Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ Two tyrants, Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini focused on policing women’s bodies as the site of their respective ideologies of power and domination, with the bodies of women as the ideological battleground of their patriarchal practices. “What we are witnessing in Iran in the imposition of mandatory veiling is, of course, the reverse of what we see in much of Europe and North America where Muslim women are systematically harassed if they choose to wear the Muslim hijab.  For decades not a single day passes without a racist, misogynist, bigoted violent attack on Muslim women in Europe and the US.” How they became an ideological battleground

Artist Samson Kambalu

  قلتُ للحاكمِ : هلْ أنتَ الذي أنجبتنا؟ قال : لا … لستُ أنا قلتُ : هلْ صيَّركَ اللهُ إلهاً فوقنا؟ قال : حاشا ربنا قلتُ : هلْ نحنُ طلبنا منكَ أنْ تحكمنا؟ قال : كلا قلت : هلْ كانت لنا عشرة أوطانٍ وفيها وطنٌ مُستعملٌ زادَ عنْ حاجتنا فوهبنا لكَ هذا الوطنا؟ قال : لم يحدثْ، ولا أحسبُ هذا مُمكنا قلتُ : هل أقرضتنا شيئاً على أن تخسفَ الأرضَ بنا إنْ لمْ نُسدد دَينَنَا؟ قال : كلا قلتُ : ما دمتَ إذن لستَ إلهاً أو أبا أو حاكماً مُنتخبا أو مالكاً أو دائناً فلماذا لمْ تَزلْ يا ابنَ الكذا تركبنا؟؟ … وانتهى الحُلمُ هنا أيقظتني طرقاتٌ فوقَ بابي : افتحِ البابَ لنا يا ابنَ الزنى افتحِ البابَ لنا إنَّ في بيتكَ حُلماً خائنا !!!!!!

Sayeh incarnait une génération d’intellectuels aux voix libres et populaires A big hit with an iconic song

  What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. Popular literature and films often depict the opposite — policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions.   —Henry Kissinger  A mild take on two women complicit in an imperialist crime 

Her country brutalised Africans

“ It seems that today’s Tories – even (or perhaps especially) their most committed ideologues – are once again prepared to ‘pay up’ if it allows them to win a class fight. And let’s not delude ourselves: Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget … shows that a class fight is underway.” Sound money? “Class war is traditionally a term levelled at the left – typically when arguing for radical things such as housing or food – but it is clearer than ever that it is the Tories who wage it.” The class war is upon us

I, too, am the daughter of an “honour crime ”   مقال سردي وليس تحليليا، ولكن القصة تعبر عن ظاهرة اجتماعية مهمة. مصر: أنا أيضا ابنة "جريمة شرف" حين احتفل أخوالي بقتل أمي Related   “France's 1810 Penal Code Article 324 also inspired the 1858 Ottoman Penal Code's Article 188, both the French Article 324 and Ottoman article 188 were drawn on to create Jordan's Article 340 which was retained even after a 1944 revision of Jordan's laws which did not touch public conduct and family law;  article 340 still applies to this day in a modified form.  France's Mandate over Lebanon resulted in its penal code being imposed there in 1943–1944, with the French-inspired Lebanese law for adultery allowing the mere accusation of adultery against women resulting in a maximum punishment of two years in prison while men have to be caught in the act and not merely accused, and are punished with only one year in prison.” The phenomenon persists today in same areas of the world bec...

The question remains a question of class.

Palestinian-Syrian refugee opens Iraq’s first cat and dog hotel I wonder how many English would like this. Dozens of migrants killed as boats sinks off Syrian coast Good that ‘killed’, not ‘died’, has been used in the headline.

I like d’Eramo. “ while we pursue such extravagant schemes, we are simultaneously condemning this small, singular, fabulous planet of ours to destruction.” Exploiting the cosmos

  Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. ―  Simone Weil

Thrashed for theorising

 

 

“Could we say … that the prioritization of form is detrimental—almost hostile—to the recollection of context? If we did, we would not be the first. Indeed, formal analysis has often been taken as an anti-political distraction or bourgeois salve for psyches incapable of grasping larger, more worldly contradictions: the small, beautiful thing has always been pitted by critical voices against the forgotten social reality. Still, it seems important to note that form is able to reduce and disarm our awareness of context only because awareness of context is so difficult to maintain; it depends on the comprehension of something intangible and hulking in the background, of that which necessarily exists outside the lines. And the rub: any overarching network of conditions—but especially those of global capitalism—is one we ourselves are implicated in and shaped by. We live and move in the same context that produces the forms we espy. No wonder we would rather see the form by itself. Isolated, i...

“We paid the price twice” for Bashir’s dictatorship, says Amjed Farid, the opposition activist. “We got rid of the tyrant who was supporting terror, through a popular revolution that we paid for with our blood. And now we are paying the price for this tyrant, even though we were his first victims.” “Is this justice?”

The violence in Leicester Related The forsaken ones

Context: The revolution of 1905-1911, the Anglo-Russian active opposition to the revolution, the abdication of a shah and ascendance of another, reactionaries and conservatives continued to promote royalism and the execution of one of them–Fazlullah Nuri*.  “My countrymen I loathe and execrate,   My country is the object of my hate!   I represent the Monarch wise and great,   Who to my hands commits the nation’s fate!   ‘Tis time for breakfast. Put this business through!   Who bids? Who bids? Come Sir, a bid from you!” Quoted in E. G. Browne’s The Press and Poetry of Modern Iran , 1914, Cambridge University Press  * Nuri “was hanged in his turban and cloak, an eloquent tableau of clerical authority subordinated to  profane law. It is a telling commentary on the spread of constitutional ideas that the sentence was endorsed by many of the senior ulema of Iraq, as well as Nuri’s own son, Mahdi, who ‘stood at the foot of the g...

Cancelling the future Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life Related Capitalist Realism - Is There no Alternative?

  وأَنتَ تُعِدُّ فطورك ’ فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ لا تَنْسَ قُوتَ الحمامْ ] وأَنتَ تخوضُ حروبكَ، فكِّر بغيركَ  [لا تَنْسَ مَنْ يطلبون السلامْ] وأَنتَ تُسدِّدُ فاتورةَ الماء، فكِّر بغيركَ [مَنْ يرضَعُون الغمامْ] وأَنتَ تعودُ إلى البيت، بيتِكَ، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ لا تنس شعب الخيامْ] وأَنت تنام وتُحصي الكواكبَ، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ ثَمَّةَ مَنْ لم يجد حيّزاً للمنام] وأَنتَ تحرِّرُ نفسك بالاستعارات، فكِّرْ بغيركَ [ مَنْ فَقَدُوا حَقَّهم في الكلامْ] وأَنتَ تفكِّر بالآخرين البعيدين، فكِّرْ بنفسكَ [ قُلْ: ليتني شمعةٌ في الظلامْ]

An Extinction Rebellion that cannot rebel. A Trade Union Congress that bows in front of class rule. An excellent article by Chris Hedges Related

Man must assert his native rights, must say ;  We take from Monarchs’ hand the granted sway;  — Shelley, an English poet     Separating the “human” from the institution, and the “family” from the “monarchy” has long been a successful tactic in preventing searching scrutiny of the institution. She faithfully served the British imperial project Related Insurgent Empire

There are two kinds of philosophy in the world: one of them is to the effect that there is nothing in the world which is ours, so we must remain content with a rag and a mouthful of food. The other is to the effect that everything in the world is beautiful and desirable, that it does and ought to belong to us. It is the second which should be our ideal … as for the first, it is worthless, and we must pay no attention to it.   Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī  (1838/39-1897), quoted in Kedouri’s Afghani and ‘Abduh , p. 15, 1966. Al-afghānī did not conceal his opposition to Ismai’l Pasha [the viceroy of the Ottoman sultan in Egypt], exclaiming in a speech he delivered to the fellahin [peasants] in Alexandria,  ‘Oh! You poor fellah! You break the heart of the earth in order to draw sustenance from it and support your family. Why do you not break the heart of your oppressor? Why do you not break the heart of those who eat the fruit of your labour?’ Ibid., p. 25

Excerpts from The Islamic Enlightenment

So what if Putin likes Dostoyevsky? Related “ Lithuania - together with Latvia, Estonia and Poland - banned all Russian tourists , arguing they should not be enjoying democracy and freedom in Europe while their government attacks those very values in Ukraine.”

From Imamate to the present

  If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism and urged the crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad. As a Kenyan , I feel nothing. This theater is absurd. Criticism of British empire intensifies Related Dozens of staff at King Charles’s former residence told they could lose jobs

  Táhireh / Qurrat al-Ayn  (1814/17-1852)

“The UN's labour organisation is keen to stress that slavery is not confined to poor countries far away from the Western world - more than half of all forced labour happens in wealthier countries in the upper-middle or high-income bracket.“ 10 million increase in numbers in five years

Gender, Power, Resistance Related A guide to students

A good panorama of the situation in the MENA region. However, I think that there is  too much focus on ‘democracy’ without a single mention of capitalism in a left wing publication. ‘Democracy’ is narrowly defined and although Alaoui highlights the role of counterrevolution, he never grounds ‘democracy’ in a socio-economic revolutionary’ context. The revolution broke out in December 2010 before its spread to other countries raising socio-economic slogans and issues, not ‘democracy’.  ‘Neoliberal’ for of capitalism is meant to be the culprit along the counterrevolutionary forces as if the working of capital itself is not counterrevolutionary. ‘Aid’ replaces debt as mechanism of subjugation. The question (the headline) itself begs the question: what is the relevance of the question since the author clearly speaks about the regimes as the leading force behind the counterrevolution? ‘Popular’ as in ‘popular forces’, ‘popular currents’, ‘popular mobilisation’, etc.  is often r...

The role the monarchy played in the service of UK’s imperial interests

The main ideas in the rest of the article : Hazony founded the Edmund Burke Foundation in Washington to strengthen ‘the principles of national conservatism in Western and other democratic countries’. Hazony, writing just after [Meir] Kahane’s assassination in 1990, made clear that he never subscribed to his violent political views, but he did adopt Kahane’s neo-messianic brand of theology. Hazony helped edit Netanyahu’s  A Place Among the Nations,  the book which set out the future prime minister’s programme. Netanyahu asserts (in the Hebrew edition) that ‘the Israeli left may be suffering from a chronic disease that has affected the Jewish people for a century: the Marxism that impregnated the Jewish leftist, far-left and communist movements in Eastern Europe.’  An affliction that might explain why, after the June 1967 war, some leftwing Israelis wanted to give back the conquered territories. Hazony takes Asa Kasher, a philosopher at Tel Aviv University to task: ‘Kasher ...

have not been invaded by Britain.

A very short introduction Related British atrocities in Kenya

We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then, by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes. — James Connolly Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities. The Right Divine of Labour To be first of earthly things; That the Thinker and the Worker Are Manhood’s only Kings — Connolly

According to  a 2014 YouGov poll , 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies . Related Interview with Usta Patnaik Inglorious Empire by Shashi Thahroor

She is so strong in the imagination that even in death she is able to cancel class conflict: unions suspend strike action . … and some of the great people she met in her life.