State of the Revolution in Egypt -- from Arabist.net

FIVE JANUARY 25 GAINS THAT HAVE (SO FAR) SURVIVED THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION By Steve Negus September 30, 2011 at 12:12 PM Share As quite a few commentators have gloomily noted, an Egyptian counter-revolution appears to be in full swing. The Supreme Council for the Armed Forces has vowed to step up its use of Emergency Law and demonstrating a willingness to crack down on street protesters, strikers, critics of the military, NGOs who receive foreign funding, and anyone else who might trouble their hold over the country. Newspapers are again being censored. The Interior Ministry seems to have successfully resisted real reform, at least for the time being. Supporters of the revolution are trying to count the tangible achievements of the January uprising and coming up short, sober observers are reminding us that those who create a revolution rarely get to determine its outcome, and some Edmund Burkes are surveying the scene and declaring that they knew all along that the naive youth of Facebook could never seriously shape the course of Egypt's future, except as pawns. I would agree that the vision of Egypt's future articulated by protesters in Tahrir is still far from being realized. However, they have already accomplished far more than many would give them credit for doing. Some examples: 1) Egypt's media and political political landscape has become vastly more pluralistic. SCAF has been cracking down on the media, but in a very piecemeal fashion, a few pebbles tossed against the torrent of licensings of newspapers and television channels licensed in the first months after Mubarak's departure. Every major political trend in the country has been allowed to form its own political party. This means, among other things that parties have more internal democracy: Islamists no longer have to huddle together under the semi-tolerated protective umbrella of the Muslim Brothers to avoid prosecution for illegal political activity, but have been free to split off into smaller groups that express their discontent with the parent organization. 2) Liberals have established themselves as a real force in Egyptian politics. Electorally, they may not be as organized as the Islamists, but the leftist/liberal secular-leaning youth are the acknowledged heroes of January. Groups like April 6 and the Revolutionary Youth Coalition now have major name recognition, and polls suggest that they are at the very least competitive with the Muslim Brothers. Prior to January, very few people would have mentioned the Islamists and the liberals even in the same breath as political forces of comparable power. 3) Egypt's political discourse has become increasingly liberal. The demands of the January uprising have hardened the consensus that Egypt needs to have a democratically elected government. And we're not talking about the "democratic transition" offered by Mubarak, where Egypt may be allowed to elect their 20 years down the road, if conditions are absolutely perfect -- pretty much everyone has agreed in principle that the next government must be fairly elected under the supervision of an independent judiciary. And with the exception of a few Salafis, pretty much every group insists that the government be "civil" -- ie, not an Islamic state. You may or may not believe that the Muslim Brothers would not establish a theocracy if given the chance. But in order to implement a radical agenda, a would-be radical vanguard party usually needs to pitch itself as offering a major alternative to the current order. Very few Egyptian politicians seem to have calculated that there is a market for religious radicalism. The revolution also seems to have strengthened the consensus in favor of individual rights -- leading Islamists have acknowledged a right for Muslims to convert out of Islam, for example, while Coptic activists have become more vocal in demanding that the Church should no longer have the capacity to regulate their personal lives, in particular their right to divorce. 4) Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have become politically active -- not just in the crowds in Tahrir, but in the workplace as well. Egypt was never quite as compliant as it was portrayed to be, and workers, government employees, professionals, tenants, and other aggrieved groups have always staged strikes and demonstrators to further interests. But under Mubarak, the regime was usually able to keep these groups focused on their specific needs and fairly easily appeased with small concessions. Now, workplace organizations are far more militant, and far more likely to mix their own parochial demands with pressure to keep up reforms at a national level. Also, Egyptian institutions from labor unions to al-Azhar have signalled that they will no longer tolerate their leadership being appointed by the state, and insist on autonomy. 5) The calculus of running the country has been changed. No future government can assume, as Mubarak's did, that it can violate its pledges or make an utter mockery of elections, and only a small handful of activists will turn out to protest, outnumbered by the Central Security forces which surround them. No future autocrat can quite as cocky about rigging elections, about promoting a family member as heir, or otherwise ignoring the desires of the Egyptian public. None of these successes is irreversible. None are cast-iron guarantees of fair and democratic elections. But they are major obstacles in the path of any would-be strongman who wishes to reestablished an entrenched and lasting autocracy.

Where did the money go?

From NPR:

The amount the U.S. military spends annually on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan: $20.2 billion, according to a former Pentagon official.
That's more than NASA's budget. It's more than BP has paid so far for damage from the Gulf oil spill. It's what the G-8 has pledged to help foster new democracies in Egypt and Tunisia.
"When you consider the cost to deliver the fuel to some of the most isolated places in the world — escorting, command and control, medevac support — when you throw all that infrastructure in, we're talking over $20 billion," Steven Anderson tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Rachel Martin.

From Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post:

With just over three months until the last U.S. troops are currently due to leave Iraq, the Department of Defense is engaged in a mad dash to give away things that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars to buy and build....

The most colossal relics of the U.S. invasion of Iraq will be the outsize military bases the Bush administration began erecting not long after the invasion, under the never explicitly stated assumption that Iraq would become the long-term staging area for U.S. forces in the region...

Most of the $2.4 billion was spent building about a dozen huge outposts that, in addition to containing air strips and massive fortifications also have all the comforts of home. The Al-Asad Airfield in Anbar province, for example, covers 25 square miles -- about the size of Boulder, Colo. -- and is known as "Camp Cupcake" due to its amenities.

The 15-square-mile Joint Base Balad, as Whitney Terrell wrote earlier this year for Slate, is "home to three football-field-sized chow halls, a 25-meter swimming pool, a high dive, a football field, a softball field, two full-service gyms, a squash court, a movie theater, and the U.S. military's largest airfield in Iraq."

 Imagine, a whole new Boulder in Iraq!

Image:  Al-Asad Airfield in its glory days.

For the proud daughters

Speak to me of summer,
Long winters longer
Than time can remember,
Setting up of other roads,
Travel on in old accustomed ways.
I still remember the talks by the water,
The proud sons and daughters
That knew the knowledge of the land,
And spoke to me in sweet accustomed ways.

Clash of civilizations time?

Since I am teaching both  Islamic Civilization and Crusade and Jihad this term, you can see how this piece, summarized from an Arabic source  in Syria Comment, could not help but draw my attention.

Why don’t the Christians in both Lebanon and Syria immigrate to Europe is allegedly what Sarkozy asked the Maronite religious leader on his recent visit to France.  According to the article, Christians had no place in the Middle East given the clash between Christianity and Islam.  The Maronite leader was shocked by what he heard which prompted the French leader to point to a document that cites how over three million Christians immigrated from Lebanon over the past 20 years and that the Middle East will face many problems in the future.

One wonders, but not very much, what the French president thinks about all those Muslims in France.

Observation Post Mustang, Afghanistan

From The Big Picture.  Click to expand -- it is worth it.

Kunar province, Afghanistan

From The Big Picture.

Another impressive re-enactment I missed: WMAW

That's "Western Martial Arts Workshop" to you, and it took place in Chicago this past weekend.  Get a gander at that gorgeous armor!

About that Overview of Late Antiquity

Back  when I came to Nipissing University in the late 80s and early 90s, I was finishing up my first book, on fifth-century Latin ecclesiastical chronicles, and casting around for a new project.  One idea that occured to me was a zippy textbook on Late Antiquity, with lots of maps and pictures and punchy, straightforward language, not to mention fearless generalization.  After all, I had spent well over a decade reading intensively about the period, and I had a pretty good idea of how to fill the  major holes that remained in my personal knowledge.

So I happily began to read, write, and sketch maps.

When it was more or less done, I kind of chickened out.  I thought this "Overview of Late Antiquity" was pretty good, and accessible to a student or general audience -- a big priority -- but was it commercial?  Shouldn't it perhaps go as far as the First Crusade? Undercutting myself, I showed it to no publishers (DON'T DO THIS!) and put it on the shelf.

If it hadn't been for the Web, that would have been it.

But the Web did come along, I was approached by ORB to put together a section on Late Antiquity, and one of the first things I did was web the Overview.  At least, the text plus links to pictures elsewhere on the Web.  Regretfully, I never turned the sketch maps into polished images.

The Overview has been freely available on-line since about 1995, and I am sure it has been read by many more people than would have seen it if it had been put into print.  Currently, I am using it again to supply background material to my seminar students in the course "The World of Gregory of Tours."

And you know, I think it's pretty good.  You can see what you think if go here, or  if that doesn't work, here.

Image:  A late-antique version of heaven, from a 6th-century church in Ravenna.

Students in HIST 4505

There seems to be a problem accessing the Overview Of Late Antiquity. Try this direct link to chapter 1 section 1. http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/orb/ovc1s1.htm

And a book manuscript wings its way to a publisher

Doesn't happen every day!

Wish me luck!

Scandal at Marathon

A free Greek hoplite lounging around with his wife in public!

Time and a word

This evening  I listened to the second album by Yes, Time and a Word, from about 1971.  Did it take me back?  Perhaps, but maybe not to the actual 1971, but to the alternate world they created with their music in 1971.

I feel the same way about the Beatles, heard most recently on CBC1 as we drove home from North Bay.  Timeless -- but the music was timeless then.

Not to be missed: conjuring up Rome in AD 600

Dr. Beachcombing imagines the near-ghost town it must have been:

Let’s take the lowest sensible estimate for classical Rome – half a million – and the highest for Rome c. 600, about 50,000. That means that the population has not only been decimated, but that it had been decimated nine times over. And what is more these heirs of Rome (as fashionable ‘late antique’ historians call them) were resident in an echo box; a city that they no longer had the technology to repair, let alone recreate, where nine out of every ten residences were empty, where three and four story buildings gradually keeled over into the streets and where the Parthenon and the Coliseum looked down mockingly on the little people below, not so much dwarfs on giants’ shoulders, as blue-bottles buzzing around a cow’s backside.

Then, remember, perhaps the actual population of Imperial Rome was more like a million and the population of Rome c. 600 was more like  ten thousand, a hundredth of what it had been. The psychopathic Anglo-Saxon guard, the tourist from Scythia and the Pope and his tiny administration could shout as loud as they wanted and no one would have heard them in their ghost town. No one was listening, not even the red baked tiles made in a happier age.

I have recently lived across the river from Detroit...so this is evocative.  Detroit is not, however, quite so echoic.

Parthenon presumably should be Pantheon (above).

More on ancient population estimates in a later post.

Unexpectedly well

Why have things gone better in Libya than in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein?  Veteran observer Rory Stewart has his theories but admits he doesn't know.  But this time it is different:

Libya did not look as shabby or dangerous as Iraq. Despite six months of fighting and uncertainty, the lawns in Tripoli were mown, the bougainvillea bushes were bright, and the rubbish was still in garbage bags, not strewn, as in Basra, in suppurating ditches. The shops and petrol stations were reopening, the water supply was beginning to return. The armed 15-year-olds were polite. No one at any of the checkpoints asked for a bribe, or our satellite phones. The Misrata militia in their jeeps were as friendly as the Knights of Zintan in their pick-up trucks. There was little talk of revenge. No one was shooting anyone else.

And to my surprise, there was little looting. In the executive offices, it was not just the furniture and the televisions that were untouched: even the silver ashtrays and gold paperknives were still on the desks. It seemed that no one had slipped even a fountain-pen into their pocket when the government left and the rebels came in. At night, the streets of Tripoli were so jammed with honking cars, waving flags, boys wearing the national colours, that one might imagine Libya had just won the World Cup. The government and the police were not in any position to prevent disorder, but it seemed that the Libyans were not drawn to looting or violence. And no one I spoke to, from expatriate engineers to young gunmen, expected that.

Already people are claiming that the euphoria and calm after the fall of Tripoli could have been predicted and can be easily explained. But such civility was not inevitable; it could not have been assumed from Libyan history or culture. Libya shares many features of countries where anarchy has prevailed. Like Afghanistan or Iraq, it has a distinguished history and has experienced periods of stability but lacks the essential trinity of the international state-building apostles: ‘a vibrant civil society’, ‘rule of law’ and ‘good governance’. It has a rapidly growing young population, which is only partially educated, and few jobs. The traditional forces of tribe and Islam co-exist with more cosmopolitan aspirations, as they do in the rest of the Islamic world.

Many of the positive things that can be said about Libya can be said about other more troubled countries – right down to the small details.

 ...

If we cannot come to any satisfactory conclusions on the London riots – a limited event, exhaustively documented, in our own capital – what sense can we make of why they did not riot in Tripoli?

Marathon re-enactment

The Montreal Gazette has a great collection of photos  of this summer's event.

Phil Paine in Crete

A long-time and well-read fan of Minoan archaeology gets to see the real thing up close:

On the Road Again

There ain’t no justice on the Aeriopagus

Athens Redux

The Prince of the Lilies

Minoan Exiles

Plateau of Lost Souls

Phaestos and Aghia Triada

Sleeping in Graveyards

Before the gates of Excellence.…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine my surprise

In the first class meeting of my Crusade and Jihad course this morning, I said something like this:

You don't have to want to be a Christian crusader in the present, or even be a Christian, to have a vague positive feeling about those old holy wars.  For example, the recent movie Kingdom of Heaven by implication condemns some aspects of crusading, especially fanatics who go too far, but does not condemn crusading or Crusaders completely.  There are plenty of literary and film examples of this going back to Walter Scott in the early 19th century.  This results in the nostalgic feeling that somewhere sometime there was a worthy crusade pursued by sincere people who even if they made some mistakes had good hearts. 

Then I asked my students if they had any such nostalgic feeling.

Not one said they did.

Image:  Richard Lionheart, North Bay seems to have fallen out of love with you...

Course materials for my students

I have posted course outlines:

• HIST 3116;
• HIST 3805;  
• HIST 4505.

Apologies for the ugliness due to the loss of formatting.  HTML is so complicated these days that I am going to need expert help just to find the problems.

A taste of revolution

Football fans taunt the police in Cairo:



Discussed in detail  and translated at Arabist.net. 

Update:  Chanting, voting, and ancient church councils.

Nothing to say but it's ok...

Good morning, good morning!

Egyptian revolutionaries attack Cairo's Israeli embassy

I've called Cairo "Paris, 1791." It may be progressing to Paris, 1792, or even Tehran, 1980--the attack on the US embassy comes to mind, an attack on the hated foreign ally of the Old Regime.

What other people were doing on Labor Day weekend

The Temple of Transition blazes at Burning Man (the 25th).


Thanks to the Big Picture.

Fighting in the woods

I am there dodging swords.  Thanks again to Kyle Andrews.

Jack Vance's hadaul, done SCA style as "Mordain's Rings"

A little medievalesque fun on my back field.  Thanks to Kyle Andrews.

Phil Paine visits Knossos, at last

His reflections after fulfilling a life-long dream:

I have my owned pref­er­ences about inter­pret­ing Knos­sos, but until now they’ve been based on pho­tographs, writ­ten descrip­tions, and site plans. These second-hand things give lit­tle feel­ing for the three-dimensional real­ity. It was only after exam­in­ing every cor­ner of the real site that I could con­fi­den­tially feel con­firmed in my own inter­pre­ta­tions. I am con­vinced that the “palace” of Knos­sos was no palace. The Minoan state of Knos­sos may or may not have had kings, but if they did, this com­plex was not an expres­sion of it. It is noth­ing like the royal palaces of Mesopotamia.

The most dis­cussed part of the com­plex is the Cen­tral Plaza, which Evans visu­al­ized as a palace court­yard, and the venue for the bull-leaping por­trayed in Minoan art. The plaza seems sin­gu­larly imprac­ti­cal for such an activ­ity, but it is not impos­si­ble. What­ever cer­e­monies were per­formed there, it seems to me unlikely that they were pri­mar­ily for the enter­tain­ment of a king, queen and court. Com­mu­nal feast­ing seems more likely. Per­haps the bull-leaping was done else­where, and the bull brought to the plaza for sac­ri­fice. Large quan­ti­ties of cups have been found, to del­i­cate for nor­mal use, and there are other signs of large-scale cooking.

The most impor­tant alter­na­tive expla­na­tion of the pri­mary pur­pose of the com­plex has been that it might have been a monas­tic com­plex. There are strik­ing analo­gies in its lay­out to monas­tic com­plexes in Tibet (which also focus on a rec­tan­gu­lar plaza), or the medieval Euro­pean monas­ter­ies (which also had exten­sive stor­age and work­shop facil­i­ties). I think this is closer to the truth, but I would take the argu­ment a step fur­ther. At one point, I turned to Filip and said: “This is an Agora.”
Every­thing about the place says “Agora” to me. In my mind’s eye, I can see a mar­ket place (gr. agora), spring­ing up between two or small sacred places that have turned into sanc­tu­ar­ies and places of pil­grim­age. These grad­u­ally evolved into shrines served by priest­esses, and even­tu­ally into a com­plex of monas­tic insti­tu­tions, but always main­tain­ing the cen­tral open space for a mix­ture of com­mer­cial, rit­ual, judi­cial, and polit­i­cal use. There is no one over­whelm­ing sacred place, as with a Cathe­dral or a Mesopotamian tem­ple. There is no one cen­tral audi­ence hall where a king could over­awe his sub­jects. The struc­ture which Evans imag­ined to be a royal throne room is com­pletely inap­pro­pri­ate for such use. It’s a small room, with a small chair set against the longest wall, at floor level. The “throne” faces a nar­row space partly filled with some kind of offer­ing bowl. Nobody ever built throne rooms like that. The aes­thet­ics is over­whelm­ingly inti­mate and reli­gious, not monar­chi­cal. No king who could com­mand the impres­sive resources of so wealthy a state would be con­tent with such a dinky lit­tle room, in which he could impress no one. All over the com­plex, there are no murals con­vey­ing kingly power and author­ity, noth­ing say­ing “look on this, ye mighty, and despair.” There are only pic­tures of flow­ers, chil­dren play­ing games, dol­phins leap­ing in the sea, farm­ers har­vest­ing their crops, ath­letes, ele­gant ladies, pets, and so on. The archi­tec­tural fea­ture are every­where con­sis­tent with domes­tic, com­mer­cial, and small-scale reli­gions uses.
At some points in time, the whole com­plex seems to have been con­sol­i­dated or rebuilt by a uni­form plan, but that is quite pos­si­ble in a non-monarchical con­text. The Agora of Athens under­went such a process under demo­c­ra­tic rule.

Which brings us to the intrigu­ing pos­si­bil­ity that Knos­sos, and the other Minoan cities such as Malia, Phaestos, and Gortyn might have been republics of some kind. Of course, no proof exists for such a hypoth­e­sis, but no proof exists for Evan’s roy­al­ist inter­pre­ta­tion, or sub­se­quent priestly the­o­ries. The level of evi­dence sim­ply does not per­mit any cer­tain­ties. Only the pos­si­bil­ity of deci­pher­ing the Lin­ear A or the hiero­glyphic texts holds any hope for that. But I think that a repub­li­can inter­pre­ta­tion has been resisted by archae­ol­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans under the influ­ence of dubi­ous assump­tions about lin­ear social evolution.

The emer­gence of repub­li­can state insti­tu­tions in the 18^th and 19^th cen­turies was partly inspired and harked back to Medieval and Renais­sance republics, though the con­ti­nu­ity between them was slim stuff, and largely depen­dent on folk­loric insti­tu­tions below the state level. The Medieval republics sim­i­larly harked back to the Clas­si­cal republics of Greece and Rome, though again the con­ti­nu­ity was ephemeral. It may be that the Democ­racy that emerged in the Greek polis of the fourth cen­tury BC was itself hark­ing back to remote prece­dents in the Bronze Age.

Before com­ing here, I had no clear notion of the broader phys­i­cal set­ting of Knos­sos. The “palace” was sur­rounded by a large (by Bronze Age stan­dards) city, of which we know very lit­tle. There were some large out­ly­ing struc­ture, and prob­a­bly a net­work of vil­lages sub­servient to, or inte­grated with the city. There were roads which led directly to the cen­tral plaza — another fea­ture that sug­gests an Agora. It’s only when you stand in them that you grasp that they were as tech­ni­cally advanced as any­thing the Romans built. The plaza is aligned with the region’s most dra­matic look­ing moun­tain peak. It is in a val­ley of fab­u­lous agri­cul­tural poten­tial. The sur­round­ing hills are ter­raced, and from what I gather the ter­races, con­stantly rebuilt, were there in Minoan times. This val­ley in turn was part of a sys­tem of broad, fer­tile val­leys and plains that dis­sects the island of Crete, with other major Minoan sites scat­tered in it. This area is extra­or­di­nar­ily beau­ti­ful. The Neolithic agri­cul­tural “pack­age” of domes­tic ani­mals and crops would have sup­ported a very high stan­dard of liv­ing, and com­bined with fish­ing and sea trade would have made life very sweet by ancient stan­dards. The murals don’t seem to lie.

We returned to Irak­lion and vis­ited its Archae­o­log­i­cal Museum. This was almost as great a plea­sure as Knos­sos itself. It con­tains most of the famous arti­facts unearthed at Knos­sos. It’s only when you see them in real life that you can fully appre­ci­ate them. Some are of great beauty. Some are just delight­ful, like the toy or model house, which is so detailed and obvi­ously intended to be real­is­tic that we can con­fi­dently pic­ture what Minoan houses actu­ally looked like. The famous murals are there. You can imag­ine my delight at being pho­tographed in front of the “Prince of the Lilies” mural that adorned my web­site for years.

Image:  the mural.

More ominously from Syria

Again from Anthony Shadid:

Abdullah represents what the government insists it is fighting. He is a Salafist, an adherent to a puritanical Islam, though he disavows the term. To him, Salafists bear arms, and he understands that the moment he and others fire a bullet in Homs or anywhere else, the regime will have the justification it covets to crush them with even more force. But there was no question of his devotion to a state that adheres to Islam as its foundation, and he dismissed the comparatively liberal rhetoric of some Islamic activists, like the Muslim Brotherhood. “They want to satisfy the West, and they don’t want to satisfy Muslims,” he told me the next morning. “They say, ‘We’re a modern Islam.’ But there’s no such thing as modern Islam. There’s Islam, and there’s secularism.” We debated the imposition of religious law and whether Christians and Muslims could intermarry. For the first time since I met him, Abdullah grew angry at me, when I suggested that no Christian or Alawite would subscribe to his vision of the state he would build in the wake of the revolution. He quickly cooled, aware that he shouldn’t show his emotions. At one point, he even suggested that however he might feel, however draconian he believed religious law should be, he was still a minority in the opposition. As much as the activists here talk of unity in the face of government oppression, I often felt as I did in Iraq in those early months after the American invasion in 2003. The more people denied their differences, the more apparent they became. For Iyad, Abdullah and others, there was deep anger at Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite movement that has baldly supported the Syrian regime. That anger had spilled into chauvinism against Shiite Muslims, intensifying the hostility they already felt for Alawites. They understood the importance of nonviolence, but even Abdullah admitted that if Assad fell, sectarian vendettas would erupt in the countryside. One of the young men warned darkly that events “were headed toward violence.”