The Linguistic Labyrinth of Arabic News
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As the Syrian government took back eastern Aleppo from the rebels in December, the story you heard in the Arab world about what was happening largely depended on where you got your news.
On some channels, it was a heroic tale of the Syrian Army’s “cleansing” the area of “armed groups” or “terrorists” before leading a process of “reconciliation.”
On others, the “regime” had routed “the revolutionaries” and planned to carry out “ethnic cleansing” against “the Syrian people.”
Such drastically different narratives of the same event are prominent features of the media landscape in the Arab world, a reality that I have had to learn to navigate during a decade living and working here as a journalist.
There are hundreds of 24-hour news channels, from giants like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, which reflect Qatari and Saudi views, respectively, to newer arrivals like Al Mayadeen, which holds a pro-Iranian line, along with many other national channels.
Even militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas have networks that broadcast news, talk shows and rousing music videos of militants crawling through forests and launching rockets.
Far from being independent brokers of information, these channels have powerful backers who deploy them to bolster their agendas and undermine their foes. What that means for the viewer, and for the student of Arabic, is having to decipher a complex code of politically charged vocabulary whose usage can swiftly betray someone’s political views.
Who are the “martyrs” in Syria, for example? The government soldiers killed by the rebels, or the rebels killed by the government? Who is “the resistance”? Hezbollah and other groups committed to the destruction of Israel, or militias fighting for the exiled government in Yemen?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/opin ... ef=opinion
THE MIDDLE EAST
The Visible Effects of Climate Change in Iran
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/photos ... ut#image=1
Slide show:
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/weather/photos ... ut#image=1
Saudi Arabia cuts off Qatar
The kingdom is raising tensions with its immediate neighbours as well as with Iran and Yemen
SAUDI ARABIA and its satellites have repeatedly put their neighbour Qatar on notice, but never as severely as this. In 2014, they temporarily recalled their ambassadors from the tiny, rich Gulf statelet: but on June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain announced they were not only severing diplomatic relations with Qatar, but their air, sea and land links too—meaning that Qatar’s only land border is to be closed. Panic buying is already reported in Qatari shops. Qataris must leave Saudi Arabia within days, and will henceforth be denied entry. For good measure the ambitious young Saudi defence minister and deputy crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, expelled Qatar’s 1,000-strong force from the coalition he leads against rebels in Yemen.
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http://www.economist.com/news/middle-ea ... lydispatch
The kingdom is raising tensions with its immediate neighbours as well as with Iran and Yemen
SAUDI ARABIA and its satellites have repeatedly put their neighbour Qatar on notice, but never as severely as this. In 2014, they temporarily recalled their ambassadors from the tiny, rich Gulf statelet: but on June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain announced they were not only severing diplomatic relations with Qatar, but their air, sea and land links too—meaning that Qatar’s only land border is to be closed. Panic buying is already reported in Qatari shops. Qataris must leave Saudi Arabia within days, and will henceforth be denied entry. For good measure the ambitious young Saudi defence minister and deputy crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, expelled Qatar’s 1,000-strong force from the coalition he leads against rebels in Yemen.
More..
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-ea ... lydispatch
Saudi Arabia Rewrites Succession as King Replaces Heir With Son, 31
BEIRUT, Lebanon — King Salman of Saudi Arabia promoted his 31-year-old son, Mohammed bin Salman, to be next in line to the throne on Wednesday, further empowering a young and ambitious leader who has upended the ruling family at a time of deep Saudi involvement in conflicts across the Middle East.
The king’s decision to remove the previous crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, 57, capped two and a half years of dramatic changes that have erased decades of royal custom and reordered the power structure inside the kingdom, a close American ally. And it came as Saudi Arabia was already grappling with low oil prices, and intensifying hostilities both with Iran and in its own circle of Sunni Arab states.
In sweeping aside Mohammed bin Nayef in favor of his son, the king marginalized a large cadre of older princes, many with foreign educations and decades of government experience that the younger prince lacks. If Mohammed bin Salman succeeds his father, he could rule the kingdom for many decades.
Prince Mohammed’s swift rise and growing influence had already rankled other princes who accused him of undermining Mohammed bin Nayef. But such complaints are likely to remain private in a ruling family that prizes stability above all else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/worl ... d=45305309
BEIRUT, Lebanon — King Salman of Saudi Arabia promoted his 31-year-old son, Mohammed bin Salman, to be next in line to the throne on Wednesday, further empowering a young and ambitious leader who has upended the ruling family at a time of deep Saudi involvement in conflicts across the Middle East.
The king’s decision to remove the previous crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, 57, capped two and a half years of dramatic changes that have erased decades of royal custom and reordered the power structure inside the kingdom, a close American ally. And it came as Saudi Arabia was already grappling with low oil prices, and intensifying hostilities both with Iran and in its own circle of Sunni Arab states.
In sweeping aside Mohammed bin Nayef in favor of his son, the king marginalized a large cadre of older princes, many with foreign educations and decades of government experience that the younger prince lacks. If Mohammed bin Salman succeeds his father, he could rule the kingdom for many decades.
Prince Mohammed’s swift rise and growing influence had already rankled other princes who accused him of undermining Mohammed bin Nayef. But such complaints are likely to remain private in a ruling family that prizes stability above all else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/worl ... d=45305309
Saudi Arabia’s Grand Plan to Move Beyond Oil: Big Goals, Bigger Hurdles
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is throwing an economic coming-out party of sorts this week, hawking its efforts to liberalize its conservative society and diversify its economy in a sweeping overhaul of the way the wealthy Arab kingdom has long operated.
In a glittering conference center in Riyadh, slick videos promised a gleaming, $500 billion city of the future, powered by solar energy and run by robots. The crown prince lauded a “moderate Islam” that embraces the world. And members of the global business elite attended standing-room-only sessions on sustainable energy and the future of urbanization.
The message to bankers, businesspeople and high-rolling investors was clear: The once-insular kingdom is now open for business.
“Today we have a people who are convinced that by working very strongly together, Saudi Arabia and all of its projects and programs can reach new horizons in the world,” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said at the conference on Tuesday.
But despite the royal rollout, including a lavish dinner with sushi, lamb and overflowing trays of chocolate truffles, the prince’s grand plans have proceeded haltingly.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/worl ... d=45305309
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Saudi Arabia is throwing an economic coming-out party of sorts this week, hawking its efforts to liberalize its conservative society and diversify its economy in a sweeping overhaul of the way the wealthy Arab kingdom has long operated.
In a glittering conference center in Riyadh, slick videos promised a gleaming, $500 billion city of the future, powered by solar energy and run by robots. The crown prince lauded a “moderate Islam” that embraces the world. And members of the global business elite attended standing-room-only sessions on sustainable energy and the future of urbanization.
The message to bankers, businesspeople and high-rolling investors was clear: The once-insular kingdom is now open for business.
“Today we have a people who are convinced that by working very strongly together, Saudi Arabia and all of its projects and programs can reach new horizons in the world,” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said at the conference on Tuesday.
But despite the royal rollout, including a lavish dinner with sushi, lamb and overflowing trays of chocolate truffles, the prince’s grand plans have proceeded haltingly.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/worl ... d=45305309
Saudi Crown Prince’s Mass Purge Upends a Longstanding System
LONDON — A midnight blitz of arrests ordered by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over the weekend has ensnared dozens of its most influential figures, including 11 of his royal cousins, in what by Sunday appeared to be the most sweeping transformation in the kingdom’s governance for more than eight decades.
The arrests, ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman without formal charges or any legal process, were presented as a crackdown on corruption. They caught both the kingdom’s richest investor, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the most potent remaining rival to the crown prince’s power: Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a favored son of the late King Abdullah.
Prince Mutaib had been removed from his post as chief of a major security service just hours before the arrests announced late Saturday night.
All members of the royal family were barred from leaving the country, American officials tracking the developments said on Sunday.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/worl ... 87722&_r=0
LONDON — A midnight blitz of arrests ordered by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over the weekend has ensnared dozens of its most influential figures, including 11 of his royal cousins, in what by Sunday appeared to be the most sweeping transformation in the kingdom’s governance for more than eight decades.
The arrests, ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman without formal charges or any legal process, were presented as a crackdown on corruption. They caught both the kingdom’s richest investor, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the most potent remaining rival to the crown prince’s power: Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a favored son of the late King Abdullah.
Prince Mutaib had been removed from his post as chief of a major security service just hours before the arrests announced late Saturday night.
All members of the royal family were barred from leaving the country, American officials tracking the developments said on Sunday.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/worl ... 87722&_r=0
Attention: Saudi Prince in a Hurry
To understand the upheaval that is taking place in Saudi Arabia today, you have to start with the most important political fact about that country: The dominant shaping political force there for the past four decades has not been Islamism, fundamentalism, liberalism, capitalism or ISISism.
It has been Alzheimer’s.
The country’s current king is 81 years old. He replaced a king who died at 90, who replaced a king who died at 84. It’s not that none of them introduced reforms. It’s that at a time when the world has been experiencing so much high-speed change in technology, education and globalization, these successive Saudi monarchs thought that reforming their country at 10 miles an hour was fast enough — and high oil prices covered for that slow pace.
It doesn’t work anymore. Some 70 percent of Saudi Arabia is under age 30, and roughly 25 percent of them are unemployed. In addition, 200,000 more are studying abroad, and about 35,000 of them — men and women – are coming home every year with degrees, looking for meaningful work, not to mention something fun to do other than going to the mosque or the mall. The system desperately needs to create more jobs outside the oil sector, where Saudi income is no longer what it once was, and the government can’t keep eating its savings to buy stability.
That’s the backdrop for this week’s daring, but reckless, power play by the 32-year-old son of King Salman — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials M.B.S. I’ve interviewed M.B.S. twice. He is a young man in a hurry. I’ve found his passion for reform authentic, his support from the youth in his country significant and his case for making radical change in Saudi Arabia compelling.
Indeed, there are two things I can say for sure about him: He is much more McKinsey than Wahhabi — much more a numbers cruncher than a Quran thumper. And if he did not exist, the Saudi system would have had to invent him. Somebody had to shake up the place.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/opin ... d=45305309
To understand the upheaval that is taking place in Saudi Arabia today, you have to start with the most important political fact about that country: The dominant shaping political force there for the past four decades has not been Islamism, fundamentalism, liberalism, capitalism or ISISism.
It has been Alzheimer’s.
The country’s current king is 81 years old. He replaced a king who died at 90, who replaced a king who died at 84. It’s not that none of them introduced reforms. It’s that at a time when the world has been experiencing so much high-speed change in technology, education and globalization, these successive Saudi monarchs thought that reforming their country at 10 miles an hour was fast enough — and high oil prices covered for that slow pace.
It doesn’t work anymore. Some 70 percent of Saudi Arabia is under age 30, and roughly 25 percent of them are unemployed. In addition, 200,000 more are studying abroad, and about 35,000 of them — men and women – are coming home every year with degrees, looking for meaningful work, not to mention something fun to do other than going to the mosque or the mall. The system desperately needs to create more jobs outside the oil sector, where Saudi income is no longer what it once was, and the government can’t keep eating its savings to buy stability.
That’s the backdrop for this week’s daring, but reckless, power play by the 32-year-old son of King Salman — Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials M.B.S. I’ve interviewed M.B.S. twice. He is a young man in a hurry. I’ve found his passion for reform authentic, his support from the youth in his country significant and his case for making radical change in Saudi Arabia compelling.
Indeed, there are two things I can say for sure about him: He is much more McKinsey than Wahhabi — much more a numbers cruncher than a Quran thumper. And if he did not exist, the Saudi system would have had to invent him. Somebody had to shake up the place.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/opin ... d=45305309
New light
The first universal museum of the Arab world opens in the UAE
Abu Dhabi tries to distinguish itself as a cultural destination
AS EMMANUEL MACRON and Muhammad bin Zayed, the president of France and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), walked towards the Louvre Abu Dhabi (LAD) for its grand opening on November 8th, their eyes were fixed on the magnificent silvery domed roof—heavy as the Eiffel Tower—that appears to float above the galleries. They might have got a better sense of the project if they had gazed down at the floor.
For there, in the entrance, is a map of the UAE’s coastline. All along the shore, listed as if they were ports on an old parchment, are the names of towns around the world that manufactured the hundreds of objects on display inside. Each one is spelled out in its own language; 26 in all. There is Greek, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. There is even one in Hebrew, for Qa al-Yahud, the old Jewish quarter in Sana’a, Yemen, where the LAD’s medieval Torah was made.
As a work of design, the museum, created by Jean Nouvel, a Pritzker prize-winning architect, will count as one of the great buildings of his generation. As an exercise in cultural co-operation and “soft diplomacy”, it is unprecedented. The 30-year contract, signed in 2007, is worth €974m euros ($1.1bn) to the Louvre and its partner museums in France. They, in turn, have lent the LAD 300 objects. The loans will continue for ten years and the Louvre and its partners are committed to mounting four exhibitions annually in Abu Dhabi for the next 15 years. It also advises on acquisitions for the LAD’s own collection. Prince Muhammad has described the museum to friends as the “crown jewel” in his country’s relationship with France. The UAE also hosts a French military base and an offshoot of the Sorbonne.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... lydispatch
The first universal museum of the Arab world opens in the UAE
Abu Dhabi tries to distinguish itself as a cultural destination
AS EMMANUEL MACRON and Muhammad bin Zayed, the president of France and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), walked towards the Louvre Abu Dhabi (LAD) for its grand opening on November 8th, their eyes were fixed on the magnificent silvery domed roof—heavy as the Eiffel Tower—that appears to float above the galleries. They might have got a better sense of the project if they had gazed down at the floor.
For there, in the entrance, is a map of the UAE’s coastline. All along the shore, listed as if they were ports on an old parchment, are the names of towns around the world that manufactured the hundreds of objects on display inside. Each one is spelled out in its own language; 26 in all. There is Greek, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. There is even one in Hebrew, for Qa al-Yahud, the old Jewish quarter in Sana’a, Yemen, where the LAD’s medieval Torah was made.
As a work of design, the museum, created by Jean Nouvel, a Pritzker prize-winning architect, will count as one of the great buildings of his generation. As an exercise in cultural co-operation and “soft diplomacy”, it is unprecedented. The 30-year contract, signed in 2007, is worth €974m euros ($1.1bn) to the Louvre and its partner museums in France. They, in turn, have lent the LAD 300 objects. The loans will continue for ten years and the Louvre and its partners are committed to mounting four exhibitions annually in Abu Dhabi for the next 15 years. It also advises on acquisitions for the LAD’s own collection. Prince Muhammad has described the museum to friends as the “crown jewel” in his country’s relationship with France. The UAE also hosts a French military base and an offshoot of the Sorbonne.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... lydispatch
Iranian and Saudi Youth Try to Bury 1979
The biggest question about the recent protests in Iran — combined with the recent lifting of religious restrictions in Saudi Arabia — is whether together they mark the beginning of the end of the hard-right puritanical turn that the Muslim world took in 1979, when, as Middle East expert Mamoun Fandy once observed, “Islam lost its brakes” and the whole world felt it.
The events of 1979 diminished the status of women, pluralism and modern education across the Arab-Muslim region, and they fueled religious extremist groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and ISIS, whose activities have brought ruin to so many innocent Muslims and non-Muslims alike — and so many metal detectors to airports across the globe.
I know a bit about 1979. I began my career then as a cub reporter in Beirut, where I promptly found myself writing about the following events: the ayatollahs’ takeover in Iran, creating a hard-right Shiite clerical regime bent on spreading its Islamic revolution and veiling of women across the Muslim world; and the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by puritanical Sunni extremists, which freaked out the Saudi ruling family. The family reacted by purging music, fun and entertainment from their desert kingdom, strengthening the hold of the religious police over their society and redoubling the export of the most misogynist, antipluralistic interpretation of Islam to mosques and madrasas from London to Jakarta.
In addition, 1979 saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. encouragement of Islamist mujahedeen fighters, funded by Saudi Arabia, to defeat the Russians there. It also saw the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which sharply curbed the growth of nuclear power in America. That nuclear freeze, the turmoil in the Middle East and Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 move to unleash capitalism in China helped to increase demand for fossil fuels. So Iran and Saudi Arabia had more money than ever to compete over who could spread their respective version of fundamentalist Islam farther.
But today Iran and Saudi Arabia have something new in common: A majority of their populations are under age 30, young people connected through social networks and smartphones. And a growing number of them are fed up with being told how to live their lives by old, corrupt or suffocating clerics — and they want to bury 1979 and everything it brought.
More...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/o ... 0&referer=
The biggest question about the recent protests in Iran — combined with the recent lifting of religious restrictions in Saudi Arabia — is whether together they mark the beginning of the end of the hard-right puritanical turn that the Muslim world took in 1979, when, as Middle East expert Mamoun Fandy once observed, “Islam lost its brakes” and the whole world felt it.
The events of 1979 diminished the status of women, pluralism and modern education across the Arab-Muslim region, and they fueled religious extremist groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and ISIS, whose activities have brought ruin to so many innocent Muslims and non-Muslims alike — and so many metal detectors to airports across the globe.
I know a bit about 1979. I began my career then as a cub reporter in Beirut, where I promptly found myself writing about the following events: the ayatollahs’ takeover in Iran, creating a hard-right Shiite clerical regime bent on spreading its Islamic revolution and veiling of women across the Muslim world; and the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by puritanical Sunni extremists, which freaked out the Saudi ruling family. The family reacted by purging music, fun and entertainment from their desert kingdom, strengthening the hold of the religious police over their society and redoubling the export of the most misogynist, antipluralistic interpretation of Islam to mosques and madrasas from London to Jakarta.
In addition, 1979 saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S. encouragement of Islamist mujahedeen fighters, funded by Saudi Arabia, to defeat the Russians there. It also saw the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which sharply curbed the growth of nuclear power in America. That nuclear freeze, the turmoil in the Middle East and Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 move to unleash capitalism in China helped to increase demand for fossil fuels. So Iran and Saudi Arabia had more money than ever to compete over who could spread their respective version of fundamentalist Islam farther.
But today Iran and Saudi Arabia have something new in common: A majority of their populations are under age 30, young people connected through social networks and smartphones. And a growing number of them are fed up with being told how to live their lives by old, corrupt or suffocating clerics — and they want to bury 1979 and everything it brought.
More...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/o ... 0&referer=
The Crown Prince and the New Saudi Economy
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s goal of replacing a corrupt feudal state in Saudi Arabia with a Western-orientated market economy is doomed to be elusive unless he stops acting like a despot and rules like a reformer.
When Prince Mohammed announced his highly ambitious national transformation plan in 2016, he promised to privatize state assets, create 1.2 million jobs in the private sector and cut unemployment to 9 percent by 2020. It was rehashing an old panacea — weaning the kingdom off its addiction to oil.
Prince Mohammed has made progress. He has lowered obstacles to women’s participation in the work force, cut subsidies on utilities and raised indirect taxes. On Jan. 1, he increased fuel prices by over 80 percent and imposed a new 5 percent sales tax.
But his outreach to the private sector, on which his plan depends, has been stymied by a lack of capacity and institutional experience, and, increasingly, his hubris. His oppressive conduct is alienating the very sources he should be trying to attract.
Rather than plod on with austerity measures, he seems mesmerized by ambitious vanity projects and fattening his personal portfolio. The Public Investment Fund is supposed to be Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, but the prince, who heads its board, runs it like his own business. In April, it acquired 129 square miles of state land for a sports and entertainment city. In August, it announced plans for a tourist resort bigger than Belgium. And in October, Prince Mohammed unveiled Neom, his $500 billion robot city, at an international conference. Once again, the Public Investment Fund led the way.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opin ... dline&te=1
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s goal of replacing a corrupt feudal state in Saudi Arabia with a Western-orientated market economy is doomed to be elusive unless he stops acting like a despot and rules like a reformer.
When Prince Mohammed announced his highly ambitious national transformation plan in 2016, he promised to privatize state assets, create 1.2 million jobs in the private sector and cut unemployment to 9 percent by 2020. It was rehashing an old panacea — weaning the kingdom off its addiction to oil.
Prince Mohammed has made progress. He has lowered obstacles to women’s participation in the work force, cut subsidies on utilities and raised indirect taxes. On Jan. 1, he increased fuel prices by over 80 percent and imposed a new 5 percent sales tax.
But his outreach to the private sector, on which his plan depends, has been stymied by a lack of capacity and institutional experience, and, increasingly, his hubris. His oppressive conduct is alienating the very sources he should be trying to attract.
Rather than plod on with austerity measures, he seems mesmerized by ambitious vanity projects and fattening his personal portfolio. The Public Investment Fund is supposed to be Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, but the prince, who heads its board, runs it like his own business. In April, it acquired 129 square miles of state land for a sports and entertainment city. In August, it announced plans for a tourist resort bigger than Belgium. And in October, Prince Mohammed unveiled Neom, his $500 billion robot city, at an international conference. Once again, the Public Investment Fund led the way.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opin ... dline&te=1
Memo to the President on Saudi Arabia
Memo to: President Trump.
From: The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia (if we had one.)
Subject: Saudi crown prince visit
Mr. President, in advance of the visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. M.B.S., I want to share some thoughts:
It’s only a matter of time before King Salman turns over the reins of power to M.B.S., who’s already the effective ruler. M.B.S. is not a democrat, nor is he interested in promoting democracy. He’s a modernizing autocrat. The most we can expect from him is the modernization of Saudi Arabia’s economy and religious/social structure, but given how badly the country has stagnated from years of tentative reforms, this is deeply significant.
M.B.S. is definitely bold. I can think of no one else in the ruling family who would have put in place the profound social, religious and economic reforms that he’s dared to do — and all at once. But I can also think of no one in that family who’d have undertaken the bullying foreign policy initiatives, domestic power plays and excessive personal buying sprees he’s dared to do, all at once. They are two halves of the same M.B.S. package. Our job: help curb his bad impulses and nurture his good ones.
His potential is vast. M.B.S. is trying to forge a societal transformation in Saudi Arabia. Call it “one country, two systems.” For those who want piety, the mosque, Mecca and Islamic education, they’ll all be available and respected. But for those who want modern education and a more normal social life between men and women — and access to Western film, music and the arts — those too will be available and respected. No more religious domination. That is huge.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/opin ... dline&te=1
Memo to: President Trump.
From: The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia (if we had one.)
Subject: Saudi crown prince visit
Mr. President, in advance of the visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. M.B.S., I want to share some thoughts:
It’s only a matter of time before King Salman turns over the reins of power to M.B.S., who’s already the effective ruler. M.B.S. is not a democrat, nor is he interested in promoting democracy. He’s a modernizing autocrat. The most we can expect from him is the modernization of Saudi Arabia’s economy and religious/social structure, but given how badly the country has stagnated from years of tentative reforms, this is deeply significant.
M.B.S. is definitely bold. I can think of no one else in the ruling family who would have put in place the profound social, religious and economic reforms that he’s dared to do — and all at once. But I can also think of no one in that family who’d have undertaken the bullying foreign policy initiatives, domestic power plays and excessive personal buying sprees he’s dared to do, all at once. They are two halves of the same M.B.S. package. Our job: help curb his bad impulses and nurture his good ones.
His potential is vast. M.B.S. is trying to forge a societal transformation in Saudi Arabia. Call it “one country, two systems.” For those who want piety, the mosque, Mecca and Islamic education, they’ll all be available and respected. But for those who want modern education and a more normal social life between men and women — and access to Western film, music and the arts — those too will be available and respected. No more religious domination. That is huge.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/opin ... dline&te=1
Saudi Arabia Lightens Up, Building Entertainment Industry From Scratch
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The lights dimmed, the conductor emerged and the nearly full house applauded as he stood before the orchestra. Then the lights went up and the cast appeared on stage in historical Arab garb.
“My love, speak to me in a poem,” sang the female lead, opening an opera about racism, war and love. It was remarkable not for the show itself, but for the fact that it was happening at all, on a public stage, in the conservative capital of Saudi Arabia. The recent production of “Antar and Abla” was part of a new, large-scale push by the Saudi government to create — virtually from scratch — a vibrant entertainment sector for its 29 million people.
Saudi Arabia has long been known as one of the world’s most conservative places, where bearded religious police enforced strict social codes and women cloaked their bodies and often covered their faces in public. Concerts and theater were largely banned, and even the notion of fun was often frowned upon as un-Islamic.
Now the kingdom is lightening up with comic book festivals, dance performances, concerts and monster truck rallies. The New Age music guru Yanni performed there in December, as did the American rapper Nelly (for an all-male audience). The Egyptian pop star Tamer Hosny is set to perform this month, although his fans will be barred from dancing and swaying. Cirque du Soleil will make its Saudi debut this year (with less racy outfits than it uses elsewhere). And international companies are signing deals to operate movie theaters across the country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/worl ... 3053090318
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — The lights dimmed, the conductor emerged and the nearly full house applauded as he stood before the orchestra. Then the lights went up and the cast appeared on stage in historical Arab garb.
“My love, speak to me in a poem,” sang the female lead, opening an opera about racism, war and love. It was remarkable not for the show itself, but for the fact that it was happening at all, on a public stage, in the conservative capital of Saudi Arabia. The recent production of “Antar and Abla” was part of a new, large-scale push by the Saudi government to create — virtually from scratch — a vibrant entertainment sector for its 29 million people.
Saudi Arabia has long been known as one of the world’s most conservative places, where bearded religious police enforced strict social codes and women cloaked their bodies and often covered their faces in public. Concerts and theater were largely banned, and even the notion of fun was often frowned upon as un-Islamic.
Now the kingdom is lightening up with comic book festivals, dance performances, concerts and monster truck rallies. The New Age music guru Yanni performed there in December, as did the American rapper Nelly (for an all-male audience). The Egyptian pop star Tamer Hosny is set to perform this month, although his fans will be barred from dancing and swaying. Cirque du Soleil will make its Saudi debut this year (with less racy outfits than it uses elsewhere). And international companies are signing deals to operate movie theaters across the country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/worl ... 3053090318
Muslims consider Queen Elizabeth’s ties to the Prophet Muhammad
Reaction to the queen’s purported Muslim extraction has been varied in the Arab world
“QUEEN ELIZABETH must claim her right to rule Muslims.” So ran a recent headline on the Arab Atheist Network, a web forum. It was only partly in jest. According to reports from Casablanca to Karachi, the British monarch is descended from the Prophet Muhammad, making her a cousin of the kings of Morocco and Jordan, not to mention of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.
The claim, first made many years ago, is gathering renewed interest in the Middle East. Why is not clear, but in March a Moroccan newspaper called Al-Ousboue traced the queen’s lineage back 43 generations. Her bloodline runs through the Earl of Cambridge, in the 14th century, across medieval Muslim Spain, to Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Her link to Muhammad has previously been verified by Ali Gomaa, the former grand mufti of Egypt, and Burke’s Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... m=20180411
Reaction to the queen’s purported Muslim extraction has been varied in the Arab world
“QUEEN ELIZABETH must claim her right to rule Muslims.” So ran a recent headline on the Arab Atheist Network, a web forum. It was only partly in jest. According to reports from Casablanca to Karachi, the British monarch is descended from the Prophet Muhammad, making her a cousin of the kings of Morocco and Jordan, not to mention of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader.
The claim, first made many years ago, is gathering renewed interest in the Middle East. Why is not clear, but in March a Moroccan newspaper called Al-Ousboue traced the queen’s lineage back 43 generations. Her bloodline runs through the Earl of Cambridge, in the 14th century, across medieval Muslim Spain, to Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Her link to Muhammad has previously been verified by Ali Gomaa, the former grand mufti of Egypt, and Burke’s Peerage, a British authority on royal pedigrees.
More...
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... m=20180411
What Fuels the Saudi Rivalry With Iran?
Excerpt:
The relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran has oscillated between indifference, hostility, rapprochement and tension over the decades. Prince Mohammad appears determined to intensify the rivalry with Iran as he continues to raise Riyadh’s concerns over Iranian expansion in the Arab world and beyond.
The roots for perpetuating this conflict lie in the domestic context. The crown prince has used the rivalry with Tehran to deflect attention from the complexity of his own domestic uncertainties. The same may be true of Iran.
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the country set out to export its brand of revolutionary Islam. As Iran became an Islamic republic, Sunni Islamists were not only jealous of the triumph of the Shia Islamism but became even more determined to establish their version of the Islamic state.
Saudi Arabia exported Wahhabi Islam across Africa, Asia and even Europe. The two countries entered a fierce battle over the souls of Muslims with Saudi clerics augmenting their anti-Shiite rhetoric and the Iranian counterparts playing down their Shiism to appeal to Pan-Islamic, anti-imperial and anti-Western sentiments among Muslims.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/opin ... dline&te=1
Excerpt:
The relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran has oscillated between indifference, hostility, rapprochement and tension over the decades. Prince Mohammad appears determined to intensify the rivalry with Iran as he continues to raise Riyadh’s concerns over Iranian expansion in the Arab world and beyond.
The roots for perpetuating this conflict lie in the domestic context. The crown prince has used the rivalry with Tehran to deflect attention from the complexity of his own domestic uncertainties. The same may be true of Iran.
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the country set out to export its brand of revolutionary Islam. As Iran became an Islamic republic, Sunni Islamists were not only jealous of the triumph of the Shia Islamism but became even more determined to establish their version of the Islamic state.
Saudi Arabia exported Wahhabi Islam across Africa, Asia and even Europe. The two countries entered a fierce battle over the souls of Muslims with Saudi clerics augmenting their anti-Shiite rhetoric and the Iranian counterparts playing down their Shiism to appeal to Pan-Islamic, anti-imperial and anti-Western sentiments among Muslims.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/opin ... dline&te=1
Saudi Arabia is pushing out foreigners to create jobs for locals
But new Saudi hires are not always up to the job
EVER since the local laundrette replaced its Asian workers with Saudis, his Parisian silk shirts have come back as nylon cast-offs, says a lawyer in Saudi Arabia. The new hire at his chemist, a bashful Saudi girl, shies from his request to spray colognes on his hand. He himself has hired four Saudi lawyers in order to comply with the kingdom’s drive to replace foreigners with Saudis. They are useless, he says.
“Labour pains,” tuts Ahmed Kattan, the deputy labour minister. As part of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s “Saudisation” efforts, Mr Kattan has slapped monthly levies on migrants (based on the size of their families) and the Saudis who hire them. He has also barred foreigners from 12 sectors of the economy, including baking and optometry. The scheme, he says, will reduce the kingdom’s dependence on about 8m predominantly unskilled foreigners, who far outnumber Saudi workers. He reckons this will cut Saudi Arabia’s jobless rate to 10% by 2022 (from around 13% today), get more women into work and encourage automation.
More....
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... m=20180430
But new Saudi hires are not always up to the job
EVER since the local laundrette replaced its Asian workers with Saudis, his Parisian silk shirts have come back as nylon cast-offs, says a lawyer in Saudi Arabia. The new hire at his chemist, a bashful Saudi girl, shies from his request to spray colognes on his hand. He himself has hired four Saudi lawyers in order to comply with the kingdom’s drive to replace foreigners with Saudis. They are useless, he says.
“Labour pains,” tuts Ahmed Kattan, the deputy labour minister. As part of Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s “Saudisation” efforts, Mr Kattan has slapped monthly levies on migrants (based on the size of their families) and the Saudis who hire them. He has also barred foreigners from 12 sectors of the economy, including baking and optometry. The scheme, he says, will reduce the kingdom’s dependence on about 8m predominantly unskilled foreigners, who far outnumber Saudi workers. He reckons this will cut Saudi Arabia’s jobless rate to 10% by 2022 (from around 13% today), get more women into work and encourage automation.
More....
https://www.economist.com/news/middle-e ... m=20180430
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Modern Hatreds
Excerpt:
The conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is widely described — by columnists, policymakers and journalists — as rooted in a primordial and intractable hatred that, as a Times opinion writer put it, goes back to “the seventh-century struggle over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad — Shiites or Sunnis.”
Even President Barack Obama, who staked a lot of political capital on the nuclear deal with Iran, invoked the specter of “ancient sectarian differences” to explain the turmoil in the Middle East. In his final State of the Union address, Mr. Obama asserted that the issues plaguing the region are “rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.”
Projecting current conditions back and imagining they are this way because they have always been this way is a grave mistake. This convenient, Orientalist narrative has become the new conventional wisdom in the West — one with very real political consequences.
Global conflicts have more proximate causes and are driven by state actors pursuing political power and strategic interests. During the Cold War, Saudi Arabia and Iran enjoyed amicable relations. Both countries had warm relations with the United States, and they were on the same side of the region’s defining issues.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opin ... treds.html
Excerpt:
The conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia is widely described — by columnists, policymakers and journalists — as rooted in a primordial and intractable hatred that, as a Times opinion writer put it, goes back to “the seventh-century struggle over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad — Shiites or Sunnis.”
Even President Barack Obama, who staked a lot of political capital on the nuclear deal with Iran, invoked the specter of “ancient sectarian differences” to explain the turmoil in the Middle East. In his final State of the Union address, Mr. Obama asserted that the issues plaguing the region are “rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.”
Projecting current conditions back and imagining they are this way because they have always been this way is a grave mistake. This convenient, Orientalist narrative has become the new conventional wisdom in the West — one with very real political consequences.
Global conflicts have more proximate causes and are driven by state actors pursuing political power and strategic interests. During the Cold War, Saudi Arabia and Iran enjoyed amicable relations. Both countries had warm relations with the United States, and they were on the same side of the region’s defining issues.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/opin ... treds.html
The Gaza Violence: How Extremism Corrupts
Excerpt:
But sometime in the 1990s, a mental shift occurred. Extremism grew on the Israeli side, exemplified by the ultranationalist who murdered Rabin, but it exploded on the Palestinian side. Palestinian extremism took on many of the shapes recognizable in extremism everywhere.
First, the question shifted from “What to do?” to “Whom to blame?” The debates were less about how to take steps toward a livable future and more about who is responsible for the sins of the past. The central activity became moral condemnation, with vindication as the ultimate goal.
Second, the dream of total victory became the only acceptable dream. In normal politics, certain longstanding debates are never really settled; competing parties instead reach an accommodation that works in the moment. But extremists stop trying to win partial victories, insisting that someday they will get everything they want — that someday the other side will magically disappear.
Third, extremists over time replace strategic thinking with theatrical thinking. Strategic thinking is about the relation of means to ends: How do we use what we have to get to where we want to go? Theatrical thinking is both more cynical and more messianic: How do we create a martyrdom performance that will show the world how oppressed we are?
Palestinian politics has shifted. It shifted from 1967 thinking to 1948 thinking. If you read the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s April 30 speech or much of the commentary published over the past week, it’s clear that some powerful Palestinians now believe that the creation of the state of Israel is the wrong that needs to be addressed, not the expansion and occupation.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/opin ... emism.html
Excerpt:
But sometime in the 1990s, a mental shift occurred. Extremism grew on the Israeli side, exemplified by the ultranationalist who murdered Rabin, but it exploded on the Palestinian side. Palestinian extremism took on many of the shapes recognizable in extremism everywhere.
First, the question shifted from “What to do?” to “Whom to blame?” The debates were less about how to take steps toward a livable future and more about who is responsible for the sins of the past. The central activity became moral condemnation, with vindication as the ultimate goal.
Second, the dream of total victory became the only acceptable dream. In normal politics, certain longstanding debates are never really settled; competing parties instead reach an accommodation that works in the moment. But extremists stop trying to win partial victories, insisting that someday they will get everything they want — that someday the other side will magically disappear.
Third, extremists over time replace strategic thinking with theatrical thinking. Strategic thinking is about the relation of means to ends: How do we use what we have to get to where we want to go? Theatrical thinking is both more cynical and more messianic: How do we create a martyrdom performance that will show the world how oppressed we are?
Palestinian politics has shifted. It shifted from 1967 thinking to 1948 thinking. If you read the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s April 30 speech or much of the commentary published over the past week, it’s clear that some powerful Palestinians now believe that the creation of the state of Israel is the wrong that needs to be addressed, not the expansion and occupation.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/opin ... emism.html
Milk sheikhs
Why Qatar is raising cows in the desert
STEP inside, and it could be a scene from the English countryside or the American heartland: one hundred well-fed dairy cows spinning slowly on a circular milking parlour. But outside there are no green fields, only sand. Baladna (“Our Country”) is a dairy farm in the desert, 50km from Doha, the Qatari capital. Behind the milking house is the din of construction. Hundreds of labourers are working to expand the farm, building new barns and installing fans and misters to cool them. “None of this was here a year ago,” says John Dore, the Irishman who manages the place.
There was no need for it. Until June Qatar imported milk from Almarai, a Saudi conglomerate. Then Saudi Arabia and three other Arab states closed their borders to punish Qatar for supporting Islamist groups and Al Jazeera, a state-owned broadcaster that criticises all the Gulf monarchies except Qatar’s. Overnight the world’s richest country (measured by income per head at purchasing-power parity) was cut off from its food supplies. It first turned to Turkey and Iran. Shoppers got a crash course in Turkish: placards in the dairy aisle of supermarkets explained that “süt” meant milk.
More...
https://media.economist.com/news/middle ... making-its
Why Qatar is raising cows in the desert
STEP inside, and it could be a scene from the English countryside or the American heartland: one hundred well-fed dairy cows spinning slowly on a circular milking parlour. But outside there are no green fields, only sand. Baladna (“Our Country”) is a dairy farm in the desert, 50km from Doha, the Qatari capital. Behind the milking house is the din of construction. Hundreds of labourers are working to expand the farm, building new barns and installing fans and misters to cool them. “None of this was here a year ago,” says John Dore, the Irishman who manages the place.
There was no need for it. Until June Qatar imported milk from Almarai, a Saudi conglomerate. Then Saudi Arabia and three other Arab states closed their borders to punish Qatar for supporting Islamist groups and Al Jazeera, a state-owned broadcaster that criticises all the Gulf monarchies except Qatar’s. Overnight the world’s richest country (measured by income per head at purchasing-power parity) was cut off from its food supplies. It first turned to Turkey and Iran. Shoppers got a crash course in Turkish: placards in the dairy aisle of supermarkets explained that “süt” meant milk.
More...
https://media.economist.com/news/middle ... making-its
End the Blockade of Qatar
DOHA, Qatar — For more than 15 years the Middle East has been a region of turmoil and instability. Transnational terrorism, waves of displaced populations and seemingly intractable wars present global threats that affect countries far from the region.
In Qatar, we believe that the crises in the Middle East are interconnected and require comprehensive solutions, and that peace and stability will be restored only when the region’s countries agree to work together to reach consensus on key challenges, including the destabilizing influence of sectarianism, rising youth unemployment and our common need to diversify our energy-dependent economies.
But at a time when Arab allies should be united in facing the atrocity of the mass killings in Syria, the escalating war in Yemen, and the rebuilding of state institutions in Libya and Iraq, some regional players have chosen to pursue petty grievances and selfish ambitions that undermine our unity. Exhibit A: the blockade of my country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/opin ... ister.html
DOHA, Qatar — For more than 15 years the Middle East has been a region of turmoil and instability. Transnational terrorism, waves of displaced populations and seemingly intractable wars present global threats that affect countries far from the region.
In Qatar, we believe that the crises in the Middle East are interconnected and require comprehensive solutions, and that peace and stability will be restored only when the region’s countries agree to work together to reach consensus on key challenges, including the destabilizing influence of sectarianism, rising youth unemployment and our common need to diversify our energy-dependent economies.
But at a time when Arab allies should be united in facing the atrocity of the mass killings in Syria, the escalating war in Yemen, and the rebuilding of state institutions in Libya and Iraq, some regional players have chosen to pursue petty grievances and selfish ambitions that undermine our unity. Exhibit A: the blockade of my country.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/opin ... ister.html
Can the Saudis Break Up With Wahhabism?
Excerpt:
In the mid-18th century, the Saud embraced Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a revivalist preacher who advocated a narrow reading of the Quran and the Hadith and attacked any deviations from or accretions to the original practice. People who deviated from the Wahhabi doctrine were excluded from Islam, and jihad was considered the only way to bring them back to the right path.
The compact with Wahhab and his disciples helped the Saud to legitimize an expansionist policy and create a durable state in the early 20th century. The Saudi monarchy monopolized political and military action; the Wahhabi clerics took charge of the religious, legal and social spheres.
Prince Mohammed is unlikely to pull off a break with the Wahhabi religious establishment because the clerics have proved to be resilient and have displayed a great capacity to adapt to transitions and vagaries of power. Attempts to marginalize the clerics date back to the early 20th century.
When King Abd al-Aziz, the founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 1902 to 1953, set out to monopolize power, work with Western partners and find acknowledgment from the broader Muslim world, he felt the need to use Islamic reformism to weaken and moderate Wahhabism.
Wahhabi clerics preserved their authority and even grew stronger by offering ideological concessions such as showing more tolerance toward non-Wahhabis, allowing the presence of non-Muslims in Saudi territory, and accepting modern education and administration.
More.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/opin ... dline&te=1
Excerpt:
In the mid-18th century, the Saud embraced Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a revivalist preacher who advocated a narrow reading of the Quran and the Hadith and attacked any deviations from or accretions to the original practice. People who deviated from the Wahhabi doctrine were excluded from Islam, and jihad was considered the only way to bring them back to the right path.
The compact with Wahhab and his disciples helped the Saud to legitimize an expansionist policy and create a durable state in the early 20th century. The Saudi monarchy monopolized political and military action; the Wahhabi clerics took charge of the religious, legal and social spheres.
Prince Mohammed is unlikely to pull off a break with the Wahhabi religious establishment because the clerics have proved to be resilient and have displayed a great capacity to adapt to transitions and vagaries of power. Attempts to marginalize the clerics date back to the early 20th century.
When King Abd al-Aziz, the founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who ruled from 1902 to 1953, set out to monopolize power, work with Western partners and find acknowledgment from the broader Muslim world, he felt the need to use Islamic reformism to weaken and moderate Wahhabism.
Wahhabi clerics preserved their authority and even grew stronger by offering ideological concessions such as showing more tolerance toward non-Wahhabis, allowing the presence of non-Muslims in Saudi territory, and accepting modern education and administration.
More.....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/opin ... dline&te=1
Crazy Poor Middle Easterners
The Middle East could prosper if it would put its past behind it.
I greatly enjoyed the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” because, beyond the many laugh lines, it reminded me of an important point: Rich Asia has gotten really rich — not because it doesn’t have political, tribal, ethnic and religious differences like other regions, but because in more places on more days it learned to set those differences aside and focus on building the real foundations of sustainable wealth: education, trade, infrastructure, human capital and, in the most successful places, the rule of law. Most of Asia became prosperous not by discovering natural resources but by tapping its human resources — men and women — and giving them the tools to realize their potential.
It got me thinking that if someone were to do a similar movie about the Middle East it could be called “Crazy Poor Middle Easterners.” Because, with a few exceptions, this region has never been a bigger mess, had more people fighting over who owns which olive tree, had more cities turned to rubble by rival sects and missed its potential so vastly.
The region of the world that should be naturally rich has made itself poor by repeatedly letting the past bury the future and the region that is naturally poor has made itself rich by letting the future bury the past.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/opin ... dline&te=1
The Middle East could prosper if it would put its past behind it.
I greatly enjoyed the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” because, beyond the many laugh lines, it reminded me of an important point: Rich Asia has gotten really rich — not because it doesn’t have political, tribal, ethnic and religious differences like other regions, but because in more places on more days it learned to set those differences aside and focus on building the real foundations of sustainable wealth: education, trade, infrastructure, human capital and, in the most successful places, the rule of law. Most of Asia became prosperous not by discovering natural resources but by tapping its human resources — men and women — and giving them the tools to realize their potential.
It got me thinking that if someone were to do a similar movie about the Middle East it could be called “Crazy Poor Middle Easterners.” Because, with a few exceptions, this region has never been a bigger mess, had more people fighting over who owns which olive tree, had more cities turned to rubble by rival sects and missed its potential so vastly.
The region of the world that should be naturally rich has made itself poor by repeatedly letting the past bury the future and the region that is naturally poor has made itself rich by letting the future bury the past.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/opin ... dline&te=1
Saudi Arabia: Facts And Photos You Should See
Saudi Arabia is the heartland for religious followers of the Islamic faith. Millions of worshipers come to visit the two holiest sites in Islam every year. But what do we know about the military and economic powerhouse in the Middle-East that is Saudi Arabia? Perhaps these facts and photos can shed light on what really goes on in the Sunni Muslim state.
Slide show:
http://www.horizontimes.com/facts/saudi-arabia
Saudi Arabia is the heartland for religious followers of the Islamic faith. Millions of worshipers come to visit the two holiest sites in Islam every year. But what do we know about the military and economic powerhouse in the Middle-East that is Saudi Arabia? Perhaps these facts and photos can shed light on what really goes on in the Sunni Muslim state.
Slide show:
http://www.horizontimes.com/facts/saudi-arabia
Iran & Saudi Arabia, Thelma & Louise
We made two bets, and the Iranians and the Saudis responded with their worst impulses.
Excerpt:
I note this simply to point out that this whole region is in the grip of an incredibly self-destructive cycle of tribal, political and sectarian madness — Persians versus Arabs, Shiites versus Sunnis, Egyptian government versus democracy activists, Saudis versus Qataris, Alawites versus Sunnis, Islamists versus Christians, Israelis versus Palestinians, Yemeni Houthis versus Yemeni Sunnis, Turks versus Kurds and Libyan tribes versus Libyan tribes. So much hate, in so many directions.
“People talk as if America’s choices in the Middle East are between ‘good allies,’ like Saudi Arabia, and `bad adversaries,’ like Iran, but our actual choices are between bad allies and bad adversaries,” observed Karim Sadjadpour, Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/opin ... dline&te=1
We made two bets, and the Iranians and the Saudis responded with their worst impulses.
Excerpt:
I note this simply to point out that this whole region is in the grip of an incredibly self-destructive cycle of tribal, political and sectarian madness — Persians versus Arabs, Shiites versus Sunnis, Egyptian government versus democracy activists, Saudis versus Qataris, Alawites versus Sunnis, Islamists versus Christians, Israelis versus Palestinians, Yemeni Houthis versus Yemeni Sunnis, Turks versus Kurds and Libyan tribes versus Libyan tribes. So much hate, in so many directions.
“People talk as if America’s choices in the Middle East are between ‘good allies,’ like Saudi Arabia, and `bad adversaries,’ like Iran, but our actual choices are between bad allies and bad adversaries,” observed Karim Sadjadpour, Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/opin ... dline&te=1
More Schools and Fewer Tanks for the Mideast
The U.S. should send more soft power and less hard power to the region.
President Trump’s sudden announcement that he’s pulling U.S. troops out of Syria and shrinking their number in Afghanistan has prompted a new debate about American ground forces in the Middle East and whether keeping them there is vital or not. I’m asking myself the same question. To answer that question, though, I need to start with another question:
Why is it that the one Arab Spring country that managed to make a relatively peaceful transition from dictatorship to a constitutional democracy — with full empowerment for its women — is the country we’ve had the least to do with and where we’ve never sent soldiers to fight and die? It’s called Tunisia.
Yes, Tunisia, the only Middle East country to achieve the ends that we so badly desired for Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, did so after having hosted more U.S. Peace Corps workers over the last 50 years than U.S. military advisers and after having received only about $1 billion in U.S. aid (and three loan guarantees) since its 2010-11 democracy revolution.
By comparison, the U.S. is now spending about $45 billion a year in Afghanistan — after 17 years of trying to transform it into a pluralistic democracy. That is an insane contrast. Especially when you consider that Tunisia’s self-propelled democracy is such an important model for the region, but an increasingly frail one.
It’s threatened by labor strikes, the spillover of instability from Libya, a slowing economy that can’t produce enough jobs or income for its educated young people, a 2016 International Monetary Fund loan that restricts the government from hiring, all causing stresses among the key players in its power-sharing deal involving trade unionists, Islamists, old-regime types and new democrats. For now, Tunisia is holding together, but it could sure use one week’s worth of what we spend in Afghanistan.
Why could Tunisia transition to democracy when others couldn’t? It starts with its founding father, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s leader from independence, in 1956, to 1987.
Though he was a president-for-life like other Arab autocrats, Bourguiba was unique in other ways: He kept his army very small and did not waste four decades trying to destroy Israel; he was actually a lonely voice calling for coexistence.
He educated and empowered Tunisian women and allowed relatively strong civil society groups to emerge — trade unions, lawyers’ syndicates, women’s groups, who were vital to toppling Bourguiba’s tyrannical successor and forging a new Constitution with Tunisia’s Islamic movement. Tunisia was also blessed by having little oil, so it had to invest in its people’s education.
Tunisia, in short, had the cultural underpinnings to sustain a democratic revolution. But political and cultural transformations move at different speeds. The U.S. (myself included) wanted to rush the necessary cultural transformation of Afghanistan and Iraq, but as Peter Drucker once noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That fact — plus our own incompetence and their corruption — has eaten alive the U.S. democracy efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opin ... dline&te=1
The U.S. should send more soft power and less hard power to the region.
President Trump’s sudden announcement that he’s pulling U.S. troops out of Syria and shrinking their number in Afghanistan has prompted a new debate about American ground forces in the Middle East and whether keeping them there is vital or not. I’m asking myself the same question. To answer that question, though, I need to start with another question:
Why is it that the one Arab Spring country that managed to make a relatively peaceful transition from dictatorship to a constitutional democracy — with full empowerment for its women — is the country we’ve had the least to do with and where we’ve never sent soldiers to fight and die? It’s called Tunisia.
Yes, Tunisia, the only Middle East country to achieve the ends that we so badly desired for Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan, did so after having hosted more U.S. Peace Corps workers over the last 50 years than U.S. military advisers and after having received only about $1 billion in U.S. aid (and three loan guarantees) since its 2010-11 democracy revolution.
By comparison, the U.S. is now spending about $45 billion a year in Afghanistan — after 17 years of trying to transform it into a pluralistic democracy. That is an insane contrast. Especially when you consider that Tunisia’s self-propelled democracy is such an important model for the region, but an increasingly frail one.
It’s threatened by labor strikes, the spillover of instability from Libya, a slowing economy that can’t produce enough jobs or income for its educated young people, a 2016 International Monetary Fund loan that restricts the government from hiring, all causing stresses among the key players in its power-sharing deal involving trade unionists, Islamists, old-regime types and new democrats. For now, Tunisia is holding together, but it could sure use one week’s worth of what we spend in Afghanistan.
Why could Tunisia transition to democracy when others couldn’t? It starts with its founding father, Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s leader from independence, in 1956, to 1987.
Though he was a president-for-life like other Arab autocrats, Bourguiba was unique in other ways: He kept his army very small and did not waste four decades trying to destroy Israel; he was actually a lonely voice calling for coexistence.
He educated and empowered Tunisian women and allowed relatively strong civil society groups to emerge — trade unions, lawyers’ syndicates, women’s groups, who were vital to toppling Bourguiba’s tyrannical successor and forging a new Constitution with Tunisia’s Islamic movement. Tunisia was also blessed by having little oil, so it had to invest in its people’s education.
Tunisia, in short, had the cultural underpinnings to sustain a democratic revolution. But political and cultural transformations move at different speeds. The U.S. (myself included) wanted to rush the necessary cultural transformation of Afghanistan and Iraq, but as Peter Drucker once noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” That fact — plus our own incompetence and their corruption — has eaten alive the U.S. democracy efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/opin ... dline&te=1
Beware the Mideast’s Falling Pillars
Changes beyond the control of the region’s leaders are spurring a new Middle East.
AMMAN, Jordan — For the last half-century the politics of the Middle East has been shaped by five key pillars, but all five are now crumbling. A new Middle East is aborning — but not necessarily the flourishing one that people imagined in the 1990s.
This one is being shaped more by Twitter memes than by U.S. diplomats, more by unemployment than by terrorism, more by upheavals on the streets than by leaders in palaces, more by women than by men. Can’t say where it will all settle out, but for now, beware falling pillars.
How so? For starters, there was always a deep U.S. involvement in shaping the future of this region. But just look around today: The U.S. doesn’t even have ambassadors in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a former Trump bankruptcy lawyer, is so enthralled with the right-wing Jewish settler movement that he is more a propagandist than a diplomat. Bye-bye American pie.
Second, there has always been some kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace process pushing for the best two-state solution. Again, bye-bye. Today, in truth, the U.S. and Israel seem to be engaged in a search for the best one-state solution, meaning permanent Israeli security control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with some form of deep Palestinian autonomy.
Third, Arab governments could always guarantee jobs for their populations in their bureaucracies or security services — jobs where you could come late, leave early and work another job on the side. Also, bye-bye. With falling oil prices and rising populations, virtually every Arab state today is trying to figure out how to shed government workers and outsource services.
Jordan’s King Abdullah recently told a group of U.S. military visitors that what keeps him up at night is just one thing — and it’s not ISIS or Al Qaeda. It’s the fact that 300,000 Jordanians are unemployed and 87 percent of them are between the ages of 18 and 39, prime working years.
For weeks there have been sit-ins by jobless students outside Abdullah’s palace and protest marches across Jordan by the unemployed, hungry and hopeless. At the same time, the unemployed in Gaza last week began a “revolt of the hungry” against Hamas’s economic mismanagement, and similar street protests erupted in Algeria and Sudan, aimed at their failing, long-entrenched autocrats. Arab Spring 2.0 anyone?
The fourth crumbling pillar: The days when information flowed only from the top down, and Arab governments could control the voices in their countries, are long gone. With Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp widely diffused in the Arab world, information now moves horizontally and people — using their real names — now tweet the most insulting things at their leaders.
(It is increasingly obvious that social networks and cyber tools are making efficient autocrats, like China, even more efficient. But they seem to be making soft authoritarians, like Jordan, more fragile, and they are making Western democracies increasingly ungovernable.)
Finally, men could dominate women through formal and informal religious, cultural and legal norms. But the recent high-profile cases of young women fleeing male control in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. spoke for many Arab women who are no longer so willing to submit to male guardianship. This is especially true because women in many countries, Jordan, for instance, are now out-graduating men in both high school and universities.
However, without a change in the laws of marriage, inheritance, divorce and child custody — all of which favor men — all the women doing well in school will never be able to realize their full potential in the work force, where they are still badly underrepresented. Something has to give.
Meanwhile, it’s hard for men to marry without a job. Having lots of men who have never held power, held a job or held a girl’s hand is a prescription for social unrest — especially when they’re all on Twitter.
Welcome to the new Middle East!
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/opin ... dline&te=1
Changes beyond the control of the region’s leaders are spurring a new Middle East.
AMMAN, Jordan — For the last half-century the politics of the Middle East has been shaped by five key pillars, but all five are now crumbling. A new Middle East is aborning — but not necessarily the flourishing one that people imagined in the 1990s.
This one is being shaped more by Twitter memes than by U.S. diplomats, more by unemployment than by terrorism, more by upheavals on the streets than by leaders in palaces, more by women than by men. Can’t say where it will all settle out, but for now, beware falling pillars.
How so? For starters, there was always a deep U.S. involvement in shaping the future of this region. But just look around today: The U.S. doesn’t even have ambassadors in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, a former Trump bankruptcy lawyer, is so enthralled with the right-wing Jewish settler movement that he is more a propagandist than a diplomat. Bye-bye American pie.
Second, there has always been some kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace process pushing for the best two-state solution. Again, bye-bye. Today, in truth, the U.S. and Israel seem to be engaged in a search for the best one-state solution, meaning permanent Israeli security control over the West Bank and East Jerusalem, along with some form of deep Palestinian autonomy.
Third, Arab governments could always guarantee jobs for their populations in their bureaucracies or security services — jobs where you could come late, leave early and work another job on the side. Also, bye-bye. With falling oil prices and rising populations, virtually every Arab state today is trying to figure out how to shed government workers and outsource services.
Jordan’s King Abdullah recently told a group of U.S. military visitors that what keeps him up at night is just one thing — and it’s not ISIS or Al Qaeda. It’s the fact that 300,000 Jordanians are unemployed and 87 percent of them are between the ages of 18 and 39, prime working years.
For weeks there have been sit-ins by jobless students outside Abdullah’s palace and protest marches across Jordan by the unemployed, hungry and hopeless. At the same time, the unemployed in Gaza last week began a “revolt of the hungry” against Hamas’s economic mismanagement, and similar street protests erupted in Algeria and Sudan, aimed at their failing, long-entrenched autocrats. Arab Spring 2.0 anyone?
The fourth crumbling pillar: The days when information flowed only from the top down, and Arab governments could control the voices in their countries, are long gone. With Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp widely diffused in the Arab world, information now moves horizontally and people — using their real names — now tweet the most insulting things at their leaders.
(It is increasingly obvious that social networks and cyber tools are making efficient autocrats, like China, even more efficient. But they seem to be making soft authoritarians, like Jordan, more fragile, and they are making Western democracies increasingly ungovernable.)
Finally, men could dominate women through formal and informal religious, cultural and legal norms. But the recent high-profile cases of young women fleeing male control in Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. spoke for many Arab women who are no longer so willing to submit to male guardianship. This is especially true because women in many countries, Jordan, for instance, are now out-graduating men in both high school and universities.
However, without a change in the laws of marriage, inheritance, divorce and child custody — all of which favor men — all the women doing well in school will never be able to realize their full potential in the work force, where they are still badly underrepresented. Something has to give.
Meanwhile, it’s hard for men to marry without a job. Having lots of men who have never held power, held a job or held a girl’s hand is a prescription for social unrest — especially when they’re all on Twitter.
Welcome to the new Middle East!
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/opin ... dline&te=1
Benjamin Netanyahu and the Death of the Zionist Dream
Israel’s founding fathers are turning in their graves.
From the 1920s onward, the Zionist movement was split into two groups that put forward rival ideas of the Jewish state, one liberal, the other right wing. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and its longest serving prime minister, was the leader of Labor Zionism, the liberal vision; Zeev Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the spiritual father of the Israeli right. Mr. Ben-Gurion embodied the liberal Zionist dream of a free, independent and egalitarian Jewish state. Mr. Jabotinsky was an ardent Jewish nationalist who laid claim to Jewish sovereignty over the whole of the territory between both banks of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Although he led the opposition to mainstream Zionism, Mr. Jabotinsky was, in fact, the main architect of the strategy that guided the entire movement in the confrontation with the Palestinians — the strategy of the “iron wall.” This strategy consisted of two stages: First, build an iron wall of Jewish military power to compel the Arabs to recognize that the Jewish state was there to stay. Then negotiate with the Arabs about their rights and status in Palestine. The essence of the strategy was negotiations from strength. The risk inherent in it was that military superiority would lead to diplomatic intransigence.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who won a fifth electoral victory last week in an election that was essentially a referendum on his leadership, is in many ways the heir to Mr. Jabotinsky’s legacy. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was Mr. Jabotinsky’s secretary and the editor of the Revisionists’ daily newspaper, HaYarden; his party, Likud, is the successor to the post-independence Revisionist party, Herut.
With last week’s victory, Mr. Netanyahu is now on course to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, surpassing Mr. Ben-Gurion. By trouncing his left-wing opponents and beating a challenge from a new centrist party, Mr. Netanyahu gained more than just another term in office: He secured a fresh mandate for his idea of Greater Israel.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/opin ... dline&te=1
Israel’s founding fathers are turning in their graves.
From the 1920s onward, the Zionist movement was split into two groups that put forward rival ideas of the Jewish state, one liberal, the other right wing. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and its longest serving prime minister, was the leader of Labor Zionism, the liberal vision; Zeev Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the spiritual father of the Israeli right. Mr. Ben-Gurion embodied the liberal Zionist dream of a free, independent and egalitarian Jewish state. Mr. Jabotinsky was an ardent Jewish nationalist who laid claim to Jewish sovereignty over the whole of the territory between both banks of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Although he led the opposition to mainstream Zionism, Mr. Jabotinsky was, in fact, the main architect of the strategy that guided the entire movement in the confrontation with the Palestinians — the strategy of the “iron wall.” This strategy consisted of two stages: First, build an iron wall of Jewish military power to compel the Arabs to recognize that the Jewish state was there to stay. Then negotiate with the Arabs about their rights and status in Palestine. The essence of the strategy was negotiations from strength. The risk inherent in it was that military superiority would lead to diplomatic intransigence.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who won a fifth electoral victory last week in an election that was essentially a referendum on his leadership, is in many ways the heir to Mr. Jabotinsky’s legacy. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was Mr. Jabotinsky’s secretary and the editor of the Revisionists’ daily newspaper, HaYarden; his party, Likud, is the successor to the post-independence Revisionist party, Herut.
With last week’s victory, Mr. Netanyahu is now on course to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, surpassing Mr. Ben-Gurion. By trouncing his left-wing opponents and beating a challenge from a new centrist party, Mr. Netanyahu gained more than just another term in office: He secured a fresh mandate for his idea of Greater Israel.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/opin ... dline&te=1
The unlikely rise of book fairs in the Gulf
Can literary culture thrive in the absence of free expression?
Perhaps only in the Middle East do the censors get their own stand at book fairs—as they did at last year’s jamboree in Kuwait. Outside, a frustrated local artist installed a mock cemetery of banned works, with hundreds of titles inscribed on headstones. Over the past five years the information ministry has banned more than 4,000 books, from Dostoevsky to “Children of Gebelawi”, published in 1959 by the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to win the Nobel prize for literature. The cemetery protest, too, was quickly censored. The rumpus encapsulated the trick that several Gulf states are trying to pull off. They want to become literary beacons, even as they restrict freedom of speech.
Arabs have an old saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads.” The book fair in Cairo, the Middle East’s oldest, has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Each year it draws more than 2m people to stalls packed with titles from publishers across the Arab world. But the Gulf states are now establishing themselves as stops on the literary circuit, too. Ten years ago few would have heard of the book fair in Sharjah, one of the lesser-known parts of the United Arab Emirates (uae). Today it attracts 2.3m visitors a year, double Sharjah’s population. Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, Riyadh—all are transforming from sleepy trade fairs to popular events.
More...
https://www.economist.com/books-and-art ... n-the-gulf
Can literary culture thrive in the absence of free expression?
Perhaps only in the Middle East do the censors get their own stand at book fairs—as they did at last year’s jamboree in Kuwait. Outside, a frustrated local artist installed a mock cemetery of banned works, with hundreds of titles inscribed on headstones. Over the past five years the information ministry has banned more than 4,000 books, from Dostoevsky to “Children of Gebelawi”, published in 1959 by the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to win the Nobel prize for literature. The cemetery protest, too, was quickly censored. The rumpus encapsulated the trick that several Gulf states are trying to pull off. They want to become literary beacons, even as they restrict freedom of speech.
Arabs have an old saying: “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads.” The book fair in Cairo, the Middle East’s oldest, has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. Each year it draws more than 2m people to stalls packed with titles from publishers across the Arab world. But the Gulf states are now establishing themselves as stops on the literary circuit, too. Ten years ago few would have heard of the book fair in Sharjah, one of the lesser-known parts of the United Arab Emirates (uae). Today it attracts 2.3m visitors a year, double Sharjah’s population. Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, Riyadh—all are transforming from sleepy trade fairs to popular events.
More...
https://www.economist.com/books-and-art ... n-the-gulf
Lebanon’s Blasphemy Wars Strike a Popular Rock Band
The decision to cancel a concert by Mashrou’ Leila is jolting the Lebanese out of their complacency about the withering of their country’s freedoms.
When Egypt and Jordan banned the Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila a few years ago because of its openly gay frontman and its progressive lyrics addressing social and sexual taboos, many Lebanese declared that this would never happen in their country.
A religiously diverse nation, Lebanon has long been a haven for artists and writers from the region, even more so as oppressive regimes continue to clamp down on freedom of expression in the wake of the Arab uprisings.
But last week, after a 10-day campaign by Christian activists against Mashrou’ Leila, including blasphemy accusations, online bullying and death threats against its four members, the Byblos International Festival, a major local music event, scrapped a planned concert by the band. Festival organizers said the decision was to “prevent bloodshed and maintain peace and stability.”
Locally, the announcement was greeted with outrage and disbelief. Mashrou’ Leila has played many times at various venues in Lebanon and appeared twice at the seaside Byblos festival. Yet the controversy is about much more than just one country, a local band and a canceled concert — it is evidence of the renewed power of intolerance and fundamentalism in the region and beyond.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opin ... ogin-email
The decision to cancel a concert by Mashrou’ Leila is jolting the Lebanese out of their complacency about the withering of their country’s freedoms.
When Egypt and Jordan banned the Lebanese indie rock band Mashrou’ Leila a few years ago because of its openly gay frontman and its progressive lyrics addressing social and sexual taboos, many Lebanese declared that this would never happen in their country.
A religiously diverse nation, Lebanon has long been a haven for artists and writers from the region, even more so as oppressive regimes continue to clamp down on freedom of expression in the wake of the Arab uprisings.
But last week, after a 10-day campaign by Christian activists against Mashrou’ Leila, including blasphemy accusations, online bullying and death threats against its four members, the Byblos International Festival, a major local music event, scrapped a planned concert by the band. Festival organizers said the decision was to “prevent bloodshed and maintain peace and stability.”
Locally, the announcement was greeted with outrage and disbelief. Mashrou’ Leila has played many times at various venues in Lebanon and appeared twice at the seaside Byblos festival. Yet the controversy is about much more than just one country, a local band and a canceled concert — it is evidence of the renewed power of intolerance and fundamentalism in the region and beyond.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/opin ... ogin-email
Interesting Facts About Iran People Need To Know
From the magic Persian yogurts, to the Rich Kids of Iran, to Iran’s very own soccer stars, after you read these facts about Iran, you’ll never look at the country the same! When most people think of Iran, they immediately conjure up images of mosques and women sporting hijabs, but they’d be shocked to know that there is so much more to the country than they ever imagined. Iran, once known as Persia, has a rich history and culture that makes it stand apart from other nations. However, besides for the historical sites and monuments, Iran has some incredibly interesting facts, customs, and practices that you won’t find anywhere else.
Slide show at:
https://www.icepop.com/interesting-iran ... s_v25_3103
From the magic Persian yogurts, to the Rich Kids of Iran, to Iran’s very own soccer stars, after you read these facts about Iran, you’ll never look at the country the same! When most people think of Iran, they immediately conjure up images of mosques and women sporting hijabs, but they’d be shocked to know that there is so much more to the country than they ever imagined. Iran, once known as Persia, has a rich history and culture that makes it stand apart from other nations. However, besides for the historical sites and monuments, Iran has some incredibly interesting facts, customs, and practices that you won’t find anywhere else.
Slide show at:
https://www.icepop.com/interesting-iran ... s_v25_3103
Hazzaa al-Mansoori, First U.A.E. Astronaut, Launches to Space Station
The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program.
The United Arab Emirates has sent its first astronaut to space. That is a step in a budding, ambitious space program for an oil-rich country the size of Maine along the southern side of the Persian Gulf. Next year, it plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, and its leaders talk of colonizing the red planet a century from now.
Emirati officials hope that space will inspire and train a generation of engineers and scientists who can help prepare the country for a post-oil future.
Hazzaa al-Mansoori, a former Emirati F-16 pilot, launched for the International Space Station in a Soyuz space capsule from a Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan on Wednesday. Also aboard were Jessica Meir of NASA and Oleg Skripochka of Russia. After a quick, six-hour trip, the spacecraft docked with the station at 3:42 p.m. Eastern time.
MBR Space Centre
✔
@MBRSpaceCentre
The #Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft, carrying the #FirstEmiratiAstronaut, #HazzaaAlMansoori, has successfully docked with the #InternationalSpaceStation. After all the necessary checks are complete, the astronauts will enter the ISS@astro_hazzaa
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“I will try to remember each second of the launch itself,” Mr. al-Mansoori said during a news conference this month. “Because it will be really very important for me to share it with everyone and my country, the entire world and the Arab region.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/scie ... d=45305309
The Persian Gulf country has an ambitious, budding space program.
The United Arab Emirates has sent its first astronaut to space. That is a step in a budding, ambitious space program for an oil-rich country the size of Maine along the southern side of the Persian Gulf. Next year, it plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, and its leaders talk of colonizing the red planet a century from now.
Emirati officials hope that space will inspire and train a generation of engineers and scientists who can help prepare the country for a post-oil future.
Hazzaa al-Mansoori, a former Emirati F-16 pilot, launched for the International Space Station in a Soyuz space capsule from a Russian spaceport in Kazakhstan on Wednesday. Also aboard were Jessica Meir of NASA and Oleg Skripochka of Russia. After a quick, six-hour trip, the spacecraft docked with the station at 3:42 p.m. Eastern time.
MBR Space Centre
✔
@MBRSpaceCentre
The #Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft, carrying the #FirstEmiratiAstronaut, #HazzaaAlMansoori, has successfully docked with the #InternationalSpaceStation. After all the necessary checks are complete, the astronauts will enter the ISS@astro_hazzaa
View image on Twitter
69
1:49 PM - Sep 25, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
49 people are talking about this
“I will try to remember each second of the launch itself,” Mr. al-Mansoori said during a news conference this month. “Because it will be really very important for me to share it with everyone and my country, the entire world and the Arab region.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/scie ... d=45305309