Egypt: Kifaya?

WaPo's lead editorial today is an unusually sharp attack on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek for his mistreatment of imprisoned political reformer Ayman Nour. The Bush administration wants Nour released, but Mubarek has essentially brushed off the U.S., and has even resumed a campaign of anti-U.S. incitement in the state-run press. Writes the Post, "Mr. Mubarak is no longer testing Mr. Bush; he is spitting in his face."

Nour is the head of the newly legal Party of Tomorrow, a liberal, free-market party that has been noted in Hit&Run here and here. In recent weeks, he has been organizing protests over Mubarek's seeking a fifth term as president under the "emergency" laws that have been in place during his entire rule; the protest byword is "Kifaya!" (Enough!).

As the Post notes, Nour's first protest in December drew 50 people; his most recent effort drew 500. Mubarek, who is expected to try to hand the presidency to his son, wants to put an end to this movement before it gets any larger. Nour has been charged with forging some of the petitions that enabled his party to become legal; a diabetic with a bad heart, he is enduring hours of prison "interrogation."

Actually, Nour is in jail, writes the Post, "because, like Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister who was assassinated last week, he offered a fresh democratic alternative in a Middle East stirred by the votes of Iraqis and Palestinians."

Liberal Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh notes that the crowds in the Kifaya! protests feature not only free-market liberals, but also leftist radicals and Islamists. "Not my cup of tea," he writes. "Nevertheless, something is beginning to happen in Egypt."

Comments

[WSDave]

Does this mean (if things go well for Mr. Nour) that the FreeState Project could actually get started in Egypt? Cool!!

[Rhywun]

newly legal Party of Tomorrow...
fifth term as president...
"emergency" laws...
hand the presidency to his son...
prison "interrogation"...

Is there anything at all democratic about Egypt's "democracy"?

[gaius marius]

protests feature not only free-market liberals, but also leftist radicals and Islamists.

of course, having seen a shia theocracy under sistani emerge from iraq's "democratic" reforms, why would the islamists oppose displacing mubarak?

careful what we wish for, people.

[kwais]

I wonder if now would be a good time to stop giving Egypt the 3 billion a year or so?

[R C Dean]

having seen a shia theocracy under sistani emerge from iraq's "democratic" reforms,

Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren't you, gaius. I mean, they haven't even convened their constitional convention yet, and you have already fired up your way-forward regime to determine that it will be a shia theocracy (even though the Iraqi shiites are of the quietist branch that disdains theocracy).

[Rick Barton]

What kwais asked. And the answer is Hell yes!

[NoStar]

I once asked my 5 year old if I had to pay him to be good or would he be good for nothing.
He assured me that he would be good for nothing.
(By age 7, he caught on to the joke and said I had to pay him. Ouch!)

It is a good time to find out if Egypt will be good for nothing.

[Do As I Say...]

Having George "I [heart] Gitmo" Bush demand that a country release a prisoner is fucking hilarious.

[gaius marius]

I mean, they haven't even convened their constitional convention yet, and you have already fired up your way-forward regime to determine that it will be a shia theocracy

lol -- i'm happy being ahead of you, mr dean. 🙂 sincerely, i hope you can come back and tell me otherwise in two or three years. but i think the odds are good that tehran is more or less in the drivers seat. at least, that's what the folks on the ground seem to think.

it's ironic, but i think our best hope for a political compromise that ISN'T an iranian-style theocracy might be the sunni insurgency, whose goals are largely secular and nationalist.

[Gary Gunnels]

"Nevertheless, something is beginning to happen in Egypt."

Haven't they been having sporadic protests like this in Egypt since the 1970s?

[Mo]

I know Rick's answer, but to kwais and NoStar, do you advocate cutting off Israel's financial aid as well. They're a liberal democracy with a robust economy, they should be able to handle. Egypt's foreign aid is pegged to Israel and $0 times anything is still $0.

[sarcasm]
Otherwise, I'm sure no Arab countries would read anything more into pulling Egypt's financial aid without doing the same to Israel.
[/sarcasm]

[NoStar]

Mo,
I am a born again messianiac believing zionist and a libertarian. While I have no problem sending my own money to support Israel, I advocate that my country's government stop trying to buy friends and the good behavior of foreign nations.

[kwais]

Mo,

Right of the bat I would say; yeah cut Israels financial aid too.

But if we have to give an Arab nation 3 billion to match the money we give to Israel, why not give it to the newly peace oriented Palestinians. Why don't we give them a conditional 3 billion. After all the conflict does involve them much more than it involves Egypt right now.

[kwais]

On second thought, I am with NoStar. No foreign aid.

Incidentally what is the pen name 'NoStar' from? Is it a movie reference?

'Kwais' is Saudi and Egyptian Arabic for 'good'. Iraqi Arabic is 'zien'.

[NoStar]

Kwais,
NoStar is a name with many levels of meaning for me. I first started using it shortly after 9/11/01 on Slate's Fray as a protest of their editorial policy of giving stars to favored posters, ("We don't need no Stinkin Stars"--I love Bogart movies) the arrogance of certain starred posters, and unstarred posters who whined about not having one. The ironic part is I was given a star nine months later, but I kept the name.

Also, I wrote this poem soon after assuming the name:

I am NoStar

A smart-ass libertarian
on bad days, a contrarian
I never met a pun I didn't like
A dyslexic number cruncher
A happy brown bag luncher
With a six mile ride to work upon my bike

I was once a long-haired drummer
No more gigs though, what a bummer
Now, I sing at home and strum an old guitar
Took my shot at being famous
And I learned how hard that game is
Still I'm happy, even if I am no star
----

Kwais, thanks for the meaning of your nom d'blog. Good, very good. Can you tell me how to phonetically pronounce it?

[Mo]

kwais,
Thanks for the Iraqi Arabic lesson (seriously). I'm with NoStar as well, I'd rather not subsidize Mubarak's thuggish regime, but I'd rather not subsidize Sharon either. No love for either of them.

NoStar,
It's pronounced kway - yis (hard k, yis pronounced like the first sylable of Ysidro, San)

[kwais]

Cool,

Kwais is the best phonetic approximation I could make. Arabic letters are different, they have different sounds. They have two different letters and different sounds that apporoximate the sounds of K, S, and T. Thus the word "Kalbi", can mean "my love". or "my dog" debending on wich K you use.

And I can't tell them apart most of the time. They also have a few letters that don't have an equivalent in English.

One of the ways to tell a Kurd from an Arab is that the Kurds can't pronounce some of the Arab letters either, unless they grew up in Baghdad or something.

I listened to a Kurdish lady argue with an Arab in Arabic, and it struck me that Iraqi Arabs speaking Arabic is the coolest sounding language ever.

Kurdish sounds a little more like Russian to me. And Saudi Arab sounds a little lazier than Iraqi Arabic.

[kwais]

Mo,
I don't have the 'zien' down yet. Sometimes it sounds to me like 'zinn', sometimes it sounds like 'zinna' with a very short a at the end. And most the time it sounds like zien. Most the people I learn Arabic from are not Arabs, and when I try to talk to an Arab, they correct just about every (all three of them) word I say.

I think part of the think with the 'zien' word is that it might be different depending on if you are talking to a woman, or it might be different depending on the other words in the sentence.

[kwais]

Here is another titbit of Arabic that I learned today, it may come usefull to one of y'all trying to pick up on an Iraqi Arab chick.

"Hubbee mustakbal ghayree"

It means "my love but another's future"

I take it to mean that "we can hang out and bump uglies, but lets not make a relationship out of this".

But it might be something like when a girl in the US says that you are a "nice" guy. In other words "not getting any".

This concludes the Arabic lesson for today.

[Mo]

kwais,
I?m about the last person that should be giving Arabic lessons. On one hand, I took lessons once a week for about 8 years and heard it around the house about 30% of the time. On the other, my dad was real big on assimilation, ?We came to the US to become Americans, not avoid it,? and most of the Arabic I learned was Egyptian. The upside is that most Arabic speakers understand me, Egypt is the ME version of Bollywood, but I can?t understand other dialects or even proper Arabic very well. If you think Saudi Arabic is lazy, listen to the Egyptian version. The hard K, kaf, is silent in a lot of words. It makes my attempts to read difficult because it's hard for me to remember when it's silent in my mental vocabulary and when it isn't. Arabic, like Spanish, has different words for male and female subjects. It took me forever to get inta and inti (you m/f respectively), through to my gf. The thing that gets me and my brother (after a year in Egypt, his Arabic improved immensely, but still can't get this) is which everyday words are 'male' versus 'female.' I think most of that comes from experience. I think 6 months of immersion lessons would get me to a near native level of conversation. This is the first trip in a while where my relatives were impressed with my Arabic half as often as they made fun of me. I only got called a kawaga (gringo) 3 times!!!!

[NoStar]

Kawaga, now that would make a nice nickname.

[Mo]

Ooops, should be khawaga if you want to be technically correct NoStar 🙂

[kwais]

Hey Khawaga

Is there an alif after the "kha" or the "wow" in that word? And what letter is the "ga" sound made with, and is it followed by an alif? If you answer those questions I can find out if that word exists in Iraqi in a little while.

Also, you may have only been called khawaga 3 times, but when I was somewhere in the north, I went with a kurdish guy to talk to an Iraqi police guy who was also Kurdish.

I said to the cop;
"thalatha rajool fee siarra abiyad"
"siarra arba albaab"
"rajul fee siarra moo zinn"

(3 guys in a white car, a four door car, and the three inside are bad guys)

And the cop later asked the Kurd I was with if I was Arab.

[Mo]

Wow, kwais, I'm impressed. There's an alif after the kha and the wow and the ga is a "jeem" with a "teh marboota" (the letter that looks like the front of a Viking ship).

[kwais]

Excellent Mo,
I showed the word to a local and she said "khawajah", it is an Egyptian word but we understand it."

She said it means like "American in Iraq" sort of.

BTW, glad I impressed you.

[kevrob]

The comparative Arabic discussion is fascinating. Do the Pan-Arabic TV and radio stations have a common "BBC English"-like style that educated people try to emulate? Does the effect of mass media mean that the development of local dialects into separate languages, a la the Romance languages, will be arrested?

Remember that when Ronald Reagan first ran for Governor of California, his slogan was "Had Enough?" - sometimes rendered "?Ya Basta!"

[Mo]

Kevin,
There is a proper Arabic that is used in Pan Arabic stations and in most newspapers. In my experience, I've never met any native speakers that speak in proper Arabic in everyday situations, even among the educated classes. I'm guessing there is less of a chance of the dialects splintering off into separate languages now, but I don't think it was going to happen anyways.

kwais,
Have you been able to catch any of the local/Pan Arab television. They sure have us beat on the attractive TV/music personalities.

[kwais]

Mo,
I did get Arab tv when I was in Saudi Arabia, but not here. The only tv that I get here is CNN, Fox news, and some Armed Forces Channels, and on NBC for Arabs channel, but that has all US programs (suck ones) with Arabic subtitles.