Snapshots of Lebanon's Nutshells

Snapshots of Lebanon's nutshells.
Saad gets three because, well, because he's Saad

*****

While I gather thoughts and facts about Iran, which will take some time, and on the occasion of the cataclysmic, do or die, life or death, watershed June parliamentary elections in Lebanon, here are a few helpful lines on this Switzerland of the Middle East. Mind you, if you are desperate to take this country seriously, there are plenty of serious analyses out there waiting desperately for someone like you. But if you have been rehabilitated, this post, as untidy as it necessarily has to be, should be more than enough for you.

*****

Exchange between Marwan Hmadeh and Michel Aoun on March 19, 2009--but before that, some necessary introductions:

Michel Aoun: ex-general; perennial presidential candidate; ex (as in many years ago)-psychiatric patient (he’s feeling much better now); ex-nemesis of Syria, current friend of Syria; Christian leader (75% of the Christian vote in the 2005 parliamentary elections); ex-enemy and now ally of Hezbollah.

Marwan Hmadeh: a Druze leader, man of Walid Jumblatt (the Druze leader); ex-man of Syria; one of the late (by assassination) Rafiq Hariri’s enablers/friends; now hero of March 14, which supporters dub as an enlightened, progressive, non-sectarian and democratic coalition; anti-Syria man; Saad (the son) Hariri’s enabler/friend.

Hezbollah: as per its own description, a tiger of a Shiite, Lebanese, nationalist, Islamist but non-sectarian, black but pastel, resistant of a political party, which also happens to be—according to the precise words of Hassan Nassrallah--a “proud soldier in the army of Wilayat al Faqih”(you know what that is, don’t you?).

*****

Hmadeh about Aoun:

“The General wants to liquidate the political and intellectual legacy of Jubran Tueni (Hmadeh’s nephew) and return Ashrafieh to Syrian custodianship.”

Time out: Tueni, an ally of Aoun back when the General was at war with Syria, was assassinated three years ago, and his 26-year old daughter Nayla is running for his old seat in Ashrafieh, East Beirut, as a March 14 candidate. God rest his soul, I knew Jubran to be many things, but that intellectual bit would probably have surprised him just as much as it surprised the rest of us.

Back to Hmadeh’s quote:

“…the one thing that ties them together (Aoun, Hezbollah and Nabih Berri’s Amal movement) is their alliance with Syria, first and foremost, and some of them with Iran.”

___________

Aoun about Hmadeh:

“With regards to the statement issued by the sick man who was kicked out of the beik’s garden in the mountain; the godfather of strife and traps and conspiracies, who turned the politics of recklessness and the planting of divisions in people’s souls into a profession; the boy scout to occupations and custodianships; the expert in squandering the political legacy of Jubran Tueni, we need to ask if Marwan Hmadeh is the spokesperson for the Metn (mountain) and Ashrafieh? Because if he is, then without a doubt time is about to come to an end.”

*****

Sami Gemayel, 29-year old son of Amin Gemayel, ex-president of Lebanon (other qualities are just too difficult to quantify), brother of the late (by assassination) Pierre Gemayel; Metn candidate of the Phalange Party, one of Lebanon’s early experiments with Christian fascism and current member of the enlightened, progressive, non-sectarian and democratic March 14 coalition:

“Consensus contradicts the principle of democracy…There is no Sunni-Christian or Shiite-Christian or Druze-Christian project. There is only a Christian-Christian project.” April 4, 2009, Al Hayat Newspaper.

*****

Saad al Hariri (son of the late Rafiq; current sheikh of the Sunnis; aziz (as in the dear one) of Azouz, son of the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia; the big guy in the enlightened, progressive, non-sectarian and democratic March 14 coalition, to whom everyone goes for monetized blessings) inaugurated last month the nursing school at the American University of Beirut (AUB), for which his father was the main donor. Receiving him was the Board of Trustees and the new American President of AUB. Accompanying him was the usual orchestra of cheerleaders-cum-hooligans-cum-thugs that have been accompanying all respect-starved Lebanese politicians since modern Lebanon was born on that precious day in 1920. After every other line uttered, the gents erupted into applause and shouts: “Saad w bass”-- Saad and only Saad. They must have been on to us, because one Saad is about all we can handle.

But the most beautiful moments during the speech came when Saad stopped every once in a while to have a sip of water. “SAHTAIN,” would thunder from the back of the room after each gulp--a double good health, but unfortunately for Saad w bass.

*****

Check out clauses 1&3 in the agreement that was drafted between Hezbollah and certain groups within the Lebanese Salafi (as in extremely Sunni) current in August 2008, a few months after Hezbollah crashed through many of Lebanon’s red lines.

The Salafis, under pressure from other Sunni groups (including Saad w bass), withdrew from the agreement the day after it was announced. For assistance in catching all the nuances packed into the clauses, look for the underlined crucial parts.

Clause 1: “Based on the sacredness of a Muslim’s blood, we forbid any attack by any Muslim group against another Muslim group…”

There was not a peep from the normally voluble Aoun about where exactly that would leave Christian blood. Maybe he felt his own sacredness was guarantee enough.

Clause 3: “To stand in the face of the American-Zionist project whose most important tool is inflaming sectarian divisions and fractioning the fractioned and dividing the divided.”

GOT THAT?

*****

Now does all this not evoke the evocable and goosebump the goosebumpable?

About Matters Fundamental

Why waste time on gargara (blather)? A couple of perfect Kodak moments, and that should wrap it up for this post.

We will get rid of the disruptions
and implement development schemes
…to forge a great nation.”

President Omar Bashir of Sudan,
During a rally in March after being
indicted by the ICC for War Crimes
in Darfur.




Britain created you and America protects you.
But out of respect for the nation, I consider
the personal spat between us over…I am a
leader, a nationalist, the dean of Arab rulers,
king of African kings and the Imam of Muslims.
My international standing does not allow me to stoop lower.

President Mu’amar Qadafi of Libya during last week’s Arab League meeting in Qatar, addressing King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

****

First, the grizzly exit line: “Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheavals starts now.” This is the apocalyptic point finale with which Niall Ferguson sealed a recent lead article in Foreign Policy Magazine.

Happily, of the 14 offenders cited by the historian, eight are in the greater Middle East and eight are card-carrying members of the Muslim club. The beldams competing to turn our dreams—at least those of us who dare indulge in happy ones--to dust are Gaza, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Turkey and Indonesia. The others? Russia, Mexico, the Congo, Zimbabwe and Thailand.

So, it would appear, something wicked this way comes.

Since seven of the cited Middle Eastern countries are either grappling with fundamentalisms eager to rule or with fundamentalisms working hard to stay in power (I am exempting Turkey, not Israel, by the way); and since most analysts keep repeating, mantra-like, that Islamic fundamentalism is the one inspiration that is growing stronger in the midst of turmoil and in the shadow of political stagnation; and since there is a raging debate about the need to establish (at least) eye contact with Islamism, it is only reasonable that I stick to the subject that seems to be on everybody’s mind, and head straight for Egypt.

But before I plunge into umm al dunya (the mother of the world) and its Brotherhood, the mother of all brotherhoods, let me offer this by way of a preface and a conclusion: the short end of this tale is that you’re standing right on the tail end of it. As powerful a presence as Islamic fundamentalism is in the Middle East, it is not new, its ways are no longer mysterious, its message is neither fresh nor untried and those voices that spoke to us as one for many decades have split into so many vernaculars. Islamism might be the rave now in the West-- everyone from goonish Pat Robertson to the infinitely more elevated Martin Amis have been delighting in it (in a manner of speaking, of course), feeling its fangs and horrorizing on its pull over here and its push over there—but, truthfully, enigma left this fellow and its compadres a long time ago. Whatever its home base, Islamic fundamentalism has had a full life and has all the scars to show for it.

Above all, Islamism, contrary to the herd think that still dominates the discussion on it, is not the status quo anti, but actually can claim just as large a slice of the status quo as the so-called Arab order itself. For many years, in countries like Egypt and Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood has been as much a fixture of the political scene as the regimes themselves, while elsewhere—from Wahhabi Saudi Arabia to clerical Iran to Talibanic Afghanistan to Turabian Sudan to Hamassian Gaza--an assortment of Islamisms have been calling the shots for quite sometime. It is therefore not only glaringly ignorant but patently silly for presumably seasoned observers to keep wondering about how Islamism will behave once it is in power. We know. And the picture is as colorful as they come.

Hence if the future, as Ferguson predicts, will soon tire of the old game and start a new one whose name is havoc, we will not see a discredited, bankrupt authoritarianism fighting it out with a lithe, sharp, towering, blunder-free, on-message fundamentalism. True, wherever the old boys remain, and wherever Islamists have replaced them, there is still a firm grip on power: the power to bully, to mobilize the die-hards and the courtiers, to use bread and butter to fill hungry stomachs and lull rebellious thoughts. But for all the bluster of these two camps, one is a cruel, ranting, imbecile of an uncle, and the other may have been a dashing promise 20 years ago, but today is a disheveled, browbeaten if not beaten record. Much like the competition, fundamentalist dominions are wrestling with the dissonance between their lofty rhetoric and their people’s lowly realities, repenting Al Qaeda mentors such as Sayyed Imam al Sharif of Egypt and Abu Mohammad al Maqdissi of Jordan are taking the wind out of a fuming, cave-bound Ayman Zawahiri and temperate fundamentalists are blowing all shades of gray into the more mainstream currents within Islamism.

There is flux, to be sure, but a close look at the tensions inside both the more extreme and milder expressions of fundamentalism will tell you that tumult is very likely to be as sorely felt inside its sea as out.

****

On to Egypt!

In 2006, specifically on April 9, a crack in the hard-edged, chiseled image of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) appeared. It came in the shape of a smirk. In an apparently feisty interview with the pro-government Rose el Youssef, Mohammad Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of the MB loutishly declared to the reporter, “Tuz fi Misr.” The shy translation is “to hell with Egypt.” The more accurate and, it just so happens, hilariously revealing one is “my fart on Egypt.” During the interview, Akef had indicated that, if it came down to it, he would prefer to see a Malaysian Muslim rather than a Christian Egyptian as president of the country. Intrigued by the implications of Akef’s preference, the reporter pressed him about the Society’s commitment to the national integrity of Egypt, to which Akef replied, “Tuz fi Misr.” That was his way, I suppose, of insisting that for the Brothers the Muslim umma (community) takes precedence over a bunch of borders.

Two years later, specifically on May 11, 2008, a long conversation took place between two intrepid al Hayat Newspaper reporters and Akef (the translation and underlined parts in bold are mine).

Question: Since you are unable at present to hold elections for Maktab al Tarshid (The Office of Guidance), will you resort to appointments to fill some of the positions?

Akef: This is not your concern, this is our concern, the Muslim Brotherhood. In the shadow of this assault on us, we will fill any vacuum by our own special method.

Question: But the masses want to know more about the Brotherhood?

Akef: They (the masses) have the right to support us in our battle against this oppression, but it is not anybody’s right to talk to me about my modus operandi unless he is from the Brotherhood.

Question: According to this logic, then, no one has the right to question the ruling National Democratic Party?

Akef: I am not an owner of projects (sahib mashari’) and I am not in the business of issuing corrupt laws. The NDP has to be accountable. I am not the ruler here, I am the oppressed one.

A few lines down the page…

Question: The price rise in Egypt has a global dimension. The Brotherhood criticizes but has yet to offer any solutions?

Akef: I am not the government for me to be specific. I caution only. Offering solutions is not part of my responsibilities. The institutions are not in my hands. I say--my point of view is-- that what is happening is symptomatic of a sickness. The people have no freedom, and I can only say: Leave the people alone.

Two questions ensued on sources of funding, and then…

Question: The people need some issues clarified?

Akef: The street has no right to question me. Let it question the government first.

Question: But you are betting on the street?

Akef: When it [the street] comes to me and becomes part of the Brotherhood, then it can question me, and I will answer. I am responsible for the Brothers who have accepted our program and have been living with us. I am not responsible for the secularists and mercenaries.

Now if your thoughts happen to be of the swashbuckling variety, they might just get away with persuading you that of the four qualifiers—serious, credible, alternative and opposition—which accompany the Egyptian Brothers everywhere they go like advance bodyguards, these interviews laugh out of the room the first three and leave the fourth to loiter around like an out-of-work pencil pusher. In which case, you can, and with much ease of conscience, stop here and wait for the next post.

But if you need to linger on backdrops and spend some time with contexts, then, by all means, read on.

****

Peculiar tenor from the leader of an 80-year old movement which was celebrating as recently as 2005 a stupendous victory in the first parliamentary elections it decided to seriously contest—88 candidates out of 165 fielded as independents won in spite of brazen state fraud, harassment and intimidation—giving it 20 percent of the seats. And that triumph was only the last in a series of feats achieved over the course of three decades, all of which were more than enough to persuade even the worst of skeptics that the MB, as both a social and political force, is a formidable influence on Egyptian life.

At first glance, the Society’s rush through Egypt looked like bear-hug encirclement: dominance in Egypt’s major professional and student associations from the right, a countrywide, dollar-rich network of social and charitable services from the left, dawa (proselytization or outreach) up and down and more conservative, sharia-based state laws all around. By the early 1990s, among an estimated 85 percent of women the veil became a daily habit, among a good majority of men the mosque became a daily destination and among a good majority of Egyptians Islam became a daily ritual. To the MB—by turns oppressed and massaged by the state--went the credit for Egypt’s increasingly conservative bend. Come 2005, the organization was boasting one million members (independent sources estimate registered membership at 50,000 to 60,000 and supporters at 400,000 to 500,000) and the people’s sympathies.

And yet, if Akef’s clownishness, barely months after his party’s parliamentary win, was reminiscent of anything, it was of Mubarak’s own gaffes in many an instance. Fatigue, it had become inescapably clear, was showing on the two faces of Egypt’s politics, that of the regime from being in power for too long, and that of the MB from being in opposition for even longer. But more than fatigue itself, “tuz fi Misr,” “offering solutions is not part of my responsibilities,” “the street has no right to question me,” showed the extent to which the Brotherhood and the regime were cut from the same cloth. It is no small irony that at a time when Egypt is reeling from having to work so bloody hard for a living, neither the state nor its main opposition are able to inspire anything other than fear and derision.

Call it extreme exposure. Truthfully, for those who cared enough to watch and listen and question, the cracks had been creasing the polished surface of Egyptian Islamism for a while, and all that Akef’s faux pas did was deepen the lines. Over the past decade, everywhere you turned there were signs of trouble. Unease began to deepen when inquisition-style legal suits by conservative Islamists against “heretic” professors, against “blasphemous” books, “degenerate” poets, “depraved” women-- against life itself if it dared swim in a bit of color—found receptive judgments within the state’s own judiciary system. Soon enough, the front pages of newspapers and the Internet were relaying the latest pornographic fatwa, some by the state-sponsored Azhar, many not. It did not help that such fatwas and other lascivious statements by this sheikh and that prayer leader were taking place at a time when sexual harassment was reaching epidemic levels in a country that had grown visibly more pious, and that among the countless Egyptian women habitually suffering from such harassment, the veiled ones would turn out to be the most inviting target.

But perhaps it was the 2007 draft political platform of the MB that finally betrayed its inability to reconcile the demands of citizenship and pluralistic democracy with its specific interpretations of sharia-based governance. The manifesto, which soon after its release was shelved under a storm of protests from civil organizations, human rights groups and even the party’s own liberal wing, declared that women and non-Muslims are not eligible for the office of president. It also called for the establishment of a council of ulama (religious scholars), whose main purpose would be to make sure that all legislation conforms with sharia. No less intriguing was the clause which stipulated that tourists should abide by the Islamic dress code and use Islamic banking. Significantly, telling criticism came from leading MB bloggers (there are 150 Brotherly blogs out of an estimated 34,000 Egypt-wide), who counseled their leadership to abandon, once and for all, their party’s outmoded and exclusionary tenets.

Flummoxed by the intensity of the wall-to-wall criticism—which, I suppose, should tell us plenty about the MB’s feel for Egypt’s pulse—the movement has yet to issue the new and improved platform. A public relations blunder, many called this last episode. The program, claimed detractors, revealed the wolf in sheep clothing; the joke was that it actually exposed the sheep in wolf clothing.

Seriously, though, what does Akef’s “offering solutions is not part of my responsibility,” say to an Egypt riven with problems in desperate need of solutions? More specifically, what does it say about the MB that they can be so easily roused for Palestine and so conspicuously absent from the workers’ strikes and riots that have recently struck several of the country’s industries—no less than 400 actions between mid-2005 and the end of 2007 alone. More poignantly, what does it say for the prospects of a heaving country that it is about to limp into even sorrier times with neither parent really caring for or about it.

Don’t think that the Egyptians, for all their world weariness, are indifferent to any of this. The voter turn out in the 2005 parliamentary elections was a mere 27 percent; for the presidential ones 24 percent. The silence of the majority sometimes can be quite deafening.

There has been interesting chatter about the struggle inside the MB along generational, urban-rural, liberal-conservative, religious-political lines that apparently intermingle intimately rather than politely keeping to themselves. “A plurality of trends,” MERIP, Middle East Report, called the give and take in a recent exposé on the party. Should coexistence become untenable between the more pragmatic, politically oriented, moderate bloc and the more reticent, religiously conservative, dawa-driven, and currently stronger faction—whatever their ages or geographic location—it would not be the first time the Society undergoes this kind of divorce. In the mid-1990s, a group of Brothers, under the leadership of Abu al-Ila Madi, split with the MB and established the Wasat (Centrist) Party, which, of course, has yet to receive government approval. Healthy or not, the increasingly heated internal debate as well as mounting external repression have left the movement wobbly, reactive and more often than not behind the curve of opposition in Egypt rather than at the forefront of it.

Commenting to International Crisis Group on the fiasco surrounding the draft political program, a high ranking member of the MB, obviously a liberal voice himself, quipped: “The ideological stagnation of the Muslim Brotherhood is part of Egypt’s political crisis.”

Ballah ? No, really?

The question is: Does anyone sniff the opportunity in this upheaval?

Birth Pangs or Death in Camouflage?

The customary victims of the Palestinian-Israeli tragedy have assembled again in their full, familiar regalia. There they are, the crouching man, head between hands, about to give full vent to his Munchian scream; the baby, a bloodied, lifeless Cabbage Patch dangling from her panic-stricken mother’s arm; the terror-filled children lining the corridors of supposedly safe schools minutes before lining the corridors of a supposedly extant heaven; life itself in the twin grip of defiance and beggary. And yes, they are all Palestinian because, hands down, in the heartbreak department they are always the winners.

The occasion does call for poetry, and even the Economist was moved enough to oblige with prose that makes of raging realities a thing of quiet eloquence: “And Gaza, remember, is only one item in a mighty catalogue of misery, whose entries are inscribed in tears.”

II

Throughout this last bit of bloodletting, almost everything that needed to be said about Gaza has already been written. And yet, somehow the story refuses to leap into the next dreaded page as if in mortal fear that this drama has outgrown all the old plotlines and is agitating for new ones. A century into this conflict, even the most bold amongst us are loath to part with perspectives and interpretations that have served us so well for so long.

But it is time to move on, and perhaps the first serious thought we need to confront is that well before Israel and Hamas came to blows over the ruins of Palestine the only conceivable way out of this problem—the two-state solution—was already dead, and it breathed its last as shifting trends and alliances converged to reshape the face of the region.

Among the new regional variables that have come to influence the question of Palestine, Iran’s final ascendance in the aftermath of Saddam’s collapse (and concomitant Shiite resurgence) looms largest. In fact, Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s nervousness about Persia’s growing hegemony in the Middle East and Shiite assertiveness in Iraq is amply reflected in their loud impatience with Sunni Hamas, which, along with Shiite Hezbollah and Alawite Syria, has enabled Iranian encroachments deeper into Arab turf. Palestinian factions have always been a playing piece in the Arab regimes’ rivalries, but while Arafat’s somersaults may have been infuriating, he kept them strictly in the family. Hamas’ willingness to pair with the Iranian intruder crosses the line and borders on heresy, especially for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the two pillars of the Arab status quo. The disaffection with Hamas is not necessarily a prelude to a Sunni-Israeli alliance, as some on both sides of the divide hope. There is still much to disagree about between them, and we have yet to see how Iran will play the Obama card. For Hamas, though, there is not much space for a sigh of relief in any of this. When it limps out of this fight, its surroundings will be infinitely more hostile than they were before it.

III

And so, the pain of Gaza may feel like a replay of the same old sorrows, but this “sad finger of dunes” bleeds over an entirely new political landscape. The usual chest pounding and finger wagging will be distracting, maybe even deceiving for a while, but after all the momentary victories have been declared after this round, they will all be losers, Palestinians and Israelis alike.

True, on the face of it alone the historical record shows that providence has been palpably kinder to Israel than to Palestine. But lurking on the surface of things in the Middle East is like splashing around merrily in a swamp and ignoring the muck tugging at you neck down. It is indeed nothing short of damning for the Israelis and Palestinians that they—and the region with them—are at the doorsteps of a new age, whose beginnings seem to be beholden to the same conviction which set the old one ablaze: that there literally is no room for coexistence between these two people. Except that when this debacle started one hundred years ago, the slate was clean, the killing fields were empty and the possibilities many; today everywhere you look there are vistas of wretchedness and a trail of blood that leads to cul-de-sacs which were once wide-open exits.

Take out a map of this burning expanse. You will see two people in a choking embrace that has put paid to sacred dreams and age-old plans. The growing number of Israeli settlers (464,000 by the last count) living in a mounting number of settlements and outposts (121 and 102 by the last count) in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has killed almost all chances for a Palestinian state, and fratricide has completed the job by decapitating an already mangled and tormented Palestinian nation. This does not make for a “2-state plan” in peril, as Michael Slackman offered in last Monday’s New York Times. It makes for a dead one. And it did not die the casualty of furious events, it died a slow, deliberate, well-executed, ugly death. Avi Shlaim put it well a few days ago in The Guardian when he wrote, “Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.” However reticent or ill intentioned or violent or weak the Palestinian side has been throughout this impasse, as Israel has long been claiming, the settlements and the policies devised to satisfy the messianic hunger of their residents are a reflection of the Jewish state's own motivations and choices.

But if the settlers are a blatant commentary on the ideological fervor and militant politics that have nurtured and guided Israel’s strategy in the Occupied Territories, the war between Hamas and Fatah is flagrant proof that these two resistance movements are clueless about the hard business of resistance. Worst still, the fierceness with which both organizations reign over their charred, trapped, wretched patches of Palestine makes clear their contempt for cause and people.

However gratifying all this must be for Israel, whose mantra has always been that Palestinian leaderships, whatever their color, are simply incapable of providing a decent life for their people, the dividends it yields for it are little more than fictional. As dire as the situation is for the Palestinians, that choking embrace has made it just as untenable for the Israelis. Look at the map again to catch a glimpse of Israel frantically picking through the wreckage of its occupation for the prospect of a state that is uncontaminated in its Jewishness and remotely convincing in its democracy. It turns out—and could Israel not have known?--that in plotting to do away with the spirit and aspirations of the Palestinians, it ended up trampling on its own. It turns out—and could Israel not have realized?—that in order for it to be irreversibly Jewish, it would have to commit acts no self-respecting state could possibly entertain let alone undertake. If the settlers have rendered hopes for a Palestinian state practically nil, the 1.4 million Palestinians in Israel and 3.7 million in the Occupied Territories (including Gaza) have ensured that Israel’s hopes to be a Jewish democracy are equally faint.

In spite of the accusations and counter-accusations that coat this morbid issue much like the debris that cakes the corpses of its unending wars, the effects of the 40-year-old occupation are very easy to read, and they have proved as taxing on Israel’s rigor as they have been debilitating to the Palestinians’. Forgive this excerpt from a previous post, but there is no reason to rephrase old conclusions:

This moral and demographic quandary in which Israel has put itself since 1967, because of its conviction that a biblical carte blanch and epical yearnings justify earthly conquest, is pretty much what it has to show for forty years of occupation in the name of redemption. Perhaps the most exasperating part of this journey for Israel has been its inability to write the post-1967 narrative in the spirit of the 1948 one. Neither its exalted conception of itself nor the world’s sympathetic conception of it proved immune enough to its blatantly predatory policies, and the unfortunate outcome is written all over the Israeli state’s current distress.

III

These past three weeks have been a time of wrath and then some. From them, Israel might well reap a licked Hamas, pounded, clobbered and thrown about. That’s what happens when a liberation movement opts to raise itself above ground and govern a people who are living in an encircled virtual prison: many of its representations become tangible, more of its assets become visible, more of its cadre becomes identifiable, its institutions become concrete—literally. It morphs from a stealth force into a sitting duck, easier pickings. Hamas should have known that much as land grabbing and peace are incompatible, resistance and governance (under occupation) are simply irreconcilable. Hamas had a choice and it chose governance. It would appear this Islamist group thought it had absolutely nothing to learn from Fatah. But then again, of all the flaws that make one of the PLO under Yasser Arafat and those who came after him, and Hamas (and those certain to come after it) the most detrimental is a crippling intoxication with power and a devastating disinterest in the grueling and painstaking struggle for liberation.

For this breathtaking failure of leadership, the Palestinians have been paying the highest price. Now they are two movements down and there is not a third voice in sight. In their century-long battle for a fistful of biblical sand, this moment is historic: where it most counts for the Palestinians—a dignified life in a state of their own—Fatah and Hamas, for all the wiliness of Arafat, the toadying of Abbas and the fury of Hamas, have delivered nothing and are all but bankrupt. Since their inception, Hamas and Fatah have each committed many follies and followed many a wrong path, but it was sheer madness to finally achieve for Israel what it could not have accomplished by its own wits alone.

Where to from here?

When Gaza quiets down, the more Hamas’s wounds, the more boastful its victory lap will be, and the fewer its wounds, the more boastful its victory lap will be. You see, however major the strategic miscalculations, however great the losses and traumatizing the outcome, there is no place for defeat in our Arab dictionaries, because when we die in our battles with Israel, we die as martyrs, and when we survive, we live as heroes.

For Israel, this hardly matters. If Hamas is visibly beaten down, then more radical elements will pick up where it left off and Israel will have an even more attractive pack of enemies; and if Hamas stays defiant and retains control of its boxed in, flattened strip of land, then all the better because Israel will have an even softer punching bag. Needless to say, Mahmoud Abbas will be what all moderates usually become when blood is shed and violence sets up camp: enfeebled, discredited, irrelevant.

And yet because of that chocking embrace, Israel will still be stuck where it was before it embarked on Operation Cast Lead: its democracy in tatters, its society at once implacable and demoralized, its Jewishness still in jeopardy, and an occupation that is sure to keep eating into the three of them.

IV

A tragic panorama, you’re sure to think, irrespective of the side of the fence you happen to be standing on—and it is primed to become even more harrowing. Alas, the audacity needed to bring the two-state solution back from the dead, even if Obamanesque in name, will have to be herculean in size. Not surprisingly, as fast as the vision of two states is dissolving into a mirage, the imponderables of the past are becoming the only possibilities of the future. One old, particularly sinister Israeli idea currently being openly peddled by the likes of John Bolton as a respectable way out is a Jordanian nanny in the West Bank and an Egyptian one in Gaza.

War in the Gaza Strip demonstrates yet again that the current governance paradigm for the Palestinian people has failed. Terrorists financed and supplied by Iran control Gaza; the Palestinian Authority is broken, probably irretrievably; and economic development is stalled in Gaza and the West Bank….Given this landscape, we should ask why we still advocate the "two-state solution," with Israel and "Palestine" living side by side in peace, as the mantra goes…Instead, we should look to a "three-state" approach, where Gaza is returned to Egyptian control and the West Bank in some configuration reverts to Jordanian sovereignty.

Thankfully the gods of subtlety were taking a snooze when Bolton popped out of his mother because, when it comes to saying it like it is, there is no one quite like this much mustachioed, neoconservative, one-two-punch. Who better, then, than a straight shooting friend of Israel’s to imbue a loathsome notion with the air of resigned inevitability? If not this infernal exit for the Palestinians and their Jordanian and Egyptian neighbors, there is another no less searing for Israel: a bi-national state. Other than these two propositions, we have, of course, permanent occupation.

No wonder the hip, hip, hoorays for the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative have suddenly begun to sound in the West after four years of silence. Hope has become dirt poor again and is frantically looking for shelter, and short of this last ditch of a peace effort the alternatives are few and all plainly deadly.

My Goat for Your Cucumber/Part Two

Watch the Cookie Crumble


Since 2008 insists on ending with cascades of howling, giggling images, I want to share with you a few more of these before final thoughts can take their place at the tail end of this year and perhaps—perhaps—that of an era. The surreal camera angles are not just snapshots of decay laced with black humor, they are markers of change, sly and yet far reaching.

Big words for such a small post, so let me tone down the drama by plainly stating that in the Middle East you can actually put lipstick on a pig. And we do. All the time. Every day.

In tomb-like Gaza, 500 to 600 secret tunnels link Gazans to Egypt and literally life itself. The border is so short and they are so many that barely a few centimeters separate one from the other. In the miserable old days, the goods that travelled through these tunnels went straight to the black market. But the more hellish Gaza became, the whiter they turned, finally becoming a very respectable, vanilla-white slice of its official, and officially, dead economy.

In recognition of their contribution to the struggle for Palestinian breath, the Ministry of Interior of Hamas has established a Tunnel Administration. The legal contracts between the property owners and diggers are called Underground Commercial Venues. This is how Hamas oversees the flow of material: “Typically, the government provides smugglers with a list of permitted items, regulates prices and collects taxes (fuel is taxed in kind). Hamas itself requests specific items, especially weapons, spare parts and medicine. The government films tunnel activity and posts monitors, who work eight-hour shifts…should smugglers cheat, they have to pay a penalty—‘or get shot in the legs’. Alternatively, Hamas might inform Egypt about the tunnel, which then would likely be destroyed.” (Crisis Group Report, “Round Two in Gaza, September 11, 2008, p. 14).

I can’t be sure, but I am willing to bet that the tongues of the Crisis Group team were nowhere near their cheeks when they were writing this report.

The good news is that the tunnels are helping Gazans breathe. The bad news is that all they get to breathe is their own shit, millions of liters worth contaminating the Mediterranean Sea and fresh water reserves, infecting Palestinian hearts and souls along with them. I specifically mention the heart and soul because while the people may be respiring, precious air is fast seeping out of the education, transportation, health and private sectors.

I can’t be sure, but I am willing to bet that Gazans are just dying to find out how Hamas plans to spin from an open, sewage-filled, hungry, work-deprived, unschooled, isolated, paralyzed, broken, warring prison--a free Palestine. Attaching adjectives to Israel and its siege is easy enough. The question is, how many of them is Israel happily lending to Hamas as lipstick for its own pig of a situation? I, like Ha'aretz’s Amira Haas, say a whole roast of them.

“The brutal siege…saves Hamas from having to cope with the contradiction between its platform (the liberation of all of Palestine) and its integration, despite its denials, into the institutions created by the Oslo Accords. If Israel jeopardizes the lives of premature babies and causes business owners, including supporters of Oslo and Yasser Arafat, to go broke, the Hamas government can present itself as resisting the occupation by its very nature. The extraordinary conditions of the extreme siege and the disconnection between Gaza and the West Bank (another intentional Israeli policy) have made the possibility of holding new Palestinian general elections a very distant one. Hamas can thus bolster its rule with coercion, wages, charity and the consoling power of religion. And perhaps that is exactly what the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces and government want?”

Batty realities in Gaza turn into embarrassingly laughable ones for us Lebanese. There they stood during Independence Day celebrations last Saturday: three men in silly white suits, pretending to be president, prime minister and speaker of parliament of a bubble pretending to be a state, saluting a collection of militarily clad men pretending to be an army and staring somberly at two 40-year-old jets that kept flying back and forth, to and fro, hither and thither, pretending to be an air force. All this for a mass of sniggering individuals pretending to be a nation. You couldn’t but feel nostalgic for that scene in Woody Allen’s Bananas, when Allen, exiting the dining room with El Presidente, turned to the balcony orchestra which had been playing without instruments throughout the whole dinner, and said, “Can you turn the music down? You’re giving me a headache.”

Of course, the whole of central Beirut came to a stop on Saturday in order for Lebanon to live as a fleeting figment in these people’s imagination.

Blood sister that it is, the absurdity that is Syria is no less absurd than the absurdity that is Lebanon. Recently, this self-professed beacon of Arab light has revealed itself, once again, for the very dark tale of whodunits that it actually is. First went the head of Hezbollah’s mercurial Imad Mughnieyh, then Brigadier General Mohammad Suleiman gets it in both eyes while resting in his much-protected Chalet in Latakia, then two car bombs go off in Damascus. As usual, and very much in Libano-Syrian style, there are multiple plausible scenarios for these mysteries, each with winding, bushy, thorny roads leading to many winding, bushy, thorny paths to the future, by the end of which one is almost desperate for some of that Rumsfeldian prose.

As we know, There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know There are known unknowns.

That is to say We know there are some things We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

Free verse that Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashed al Maktoum, the one-time visionary and current dunce of the Gulf, is probably reciting round the clock to reassure himself about his credit-fueled Dubai’s imperviousness to the financial meltdown. Who knows? The Sheikh might be under the very strong (and right) impression that Dubai has become too big, its debts too high and “services” too precious for its neighbors to let it down. And they most probably will not. But that’s not where the story is. When the dust has settled, Dubai, though trimmed and clipped and chastened, will still be standing; however, the pillars on which it was built will not.

Only last year, at a leadership conference sponsored by the London Business School, Niall Ferguson warned his audience that war in the Middle East was more likely than they thought. Asked to explain himself in full sight of the sparkling jewel that is Dubai, the historian retorted that he would not invest a penny in that tin city. Actually, there was a time—the early 1990s, to be exact—when one could trace the contours of interesting, bold possibilities in the desert. Soon enough, however, what looked like an intriguing vision morphed into the longest trip on LSD. When a few of us party poopers expressed skepticism about the longevity of a phantasmagoric city-state conceived by borrowed brains, financed by borrowed funds, constructed by borrowed hands, overseen by borrowed high management, run by borrowed middle management and floating on bubbles of hot air and a sea of angry contradictions, we were laughed out of the room as small people hooked on small schemes. Dubai was the future, and we were all about the past.

Well, the past has pretty much caught up with Dubai’s future, although it’s not clear whether the Sheikh and his men have begun to internalize the ugly facts. As things began to fall apart, Nakheel, a state-owned property development giant, announced plans at an event to build a one-kilometer tall building, which prompted a participant to stand up and finally—finally--ask the question that has long been on many a bemused mind: Why? The multimillion, star-studded extravaganza a few days ago to launch the appropriately named Atlantis Hotel was one very quizzical answer.

What the hell, this is sand country, and in the head-in-the-sand business we are pros: no people do it more or better. Our pain screams still, but rarely do we feel the direction of a headwind, sense an impending disaster, sniff an opportunity, catch the meaning of an absurdity staring us in the face. For those who feel like protesting right about now, I don’t want to rub it in, but I do have the urge to let slip 1967 by way of a teaser and, maybe for added flavor, bring in the latest shocker of how America ended up in Iraq and Saddam six feet under.

In closing this chapter, I suppose I could dwell for a while on the spectacle of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah holding forth recently on the need for religious tolerance and a dialogue between civilizations. But, frankly, we already know there is not enough lipstick in the world to smear on this one (I am talking about the Saudi initiative, not the king). Of course, good manners prevented attendees of the Saudi-sponsored Interfaith UN Conference from asking the monarch what genuine reforms he has passed as of late to address, oh, say, the delicate circumstance of women, or Shiites, or those who would like to worship the Christian way in his oasis. No one at the Conference thought to ask him either why Mr. Abdularahman al-Lahem, the lawyer of the Qatif rape girl was denied permission to leave Saudi Arabia, the very same week of the UN deliberations, for a Human Rights Watch gathering in London.

****

It could be that we Arabs seem little aware of the meaning of the weirdness that permeates our days because we really don’t feel it’s ours alone. We may have an abundance of moronic leaders and salivating Savonarolas issuing tragic-comic fatwas which obsess about all that threatens to moan and groan under the belt, but our chiefs are not the only ones who have perfected the art of appearing at their creepiest when they’re being at their most serious. It’s a straight, short walk that takes us from them to doggon-it, say-it-aint-so-Joe, Pentecostal Sarah Palin and the Imam-Mahdi-is-my-best-friend, I-the-divine, we-have-no homosexuals-in-Iran, alhamdulillah Ahmadenijad. And it’s literally no leap of faith (or nationality, for that matter) from that one to bring-me-70-Palestinian-corpses-a-day Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s minister of transportation and IDF Chief of Staff during the second intifada.

Deliciously ironic as well are the modesty patrols in Haredi quarters in Israel which are very busy bridging the “cultural” divide between the Jewish state and the neighborhood. Leave it to us women to bring together in perfect harmony mortal enemies everywhere else. And, for all their ugliness, Haredi patrols are hardly Israel’s most dire prospect. Of all the wars raging inside it, the most riveting is the one between two sets of religious fanatics, one as mortified by Jewish converts as the other is desperate for them. In this furious face-off, it appears that sex during menstruation for Israel’s Ultra Orthodox Rabbinical Courts is more than enough to declare not Jewish the errant converts religious Zionists are eagerly minting in their frantic race against the tireless energy of the Palestinian libido. According to the miffed Moshe Gafni of the Ultra Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, “There is something more important than the state of Israel and Zionism… Unlike Christians, we Jews are not missionaries. If someone really wants to join the Jewish people, we're going to make it difficult for them." (WP, August 30, 2008). Here’s a piece of good news for Palestinians in a life of awful one!

In the midst of all this nuttiness, nervous Israelis might well be cheered by all the impressive statistics and ingenious qualities that tell them they are still different from, way better than, the rest of us sourpuss Arabs. Or they might want to mull over the infinitely more terrifying likelihood that they actually are not. So many little Israels, so many clashing visions, and such little room for all of them to play without wrecking each other’s sandcastles.

It all looks Middle Eastern enough to me.

My Goat for Your Cucumber/Part One

“They killed female goats because their reproductive organs were uncovered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram (profane). They branded cucumbers as male and tomatoes as female, and they forbade our women from buying cucumbers….”
(Hameed al Hayess, one of Anbar’s tribal chiefs on the wondrous teachings of al Qaeda. Quoted in a Reuters article in August).

Heartbreaking, isn’t it, how madness cackles atop our tragedies: hundreds of thousands slain, a people terrorized, a nation shellshocked by a gang of sexually disturbed, God-obsessed suicidal lunatics whose derangement is finally exposed by the bare-assed goat and the perpetually erect cucumber.

Twenty years from now as we all look back on (hopefully) the eclipse of al Qaeda in Sunni Iraq, it might well be the cucumbers and tomatoes we thank although you would not know it from all the recent coverage on the supposed extrication of Anbar (and other provinces) from a terrible predicament. Because, well, where can serious thinkers fit such lunacy in their somber analyses? And so, when time comes to blast, for example, the trumpets for Anbar, death is stripped of its clown suit and sexually harassed goats, allowed to graze in earlier scenes, are airbrushed out of the grand finale, where Petraeus’s genius, the Iraqi army’s revival and awakened tribalism are all given the space to--pardon the pun--surge triumphantly forward. To be fair, al Qaeda’s travails are mentioned but the cucumbers are recycled as strategic mistakes and the killing of cock-teasing goats is touched up as indiscriminate cruelty. This way, mayhem gets to keep its good name and we get to paper over the idiocy that afflicts many of this region’s troublemakers, lest the “silly” talk make light of the genuine catastrophes they helped bring about.

Some jaded observers might protest that this is an old, much covered story. Our sagas have long offered a mélange of filth and flimsiness which always made Western types positively giddy from the seediness of it all. And zany Marquezian characters like Muammar Qaddafi, who are just as good at provoking laughter as they are at snuffing out a life, have been around for decades now. True. But this is not about exotica in deadly locales, this is about a public arena that has become almost totally beholden to a ruinous lot. The cultural malaise that one can sniff everywhere in the air, the political discourse that has deteriorated into farce, the drivel from the pseudo-religious brigades and the sphinxes at the top which insult the mind and deflate the spirit, the perverseness that obsesses about all things sexual; it’s as if this place—this whole Arab dominion—has finally reconciled itself to an existence as jejune as it is indecent. Look under any current high-stakes political game, religious fatwa, draft law, or campaign that promises (or threatens) to leave footprints deep in our mud and you will very likely see a queue of blithering idiots churning out the scripts.

Witness withering Palestine: two failed liberation movements shoved this way and that by a remorseless occupation; fundamentalist currents nibbling on Hamas now, much like Hamas nibbled on Fatah before; rampant poverty; fratricide; a cause in absolute tatters… In full view of this torment, Hamas’s Mahmoud Zahar offers this flash of brilliance in a meeting with a group of journalists last month: “The party that is in Ramallah (Abbas) does not want reconciliation until the American pond dries up and the frogs in it are counted.” Reading these words, I couldn’t but remember another place, another siege and the face of Arafat memorably telling a TV interviewer in 1982: “Put cat in corner...Tiger.”

In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) claim a solid following and where an estimated 80 percent of women are veiled, it appears that sexual harassment has reached epidemic levels. In the latest survey conducted by the Center for Women’s Rights, 62 percent of interviewed men admitted to harassing women, and the overwhelming majority of surveyed women reported suffering sexual harassment. All this, however, is nowhere near as intriguing as the revelation that veiled women actually encountered higher incidents of harassment after covering up. One such furious soul told Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post (August 17, 2008), “These guys are animals. If they saw a female dog, they would harass it.”

But all this bad news for the veil, for Egypt’s ostensibly conservative values, for the MB’s promise of respect through modesty, for female dogs, has not discouraged an anonymous group of Egyptian do-gooders from launching an on-line campaign to promote the hijab by likening the female to a lollipop and—yup, you guessed it--men to flies. Are you catching on how literally beastly our position has become?

You Cannot Stop Them, But You Can

Protect Yourself

I don’t know? Every time I look at this ad, I think to myself, why cover up when you can just zap the suckers.

While the Egyptian MB were no doubt trying to figure out how a society can be at one and the same time more devout and more predatory towards its women, the head of the Doctor’s Syndicate, a fellow with strong ties to the “Brothers,” proposed a law that would restrict organ transplants to family members and prohibit them between people from different religions and nationalities. Under attack by human rights organizations, the good doctor insisted that the law is meant to address the problem of trafficking in human organs. Which kind of makes you wonder, because if the law restricts transplants to family members, why add nationality and religion?

Not to be outdone, Saudi Arabia’s religious police last July came up with yet another gem. They banned the sale of pet cats and dogs and walking those already sold in public places in Riyadh because they are used by men—here we go again—“as a chick magnet.”

Only two days ago, Al Lihedan, the primo shaikh of KSA, fatwaed (might as well make of the damn thing a verb, it’s practically English now) that owners of TV satellites should be killed because they “broadcast bad programs…Those calling for corrupt beliefs, certainly it's permissible to kill them. Those calling for sedition, those who are able to prevent it but don't, it is permissible to kill them."

Alas, howls and giggles have become the flip sides of Arab life: flip it this way, you get anguish, flip it that way and it's masquerade party.

More to come.

Welcome to Lebanon!

There was mention of a livable abyss in this Lebanon, in an earlier post (Jan.9, 08)): not like Zimbabwe, not like Haiti, not like Iraq, not that kind of carnage, not that side of turmoil. Something much kinder in fact: death a la carte, chaos on a tight leash, violence that leaks from the kitchen faucet as opposed to that which floods the entire house. In political speak: a tacit agreement between the warring parties to inflict pain but stay away from wholesale torture, to peacefully divvy up the place and sink deep in red ink the sharp, clear lines, the dos and don’ts, that drive its politics.

I pronounced Lebanon dead. Dead because it never could figure our why it must be. Dead because from the start it was made up of tiny dreams, of small calculations, of trivial ambitions, of narrow visions all at odds, all happy to embrace any idea but that of Lebanon. Dead because the cynicism of its shepherds comes in abundance, their wisdom in dribs and drabs. Dead because, for all its blemishes, to its many suitors it remained beautiful, ready to be had again, and again, and again.

But it seemed to me that the so longs and as ifs in this enclave on the Levantine coast might just be enough for a semblance of an afterlife. Perhaps mine was nothing more than fascination with a people who were collectively finished but individually very much alive, going about the business of life while their screaming politics, a mad Mrs. Rochester, let loose dreadful sounds and lunatic giggles every once in a while from the attic reminding the residents below of an ominous moment yet to come. And here it is with us now. This house burns.

Last week’s fury has shown how buffoonery can at a moment’s notice morph into madness. Sacrosanct, sky-high red walls have been brought down. We, Lebanese, are sitting stunned, the politically astute amongst us unable to predict tomorrow or fathom exactly what happened yesterday, the most cynical confidently churning out tactics and chess moves so utterly devilish, so pitch-perfect, you’d think the gods are in this fight and the rest of us are just poor, hapless, stupid humans lining up for the usual ritual sacrifice.

Such is the price of ignorance when you are asked to think your way out of near-total darkness: facts appear to you as shadows would, the tangibles fading in and out of the mind’s eye. And such is the price of ignorance in a Lebanon where the givens are so temperamental and politics is at once unbearably crude and ridiculously complicated. That is why our facial expressions keep changing as we bear witness to a country that keeps swinging between seismic shifts and stasis.

Eventually, and maybe very soon, events will point to the shape of our future. Into it, they are sure to pour the residues of the cruel pounding our realities have just received; realities dictated by sectarian taboos and fed by age-old parochial sentiments; realities sustained by a very fragile regional and local balance of wills and a resistance movement’s multiple identities and grand ambitions.

I don’t know what will happen next, but the latest disturbances were more than replays of Lebanon’s morbidly familiar sectarian discords. They were the last rung in the ladder that has taken the Party of God to the bottom of the Lebanese morass. These past five days have finally ushered in a very provincial Hezbollah--its nationalist credentials now muddied and strategic weight made much lighter. However powerful it shall remain within the political confines of Lebanon, against Israel its status has become perceptibly more vulnerable. For what resistance movement in history has thrived and fought well and won when its own people were deeply suspicious of its intentions and actively hostile to its cause.

It is not clear which ally incited, or which enemy provoked, Hezbollah’s military offensive, but what is unmistakable is that the gambit has failed. I hear its aftershocks are already reverberating in the Southern Suburbs. If this is true, then Damascus and Tehran and Tel Aviv are well into evaluating their impact.

The sad irony for Hezbollah is that it would not have ended up so very small and Lebanese had its grasp of the country’s confessional mosaic not been so mystifyingly weak. I suspect that the party genuinely believed that it had enough cross-sectarian support to bless its assault on the Sunni and Druze pillars of March 14 and the frustrating status quo that has held against its best efforts in the past 18 months. Hezbollah must have been convinced that the Lebanese people, across the divides, are just as taken as the movement is with its exceptionalism, not realizing that in Lebanon no one, however mighty, can ever be an exception to the rules. And hence during a week of crass muscle flexing, the earth shook but time-honored mind-sets and practices barely stirred. Only the sanctity of Hezbollah’s weapons died on the streets of Sunni Beirut and in the villages of the Druze mountains. Only the dignity of its purpose took a serious drubbing.

What a rude awakening!

As of this moment, I have only one message for Siyyid Hassan Nassrallah: Welcome to Lebanon.

So, Who’s the Bimbo? Part Two

I’ve been staring at this swinging Haifa and these floating black swans for weeks on end. Even in private thought I catch myself tiptoeing around these women and the fabrics that clad them. That’s the trouble with our veil: it has become radioactive. On it hang the prospects of a debate that is as contrived and fatuous in certain circles as it is serious and consequential in others. Of all our items of clothing, it carries within it a symbolism that is as political as it is sexual, as chauvinistic as it is emancipatory, as regressive as it is contemporary.

Not for the squeamish, therefore, talk about this precious veil! You have to sew your sentences ever so carefully and stitch your ideas together with such delicacy, although the image you’re finally embroidering deep into the surface of this issue is anything but pretty.

****

There is no doubt they’re special, these women—iconic, really. For many, they tell tales about dissonance and malaise, about rough endings and radical departures, modishness and piety when they are read backward or worn upside down. In conversations here and elsewhere Haifa and the black swans are often tagged as the human summations of our confused sense of Arab Muslim self, testimonies of our inability or unwillingness to write a meaningful narrative that neither plagiarizes from the West nor seeks inspiration in a distressingly introverted Islam.

Haifa, well, Haifa’s story is plain enough—at least to the eye: bimboism, as a supracultural trend, bimboism by the cookie cutter, if you like, and, inevitably, the female as sex object. Wherever you see her, however sassy or attractive she may be, she is everywhere the same. Of course, in her own backyard—the Arab world—poor Haifa carries even heavier baggage for most of the region’s religiously devout: she is visual proof of our drooling mimicry of the West, our susceptibility to its lasciviousness, our flouting, and with such scandalous nonchalance, the very clear commands of Islam. She is the very reason we need to turn back and inward and (for the most zealous among the faithful) fade our femaleness into black.

Which brings me to the lovely ladies traveling by her side. By looks alone, you would think that they and Haifa are worlds apart, that they pray to clashing deities, live by colliding value systems. The dress code alone would make any arguments to the contrary rather cheeky. They themselves would probably bristle at the suggestion that the one thing that makes them appear so physically different from one another is what actually makes of them the best of sisters: sex. Their sex, to be more precise, and the sheer lure of it which Haifa flaunts with such relish and which they hide with such zeal.

Mind you, there are plenty of us women populating the space between Haifa and the niqabis. We all spend fractions of our mornings and evenings determining how much we want to expose of ourselves. Call it our daily give-and-take with our femaleness. Sexuality, shi’na am abaina (whether we want it or not), is the first hanger we take out from a closet crowded with moods, tastes and identities. And here’s where Islamism pretends to leave the premises, all while installing itself king of the house: contrary to its contention that the veil is the Muslim woman’s path away from such potentially demeaning chitchats, it is a march smack into the heart of them, as screaming a voice for the objectification of female sexuality as Haifa’s zigzagging black rope without which her dress and she can never be one. For in that act that a woman takes to cover up in order to render more bearable her seductiveness, to temper—so to speak--the Eve in her, she is not authoring new rules for this ageless game, she’s playing by the oldest of them: like the famous chanteuse, she is embracing her sexuality’s wicked sway over men but is dutifully opting to switch it off rather than turn it on. And so, after traveling long and hard away from Haifa, she finds herself at the end of the trip right where she started: standing very close to the flaming tigress herself.

But of course, in these nervous times these musings are tantamount to petty rabblerousing, akin to pissing on someone’s party. It would defeat the objective of all this name calling inside and out, wouldn’t it, if these symbols of our cultural waywardness (Haifa) or religious atavisms (the black swans) turn out to be the creative handiwork of the very same mindset? A sharboukeh, we call this quandary in Arabic, a real tangle, because entire civilizations have been mobilized, enough books have been churned out to stack up libraries, intellectual powerhouses have been called in, eyebrows are in permanent mating, mouths are salivating all around their angry rim…You want to laugh at all this, but somehow something about the sorry sight kills the glib in you.

So, I don’t want to be glib about any of it, and I especially don’t want to be glib about the veil. Not the veil! Because here’s a piece of fabric that might well be as old as Gilgamesh himself and yet is forever young and vibrant. It has lived in so many countries and travelled to so many places, no more than a formality in that culture, no less than chastity itself in this one. It’s a chameleon: to some, soft and colorful and ever so light on the face; to others, heavy and immovable, wrapping bodies the way death swallows up life. It is versatile: to that daughter a quiet, even tentative, negotiation with “modernity;” to this one, pitchfork-angry, despotic and sadistic. It can play uncle, protecting its weary women from the incessant harassments of idiotic men, or be the best disguise for naughty girls in need of the perfect cover on illicit outings. It also can be out-and-out political, as the last few decades have shown. Yes, this perennial hallmark of female virtue has entered the political fray, in certain neighborhoods willingly, in others with its feet kicking and dragging. It has become a basic matter of identity--not all of it, to be sure, but enough of it for many of us to wear it as an act of cultural and political rebellion. It is no small irony, of course, that by willfully choosing to make our sexuality so inconspicuous we have rendered it the most conspicuous marker of this supposedly new identity.

Impressive, this remarkable ability of a piece of fabric to straddle so many realms and crown so many heads! How cleverly it mixes sexuality with politics with jingoism with culture with religion, and makes of the female the most valuable currency in this endless haggling over who we are. To talk about the veil today as a mere religious requirement would in fact be a violation of its civil and political rights: it strips it from much of its substance, denies its actual appeal and silences the crowds of motivations that have carried it triumphant out of its religious bounds. In countries that have made of diversity and pluralism umbrellas for feuding lifestyles and conflicting belief systems, the veil can be pretty much whatever it wants to be. However widespread and assertive it is in its own milieu, at its most ambitious it would be only one among many chapters on the challenges of assimilation and tolerance. But in instinctively conservative societies, the more popular it is, the more unnerving it becomes. Just by showing up, it has the capacity to harass women whose sexuality is as irreligious as it is apolitical. Watch it in Turkey become a victim of its resounding success everywhere in the region: no matter how loud or truthful its protestations that it is nothing more than a fulfillment of a scriptural obligation, no one will believe it. And with good reason, because if Islam’s manifest destiny is to colonize every dominion of life—or if it is in fact life itself, as its Islamist champions openly claim
--then the veil is the most vivid demonstration of its irredentist tendencies.

*****

None of us has to spend too much time figuring out the reasons for the veil and its glory. They run around in rowdy packs screaming their way down our history. One is about a frazzled people’s hope that their religion will help them crawl out of their deep well of impotence. One is about how fickle we Middle Easterners always were about our secularism and how little we appreciated the beauty of it. One is about the search for companionship in landscapes emptied from every lover but religion. Yet another is nothing more than misogyny calling itself the word of God. Still others are about the need to believe that Islam can offer its own version of modernity, that there is more than one way to feel liberated and free, even if it means living in tomb-like darkness. That our womanhood should become so hopelessly entangled in an entire region’s convulsive relationship with its faith, its history, its place in the here and now, its political masters, the West, tells you how utterly indispensible we are in this struggle and how confounding our situation is because of it.

But don’t go around mocking those women who think they have set themselves free by covering up. That they have stood emancipation on its head in this day and age is no easy feat. And kid yourself not, most of them are no pushovers—sort of like Haifa herself. Research (see Lara Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shii Lebanon, and Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate) reveals that younger generations of educated women from secular middle and upper middle class families have enthusiastically taken up the veil to create for themselves a life that is self-consciously skeptical about a Westernism that comes in all or nothing packages. They want to pick and choose their way through things contemporary, mix and match PhDs’ and careers and financial independence with a white veil and tight black skirt today, a mauve one and jeans tomorrow. On many an intrepid face, you see lipstick accentuating the color of humility, bright eye liner complimenting it. In marveling at these women, we rarely compute that their rather imaginatively veiled displays are actually far more demanding of Islamism (yes, the ism is deliberate) than they are of the modern life. The latter is happy to indulge them as much as it tolerates all of us, all the way to Haifa’s side of the bargain. It is the former that is being asked to concede much because it is infinitely more particular about what it wants from its women. It is being asked to concede that the veil speaks with more than one tongue, likes having more than one interpretation, enjoys more than one standard, boasts more than one cultural accent, even if it dwells happily within the shifting walls of its faith.

*****

Still, as a woman of this place and of this religion, as someone who, without hesitation, insists on every woman’s right to live with the veil or without it, I cannot but wonder at the astounding cleverness of this piece of cloth. All these twists and turns and layers and upon layers of emotions and thoughts and expectations and disappointments and heartbreaks suffusing it and imbuing it with such meaning, when, in truth, it has always been, by its own admission, about one very crude supposition: the sinful magnetism of the female and the burden we shoulder in physically shielding men from her.

Had I been, strictly speaking, a woman of faith, I might have lingered momentarily, as other woman have before me, at the obvious notion that since God went through all this trouble to create all this attractiveness in the female, the last thing he would want her to do is wrap it up. And since this life presumably is one long test of human will, I would have puzzled over why the onus then is not on the man to get over it and control his ups and downs. Not very rigorous intellectual or theological observations, I admit, and yet somehow they seem more than enough--at least for this female.