregaux watches.

With Qatar on the cusp of a great boom – the IMF estimates GDP growth of 18.5 per cent in 2010, the world’s fastest – and top-of-the-line property and retail developments such as the Pearl and Lusail coming online in the coming months and years, the greater Doha area will soon be a high-end marketer’s paradise.

No surprise, then, that T Qatar previewed its first issue at this week’s much-hyped watches and jewellery exhibition and on the boardwalk of the Pearl. At first glance, it’s much like an issue of the original magazine, with gorgeous design, sumptuous images and dozens of luxury ads.

Upon closer inspection, it is in many ways an old issue of T; all but a few of the stories are reprints from earlier issues of the New York version. The cover story, on the British actor Michael Fassbender, for instance, is lifted from an issue of T published last autumn.

Mr Raman says that even when T Qatar hits its stride next year – the magazine will be every two months in 2010, monthly in 2011 – only about a third of the content will be original.

Those stories will focus on Qatar and the region and also run in Arabic towards the back of the magazine.

In the first issue, the original stories were a profile of a Doha expatriate artist, an assessment of the Museum of Islamic Art, and a look at the Pearl.

“This is about not just fashion, not just style, but with a culture and art focus,” says Raman. “Basically we’re looking at a person who is stylish and appreciates quality, quality of design, quality of life.”

Will those quality-seekers spend 20 Qatari riyals for travel, design and style insights that have been available free at the T website for months? That might feel like arriving at a fabulous party just as it’s winding down, the buzz evaporating.

Yet Oryx is sure to highlight the fresher, local content. Even slightly dated, this intelligent and locally flavoured ode to consumerism, style and the high-end zeitgeist will, for wealthy Gulf denizens, probably become the sort of status symbol advertised in its pages.

With any luck, T Qatar will in a few years throw a coronation party that outdoes T magazine’s Milan shindig. It will coincide with some anniversary or product launch. It will be held at the Museum of Islamic Art, perhaps during the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. And Mischa Barton will be there.

---------
originally appeared in Feb 21 The National, www.thenational.ae

Lessons in diplomatic dexterity

2010-02-20T01:47:00.002-05:00

DOHA // On a visit to Qatar this week, the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton met with the Qatari Emir, spoke at a conference on US engagement with the Muslim world and, during a discussion with students, said, “Iran is moving towards a military dictatorship”.

The next day, the Iranian frigate Bandar Abbas docked in Doha harbour and the head of the Qatari armed forces boarded the ship to chat with the captain about boosting military co-operation between the Gulf neighbours.

Considering that the US maintains two military bases here and that US-Iranian tensions have risen to a boil over the past fortnight, some might wonder if Qatar’s left hand knows what the right hand is doing. But for Qatari leaders, maintaining friendly relations with two sabre-rattling rivals is nothing new.

“This is their usual modus operandi,” said Mark Farha, professor of comparative and Middle East politics at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar.

“I don’t know if they have much of a choice; If they had snubbed Iran that would open them to a lot of difficulties, and the same with the US,” said Prof Farha, who analyses Qatari foreign policy in a research paper to be published this spring by the Center for International and Strategic Studies. “Qatar did not choose its delicate geopolitical location in the crosshairs of two behemoths.”

Along with considerable natural resource wealth, Qatar’s vital geostrategic locale has helped foster the defining characteristic of its international profile: an openness to dialogue and co-operation.

Prof Farha is well placed to study the phenomenon. He grew up in famously diplomatic Switzerland, his father is Lebanese-American and he earned a PhD in history, Middle East and religious studies at Harvard University. He speaks fluent English and Arabic, along with German and French.

In his forthcoming report, he links Qatar to small but influential states such as Switzerland and Singapore.

“These micro-states share numerous common traits,” writes Prof Farha, “including a limited size, high vulnerability to external shocks, diplomatic dexterity, a salient presence in conflict mediation, record numbers of imported migrant labor, export-led growth, as well as a drive to maintain an efficient infrastructure and a skilled human capital base in highly competitive economies.”

Moreover, all have matured into progressive and stable regional leaders and learnt to punch above their weight internationally.

The trio do have their differences. Switzerland is an established liberal democracy, while Singapore has a form of democracy. Although Qatar held municipal elections in 2007 and is scheduled to hold a legislative vote for Shura Council members in June, its government remains a monarchy.

In terms of economic development, too, Qatar lags behind. But because of a vast natural resource advantage – Qatar holds the world’s third-largest reserves of natural gas – the gap is closing. One example is Education City, managed by Qatari First Lady Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned’s Qatar Foundation and home to Gulf branches of six respected American universities.

“This type of opening up, it is really to the advantage of the host country,” said Prof Farha.

“Islamic civilisation itself, why did it flourish? It flourished because it was like a sponge, absorbing other cultures and integrating them into a new cultural model – and I think that’s what we have here: there’s a saying in Islam, ‘seek knowledge, even if you have to go as far as China’.”

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund has ventured far afield as well, making major purchases from London to Ho Chi Minh City. In recent weeks the Qatari government has announced US$2 billion (Dh7.3bn) in mostly infrastructural investments in India and $12bn in economic and cultural investments in Syria.

But as the tensions between Iran and the US increase, it is Qatar’s relationship with Syria’s closest ally, Iran, that bears watching.

The West looks increasingly likely to place sanctions on Iran. If those fail, the next step would perhaps be military action. Prof Farha advises the rivals to take a page from the Qatari playbook.

“The basic Qatari stance – no military escalation, no nuclear proliferation – is not bound to change,” said Prof Farha. “Of all actors, Qatar seems by far to be the most level-headed in this conflict. One can only hope that reason will prevail given that a war would be devastating for the vast majority of parties involved.”

Another analyst pointed out that the US Central Command centre and largest regional air force base are in Qatar.

“If there is any military showdown it won’t be long before these two bases are involved in the conflict,” said Riad Kahwaji, the founder and CEO of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, based in Dubai. “Qatar, like other Arab Gulf countries, would find themselves in the middle of any conflict, so it is in their interest to do all they can to get the situation resolved short of a military conflict.”

Prof Farha sees a historical parallel in Switzerland, which co-operated with both the allies and the axis powers during the Second World War. But Qatar has made its mark with engagement as well as peacemaking.

Over the past decade, Qatari leaders have burnished a reputation for diplomacy: from the 2008 Doha Agreement that ended Lebanon’s political crisis to the Doha Round of world trade talks; and from the Doha Debates to ongoing negotiations toward a political settlement in Darfur.

The Qatari identity has become intertwined with an openness to progress and dialogue, according to Prof Farha.

“It started with Sheikha Mozah and the emir and the prime minister, but they now have the support of their community,” said Prof Farha. “Each Gulf state wants to leave its mark, wants to distinguish itself from the other, and this is Qatar’s … If you’ve had one Sheikha Mozah now, you’ll have a whole string of them down the line.”

----
originally appeared in 20 Feb The National, www.thenational.ae

Hillary busts out the "D" word on Iran

2010-02-17T07:55:00.005-05:00

DOHA // The US secretary of state deployed the Obama administration’s harshest critique yet of Tehran yesterday, saying the country was growing into a military dictatorship.

“Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship – that is our view,” Hillary Clinton said during a town hall-style meeting with students at Education City here. She explained that any future sanctions against Iran would target “the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which we believe is in effect supplanting the government of Iran”.

As she visits the region to rally support for increasing pressure on Iran, Mrs Clinton’s rhetoric might mark the start of a tenser phase in the West’s nuclear stand-off with the Islamic Republic.

“It is very understandable that the US is expressing deep frustration,” said Hady Amr, director of Brookings Doha, the Qatar branch of a US think tank. “It’s no longer just about the nuclear programme; it’s also frustration with how the regime has responded to the aftermath of the elections.”

After Iran’s presidential elections in June, a mass uprising calling for votes to be recounted was forcibly silenced with beatings, arrests, detention and, in recent months, executions. The repression continued last week with the smothering of protests during anniversary celebrations of the Iranian Revolution.

That same day last week, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, announced that the country had successfully enriched uranium to a 20-per-cent level needed to fuel a medical research reactor. “The US is trying to signal,” Mr Amr added, “that it’s not really willing to wait a lot longer before it changes its policy.”

Yesterday, however, the director of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi, said that the major world powers with which it is at loggerheads over the issue have made a new offer to Iran for a supply of nuclear fuel in return for its shipping out of most of its stocks of low-enriched uranium.

“After the decision by Iran to produce its own uranium enriched to 20 per cent, France, Russia and the United States presented a new proposal which we are in the process of considering,” Mr Salehi said, according to the ILNA news agency.
He gave no details of the new offer. France quickly denied yesterday that such an offer even existed.

Mrs Clinton is spearheading the Obama administration’s full-court press of the region this week, meeting with the leaders of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Along with the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain, Qatar is one of four Gulf countries that accepted US missile-defence systems designed to shoot down short-range Iranian missiles.

“They worry about Iran’s intentions, they worry about whether Iran will be a good neighbour,” Mrs Clinton said. “The question is what can Iran do in order to allay the worries and the fears of its neighbours … and yet I don’t see much progress there.”

Beyond Iran, Mrs Clinton’s discussion topics with the students included US-Islam engagement and building a dialogue with Muslim youth. “We will not agree on everything. I don’t think any family agrees on everything,” Mrs Clinton said. “What I look for are ways that we can celebrate our differences but narrow our disagreements and find common cause.”

Some expressed doubts about the US ability to eradicate stereotypes and move beyond rancour. Mrs Clinton said it would be up to the next generation to bridge the divide. “The decisions that are made here at Education City and in my own country are really about what kind of future we will help provide for those of you who are students today. The education you are receiving here is absolutely critical. The important thing is not what you wear, but what’s in your head and your heart.”

Farah Pandith, the US state department’s first special representative to Muslim communities, who joined Mrs Clinton at Education City, highlighted the potential of today’s young Muslims.

“Every single day since 9/12, on the page of every magazine or newspaper around the world, you see Islam defined in a particular way,” Ms Pandith on Saturday at the US-Islamic World Forum, which concluded here yesterday. “This generation is having to navigate through that and understand what it means to be modern and Muslim – and also is really searching for a way to be connected.”

She urged businesses and foundations to invest in Muslim youth, to listen to their ideas and help them innovate and build partnerships. “New media are playing a gigantic role in what these young people are hearing,” said Ms Pandith, referring to them as the “social network generation”.

“There is really something going on right now with young people, and if we do not harness what is taking place with the youth demographic we will have missed this unbelievably important window.”

Amr Khaled, an Egyptian televangelist and one of the most influential Muslim voices, also worried about Muslim youth. He called on the United States to launch a “Project for Love”, and invest US$10 billion (Dh36.7bn) over five years on education, poverty and health in the Muslim world.

“America is fighting already wars against terror and injustice, why not a third?” Mr Khaled said. “Millions of Muslim youth will stretch out their hands to you.”

At a Sunday morning panel, the Malaysian opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, urged Barack Obama to engage smartly. “Yes, President Obama, engage with hope, but you must engage the aspirations of the whole people,” he said, pointing the inclusion of leaders, non-governmental organisations, intellectuals, Islamists and secularists. “Because if you miss some of them, you will have a continuation of this problem.”

-------
an edited version of this story appeared on page 1A of the 16 Feb edition of The National, www.thenational.ae

Doha drives home lesson in safety

2010-02-13T23:47:00.000-05:00

Last summer, Nasser al Thani edited together a series of grisly crash images: cars split in two; front ends flattened; vehicles entwined, like pretzels. He added an operatic soundtrack and posted the video on YouTube in an effort, the Qatari said, “to raise awareness of road safety.”

More than six months later, the message may be getting through.

From Kuwait City to Muscat, the hazards of the road are real and growing. But they are particularly acute here in Qatar, which has seen traffic and serious road accidents mushroom in the past decade as Doha’s population has doubled.

For every 10,000 vehicles on Qatari roads today, seven people are killed in crashes each year – a rate nearly five times higher than most western nations (in Britain, 1.5 people are killed annually per 10,000 vehicles).

“If you look at traffic, this is a serious and fundamental problem that impacts safety, environment, and productivity,” said Dr Adnan Abu-Dayya, the executive director of the Qatar University Wireless Innovation Center (Quwic).

Qatari officials and business leaders have in recent months moved to stem the tide – importing outside analysts, launching major infrastructure projects, devising technological solutions and hosting instructional workshops.

A ride on the roadways of the Qatari capital is seen by many locals as equal parts frustration and trepidation. Many of Doha’s primary arteries are clogged for much of the day, and the Qatar International Safety Centre (QISC) said more than 100,000 accidents occur in Qatar each year, and that a person is seriously injured on Qatari roads every two hours.

To improve public safety, Qatari officials asked the advice of the US transportation department, which manages a system of more than 250,000km of roadways. Earlier this week, US Federal Highway Administration officials submitted a preliminary report on the state of Doha’s roadways. “Our mission here is not only preventing injuries on the country’s roads from vehicular accidents,” said Craig Alfred, a transportation safety specialist. “We are also focusing on how to save lives.”

The analysis included general comments on traffic and safety and recommendations on street parking, constructing motorway barriers and isolating industrial and other areas of heavy commercial traffic.

The report, a final version of which will come next week, also called for pedestrian protections, such as wider walkways and more footbridges.

“This was the biggest review we’ve had in regards to what we need to take care of,” said Jamal al Kaabi, the chairman of infrastructure affairs at the Public Works Authority (PWA). “We are definitely considering a lot of the issues they brought up, because safety is one of our top priority issues, especially in new roads and highways.”

To that end, the PWA is building fencing along all major highways to keep people from attempting to cross, and adding separated bike lanes to major new roads.

Two major infrastructure projects aim to further improve safety by decreasing congestion. Last week, the government announced plans last week for a six-lane tunnel that will run under Gulf waters from Doha’s new airport, opening in 2011, to the city’s densely populated West Bay. “We are still waiting for the final concept design,” said Mr al Kaabi, adding that the cost and start date remain unknown.

Last November, Qatari Diar announced a 300km, US$25 billion (Dh92bn) metro and light rail system, built in partnership with the German transportation company Deutsche Bahn, to begin construction across Doha next year.

A variety of smaller initiatives approach Qatar’s traffic and road safety problems from different angles. Quwic’s traffic monitoring system delivers real-time data to help drivers avoid the busiest routes. The University of Texas A&M at Qatar recently gave 40 engineers from the PWA a short course on traffic safety, highlighting the importance of road design and traffic light placement. Also on the Education City campus, designers at Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar are studying the effectiveness of Qatar’s road signs and their ability to communicate their messages to drivers.

Despite all this attention, the precise level of danger drivers face on Qatari roads is unknown. “It’s very difficult to get good information,” said Mario Virgili, the director of road safety at QISC. “We can’t guarantee our figures are correct, given that the traffic police don’t provide the information we need.”

While the Qatari interior ministry reported 230 vehicular deaths in 2008, for example, the QISC estimates 346.

What is clear is that the majority of accidents result from a lack of awareness. A study by Qatar’s Emergency Medical Services found that the top reasons for road accident deaths were speeding and failure to wear seat belts, while the QISC said the majority of drivers involved in accidents are under 30 years of age.

Doha's young poets step into the ring

2010-02-13T23:46:00.001-05:00

In the Arabian Peninsula of the sixth century, the emergence of a talented poet was an event, ensuring a tribe’s renown as well as its future posterity. Seven of the more revered poems from the era – collectively called the Mu’allaqat, or Suspended Odes – are said to have been written on tapestries and hung from the Kaaba, Mecca’s sacred cube, before the arrival of Islam.

As the setting for a youth poetry recitation contest, then, Aaqol Atrium – a broad, high-ceilinged space in the community centre of Doha’s Education City – seemed appropriate. The event, officially titled the Aspiring Youth Poetry Slam, had been organised by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP), a non-profit subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation with a publishing arm managed by London-based Bloomsbury Publishing.

At the event’s 5pm start time, the room was all but empty, and the proffered coffee, juices, cakes and sandwiches sat untouched. But as the sinking sun’s rays filtered through the entrance, so too did a trickle of anxious poets and their guests. “I’m not staying here, go back,” a headscarved girl whispered to a friend, who then pushed the whisperer towards the front. “Come on, let’s not be shy,” said another girl, urging her friends to sit.

Outside, darkness fell. After a few introductory remarks by a BQFP staffer, the readings began. Gothic and purple verses flew.

“His image viciously tears the ideas in my mind,” intoned Walaa Quisay, a dimpled Egyptian student from the International School of Choueifat. “His eyes penetrate my corpse and contaminate the blood of my heart.”

Salima, a Northwestern University-Qatar freshman in skinny jeans, canvas trainers and a sky blue headscarf, furrowed her brow and tightly gripped the page from which she read – “So you’re tired of dreaming / And breathing / And looking for reasons to smile at the spotless sun” – then beamed at the audience’s burst of applause.

She was followed by Sundus Sardar, a Weill Cornell freshman and, to judge by her writing, a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. “Darkness rolling... churning... eyes blinking no more,” she began, punctuating each phrase with a pause, as if her poem, The Unheard Screams of Death, were stalking its listeners. “Existence burning... screaming... flesh feeling no more.”

At the end of the evening’s English-language portion, the poets stood in a line before the audience, which indicated its favourites with applause, then chose a finalist with a show of hands. Two high school girls tied for the top honour and were given some writing paraphernalia; all received praise and thanks.

“We chose poetry because it has a strong Arab foundation,” Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, BQFP’s director of reading and writing development, said during a break in the readings. “It also offers a natural platform for youth involvement.” A couple of weeks ago, the organisation held a poetry contest over Twitter. Next month they’ll hold a competition for the best text message poems.

“We want to show people there is a lot of creativity in Doha, across nationalities, across age groups,” said Rajakumar, who hopes to improve the image of Arabs in the western world. “We also want to keep that connection to the language, that love of Arabic.”

After the break, the evening’s Arabic recitation commenced. “Qatar, the home of glory,” read Abdullah Saeed al Muraikhi, a 16-year-old student at Omar Iban al Khatab Prepatory School. “Qatar, the home of close friends. The country of glory that passed from father to son: Abu Meshaal, the symbol of our pride.”

Perhaps the evening’s most lively performance was delivered by Mohamed Saeed al Marri, a classmate of al Muraikhi’s, who arrived at the last minute, hurried onto the stage and launched into a passionate reading of his poem Shedding Tears.

“Your love is deep in my heart, not affected by blowing wind. The only thing that could wound me deeply was your abandoning me. I hoped to step in your way and shout, Damn your exaggerated pride, of position and reputation.”

The 16-year-old, who wore a bright white thobe and ghutra with his oral (the black ring that keeps the headscarf in place) at a jaunty angle, punctuated his phrases by peering heavenwards or gesturing with his left hand, which was wrapped with prayer beads. “For lovers, desertion is the ultimate. I will struggle to live without you, though it is so difficult. I have tried to control my tears but they help me by coming out.”

Later, as the half-filled room emptied, Mohamed spoke of his love for Gulf poetry, his support network of writers and readers, and his new-found confidence.

“You see how I come in late, things are a little crazy, but still it works out and I am able to read my poems and get things done,” he said in English. “Maybe this habit has given me a good strong persona. I feel like I can do anything I want – nothing is impossible.”