on being Egypt's first female marriage registrar

Amal Afifi, the first woman appointed as a marriage registrar, struggles to gain legitimacy. As one of her colleagues so eloquently put it:

"This job is unfit for women as it usually requires mixing with men for a long time, a requirement that is against Islam," said Anwar Dabour, a professor of Sharia.

"It is unwise to allow women to work as marriage registrars, especially as there are many qualified men around who can do the job," Dabour told this paper.

on the availability and frequency of abortions in the Middle East

Apparently both are increasing.

"people love jazz because they love freedom"

A piece reminiscing on the "Jazz Diplomacy" program of the Cold War, where Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and others traveled across the world (the article lists Athens, Moscow, Karachi and Cairo as a little sample) introducing non-Americans to the real American flavor of jazz.

The writer, Fred Kaplan, waxes nostalgic about the tour:

Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”

The anecdote he includes about Athens is particularly striking in the contrast between the way real ambassadors and so-called "Jazz Ambassadors" are received:

The band’s first stop was Athens, where students had recently stoned the local headquarters of the United States Information Service in protest of Washington’s support for Greece’s right-wing dictatorship. Yet many of those same students greeted Gillespie with cheers, lifting him on their shoulders, throwing their jackets in the air and shouting: “Dizzy! Dizzy!”

Kaplan's interpretation seems to be that we no longer do things quite the way we used to - America is no longer propogating its art and culture to its advantage so strategically. (He doesn't discuss the obvious implications that new technologies have for a tour like this, either - for example, anyone with YouTube can see a performance of an American musician in his own living room, so some of the work of this jazz tour is already being done without any government meddling).

But in today’s world what would “something like this” be?

Jazz was a natural for the cold war. Soviet citizens who hated their government found anything American alluring, especially jazz (and later rock), which was such a heady contrast to Moscow’s stale official culture. The same was true, to a degree, in some of the nonaligned nations, which were under pressure from both superpowers to sway toward one side or the other.

He seems to identify the content of the program - what kind of music is being sent abroad - as the big difference between then and now. But for me, the real crux of the difference was expressed in this bit:

Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school-integration laws. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.”

Administration officials feared that this broadside, especially from someone so genial as “Ambassador Satchmo,” would trigger a diplomatic disaster. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Attorney General Herbert Brownell that the situation in Arkansas was “ruining our foreign policy.” Two weeks later, facing pressure from many quarters, Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas. Armstrong praised the move and agreed to go on a concert tour of South America.

The jazzmen’s independence made some officials nervous. But the shrewder diplomats knew that on balance it helped the cause.

I sincerely cannot fathom such a sequence of events taking place now. Perhaps that is just because of the reason Kaplan named - jazz just is not as famous now as it was 50 years ago, and the musicians don't have the following to force the government into taking any sort of action. It's possible. But there are other musicians who have their own brand - I am sure you can think of 2 without even blinking. Some of those musicians might not be admirable representatives of the United States, but others could very well be, and I still can't imagine the government putting those individuals in a position where they might have a platform to deliver a message other than the scripted government line. And maybe more importantly, it's possible they wouldn't want to represent the U.S. government.

Our government is, at this point, considered a lying organization. What musician would want to carry that torch? It is no longer a matter of reconciling the good things you see the government doing - e.g. fighting Communism - with the bad things - e.g. neglecting school integration - and ensuring that the balance is positive. It is now a matter of swallowing your objections to the government's infringing on civil liberties through new 'national security policies', mistreating and perhaps torturing detainees, starting an elective war in Iraq based on a fabricated narrative of WMDs, and doing all of it wrapped in the mantel of good warring against evil. The Bush administration itself recognizes this by now, I am sure, and chooses not to enroll popular figures to perform on its behalf. And those figures know that their popularity could only suffer if they represented the government.

The idea that people in foreign countries must learn to separate American culture from American foreign policy in order to develop a warmer attitude towards the United States makes sense. However, American music and styles and slang are being exported. You can watch Friends every day on MBC in Riyadh. The problem is not that "other people don't know enough about how likable Americans are". The problem is that we have bad policies. So, until the policies are updated, I think the bands can stay at home.

speaking of 'Islam' being associated with 'jihad'

WSJ on the way that Obama is navigating his relationship with the Muslim community.

"If he were a Muslim, so what? That insinuates that if he were a Muslim, he's automatically a jihadist. That's incredibly insulting to people of the Muslim faith and Arabs who are Christian," says Tony Kutayli, a spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and a Christian.

on Ian McEwan and Islamophobia

Novelist Ian McEwan (author of Atonement, On Chesil Beach and many many others - those are just my favorites) made a few comments recently on Islamism that weren't necessarily received, the most oft-quoted being that militant Islam seeks to "create a society that I detest". He drew a distinction between militant Islam and militant Christianity:

McEwan recognised that similar views [oppression of women, opposition to homosexuality] were held by some Christian hardliners in America.

"I find them equally absurd," he said. "I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."

It may not be true that those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in his city. However, they haven't in the recent past, and McEwan certainly isn't the only one paying closer attention to the threat of terrorism from Muslims than from Christians - most governments use his hierarchy of threat. McEwan does appear to adopt a tone that implies he thinks himself courageous, and Adrian Hamilton in the Independent takes him to task for it.

Indeed, as a catalogue of the failings of Islamism, and by extension of all Islam, McEwan's enunciation of the despicable are pretty much the received wisdom of our time.

It is not that which I object to. What is objectionable is not the triteness of their views but the way that they present them as if they were somehow brave and outspoken, a courageous gesture against the norms of political correctness. In reality they are simply the mirror image of the views propagated by the worst of the mullahs, and playing directly into their hands.

I tend to think that the "define your terms" imperative could be accurately directed at both McEwan and Hamilton (and, I guess, Martin Amis - who McEwan was defending when he made the abovementioned comments. Although Amis' comments about strip-searching everyone who looks like they might be from Pakistan or the Middle East do define terms in a way that ... doesn't insulate him from accusations of racism, exactly). I was at a conference recently where one of the participants named the failure on the part of the counterterrorism community to clearly delineate who they considered a terrorist was, perhaps ironically, one of the motivating factors (granted, just one) mobilizing future jihadis against the West. Amis clearly thinks all Muslims need to suffer for the wrongs of a few; McEwan makes a small effort to restrict his criticisms to extremists (hence the use of the word 'militants') but doesn't do it heartily enough to distance himself from Amis. Therefore we have Hamilton saying things like this:

The more that the West demands change from outside, the more it makes such issues as women's rights the litmus test of reform, the more difficult it makes the task of those pushing for change from within. The more it resorts to terms such as "Islamofacism" and "mediaevalism", the greater its ignorance of the pressures and the possibilities of societies in flux today. There are no generalities, just particulars, specific to place, person and moment.

And so the conversation becomes nothing more than a tit for tat between the politically 'correct' and 'incorrect'. Of course we must be careful about generalities - but as a journalist, and particularly as a columnist, Hamilton must rely on generalities a good deal of the time just to fill his word quota. Does he not know this? A newspaper columnist slamming a novelist commenting on politics for using 'generalities' sounds to me like the pot calling the kettle black. And, to be frank, it has the potential to bring the dialogue even further afield from what is taking place in many Muslim communities, where making a sharp distinction between Muslims and Islamic extremists is necessary for their members' continued full participation in society. The association of all images of Islam with extremism contributes to the ire over McEwan's comment, I think - if he had just said he would detest a society where homosexuality was condemned and women were second-class citizens then no one would have called him racist, but tacking on 'Islamic militants' to his discussion made him a Muslim-hater. If our brains were not so hard-wired to make the connection between a whole faith community and one violent subgroup thereof, then Muslims would have had as little problem with it as I, a nonpracticing Christian, have with him saying that American evangelicals are extreme as well.

We have a long way to go in this conversation, to say the least.

more on al Qaradawi the moderate (?)

Some excerpts from the Peninsula (Qatar) on al Qaradawi's perspective on different issues, from women's role in society:

Turning to the status of women, Qaradawi said women must study and become great leaders, teachers and scientists.

"We support and promote equality of opportunity for males and females. In Qatar, there is equality between men and women, especially in terms of benefits and pay, they are the same in the employment sector and equality is evident; it does not discriminate by gender".

to the need for the Middle East to become agriculturally solvent:

Qaradawi urged Arab societies to promote agriculture, noting that this was something Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) had encouraged Muslims to do. He said there was enough land in Sudan which, if cultivated properly, could feed the entire ummah (Muslim society).

"This is an ummah not sufficient in agriculture," he said. Islam was not the reason for this problem, he added. "Religion is not what held us back, but it is the misunderstanding of our religion."

Clearly, he counts a wide range of issues in his purview; I am inclined to think that a policy wherein a government engages only with groups that it agrees with one hundred percent of the time could be called isolationist.

better yet, don't talk to the Islamists

FP has a piece from Steven Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations, discouraging alliances with Islamist groups, regardless of how 'moderate' they may be. Of course he brings up the headscarf controversy in Turkey:

If there was ever a problem in defining moderate Islam, however, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) epitomizes it. The party seems to be the paragon of moderate Islamism, undertaking a wide range of reforms and staking its political legacy on Ankara’s entry into the European Union. Yet, Turkey’s archsecularists and a fair number of analysts in the West regard the party with deep suspicion. Citing the AKP’s recent effort to lift the ban on women wearing head scarves at publicly funded universities as only the most egregious example, they argue that the party’s real agenda is to Islamize Turkish society. Whose side should the United States take here?

I am tempted to be sarcastic about this. Does Cook really think that allowing women who wear headscarves to attend public universities is evidence of being immoderate in one's religious views?

He also places an emphasis on attitudes toward suicide bombing as a litmus of moderation - frequently a disqualifier. The example of Qaradawi serves to underline what seems to be his suggestion: that seemingly 'moderate' Islamists/Muslims still want to kill Israelis.

Take Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential TV star in the Arab world. His weekly Al Jazeera show, Sharia and Life, attracts millions of viewers. Qaradawi holds progressive positions on family law, the status of women, and political reform. He recently told Egyptian government employees to “pray less” to improve their productivity. Many Arabs regard him as staunchly moderate. Yet the sheikh has also placed his theological imprimatur on suicide bombings against Israelis, arguing that since all Israelis serve in the military at one time or another, they are all legitimate targets. For those analysts who call for support of moderate Islam, it is hard to believe Qaradawi is whom they have in mind.

As Cook uses attitudes toward Israelis as a test in his own calculus of moderation, he should be careful not to discount the role that it might play in Arab audiences' calculus of authenticity. Suicide bombing/rock throwing are considered by some the only means the Palestinians have at their disposal for retaliation against Israeli aggression, and to speak out against suicide bombing might sound in some cases like speaking out against the Palestinians, leading to the scholar or politician or whomever losing credibility with Arab/Iranian (Rafsanjani is another of his examples) audiences.