A mangled version of this review appeared in the Independent.
What is happening in the Middle East? Tariq Ramadan, one of the foremost Muslim intellectuals, calls the contemporary events ‘uprisings’, more concrete and permanent in their effect than ‘revolts’ but still short of thoroughgoing ‘revolutions’. So far, Tunisia is the only clear democratising success, and even there it remains unclear if the new dispensation will be fundamentally more just economically than the last.
Half of this slim volume is spent examining whether the uprisings were staged or spontaneous. Ramadan counsels against both the naive view that outside powers are passive observers of events, and the contrary belief that Arab revolutionaries have been mere pawns or useful idiots in the hands of cunning foreign players.
Certainly the US and its allies helped to guide events by collaborating with the military hierarchies which removed presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, and by full-scale intervention in Libya – this for a variety of obvious reasons. An agreement signed by Libya’s NTC in March last year, for instance, guaranteed France 35% of future oil exports.
There’s been Gulf and Western hypocrisy over Bahrain, home to Formula One and the US Fifth Fleet, and al-Jazeera’s coverage has been tailored to reflect its Qatari host’s strategic concerns.
Then, less convincingly, the social media conspiracy: trainees from 37 countries learned non-violent cyberactivism in Serbia. Google, Twitter and Yahoo offered training in the US. Google provided satellite access codes to Egyptian activists so they could evade censorship, but not to their Syrian counterparts.
Ramadan also remarks on Syria’s abandonment by the ‘international community’. “It would have been possible to isolate the country in an effective way with a military option,” he writes in one of the more breathless journalistic pieces which make up the last third of the book. His belief that there could be such a thing as disinterested intervention is characteristically idealistic.
Ramadan pays too much attention to the foreign conspiracy red herring, in part because the “conspiratorial paranoia of those who have lost their faith in the ability of human beings to assert themselves as the subjects of their own history” necessitates it, but also because, like the media he criticises, he focuses too much on cyberactivists and not at all on organised labour, whose strike actions in Tunisia and Egypt were finally more effective than mass demonstrations, or on the rights advocates in Syria and Yemen who kept anti-regime struggles alive.
Ramadan comes into his own not as a political writer but as a historian and provoker of ideas. He notes how, in their Western representation, Muslim Arabs have shifted during the uprisings from the benighted, terrorist ‘other’ to the “alterego of the Western Universal.” He is worried by the Arab internalisation of this false universalism, and of the fruitless, inaccurate and Orientalist binary opposition of Islamism and secularism.
Both schools of thought are in crisis. Secularists lack mass support; indeed ‘secularism’, associated with colonialism and post-colonial oppression, has become a dirty word in Arabic. Islamism has support but no coherent programme. Its proponents are divided by contentious issues from the rights of women and minorities to attitudes to sharia and statehood. The Iranian theocratic model, once an inspiration, is now tarnished. In opposition the Islamist current concentrated on the symbols of an Islamic society – hijabs and the like. Political Islam may be as diverse as political Judaism or Christianity, but is unified by its failure to even claim to offer answers to pressing economic, social and environmental crises.
In recognition of their weaknesses, both parties to the argument now prefer the term ‘civil state’ over ‘Islamic’ or ‘secular’ state labels.
Ramadan blames the ideological void on “the deadening weight of dictatorship” which impoverished “the life of ideas in society.” Specifically, “critical, creative economic thinking appears to have deserted the Arab political debate”. Rejecting the superficiality of ‘Islamic finance’, he calls for a fuller critique of capitalism’s unethical and undemocratic content.
More than that: He wants the Arab Muslims to “draw upon their collective cultural and symbolic capital to produce something new, something original, something distinct.” He calls for social justice based on the Quranic verse “We have conferred dignity on human beings,” and for an all-encompassing spiritual, cultural and “intellectual jihad.”
He calls for revolution, in other words.
Source : Qunfuz
Second part
Third part
Syria under lockdown
We travel back to Daraa, where the nation’s uprising began, to find a city under complete military control
By Reporter in Syria and Hugh Macleod, GlobalPost
In this image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network and accessed Wednesday, April 18, 2012, smoke billows an impact following purported shelling in Khaldiyeh district, Homs, Syria. (AP Photo/Shaam News Network via AP video) (Credit: AP)
DARAA, Syria — In the heart of Old Daraa — the tough, tribal, farming community on Syria’s southern border with Jordan — the Omari Mosque once stood as a symbol of resistance, a gathering point for those demanding the end of the regime, and a field hospital for when they received their reply.
Today, a year after GlobalPost first visited the city where Syria’s uprising began, the mosque has been transformed into a military base. Cement rooms have been built around its walls, home to dozens of soldiers.
The snipers who picked off civilians during the siege here last year are still posted atop the highest buildings and the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party and the regime’s many security agencies.
Tanks and armored vehicles remain deployed not only inside the main city itself — in violation of the UN-Arab League cease-fire plan — but around most towns and villages where anti-regime protests have taken place.
On road signs, bridges, schools and clinics the graffiti slogan that children first scrawled back in March 2011 still stands: “The people want to topple the regime.”
Dozens of checkpoints still ring Daraa and divide its streets and neighborhoods. Soldiers and secret police mete out arbitrary humiliation, residents said, often abusing women or making locals wait an hour in the blazing sun while they leisurely finish their cigarettes and tea.
Locals said government services are running at a minimum and state employees now regularly work only one or two days a week. The shops are open again, but night markets are a thing of the past as shutters come down promptly at 7 p.m., just before the regular nightly clashes between regime troops and armed rebels of the Free Syrian Army.
Exactly one year after first visiting this city, which gave birth to the Syrian uprising, a GlobalPost reporter described Daraa as “dying,” a “demolished battlefield” where residents complain bitterly about the destruction of their livelihoods and discuss international military intervention, finding arms to fight and other means to bring down the regime.
As the first major city to suffer a full military assault, the situation in Daraa could foreshadow the fate that likely awaits Homs, Hama and other major protest centers if the regime re-exerts long-term security control over urban opposition strongholds.
“We know that if we give up now the regime will finish us later,” said Abu Rami, a member of the Zuabi tribe, one of the four big tribal families that dominate Syria’s south, a land of black basalt rock, known to locals as the Houran.
“To keep our revolution going now costs less than if we stay at home until the army or security men come and slaughter us like sheep.”
One of Abu Rami’s cousins was among the 15 schoolboys whom security forces arrested last March for spray-painting anti-regime graffiti. The boys were tortured, sparking the mass protest movement. A year later, the 40-year-old said that security forces have killed at least 70 members of the Zuabi tribe. Each one — under the local system of tribal law — represents a blood feud between the tribe and the regime.
To travel from his home in Old Daraa’s Arbaeen quarter into the city center means Abu Rami must pass through three checkpoints, his every movement monitored by snipers.
Protests still go on across the Houran most Fridays, but they are now usually small and unable to join together as they did this time last year.
And every weekend, Syrian activist groups report the endless morbid toll: Reem Abdul Rahman, 17, killed in Giza yesterday, a day after her brother; Adel Ghaleb al-Zuabi, died of wounds untreated in Taiba; Ali al-Turk, tortured to death after being arrested in Al Karak al-Sharwi eight days ago; an unknown male from Heet, detained and tortured to death; Mahmoud al-Badawi, also from Heet, whose body was discovered in the village of Sahm, bearing the scars of torture.
All of these fatalities were from Daraa, just one area of Syria. The respected Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) confirmed their deaths on Sunday. All told, the SNHR found 25 people killed on Sunday in Syria, a modest toll by the standards of the past month.
Against this backdrop of everyday long-term violence, even overtly non-political residents of Daraa appear to be becoming increasingly radicalized against the regime.
Ali is a 45-year-old engineer who works for the state and lives comfortably in a big house with his wife, four children and elderly parents in Daraa’s Qusour district. For the past year, however, Ali’s middle-class status has taken a serious hit: With regular electricity blackouts lasting between 12 and 14 hours, Ali can’t keep fresh food in his fridge, and his children have to study by candle or flashlight.
If his parents need medical treatment they can no longer seek it for free at the state-run Daraa National Hospital because Ali said the facility has been taken over by the military for the treatment of injured soldiers, secret police and armed pro-regime thugs.
Instead, they must travel to Damascus and endure the one aspect of the regime’s vice-like grip on Daraa that irks Ali the most: checkpoints.
“I am an engineer and earn a good income and have no problems with the government. But when I cross any checkpoint, the security men deal with me as if I am an armed fighter,” Ali said. “They don’t respect anyone: The elderly, women, the educated, they see all people as nothing.”
Last week, as he was trying to cross a checkpoint, Ali said a young member of the secret police took his ID and slapped him in the face with it.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen you before.’ He was joking and making fun of me. I felt so angry, but what can I do? It is very easy for him to shoot me and say that I am an armed fighter. No one will investigate or hold him accountable.”
As well as IDs, residents of Daraa wishing to travel north to the capital must now show security men at checkpoints their recently paid electricity, water and phone bills, a move by the regime to counter the spread of civil disobedience in protest centers like Daraa and Hama where residents began burning their municipality bills.
With so many checkpoints choking it off, Ali said many large food companies no longer send their trucks to Daraa, creating spiraling inflation on basic commodities.
Many of Ali’s neighbors have moved to the slum-like illegal housing areas that have sprung up around Damascus over the past decade. Ali chose to stay in Daraa to continue working his government job but makes regular trips to Damascus to buy dry foodstuffs rather than pay exorbitant local prices.
And every time he travels he faces the same checkpoint humiliation.
“The military and security crackdown pushed the people to be more angry and radical but without solving any problems,” Ali said. “Personally, I used to be very supportive of Bashar al-Assad, but today I am not.”
More GlobalPost
-
Syria: How it all began
A single act of brutality by Assad’s secret police ignited protests that swept the countryHugh Macleod and a reporter in Syria April 23, 2011 -
source
See interview on Democracy Now here
1. A person suffering from autism stands in front of the camera and makes us witness the scars of the whipping and electrocution on his chest, legs and arms. His eyes are swollen, his cheeks black and blue, his lips split, yet he continues to smile. He is happy to be filmed and to soak up the attention.
2. The little girl lost her mother. Everyone was preoccupied with escorting the martyr to her final resting place, with the revolution, with the slogans. The girl closed the door behind her and drew an image of her mother with chalk on the floor of the room. Beside it she wrote‘Mummy’. She fell asleep embracing her drawing.
3. One wounded ankle is bleeding, the other is covered by a sock adorned with a red ball. A girl, four years of age, with a shoe size of 27, was not rushed to hospital. They treated her in the same way that they treated all the patient revolutionaries – at home, in hiding, and without anaesthetic. As the bullet was removed from her ankle, she screamed in pain. The doctor tried to calm her: ‘Soon the pain will be gone!’
4. A three-year-old child knew his faith and his Lord, knew his friend from his foe, knew his path from the moment they killed his mother. He led protests every day, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar, takbeer! Allahu Akbar, takbeer! The President will fall!’ And he would repeat, ‘Allahu Akbar, the People Want the Execution of the President!’ He looks in anger from the corner of his eye and inspires those present to follow his lead and to also call: ‘Takbeer! Takbeer!’
5. Hiding in underground passages, sitting on a ragged rug and shifting their weight from side to side, drinking maté, dreaming of freedom and justice, and talking in quiet and quivering voices. They discuss politics and sing; yet at every moment they are under threat of being raided and attacked, tortured, killed, and cut up into pieces.
6. The family wrapped up their martyred son, laid him on two wooden ledges, and tied the corpse with rope. They said, ‘Bismillah ur-rahman ur-rahim, In the name of the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.’ They threw the rope to the neighbouring alleyway; the people of the alleyway pulled him along, and then they in turn threw the rope to the next alleyway. Passing in this way from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, their murdered son, shot by gunfire, tied to two ledges, and under continuous gunfire, arrived safely at his grave. In one voice all the alleyways repeated: ‘Alhumdulillah! Alhumdulillah! Thank God! thank God!’
7. Her father arrived home dead. The sound of the mother’s, aunts’ and the whole family’s wailing could be heard everywhere. A girl amongst them screamed: ‘But this isn’t my dad! My dad is more beautiful than this.’
8. Two young men remained for months in the city of wonders. One wrote lyrics and the other sang. The first would randomly write word after word without rhythm or care and the second would happily sing, both of them in harmony and mutual understanding. Hearing them, the residents of the sad city became happy. They would meet every day and gather around these young men calling for the fall of the tyrant and they clapped as they sang. One day the television announced that the singer had been killed. The people were shocked. Then they disregarded this news which did not concern them. So no-one knows how the two voices survived; one would write lyrics and the other would sing and warble.The residents of the city, whose number grew steadily less as they were killed, continued to protest and to call their slogans unceasingly.
9. When the lover was informed, she came at great speed. Pouncing without any thought, she began kissing the face and cheek of her husband’s corpse. Her tears fell; she lifted his head and buried it in her chest. Tilting her head and scolding him fiercely, then kissing his face and cheeks and stroking his skin softly. Her headscarf and coat were coming undone. Her sister called: ‘Come here!’ The woman did not hear; she was entirely unaware of her lack of modesty.
10. The young man leaping up from between the protestors, the veins on his neck bulging, his index finger raised, shouts: ‘I am not an animal.’
11. The man’s palm caresses the corpse of his murdered son. He tries to swallow his tears so that he can clearly and in a manly fashion describe the manner in which his son was killed at the protest. Yet the piercing camera sees through his attempts to compose himself. The lens does not turn a blind eye to the man’s condition as he had hoped; in fact it exposes all the tenderness in his voice, his weakness and his pain.
12. The mother looks in bewilderment on the moving casket which is carrying her son away, her eyes unbelieving, yet she continues to repeat, reassuring herself and those who hear her, from the Lord in the heavens to His creatures on earth, that her son is a martyr.
13. Exiled, far away, alone, he follows his motherland’s revolutions, wishing, craving, laughing, crying, screaming, praying – and when his loved ones are killed, he kneels down in prayer. He screams aloud with his hand covering his mouth. No one hears or sees him in this state. When he is done wailing, he washes his face and returns to his seat in front of the computer. He follows the news, wishing, laughing, screaming, praying – and when his loved ones are killed, he kneels down in prayer.
14. The person, who doesn’t understand anything of what is happening except his pain, rushes to the frontline, threatens and promises, then reprimands the world for its negligence – and when he calms down he states an opinion.
15. In his grief the distant citizen yearns to shackle the hands of the aggressors who are fiercely beating their victims, while he watches via the television screen.
16. Pupils at school are chanting with the revolutionaries as if they were adults. Their mothers are waiting at home. These pupils, or at least some of them, may not return, even though their mothers are awaiting their return so that they may bathe, have supper and sleep.
17. He abstained from international festivities. He crouched in the corner replaying all that had happened. He was overcome with sorrow. He thought he’d be able to strap himself with bombs and blow up the world. Later on, with a trembling heart, he was on the verge of surrendering to tears. By the time Valentine’s Day arrived his heart was numb and the criminals were victorious.
Manhal al-Sarraj is a Syrian novelist based in Sweden. Her first novel, As the River Must, considers the Hama massacre of 1982, and is banned in Syria.
I have not posted the past four weeks. In the meantime, the Assad’s army entered Homs, and then Idlib as FSA withdrew from both cities, massacres have taken place Car bombs have returned to the picture, just as Annan is expected to send a team of experts. However, the new car bombs have targeted areas with Christian majorities including today’s explosion in Aleppo’s sleimanyeh quarter. This is consistent with warnings signs that came out last week regarding the regime’s intent to wrap up its perceived victory by increasingly forcing Syria’s Christians to take a sectarian side.
Here are a few comments on specific issues.
Batta 
Batta (Duck), a befitting address by a “modern” wife and by an admiring young woman to a man whose army assisted by vile militia gangs is terrorizing and murdering Syrians ever since some of these Syrians declared that they have had enough of his family’s totalitarian control over their lives and are no longer willing to take it.
Oddly enough, absent (to-date) from the leaked emails are indications of any involvement by senior government officials, business partners, religious figures, or even social climbers’ in the narrow circle the boy-king has surrounded himself with. What we notice is the critical role of two intern-level women (Shehrazad Gaafari and Hadeel Al-Ali) along with the notorious Luna Al-Shible in proposing media campaigns and passing information and summaries to the boy-king who is occupying his busy time with state affairs in parallel with trivia such as downloading teens songs from I-tune and playing harry potter games among other life occupations.
The men in the email are different. They are security oriented. One passes advises (or commands) from key Iranian and HA contacts, still through the interns. Another (Khaled Al-Ahmad) seems to be the personal envoy-spook of the boy king traveling throughout the country’s hot-spots and making observations and recommendations while connecting with regime-friendly Lebanese tycoons. The father in law remains heavily engaged as well, putting to rest claims of his family’s distance from the murderous regime and placing himself at risk of being the first member of the regime to be successfully tried in the west for abetting and aiding crimes against humanity. He may be followed by his daughter, who may now be tried in the UK for violating sanctions, independent of what trivial, yet expensive items she seems obsessed with purchasing.
What comes out drives a dagger at the heart of the loyalists and regime-made opposition claims that they oppose the revolution because it threatens to destroy the institutions of the state. It also obliterates the loyalists frantic efforts to retain the fraudulent image of a “normal” president and state. Clearly, when a young, albeit seasoned diplomat such as Jihad Maqdisi has to rely on a intern level advisors to pass his opinions to the head of state, one must wonder the extent at which the Assads believe in these institutions. Needless to say, pro-freedom thinkers and intellectuals have argued from day one that under the Assads, there are no institutions or state, as all are simply overshadowed by a cancerous criminal-security apparatus and mafia family.
Some of us will get busy trying to decipher the interpersonal relationships of the boy-king now sarcastically known as Batta in attempts to demonstrate the increasingly isolated family. However, the presence of these intern-senior-advisors and their impacts on the actions taken by the regime can not and should not be trivialized by sarcasm. Information provided to the boy-king by these people were acted upon and may have resulted in deaths, including those of journalists in Homs. And if anything they indicate that the boy-king is in control and has directed actions either by transferring the information to his henchmen, or by directly ordering actions. These advisors are not merely providing media advise, but far more sinister advises, even if the emails do not reveal direct orders from the boy-king to his high ranking officers and henchmen. The compartmentalization of connections only illustrates his lack of trust in the state and its institutions not to mention his derogative description of his own fraudulent reform laws. It is no wonder that regime apologists on Syria Comment are now blasting Joshua Landis for publishing the little he did of these emails. The little that has been leaked exposes their own moral degeneration.
In the aftermath of the continuing leaks, Nir Rosen seems to be in the hot seat now. On at least two occasions, he was described by both the intern and the in law as being “helpful” to the regime. Although it is more than possible that in both cases, the two “inner-circle” members have interpreted any critique of the opposition as favorable to the regime, and thus bestowed the “helpful” title on Rosen, critiques of Rosen seem to focus on the implication that he may have divulged information that was used to help the regime’s aggression against homs. Rosen himself has written a post protesting his innocence. I will now from opinion on his response and would leave it to the readers to decide.
Where to ?
band annie's Weblog 