Category Archives: Journalism and Media

Morsi: The Arab World’s Wannabe Mugabe

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

I wonder if the judges who dole out the increasingly meaningless Nobel Peace Prize ever have second or third thoughts. In 2011 the Yemeni journalist Tawakkul Karman shared the prize for her visible opposition to the regime of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Salih. The prize is symbolic to be sure, so it is not surprising that a recipient becomes hyperbolic with the international public attention. Karman was picked because of her advocacy work in Yemen, not because she was a savy expert on Middle East politics. A week ago she decided to cash in on her reputation and lend support to the sit-in followers of deposed President Morsi. The Egyptian authorities, not unsurprisingly, denied her entry for an obvious propaganda tour for the Muslim Brotherhood. Karman is shocked, it seems, that a military regime that would oust a sitting president would then deny her entry to come into Cairo and provide support for the opposition.

Foreign Policy has posted a commentary by Karman entitled Morsy Is the Arab World’s Mandela, with the subtitle Why we must stand and support the Muslim Brotherhood’s fight for democracy. Nelson Mandela? At a time when this fellow recipient of the Peace Prize (in 1993) is rumored to be near death’s door, this is an insult to the work of Mandela to end South Africa’s apartheid. My point is not to vilify or defend Morsi, but to compare him to Mandela is pure media hype. Continue reading Morsi: The Arab World’s Wannabe Mugabe →

A dowdy pundit and an easy target

Gender and Sexuality, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

Some journalist pundits follow the Barnum and Bailey freakocentric approach to writing for the public. It really does not matter if they lean to the left or right, since it is never clear where a rational media center would be. I am actually glad that opinion page and editorial commentaries are amalgamated into the acronymical “op-ed” since it removes the genre further away from being taken seriously. There is plenty of hanging red meat around, a recent example being the New York electoral season with former governor Eliot Spitzer running for city comptroller and former congressman Anthony Weiner attempting to fill the shoes of Mayor Bloomburg. Here are two seasoned politicians with two glaring things in common: both fell from grace due to excessive sexual interests and both have wives who have not taken the route of former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s wife and jilted.

The tabloids are in paradise over these two. So why not the New York Times as well? I guess that is what prompted Maureen Dowd to unleash her op-edible wit and take down “Carlos Danger” AKA Anthony Weiner. In her piece for Sunday, July 28, she began with the following rhetorical volley:

WHEN you puzzle over why the elegant Huma Abedin is propping up the eel-like Anthony Weiner, you must remember one thing: Huma was raised in Saudi Arabia, where women are treated worse by men than anywhere else on the planet. Comparatively speaking, the pol from Queens probably seems like a prince.

When I puzzle over these opening lines, I am not able to forget one thing: Maureen Dowd must have learned everything she thinks she knows about Saudi Arabia from watching the movie Sex and the City 2. Continue reading A dowdy pundit and an easy target →

Punditry: Pondering or Pandering?

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Ethics, Journalism and Media

Having established this blog a little less than a decade ago, I was initially excited about the possibility of responding to things I read about the Middle East and Islam in virtual “real time.” I still have several letters (the kind put on paper) to the editor that never were published where I sent them. Even if they had been eventually published, it would have been a bit late. Blogs seemed a new and accessible way to play the role of a pundit. But there are different paths for punditry. The best kind is pondering about events; the least useful is pandering to a particular point of view.

To ponder is to wonder, which requires taking risks with ideas and sentiments. Pondering goes beyond posturing, which is simply repeating a polemical mantra no matter where it falls on the left-right political spectrum. Pandering results from preaching to the choir, fixating on speaking a specific truth to power that others may not think is a valid “truth” at all. The contentious issues surrounding representation of Islam, Muslims, Arabs, Jews and the gamut of issues that smolder in the region known as the Middle East are not resolved by rhetorical crossfire. I think that sometimes there is so much speech clutter on the internet that voices of reason have little chance of being heard.

Everyone has pet issues and I am certainly no exception. The reader of my posts over the years will find that for the most part I preach tolerance of diverse views with one glaring exception: I am loathe to tolerate intolerance. A dialogue of disagreement, in my mind, is always better than a monologue of “I am right and you are wrong.” To ponder an issue, then, should be to probe it, test it, play with it, throw it around and see what falls out, make it transparent. Dogma ends all dialogue. Continue reading Punditry: Pondering or Pandering? →

Freelancing the Syrian Conflict

"Arab Spring", Gender and Sexuality, Journalism and Media, Syria



A dark, rancid corner Borri says journalists have failed to explain Syria’s civil war because editors only want ‘blood.’ (Alessio Romenzi)

Woman’s Work
The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria

By Francesca Borri, Columbia Journalism Review, July 1

He finally wrote to me. After more than a year of freelancing for him, during which I contracted typhoid fever and was shot in the knee, my editor watched the news, thought I was among the Italian journalists who’d been kidnapped, and sent me an email that said: “Should you get a connection, could you tweet your detention?”

That same day, I returned in the evening to a rebel base where I was staying in the middle of the hell that is Aleppo, and amid the dust and the hunger and the fear, I hoped to find a friend, a kind word, a hug. Instead, I found only another email from Clara, who’s spending her holidays at my home in Italy. She’s already sent me eight “Urgent!” messages. Today she’s looking for my spa badge, so she can enter for free. The rest of the messages in my inbox were like this one: “Brilliant piece today; brilliant like your book on Iraq.” Unfortunately, my book wasn’t on Iraq, but on Kosovo.

People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?” Continue reading Freelancing the Syrian Conflict →

A “Mental” Lapse for David Brooks

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Ethics, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

In today’s New York Times, talking head David Brooks makes what I think on a certain level could be a valid point, but suffers a “mental” lapse in the process. He divides the camps weighing in on the recent military “coup” in Egypt as those who emphasize process and those who emphasize substance. Starting with a simplistic binary is only the first mistake. Process and substance are hardly independent variables. The process he talks about is “democracy,” as though any time a bunch of ballots are collected in what the Carter Center would call a “free election,” there must be democracy. In the Egyptian case, the Carter Center noted that the election was “marred by uncertainty.” It is obvious that there is no “free” election anywhere in the strict sense. People are often intimidated or so ideologically driven that they do not consider the options available. In many elections, Egypt and Iran being only recent examples, the options are so limited that some people do not even bother to vote. Then there is the question of one-person-one vote vs. the electoral patch that underlies the democracy of the United States. Democracy is a chimera if not seen as relative to other forms of political coercion.

But Brooks steps deep in his own bullshit (and then puts his rhetorical foot in his mouth) when he claims that “It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.” The “it” here is the word for a nation state, but the implication is that the people of Egypt are somehow mentally deficient. He does not even bother to clarify that his target is the so-called “Islamists,” but totally ignores the fact that Egyptians are a diverse population with views all across the political spectrum. I wonder what these “basic mental ingredients” are? Can they be found with the Tea Party or even the current debilitating state of the Republican Party in the United States? Does the Democratic Party have such basic mental ingredients when it has conservatives who vote against the Democratic president to secure their seats in Confederate territory? Continue reading A “Mental” Lapse for David Brooks →

The Myth of the “Yemen Model”

"Arab Spring", Development, Journalism and Media, Yemen


Yemen’s Abdul Wahab al-Ansi (C), secretary-general of the party Islah, speaks during a session of the National Dialogue Conference in Sanaa, March 23, 2013. (photo by REUTERS/Mohamed al-Sayaghi)

by Atiaf Zaid Alwazir, Huffington Post, May 29, 2013

Shortly following the internationally funded uncontested election in Yemen, a high-ranking western diplomat berated me for not voting. When I asked him, “would people in your country be happy with a one-person election?” He responded: “people in my country are not trying to kill each other!”

While not all diplomats think this way, unfortunately, that simplistic and ignorant statement is what drives much of western policy on Yemen — if there is a policy — and it is also why it is expected that Yemenis should accept half solutions — should in fact celebrate them!

Maybe misconceptions of Arabs as apolitical, who were just “awakened” by the “Arab Spring,” leads to the belief that anything is a step forward. These misconceptions, if internalized, lead to flawed analysis, and worse they can become disastrous policies.

This is egregiously exemplified by Thomas Friedman’s recent New York Times op-ed (on May 11) where, for example, he states that “the good news is that — for now — a lot of Yemenis really want to give politics a chance.” Friedman is referring to the internationally backed National Dialogue Conference (NDC) in Yemen. The NDC began in March 2013 and is to last for six months, with 565 delegates tasked with providing recommendations and culminating in writing of a new constitution. Friedman’s statement attempts to celebrate Yemenis, while in fact downplaying an entire history of political participation and ignores Yemen’s cultural tradition of dialogue and political pluralism. Yemen has had dialogues before and has operated in a relatively diverse political sphere. The movement for change in 2011 is a culmination of years of activities in the south and north.

Neglecting all of that naturally does not present a thought-out article. Continue reading The Myth of the “Yemen Model” →

Journaling On, but why?

Anthropology/Sociology, Islam: Introduction, Journalism and Media, Teaching Resources


Recently I received news of three new journals with laudable goals: one is Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies, an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal; the second is The Sociology of Islam Journal, which will be published by Brill on a subscription basis. The third is Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (ACME). When I started my graduate career in the early 1970s there were only a few journals dedicated specifically to the study of Islam and none to the anthropology of the Middle East or Central Asia. Der Islam, Studia Islamica, the Muslim World were solely for Islam, although they rarely had sociological or anthropological articles. Most scholars published in journals of their discipline or broader Middle Eastern Studies, such as the Middle East Journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arabica, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, and the like. The first journal devoted solely to contemporary Islam, with an anthropological focus, is Contemporary Islam, founded by Gabriele Marranci. The first journal created for the anthropology of the Middle East is, appropriately enough, Anthropology of the Middle East.

As the co-editor of a major Springer journal, Contemporary Islam, and the editor-in-chief of an online, peer-reviewed open access journal, CyberOrient, I am probably the last person who should be complaining about more new journals. It is not really a complaint as much as it is a contemplation: why are there more and more subscription-based academic journals when library budgets are being skimmed and few scholars can afford the exorbitant individual subscription prices of major presses? Is it the case that there are too few journals out there? Given the quality of the articles I sometimes see in professional journals, it seems as though quality or cogency is not always significant for getting into print. An argument could be made that there are so many more academic scholars these days, that new journals are needed to accommodate them. I can see this point, but then why not create open-source journals, like Mashriq & Mahjar, which can as easily be peer-reviewed as those distributed by major publishing houses?

There are several disadvantages I see with the expanding number of subscription-based academic journals. Continue reading Journaling On, but why? →

Pew Survey on World’s Muslims

Ethics, Islam: Introduction, Journalism and Media

The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, April 30, 2013

Executive Summary

A new Pew Research Center survey of Muslims around the globe finds that most adherents of the world’s second-largest religion are deeply committed to their faith and want its teachings to shape not only their personal lives but also their societies and politics. In all but a handful of the 39 countries surveyed, a majority of Muslims say that Islam is the one true faith leading to eternal life in heaven and that belief in God is necessary to be a moral person. Many also think that their religious leaders should have at least some influence over political matters. And many express a desire for sharia – traditional Islamic law – to be recognized as the official law of their country.

The percentage of Muslims who say they want sharia to be “the official law of the land” varies widely around the world, from fewer than one-in-ten in Azerbaijan (8%) to near unanimity in Afghanistan (99%). But solid majorities in most of the countries surveyed across the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia favor the establishment of sharia, including 71% of Muslims in Nigeria, 72% in Indonesia, 74% in Egypt and 89% in the Palestinian territories. Continue reading Pew Survey on World’s Muslims →