The Guardian has an interactive and updated timeline on the events labeled the “Arab Spring,” with links to articles in The Guardian. You can choose the time period and the country and the type of event or issue. It is current through September 26, 2011.
The Saudi ambassador to the US Adel al-Jubeir speaks during Middle East peace conference in Maryland in 2007
The news dominating coverage of the Middle East today catapults Iran and the Palestinians over the ongoing Arab Spring. Even the fact that tens of thousands of Syrians turned out in Damascus to support the Asad regime pales in relation to the James Bond scenario of Iranians, drinking tequila with Mexican drug runners in order to set up the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. It sounds like a movie plot, but then so does the whole Arab spring since February. American officials are acting as though they have slam-dunk proof, which is a dangerous sign when no one has seen even an iota of that proof apart from the allegations given by Attorney General Holder. And it seems the culprit has confessed, so what more needs to be said? The plot is plausible to most Americans, I suspect, because one expects Iran to engage in terrorism and the government officials in Iran despise the Saudis as much as they do the United States. It sure makes Eric Holder, who has come under blistering attack by Republican hawks, smell like a rose.
Also headlining the news today is the agreement between Israel and Hamas in which some 1,027 Palestinians being held in Israel jails will be exchanged for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured some five years ago. And the plot thickens, because the exchange of 1000/1 is taken as a victory by both sides. The dark side is that such a deal reinforces the notion that Israel lives are more valuable than Palestinian lives at the same time as individuals are being freed rather than blown up. Given previous hard-line rhetoric of Netanyahu, the idea of such a trade also seems something dreamed up in a novel.
There are serious plots in which people die every day, such as more bombs in Iraq. And there are, in biblical terms, rumors of plots. These two events today would be earth-shaking on any day, but are especially ripe for punditry at this juncture in the region. What will the impact of this release mean on the Palestinian quest for statehood in the U.N.? What new sanctions can be brought out against Iran? And if the Saudi ambassador had been killed, along with a number of Americans, what would have been the response of the Obama administration? I can only imagine the re-election landslide if Obama and the Israelis were to successfully launch an attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear plant. He would be drinking tea all the way to a second term in the White House.
Let’s see what new plot unfolds tomorrow…
Eduard Glaser (1855-1908), left; Walter Dostal (1928-2011), right
[In early August the academic community lost one of the pioneers of ethnographic study on the Arabian Peninsula, the distinguished Austrian scholar Walter Dostal. Here is the obituary from the Austrian Academy of Sciences website.]
With Walter Dostal’s passing away in Vienna on August 6th/7th 2011, the anthropological communities in Austria, Central Europe and the German-speaking countries lose one of their best-known representatives shaping the field throughout the latter quarter of the 20th century.
Dostal was best known for his ethnographic studies of Arabian and Middle Eastern societies, but he also contributed substantially to anthropological theory – with particular emphasis on the interplay between environment, society, and history. As a leading expert for the Arab peninsula at this Academy, Dostal continued a remarkable research record into the early 21st century which at the Academy of Sciences goes back to the late 19th century.
Dostal had belonged to the first generation of anthropology students trained after the second world war, and his scholarly work was committed to build a new and internationally oriented foundation for the discipline once called “Völkerkunde” in the German-speaking countries after 1945. Born on May 15th 1928 in Grulich near Brno (today: Czech Republic), Dostal and his family moved at the end of the war to Vienna where he began his studies in anthropology. His critical engagement with the so-called “Culture Circles” theory led him to reject any speculative historical models, and to appreciate the empirical archaeological and textual evidence. Formative influences during those early years of his career were Robert Heine-Geldern (a corresponding member of the AAS) and Joseph Henninger. After his dissertation on Semitic-speaking peoples he began a first sequence of ethnographic fieldwork in the Arab peninsula, which he combined with international research sojourns in Frankfurt and Rome, and his first position as Curator for the Middle Eastern section at Vienna’s Ethnology Museum. Continue reading Walter Dostal (1928-2011)
Consider the opening line of the lead story in yesterday’s New York Times:
BAGHDAD — Saudi Arabia and Libya, both considered allies by the United States in its fight against terrorism, were the source of about 60 percent of the foreign fighters who came to Iraq in the past year to serve as suicide bombers or to facilitate other attacks, according to senior American military officials.
In the long durée, as Napoleon might say if he were alive today, politics makes strange embedded fellows of nation states. There are three nations at play here in the field of lording over by the world’s reigning super power. Iraq and Libya had European imposed (and later revolution-deposed) monarchs at mid-stream in the 20th century. At the same time Saudi Arabia’s royal line evolved an iconclastic religiously mandated kingship that has withstood toppling and seems likely to do so far into the security based future. All three states are where they are today largely because of the world’s thirst for crude oil. The same three states, should Iraq survive de facto federation, face a future defined by a mega-politicized war on terrorism, a war with no state-like enemies being fought by a coalition of nation states willing to arm themselves to the teeth with conventional weapons and make airline passengers take their shoes off each and every time they fly. Two centuries from now a future Napoleon, whatever his or her nationality, may look back on the current political climate and have a hindsight sense of déjà vu, or will it be more of the voodoo politics mass mediated today? Continue reading Tabsir Redux: Déjà Voodoo
BY Karim Sadjapour, Foreign Policy, June 15, 2011
How a couple of cows explain a changing region: equal opportunity offender edition.
In the early years of the Cold War, in an effort to simplify — and parody — various political ideologies and philosophies, irreverent wits, in the spirit of George Orwell, went back to the farm. No one really knows how the two-cow joke known as “Parable of the Isms” came about, but most students of Political Science 101 have likely come across some variation of the following definitions:
Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one of them and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism: You have two cows. The government takes them both and provides you with milk.
Nazism: You have two cows. The government shoots you and takes the cows.
Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
Over the years, the parables gradually expanded, using the two-cow joke to explain everything from French unions (You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.) to the Republican Party (You have two cows. Your neighbor has none. So what?). While in its original iteration the cows were a metaphor for currency, capital, and property, they later began to take on different meanings.
Today, the Middle East has replaced the Cold War as America’s primary foreign-policy preoccupation. As opposed to the seemingly ideologically homogenous communist bloc, however, the 22 diverse countries that compose the modern Middle East are still confusing to most Americans. Why can’t the Israeli and Palestinians stop fighting already? What’s the difference between Libya and Lebanon again?
Herewith then is a satirical effort to simplify the essence of Middle Eastern governments so that, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, “the boys in Lubbock” can read it. And, rather than symbolizing property, the cows here symbolize people, which — funny enough — is how most Middle Eastern regimes have traditionally viewed their populations.
Saudi Arabia
You have two cows with endless reserves of milk. Gorge them with grass, prevent them from interacting with bulls, and import South Asians to milk them.
Iran
You have two cows. You interrogate them until they concede they are Zionist agents. You send their milk to southern Lebanon and Gaza, or render it into highly enriched cream. International sanctions prevent your milk from being bought on the open market.
Syria
You have five cows, one of whom is an Alawite. Feed the Alawite cow well; beat the non-Alawite cows. Use the milk to finance your wife’s shopping sprees in London.
Lebanon
You have two cows. Syria claims ownership over them. You take them abroad and start successful cattle farms in Africa, Australia, and Latin America. You send the proceeds back home so your relatives can afford cosmetic surgery and Mercedes-Benzes.
Hezbollah
You have no cows. During breaks from milking on the teat of the Iranian cow you call for Israel’s annihilation. Continue reading Tabsir Redux: The Cynical Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the New Middle East
Yes, indeed, Saudis can dance to an American tune. Ah, but who’s their Papa?
Check it out on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33FDP0o3s1s&feature=youtube_gdata_player
It is going to be a long hot summer following the wintry start of the Arab spring. Here is a little comic relief from Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqJDuZIcQ34&NR=1
AUC Press has recently published A Photographer on the Hajj, preserving one of the earliest visual records of the Hajj and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The photographs were taken by Muhammad ‘Ali Effendi Sa’udi (1904/1908), a civil servant and accomplished photographer. Check out the website dedicated to the book with a few of the photographs shown there.