Life and Culture

Brookings has a new paper out -- it's two papers in one, really -- examining the role of madrassas (religious schools) in promoting militancy in Pakistan, and the interplay between education and conflict.

The educational system in Pakistan is a mess, due in part to the federal nature of the education system. Literacy is 54 percent nationwide, a figure that masks great regional and gender disparities (less than 10 percent of women in Balochistan can read, for example). 6.8 million children between the ages of five and nine are not in school; less than one-fourth of girls finish primary school.

This weekend's electricity protests in Basra might spark a renewed bid for autonomy in southern Iraq: Jabbar Amin, the chairman of the provincial council, said yesterday that he wants to create a Basra autonomous region (عربي) to "improve the services provided to residents of the province."

A group of female activists is preparing a ship full of women, called the Mariam, which is scheduled to leave Lebanon for Gaza in the coming days. Or maybe not.

The Israeli government has already warned the United Nations that it will use "all necessary force" to stop the ship. Israel has also linked the ship to Hizballah, but the group denied any connection to the flotilla in a statement released Friday.

We're in the middle of a brutal (and apparently unprecedented) heat wave here in the Gulf. Daytime highs between 46 and 50 Celsius -- 115 and 122 Fahrenheit -- haven't been unusual over the last two weeks.

Tempers followed temperatures in southern Iraq today, where thousands of protesters tried to storm the provincial government building to protest a lack of basic services -- particularly electricity and potable water. The protesters demanded the dismissal of the provincial governor, and the electricity minister, Karim Waheed al-Aboudi.

The Israeli tabloid daily Maariv carried a story on Thursday exposing what the newspaper purported to be a "secret" plan hatched by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to "pester" Saudi Arabia with a global information campaign that could involve lobbying the U.S. Congress and European parliament, and perhaps even filing lawsuits, all with the intent of exposing the kingdom's "involvement in financing terrorism, the state of human rights ... the status of women and numerous other issues." (Original article in Hebrew here.)

As U.S. policymakers debate whether to hand Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak a "stunningly deferential," nearly strings-free endowment to be used over the next five to ten years -- an endowment that Cairo has proposed should reach a whopping $4 billion -- it might be useful to remind ourselves about the reality of life in America's ahwa-sipping, shisha-smoking Arab best friend in the Middle East.

The murder last week of Kurdish journalist and student Zardasht Osman continues to trouble the water in ostensibly stable and secure Kurdistan. On Tuesday, hundreds of university students marched through Erbil, the capital of that semi-autonomous northern region, and fought with security forces at the parliamentary building there, according to the New York Times.

If you follow Lebanon closely, you've already seen this and had a good laugh about it. If not: Lebanon's top politicians met yesterday at the Cite Sportif (عربي) in Beirut for a "national unity" football game to mark the 35th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese civil war.

So Lebanese papers this morning are full of images like this one:

The Hariri-led red team won the match, 2-0, over the white team, led by Hizballah MP Ali Ammar. NOW Lebanon has a bit of video; Sean Lee and Qifa Nabki have some amusing details and more photos of the match; and al-Mustaqbal has a seemingly endless collection of Hariri photos (عربي).

The match was played in an empty stadium, by the way, for security reasons. And it doesn't seem to have impressed many people in Lebanon.

I don't have anything to say about yesterday's absurd diplomat-smoking-on-an-airplane incident over Denver. I liked Juan Cole's comparison with a Monty Python skit. (Mohamed Al-Madadi, the diplomat in question, has been released without charge, by the way.)

But one fun bit of irony: On Monday, the Qatari health ministry announced a stepped-up enforcement campaign (fines of QAR50,000!) against... public smoking.

Andrew Exum and Spencer Ackerman were talking about Haifa Wehbe yesterday, so this seems a good time to mention that her new children's album (issued by Rotana) hit stores this week (عربي).

Seriously: A Haifa Wehbe children's album. I plan to pick up a copy once I get to Doha, mostly because I have no idea how she pulled off a children's album (clearly there are no music videos...).

This is the album that caused a stir in November, by the way, because one song referred to Nubians as "monkeys."

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a potential candidate for the Egyptian presidency, released a video on his Facebook page on Saturday urging citizens to join his new National Association for Change. Supporters of political reform in Egypt hope that ElBaradei, 67, challenges 81-year-old incumbent Hosni Mubarak in next year's election, and it seems as though ElBaradei is willing to flirt with the possibility.

My Arabic isn't nifty enough to offer a translation for the video (after the jump), but we'll work on it, and in the meantime, our Arabic-speaking readers should feel free to offer their thoughts in the comments:

(Updated below) Egyptian state media reported today that Ahmed al-Tayeb has been appointed the new sheikh (عربي) of Al-Azhar University, replacing Mohamed Tantawi, who passed away last week.

The 64-year-old Tayeb, born in Qena province, is a safe choice for Mubarak. He's spent more than four decades at Al-Azhar: He received a Ph.D. in religion from the school in 1977, then went on to join the faculty, and eventually became dean of the philosophy department. In 2003, he was appointed president of the university; he also served a one-year stint as Egypt's grand mufti. (The current grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, congratulated Tayeb on his appointment today.)

I know many of our readers have been waiting anxiously for Marty Peretz's take on the Ramot Shlomo kerfuffle. Wait no longer. I would criticize his argument on its merits, but I can't, because I honestly can't identify his argument. So instead let me pull out my favorite line:

... there are the editorials, the collective voice of the [Washington] Post, which strike an independent voice free of Arabisant cant and America bashing. This is in contrast to the New York Times, which hasn't run an op-ed sympathetic to Israel in ages.

I guess Peretz missed yesterday's New York Times, which carried an op-ed from Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States. I seem to recall it being quite sympathetic.

With elections for Egypt's People's Assembly, the lower house of parliament, set for this fall, the government has already begun its usual crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist social organization and political party that is banned by law but allowed to operate with a low profile by the government. Following the arrest in February of high-ranking Brothers, police arrested dozens (perhaps hundreds) on Friday and Tuesday at protests.

The Brotherhood won 88 seats in the 454-seat Assembly during landmark elections in 2005. Since then, the leadership of the Brotherhood has changed and signaled less of an interest in electoral politics, but President Hosni Mubarak's approach to the organization has remained the same: Mubarak's government looks like it's in the process of turning the screws on the Brotherhood in the run-up to this year's elections, just as it did in 2005.

The award for curious news story of the day goes to this piece from Politico's Josh Gerstein, who reports that a federal magistrate in Washington, D.C., has denied an effort by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to get Atlantic writer and stubborn, fiery Israel-defender Jeffrey Goldberg to testify on their behalf in a case brought by a Jewish settler.

More than 30 people were injured yesterday in a sectarian riot (عربي) in Egypt's Matrouh governorate.

The fighting reportedly started when Muslim residents threw stones at Christian construction workers who were building a fence around a lot owned by the El-Shahideen church. The rioters thought the laborers were blocking off the site to build a new church; the workers say they were actually building a fence around a hospice.

Mohamed Tantawi, the sheikh of Al-Azhar University, passed away from a heart attack (عربي) in Riyadh this morning while boarding an airplane.

Tantawi was in Saudi Arabia for the King Faisal Awards;Al-Jazeera reports that he looked fine during the ceremony; an adviser to Tantawi says the sheikh was in "excellent health" before the trip.

Tantawi made headlines most recently for his edict against the niqab, in which he declared the full-face veil a "tradition" with no basis in Islam, and for an incident in which he lifted a young girl's niqab. His legacy includes a number of other controversial decisions -- rulings on banking reforms, for example, and a meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Issandr El Amrani has a detailed obituary with a lot of interesting detail about Tantawi's place in Egyptian society. His immediate verdict:

... he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows.

Tantawi's body will be buried in Medina, according to the BBC.

Forget all the doom and gloom, the United Arab Emirates are going up, up, up! At least, that's what Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media baron and owner of News Corporation believes.

From the National>:

Fox International Channels, a subsidiary of News Corp, is making Abu Dhabi its regional hub for online advertising sales, documentary production and satellite television broadcast.

Murdoch and Fox are betting that the booming wealth of the Gulf states, combined with the enormous Middle Eastern youth population that consume media products produced in the Gulf, will spell big profits for online advertising in the region.

The BBC has a somewhat alarming story about exponentially higher rates of birth defects in Fallujah in the years following the U.S. invasion.

That's what the story claims, at least. But there's not much analytical rigor in the piece, which doesn't define what it means by "birth defect" and presents mostly anecdotal data. The topic deserves further study before we conclude there's a crisis.

Move over, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh -- another Dubai murder made the headlines today: Egypt's Court of Cassation ordered a retrial for Hisham Talaat Mustafa, the billionaire businessman accused of killing Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim in Dubai in 2008.

Mustafa was sentenced to death in May, after a Cairo court found him guilty of paying a retired Egyptian police officer US$2 million to kill Tamim, his former lover. Prosecutors said Mustafa had Tamim killed after she refused to marry him.