A Lebanese-American Journalist Reflects on the Arab Spring: Anthony Shadid

Veteran war correspondent Anthony Shadid spent much of the past decade in Baghdad covering the Iraq war, first for The Washington Post and then for The New York Times. Last December, Shadid left Baghdad for his home in Beirut, Lebanon, where he’s been based for more than a decade.

“It was amazing to me how many conversations I was having with people about how dejected they were, how disappointed, how pessimistic they were about where the Arab world was,” he tellsFresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “… And so remarkably, just a week or two later, the uprising began in Tunisia.”

Shadid reported from Tunisia and then from the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Bahrain. He says 2011 has been one of the most unbelievable years he ever could have imagined experiencing in the Middle East region.

“I think back to this idea that a generation ago, the Iranian revolution was this event that changed the Middle East,” he says. “And we’re [talking about] six revolts or revolutions or uprisings all happening, in a lot of respects, at the very same time.”

Shadid says the euphoria felt in places like Tunisia and Egypt throughout the spring has now passed.

“I think there’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty of where we’re headed,” he says. “I guess after being a pessimist in Baghdad for so long, I remain an optimist. I think that optimism comes from this idea that these societies — that have been moribund for so long — have been revived or rejuvenated. … And that very dynamism of those societies leaves hope for the future.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM NPR 

2011: Islam redeemed, and by God, we came a long way

“You can crush the flowers, but that will not delay the Spring.” – Protest graffiti in a Cairo mosque

The year that is about to pass is historical for Islam for the reason that a much-derided faith has proved to be capable of being all that it was thought incapable of.

An awakening that swept the Arab world ended up re-inventing Islam in the eyes of the world. I consider myself lucky for being able to travel to some of the lands and meeting some of the people who were part of this.

The changes have been variously called “Arab Spring”, “Arab awakening” or “Arab Empowerment”. I prefer to call it Islam’s second renaissance.

For this to be the second renaissance, you may wonder, there ought to be a first one in the first place. Digression be excused, Ibn Rushd’s (Averroes for Europe) rescue of the Aristotelian texts (when Europe almost buried them) should be counted as one of the key features of the first Islamic renaissance.

The Arab spring was sparked in Tunisia in late 2010 by protests that followed the self-immolation of a young vendor harassed by police. His death in a hospital in January prompted thousands to take to the streets that forced the longtime president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee to Saudi Arabia.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE HINDUSTAN TIMES (INDIA)

Rival Islamist blocs leading in Egyptian vote

It’s been a historic week for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the prime beneficiary in the first round of voting for the country’s new parliament. Fully 62 per cent of eligible Egyptians cast ballots this week, and more of them voted for the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party than for any other party or alliance.

 

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While election officials declined Friday evening to reveal returns until all three rounds of voting have been completed in early January, leaks from the organization and from judges overseeing the process indicate that about 40 per cent of the ballots were cast for the Islamist FJP.

For them, that’s the good news.

However, the last thing the Brotherhood wanted was to have its upstart Islamist rivals, the Salafists, running in second place in the voting, with as much as 25 per cent of the vote.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL 

Protesters in Egypt Urge Christian-Muslim Unity

CAIRO (AP) — Hundreds of protesters marched Friday from Egypt’s pre-eminent mosque to a central Cairo cathedral in a show of Muslim-Christian unity after a bloody clash earlier this week involving Coptic Christian protesters and the military.

Demonstrators chanted slogans against the country’s military ruler, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who has increasingly become the focus of activists’ anger during the bumpy transition following Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February.

A crowd of onlookers threw rocks at the demonstrators outside Al-Azhar mosque, the most important center of learning in Sunni Islam. But the group of Muslims and Christians was undeterred and marched on toward the cathedral before heading to Tahrir Square and a nearby boulevard along the Nile where Sunday’s clashes took place.

The distrust between pro-democracy activists and the military council, which is leading the country’s transitional period until presidential elections expected in 2012, deepened after the clashes.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

Obama’s Bahrain Backpedaling

editor’s Note: Joost R. Hitlermann is Deputy Program Director for Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group.

By Joost R. Hiltermann, Foreign Affairs

Ever since the Arab Spring began, Washington has been faced with the question of how to ease autocrats from power. After former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from office in February, President Barack Obama said that the United States had been on the “right side” of history, suggesting that that is where Washington would position itself in the Arab world’s transition to democracy. What exactly this should mean in practice remains an unsettled question – especially in states presided over by dictators whose stable rule and pro-U.S. orientation were long-standing cornerstones of U.S. strategy in the Middle East.

This dilemma is particularly salient in the case of Bahrain, a small island kingdom in the Gulf and a longtime U.S. strategic ally. For months now, Bahrain has been engulfed in protests against the repressive rule of the Khalifa family; the most recent demonstrations in late August claimed the life of a 14-year-old boy, the latest casualty in the regime’s drive to restore order.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN

Bahrain: the Untold Story

The Islam Debate Egypt Needs

Six months after a coalition of activist groups in Egypt toppled Hosni Mubarak from power, many in the West are once again raising alarms that the so-called Arab Spring is merely the harbinger of an Islamist takeover of the Middle East.

The latest salvo comes in response to a rally held in Tahrir Square last Friday that was dominated by Islamist and Salafist (ultra-conservative Muslim) groups, many of them associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The sheer size and strength of the demonstration was, for many, a sign that the dream of democracy in Egypt may be giving way to the reality of theocracy. The Washington Post wrote that the Islamists’ presence at the rally “was a stunning show of force that left the liberal pioneers of Egypt’s revolution reeling.”

It is true that Islamists comprised the largest and most vocal of the more than 25 different Egyptian organizations, most of them labor and youth groups, who organized last week’s mass show of unity against the country’s military rulers. But that is a reflection of their superior organizational skills and their ability to mobilize their members, and not of their political clout or their national support.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE WASHINGTON POST 

Arab Youth Step in Where Islamism Failed

By David Gardner in London

Only six months on and the metaphors are already starting to grate. The Arab spring has entered a long, hot summer and, in the view of some commentators, is headed for the deep freeze of winter. There is something unexamined about this view, which appears to hanker after the old order in the Middle East, and perhaps wants it replaced with some sort of status quo-lite.

But has the pent-up yearning for change across the Arab world really gone so wrong?

There was never even a remote possibility that the transition from entrenched, often western-backed autocracies could be anything other than messy and prolonged, and often violent. The successful topplings of the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are seen as peaceful – which they were in comparison to the present conflicts in Syria and Libya. Yet, in Egypt, for example, while the tactics of the Tahrir Square revolutionaries were for the most part non-violent, 850 people were still killed by regime forces, according to official figures.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE FINANCIAL TIMES OF LONDON

US Reaches out to Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

CAIRO, Egypt — The U.S. government announced today it was opening a dialogue with Islamist political parties amid sweeping changes brought on by the Arab Spring and announced it was seeking “limited contacts” with members of Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently visited Egypt, said, “It is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful and committed to nonviolence. We welcome therefore dialogue with those Muslim Brotherhood members who wish to talk with us.”

Clinton made the comments to reporters while traveling in Budapest, according to the Associated Press.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE GLOBAL POST 

A Coptic Evangelical’s Reason for Backing the Muslim Brotherhood

CAIRO // Rafik Habib likes to finish his days at a Costa Coffee shop near his home in Rehab City on the outskirts of Cairo. He drinks an espresso, reads the newspapers … and defends the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamist organisation needs little help from one man: surveys show it has support from at least 15 per cent of Egyptians. But Dr Habib is an exception. He is a Coptic Christian intellectual who crossed sectarian lines to join the Brotherhood’s newly established Freedom and Justice Party as third-in-command.

“A large segment of Muslims think it was a good step, except some Salafis,” he says in his sparse office dotted with 1970s furniture.

“But the Christian community in general has refused my choice, and especially my decision to join as a founder.”

Some of his detractors have said his position in the group is merely cosmetic, but Christians have been more vitriolic, calling it an act of treason.

For Dr Habib, 52, it was one of the most difficult political decisions of his life.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NATIONAL