What’s like to belong to a religious minority in Egypt after January 25th? Will the long history of oppression get worsened or relieved? To better know, we’ve interviewed four young activists who represent a major portion of the religious minorities in Egypt; a Baha’i, an atheist, a secular, and a Christian, in quest for their opinions, reflections, thoughts, ideas, and hopes about the Egyptian people’s uprising which made the news for the last 2 consecutive months.

To better understand the situation, the listener has to put in mind that Egypt hosts two major religious institutions, the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria established in the middle of the 1st century by Saint Mark the Evangelist, and Al-Azhar University founded in 970 A.D by the Fatimids as the first Islamic University in the world. Cairo has a unique cityscape with its ancient mosques, especially around the area of Old Cairo. Cairo is also known as the “city of a thousand minarets.”

Egypt’s “recognized” religions are Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and more recently the “Dash religion,” which denotes the Baha’i faith according the the state. The Bahai’s of Egypt, who were granted their basic rights to issue an ID after uphill trials and long waiting years, still face a lot of problems though. You’re not allowed, by state, to believe in any other religion, or practise any other rites. Egypt is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country with Islam as the recognized state religion. The percentage of the adherents of various religions is a controversial topic in Egypt, with different sources citing different figures. According to public figures, around 90% are identified as Muslim “by birth or by I.D.,” however it’s nearly impossible to estimate accurate figures, because it’s considered “deadly” to announce a convert publicly. A significant number of Muslim Egyptians also follow native Sufi orders, and there is a minority of Shi’a. Islam plays a central role in the lives of most Egyptian Muslims, however the state of ambivalence is a wide trend in Egypt. The Adhan (Islamic call to prayer) is heard five times a day, and has the informal effect of regulating the pace of everything from business to media and entertainment. Cairo also comprises a significant number of church towers.

According to the current constitution of Egypt, until Saturday’s referendum, any new legislation must at least implicitly, but ambiguously, agree with Islamic law; however, the constitution bans political parties with a religious agenda, moreover the constitution is mostly secular, except for the personal status laws which are derived from Sharia Law.

Religious minorities face discrimination and marginalization on many levels. In terms of religious freedom, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life ranks Egypt as the fifth worst country in the world, after Saudi Arabia, Iran, Uzbekistan and China. In addition, Egypt ranks among the 12 worst countries in the world in terms of religious violence against religious minorities and in terms of social hostilities against Christians in specific. Furthermore, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has placed Egypt on its watch list for religious freedom that requires close monitoring due to the nature and extent of violations of religious freedom engaged in or tolerated by the government.*

Listen to the podcast now or download it!

* Wikipedia.

The picture from here.

Mideast Youth Podcast: Broadcasting Ahead

AsiatoGaza is a movement that intends to break the illegal siege of Gaza in a peaceful manner. AsiatoGaza consists of non governmental organizations as well as people from various Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kuwait, UAE  and various religions like Muslims, Christian, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists. In coordination with other activists all over the world, AsiatoGaza has arranged a caravan from India to Gaza with the participation of several Asian countries. This caravan will start in first week of December 2010 from India through Pakistan, Iran to Turkey and from Turkey toward Gaza.

Caravan's path

Caravan is currently in Iran (Isfahan to Tehran) and below is some photos that I took from one of caravan’s campaigns while I was in Tehran, yesterday.

Nestle, Israeli brand

2) Palestinians call on all people of conscience: Come visit Palestine this Christmas Palestinian civil society organizations and peace and human rights defenders and activists on the ground call on civil society organizations and people of conscience around the world to come to Palestine between December 22-28 for a week of fellowship and actions centered around Jerusalem. Palestinians throughout historic Palestine and in exile still believe in and work for peace based upon justice and trust that with the help of the international community we will achieve our peace and freedom and restore the values and principles that we share as human beings.

We invite you. We call upon you. Join us and be the change you want to see in this world.

Come join us this Christmas season as we pray and act for peace with justice in Jerusalem. We believe in nonviolence as a way of life and an absolute powerful means of resistance. We believe in International Law and Human Rights. We believe that every single one of us is a change maker, and nobody has the right to say I can’t do anything. You will be accommodated locally and enjoy Palestinian hospitality and a full program of peace work, networking, and fellowship.

Contact us info[at]palestinejn.org if you would like to be connected to the organizing group in your country.

I can tell you why from my own perspective – and why most of my time is devoted to acknowledging and acting upon the many human rights abuses facing various minorities throughout the region.

Ugly design

The first thing I do when people ask me this question (aside from stating the obvious, which is that these minorities are simply humans and equally deserving of any rights) – is ask them back, if you ran a website, would you be okay if its design was incredibly ugly? If loading it up every morning makes you cringe, why would you keep doing it?

Would you be successful if you had a failing, tasteless, poorly coded website that was only compatible with the world’s most hated browser: Internet Explorer? A website that doesn’t compliment your content, no matter how strongly you felt about it? People weren’t reading it. They weren’t tweeting it. They weren’t talking about it. You didn’t make the news. People think you’re a loser with bad design. You are on no one’s recommended reading list.

This design is what tyranny looks like.

It is empty. Oppressive. Dull. Hopeless. And seemingly without a decent future.

Exceptional design

Now imagine you ran a website with an exceptional design – something that represents you. Something that other people visited and thought, “hm, this is unique, I’d like to visit this page again. It is refreshing. I may learn something here.” You no longer have to worry about traffic. People rave about your site’s functionality and design. They are therefore interested in what you have to offer. You are taken seriously.

This design is what a tolerant society looks like.

It is complete. It is pleasant to look at. It is colorful. It is encouraging you to participate.

Why? Because this design is not oppressively empty. You can tell that it’s a creative collection of many thoughts and elements. It’s exciting.

More importantly, it soon becomes obvious that this design is a result of a million little codes working alongside each other. Dozens of languages. Tons of colors. Lots of experimentations. Some codes may not be compatible at first – like two versions of JavaScripts, but you make it work. It’s a frustrating and painful process, but you commit yourself to these details, because you want to succeed.

Eventually, your site is much faster and user-friendly. You suddenly have 500,000 users signed up overnight. You did it! But not entirely yourself. The platform you relied on was Open Source, for people like you to take advantage of – some of your code was available free online, your design was an effort by CSS experts and world-class illustrators, you implemented dozens of features flawlessly. You relied on a mountain of other people’s efforts to build your own variation of what is now a powerful, useful and unique service. People love it – and they love you.

This is what a tolerant society would be like. It’s exceptional design. It’s colorful, it’s respectful, it’s compatible with all the modern (browsers.) It’s the future. This is where I want to be.

Minorities in my society make my life more colorful, functionable and “user-friendly.” I learn more, I do more and I simply AM more because of it. Great development and design encourages you to innovate. The result is often a fantastic service used and constantly enhanced by millions of relatively comfortable people. You may come across bad codes and dysfunctional plugins, but you correct it and improve it, then re-release it with all the bugs fixed for others to download.

I cannot imagine what the Internet would be like if we had to pay for visiting every website. I cannot imagine what our societies throughout the region would be like if we continued to oppress and belittle the existence of those who merely wish to coexist with the rest.

What we do with websites, it’s what societies should do – focusing on the details (the injustices that are often ignored.) A misplaced pixel in a logo ruins the entire thing. So if we gave rights to everyone and denied them to the Kurds, it’s still ugly. It’s missing a piece.

This doesn’t mean accepting each other’s beliefs and practices as our own, or replacing our traditions. It simply means you lack the insistence to dominate and oppress. Just like those codes that don’t work well together, you tweak it, and suddenly there are no further errors. They learn to coexist.

Of course, there is no perfect site (society), so I do find this argument to be completely realistic. There will always be flaws. Just like websites, which break the moment you upgrade to a different platform or host, our societies will break regardless of any unity. Politics are constantly changing, as is the world and power shifts around us. But you pick the pieces up. You re-code. Once you achieve that, you’re now on a much powerful platform and hosting service, that not even a DDoS attack can bring you down. You survived it and simply grew stronger as a result.

In other words, societies would become stronger if its minorities were embraced and treated like the equal citizens that they are. Diversity is to be celebrated – just like amazing websites are. But they certainly wouldn’t be amazing if every detail wasn’t accounted for.

To put it simply: Abusing minorities, censoring them, disrespecting their rights is exactly like running an ugly design and refusing anyone’s help to improve it. Perhaps you’re too proud – this is something you ALONE built and no one should mess with it, these are your values, your religion, your traditions, your culture and history, and no one can alter that opinion. So you stay on this design. This ugly design that looks like rancid toenails. But it doesn’t mean that your visitors wouldn’t find that site to be filthy, making you ultimately unhappy with everyone around you dissatisfied. Anyone can be proud of a less-than-average achievement, too stubborn to improve it, but who is that person kidding?

The ugly site – No one wants it at the end of the day. If we deny it’s ugly and outdated, someone will prove us wrong. It’ll get hacked. And maybe then you would realize the issue, but it would be too late by then. Your content is all gone. Everything you built has been destroyed. Not improved and built upon. Just gone.

For me, I cannot fight for my rights when there are tons of ethnic, religious, intellectual etc minorities who have many less rights than myself. I don’t consider myself to be free, but at the very least, I do feel my pixel is in place. I’m already in the logo. They aren’t – and this is why it’s ugly. We refuse their help and support and even deny them the very right to exist. But they are equal to us and we cannot innovate and move forward until they are on board.

We aren’t purely doing them a favor. We’re doing ourselves one.

They are ready to get on board with the rest of us and build and advance and move forward.

So let us not push them away – or else we’ll get hacked.

And if we continue moving towards the path we’re still heading for, we WILL get hacked. Because where we live is still incredibly ugly. And I can’t sit back and accept that.

We need to fix that ugly design.

Sabbar Kashur met the woman in downtown Jerusalem in September 2008, introducing himself as a single Jew. Later that night they had sex. When the woman discovered he was actually Arab, she filed a criminal complaint for rape and indecent assault, later changing it to rape by deception through a plea bargain.

On Monday, the judges sentenced Kashur to eighteen months in jail after being under house arrest for almost 2 years. While they acknowledged it was not a “a classical rape by force,” they argued, “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated”

“I would say she set upon me. She was interested in my motorcycle and so we talked. I didn’t pretend. I said my name is Dudu because that’s how everybody knows me. My wife even calls me that.”, Kashur argued.

Regardless of the fact of this relationship or ‘hook-up’ being adulterous with Kashur being married, and of him not letting her know of him being an Arab, this is a clear case of discrimination against the Arab population in the state of Israel. Given the fact that couples of Jewish and Arab origins who choose enter into a consensual interfaith relationship with both of them well aware of the their respective partners’ ethnicity and religion still remain to be ostracized from the general society, and tend to face hostility from the general Jewish population as well as receiving death threats from extremist Jewish gangs who patrol the streets, lurk at night clubs and follow Jewish women around to ensure that no Arab man would engage with them in a conversation.

Israeli Commentator Gideon Levy simply asks:

“What if this guy had been a Jew who pretended to be a Muslim and had sex with a Muslim woman? Would he have been convicted of rape? The answer is: of course not.”

With Israel growing increasingly discriminating towards the Arabs and gradually transforming to what would be described as an ‘exclusively Jewish state’ – given the irony that being Jewish is more of ‘following a religion’ rather than a ‘race’ – and with these Nuremberg-like Laws seemingly emerging in Israel, I really ask myself…

Should we remind them that they had only been able to come back to Palestine – with a few who actually returned – after being in diaspora for almost 500 years only after the Arabs had defeated the Byzantine Romans and took control of al-Quds (Jerusalem)? Should we remind them that it was the Nazi Germans who persecuted them in World War 2 and not the Arabs or Muslims? Should we remind them that it was the Babylonians who destroyed the First Temple and the Romans who destroyed the Second Temple and not the Muslims? Should we remind them that they prospered and thrived during the rule of the Islamic Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire unlike they did under the rule of any other civilization? Should we remind them that they – like us – were persecuted, chased and killed when the Spanish Conquistadors conquered Andalusia and took it as their own? Should we remind them that the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) neighbor was a Jew, who was treated with respect and absolutely no hatred or racism?

I guess according to them, Jews must breed with Jews only to keep the “chosen race” pure or face prison. ‎”It’s not that they are being racist or anything tacky like that. Because they aren’t. And we’re ‘Hitlerian’ anti-Semites if we say they are…”.

By blocking websites, becoming member of “Against Draw Muhammad”, sending death threats or killing infidels you change nothing.
Why Muhammad should be just depicted by those who are against Islam or non-Muslims? Why world should see Muhammad from their viewpoints?
My idea is to draw Muhammad in the respectful way and show how honorable he has been. Let’s show the world our viewpoints, let’s made the world recognize Muhammad through Muslims points of view. Let’s change the battle for good and prove those who are against Islam that Muslims are tolerated and respectful beings. Show them how respectful Muhammad has been.
So I developed “Draw Mohammad Respectfully” page and encourage every Muslim and every other one who thinks insulting a religious prophet is not a good act, to draw their respectful depictions and upload there.

Imagine you’re at school. There is a big guy there who is strong and is not a tolerated guy relatively to other classmates. He scares you and you don’t even dare to ridicule him. In resting times he beats and kicks other guys and threatens them.
One day a courageous classmate draws big guy on the blackboard. The big guy becomes angry and beats him madly. It makes a bad atmosphere in the class for few months. Everyone talks about that event and everyone fears with an inner hatred. But it’s just like a fire under coal. It grows day after day and reveals itself someday.

This phenomenon also happens in other communities and has happened lately. Let’s call it Muhammad’s depiction controversy!

“Everybody Draw Mohammad Day – May 20th, 2010” was not unexpected. It would be started somehow. And I believe it grows day by day because of an inner hatred that exists in non-muslim community against Islamic fundamentalism. That’s what Muslims did to themselves.
Allah in Quean mentions Muhammad as another human being like us. And I don’t think he is holier than Jesus or Moses who are depicted freely.

Say, (O Muhammed) “I am no more than a human being like you….” 18:110

To be followed

As someone who focuses on Iranian society and transformation, it makes me chuckle. I know that a lot of Iranians have superiority feelings towards other cultures and for them to see an African country beat them to it when it comes to progressive paradigms and systems must be quite a blow. Let us not forget that despite all political love affairs there still exists a considerable amount of racism for Africans and black people in Iran.

But Iran could do better. It’s the birth-place not only of Cyrus the Great and the first human rights charter, it’s the cradle of a very recent philosophy that originated in 1844 and proposes the equality of women and men, the harmony of science and religion, the eradication of extremes of wealth and poverty, universal education, the unity of religions and the oneness of humanity; a philosophy that provides the blue-print for a mutualistic democracy that safeguards the interests and affairs of all peoples of the world, not just a privileged few. But this philosophy, born in Shiraz and nurtured by a Persian Siyyid was quickly banished out of Iran and into Palestine, which is now Israel. And now Iranians call it a British invention! Which can only flatter the British.

So according to some people’s bookkeeping:

Equality of women and men, universal education, progressive revelation, oneness of humanity, mutualistic democracy, human rights = British invention

Suppression of woman, suppression and persecution of minorities and majorities, the inherent division of humanity into good and bad, human rights abuses = Iranian

Hmmm…I guess at the end of the day you have to make up your own mind. But let it not be said that there is no choice. You don’t have to be a Baha’i to be proud of the fact that this movement originated on your soil. Why is it so hard to just celebrate the awesomeness of this rich philosophy and take ownership of it? And of Kurds, and of Sunnis, Jews, Christians and of atheists and of Shi’ih majorities who want to lovingly build a great society and blog about it?

*

The day Iran produces and owns a charter of religious rights and freedoms like the one in South Africa – that’s the day I’ll be buying my ticket to go home.

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