Sectarian Shadows in Bahrain

This is an older article I wrote regarding Bahrain. I thought I might share it with the readers of this blog. I personally think this is one of my better works, I wrote it emotionally and it addresses some of the main issues facing the region, in my opinion.

Sectarian Shadows in Bahrain


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The specter of sectarianism grips the Persian Gulf and greater Middle East — just recently Iraq “awoke” to a spate of brutal attacks all across the country. The truth is, Iraqis have been awake in a nightmare of violence and struggle for decades, a nightmare that that the rest of the region has also been experiencing to various degrees.

Just down the coastline of the Gulf, the ghosts of sectarianism eye Bahrain, where plans to construct an ambitious Catholic Church have been met with stiff opposition. For those who believed that sectarianism was limited to intra-Muslim conflicts, they were rudely awakened.

After construction plans of the Church were announced, more than 70 clerics signed a petition addressed to Bahrain’s king “saying it was forbidden to build churches in the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam,” according to the Associated Press (AP).

This is odd considering that the Quran formally recognizes Jews and Christians as “people of the book,” and the Prophet Muhammad as continuing the same message as the holy Jewish and Christian prophets before him.

According to the AP article,

“The uproar reflects the widening influence and confidence of hardline Sunni groups, who have been a key support for the monarchy as it faces a wave of protests led by Shiites demanding greater political rights. Shiites account for about 70 percent of Bahrain’s population of just over half a million people, but claim they face widespread discrimination and lack opportunities granted to the Sunni minority. The monarchy has also has relied heavily on help from ultraconservative Saudi Arabia, which last year sent troops to help crush protests.”

In response to the popular uprisings of the Arab Awakening, various governments throughout the region resorted to calling upon cynical religious affiliation to ward off completely legitimate demands and grievances against governments which did not fulfill their duties towards their constituents.

Bahrain is a glaring example of such blatant misuse of religious affiliation to hold firmly onto a power structure based on systematic discrimination of the majority Shiite population, and now as it seems, against anyone not to the liking of certain intolerant figures.

In March of 2011, just one month after mass peaceful demonstrations sprung up in Bahrain, neighboring Gulf monarchies led by Saudi Arabia invaded Bahrain and violently crushed thousands of protesters demanding reforms.

These forces, alongside the Bahraini government went on to destroy a reported 28 mosques and religious centers used by Shias. For a country with a such a small population, this is tantamount to what one resident called a “war against identity,” according to Al Jazeera.

A top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim, has contextualized these developments to also come out against the construction of the Church, “questioning why the government should donate land for a Christian site when Shiite mosques have been destroyed as part of the crackdown,” according to the previously cited AP article.

This is a potential missed opportunity given the shared assault the Shias, and now, Christians are beginning to feel. However, the motivations behind building this Church on donated monarchical land is suspect to Ayatollah Qassim who may view the move by King Hamad Al Khalifa as a defense against outside accusations of religious persecution while very real discrimination is happening against the population.

Regardless, Islam teaches for complete religious tolerance for Christians and if domestic constituents have demands for religious centers, there is no Islamic edict against such a thing. The Bahraini government has a complete responsibility to both Muslims and Christians in this regard.

Instead, by staking its defenses on being a shield against the specter of Shiism, the Bahraini government is now firmly entrenched and sensitive to backward religious discrimination, to a base of people it has scared into believing that disenfranchised citizens demanding completely logical and peaceful equality should be hated.

The way out is not through religious discrimination, but rather through ruling justly as the example of Prophet Muhammad provides, who lived peacefully with “people of the book,” (along with of course his fellow Muslims) and who built mosques, not destroyed them.

Perhaps it would be best for Bahrain’s clergy to rebuke King Al Khalifa with the lines of Ferdowsi, Persia’s master poet the next time the King approaches them (translation Dick Davis):

“It is not in my habit to shed blood / and besides it would be unworthy of my faith for me to do evil in this way.

You summon me, but to no purpose / I serve God, not kings”.

Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar - By Nick Schifrin | Foreign Policy

One of my favorite articles merging the relevance of literature to everyday life and politics. It has a highly pertinent message regarding the realities of vengence and hatred:

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Reading Shakespeare in Kandahar - By Nick Schifrin | Foreign Policy

"Thank you for coming," Prof. David Kastan told the half-full auditorium. "You did not have to be here this morning. I did. It means the world to me that you came." I looked around at my fellow classmates; we were all tired and dazed. The night before, the acrid, unforgettable smell of melted steel, atomized concrete, and human remains had drifted seven miles north, from southern Manhattan up to Columbia University's campus.

It was Sept. 13, 2001, and I was 21 years old. Two days earlier, I had walked into Kastan's Shakespeare class before the attacks began and walked out after the second tower had already fallen. Columbia canceled classes for two days. I spent my time at the daily student newspaper, the Spectator, where I was managing editor. On Thursday morning, the first class back was Shakespeare.

"I will not make a political statement today," Kastan continued. "But I will say this: This play we will discuss today is about revenge -- and what demanding revenge can do to a person. I only hope that the people who will be making decisions on how to respond to Tuesday's attacks read Titus Andronicus."

When he finished, the class gave him a standing ovation.

Nine-and-a-half years later, I found myself standing outside a large house in Pakistan. It was 1:00 p.m. on May 2, 2011, and I was a correspondent for ABC News. Twelve hours earlier, the United States had finally taken its revenge. In the middle of the night, Navy SEALs shot the man who ordered the 9/11 attacks in the head and chest. After loading his body onto a helicopter, they flew it to Afghanistan and then to a ship at sea, where they dumped the prepared body in the ocean. I was the first American reporter to arrive at Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad. My team and I aired the first video from inside the compound and filed 11 stories in five frantic days.

It was only after I had returned to my home in Islamabad, about a 90-minute drive away, that Titus Andronicus and Kastan's warning came to mind. I was sitting with a group of American and British friends -- journalists, NGO workers, and diplomats -- having that familiar melancholic conversation about 9/11: "Where were you?" And, because we now lived where 9/11's plotters had fled: "Did you imagine you'd be here, 10 years later?"

No, I said. I hadn't imagined, sitting in my Shakespeare class a decade ago, that I would end up in Pakistan reporting the death of Osama bin Laden. But perhaps Shakespeare might have imagined the United States would be "here," 10 years later.

Titus Andronicus is a play about revenge. It is about how a general fighting for an empire -- Rome -- finally defeats the "barbarous" Goths and returns to his capital with prisoners, the vanquished queen and her sons. Despite the queen's pleas, Titus kills her oldest son to avenge his own sons' deaths, beginning cycles of brutal violence that end in the death of nearly every major character.

At its core, Titus Andronicus is a play about how good people can become unhinged and indeed overwhelmed by the need to avenge. It is about how powerful people surrender themselves to cycles of violence, how tribal and religious customs unequivocally demand retaliation, and how two tribes' or two religions' speaking past rather than with each other can lead to chaos.

"Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,/Blood and revenge are hammering in my head," one of Titus's enemies says before the bloodletting begins.

Kastan was right to worry. The United States has made many of the same mistakes that Titus Andronicus and his fellow tragedians made: prioritizing revenge and killing the enemy over helping the local populations; choosing allies who help produce short-term gratification (security gains) but long-term trouble; refusing to truly engage with a population that seemed so different from themselves.

Had the Americans learned from Shakespeare's epic of vengeance, might Afghanistan and Pakistan, where I have lived for the last three years, been less violent and more welcoming of the United States today?

Roses from the Garden of Saadi

The poems of Saadi, unlike physical roses, are the literary roses which "always remain," as the poet himself claimed in his work, "Golestan." Below are some beautiful roses from his work, in a chapter fittingly called, "on the advantages of silence":

I said to a friend that I have chosen rather to be silent than to speak because on most occasions good and bad words are scattered concurrently but enemies perceive only the latter. He replied: ‘That enemy is the greatest who does not see any good.’

Virtue is to the eyes of enmity the greatest fault.  Sa’di is a rose but to the eye of enemies a thorn. 

 يكي را از دوستان گفتم : امتناع سخن گفتنم بعلت آن اختيار آمده است در غالب اوقات كه در سخن نيك و بد اتفاق افتد و ديده دشمنان جز بر بدي نمي آيد . گفت : دشمن آن به كه نيكي نبيند .

هنر به چشم عداوت ، بزرگتر عيب است
 
گل است سعدى و در چشم دشمنان خار است 

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A merchant, having suffered loss of a thousand dinars, enjoined his son not to reveal it to anyone. The boy said: ‘It is thy order and I shall not tell it but thou must inform me of the utility of this proceeding and of the propriety of concealment.’ He replied: ‘For fear the misfortune would be double; namely, the loss of the money and, secondly, the joy of neighbours at our loss.’

بازرگانی را هزار دینار خسارت افتاد پسر را گفت نباید که این سخن با کسی در میان نهی. گفت ای پدر فرمان تراست، نگویم ولکن خواهم مرا بر فایده این مطلع گردانی که مصلحت در نهان داشتن چیست؟ گفت تا مصیبت دو نشود: یکی نقصان مایه و دیگر شماتت همسایه.

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An ill-humoured man insulted someone. 
He bore it and replied: ‘O man of happy issue, 
I am worse than thou canst say that I am 
Because I know thou art not aware of my faults as I am.

یکی را زشت خویی داد دشنام		تحمل کرد و گفت ای خوب فرجام
بتر زانم که خواهى گفتن آنی		که دانم عیب من چون من ندانى

--- Source for English translation: http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/far/hobbies/iran/Golestan/index.html

International Law and the Iran Impasse [Re-post]

I'm re-posting a highly interesting and well argued essay written by Asli Bali, of UCLA law school, on the legal implications of the sanctions and nuclear program of Iran. Well worth a thorough read by anyone interested in this issue.

It mirrors a lot of very accurate sentiments argued by Mehdi Mohammadi of Kayhan in an article I translated a while back.

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On any given day, provided her paper of choice still features international coverage, the average American newspaper reader can expect to be treated to one or two articles on attempts to halt advances in Iran’s nuclear program. These articles might cover efforts to levy fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic; they might relay news of discussions among Iran’s primary interlocutors on the nuclear question, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (the so-called P5+1), about diplomatic overtures. Or the stories might echo the mounting calls for airstrikes or other military action to delay and disrupt the progress of Iranian nuclear research. Until October, indeed, breathless reporting on the increasing likelihood of Israeli military strikes on Iran was daily fare. The brakes were placed on this speculation in time for the US presidential elections, but the brief respite has come to an end.

Israel, the United States and their principal Western partners all now seem agreed upon a spring 2013 make-or-break deadline by which Iran must accept a Western-backed deal or face an array of threatened military operations aiming to damage or destroy its nuclear facilities. In the meantime, a crippling international sanctions regime, reinforced by even more extensive bilateral sanctions imposed by the US and its allies in Europe and Asia, chips away at the Iranian economy. Sporadic acts of sabotage kill off the cadre of physicists and other nuclear scientists who contribute to Iran’s nuclear program.

Amidst these developments, the one question that is rarely asked is what exactly Iran has done to occasion all of this international concern and pressure, let alone the rumblings of imminent attack. In one sense, the answer to this question is obvious: Because international actors fear that Iran wants to build an atomic bomb, they perceive its nuclear program as an unacceptable threat to Iran’s neighbors, especially the Gulf Arab monarchies and Israel. Put differently, the specter of an Iranian bomb strengthens the Islamic Republic’s claim to be a regional hegemon and counterweight -- read, political challenge -- to the pro-American distribution of power in the Middle East.

Yet if these answers seem self-evident, they do not answer another critical question. The UN Security Council is supreme arbiter of international law, and its repeated interventions on the Iranian nuclear issue have created an ambient sense that what Iran is doing is illegal. In what sense are Iran’s nuclear activities unlawful? In other words, to what extent does the illegality of Iran’s nuclear program legitimate the regime of sanctions and punishment to which the country has been subjected? The answer to this second-order question is far less straightforward and points to the gray zone of international law where politics most directly shapes, and at times even trumps, the normative order.
NPT Law

The first document relevant to the Iranian nuclear impasse is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, to which Iran is a signatory. Article IV of the NPT specifies the rights of state parties to the treaty to engage in nuclear research geared toward peaceful uses, such as power generation or production of isotopes with medical utility. In 1975, Iran also signed a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), by which the UN nuclear watchdog is authorized to conduct regular inspections to verify that state parties are not engaged in pursuit of an explosive device.

From the time that it first revealed -- under pressure from prior revelations by an Iranian dissident group -- that it had resumed its nuclear program in 2002, Iran insisted that its activities were intended for the development of a civilian nuclear energy program. More specifically, Iran claimed that its centrifuge-based uranium enrichment program was designed to yield low-enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear power plants, as opposed to the high-enriched uranium that would be necessary to produce weapons-grade fuel. Further, the Iranians insisted, such an enrichment program was entirely consistent with their rights and obligations under Article IV of the NPT.

Confronting Moral Police on IRIB

I ran across a very interesting interview which took place on Iran's official Jaam-e Jam (IRIB) network with a young host grilling a official from the Islamic Republic police force tasked with upholding "moral security."

The clip is in Persian (unfortunately no subtitles), but it was a very interesting few minutes. We often think of all organs of the Iranian government as "sticking to the script" -- i.e. just praising all the policies and actions of the Islamic Republic. However, as the clip below demonstrates, there is a wide variety of opinions and outlooks, even within the government and its personel.

The young host is essentially telling the police commander that the method of Iranian police in enforcing moral behavior (telling people to wear better clothing, breaking up un-married couples, etc.) is way over the top. The style of confronting immoral behavior is wrong, says the host, not that immoral behavior should be allowed to go unchecked by the Iranian police. The host recounts personal stories of how he and others were treated like petty criminals instead of like regular citizens. If the role of the moral police is to guide people on the right path, then treating people roughly is not the right way to go about it.

I think he raises some good points.

Morsi Op-Ed Guardian

Below is an interesting op-ed which I think correctly approaches some of the issues confronting Egypt today. It's a bit weird to see a Western newspaper correctly identify the situation largely in favor of an "Islamist," but I suppose weirder things have happened.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/07/egypt-tug-of-war-editorial

As the crisis in Egypt develops, it is becoming increasingly clear what it is not about. It is not about the proposed constitution, many of whose provisions opposition members put their signatures to, before changing their minds and walking out of the drafting committee. Negotiations on the contentious clauses have been offered and rejected. Nor is it about the date of the referendum, which the Egyptian justice minister, Ahmed Mekki, offered to postpone. Again, this was rejected. Nor even is it about the temporary but absolute powers that the Egyptian president,Mohamed Morsi, assumed for himself – which will lapse the moment the referendum is held whatever the result.

Urging the opposition to shun dialogue, Mohamed ElBaradei said that Morsi had lost his legitimacy. So the target of the opposition National Salvation Front is not the constitution, or the emergency decree, but Morsi himself. What follows is a power battle in which the aim is to unseat a democratically elected president, and to prevent a referendum and fresh parliamentary elections being held, both of which Islamists stand a good chance of winning. Morsi, for his part, is determined that both polls be held as soon as possible to reaffirm the popular mandate which he still thinks he has.

In weighing who occupies the moral high ground, let us start with what happened on Wednesday night. That is when the crisis, sparked by Morsi's decree when he was at the height of his domestic popularity over the role he played in stopping the Israeli assault on Gaza, turned violent. The Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party sanctioned a violent assault on a peaceful encampment of opposition supporters outside the presidential palace. But lethal force came later, and Islamists were its principle victims. Five of the six people killed in Cairo were members of the Brotherhood and one came from the opposition. Two more Islamists were killed outside the capital. Brotherhood offices were attacked up and down the country, while no other party offices were touched. This does not fit the opposition's narrative to be the victims of Islamist violence. Both sides are victims of violence and the real perpetrators are their common enemy.

Morsi undoubtedly made grave mistakes. In pre-empting a decision by the constitutional court to derail his constitution, his decree was cast too wide. The final draft of the constitution has many faults, although none are set in stone. The opposition on the other hand has never accepted the results of freely held elections, parliamentary or presidential, and is doing everything to stop new ones being held.

Iranian Internal politics

The case of Sattar Beheshti is a very intriguing one. It achieved a widespread following due to the newspaper Iran bringing the story to prominence. Iran is run by  pro-Ahmadinejad supporters and it is speculated that they revealed this case after Sadeq Larijani refused Ahmadinejad to visit his jailed press adviser, Ali Akbar Javanfekr. 

The lesson to be taken here is that the politics within Iran and the dynamics which play out within the borders are much more significant than having outside "human rights" group push the Iranian government to reform. In this case, a totally domestic series of events led to one of the most open investigations and debates over rights abuse in the country. This was also the case with the notorious "chain murders" during Mohammad Khatami's presidency when domestic journalists uncovered the case which led to reforms of the Intelligence Ministry and greater transparency (although as we now see there is a long way to go!).

As Middle East Online reports:

Beheshti, 35, was found dead in his cell in a Tehran prison on November 3 after being arrested on October 30, according to chief prosecutor Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie.

His death also provoked outrage inside the regime, in a rare case of Iran accepting international criticism over a human rights complaint.

Judiciary officials have promised a full investigation into the case, leading to seven arrests so far, according to Iranian media.

 Alaeddine Boroujerdi, who heads parliament's national security and foreign affairs committee, took issue on Saturday with claims by pathologists that Beheshti had died from shock and fear, saying he had "very clearly" been beaten while in detention.

MEO does a fair job of reporting, however with the vast majority of other outside press, when politics plays out in Iran, it's always framed as "de-legitimizing" and a sign that the regime is cracking. This is probably the case because Western media treats Iran as if it was Saddam's Iraq where one class of people, dominated by minority Sunni Baathists, autocratically ruled the country as their personal kingdom with zero regard for any politics outside of single-party Baathist dominance through pure fear. These commentators who make such ill-intentioned remarks about Iran do not understand the nature of Iranian politics and society. 

The Islamic Republic was established as a result of a popular revolution and referendum which followed. The Iranian political scene was full of factions with differing beliefs from the very start and despite institutional make up at the top, the momentum has always been with the Iranian people to change the status-quo. Yet, for some reason for Western press, when politics plays out in Iran, it is always a sign that the regime is breaking up. This is far from the truth, in fact it shows that differences are actually being negotiated in a society. In this instance, it led to very promising results, with open parliamentary questioning.

There is a long way to go in reforming the parts of Iranian government and society which are against Islamic morality and practices, such as prisoner abuse and overbearing censorship. However, these reforms will only be genuine if they are a result of a dialogue and practice happening within the country, not dictated by haughty groups from the outside who believe they know what is best for every situation and every nation.