Harvard University Press Blog

The Rise and Fall of Syria's President for Life?

Roger Owen writes in The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life that he became interested in the subject in the spring of 2009, and soon after decided to write a book. It was virtually completed by the end of December 2010, “just as the first rumblings of opposition to President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia suggested that these systems of quasi-monarchical government were much more vulnerable to popular pressure than almost anyone had previously imagined.” Faced with the question of whether or not to amend his work to reflect the inchoate Arab Spring, Owen compromised: “I would adapt my manuscript to take account of the fall of two presidents, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; the tremendous pressure faced by three more, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya; and the announcement by Omar al- Bashir of Sudan that he would not seek another term as president when his present term expired in 2015. This meant, in effect, the end of the system that my book seeks to explicate as a particular form of modern Arab political practice.” Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya have of course since been removed from power. In Syria, however, Bashar al-Asad remains. With the massacre last week of over 100 villagers in central Syria ratcheting international outrage yet higher, an end to Asad’s reign may be growing closer. We offer below an excerpt from Owen’s book that outlines the common features of the system of Arab monarchical republics, which may also be seeing its end.

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The systems of Arab presidents for life were many decades in the making, having their origins with the (mostly military) leaders who came to power from the late 1960s onward and soon learned how to construct the coup-proof regimes that would allow them to remain in offi ce for as long as they lived. From then on, only one Arab republican president, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani of North Yemen, left office more or less of his own free will when his term expired in 1974. Other unusual exceptions were Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who got pushed aside by ambitious subordinates, while two more, Gafar Nimeiri of Sudan and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria, were removed by fellow military officers in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

As of 31 December 2010, the list of longtime presidential survivors included Muammar Qaddafi, who got rid of the Libyan monarchy in 1969; Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen (1978–) and a United Yemen (1991–); Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1981–); Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia (1987–); and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (1993–). By then, just one—Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (1970–2000)—had managed to pass on power to his son, Bashar. But there was every reason to suppose that others, like Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi, fully intended to try. Meanwhile, at least two of the Middle East’s remaining monarchies, Morocco and Jordan, had become significantly more presidential in their exercise of royal authoritarian power.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have read the long history of political republics, beginning with the emergence of powerful figures such as the Caesars of ancient Rome. Then, too, there are the cases of the two powerful leaders of the revived form of republicanism represented by the American and French revolutions, with George Washington fighting off the various influences suggesting that he become another type of monarch and Napoleon Bonaparte agreeing to become emperor in the interest of ensuring that the revolution could be continued on a permanent basis.

Nevertheless, it took some little time to understand how, in a roughly similar republican context, roughly similar pressures encouraged the leaders of the world’s newly independent states to take their first step in the process toward permanency by allowing themselves to serve on and on without thought of retirement. It remains true that, in the Arab world at least, the general rationale of such systems, their structures, their politics, and the ways in which they sought to legitimize themselves remain little researched and poorly understood. All this in spite of the work of a small group of academic researchers, mostly political scientists, who have begun either to explore the present political dynamics of individual Arab presidential security states such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia or to look comparatively at certain aspects of these same dynamics either across the Middle East or, in a few cases, across all or most of the former colonial world.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum:

 

Second Chances at First Impressions

Along with all of our new books, each season we release paperback editions of dozens of titles that were first published in cloth a year or two earlier. When a paperback comes out it can be a nice reminder of a favorite work from seasons past, but it can also be an occasion to take a new look at a book that may have escaped notice the first time through. For the books themselves it can be a second chance at a first impression. With that in mind, we’ve collected here the first crop of Fall paperbacks, and excerpted the first few sentences of each. Maybe you’ll find something you didn’t even know you’d missed.

Ian Almond, Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

This book is a somewhat primitive book. It has a very straightforward purpose: to relate a selection of moments in European history when, in the very heart of countries such as Spain, Italy, Greece and Hungary, Muslims and Christians collaborated and co-operated with one another to fight against a common enemy–often an enemy also composed of Muslims and Christians. The book does not really do much more than this. It is not some vast overview of Muslim-Christian relations since 1100, nor an in-depth analysis of inter-cultural exchange between Islam and Christianity. It does not offer profound gems of philosophical insight into how human beings can learn to love one another, nor moving moments of idealism concerning the common humanity which can overcome all political/social/religious divisions, etc., etc. The book’s very modest aim, on the contrary, is to show how Muslims do not belong to an ‘other’ civilisation, but rather to the essence of a ‘Europe’ we are quickly in the process of forgetting.

Bernard Bailyn, Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Historical accounts of events and developments that took place in the Atlantic world began to appear almost as soon as contacts were established between Europe and the Americas in the late fifteenth century. But Atlantic history itself—that is, the evolving history of the zone of interaction among the peoples of Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas—was first seen as a distinct and cohesive subject of historical inquiry in the years immediately after World War II.

Daniel Bodansky, The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law

One evening a few years ago, a volunteer for a well-known environmental organization rang my doorbell to solicit a contribution. I declined, saying that I disagreed with the organization’s positions on various issues. The volunteer demanded to know which ones.

Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome

The year was 1468. On Fat Tuesday, the last and most extravagant night of carnival in Rome, Pope Paul II sat attentively watching the races from his throne high above the boisterous crowd, when suddenly a scuffle broke out. The papal guards had stopped someone who was loudly insisting on speaking with the pope urgently about a matter of life and death. The man, his beard and dark eyes barely discernible under his hood, was dressed like a philosopher. Seeing that he had captured the pope’s attention, the “philosopher” broke free of the guards and intoned: “Holy Father! You are in great danger!” The pope sat up, leaned forward, and beckoned the stranger to approach and explain. What he heard made him tremble and turn pale.

Chrystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching

This is a history of two southern women, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931), and the thousands of women who joined their campaigns against rape and for women’s rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the height of lynching in the American South. Felton was born in 1835 to a prosperous slaveholding family in De Kalb, Georgia. Wells, the daughter of slaves, was born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Despite differences in their age, race, class, and status, they both, in very different contexts, took radical stances on rape and lynching. Together, their struggles against sexual violence—Wells advocated on black women’s behalf and Felton mostly fought for the protection of poor white women—brought to southern politics the concerns of women who historically had been excluded from debates about rape and protection. Although both campaigned for women’s safety, they confronted the problem of lynching in completely different ways. While Wells became internationally known for her radical anti-lynching crusade, it was Felton’s notorious plea to “lynch a thousand a week” that thrust her into the national spotlight. From different sides of the color line, Felton and Wells were women’s rights pioneers who negotiated and challenged the racial and sexual politics of the New South.

What Is a Palestinian State Worth?

 

As the world prepares for the possibility of a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood recognition, we should revisit the question of Sari Nusseibeh’s recent work, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? The book is a tight, philosophical examination of what’s actually at stake in the quest for Palestinian statehood. Nusseibeh, president of the Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, structured the book around a series of questions: How did we come to this? What makes life worth living? Can values bring us together? How can we move the world? And, centrally, what are states for? To address that last question, and to help us remember what’s being overshadowed by the diplomatic jockeying surrounding the possible U.N. vote, we offer the following excerpt from Nusseibeh’s What Is a Palestinian State Worth? The passage examines the question from a variety of Palestinian perspectives in an attempt to highlight what’s shared.

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Imagine that you are a Palestinian asking the grand political question “What is a state for?” and examining your feelings about a possible Palestinian state. Perhaps you are already a citizen of some other state, belonging to that state and enjoying the basic advantages— security, work, education, property ownership, services, and so on—that states are supposed to provide for their citizens. If so, you may not feel an urgent need for the creation of a specifically Palestinian state. For you, instead, the most important felt need may be the opportunity to exercise your “right of return”: to return to your original home, Palestine, now Israel. Or perhaps you are a refugee, or a descendant of refugees, and are not a citizen but a mere resident of a nearby country, such as Lebanon. If so, you may share with other refugees and exiles the longing to be allowed to return, and you may also wish, in the meantime, to be provided by your country of residence with all the benefits of citizenship short of actual political citizenship, acceptance of which would signal (to others and to yourself ) that you have forfeited your right and claim to return to Palestine.

Now imagine that you already live west of the Jordan River, in what you regard as your real country, and hold Israeli citizenship—but that as a Christian or a Muslim, you feel semi-disenfranchised by the predominantly Jewish state, and also feel short-changed as a Palestinian whose people “lost out” to Israel. If so, you may be of two minds. You may wish to be granted full rights as an Israeli citizen, equal to those enjoyed by members of the religious majority, while also wishing for the establishment of a self-sustaining and independent state for your fellow Palestinians who, living in the occupied territories, are not citizens of Israel. You may not want to move into that new state, nor may you want the Arab areas within Israel to be annexed to it, but you may feel that a state for the Palestinian people would address the national as well as the quotidian needs of your non-Israeli fellow Palestinians, and also that it might aid your own struggle to co-own the State of Israel, which you now feel by right belongs to you.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.

Nonviolence Without Borders

Protesters throughout this Arab Spring have been inspired by the legacy of the American civil rights movement. Nico Slate, author of the forthcoming Colored Cosmopolitanism, explains below how this transnational affinity echoes that of an earlier era, a hidden history of bonds of sympathy and solidarity forged between African Americans and Indians during their freedom struggles of the late nineteenth century through the 1960s.

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A 50-year-old comic book about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s approach to nonviolent resistance has been translated into Arabic and has been circulating amongst protesters in Egypt and throughout the Middle East for months. According to a recent article by CNN, the cartoon is only one manifestation of a broad interest in the civil rights movement amongst today’s nonviolent activists. The comic book in question, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, itself documents an older link between the civil rights movement and freedom struggles throughout the world. The comic book, which can be found here, traces King’s leadership back to the nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi in India.

As I detail in my forthcoming book, Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India, connections between Indian and African American freedom struggles go well beyond the relationship between Gandhi and King. The comic book was published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization that by the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott had been working for decades to translate Gandhian methods for use in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. FOR helped organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial organization that launched sit-ins modeled on Gandhian protest in the early 1940s and later pioneered the freedom rides. Many civil rights activists—some now famous and others largely forgotten—turned to Gandhi for inspiration and ideas.

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, two young Black women were arrested on a bus near Petersburg, Virginia. Like Parks, both women were already actively engaged in the struggle for racial equality. By the time they boarded an old bus bound for Durham, North Carolina in late March 1940, Pauli Murray and Adelene McBean had long discussed how they could most effectively challenge racial segregation. The poor condition of their bus gave them the opportunity to translate their thoughts into action. Seated near the back of the bus, directly over a wheel, the two young women suffered with every bump. When McBean began to feel a sharp pain in her side, she and Murray occupied seats in the middle of the bus. The driver told them to move back. They refused and, after a lengthy debate with the driver and local police officers, were arrested. Murray wrote friends soon after her arrest, “We did not plan our arrest intentionally. The situation developed and, having developed, we applied what we knew of Satyagraha on the spot.”

Gandhi used the word satyagraha, combining the Sanskrit for “truth” and “holding firm,” to refer to his particular approach to nonviolent civil disobedience. In her memoirs, Murray remembered that when she and McBean were arrested their knowledge of satyagraha was “sketchy” and they had “no experience in the Gandhian method.” Like Murray, many Americans would learn the “Gandhian method” in the process of applying it against racial injustice. Less a rigid system than a series of guiding principles and a source of inspiration, Gandhian satyagraha would be reinvented in restaurants, department stores, buses and jails throughout the United States.

Connections between South Asians and African Americans extended beyond nonviolence, as Manning Marable’s new book on Malcolm X makes clear. Marable’s work demonstrates the breadth of linkages between African American Muslims and global Islam. Colored Cosmopolitanism reveals that such linkages were part of a larger constellation of connections in which nonviolent activists, Black and South Asian Muslims, Hindu reformers, Christian missionaries, followers of Marcus Garvey, African American soldiers, Indian immigrants, labor organizers, and many others forged links across freedom struggles. What provided coherence to these multifaceted linkages? I argue that a transnational conception of color came to serve as a bridge between people struggling against racism throughout the world. African Americans and South Asians together imagined a colored cosmopolitanism, a “dark” or “colored” world united in the struggle against racism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression. Advocates of colored cosmopolitanism fought for the freedom of the “colored world” even while calling into question the meanings of both color and freedom.

A History of Tahrir Square

Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Urban History, and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of the recently released Cairo: Histories of a City. In February, he wrote here of the powerful financial interests involved in the reshaping of Egypt’s political system. Now, while international attention has shifted to the war in Libya, AlSayyad steps back to reflect on the history of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, a space that has finally earned its name.

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The recent revolution in Cairo has made Tahrir Square a household name. No one, not even a historian who has written a book on the city, could have imagined that this aptly named public space would nurture a spark that would set the entire Middle East ablaze.

Tahrir Square, 2011

Tahrir, which means liberation in Arabic, is one of the oldest squares in modern Cairo. The images of the square recently aired during broadcast coverage of the uprising—images now engraved in the minds of people all over the globe—were taken from the rooftops of the few high-rise buildings situated south of the square. Just beyond this location, looking west and north, is a collection of overlooked buildings that capture the history of modern Egypt and render the revolutionary happenings in Tahrir Square all the more poignant.

 Tahrir Square, 1962

A photograph of the square from the early 1960s helps tell the story. Appearing under the Cairo tower is the headquarters of the Arab League and next to it is the former Hilton Hotel, which is currently under renovation as a new Ritz-Carlton. North of the hotel is the salmon-colored Egyptian Museum and behind it is a building that would ultimately become the headquarters for President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP). In the foreground is a statue-less pedestal crowning a green roundabout. Each of these landmarks plays a role in the making of modern Cairo, a city that is nearly four thousand years old. Most scholars would agree that the city is only one thousand years old, but its metropolitan expansion in the twenty-first century engulfed all earlier settlements from Memphis to Giza, making Cairo many millennia older.

During the time of the Ancient Egyptians, the square was simply a patch of desert. By the time the Fatimids established Al-Qahira (which was later Anglicized into Cairo) in the tenth century, the Nile River had changed its course and swallowed much of this land. The area later became marshland covered by water during flood seasons. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, by the time Napoleon occupied Cairo, the land had dried up enough to allow the French forces to camp there. It was not until the time of Mohamed Ali, the founder of modern Egypt, that the network of barrages built to control the flow of the river, stabilized the banks of the Nile in Cairo.

Tahrir Square was born as a green field.

What Is a Palestinian State Worth?

Much of the effort to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians has focused on establishing a mutually agreeable two-state solution. And yet, despite wide public support, negotiations to that end break down repeatedly. What Is a Palestinian State Worth?, by Sari Nusseibeh, is an attempt to step back and reassess the basis of this seemingly intractable conflict. If the goal of a Palestinian state cannot be achieved, Nusseibeh suggests that perhaps it is a goal that should be set aside.

Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem and a noted Palestinian intellectual, has written a deeply personal examination of the everyday lives of Palestinian people. Though the book is a work of political philosophy in which Nusseibeh earnestly addresses the worth of a Palestinian State, his approach is universal in its attempt to identify the role of the state in modern life. Nusseibeh carries the questioning spirit of his title through this whole work, and in chapters headed “What Makes Life Worth Living?” and “What Are States For?, he thinks his way to answers.

States for Nusseibeh perform a utilitarian function, providing to their citizens such things as health, education, and safety. As a younger man, he saw a state as the only possible means to those human ends. Now that, as he writes, “the state, as we had conceived it, is no longer practical or realistic,” Nusseibeh has written this book to reconsider the ultimate human desires embedded in the longing for a Palestinian nation, and to provoke the consideration of alternatives. “Politics for me has always been a means, not an end,” he writes, and the aim of his book is to put forth an alternative means.

What he offers is a challenging prompt, which he himself labels a “thought experiment.” From the book’s Introduction:

…let me propose that Israel officially annex the occupied territories, and that Palestinians in the enlarged Israel agree that the state remain Jewish in return for being granted all the civil, though not the political, rights of citizenship. Thus the state would be Jewish, but the country would be fully binational, all the Arabs within it having their well-being tended to and sustained. Given Israel’s demand to be recognized as a Jewish state, and as long as it refuses to grant those Palestinians full citizenship, their next best option is to have full civil rights even without the right to hold elective office—so that they can enjoy the civil benefits of the de facto single state without being accused of diluting or “defiling” its Jewishness. In any case such a scenario would provide them with a far better life than they have had in more than forty years under occupation or would have under another projected scenario: Israeli hegemony over scattered, “autonomous” Palestinian enclaves.

Nusseibeh describes this approach as “so objectionable that it might well generate its own annulment, either by making all parties see the need to find a tenable alternative or, if indeed adopted, by serving as a natural step toward a single democratic state.” Though modestly proposed, the provocation of this thought experiment is clear. Israel could not accept such a compromise and remain both Jewish and Democratic. Palestinian leaders could not offer it without formally legitimizing an occupation they’ve fought for nearly fifty years.

Whether his proposal is actually politically tenable is mostly beside the point for Nusseibeh. As he explained to Haim Watzman in an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nusseibeh isn’t really intending to offer a solution. “It's not like going to the supermarket and they're out of two-states so you pick up a one-state. It looks like we are stuck, so the question arises: What are we to do?” He says of the book that “A lot of stuff in there is questions, things I haven't worked out properly… I hope people who read it will be able to think about it, raise more questions, that it will allow them to find new ways of going forward.”

In the month since its publication, What Is a Palestinian State Worth? has been received as the provocation it was intended to be. Long, thoughtful pieces in the Chronicle, the New York Review of Books, Tablet Magazine, and Open Letters Monthly respond with varying degrees of enthusiasm to the content of Nusseibeh’s book. All, though, agree that what Nusseibeh has done is issue a life-giving intellectual challenge to this deeply lodged conflict. As Greg Waldmann put it in his Open Letters Monthly review, “An oddly detached sense of hope runs through What is a Palestinian State Worth?; there is nothing like it in the literature of this conflict. Every year thousands of articles and blog posts are produced about how to end the conflict. They all feel stale. This book does not.”

Military, Money, and Motives in Egypt

Nezar AlSayyad is Professor of Architecture and Urban History, and Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was raised in Cairo, and as a practicing architect has designed many buildings in the city. His Cairo: Histories of a City, forthcoming this spring, chronicles the many Cairos that have existed through the centuries, and the figures who have shaped them, including Hosni Mubarak. Below, in a piece co-written with Tara Graham, Publications Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, AlSayyad identifies the powerful vested interests threatening this vulnerable moment of transition in Egypt.

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“Egypt has passed through a critical period in her recent history characterized by bribery, mischief, and the absence of governmental stability . . . Accordingly, we have undertaken to clean ourselves up and have appointed to command us men from within the army whom we trust in their ability, their character, and their patriotism. It is certain that all Egypt will meet this news with enthusiasm and will welcome it.”

The statement above could have been uttered in the recent past by some YouTube revolutionary or Facebook organizer, but Free Officer Anwar Sadat made this early morning rally call nearly six decades ago, on July 23rd in 1952, when the Egyptian military launched a coup to overthrow the king. A few years later, the new republic swore in its first president.

The Egyptian people have long referred to that day in July as their liberation day, and Tahrir (or Liberation) Square in downtown Cairo owes its name to this early military revolt. It is both appropriate and ironic that the square became the site of the more recent revolution resulting in the removal of President Hosni Mubarak from power. Tahrir Square has certainly earned its name.

Mubarak, who stubbornly stood his ground in three successive speeches delivered during the course of the recent uprising, never announced his own resignation. In the end, he was most likely exiled by his Armed Forces, to whom he supposedly delegated his authority as president. It seems history has just repeated itself, but this time with the military ousting a president, instead of a king.

Today, as pundits of all political persuasions engage in speculation about the future of Egypt, it is important to take a more tempered attitude toward the prospects. It is not yet clear whether the Egyptian uprising will be a Velvet Revolution, as many have hoped, or an Iranian-style Islamic Revolution, but it is clear that all has not devolved into a Tiananmen Square crackdown. At least, not yet.

The country’s future now depends on the actions of the Egyptian military over the course of the next few months. While the five communiqués issued by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces give reason for optimism, they don’t readily reveal the military’s true stance on matters. The army may not have intervened to silence the anti-Mubarak protesters, but it maintained the same passivity when pro-Mubarak thugs went on the attack. The rationale here is unclear, but it’s worth noting that the military has much more to lose in the current environment than it has to gain.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Now that President Hosni Mubarak has stepped down, Egypt can turn itself to the still highly uncertain question of what comes next. As we watch, and still scramble to make sense of this global spectacle, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on some of the commentary and imagery of recent days.

The left and even much of the center in the U.S. have seemed universally to support the protesters and their aims. For many of these Americans with still inchoate understandings of Egypt’s dynamics, the recently enhanced role of the Egyptian military may have been difficult to assimilate. No matter one’s own political persuasion, a military force being welcomed, cheered, kissed by an enormous crowd of young protesters is not a familiar site, though there it was, yesterday, after the military’s first communiqué and apparent intervention. In such scenes we’re likely more inclined to fear for the protesters’ safety than to expect their elation. Certainly, many of the Americans expressing solidarity with the protesting Egyptians who were embracing their military are among those least likely to have such an affinity for our own. And yet, just as quickly as we were surprised, the military seemed to have backed away from any apparent plan to oust Mubarak, and now, in the hours following his abdication, the military’s intentions are still unclear.

Even still, this disconnect—this possibly jarring, nearly upside-down imagery of active young politcial dissidents actually physically embracing an independently empowered military—should serve as one indication of how little many of us really understand about the situation in Egypt. We’ve witnessed a massive political upswelling, one that we couldn't help but be moved by, and our commitment to the principle of democracy inspired many of us to feel strongly that if this many people thought that their leader should go immediately, then the man should take his leave.

If democracy is the goal, though, there are voices urging us to remember that Egypt is more than Tahrir Square. That point was the focus of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by many-time HUP author Edward N. Luttwak on February 4th. “The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt—a mostly rural country populated by poor peasants,” he wrote. “It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak’s removal.”

The piece continues:

Interestingly, the few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population—those who wear the traditional robe (djellaba) and depend on bread subsidized by the state—many still support Mr. Mubarak. They know that Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, and that part of it is paid for by U.S. aid. While market prices have increased by 17% since last October, the rationed bread of the poor remains very cheap.

Perhaps the impoverished—a quarter of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day—fear that a government more modern than Mr. Mubarak’s paternalistic dictatorship will stop the current bread subsidy, or that a more Islamist government will not receive U.S. aid. Either way, many Egyptians have the prudence of the very poor. They cannot afford to take risks with the unknown—including a post-Mubarak government.

Now, we can place alongside the topsy-turvy imagery of protestors embracing soldiers the notion of the Wall Street Journal as defender of the impoverished, but Luttwak’s point here is sound. Though it doesn’t affect us in the U.S. nearly as much as it does others, food prices around the world are soaring, as noted by Paul Krugman, among others. Luttwak’s larger point was that a quick Mubarak exit would be too risky, and that the country should be given time to organize proper elections. This, like his noting of the impoverished, is on its face a reasoned gesture towards universal democracy. But much has changed in the week since he wrote, and had Mubarak not stepped down on his own the situation’s escalation may yet have overshadowed the traditionally cautious concern for what happens after foreign political transitions.