A period of reform and loosening of restrictions on personal freedoms seems to be coming to an end in Bahrain, where fears of Sunni-Shia sectarianism and the Iranian Shiite giant a short distance away to the northeast have led to a crackdown.
Thanassis Cambanis, “Crackdown in Bahrain Hints of End to Reforms,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 2010
The Gulf Emirate of Dubai was especially hard hit by the recent global financial crisis. Joshua Hammer reviews three recent books about Dubai in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:
Joshua Hammer, “Good-bye to Dubai,” New York Review of Books, Aug. 19, 2010
The Sept.-Oct. issue of Foreign Affairs is running a series of articles devoted to the Middle East under the heading “Remaking the Middle East.” The NMH community may find this material through the Library’s licensed link to ProQuest.
Anthony Shadid (author of a book on the Iraq war used in this course in past years) writes in today’s New York Times about how Middle Easterners experience past and present:
“It is perhaps a cliché, the way the past intersects with the present in the Middle East, though not necessarily untrue.
In the serpentine alleys around the shrine of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, beside the tumult of Al Hussein in Cairo’s venerable old city and along the majesty of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, what has been here is often more palpable than what is here now. For Arabs, the Crusades resonate in the creation of Israel. Wars in Iraq are cast in millennium-old narratives of suffering and martyrdom.
Perspective becomes politics. So does patience.”
Anthony Shadid, “In Iraq, Wester Clocks but Middle Eastern Time,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2010
A new media outlet called “4Shbab” (“For Youth”) is attempting to reconcile pop music with Muslim values:
Negar Azimi, “Islam’s Answer to MTV,” New York Times Magazine, Aug. 15, 2010
In a significant shift, Arab public opinion has begun tilting toward Iran in spite of fears up to now of Iran’s nuclear development program. In fact, Arabs are beginning to think that program may be good for the Middle East, not bad.
Shibley Telhami, “A Shift in Arab Views of Iran,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 14, 2010
The Economist’s website has posted an account of yesterday’s incident along the border between Israel and Lebanon.
Excerpt:
“EVANGELICAL Christians in the poor world are rarely accused of undermining public order. All the more surprising, then, that in recent months around a hundred have been deported from Morocco for just that. The Christians, mostly from the United States and Europe, have been accused of trying to convert Muslims to Christianity, a crime punishable by imprisonment under Moroccan law, which protects the freedom to practise one’s faith but forbids any attempt to convert others.
Rules against proselytising are quite common in Muslim countries but Morocco has long enjoyed a reputation as a bastion of religious tolerance in the region. Almost all the country’s 32m citizens are Sunni Muslims but churches and synagogues exist, alongside mosques, to cater for the 1% of the people who are Christian or Jewish.”
The Economist, “Stop Preaching or Get Out,” July 29, 2010
The lead editorial of today’s New York Times “Pakistan’s Double Game” contains a good summary of the problems surrounding the behavior of Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) over the course of the last few decades, problems we have been discussing in this course since its inception in 2000. Pakistan has long used the Taliban as a proxy: its overall aim is to build and maintain influence over what happens in Afghanistan, thus preventing Afghanistan from falling into orbit around India, Pakistan’s biggest enemy.
Many in Lebanon fear that the international tribunal investigating the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 will issue indictments of members of the Lebanese Shia movement Hizbullah (also spelled Hezbollah). If that happens, Hizbullah has warned it will not accept the indictments. The outcome could be a new new war picking up, as it were, where the summer 2006 war left off. The following article contains a good summary of Lebanon’s recent political woes (click here for more).
Robert F. Worth, “Hezbollah Looks for Shield From Indictments’ Sting,” New York Times, July 25, 2010
UPDATE – July 30, 2010
President Bashar Assad of Syria and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia are both in Beirut attempting to head off another political crisis and perhaps even another sectarian war.
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