On Sheep & Infidels By Sarah Carr

Political situation in Egypt is of concern not just for Egypt but whole Middle East and rest of the Muslim countries also. Most of the liberals in Western media argue that it is turning point for Political Islam and exposes the weaknesses and inability of the Political Islam to govern-and was a good thing what happened it Egypt. Others argue that Army intervention further strengthens the Islamists, who will argue that Democracy, Liberals and West cannot be trusted-they accept the results only if liberals win as is evident in Egypt, in Ageria in 1969 and Hamas’s victory in Gaza. Unfortunately Turkey could be next.The West and Liberals do everything in their power to undermine democratically elected Islamists-a self-defeating proposition. Saudi Arabia and UAE just announced total aid of about  six billion dollars to Egypt. They did not offer aid while Morsi was president.These regimes do not like Democracy for their own survival. Miss  Sara Carr, an Egyptian blogger, writes wisely;” The Muslim Brotherhood should have been left to fail as they had not (yet) committed an act justifying Morsi’s removal by the military. The price Egypt has paid and will pay for the consequences of this decision are too high.”    ( F. Sheikh )

Other excerpts from her column;

Before I begin, let me state some facts, so that when people begin the ad hominem attacks they can try to rein them in within the following boundaries:

I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep Ahmed Shafiq out).

I am one of the administrators of a blog called “MB in English” that features English translations of awful statements of a sectarian, conspiratorial or bonkers nature that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) intends for domestic consumption only.

I am against army intervention in politics.

I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are currently split along identity lines in a way that they have never been over the last three years. This problem is so chronic that the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument, considered through a haze of fury and suspicion.

For the past week, I have been trundling between the pro- and anti-Morsi protests. It is like traveling between two planets. The pro-camp has significantly more men than woman — although there are women and children there — and it lacks the social diversity of the anti-camp. I have never seen one unveiled woman who is not a journalist there. I have never met a Christian or encountered any other journalist who has met one there (it is important to note that pro-Morsi protesters and pro-Morsi media have often claimed that there are Christians attending their sit-in). At the same time, they also allege that the church was behind the former Mubarak regime-US-Zionist plot to oust Morsi.

The point is that the pro-Morsi crowd is largely homogenous. Their opponents use this homogeneity as evidence that the MB is, at best, an organization that has failed to market itself to non-supporters; and, at worst, a closed group unconcerned with non-members.

While the MB’s opposition might be correct in this assertion, many go one step further. They suggest that Morsi supporters are all members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and all unthinking androids programmed by the Supreme Guide. The popular derogatory term for them is khirfan (sheep). The aim here is to dehumanize and deny agency, much in the same way the Muslim Brotherhood dismiss their opponents as kuffar (infidels) or feloul (Mubarak regime beneficiaries or loyalists).Click Link to read full article;

http://www.madamasr.com/content/sheep-and-infidels

The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.) By Oliver Sacks

LAST night I dreamed about mercury — huge, shining globules of quicksilver rising and falling. Mercury is element number 80, and my dream is a reminder that on Tuesday, I will be 80 myself.

Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers. At 11, I could say “I am sodium” (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold. A few years ago, when I gave a friend a bottle of mercury for his 80th birthday — a special bottle that could neither leak nor break — he gave me a peculiar look, but later sent me a charming letter in which he joked, “I take a little every morning for my health.”

Eighty! I can hardly believe it. I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over. My mother was the 16th of 18 children; I was the youngest of her four sons, and almost the youngest of the vast cousinhood on her side of the family. I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.

I thought I would die at 41, when I had a bad fall and broke a leg while mountaineering alone. I splinted the leg as best I could and started to lever myself down the mountain, clumsily, with my arms. In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude — gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude, too, that I had been able to give something back. “Awakenings” had been published the previous year.

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”

I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at 80 as I was at 20; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done.

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever “completing a life” means. Some of my patients in their 90s or 100s say nunc dimittis — “I have had a full life, and now I am ready to go.” For some of them, this means going to heaven — it is always heaven rather than hell, though Samuel Johnson and James Boswell both quaked at the thought of going to hell and got furious with David Hume, who entertained no such beliefs. I have no belief in (or desire for) any post-mortem existence, other than in the memories of friends and the hope that some of my books may still “speak” to people after my death. Click link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-old-age-no-kidding.html?src=me&ref=general

Posted By F. Sheikh

Rubai from Mirza Ashraf

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into
nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” (John Keats)

ہے حسنِ ظن یا رحمت دُر فشاں ہے

جو خَم با خَم جہاں مہ رو نشاں ہے

کہ زیرِ داغِ تیرہ ، نقشِ بے رنگ

بھی تہ در تہ حسیں صورت کشاں ہے

اشرف

The Perils Of A ‘People’ s Coup’ By Khaled M. Abou El Fadl

KHALED M. ABOU EL FADL is a Professor of Law at UCLA and Modern Islamic scholar. He writes in NYT article:

This time, the military agreed with the protesters. But next time, when protesters call for something that isn’t in the army’s interest, they will meet a very different fate. Today they are called “the people”; tomorrow they will be labeled seditious saboteurs. A year from now, the dreamy youth who celebrated and danced when Mr. Morsi was overthrown may well find themselves in the cell next door to the Brotherhood.”

“No country did more to undermine Mr. Morsi’s government and celebrate its fall than Saudi Arabia. The Saudis understand that the threat that the Egyptian democratic experiment once posed to Saudi autocracy is gone.”

“Democracy is not founded upon the principle of safeguarding the rights of the popular, but upon safeguarding the rights of the most unpopular. What so many Egyptians are forgetting is that the same “public interest” that justified the overthrow and persecution of one political party today will tomorrow justify the repression of anyone who questions the power of Egypt’s army and judiciary.”

“However, while spouting this lofty rhetoric, the army has completely flouted the basic principles of the rule of law. It has arrested members of the Muslim Brotherhood and of Mr. Morsi’s political party for sedition and advocating violence, but conveniently failed to arrest any of the people responsible for burning Brotherhood offices or gunning down Mr. Morsi’s supporters.

Many so-called liberals are praising the military for upholding personal freedoms while blissfully ignoring the fact that one of the army’s first acts was to close down all media that the military, in its infinite wisdom, deemed a danger to public order. This includesAl Jazeera, which saw its office in Cairo shut and its workers threatened and arrested, and their equipment confiscated.

This is nothing new. The army has simply reaffirmed and aggravated a decades-old feud between secularists (who believe that they alone understand democracy) and Islamists (who believe that secularists only believe in democracy when it serves to exclude and marginalize Islamists). Mr. Morsi’s fatal mistake was to believe he could win the trust and loyalty of his defense minister, Gen. Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. Instead, he got a coup.

Secularists across the Middle East have traditionally failed at the ballot box because they lacked support among the pious masses and instead had to rely on the repressive might of the military. Islamists have generally fared well in elections, but because of emotional appeal rather than competence in governing. So secularists have ended up monopolizing power by excluding and repressing Islamists. The predictable result has been radicalization of the Islamists, after they lose trust in the hallowed principles of democracy and human rights”. click link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/opinion/the-perils-of-a-peoples-coup.html?ref=opinion

Posted By F. Sheikh