Thursday, October 9, 2008
SALHANI: What’s afoot in Syria?
Claude Salhani
COMMENTARY:

Syria has long claimed it is tied to Lebanon in more ways than one. Over the last two weeks this statement has proven to be far more on the money than Syria would have ever imagined – or hoped for – as the wave of terrorist attacks that reared its ugly head in Lebanon has now exported itself to Syria.

Terrorist acts in Syria have been rare, but over the last two weeks a number of bombs have exploded in and around the Syrian capital. The government in Damascus remains tight-lipped, as always, when it relates to security matters; however, statements by President Bashar Assad allude to the origin of those attacks as Salafi groups based around the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli.

Needless to say, Mr. Assad’s statements have set off warning bells in Beirut as the pro-Western government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora looks with great trepidation at the statements from Damascus as well as the recent deployment of about 10,000 Syrian troops backed by armor and rotary-wing aircraft along the Lebanese border, even if the official government line is to tone down those fears.

Speaking to this reporter, a Lebanese government spokesman repeated what the Syrians have been saying, that Syrian troops have deployed to the border area to fight smugglers. Asked if there was reason to worry, the spokesman told this reporter that the “Syrians are free to deploy their forces on their side of the border.” He added, however, that the government in Beirut has asked the Lebanese army to establish liaison with the Syrian military.

Lebanon has good reason to worry. Syria has long eyed Lebanon as a rebellious province rather than as an independent country. Damascus has yet to open an embassy in Beirut, despite promises by Mr. Assad to French President Nicolas Sarkozy last July when the Syrian president was brought out of years of isolation and invited by Mr. Sarkozy to attend the Bastille Day military parade in Paris. Yet, instead of one ambassador arriving in a shinning limousine, there are fears in Beirut that Damascus instead may dispatch several thousand envoys armed with AK-47s and traveling aboard T64 Soviet-era tanks.

How did the security situation deteriorate in Lebanon to this point? Things started going bad for Lebanon on two fronts. First is the growing strength of the Salafi movement in the country, but primarily in the north around the port city of Tripoli. This new development has Syria, which long has battled the Islamists, very worried.

Second is the growing power and influence of Hezbollah and absence of the Lebanese state’s authority in the country’s south. This has Israel very worried.

Washington is taking those fears seriously. The Pentagon is preparing to install X band radars in Israel’s Negev Desert early next year. The X band radar, once fully installed, would give Israel 2 or even 3 times the range in which it could track inbound Iranian and Hezbollah missiles. It also would give Israel the possibility of attacking Iran and Hezbollah without too much worry about retaliation.

And if Syria and Israel can agree on any one thing, it most likely would be that the weakness of the Lebanese state and its inability to control its own internal security are detrimental to the security of both Syria and Israel.

Speaking at a conference in Geneva last month organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former director of Israel’s National Security Council, told delegates that he advised that the Israeli Cabinet need not view negatively the re-entry of Syrian troops in Lebanon. His reasoning was that, with Syria in charge of security in Lebanon, Israel would have a return address to any terrorist activity coming its way across the Lebanese border. Damascus would be liable to retaliation and therefore would ensure that Hezbollah followed the new guidelines. A case in point is the calm that has existed on the Golan Heights since Syria and Israel signed a truce in 1973. Whereas with Hezbollah on its own in south Lebanon, retaliation, as demonstrated during the Second Lebanon War two summers ago, remains futile.

Having said that, Israel appears to be rearming its air force with new weapons designed to fight this new type of nonconventional war. Israel is acquiring 25 F-35 fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin. The plane comes in three versions: the conventional type, a carrier type and the VTOL – vertical take-off and landing. This advanced technology would allow Israel to deploy its aircraft relatively closer to the Lebanese border, to protect conventional airfields – a difficult task, given that conventional airstrips would be prone to Hezbollah rocket attack.

While a renewed Syrian incursion into Lebanon would be a setback in terms of establishing democracy in the Middle East, it would address one of Syria’s and Israel’s major problems. Of course, Syria might not act on its urge to cross that international frontier into Lebanon without at least a tacit green light from Washington. And just how likely is Washington to turn the other way, given that Mr. Siniora’s government is considered pro-American?

Suffice it to remember one of Winston Churchill’s famous lines: “We have no lasting friends, no lasting enemies, only lasting interests.”

The Lebanese have been unable to consider themselves a unified nation, behaving instead as feuding clans. They have allowed outside political influences to give credence to another saying, from the Latin: “Divide et impera,” or divide and rule.

Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times.

Great writing by Mohja Kahf, a Muslim American woman of Syrian origin. Her father went into exile in the early 70’s because he was a member of the MB, and her husband is apparently involved in Syrian exile politics (according to the NY Times). This is a great piece.

Spare Me the Sermon On Muslim Women

By Mohja Kahf
Sunday, October 5, 2008; B01

Crimson chiffon, silver lamé or green silk: Which scarf to wear today? My veil collection is 64 scarves and growing. The scarves hang four or five to a row on a rack in my closet, and elation fills me when I open the door to this beautiful array. Last week, I chose a particularly nice scarf to slip on for the Eid al-Fitr festivities marking the end of the month of Ramadan.

It irks me that I even have to say this: Being a Muslim woman is a joyful thing.

My first neighbor in Arkansas borrowed my Quran and returned it, saying, “I’m glad I’m not a Muslim woman.” Excuse me, but a woman with Saint Paul in her religious heritage has no place feeling superior to a Muslim woman, as far as woman-affirming principles are concerned. Maybe no worse, if I listen to Christian feminists, but certainly no better.

Blessings abound for me as a Muslim woman: The freshness of ablution is mine, and the daily meditation zone of five prayers that involve graceful, yoga-like movements, performed in prayer attire. Prayer scarves are a chapter in themselves, cool and comforting as bedsheets. They lie folded in the velveteen prayer rug when not in use: two lightweight muslin pieces, the long drapey headcover and the roomy gathered skirt. I fling open the top piece, and it billows like summer laundry, a lace-edged meadow. I slip into the bottom piece to cover my legs for prayer time because I am wearing shorts around the house today.

These create a tent of tranquility. The serene spirit sent from God is called by a feminine name, “sakinah,” in the Quran, and I understand why some Muslim women like to wear their prayer clothes for more than prayer, to take that sakinah into the world with them. I, too, wear a (smaller) version of the veil when I go out. What a loss it would be for me not to have in my life this alternating structure, of covering outdoors and uncovering indoors. I take pleasure in preparing a clean, folded set for a houseguest, the way home-decor mavens lay elegant plump towels around a bathroom to give it a relaxing feel.

Tassled turquoise cotton and flowered peach crepe flutter as I pull out a black-and-ivory striped headscarf for the day. When I was 22 and balked at buying a $30 paisley scarf, my best friend told me, “I never scrimp on scarves. If people are going to make a big deal of it, it may as well look good.”

I embraced that principle, too, even when I was a scratch-poor graduate student. Today I sort my scarves, always looking to replace the frayed ones and to find missing colors, my collection shrinking and expanding, dynamic, bright: The blue-and-yellow daisy print is good with jeans, the incandescent purple voile for a night on the town, the gray houndstooth solidly professional, the white chambray anytime.

As beautiful as veils are, they are not the best part of being a Muslim woman — and many Muslim women in Islamic countries don’t veil. The central blessing of Islam to women is that it affirms their spiritual equality with men, a principle stated over and over in the Quran, on a plane believers hold to be untouched by the social or legalistic “women in Islam” concerns raised by other parts of the Scripture, in verses parsed endlessly by patriarchal interpreters as well as Muslim feminists and used by Islamophobes to “prove” Islam’s sexism. This is how most believing Muslim women experience God: as the Friend who is beyond gender, not as the Father, not as the Son, not inhabiting a male form, or any form.

And the reasons for being a joyful Muslim woman go beyond the spiritual. Marriage is a contract in Islam, not a sacrament. The prenup is not some new invention; it’s the standard Muslim format. I can put whatever I want in it, but Muslims never get credit for that. Or for having mahr, the bridegift that goes from the man to the woman — not to her family, but to her, for her own private use. A mahr has to have significant value — a year’s salary, say. And if patriarchal customs have overridden Islam and whittled away this blessing in many Muslim locales, it’s still there, available, in the law. Hey, I got mine (cash, partly deferred because my husband was broke when we married; like a loan to him, owed to me whenever I want to claim it) — and I was married in Saudi Arabia, a country whose personal-status laws are drawn from the most conservative end of the Muslim spectrum.

I had to sign my name indicating my consent, or the marriage contract would not have been valid under Saudi Islamic law. And, of course, I chose whom to marry. Every Muslim girl in the conservative circle of my youth chose her husband. We just did it our way, a conservative Muslim way, and we did it without this nonsensical Western custom of teenage dating. My friends Salma and Magda chose at 16 and 17: Salma to marry boy-next-door Muhammad, with whom she grew up, and Magda to marry a doctor 10 years her senior who came courting from half a world away. Both sisters have careers, one as a counselor, one as a school principal, and both are still vibrantly married and vibrantly Muslim, their kids now in college.

I held out until I was 18, making my parents beat back suitors at the door until I was good and ready. And here I am, still married to the guy I finally let in the door, 22 years (some of them not even dysfunctional) later. My cousin, on the other hand, broke off a marriage she contracted (but did not consummate) at 16 and chose another man. Another childhood friend, Zeynab, chose four times and is looking for Mr. Fifth. Her serial monogamy is nothing new or radical; she didn’t pick up the idea from reading Cosmo or from the “liberating” influence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It’s simply what a lot of women in early Muslim history did, in 7th- and 8th-century Arabia.

And would you guess that we’ve also been freer to divorce and remarry than Christian women have been for most of history? In medieval times, when Christian authorities were against divorce and remarriage, this was seen as another Islamic abomination. Now that divorce and remarriage are popular in the West, Muslims don’t get credit for having had that flexibility all along. We just can’t win with the Muslim-haters.

Here’s another one: Medieval Christianity excoriated Islam for being orgiastic, which seems to mean that Muslims didn’t lay a guilt trip on hot sex (at least within what were deemed licit relationships). Now that hot sex is all the rage in the post-sexual revolution West, you’d think Muslims would get some credit for the pro-sex attitude of Islam — but no. The older stereotype has been turned on its head, and in the new one, we’re the prudes. Listen, we’re the only monotheistic faith I know with an actual legal rule that the wife has a right to orgasm.

Of course, I’m still putting in my time struggling for a more woman-affirming interpretation of Islam and in criticizing Muslim misogyny (which at times is almost as bad as American misogyny), but let me take a moment to celebrate some of the good stuff. Under Islamic law, custody of minor children always goes first to the mother. The Quran doesn’t blame Eve. Literacy for women is highly encouraged by the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Breast-feeding is a woman’s choice and a means for her to create family ties independent of male lineage, as nursing creates legally recognized family relationships under Islamic law. Rapists are punishable by death in Islamic law (and yes, an atavistic part of me applauds that death penalty), which they certainly are not in any Western legal code. Birth control allowed in Islamic law? Check. Masturbation? Let’s just say former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders’s permissive stance on that practice is not unknown among classical and modern Muslim jurists. Abortion? Again, allowances exist — even Muslims seem not to remember that.

It’s easy to forget that Muslims are not inherently more sexist than folks in other religions. Muslim societies may lag behind on some issues that women in certain economically advanced, non-Muslim societies have resolved after much effort, but on other issues, Muslim women’s options run about the same as those of women all over the world. And in some areas of life, Muslim women are better equipped by their faith tradition for autonomy and dignity.

There are “givens” that I take for granted as a Muslim woman that women of other faiths had to struggle to gain. For example, it took European and American women centuries to catch up to Islamic law on a woman’s fully equal right to own property. And it’s not an airy abstraction; it’s a right Muslim women have practiced, even in Saudi Arabia, where women own businesses, donate land for schools and endow trusts, just as they did in 14th-century Egypt, 9th-century Iraq and anywhere else Islamic law has been in effect.

Khadija was the boss of her husband, our beloved Prophet Muhammad, hiring him during her fourth widowhood to run caravans for her successful business; he caught her eye, and she proposed marriage to him. Fatima is the revered mother figure of Shiite Islam, our lady of compassion, possessed of a rich emotional trove for us. Her daughter Zainab is the classic figure of high moral protest, the Muslim Antigone, shaking her fist at the corrupt caliph who killed her brother, her tomb a shrine of comfort for millions of the pious. Saints, queens, poets, scribes and scholars adorn the history of Muslim womanhood.

In modern times, Muslim women have been heads of state five times in Muslim-majority countries, elected democratically by popular vote (in Bangladesh twice and also in Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan). And I’m not saying that a woman president is necessarily a women’s president, but how many times has a woman been president of the United States?

Yet even all that gorgeous history pales when I open my closet door for the evening’s pick: teal georgette, pink-and-beige plaid, creamy fringed wool or ice-blue organza? God, why would anyone assume I would want to give up such beauty? I love being a Muslim woman. And I’m always looking for my next great polka-dot scarf.

Mohja Kahf is the author of the novel “The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf.”

MSNBC.com

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Reports: Missing Americans held in Syria
Arab media says journalists detained for entering country without visas
Reuters
updated 7:37 a.m. ET, Thurs., Oct. 9, 2008
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Two Americans reported missing by the U.S. embassy in Lebanon are being held in Syria for entering the neighboring country without visas, Arab media reported Thursday.

Doha-based Al Jazeera television said Holli Chmela, 27, and Taylor Luck, 23, were in good health. Lebanese station LBC carried a similar report. Officials at the U.S. embassies in Damascus and Beirut said they could not immediately confirm the reports.

The U.S. Embassy had said in a statement that the pair — who work for the Amman-based Jordan Times newspaper — had not been heard from since Oct. 1, when they left Beirut for the northern city of Tripoli. They were then to cross by land to Syria before returning to Jordan.

Lebanese media have speculated that they may have fallen victim to kidnappers in the north, where Syria has warned of growing Islamist militancy and the Lebanese army has been the target of two bomb attacks in the last two months.

The U.S. Embassy last week warned citizens of a security threat in Lebanon in the first half of October, linking the heightened risk to the end of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan.

Copyright 2008 Reuters. Click for restrictions.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27085418/

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