MEI Editor's Blog

It's Not Just Iran That Ties Itself in Knots Over the Name of the [Insert Name Here] Gulf

2012-05-24T17:43:00.002-04:00

We often comment here on the ongoing "Name That Gulf!" controversy over the body of water between Iran and Arabia. Usually it's Iran that is saber-rattling because someone, somewhere has called the body of water something other than "Persian Gulf"; recently, when Google Maps simply refused to label the Gulf, they went ballistic about that, and still say they will sue Google.

The latest incident, though, is in Saudi Arabia, where the Alice Through the Looking Glass rules apply and you get in trouble for calling it Persian, in this case in an English writing exam at King Khaled Universiity in ‘Asir, The temporary contract professor chose a passage from a book, unaware that there is a decree in the Kingdom forbidding using texts that include the term.

Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly suggested "the Islamic Gulf." But does that mean that the Gulfs of, oh, just off the top of my head, Tunis, Hammamet, Gabes, Sidra, Suez, Aqaba, Aden, and Oman, are somehow less Islamic? (For Khomeini the answer may have been yes, but it does seem a bit all-inclusive.)

Since you get in trouble with somebody for calling it "Persian Gulf," "Arab Gulf," just "the Gulf," or, like Google, for not labeling it at all, I will for now take my cue from the Sumerians (who got there first) and simply call it "The Great Water." Or perhaps it might be more appropriate to use one of their other names, "the Bitter Sea."

Nathan Brown on a Constitutional Declaration

2012-05-24T08:51:00.002-04:00

Nathan Brown, who's a specialist on constitutions, dissects the questions surrounding an interim Constitutional Declaration in Egypt, at Foreign Policy. The oddity of electing a President when his powers are undefined is obvious.

Day 2 in Egypt: Live Updates to Follow The Day

2012-05-24T06:34:00.001-04:00

How to follow Day 2: Live Updates and Live blogging from Day 2 in Egypt's Presidential elections:

Ahram Online Live Updates.

Egypt Independent Live Updates

Al Jazeera English Live Blog

Zeinobia's live blogging

Election Day, Day One: A Roundup

2012-05-23T15:09:00.002-04:00

Egypt Independent

I'm still encountering some Internet access problems at home so I'm not sure if I'll be blogging this evening, so I'm trying to get stuff up during the day.

Today was day one of what is likely to be round one; it would befuddle all us pundits I think if any candidate got 50% and won it in one shot. And there's a second dqy of round one voting. So we won't know much today, except that turnout was high in Cairo (voting hours were extended), less so outside the capital; some violations were reported but generally things were going well.

Live blogs of the day from Ahram Online, Al-Jazeera, and Egypt Independent.Blogger Zeinobia also blogged through the day, and also posted some useful stats and explained why she is backing Abu'l-Futuh .

And here's Michele Dunne on the candidates and their prospects.

A truly competitive Presidential election has been a long time coming, and whether or not the results are what the democracy advocates envisioned, at least one crusader for reform who spent time in jail got some credit at a polling place:

It's been a long time coming. We may not like the results when we know them,but democracy is messy, which is why as Churchill said, it's the very worst form of government, except for all the others.

Who Says Egypt Hasn't Had a Real Revolution?

2012-05-23T14:18:00.000-04:00

Why is so Little of Al-Mutanabbi Translated Into English?

2012-05-23T12:55:00.000-04:00

My first reaction to the question in the title was "Why do so few people choose to vacation in North Korea?" because Mutanabbi is a difficult poet to read even for native Arabic speakers. But my snark isn't fair because he is also widely considered the greatest poet after the age of the Mu‘allaqat. *I'm obviously not a native speaker, as was made plain some 40 years back when I took a CASA program course at AUC in Cairo on the poetry of Mutanabbi. With the possible exception of an undergrad course I once took on Ludwig Wittgenstein because it had a title that concealed its real subject, I have rarely felt so out of my depth.

The question is raised by The Egypt Independent and linked to with some comment by Arabic Literature (in English). I suggest you read both.

An earlier post in the series, which I linked to, noted the difficulty of translating James Joyce into Arabic. The issues are not dissimilar, though they go in opposite directions, and the only real parallels between Joyce and Mutanabbi are that both men loved words and played beautifully with them. (I would think it would be difficult to translate Shakespeare for the same reason, but he's popular in many languages.)

As the Italians say, traduttore, traditore, "translation is treason": (and to prove my point, I just mistranslated it: literally it's "Translator, Traitor."

So for you students of Arabic reading this: therre's an Everest still waiting to be climbed. Translate Mutanabbi.

Election Day: Shibley Telhami's Polls

2012-05-23T12:22:00.001-04:00

Most of the Egyptian polls have looked a little strange. Yes, some showed Abu'l-Futuh and Moussa leading, but others seemed to go against what the conventional reading of public opinion suggests: pools showing Shafiq leading, or Hamdeen Sabahi doing very well. Some of this may be due to special interest push-polling; some conceivably is just due to the fact that there is no past performance to judge by. I won't say that Prof. Shibley Telhami's polls are automatically reliable, but he's got a track record of Arab world polling, which is more than many Egyptian news media and NGOs can say. So here's his take. Abu'l-Futuh getting a third of the vote and Moussa a strong second; the rest of the field trailing behind; the Brotherhood suffering from it's breaking its promise not to field a candidate. Is Telhami right? We'll know soon.

Full Survey Results Here

Egypt On the Eve

2012-05-22T14:01:00.001-04:00

The Egyptian election for President begins tomorrow. Since a runoff will be required we still won't knoiw the results for a while, but at least we will finally, 15 months after the departure of Husni Mubarak, get some clue about who will lead Egypt (along with the Army, most likely) for the net several years.

The New York Times looks at the role of SCAF; while if you need a last-minute rundown of the candidates see this piece at Ahram Online. There had been talk that SCAF would unilaterally issue a new Constitutional Declaration to set the terms of the new President's power since there is no constitution in place; now they're "not setting a timeframe" but clearly it's awkward if neither the voters nor the candidates know what the powers of the new President will be.

So they're off. Let's see what happens.

Hans Christian Andersen in Istanbul

2012-05-22T08:54:00.003-04:00

When most of us think of Hans Christian Andersen, we think of fairy tales. But here's something rather different: an account of a visit by Andersen to Constantinople (Istanbul) and a descirption of celebrations of the Prophet's birthday.

A Kuwaiti Censor Speaks

2012-05-21T19:27:00.001-04:00

Still spotty connection. Meanwhile, here's a post from Arabic Literature (in English) on "The Not-so-Secret Life of a Kuwaiti Censor."

Amr Moussa: The Familiar Face

2012-05-21T16:37:00.003-04:00

(My Internet connection is glitchy today so posting will be unpredictable. I may add more links to this post when the connection is stable.)

With the Egyptian Presidential vote beginning in only two days, the polls — of dubious reliability given the lack of a track record — continue to suggest that Abdel Moneim Abul’Futuh and Amr Moussa are front runners, but with some polls showing strong performances by Ahmad Shafiq and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi. Moussa and Abu’l-Futuh virtually tied the expatriate vote, and Morsi did well among Egyptians in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf; Nasserist Hamdeen Sabahi ran better than expected. It is hard to understand the polls showing Shafiq doing well since he has little visible support in the street, but he may surprise. He and Amr Moussa are often seen as the fallul candidates, the “remnants” of the old regime; but in Moussa’s case, that “remnant” may have the support to win. It still seems likely that Moussa and Abu’l-Futuh will face each other in a runoff, though no one really knows.

Why does Moussa apparently enjoy such popularity? After more than a year of instability, he offers a familiar face; particularly for those Egyptians who feel the revolutionary movement has destabilized the country. Having been shunted from the Foreign Ministry (where he served for the decade 1991-2001) to the Secretary-Generalship of the Arab League (where he served until last year), he is seen as someone who fell out with Mubarak, and who was not part of the Mubarak apparatus in its last, worst decade, yet who represents the old establishment, has a solid international reputation, and arguably the confidence of a broad range of Egyptians.

On the down side, Egypt's problems are mostly domestic; Moussa's expertise is foreign policy. He's 75, so after years dealing with the now-octagenarian Mubarak, he brings at best only marginally younger blood to the job. He or Shafiq seem to be the hopes of those who want a familiar face, though Shafiq seems to be too much the candidate of the Army and security services. That may make Moussa, if not inevitable, then the only alternative to an Islamist like Abu'l-Futuh or Morsi.

In this recent interview with Al-Ahram, subtitled in English, he discusses his candidacy.

The Dutch East India Company and the Gulf

2012-05-21T08:49:00.000-04:00

The Bint Battuta blog reminds us that the Persian Gulf was not just a venue for rivalry between the Portuguese and the British: there was the heyday of the Dutch East India Company (VOC)in the Gulf, especally in the 1600s and first half of the 1700a. The VOC was based in Bandar Abbas and traded from Basra to Hormuz to Yemen.

Gamron (Bandar Abbas) in 1704

Zeinobia Writes the One Unwritten Story of the Egyptian Elections: The Candidates' Wives

2012-05-18T09:37:00.000-04:00

So much has been written about the Egyptian elections that it increasingly seems there must be little more to say, but the great Egyptian blogger who writes as Zeinobia has found it, in this article profiling the wives of the major candidates. In the US the media would long since have revealed all, but in the Egyptian campaign even those wives with public careers of their own are staying in the shadows, in part it seems because no one wants to be compared to Suzanne Mubarak.

Ayrault Revisited: Once Again, it's Not "Slang"

2012-05-18T09:26:00.000-04:00

It's a frequent problem that many Arabs refer to the spoken dialects of the language — the language they learned at their mother's knee — as "slang," when speaking to English-speakers; of course substantial numbers of Arabs do not even know the literary language. But even if we tolerate equating "slang" and the colloquial dialects (which I emphatically don't), most of the reporting on the Ayrault name transliteration problem still gets it wrong. That story went viral (not due to my posting it, alas) and a great many of the reports were similar to this one at CNN: "The prime minister's last name, it turns out, sounds like an Arabic slang word for penis."

True, others said that it was a case of having that meaning in certain dialects, which is technically true since only in some dialects is أيره pronounced like Ayrault's name, with an "o" vowel. But the word itself, is a perfectly good literary Arabic word with the same meaning, it's just pronounced ayruhu instead of ayro. But either way, it's still spelled أيره . And the whole story centers around what it looks like on the printed page.

It appears in the classical dictionaries such as the Lisan al-‘Arab.and, below, in Lane's great multi-volume Arabic-English Lexicon. It's true that he defines several of its forms using Latin, but hey, he was writing in the Victoran era. And, "compressed?"

This is, I hope, my last word on this subject.

In the Land of Badia and Carioca, Egypt Arrests Owner of El-Tet Belly-Dance Channel

2012-05-18T09:21:00.000-04:00

There was a time when the raqs sharqi or oriental dance, what is known in the West as belly-dancing, was above all associated with Egypt, with Lebanon perhaps a distant second. Madame Badia Masabni's Cabsrets on Opera Square and in Giza were frequented by British officials, King Farouq, and the elite. The most famous dancer of them all, Tahia Carioca, rose to fame at Madame Badia's.

Tahia Carioca in the 1930s or 1940s

But those days, when Carioca is said to have performed at Farouq's coronation (or wedding; the stories differ; one was in 1936 and one in 1938) as past as the monarchy itself. One of the first targets burned on Black Saturday in 1952 was Madame Badia's on Opera Square, and Carioca was jailed for a time under Nasser for calling for democracy. In the 1960s, Nasser's austere socialism mandated a gauzy covering over the midriff. But belly-dancing has remained popular, though increasingly limited to the nightclubs of the pyramid road and the expensive clubs of the five star hotels, where Gulf and Western tourists spend big money but which the average Egyptian cannot afford.

And now there is a different puritanism on the rise, of course. Yesterday the owner of the television satellite channel El-Tet, which broadcasts nothing but round-the-clock belly-dancing videos, was arrested and reportedly charged with "operating without a license, inciting licentiousness and facilitating prostitution." Baligh Hamdy reportedly sent videos from Egypt for broadcast from Jordan and Bahrain, which were then beamed by satellite back to Egypt, where El-Tet appears to have been quite popular. Other reports of the arrest here and here.

The belly-dance is a genuine folk tradition in Egypt, tracing back to the Ghawazee dancers described by E.W. Lane in his Manners and Customs; the popularity of the TV channel doubtless has as much to do with its being targeted as whatever actual offenses may have been committed.

Of course, even if the broadcasting authorities and the vice squad (apparently both were involved), manage to shut down the channel, it has a life of its own on YouTube. In protest of the latest attack on a genuinely popular art form now in decline, two of El-Tet's offerings, followed by one of the immortal Carioca from 1941.

Guess Which Country has the Most Amazigh Cabinet Members?

2012-05-17T18:03:00.009-04:00

This blog has frequently noted the growing identity movement among North Africa's Amazigh (plural Imazighen) or "Berber" peoples, especially with the revolutions in Tunisia and Libya. And of course Algeria and Morocco have large and influential Amazigh populations. So which government has the most Imazighen in the Cabinet?
Apparently, as of now, France:

UPDATE: But See the comments, below.

Warda (1939 or 1940-2012)

2012-05-17T15:43:00.003-04:00

The Western media this afternoon is filled with tributes to Disco Queen Donna Summer, but music has lost another famous singer today: the Franco-Algerian singer Warda, or Warda al-Jaza'iriyya, though best known just as Warda, has died at age 72. Though born in France of a Lebanese mother and Algerian father, and beginning her career singing Algerian patriotic songs, she eventually achieved stardom in Egypt.

A gallery here. And a few examples from YouTube:

The Problems of Publishing Arabic Literature in Hebrew

2012-05-17T13:41:00.000-04:00

Yael Lerer at Jadaliyya has an intriguing post about the failure of Andalus Publishing, which sought to publish Arabic literature in Hebrew in Israel. The article is an interesting reflection on the divisions within Israel today; even though significant numbers of Israeli Jews come from origins in the Arab world and there is, of course, a substantial Arab minority as well, interest in Arabic literature remains tiny and the translation efforts rare. It's an interesting piece.

Egypt: The Last Week

2012-05-17T13:02:00.000-04:00

It's now less than a week until the first round of voting in the Egyptian Presidential elections on May 23rd. Although there are many questions about the accuracy of polls (there isn't exactly a lot of precedent for competitive elections), it's pretty clear no candidate can win a majority in the first round, so a runoff will be required. (The expatriate vote will be announced tomorrow, giving us some clues, though some worry that knowing the expat results could tilt the elections.

It now appears that SCAF will issue a new "constitutional declaration" before the vote, so voters have some clue as to what powers the Presidency will have, since the constituent assembly is currently on hold. But will such a declaration survive once a real assembly convenes? Could a President be elected with one set of powers only to see them taken away? Will a SCAF "declaration" keep the Presidency under the Army's eagle eye? Can you really hold an election when no one knows what power the post will have only a week before the vote? The mess created last year by the decision to hold elections before the constitution already created a Parliament whose powers are ambiguous at best. And now the Presidency?

Most of the commentary and some of the polls seem to feel that last week's debate helped Amr Moussa and that Moussa's attempts to portray Abdel Moneim Abu'l-Futuh as very much still an Islamist gained traction. Also curious is the apparent rising strength of Ahmad Shafiq, the most unrepentant "remnant" of the old regime still in the race since ‘Omar Suleiman's exclusion. But Shafiq's eligibility remains in litigation. Anyway, we hear that Amr Moussa's campaign is "in good spirits." I'll be posting on Moussa before the vote.

And if you haven't seen it already, Michael Wahid Hanna's "Mapping Egypt's Electorate" at Foreign Policy is worth a read.

I suspect the real battle will be the runoff, if one secularist (Moussa?) and one Islamist (Abu'l-Futuh) survive the first round, it will be seen as a showdown between two worldviews. The probability that the Muslim Brotherhood's second-choice candidate, Muhammad Morsi, has little chance will be interpreted as a defeat for the Brotherhood, but if Abu'l-Futuh makes it into the runoff, he is after all an ex-Brother, and Moussa has raised questions about the "ex-" part.

It should be an interesting week.

New French PM Ayrault's Arabic Transliteration Problem

2012-05-16T13:36:00.001-04:00

What was that name again?

There are only so many sounds in the world, and lots of languages; so it's inevitable that some people are going to have names that mean something quite different in some language somewhere. Sometimes something indelicate. (There's no bad language in what follows, at least in English. And the august French Foreign Ministry has actually had to issue guidance on this.)

As this Bloomberg report notes, (or for those who read French, this piece from Le Point or this one from Le Figaro), the newly-named French Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, has reportedly created a problem for Arabic-language editors. As the English article (the French ones are more blunt) indirectly and oh-so-delicately puts it:

When spoken, his family name is colloquial Arabic in many countries for the third-person singular possessive form of the male sex organ.

If you're still struggling to remember what "the third person singular possessive form" means, it's "his." In other words, it's hard not to spell it أيره.

And a minor quibble: it's not just colloquial Arabic. While the pronunciation in literary Arabic would by a "u" vowel rather than an "o" vowel, the spelling would be the same,

Supposedly the French Foreign Ministry has even addressed the problem, and editors are taking various courses:

The potential for embarrassment prompted France’s foreign ministry to put out a statement today as Ayrault took office with the recommended spelling in Arabic. The official solution would add the letters L and T to the transliteration. Arabic is a phonetic language where normally all letters are pronounced, unlike French where these two letters in “Ayrault” are silent.

An Nahar, a Beirut-based newspaper, chose that solution. Al Hayat, a London-based newspaper widely considered a reference across the Arab world, published a front-page headline chopping Ayrault’s name to “Aro,” when a more correct transcription would be “Ayro.”

A U.A.E.-based Arabic-language channel has sent an internal note to its journalists, asking them to write his name as “Aygho.”

The Dubai-based Al Bayan newspaper chose to use just his first name on its front-page headline: “Hollande Inaugurates his Mandate by Appointing Jean-Marc as Prime Minister.”

A note for non-Arabists: "Aygho" is not as bizarre as it looks on paper, since the Arabic ghayn (غ) really does have affinities to the French "r" (not the English "r").

A suggestion from this editor: how about ايراو? I know it still contains اير but at least it gets rid of the "his" element. Similarly, Google's transliteration site offers up ايراولت , which would be this plus the "lt" that the Foreign Ministry recommends.

Ah, the challenges of modern diplomacy. That's all I'm going to say right now. You can make up your own jokes. I know I have.

Update: The superb linguistics blog Language Log has seen fit to link to my post (among others), and have in addition noted the problems the French have had with Vladimir Putin's last name, and the problems faced by the Pakistani diplomat Akbar Zeb, whose problem in the Arab world is even more embarrassing than Ayrault's, because both his first and his last names are involved. ("Akbar" is "biggest" in Arabic "Zeb," usually zibb or zubb, has the same meaning as ayr, but a bit more vulgar.)

Further Annals of the Animal Division of Mossad: Spy Bird in Turkey!

2012-05-16T09:45:00.006-04:00

Mossad's latest agent? (Ynet)

My longtime readers are already aware of the insidious Mossad plots to train regional fauna as spies: first there was the shark attack in Sharm al-Sheikh that an official blamed on the Israeli intelligence service (especially sneaky since a lot of the tourists at Sharm are in fact Israelis). Then there was the spy vulture found in Saudi Arabia with a GPS tracker and (sneakiest of all) a leg band from an Israeli university. (Obviously a plot, right? Mossad agents always wear identifying marks, don't they? Do their human agents wear armbands that say "Israel?") Not to mention that Iran has reportedly caught pigeons and squirrels in the act as well (though it was hinted those were Western agents, not Mossad's). And the Israeli press always makes fun of these stories, which means something if you have a suitably conspiratorial mind.

Well, the Animal Division of Mossad has struck again! Israeli media is quoting Turkish reports that a Turkish farmer discovered a dead European bee-eater (like the one in the picture) complete with a leg-band that said Israel. (You'd think Mossad would have learned by now not to put "Israel" on legbands of their spy birds, but who knows?)

But that's not all: according to Yediot Aharanot's English website Ynet News:

The band, however, was not the most damning piece of evidence against the bee-eater: Its nostrils were.

The bird-beak in question reportedly sported "unusually large nostrils," which – combined with the identification ring – raised suspicions that the bird was "implanted with a surveillance device" and that it arrived in Turkey as part of an espionage mission.
The bird's remains were originally handed over to the Turkish Agriculture Ministry, which then turned in over to Ankara's security services.

I suspect the Turkish security services are professional enough to politely accept the dead bird, perhaps, but not to actually spend taxpayers' lira examining its nostrils. Of course I could be wrong.

Spillover: The Fighting in Lebanon

2012-05-16T09:13:00.002-04:00

The fighting in Tripoli (the Lebanese one) that broke out over the weekend is pretty universally seen as a spillover from Syria: sectarian in its origins, involving Sunni Islamists and ‘Alawites. One of the best assessments I've seen to date is this one by Emile Hokayem at Foreign Policy. Lebanon's fate seems to be to echo the conflicts of its neighbors, but most inevitably Syria's. The potential of a protracted civil conflict in Syria to spill over into a regional conflict is real; in Tripoli, it's already happening.

The Next-to-Last Free Officer: Zakaria Mohieddin, 1918-2012

2012-05-15T19:26:00.002-04:00

Zakaria Mohieddin, one of the original Free Officers of 1952 and onetime Vice President of Egypt, Prime Minister, and intelligence chief under Gamal Abdel Nasser, has died today at the age of 94. With his passing, only one of the original Free Officers from the original Revolution Command Council survives: his first cousin, Khaled Mohieddin. (In this 2010 post about Khaled I mistakenly declared him the last, under the mistaken impression — derived from the Internet — that Zakaria had died in 2009. I acknowledge the error, which is now no longer erroneous, since Khaled is now indeed the last.)

Mohieddin, left front; Nasser center at corner of table; Naguib in hat; Anwar Sadat left rear

Zakaria Mohieddin always was a presence, if a somewhat unassuming one, in the Nasser era, often used for diplomatic missions. As a young officer he served with Naguib and Nasser at Faluja in Palestine in 1958k, and became an early member of the Free Officers. While his cousin Khaled was the Revolution Command Council's most leftwing member, Zakaria was often seen as pro-Western. He was the first head of Egypt's General Intelligence Directorate when Nasser set it up in the early 1950s, but it did not become the feared instrument of Nasser's security state until under later directors. He served as Vice President from 1961-68, and Nasser was about to dispatch him to the United Nations to try to avert war when the 1967 war broke out with the Israeli pre-emptive strike. When Nasser offered to resign after the defeat he named Mohieddin his successor, but of course the crowds, and Mohieddin, refused to accept Nasser's resignation. He was also Prime Minister in 1965-66. He quit public life in 1968, and had remained in obscurity; his last public appearance seems to have been in 2002 on the 50th Anniversary of the 1952 Revolution.

SCAF paid tribute to an earlier ruling junta with Field Marshal Tantawi, Chief of Staff Gen. Enan, and other members of SCAF participating in his funeral today.

With his passing, the only survivor of the original Revolution Command Council is Zakaria's first cousin Khaled, who is nearly 90. The last vestiges of the Nasser era are passing from scene.

The Conundrum of Abu'l Futuh: Why His Broad Appeal?

2012-05-15T08:58:00.003-04:00

One of the less-predictable aspects of Egypt's Presidential election race has been the emergence of Abd al-Moneim Abu'l-Futuh as one of the front-runners, if not the front-runner. He will be holding a big rally this coming Friday, apparently intended as a show of strength. The debate last week clearly reflects a perception that the contest is becoming a two-way race between Abu'l-Futuh and Amtr Moussa. Amr Moussa is easy enough to characterize: former Foreign Minister and Arab League Secretary-General, familiar figure in the establishment with just enough distance from the Mubarak administration to have some credibility, Most of the other candidates can be easily characterized as well: Muhammad Morsi as the Muslim Brotherhood's anointed candidate, the "spare tire" dropped in to replace Khairat al-Shater; Ahmad Shafiq the military stalwart of the Mubarak era; Hamdeen Sabahi the Nasserist; Khalid Ali the liberal, and so on.

Abu'l-Futuh should be easy enough to categorize as well. A physician, he first showed his political colors when, as President of the Student Union at Cairo University, he publicly challenged President Anwar Sadat. Starting out with links to Al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, he entered the Muslim Brotherhood, was jailed in 1981 during Sadat's crackdown on opposition, then rose through the Brotherhood ranks to serve on the Brotherhood's guidance council. Eased out of the Brotherhood senior leadership in 2009, he was officially expelled last year when he announced his Presidential campaign. It's not surprising that he has the endorsement of many Islamists, ranging from the hardline Salafi Al-Nour Party and Al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, as well as the moderate Islamist Al-Wasat Party,and by many accounts is supported by many members of the Muslim Brotherhood who find Morsi uninspiring. So it's a fairly classic Islamist resume, if more prominent than most.

So why on earth has he been endorsed by Wael Ghonim, the social-media savvy ~~Microsoft~~ Google executive who helped fuel the Facebook side of the Revolution, and a fair number of other (but by no means all) Egyptian liberals and secularists? Why is he strongly popular on university campuses?

I'm hardly the first to ask the question. Shadi Hamid's piece for Foreign Policy last week was entitled "A Man for All Seasons," and as he puts it:

Aboul Fotouh's supporters may have hailed from radically different backgrounds, but they believed, above all, in the candidate. They wanted to transcend the old battle lines of "Islamist" or "liberal" and reimagine Egyptian politics in the process.

What those grand ambitions mean in practice is, at times, unclear. As Aboul Fotouh has risen to front-runner status in the first ever competitive presidential election in Egypt's history, he has become the Rorschach test of Egyptian politics. Liberals think he's more liberal than he actually is. Conservatives hope he's more conservative.

Certainly the man has had success in portraying himself as a man who transcends the secular-religious divide. Shadi Hamid again:

Aboul Fotouh's success stems in part from his ability to neutralize this religious divide. One of his messages -- and one that has appeal for liberals and hard-line Islamists alike -- is this: We are all, in effect, Islamists, so why fight over it? . . . Aboul Fotouh is able to make this argument, and make it sound convincing, in part because of who he is. He is the rare figure who has been, at various points in his career, a Salafi, a Muslim Brother, and, today, a Turkish-style "liberal Islamist."

Abu'l-Futuh's performance in the debate showed him at his best as a dignified (and unusually tall and thus commanding), well-spoken figure. Not a rabble-rouser, or a wild-eyed radical. He looks like a distinguished medical man, which he is. But is that enough to make him President?

Egypt has never had a genuinely competitive Presidential race until now (if a race in which ten candidates, including three front-runners, were disqualified is "genuinely competitive"); so it is hard to say. And certainly not all secularists and liberals are joining the Abu'l-Futuh bandwagon; many suspect he is really still a Muslim Brother at heart, and some cynics wonder if his "expulsion" and the Brotherhood's threat to expel anyone supporting him were not ploys to increase his credibility with non-Islamists.

Some of his appeal to liberals may be understood from this post about a campaign rally by the blogger Baheyya, You might also check out the website Liberal Koshari, which despite a general irreverence endorsed Abu'l-Futuh with reservations:

Aboul Fotouh is not our ideal candidate and we disagree with a number of his views (as we indicated above) and with those who claim he is a “liberal” (as we mentioned above, he is "Islamist-lite" a la Tunisia's Ennahda). We realize that some of our readers will be disappointed with this endorsement but we think, compared to the other names in the running, Aboul Fotouh is the right man to lead Egypt for the coming five years.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, and perhaps part of the Abu'l-Futuh phenomenon is driven by this "best of a bad lot" approach. He's not as bad as the others, so he'll have to do? That doesn't seem to explain his more enthusiastic supporters, many of whom self-identify as liberals.

If you're reading this expecting me to offer some big answer: he's really still a hardcore Islamist, or he's a liberal at heart, or he's really a true middle-of-the-roader, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I think part of the attraction may be that he doesn't fit so neatly into the stereotypes of the other candidates. But then, when someone seems to be all things to all people, it's not only cynics who should ask what the man really is for. He wants an Islamic-oriented secular state? He wants a shari‘a based state but doesn't object to Muslims converting to Christianity? How can these various positions be reconciled; how can one person hold seemingly conflicting positions in their mind at the same time? Or is he really the wave of the future? The ultimate synthesis between secular modernity and Islamism? (UPDATE: Hold the Presses: the Los Angeles Times has it figured out: he's a "Dynamic Pragmatist.")

Count me as trying to keep an open mind, but as not buying into the enthusiasm. Of course, I don't have a vote, and there's a reasonable chance we're going to be having lots of time to analyze who this man is and where he would lead Egypt. On the other hand, some polls suggest he's faltering in the race, though the poll are conflicting and he's still got his big rally coming up Friday.

I won't be profiling all of the candidates, but I probably will post on the front-runners before the first round vote.

The Moor Does His Pie Charts on the Algerian Elections

2012-05-15T08:43:00.001-04:00

Kal at The Moor Next Door has checked in with his assessment of the Algerian elections, and since he frequently puts together useful charts on regional politics, he offers a plethora of pie charts.