Jeffrey Goldberg’s map of “the New Middle East” from a few years back (including an anticipated Alawite state).

What exactly is happening in al-Qusayr? I have no idea, but I’m going to tell you what I think anyway, seeing as how the biggest beneficiaries of the media blackout on Syria are the bloggers, tweeters, and other distant readers whose impressionistic musings are based almost entirely on a process of triangulating between other second-hand narratives.

Let’s begin with this report in al-Akhbar, which claims that the Syrian Army and Hizbullah’s attempt to retake al-Qusayr from the Free Syrian Army is meant to prevent the establishment of a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim stronghold on the border of Lebanon and an international war:

Retaking the city would also put an end to the possibility of setting up a hardline Salafi emirate in Qusayr, which would have served as a thorn in the side of Hezbollah and the Shia Lebanese villages of the Hermel region, and could have easily led to a full-fledged sectarian war on both sides of the border.

A Salafist emirate, you say? That sounds scary. No wonder Hezbollah has rushed to the defense of the beleaguered residents of this territory. Taking a page from the Lebanese Army’s playbook on Nahr al-Bared (which was a splendid success for that organization on all accounts), Hezbollah is obviously trying to address the cancer of Salafist extremism before it metastasizes.

But wait! This piece by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker contains the following nugget by an unnamed Washington official, about the real significance of the Homs region (which contains al-Qusayr):

According to the most common prediction of the war’s eventual end, Assad will lead Syria’s Alawites to an enclave on the Mediterranean coast, which includes the major ports of Latakia and Tartous, where the Alawites predominate. American officials say that Assad is trying to lay the groundwork. The regime has ethnically cleansed several Sunni-majority villages on routes that lead to the coast. And, according to the American intelligence official, the regime appears to be stockpiling weapons and supplies in the area. Perhaps most suggestive is the tenacity with which it has held on to the city of Homs, which lies on the highway between Damascus and the coast. Homs would give an Alawite rump state unimpeded access to Hezbollah, and to Iran. “Homs is the key,’’ the official said. “If they can hold it, then they can have the Alawite enclave on the coast that’s linked to Hezbollah and backed by the Iranians, and the Russian ships could still come into the port.”

So, what is al-Qusayr (besides the probable site of the Battle of Kadesh, between Ramesses II and Muwatalli II in 1274 BCE)? Is Hezbollah losing fighters to prevent the creation of a “Salafist emirate” or to lay the groundwork for an Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast?

Your guess is as good as mine. Seriously.

As this review in al-Ahram lays out, Dr. Shalakany’s book tells the story of Egypt’s legal elite from its heyday during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when “this class of politicians, intellectuals and visionaries who, in fighting the battle for national independence, forged almost every aspect of social, intellectual and economic life in Egypt’s liberal age. This age ended abruptly with the military-based change of regime which came about as a result of the 1952 Revolution.” Under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, the legal class would suffer one debilitating blow after another, setting the stage for the current crisis facing Egypt today, which, as Amr pointed out in his talk, has major legal valences.

Much of the discussion stemmed from the famous incident of the 1954 assault upon `Abd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī, an eminent jurist and head of Majlis al-Dawla (the State Council), who was the principal drafter of the Egyptian civil code as well as the author of a massive commentary upon it.

According to the well-known narrative, al-Sanhūrī was physically attacked in a demonstration on March 29 1954 because he and the Council had opposed the emergency laws established by Nasser’s Free Officers in 1952 and were advocating a return to the constitutional and parliamentary status quo. As Shalakany pointed out, though, al-Sanhūrī and the Council had been instrumental for the previous two years in providing legal cover for the Free Officers to suspend political party activity and to establish a Regency Council without having these measures approved by the Egyptian parliament. (For more detail on this, see Nathan Brown’s The Rule of Law in the Arab World, pp. 74-75).

Why did the judges abandon their traditional support for constitutionalism and parliamentary procedure, taking up with political allies who made no bones of their desire to impose their will through executive authority? What was the rationale behind such a strategy, especially if they would reverse it just a couple of years later? And more concretely:

Why would someone like al-Sanhūrī, the paragon of the rule of law in Egypt and the Arab world, the greatest Arab jurist, the man whose tome on the civil code must exist in the office of any self-respecting Arab lawyer… why would a man like that, whose name is associated with the rule of law and who comes across today as a hero, spend two years supporting the military and breaking everything that has to do with the rule of law?

The typical explanation, Shalakany explained, was that al-Sanhūrī had lost faith in liberal legality, and the ability of the Egyptian liberal elite (which was fundamentally a legal elite) to rule the country. Showing slides of political cartoons from the pre-coup 50′s, he argued that “the sense that lawyers and the commitment to the rule of law were response for the problems of Egypt in 1952 was very palpable.”

Other interpretations include the notion that al-Sanhūrī had also lost faith in the ruling party (al-Wafd), and had personal feuds with members of the ruling cabinet, so he was trying to settle scores by siding with the Free Officers in their coup. But Shalakany suggested that while these explanations were all perfectly reasonable, they did not go far enough to explain a central contradiction between liberal legality and revolution. Something deeper, he argued, was at stake: “a sense that at moments of revolution, lawyers and liberal legality often are the enemy. Hence Henry VI’s line, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

In the Q&A period, I asked Amr to expand on this theme, which he had not developed much further in the talk. Admitting that he was still working on it and thinking it through, he made the following point, which I think is worth quoting  in full. 

There’s just a fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, protecting individual rights and, on the other hand, saying, “I’m into democracy.” The individual is the major counting unit for liberal legality; the demos or the people are the major counting unit for democracy, and the two must — intellectually and in reality — clash with each other, and have historically clashed.

So we had liberalism in Europe way longer than we had democracy. France, England, Germany, Italy: all of these had liberal legal systems well into the 20th century but not democracies. And lawyers could perform their role as defenders of liberalism without having to also perform their roles as protectors of democracy. It’s only in the 20th century onwards  when suddenly liberalism and democracy came to be conjoined together and we have these hyphenated regimes of liberal and democratic that the fundamental contradiction between liberalism and democracy emerges.

Maybe that’s another way of explaining it. It’s a bit too theoretical and needs to be fleshed out but I feel that many of [the Egyptian judges] are happy with liberalism but not with democracy, just as many elites in Italy, France, and England in the 20th century were happy with liberalism but not with democracy.

A final point that I found very interesting in the Q&A was Amr’s suggestion that almost all of the main players in Egypt today are actually liberals, according to the classic definition. “We are all liberals today, whether we like it or not,” he proposes. Both Islamists and secularists use the language of liberalism in advocating their visions for the country, and even the Salafists — who are calling for a return to sharia — are also using the language of liberalism by speaking of constitutions and guaranteed rights, etc.

The New York Times and the Economist on the other hand, use misleading language by saying things like: “There are two sides in Egypt: Islamists and liberals.” Such a characterization is not only factually inaccurate, but also politically dangerous. Why?

Because it obfuscates the distributional stakes that are present when we are discussing these terms. So instead of saying “liberals and Islamists,” one should be saying “left and right”. One should be saying “people into public property, or redistribution, or the commons, or whatever term we use for a redistribution of wealth or power in Egypt,” versus a conservative take on the economy. The Muslim Brotherhood which rules Egypt today, if you read their economic program… [you'll find] that it is more neoliberal than the economic program of Gamal Mubarak, the son of Hosni Mubarak.

These were just a few of the several very interesting aspects of the talk that I wanted to highlight, but you can watch the whole thing here if you’re so inclined. I recommend it.

Another genre of ads gestures towards a rosy future with the slogan “Our country now has oil for X” (with various happy possibilities suggested, such as: a strong military, public transport, and various social services like free education, healthcare, and social security).

Why stop there? I think the Ministry needs a nudge in a more ambitious direction. See below for my suggestions, with more to follow…

**

(Streets free of traffic jams… private jets… manaqeesh with salmon and caviar)

(Our country now has oil … for hosting the Olympic Games)

(Our country now has oil … for military dominance)

(Our country now has oil… for space exploration)

Stay tuned.

Syria Offed Imad Mughniyeh?

Check out this Foreign Policy article about the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh. The author, Mark Perry, promises a big reveal and doesn’t fully deliver but it’s an entertaining piece. I recall hearing these very same rumors about possible Syrian involvement in the assassination, but dismissed them as wild speculation. There’s also this Al-Akhbar report from earlier this year, and the Erich Follath article in Der Spiegel from a while back.

To my mind, it seems very unlikely that Bashar al-Assad would sacrifice Mughniyeh for the slimmest of prospects of peace with Israel. I’ve argued in the past that the Syrian regime’s resistance credentials are nothing like what its apologists claim they are, but assassinating the senior military figure in Hizbullah by way of making nice with the Israelis seems very unlikely to me.

Why I Hate Twitter

If you once used to follow me on Twitter and now find that I’ve blocked you unexpectedly, please send me a note via the contact page so that I can un-block you. As it turns out, I have a puzzling number of bots following my account. Until recently, something like 40% of my followers were not actual people, so I signed up for an online service (manageflitter.com) to purge as many of them as I could. In a single evening, I dropped over 8,000 followers, some of them apparently real people and loyal readers. If you’re one of them, let me know. And if anyone else can explain to me why my account is a magnet for bots, I’m all ears.

Finally, my dissertation won a prize!

More soon.

Apparently, all that separates a salafist from a hipster is a pair of sunglasses and a hoodie.

Everyone is wringing their hands over Lebanese Salafist leader Shaykh Ahmad al-Assir’s call to send jihadists to help Syria’s rebels. On Monday, he announced the formation of resistance battalions that were prepared to join the side of the uprising, saying: “There is a religious duty on every Muslim who is able to do so… to enter into Syria in order to defend its people, its mosques and religious shrines, especially in Qusayr and Homs.”

The Lebanese President has rejected al-Assir’s demands, along with Walid Jumblatt and the Future Movement.

Apparently, even the Free Syrian Army isn’t interested in his offer, stating: “Our official position as the Supreme Military Command of the Free Syrian Army… is that we thank them but we reject any calls for jihad in Syria…We reject any presence of foreign fighters, regardless of where they are from. We have said that what we are missing in Syria is weapons, not men.”

My friend Mustapha over at Beirut Spring, on the other hand, is begging the salafists to “please, please, please go die in Syria…”

Let us once and for all get rid of your idiotic backwardness and medieval worldview. The sooner you die, the better. It’s a win win situation: You get your virgins in the sky, and we get to live without people who are fighting a pointless religious war that is thousands of years old.

I agree that the idea of jihadists going into Syria from Lebanon is an unsettling notion. But who are we kidding, really? Does anyone believe that there aren’t already Lebanese fighting in Syria, on both sides of the conflict? It has been established by many respected observers and reporters that both the Future Movement and Hizbullah are involved in the conflict in direct and indirect ways.

A few months ago, someone caught `Uqab Saqr on tape coordinating what appeared to be weapons transfers, effectively confirming what everyone knew already, namely that Saad Hariri is a major player in the logistical supply chain of weapons to the FSA. And the press of late has been full of reports about Hizbullah’s direct involvement in the fighting in Syria.

What is the difference between Ahmad al-Assir sending a few dozen Lebanese jihadists to die in Syria and Hariri or Hizbullah playing the roles they are playing? Are they not equally as destabilizing to Lebanon?

I’m knocking on every piece of wood in my office as I type this, but I’m a little amazed that we haven’t seen more significant spillover of violence into Lebanon already, because of the extensive involvement of its parties in Syria.

Your thoughts?

In light of this, I wonder if it might be possible to turn Hanf’s dictum around and use it as a diagnostic instrument: a barometer of political ‘weather’. In other words, given the ease with which Lebanon’s factions came together behind Salam’s nomination, might we conclude that conditions are actually… fair?

Obviously, the hard part (forming the cabinet) is still ahead, and we’re starting to get a sense that an old-fashioned Lebanese standoff may indeed be in the works. In the meantime, though, I think it’s worth asking how it was that one prime minister resigned and another one was appointed in relatively short order, with a minimum of fuss. What does this suggest about the balance of power in the country and the calculations of the parties?

I have no answer to this question, but my feeling is that the leadership of the Future Movement and Hizbullah are so deeply involved in the Syrian crisis that they’ve ironically agreed to agree about Lebanon for the time being. Lebanon’s government has become a sideshow to the major preoccupation of its leaders: the struggle to control Syria’s future. Along these lines, I highly recommend reading the excellent reporting by my friends Nour Malas and Farnaz Fassihi in the Wall Street Journal last week, along with the incredible PBS Frontline documentary (“Syria Behind the Lines“) that came out a couple of days ago.  I’ve quoted some of the salient bits from the WSJ piece below.

Lebanon, divided along sectarian lines that support and oppose Syria’s regime, has become a logistical support base for the civil war next door. Fighters and weapons for both warring sides in Syria pass through the country…

Lebanon’s steep descent, in many ways, goes back to October, when an explosion ripped through the car of Brigadier Gen. Wissam al Hassan, killing him. Gen. Hassan was the country’s intelligence chief and a key figure in the Sunni March 14th group.

His assassination helped unleash a spiral of sectarian violence amid speculation that he may have been targeted because of his secret role in Syria’s conflict.

Gen. Hassan had used his post as head of intelligence to organize weapons shipments to Syrian rebels from Lebanese territory in the two years before he was killed, according to several key associates familiar with the network.

Several times he funneled weapons from Lebanon’s own government stocks, replacing them soon afterward, according to rebel groups his network helped arm. Lebanese government officials declined to comment on his activities…

Meanwhile, in the Shiite-dominated south of Lebanon, Hezbollah has been flexing its muscles to aid the Syrian government.

IranAir added an extra flight each week between Tehran and Beirut after security threats inside Syria made using the Damascus airport difficult. Hezbollah wants to preserve a supply route from Iran into Lebanon that can be used regardless of whether the Syrian government survives its civil war, according to people in Iran and Lebanon familiar with Iran’s connections with Hezbollah…

“Hezbollah and Hariri’s group are playing with fire. They will eventually bring the war to Lebanon,” said Farid Khazen, a Christian member of parliament and a political-science professor at the American University of Beirut…

The Syrian conflict has changed Lebanon in profound ways. Nearly one million Syrians have come into Lebanon as refugees or new residents. Fighting has broken out between Lebanese Alawites and Sunnis in the northern city of Tripoli, killing at least half a dozen civilians. Alawites are the Shiite-linked Muslim sect that controls the Syrian government…

Soon after Mr. Hassan’s death, Sunni networks supporting the Syrian rebels turned large industrial warehouses in Tripoli into arms depots. Clerics say they try to restrain waves of frustrated, jobless youth from entering the battle in Syria. But many go anyway…

“From the birth of the Lebanese state, Tripoli has resisted being a part of Lebanon,” said Ahmad al QasQas, a media representative for the Lebanese chapter of Hizb al-Tahrir, a pan-Arab Islamist party with aspirations for one nation spanning the region under the rule of an emir. “We have a true, Islamic link to Syria.”

Since 2010, we’ve seen several apps designed for the long-suffering Lebanese citizen. There’s an app that will tell you which roads are closed because of road work, flash floods, and political protests; (Ma2too3a); an app that will tell you the owner of a car based on their license place (yes, that is scary); and now there’s even an app that will allow you to report on improperly lit street-lamps.

Like many Lebanese fathers, my own is a stickler for efficiency. Few things make him more frustrated than a light left on in an empty room. So imagine how angry it makes him to witness the common spectacle of street lamps lit during the day on Lebanese roads. It apparently got him so mad that he had a smart phone app designed that will allow anyone to report a street lamp crime at the press of the button. The GPS tracks the location and sends the (anonymous) report to a central processing office, which then relays the information to the relevant municipal authorities.

If a municipality doesn’t respond in a timely manner to repeated reports about lit street lamps, Abu Elias is threatening to publish the incriminating evidence and make his data available to the media. As powerful as Lebanese administrative inertia may be, public humiliation may be yet more powerful a force. That’s his gamble, at least.

You can read more about the app (which is called “Waffir,” or “save, economize”) here at the Daily Star, and watch a brief report on it on OTV here. The Facebook page is here.

And if you’re in Lebanon, download it from the App Store.

Not to second-guess the propensity of the Lebanese for self-sabotage, but I fail to see how a prime minister’s decision to resign signals anything more than the usual variety of political dysfunction.

Jean Aziz’s excellent (if slightly one-sided) analysis for Al-Monitor provides the proper context in which to read Mikati’s resignation, which has as much to do with short-term electoral politics and long-term systemic failures. According to his reading, Mikati’s decision to resign must be seen in the light of his own electoral calculations for the upcoming (but now delayed) parliamentary elections, as he weighs the possibility of running in his home town of Tripoli, which is strongly supportive of the Syrian revolution. Ashraf Rifi, the police chief whose rebuffed tenure extension lay at the heart of Mikati’s resignation is apparently also from Tripoli, and one could imagine a scenario whereby the Future Movement would run him in Tripoli against Mikati. Rather than risk being painted as Hizbullah’s Sunni lapdog (which Future has already tried to do), Mikati decided to cut his losses in the Serail and start worrying about his political future.

So much for short-term calculations. My personal view is that the real danger of Mikati’s resignation is that it places Lebanon on a familiar precipice, where the mandates of its political authorities will soon expire without any mechanism in place for their renewal. Crudely speaking, without a prime minister, there can be no cabinet. And without a cabinet, there can be no electoral law. And without an electoral law, there can be no parliamentary elections held this summer when the current parliament’s term ends. And without a new parliament, there can be no appointment of top governmental positions, foremost among them the new president, whose term will begin in May 2014. And without a new president… well, maybe that’s not such a big deal. But you get the point.

What’s fascinating to me is that certain political parties are trying to push the process along as though Mikati’s resignation never happened. We read that Michel Aoun favors holding a legislative session in order to vote on the Orthodox Law, effectively setting in motion the 2013 parliamentary election season. I personally have no idea whether this is constitutionally viable. Nor do I know what powers the caretaker cabinet has. Can it extend the term of Lebanon’s parliament? Can it propose a new electoral law? And even if it could, what role will the less formal but no less influential dimensions of custom and precedent play on the process that develops? When the Saniora cabinet tried to push through legislation on a majoritarian basis in 2007-08, all hell broke loose. And nothing was resolved until the international community stepped in.

This is a theme I’ve been returning to regularly since 2009, but there’s a good reason. The source of Lebanon’s current kerfuffle is not “Sunni rage” or “Shiite militarism” or “Christian division” but the fluidity and ambiguity of its political institutions and protocols. Under normal circumstances, it should not be that big a deal for a prime minister to resign when faced with the intransigence of the political coalition that put him in office. What is a big deal, however, is that there is no automatic set of procedures that must be followed when a governmental breakdown occurs. Take a look at this excerpt from the Daily Star this morning:

Political sources said that at this stage, the priorities of various political groups differ, even within coalitions. Aoun’s bloc favors convening the legislature to vote on the Orthodox proposal, which would be followed by forming a Cabinet. Key Muslim parties, meanwhile, favor extending Parliament’s term and forming a Cabinet before putting an electoral law to vote…

Meanwhile, sources close to Progressive Socialist Party chief Walid Jumblatt said he supported forming a national unity government under Mikati…

Other parliamentary sources said Jumblatt opposes extending Parliament’s term and favors increasing the retirement age of senior security officials, an issue that was seized on by Mikati in announcing his resignation…

MPs who met with the speaker at his Ain al-Tineh residence quoted Berri as saying that he has yet to decide whether to convene a Parliament session, as he continues to study the various demands made by political blocs…

Later, a delegation of March 14 MPs handed Berri a petition demanding he convene the legislature before the end of the month in order to pass a draft law to raise the retirement age of soon-to-retire security officials. “In principle, [Berri] supports increasing the retirement age; however, he decides when to call for the session,” Tripoli MP Samir Jisr said after meeting.

Apparently, it seems that all options are open. The government can either produce a new cabinet, or it can enact a new electoral law, or extend the term of parliament, or raise the age of senior civil servants… doesn’t seem to matter which order this happens.

Can you smell the democracy?

LBC is reporting (on Twitter) that Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Miqati is headed to the Grand Serail to announce his resignation over the current cabinet squabble concerning the extension of Ashraf Rifi’s tenure as director of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF).

I spoke to NOW Lebanon’s Alex Rowell yesterday about this issue, suggesting that the Free Patriotic Movement’s threat to not extend Rifi’s mandate should be taken seriously, given the long history of hostility between the FPM and the ISF.  Of course, the fight over Rifi could just be a prelude to the much larger appointment issue that is looming: the question of who will be Lebanon’s next president. This may, in fact, be the first bargaining chip in that protracted future transaction (which will get going soon after the parliamentary elections, if they ever take place).

I’m getting reports from folks as I write this that Rifi is in fact out and Miqati is in fact going to resign, so I’m going to sign off now and watch the events develop. More later, but in the meantime, I think that this post from the archives gets at the fundamental reason behind Miqati’s threatened resignation.

Live-blog/translation of Miqati’s speech:

8:35PM: I’ve committed myself to the country that I love.

8:36: It is necessary to raise the salaries of the civil society workers. It is necessary to hold elections on time. We need an electoral law that renews Lebanon’s message to the world (as a place of coexistence).

8:38: The President has demanded dialogue on all of these issues. We need a government that can save the country from the problems it faces.

8:39: The problems are great. I am satisfied with my efforts.

8:40: I have kept all channels of communication open. The nation comes first.

8:40: I threatened to resign twice before: Once over the funding of the Special Tribunal, and once when Wissam al-Hassan was murdered. Today the conditions are worse, economically, politically, etc.

8:41: Today, I announce my resignation, hoping this represents a way out of the problems that the country faces. I want to thank all of the political forces that cooperated with me over the past period.

8:42: Despite the worries and tension that hang over us, we are capable of overcoming them. I remain by your side. May God secure this nation.

End of speech. [I'm sure I botched most of it, but I'm translating while trying to finish a conference paper to be delivered in an hour...]

Just a quick note to mention a few upcoming talks I’m giving (which is a none-too-subtle way to apologize for the slow posting these days):

Poetic Forces: Creative Change in and Beyond the Arab Spring (Tuesday, March 12, 5:30 PM, Granoff Center, Martinos Auditorium, Brown University)

Very much looking forward to this event, which will feature Egyptian rapper Deeb alongside Tricia Rose, Lara Dotson-Renta, Nancy Khalek, and myself.  If you haven’t heard him yet, Deeb’s one of the most interesting artists rapping in Arabic at the moment. I’m a sucker for colloquial artistry of any stripe, and his lyrics are sharp, funny, self-deprecating, and very revealing of Egyptian political and cultural dynamics — without sounding like flat commentary. The video below is one of the few available with English subtitles, but if you’re interested in his lyrics, I’ll see if I can get permission to post the handout he sent us.

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects (March 21-23, 2013, Brown University)

“An international, interdisciplinary collaboration located at Brown University and traveling through different international locations in Bangalore, Oslo and London. It is an inquiry into the networked conditions of our times, and how they produce ways, conditions and habits of life and living which need to be unpacked beyond mapping and analyzing networks as producing seamless globalizations.” I’ll be discussing epistemological problems engendered by the network and new forms of witness in the context of the Arab Spring (sort of along the lines of this post).

And on the remote chance that anyone reading this blog is based in Portland OR and is interested in hearing me talk about 14th century Arabic encyclopedism, I’ll be giving a talk at the American Oriental Society conference this weekend. Back to regular programming soon enough.