January 17, 2012
A very quick note to point folks in the direction of my post for the NY Times’s Latitude blog this week, which deals with proportional representation in Lebanon. For most of you following the debate, not much of it will come as much of a surprise. For those who have not been following along and would like additional context, see here.
I also recommend Michael Young’s good column on the subject earlier this week, and IFES’s very good overview of the Lebanese electoral system.
December 28, 2011
I’ve been a little obsessed with the changes in the Arab blogosphere over the past year, and the Syrian blogs are among the most interesting to me, perhaps because I’ve been reading several of these bloggers for years. The shift in perspective as a result of the uprising is remarkable. People like Robin Yassin-Kassab and Off the Wall (and their readers) are elaborating, dialectically, a new meaning of Arab liberalism.
Here are the first few paragraphs from my weekly piece for the New York Times global opinion page, which deals with this subject.
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The images out of Syria this month are gut-wrenching. Two suicide bombers killed dozens of people in Damascus on Friday, an alarming ratcheting-up of the violence in a conflict that some fear is starting to look more like a civil war by the day.
Within hours of the attacks, Twitter, Facebook and the Arab blogosphere were boiling over with claims and counterclaims. Some accepted the Syrian government’s statement that Friday’s bombers were affiliated with Al Qaeda; others, who are sympathetic to the opposition, want to see President Bashar al-Assad fall (see here, here and here).
This highly polarized response is symptomatic of a broader culture war that has recently emerged among Syria watchers. For the first decade of Assad’s presidency, most Syrian blogs I read were fairly supportive of the regime because of its commitment to the Palestinian cause and its opposition to the United States and Israel. But this year has changed everything. (keep reading)
June 15, 2011
I’ve written a brief essay for Foreign Policy about the challenges facing the Mikati government, which you can read here. There are a couple of other observations I’d like to make that are too Lebanon-wonky for FP’s audience but may be of interest to regular readers of QN:
Veto politics: Najib Mikati has made a point of saying that while the March 8 coalition holds a majority in his cabinet, they don’t hold a two-thirds-plus-one supermajority. Out of thirty ministers, only eighteen belong to the FPM, Hizbulah, Amal, and their allies, while the remaining twelve are divided among the shares of Mikati, President Suleiman, and Walid Jumblatt. Is it an accident that Jumblatt’s share is just big enough (i.e. three ministers) to give March 8 a supermajority of twenty-one, if push comes to shove? Once again, Jumblatt makes sure he’s the man in the middle.
FPM: Mikati’s cabinet is already being labeled a “Hizbullah government”. This, to my mind, is an oversimplification, given that Hizbullah only holds two ministries (and insignificant ones at that). Of course, cynics will scoff and say that the Hizb doesn’t need ministries to exert its dominance over the cabinet, and that may well be true. But if they don’t need ministries to dominate a cabinet, then what makes the dynamic in this cabinet different from every other time they have held two or three insignificant ministries?
To my mind, what really makes this cabinet different is the considerable haul that the Free Patriotic Movement and its allies in the Change & Reform Bloc were able to net. Think about it: Defense, Justice, Telecoms, Energy, Labor, Tourism, Industry, Culture, plus a couple freebie ministers without portfolio. That’s tremendous, no matter how you spin it. The Aounist movement has never held that kind of power, and you can bet that they are not going to squander this opportunity to consolidate their position and win more supporters. (See here for my profile of the FPM, which dates back to just before the 2009 elections, but in certain ways remains very relevant to the situation the party finds itself in today).
The 2013 elections: The fact that Tripoli has several of her most prominent sons represented in this cabinet has not been lost on anyone. Mikati is clearly making a play to boost his profile as the most popular political figure in Tripoli, which is the first step toward challenging Saad Hariri’s claim to uncontested leadership of Lebanon’s Sunnis. When Mikati was first appointed back in January, he appeared on Marcel Ghanem’s show Kalam al-Nas, and was asked by the host about what he had to say regarding Hariri’s claims that Mikati did not represent the Sunnis. Mikati, who is usually very cool under pressure, exploded into a comical tirade of sectarian one-upsmanship (click here for the YouTube video in Arabic; English translation below):
Mikati: “I don’t accept anyone to question my Sunnism. If there’s a Sunni in Lebanon, it’s me. I won’t accept it! And those who want to hand out certificates (of Sunnism) can go do it on their own. I’m Sunni in belief, Sunni in practice, Sunni in politics, and I’m the number one defender of the Sunnis in Lebanon. If you want to talk about Sunnis, I’m the one with the highest number of Sunni votes. In the ballot boxes of Tripoli, 87% of the Sunnis voted for Najib Miqati, which has never happened in the history of elections in Lebanon. So [whoever is questioning my Sunnism] can get lost, with all my respect for the muftis and who else is concerned with this issue. I’m the number one Sunni in Lebanon!”
Marcel Ghanem: Great. Moving on…
That always cracks me up. I see great potential for some sort of party game…
It should also be noted that the FPM appointed two ministers (Nicholas Sehnaoui and Gabi Layyoun) from tough electoral districts that they lost in the last elections (Achrafieh and Zahle, respectively).
More soon.
August 12, 2010
ننتقل الآن الى موضوع لا علاقة له بالمحكمة الدولية أو حزب الله أو بالسياسة اللبنانية بشكل عام ، بل وهو موضوع اللغة العربية المهملة المنسية الموشكة على الانقراضOops. Got a little carried away there.
In case some of you are feeling a little bit overloaded on Lebanese politics (in which case, your QN membership is hereby revoked), take a look at my cover story about the future of Arabic in this week’s Review, of which I’ve pasted a few paragraphs below.
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The Words on the Street
By Elias Muhanna — The National
In the late 13th century, a North African judge and chancery official named Ibn Manzur, who served in the imperial administration of the Mamluk sultanate, was putting the finishing touches to the greatest Arabic dictionary ever compiled. Spanning 20 volumes, Lisan al-Arab (The Arab Tongue) represented the pinnacle of a centuries-old lexicographical tradition, and would not be surpassed in size and scope by another dictionary for 500 years.
Ibn Manzur was driven by a belief that Arabic’s position as the ultimate language of social prestige, literary eloquence, and religious knowledge was under threat. “In our time, speaking Arabic is regarded as a vice,” he wrote in his preface. “I have composed the present work in an age in which men take pride in [using] a language other than Arabic, and I have built it like Noah built the ark, enduring the sarcasm of his own people.”
If Arabs living at Ibn Manzur’s time didn’t speak Arabic, then what language did they use? The Mamluk territories of Egypt and Syria lay at a continental crossroads attracting immigrants and invaders from around the world, but this did not change the basic reality that Arabic remained the lingua franca of a vast area stretching from the Iberian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent. A preeminent vehicle of culture, the language was studied in places as far afield as medieval Europe, where scholars sought access to the scientific and philosophical patrimony of Ancient Greece through the intermediary of Arabic commentaries.
Update: Here are some responses to the piece from The Economist‘s language blog, Michael Collins Dunn, and M. Lynx Qualey’s ArabLit blog.
August 10, 2010
Saad al-Hariri has yet to issue a statement about last night’s press conference, since he is apparently out of the country (where he always seems to be whenever Nasrallah issues one of his earth-shaking statements about the tribunal.)
Until he returns and provides some indication as to how his government is going to respond to Hizbullah’s accusations against Israel, I’m going to give him some unsolicited advice: Thank Nasrallah for his efforts and immediately call for the creation of a Lebanese commission to look into Hizbullah’s “material evidence,” just as the party is demanding.
If Nasrallah is bluffing, Hariri should call him on it. If he’s not, Hariri loses nothing by agreeing to take a closer look at the evidence.
However, if Hariri simply ignores Nasrallah or dismisses his demands, he will be increasing the likelihood that this government will not last the year, throwing the fate of the STL itself into question. Why would this be the case? Let’s play out the most likely scenarios.
If the STL indicts any members of Hizbullah, we can be assured that the party will reject the accusations and will demand that Lebanon’s government reject them as well. Walid Jumblatt (who now counts himself as a bonafide member of March 8th) and Michel Aoun have been expressing their doubts about the integrity of the STL for weeks, and Hizbullah’s new evidence against Israel provides the perfect excuse for them to join in calling for the creation of a Lebanese commission to investigate the “Israeli theory” before any Lebanese citizens are sent to The Hague.
In other words, Hizbullah and its allies (who control over a third of the cabinet) will effectively be able to throw the brakes on the STL’s proceedings by threatening to resign from the coalition government. Without a majority in parliament, Hariri would not be a lock to be re-appointed Prime Minister, opening the door to the possibility that an alternative candidate might be chosen who does not recommit his cabinet to funding the STL.
On the other hand, if Hariri takes the initiative now to form a Lebanese investigating commission, he will force the spotlight back onto Hizbullah and its claims that Israel killed Rafiq al-Hariri.
Nasrallah did not say last night that his presentation provided conclusive evidence against Israel, but simply that it represented a compelling reason to open “new horizons” in the investigation. On this point, he is right. However, there are many reasonable objections that come to mind when considering Hizbullah’s case, for example:
All of these issues can be explored through an investigation into Hizbullah’s archive of evidence, which is why Hariri should not hesitate to launch such an investigation. If the materials are unconvincing, this will surely become clear when they are subjected to intense scrutiny. If there is something actually there, we will be one step closer to discovering al-haqiqa.
In other news, I’ve written a commentary for Foreign Policy’s Mideast Channel about the latest twist in the Hariri murder mystery, which you can read here.
Update: I recommend reading Khalid Saghiyyah’s analysis of Nasrallah’s speech in al-Akhbar, the final paragraph of which I’ve translated below. It is noteworthy because it represents a fairly prevalent line of argument about what Hariri should do. I myself disagree with Saghiyyah, but I think his point of view makes sense to many people.
The question is not, therefore, whether Israel killed al-Hariri. The question is whether the accusation can be directed against Israel. This is the question that Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah responded to yesterday. And perhaps this was what he meant when he said that what he was offering was not evidence but data. Data is enough to save the country. The documents that were presented yesterday say, simply: “Yes, it is possible to re-direct the accusation towards Israel.” And this alone represents a suitable exit for everyone. An exit for the fabricators of false witnesses. An exit for those who are rightfully accused. An exit for those wrongly accused. An exit for the descendants of the victims.
The time now is 2:00 in the morning. So, let us accuse Israel. And let Bellemare go to sleep.
July 15, 2010
I’ve written a review of Michael Young’s new book for The Nation. An excerpt is pasted below with a link to the rest of the review.
One weekend during the spring of 2008, I found myself in a discussion with a friend about Lebanon’s latest political crisis. In Beirut the office of the Lebanese prime minister was being besieged by a sprawling tent city of protesters led by the country’s opposition, demanding the resignation of the premier and his cabinet. The business of government had long since ground to a halt, as had all commercial activity around Martyrs Square, not far from where the protesters were gathered; and multiple efforts to reach a compromise between the opposition and the “March 14″ loyalists, a coalition of Sunni, Christian and Druse parties backed by the Bush administration and its European and Arab allies, had ended in failure. Pundits warned daily of a descent into the abyss of sectarian violence and civil war.
Like many Lebanese, I found this state of affairs to be both maddening and deeply ironic. Three years earlier, Martyrs Square had been the scene of what was heralded around the world as Lebanon’s rebirth, a popular uprising 1 million strong demanding the end of Syria’s military occupation of the country. This uprising—dubbed the Cedar Revolution—was triggered by the assassination of a billionaire former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, the architect of Lebanon’s postwar recovery. Syria was widely blamed for the assassination, and the ensuing protests—unprecedented in size and in their brazen defiance of Damascus—coupled with intense international pressure, succeeded in forcing the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. While no one could have imagined that Lebanon’s endemic divisiveness was now a thing of the past and that a strong democratic state would emerge spontaneously from the ashes of Syrian tutelage, there was a palpable hope, naïve in retrospect, that the Lebanese could finally take their first step toward building such a state.
Nothing so optimistic had come to pass. In the three years since the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the country had been racked by a series of high-profile assassinations and a devastating war with Israel. An international tribunal established to investigate the murder of Hariri seemed to have stalled, and street violence was mounting between youths allied with opposing factions. Most significant, the country had no president. The previous one, Émile Lahoud, a pillar of the pro-Syrian regime, had resigned four months earlier, and the polarized government could not reach agreement over a successor.
All of this I related to my friend—a Syrian expatriate living in New York City—expressing my amazement at how Lebanon had turned into a farce, its political system so broken that it could not even carry out the most elemental of democratic processes: voting a person into office. Amused by my frustration, he suggested that far more remarkable than Lebanon’s paralysis was that the Lebanese state had survived without a president for more than 100 days, with no attempted coups, military takeovers or invasions. Imagine such a thing anywhere else in the Middle East: a power vacuum at the highest levels of government “lasting five minutes, let alone four months.” The laws of political gravity, he mused, do not apply in Beirut as they do in other Arab capitals. What’s more, they never have.
April 23, 2010
Hi folks. I’ve written a brief piece about tomorrow’s secularism march for The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section. Feel free to comment either there or here.
Who, by the way, is going? Anyone? Can someone do me a solid and take some pictures?
March 4, 2010
Many thanks to everyone for all of their kind words and well wishes about the new baby: both mother and daughter are doing very well. As noted yesterday, I will not be at the Safadi/POMED event in Washington tomorrow, but you should still plan on going to hear Mona Yacoubian and Jared Cohen speak about political reform in Lebanon.
If you’d like to know what I was going to talk about, you could do worse than to read this article in The Review, which, as it happens, I managed to finish just in the nick of time.
Here’s are the first couple of paragraphs and a link to the rest of the story. Come back over here to comment.
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Elias Muhanna | March 4 2010
Last month, Lebanon’s Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, called for the creation of a committee. Across the land of the cedars, eyebrows rose and pulses quickened.
For this was to be no ordinary committee. Its task, Berri explained, would be to explore the notion of abolishing Lebanon’s system of political confessionalism, in which government posts are divided among the country’s 18 officially recognised religious communities, according to a decades-old formula. Calling the current system a source of corruption and instability, Berri – who heads the Shiite political party Amal – insisted that abolishing it was a “national duty” mandated by the Lebanese Constitution.
Berri’s rather modest proposal immediately provoked a display of unctuous outrage from Lebanon’s Christian politicians. Under the existing framework, seats in parliament are divided equally between Christians and Muslims, despite the fact that the Christian population of Lebanon has fallen well below 50 per cent over the past half-century. Replacing confessionalism with a more democratic system would almost certainly erode the number of Christian elected officials, which is why even Berri’s Christian allies wasted no time in quietly distancing themselves from the idea. Meanwhile, his opponents were outspoken in their rejection of the proposal, many pointing out the irony of a man they consider a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool confessional leader and former warlord portraying himself as a born-again democrat. Even Lebanon’s active civil society, for whom deconfessionalism is a perennial cause célèbre, sniffed condescendingly at the initiative, leaving it to die a quiet death in a handful of newspaper editorials.
Moves to eliminate political confessionalism in Lebanon have a long history of failure, dating back to the earliest days of the republic. Leftist political parties and secularists advocated for the abolition of the system in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Taif Agreement (which ended the country’s 15-year civil war) called explicitly for the establishment of a non-confessional bicameral legislature, a demand that has gone unheeded for two decades.
December 31, 2009
I love how seriously the QN readership is taking my challenge to come up with the most important developments of 2009 in Lebanon (favorite so far: “my cousin’s wedding in Chekka”).
In the meantime, here’s a piece I wrote for The National this week about the Middle East in 2009. (If you’re going out to party tonight, please don’t drink and drive.)
The year 2009 began with the Middle East ablaze. On January 1, for the fifth day running, Israeli jets continued to pummel Gaza in advance of a ground invasion that produced over 1,000 Palestinian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. The war’s effects rippled across the region in an all too familiar way: suicide bombers in Iraq targeted groups of civilians protesting the Gaza invasion, while America’s allies in the region criticised Hamas for provoking the onslaught. Meanwhile, Iran castigated Egypt for collaborating with the enemy and Syria called off its peace negotiations with Israel. The region had slipped back into the trenches of its Cold War, in which a single Katyusha could trigger a massive military response and an international diplomatic crisis.
A year later, the atmosphere in the region is markedly different. Bitter rivals have visited each other’s capitals to mend fences and the media is full of reports about a new age of reconciliation and diplomatic engagement. Following the turmoil of the previous five years, which witnessed a series of proxy wars between the Western-supported Sunni Arab regimes and the axis consisting of Iran, Syria, and their non-state allies (Hamas and Hizbollah), the relative calm that prevailed in 2009 was just one of many signs that a realignment of interests had begun to take shape.
The reasons for this realignment stem from two basic uncertainties. On the one hand, there is a question mark about the effects of a new – and still seemingly undefined – American policy for the region. Indeed, as disruptive as the neoconservative experiment was to Arab power dynamics, the presence of a new administration in Washington with a different outlook and a different set of priorities has forced the region to reorganise itself once again. On the other hand, Iran’s growing influence and the concomitant challenges to its regime’s authority have further muddied the waters, as its allies and adversaries try to gauge the health and durability of the Islamic Republic on its 30th anniversary. When these two unknown variables are combined, in attempts to assess shifting American policy toward the volatile regional heavyweight, the tea leaves become all the more difficult to read.
December 3, 2009
I’ve written a review of Eugene Rogan’s new book, for the Friday Review section of The National. The first couple of paragraphs are posted below, and you can read the whole thing on the newspaper’s website.
The Arabs: A History
There is something almost old-fashioned about the idea of a book-length history of the Arabs. Broad, all-encompassing narratives of this kind were popular in the 20th century, when historiography frequently intersected with pan-Arab nationalist projects, and when the sense of a common Arab identity was vividly felt both by the region’s inhabitants and the foreigners who observed and engaged them.
Today, the Arabs are increasingly viewed (and seem to view themselves) either as a small subset of a larger civilisation – the Muslim world – or as a collection of disparate and fractious entities whose differences often overwhelm their commonalities. Indeed, the notion of “Arabness” as a shared and distinguishing element seems to have lost its currency as a prism through which to study the region, just as it has lost its charismatic appeal in the political culture of the contemporary Middle East.
It is therefore suggestive to re-encounter a panoramic perspective in Eugene Rogan’s excellent new book, which, if we are being frank, is not so much a history of the Arabs as it is a political history of the Middle East and North Africa during the last 500 years – with an emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. The narrative begins with the Mamluk army’s defeat by the Ottomans at the battle of Marj Dabiq (in northern Syria) in 1516, the event that “marked the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the modern age in the Arab world”, and then flits through the main developments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries before slowing down the pace upon arrival at the period of European colonialism.
 | danny on Lebanon, By the Numbers |
 | Ghassan Karam on Lebanon, By the Numbers |
 | 3issa on Lebanon, By the Numbers |
 | Qifa Nabki on Lebanon, By the Numbers |
 | Norman on Lebanon, By the Numbers |
What I’m reading…
