libya: narrative, nuance, nourishment

When you’re supposed to be a joint degree student in Arab Studies and Arabic Language & Literature it’s a little humbling when an Arab country is in the news and you find you can’t offer much (or any) insight about it. Which is basically what’s happening right now when it comes to Libya. I scoured my bookshelves for books on Libya and came up with Children of Allah, your classic American-woman-follows-husband-into-exotic-Arab-land-and-writes-about-it narrative, and The North African Kitchen, which has recipes from not only Morocco but Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya as well.

Both interesting, but not exactly the enlightening tomes I was going for.

Fortunately we live in the internet age. For some more nuanced and informed insight on what’s going on right now in Libya, check out this piece on the Libyan opposition movement and this one, which gives a little context and clarification to the information (or misinformation) out there about the “African mercenaries” allegedly fighting opposition forces there.

In the meantime, a recipe for a basbousa, a Libyan semolina and honey cake. It’s like great cornbread but sweeter and reminds me a bit of some similar semolina cakes from Morocco. This recipe is an adapted version of one from The North African Kitchen, mentioned and linked above.

mix it up

women in morocco and iraq: a few links

Just wanted to post two links to (very different) pieces I’ve written that you can read elsewhere on the web:

My response to a recent NYTimes article about what women are wearing in Iraq

A Wikipedia article I wrote as part of an initiative of the Wikimedia foundation to improve their public policy content; this one is about the relatively recently reforms to Morocco’s Family Laws (also known as the Moudawana or Personal Status Code). In many Arab states, these types of laws are the only part of the legal code that draw primarily from Islamic law, so the fact that reforms to it were passed in Morocco has of course been the subject of much discussion…

around the muslim world, 5th ed.

Paul Staniland on what the empirical evidence says about counterinsurgency, on The Monkey Cage

“Counterinsurgency is still fundamentally war, and coercion, extraction, and ethnic dominance are often integral to the exercise. It’s possible, and indeed very common, for counterinsurgents to be both “population-centric” and ruthlessly coercive (population displacement and control, torture, abductions, blackmail, assassinations, etc). This unpleasant truth should seriously temper enthusiasm for COIN: the game is frequently not worth the candle.”

Great post on disentangling the subtleties of culture, religion, and women’s rights when it comes to Saudi women and Muslim women in general

Our oil spill: not the only oil spill around, it turns out

around the muslim world, 4th ed.

Muslims and America: Internalizing the Clash of Civilizations – what do Muslims around the world think of America?

Could biomass systems be an answer to some of Afghanistan’s economic, environmental, health, even gender-related problems?

How Western journalists reported the ban on burqa: a Muslim woman’s view on powers-that-be forcing women to wear or not-wear forms of Islamic dress – and how we talk about it.

Nazi Sheikhs: who speaks for modernist Islam and what do they say?

around the muslim world, 3rd ed.

A few links of interest:

1. An Egyptian praising Israel’s Mossad (their intelligence agency)? Yep, it happened, and it’s of no little significance that it was over Iran. It’s easy to lump all Muslim anti-Israel sentiments into the same category, but that’s not exactly the case. It’s true that Iran is linked to mostly-Arab groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, but a great many Arab governments (both secular ones like Egypt and Iraq and religious ones like Saudi Arabia) are as worried as Israel is about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Read about it here.

2. What constitutes discrimination? According to one French mayor, a restaurant chain selling only halal meat (that is, meat slaughtered in accordance with Islamic dietary laws – the Muslim version of kosher) fits the bill. It seems to me more like a matter of market forces at work but watch this report and decide for yourself.

3. What is halal anyway? Technically it means “lawful” or permitted (the opposite of “haram,” or “forbidden.”), so it applies to actions and behaviors, not just food. In terms of meat, though, it means, among other things, no pork and no carrion and no blood. Halal meat should be slaughtered by a Muslim (though some Muslims accept meat slaughtered by Christians or Jews, like kosher meat) by cutting the animal’s throat swiftly while keeping the spinal cord intact. This ensures as much blood as possible exit the body before death.

There have been debates over whether this is a more humane way to kill animals, as Muslims have long claimed, which brings me to this study, conducted when the German government was trying to establish standards for animal slaughter. It compares brain activity in sheep and calves during halal-style, ritual slaughter and the more common “captive bolt stunning,” a common practice in today’s industrial style meat production.

around the muslim world…2nd ed.

A few links of interest…

1. In honor of New York’s Fashion Week, a very different fashion show: what Muslim designers showed in Malaysia last fall.

2. “Where do architectural wonders, coat hanger abortions, virtual slave labor, and a modern underground railroad meet?”

- or, there’s more to Dubai than meets the eye. Dubai has been hailed for economic growth, the newest wonders of the world, and even environmental innovation, but at what social cost? Austin Considine writes in Guernica about the often-hidden world of cheap labor that makes it all possible…in two parts, here and here.

3. More oil = less freedom…or does it? New research suggests that the “oil curse” commonly associated with petrol-rich, authoritarian nations (many of them Arab) might belong more in the category of convenient myth than actual fact.

See also: the 1st edition of this post

what you should know about the muslim world, 1st ed.

For those of you who don’t know (and for most of you, well, why would you), Peace Corps has three goals: the first has to do with providing technical assistance to countries that request it. The second and third goals are more cross-cultural: helping people in other countries understand American culture, and helping Americans better understand the people and culture of other countries. The idea is that service extends far beyond my village; even after my 27 months abroad, I can continue sharing what I’ve learned. I’m always looking for new ways to fulfill that goal (including, of course, this blog).

One thought, for now at least, is to highlight interesting, clearly written articles, podcasts or essays about the Islamic world for the average American nonspecialist reader – and publish a list once a week or so. So much of the information out there about Islam and the Middle East is one-sided or full of jargon or overly complicated, and while I am definitely not capable of explaining it all or even understanding the subtleties of every bias, we have to start somewhere.

The point is for this to be interesting, informative, short, varied. If there is something you want to know more about, tell me and I’ll do my best to hunt it down! And please, if I post something that has a backstory or bias that I don’t know about, let me know so I can either provide better context or present an opposing view alongside it for balance.

add this to your file of little-known facts: behold the University of Al-Karaouine, the oldest university in the world, founded by a woman, located in the Arab city of Fes

The first three links, after the jump…