by Salman Hameed

The last two weeks has been incredibly busy - and hence the lack of posts here. I blame the government shutdown. I guess this was a sympathy shutdown here on Irtiqa. But lets start the things rolling again. So first, here is a call for papers in the journal, CyberOrient, for a special issue on History of Modernity and Telephony in the non-West. Here are the details (tip from Tabsir).

Call for Papers for CyberOrientVol. 8, Iss. 2, 2014
Submission deadline: 30 April 2014 (Full Papers)
Special Issue: History of Modernity and Telephony in the non-West
Guest Editor: Burçe Çelik 

Aim 

For the past few decades, history of modernization began to be written by focusing on how technologies as components of modernization processes change the lives of humans, their daily practices and imaginations, and the ways in which they construct and express their identities. Telephony, which functions in both public and private spheres and witnesses social and political changes in private as well as professional relations, is regarded as especially important for historical analysis. Functioning on multiple levels, social history of telephony can unearth the ways in which technologies obtain meanings and values in changing cultural contexts and the dynamics of social, political and cultural transformations. The history of modernization in the non-western societies is often studied by focusing on the projects of the rulers and on the discourses of the ruling parties that aim a social/political change in accordance with a particular Occidentalism – where modernity is imagined with a model of the western modernization processes. Yet, the question of how people of these landscapes contributed to the modernization processes and how they produced their own modern practices in daily organizations, relations and experiences, did not receive enough scholarly attention.
This special issue of CyberOrient invites articles that focus on the history of modernity and telephony in the non-west that take the user perspective to the center. Topics could include the daily practices of users with telephone technology, the meaning and values that have been attributed to this technology by users, the role of telephony within the social, cultural and political struggles of users, and the effect of the ownership or non-ownership of telephony in social, cultural and political lives of individuals and collectives. We welcome submissions from across disciplines and methodological approaches that are empirically and critically grounded. 

SubmissionArticles should be submitted directly to Burçe Çelik (burce.celik@bahcesehir.edu.tr) and Vit Sisler (vit.sisler@ff.cuni.cz). Articles should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words (including references), and follow the AAA style in referencing and citations. Upon acceptance, articles will be published online with free access in autumn 2014.

And to give you a flavor of the journal, here is the latest issue of CyberOrient that is available online:


Articles
Online and Offline Continuities, Community and Agency on the Internet
Jon W. Anderson
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8355

The Earth Is Your Mosque (and Everyone Else’s Too): Online Muslim
Environmentalism and Interfaith Collaboration in UK and Singapore
Lisa Siobhan Irving
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8336

Telling the Truth about Islam? Apostasy Narratives and Representations
of Islam on WikiIslam.net
Daniel Enstedt and Göran Larsson
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8459

Comments
Digital Images and Visions of Jihad: Virtual Orientalism and the
Distorted Lens of Technology
Raymond Pun
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8391

Reviews
Review: Arabités numériques. Le printemps du Web arabe
Luboš Kropáček
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8352

Review: Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age. The 2009
Presidential Election Uprising in Iran
Zuzana Krihova
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8386

Review: iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam. Islamic Civilization
and Muslim Networks
Vit Sisler
http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8385

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by Salman Hameed

It is a topic that is finally being discusses more broadly in the US press. I usually find Chris Hayes a bit smug, but here is a good discussion from last week that includes couple of lawyers, an ACLU activist, and the filmmaker behind the new documentary, Dirty Wars: The World as a Battlefield. One of the interesting comments made in the discussion is that fact that legally, one cannot distinguish between US and non-US citizens when it comes to the access of due-process (in reality, of course, courts have made distinctions). Here is the full program:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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by Salman Hameed

On a day of Snowmageddon in Massachusetts, here are posts from two excellent websites. One talks about images of Arab women in a video game and the other of Muslim women in comic books.

Here is Tabsir on iOrientalism - Fooling Around with Arab Princesses:

The late Edward Said lamented the biased representation of the “Oriental” in his influential Orientalism, published 35 years ago. Most of the scholarly and voyeuristic tomes he critiqued are rarely read these days, although his intellectual nemesis Bernard Lewis is well represented in your local Barnes and Noble bookstore.
...
 The ugly ethnocentrism, racism and sexism that once could be found in the broad (far too broad) discourse labeled “Orientalism” is still quite evident, although moreso in the media, political punditry on the right and rantings of career Islamophobes than by serious scholars. But we are now in the digital age and iOrientalism is now propelled through Facebook, Twitter and Youtube via iphones, ipods and their technological clones. 

One Youtube video that recently appeared on a Youtube search that had nothing to do with the subject I was searching is a mock video-game fight between three hefty-bosomed and bursting-at-the-bra-straps Arab princesses and a swarthy Mike Tysonish evil guy. This appears to be a promo for Poser Pro Animation rather than a cultural statement per se. The three Arab princesses are so scantily clad that it is more the tile-glazed architecture and palm trees that orientalize than the costume or look. Of the three kung-fu trained ladies, one has red hair, one is a blond and the other is wearing what looks to me like the kind of aviator helmet worn by Amelia Earhart in the 1930s. The bully wears a leather waist band, but otherwise the shaft he was endowed with by nature is visible to the three princesses, but not to those of us viewing the video. Ironically, this parallels Said’s choice of the Gérôme’s painting that graced the cover of the original paperback of Orientalism: this features a naked boy with a snake wrapped around him and a group of grizzled Walnetto perverts staring at his organ, while we voyeuristic viewers can only see the glistening buttocks of the youth.

The “Arab princess” in the video is a makeout-makeover of the depiction of Yasmin in Disney’s Adaddin. Far from the damsel in distress, these three are damn dangerous out of dress. They not only can kick the ass who attacks them, they can knock him out cold. I suppose a preliminary look at the video could suggest that this is a feminist response to “Arab” patriarchy. As a demanding male, you should think twice before fooling around (or trying to fool around) with these three beauties. Any one of them could take you on and win. That is one message of the video. Of course, the fact that the three warrior princesses are almost naked, except for the military boots on two of them, makes this kind of “feminism” the wet dream variety of male porn addicts. As the video does not actually have a wardrobe malfunction, letting a nipple slip into view, it is pc in a formal sense. 

But let us not fool ourselves. This thoroughly sexist rendering of a so-called “Arab princess” is about the erotic manipulation of all female bodies. It is perhaps easier to accomplish this when there is also the background bias that these “Arab” women are usually veiled and compliant to male orders. But liberating women from veils, as odious as the notion of forcing a woman to cover up due to male inability to respect the natural beauty of the human body, in this video only frees them to be objects for male fantasy. 

And on the flip side, a burqa-clad super-heroine joins the world of Marvel comics. Well, it also ends up feeding many of the stereotypes of Muslim women. Here is an insightful article by Jahanzeb Dar on Islam and Science Fiction website: Female, Muslim and Mutant - Muslim Women in Comic Books:

Immediately, the gust of sand swirls into a tornado and swallows the leader’s hand and disarms him of his assault rifle. The sandstorm retracts while the Taliban leader screams and looks at his skeletal hand in horror. Finally, the Taliban rush to their jeeps and speed off from the town. The desert wind and sand transform to reveal the city’s invisible hero. 

Meet “Dust,” or Sooraya Qadir, a burqa-garbed adolescent Afghan girl who has the ability, as shown in the scene above, to shape into sandstorms and tear the skin off her enemies. She has been a member of Marvel Comic’s X-Men since her first appearance in 2002 and she currently appears regularly in the Young X-Men comic books. 

 

In the male-dominated world of comic books where female characters are depicted with large breasts and skimpy skin-tight (or lack of) clothing, it’s interesting to examine whether or not Dust and other Muslim super-heroines escape the sexual objectification and sexism that women often suffer in comic books. Are the Muslim women subjected to stereotypes? Are they doomed to the same fate of other female characters? Does the “male gaze” still apply?
...
Grant Morrison, the X-Men writer who created Dust, said in an interview, “It can only happen at Marvel. As Wolverine comes closer to unlocking the dark secrets of his past, an Afghan Muslim mutant joins the X-Men. You want daring? You want different? Then meet Dust as New X-Men challenges the rules again.” Though the word “awesome” may initially spring to mind when one reads this statement, it can be strongly argued that the male gaze is still in effect. 

For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology, the “male gaze” is essentially female characters being depicted and presented in ways their heterosexual male writers, artists, and audiences would like to see them. In the case of Dust, we can make an argument for the Western male gaze: an “oppressed” Muslim girl is rescued from Afghanistan by Wolverine, a Western male mutant. Wolverine is told that the Taliban were trying to remove Dust’s burqa, obviously to molest her, and since there don’t seem to be other Muslims around to take a stand against the Taliban’s perverted behavior, who better to rescue her than Wolverine, or rather, “Western democracy?” The scenario of Dust fighting the Taliban, as admirable as it is, occurs enough times in later issues that it makes one question if this is how Western male writers, artists, and readers want to see a Muslim super-heroine, i.e. to rebel against her oppressors, the mutual enemy of the U.S. government? 

To support this argument even further, there are many factors to consider, including political context. For example, Dust makes her first appearance in New X-Men # 133 which was published in December 2002, a little over a year after September 11th, 2001. In the issue prior to her debut (issue # 132), Morrison writes a tribute to the victims of Genosha, a fictional mutant homeland, where 16 million mutants were killed. 

There were two direct references to September 11th used in Marvel’s advertising of the comic book, calling the Genosha tragedy “the X-Men’s own 9/11.” The final page of the comic book shows the X-Men team crying at their loss. Next month, in issue # 133, we open to a full page of Wolverine slaughtering Taliban militants. Even worse, we see Pakistani terrorists hijacking an Air-India plane while Professor Xavier and Jean Grey are aboard. Xavier uses his psychic abilities to convince the Pakistani hijacker, whose name happens to be Muhammad, to put down his weapon and surrender to the Indian authorities. Muhammad begins to cry and as he is arrested, he says, “It’s true, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life!” Morrison takes revenge on Muslim extremists by (1) brutally slaughtering them (via Wolverine), (2) passively using mind tricks on them (via Xavier), and (3) rescuing an “oppressed” Afghan Muslim adolescent girl and taking her home (via Wolverine again)! 

Well, almost “home.” Wolverine carries Dust back to an X-Men headquarters in India (no X-Men headquarters in Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, I take it), where Jean Grey invites Dust to reveal herself from concealment. “It’s ok, Sooraya,” Jean says, “You can turn back into human form now.” Finally, Dust appears in her black burqa saying “Toorab! Toorab!” Wolverine remarks, “It means ‘dust.’ It’s all she says.”
Wow, the Arabic word for dust, “toorab,” is all she says? Not only does Morrison introduce us to a super-powered Muslim girl, but also to somewhat of a doll that exclaims “Toorab! Toorab!” whenever she gets excited about transforming back into human form. 

Is it possible to imagine Wolverine’s conversation with her flying to India? “So kid, what’s your story?” 

“Toorab! Toorab!” 

Dust can be easily compared to the hooded Jawa creatures from “Star Wars” who live on the desert planet of Tatooine, always bustling around and saying the same things over and over again in their alien language. 

We not only see a political bias here, which in turn justifies the Western male gaze, but we also see a female Muslim character that doesn’t have much of a personality. In other words, Dust is a token character. Morrison doesn’t even return to her character after this issue; instead he hands her over to other writers, but perhaps for the better, since they make significant improvements. 

Male dependency is another element at work here. Although one could argue that Wolverine is practically an indestructible character with his adamantium skeleton and rapid healing factor, it’s hard to believe why Dust would need any rescuing, considering her superpowers and her human enemies. If she was being recruited, the situation would be different and we wouldn’t see any sign of male dependency, but since we see a man rescue her, we assume that Dust’s superpowers are inferior: she is not nearly as powerful as male characters like Wolverine. We have seen female characters rely on their male counterparts in comic books many times before: Super Girl, Bat Girl, Spider Girl, the Huntress, She Hulk, Lois Lane, and so on. 

Importantly, there is not a single positive Muslim male character in Dust’s debut issue. There are the Taliban militants that want to molest her, and there are the Pakistani hijackers, but the Muslim women, who Morrison couldn’t possibly kill off since they are “victims” in the Muslim world, are innocent, good, and “waiting to be saved” by Western men. The racism and sexism work hand-in-hand.

If you are interested in the topic, there is a lot more in the article. It also talks about images of women in Muslim superhero series The 99 and in AK Comics, an Egyptian-based comic company considered as the first large scale super-hero genre in the Middle East.

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by Salman Hameed

Here is literally a beautiful depiction of the Iranian internet by graphic designer Maral Pourkazemi. She considers herself a design activist and has used art to show how the Iranian government has been controlling and censoring the internet. All governments are controlling the internet to various degrees (and those degrees do vary a lot), and Iran just last year formed the Supreme Council of Cyberspace for this very purpose. While the name sounds cool, it seems to belong to a future from a Philip K. Dick novel.

Here is Pourkazemi explaining the purpose of her design (via Slate):

In six panels, Pourkazemi breaks down the Iranian government’s curated/policed Internet experience, the dissident acts of users seeking the free Internet, and the paradoxical nature of the state’s stances on open internet access. In March of 2012, the Supreme Council of Cyberspace was formed to supervise all activity online. The group aims to combat “websites that have been set up to battle our regime, promote worshipping Satan, and stoke sectarian divides,” according to Hamid Shariari, a member of the council. 

Pourkazemi hopes that by illustrating this information artistically, the true internet can become more accessible. 

“This is the power of design. This is the power of emotionalizing,” she explains. “I wanted to inform people: What is the Iranian internet? Who is the Iranian user?”

And here is a short video (3 minutes): The Iranian Internet Between Freedom and Isolation

 

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by Salman Hameed

This week's NOVA episode focused on drone technology. It is an interesting episode, but does not really address some of the more complicated legal and ethical issues of this new form of warfare. I think one of the interesting comments in here is that the use of drones in the warfare at present is where the use of biplanes was right after World War I. That seems like an accurate and frightening statement. Also, what's up with the lighting? Most of the interviewees are shot in ominous light and a low camera angle. It is especially funny with one guy, who says that I would love to show you my new technology, but it is classified.. (ooo aa aah ha ha!).

Here is the NOVA episode, but check out some links to previous posts on the topic, as well as an excerpt from a recent article from Dissent:

Watch Rise of the Drones on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Here is a Pew opinion plot on How the Muslim World sees American science and the Drones:

Also read this piece from this week's The Atlantic responding to some questionable claims about drones by a fewUS experts on Pakistan: Yes, Pakistanis really do hate America's killer drones.

On ethics and legal front, see this earlier post, Ethics, Morality and Legality of Robotic Wars. In addition here is a thoughtful piece on these issues by Michael Walzar from Dissent Magazine: Targeted Killing and Drone Warfare:

Now, does it make any difference if the actual killing is the work of a drone, operated by a technician sitting in an office 3,000 miles away? Surely the same criteria apply to the drone as to any more closely manned machine. Why should we think it different from the sniper’s rifle? The difference is that killing-by-drone is so much easier than other forms of targeted killing. The easiness should make us uneasy. This is a dangerously tempting technology. It makes our enemies more vulnerable than ever before, and we can get at them without any risk to our own soldiers. Of course, intelligence gathering may still be risky, but the drones “see” so much more than any soldier or agent in the field that they make fieldwork seem less important. They combine the capacity for surveillance with the capacity for precise attack. At least, that is the idea, and assuming now that we are rightly in the business of killing, that there are people out there who deserve to be killed, what could be better? 

But here is the difficulty: the technology is so good that the criteria for using it are likely to be steadily relaxed. That’s what seems to have happened with the U.S. Army or with the CIA in Pakistan and Yemen. The overuse of drones and the costs they impose upon the civilian population have been carefully and persuasively documented in the Stanford/NYU Clinics’ report, Living Under Drones. I will focus on only one striking example of how the moral criteria have been relaxed in order to justify the overuse and the costs. According to an article in the New York Times by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, President Obama has adopted “a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that makes it much easier to call drone attacks “proportionate.” In effect, it “counts all military age males in a strike zone as combatants.” If the targeted insurgent or terrorist leader is surrounded by, or simply in the vicinity of, a group of men who are, say, between the ages of fifteen and sixty (and even drone surveillance can’t be precise about that), an attack is permitted, and everyone who is killed is counted as a legitimate target. But this isn’t targeted killing. 

There are ancient precedents for this sort of thing. According to Thucydides, when the Athenians captured the rebellious city of Melos, they “slew all the men of military age.” And according to the biblical book of Deuteronomy, when the Israelites besieged a city and “God delivers it into your hands…you shall put all its males to the sword.” Since the Deuteronomist goes on to exclude children, the two policies are identical. The new American doctrine isn’t the same. We are not aiming to kill all the men of military age, but we have made them all liable to be killed. We have turned them into combatants, without knowing anything more about them than their (approximate) age. That wasn’t right in ancient Greece or Israel, and it isn‘t right today. 

Drone warfare could take the form of targeted killing, and it could be justified under tough constraints. But the United States now seems to be using drones in a different way, as the instrument of a more general and less focused warfare. Drones make it possible to get at enemies who hide in countries whose governments are probably unwilling and possibly unable to repress or restrain them. This is a war without a front, where the use of ground troops, even commandos, is difficult, sometimes impossible—so drones have been called “the only game in town.” But we should think very carefully before relaxing the targeting rules and turning drones into a weapon like all the others. Their moral and political advantage is their precision, which depends on using them only against individuals whose critical importance we have established and about whom we have learned a great deal. Using them like an advanced form of artillery or like “smart” bombs isn’t morally right or politically wise. 

This last point can be driven home very simply: imagine a world, which we will soon be living in, where everybody has drones.

Yes - the last sentence is worth pondering about. Unfortunately, we will be encountering that world in the very near future. Read the full article here.

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by Salman Hameed

This is for your entertainment purposes only. Now we have seen hilarious statements from the likes of Zakir Naik, Harun Yahya, Yusef Estes etc. But they are not alone. Here is a state senator from Louisiana asking a high school teacher about evolution - and wondering if E. Coli turns into a human being. Yup. There are no minimum education limits or any requisite analytical abilities to be a state senator (tip from Farid Alvie and Shahid Saeed).



Not to be ever left behind, the agents of the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice decided to prevent the vices of some dino fossils in Dammam. It is unclear why they  did that - but shutdown they did:

A lady in Dammam, the hub of the oil industry on the kingdom’s Gulf coast, tweeted a complaint from a local shopping mall. Agents of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), she said, were causing an unpleasant scene. The government-salaried vigilantes, a bearded auxiliary police force familiarly known to Saudis as the Hayaa, had marched officiously into an educational exhibit featuring plaster models of dinosaurs, turned off the lights and ordered everyone out, frightening children and alarming their parents. 

It was unclear precisely why the religious police objected to the exhibit, which apparently had been innocently featured at shopping centres across the Gulf for decades. Malls are one of the few public spaces where Saudis mix socially, and so often draw the Hayaa’s attentions. Gone, however, are the days when its agents can go about their business unchallenged.

Remember that dinos are a problem for young earth creationists, like Ken Ham of the Creation Museum. But I don't know if this shutting down has anything to do with science. It could be any number of things. But if they were going after Barney - the purple dinosaur, then I'm all for the Vice- preventing, Virtue-promoting, agents:


But what is more entertaining (and hilarious) is the reaction on Twitter, which is becoming an excellent place to ridicule such actions in the Kingdom (though it also turned ugly for another Saudi, Hamza Kashgari. See this earlier post: This guy is probably going to die because of his tweets). Here is the reaction to the shutting down of dinos:

Within minutes of the incident, a freshly minted Arabic Twitter hashtag, #Dammam-Hayaa-Closes-Dinosaur-Show, was generating scores of theories about their motives. Perhaps, suggested one, there was a danger that citizens might start worshipping dinosaur statues instead of God. Maybe it was just a temporary measure, said another, until the Hayaa can separate male and female dinosaurs and put them in separate rooms. Surely, declared a third, one of the lady dinosaurs had been caught in public without a male guardian. A fourth announced an all-points police alert for Barney the Dinosaur, while another suggested it was too early to judge until it was clear what the dinosaurs were wearing.
...
Several contributors injected bawdy innuendo into their comments. Noting that one of the displays showed a dinosaur riding on the back of another, one message declared that this was obviously sexually suggestive and possibly could be categorised as a Westernising influence. "I confess," declared one penitent, "I saw a naked dinosaur thigh and felt aroused." Another tweet provided this helpful tip to the suspicious CPVPV: "No, no, that long thing is a tail!" 

But most of the messages singled out the religious police for ridicule. "They worried that people would find the dinosaurs more highly evolved than themselves," explained one. "It’s the Hayaa that should be stuffed and mounted so future generations can learn about extinct animals," quipped another. This message adopted a more pedantic tone: "Dinosaurs are a paleontological life form from an ancient geological era, and our clerics are a paleontological life form from an ancient social era." "Hello? Stone Age? We have some of your people; can you please come and collect them?" pleaded one tweep. Another wrote: "If the dinosaurs were still alive they’d be saying, thank God for extinction."

Read the full article here.

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by Salman Hameed

I did not know about the online journal, CyberOrient. It is relatively new and is published by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. Its editor-in-chief in Daniel Martin Varisco, who also runs the fantastic blog, Tabsir.net. 

The latest issue of CyberOrient is dedicated to The Net Worth of Arab Spring. Here is the editorial by guest editor, Ines Braune:

When I was asked to be the guest editor of the current issue of CyberOrient, I realized this is a welcome opportunity to arrange and re-sort some aspects, points, and arguments about the role of the media during the Arab Spring. In the course of the events late in 2010 and early in 2011, I felt enthusiastic and overwhelmed - not primarily as a scholar with a background in Middle Eastern and media studies, but as someone who was part of the peaceful German revolution in 1989 as a young teenager. Upon reflection, I took up the role of a media researcher considering how the use of media shaped these events. Though much has already been said and written about the media and Arab Spring, it would be worthwhile after a bit more than a year to reflect and reevaluate the relationship between the media and revolutions. Due to my involvement in this edition, and after numerous discussions with colleagues, and students in my media seminar in the summer term, I frequently came across the following three points: the significance of mediatization processes, the online-offline dichotomy, and various kinds of amnesia. 

Here are the other articles in this issue (all are available online): 

Political Activism 2.0: Comparing the Role of Social Media in Egypt’s “Facebook Revolution” and Iran’s “Twitter Uprising”

by Mohammed El-Nawawy and Sahar Khamis

Al Jazeera’s Framing of Social Media During the Arab Spring

by Heidi A. Campbell and Diana Hawk 

Remixing the Spring!: Connective leadership and read-write practices in the 2011 Arab uprisings

by Donatella Della Ratta and Augusto Valeriani 

Beyond the Soapbox: Facebook and the Public Sphere in Egypt

by Anton Root 

Egyptian uprising: Redefining Egyptian political community and reclaiming the public space

by Mervat Youssef and Anup Kuma

And two book reviews:

The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam

by Jon W. Anderson 

and 

The Arab Revolution: The Lessons from the Democratic Uprising

by Marek Cejka 

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by Salman Hameed

Stem cell research shows up Presidential politics here in the US. But it has been going on in Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, etc. Even embryonic stem cell research - the bone of contention in the US - is progressing without controversy in some of these Muslim countries. In case, you are interested, you can check out the official Malaysian Guidelines for Stem Cells Research and Therapy (pdf) and it also has a section on ethnics.

Now here is a news item about four women stem cell researchers from Qatar (tip from Don Everhart):

One of the first steps taken by the collaborations was to form the International Programme on Stem Cell Science and Policy, charged with examining the ethical and religious issues involved in stem-cell science, relevant to Arab culture, and engaging with local communities. Five years on, the plan is bearing fruit. 

Hamda Al-Thawadi, Halema Al-Farsi, Heba Al-Siddiqi and Sarah Abdullah joined the Qatar Science Leadership Program (QSLP), a QF initiative that aims to groom Qataris to take leading roles in Qatari science and one day steer its ambitious national programme of research. 

The QSLP sends students to train at some of the best universities in the world. And 2011 saw Al-Thwadi and Al-Farsi go to one of France's largest universities, University Paris-Sud 11, Al-Siddiqi go to Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Massachusetts and Abdullah go to the University of Cambridge in the UK. 

At the Qatar International Conference on Stem Cell Science and Policy held this past week in Doha, Al-Thawadi, Al-Farsi and Al-Siddiqi presented their research on ovarian cancer and obesity-related diseases. Al-Thawadi practiced medicine for two years before applying for the QSLP. "In the past there was only one path for a medical doctor, treating patients. But when QF started this programme, they created a new path for doctors or graduates interested in science," she says. "This is a perfect chance for Qatar to create home-grown researchers."

And Al-Siddiqi is a co-author on a paper published in Nature Cell Biology just this past month:

The first research paper Al-Siddiqi's co-authored was published in Nature Cell Biology in February 2012. "It felt amazing, especially after all the hours of hard work," she says.
Al-Thawadi and Al-Farsi decided to work on ovarian cancer as it is highly prevalent in the Middle East. Al-Thawadi incubated cancer cells in culture with Protein C, a coagulation factor, to test its effect on thrombosis of ovarian cancer cells, which led to a significant increase in metastasis. "This gives us a clue to outline preventative measures for thrombosis in ovarian cancer patients," she explains.

This is actually pretty neat! Read the full article at Nature Middle East.

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This is a weekly post by Nidhal Guessoum (see his earlier posts here). Nidhal is an astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at American University of Sharjah and is the author of Islam's Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science.

Two months ago, Khaled Elahmad, a Social Media instructor in Jordan, produced a ranking of the 100 most influential Arabs on Twitter. He stressed the fact that such rankings are prone to change quickly, as they depend strongly on the level of activity of the various players. However, I will venture that the list he produced is, at least in its general contours, not only very interesting but also largely still valid, particularly with regard to the remarks I would like to draw from it.

The reason for this assessment of mine is because as Elahmad himself emphasized, the ranking is not solely based on the number of “followers” that a person who’s active on Twitter has; it also relies strongly on evidence of influence, which can be reflected in the numbers of re-tweets, comments, dialogues on a given tweet, quality of the accounts following the person, etc.

Now, before getting to the list and its noteworthy aspects, it is quite interesting to note that, according to the 3^rd Arab Social Media Report, there were, as of September 2011, some 650,000 twitters in the Arab world (counting those who tweet at least once every two weeks), producing a total of 37 million tweets per month (or 14 tweets per second), 70 % of them being generated in the Gulf and Egypt. Even more remarkably, Twitter grew in the region at a staggering annual rate of 2,146 % -- which means that the numbers I just mentioned are obsolete and presently much larger. Also, English and Arabic are used in roughly equal frequency in these tweets.

Now, in the aim of determining the most influential Arab twitters, Elahmad used tweet.grader.com and mtwtron.com/top_users to get the top 50 Twitter users in major Arab countries; then he turned to Klout, a website which claims to determine a person’s online influence by using many different variables on Facebook and Twitter, including the size and social importance of one’s audience, the level of its engagement with the messages being posted or tweeted, etc.

The entire list can be found here, but I would like to reproduce the top 10 ranked Arab twitters and make a few comments:

Rank	Name	Country	Profession	Klout Score	Number of Followers
1	Sheikh Salman Alodah	KSA	Religious Scholar	82	625,147
2	Abdelaziz bin Fahd	KSA	Royalty	82	224,400
3	Faiz al-Maleki	KSA	Media	81	235,457
4	Dr. Mohammed Al-Arifi	KSA	Religious Scholar	81	760,367
5	Sheikh Dr. Ayid al-Qarnee	KSA	Religious Scholar	80	551,076
6	Battal Al-Goos	KSA	Media (Sports)	79	293,107
7	Nabil Al-Awadhy	Kuwait	Religious Scholar	78	427,449
8	Saad Hariri	Lebanon	Political Leader	77	85,164
9	Belal Fadl	Egypt	Media	76	268,884
10	Nawara Negm	Egypt	Media	76	172,396

Two things immediately jump up from this table:

·      The top 6 personalities are all from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia;

·      Four of the top 7 twitters are religious scholars (strongly conservative ones).

Also, only the tenth person is a woman, a leftist Egyptian media personality who is also the daughter of a famous popular leftist poet. Notice that the number of her followers is dwarfed by those of the religious figures in the list, but still her influence is quite high, denoting a certain quality of the audience she enjoys. On the representation of women, I should note that among the 100 personalities, I counted only 10 other women (and that included a popular singer and the Queen of Jordan). Which is consistent with the ratio of 14 % found for women overall among Arab twitters.

Oh, and Barack Obama, with his ArabicObama account, clocks in at # 18 – the only American figure in the top-100 list.

To tell you honestly, except for the above remarks, which speak for themselves, I am not quite sure what to make of this ranking – having never used Twitter myself, and resisting getting onto that platform. I am sure many of the above personalities, especially the religious and political ones, have employees who take care of their tweets, Facebook pages, and various announcements and interactions with their followers (in both the usual and the Twitter meanings of the term). That probably explains why there was only one educator in the whole list: Dr. Nawal al-Eed, who is a professor of Islamic Studies at Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University in Saudi Arabia, and who has 54,000 followers…

Perhaps those of you with experience and knowledge about Twitter can shed some interesting light on the above and make recommendations for a constructive and productive usage of this important tool. Right now, I am getting the feeling that it is used to perpetuate the old system of thought…

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by Salman Hameed

At a theoretical level, we can analyze the reasons why freedom of speech can be a tricky issue for nations for various reasons. We can also see why more and more cases coming to light on the struggle for individual rights versus the state in many Muslim countries. We can see that individuals are pushing the boundaries of expression and the states - resisting change - are pushing back.

And then of course, there is Saudi "women-still-can't-drive" Arabia. Just this past December, the government there executed a woman on the charges of sorcery. The life of Lebanese TV host was spared on similar charges after severe pressure from the international community. He spend "only" two years in jail - waiting to see if he will be executed this week or the next. And there are countless other cases like this. And no - please don't try to provide any defense for this kind of barbarity.

Now we have the case of 23-year old Hamza Kashgari. Yup 23 years old. He has just been extradited from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia - where is likely going to face execution.

Shame on Malaysia! He was trying to go to New Zealand and was arrested in transit. Initially it was reported that Interpol arrested him - but now it turns out that it was the work of just Malaysians.

Oh - wait. You might ask that he must be a dangerous criminal if he is going to be executed back in Saudi Arabia. After all, there is Facebook campaign calling for his execution. Is he a serial killer on the loose.

Well...he offended people via his tweets. He is deemed to have insulted the Prophet (PBUH). Even setting apart the fact that people can call for execution for such things in the 21st century, how must he have said in the limited twitter space? Were his tweets full of profanity?

Here are some of his offending tweets from Al-Akhbar:

Below are the controversial tweets posted by Hamza Kashgari along with their English translations. 

On your birthday, I will say that I loved the rebel in you, which always inspired me. But I didn’t like the aura of holiness, I will not bless you.On your birthday, I see you in my face everywhere I turn. I will say that I loved some things in you, hated some things, and I did not understand many other things.
On your birthday, I will not bow to you. I won’t kiss your hands. I will shake hands with you as an equal, and smile at you like you smile at me, and talk to you only as a friend, nothing more.

Burn him. Kill him. Tie him at the stake. 

An obscene number of people were killed in the witch trials from 16th-18th centuries. The estimates of witch-executions range from 40,000-60,000 people - most of them older women. I'm glad that Saudi Arabia has a low population. In addition, I doubt that the current monarchy's efforts to keep Saudi Arabia in the middle ages will last very long. Otherwise, the protectors of the Holy Land have the pre-requisites to match the brutal record of the pre-modern Europe. 

We have to stand up and raise our voice on this issue. If there is a facebook group calling for his execution - then I hope a lot lot more people can join together to eclipse these insane voices. You can at least join Save Hamza Kashgari Facebook page. If you know of a single petition place, add that in the comments.

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by Salman Hameed

So as of last month, Pakistan had roughly 6 million Facebook users (about 3% of population). Egypt - 9 million (11%). Malaysia - 12 million (42% of population!). Indonesia - 41 million (17% of population)!

This is just to give you a snapshot of the diversity of Facebook use in some of the more populated Muslim-majority countries. The correspondence of internet users and facebook users is almost 1 to 1 in Indonesia.

As for Pakistan, I found this graphic in today's Tribune. This pattern is most likely true at least for most of the developing world:

And here is a bit more info on users in Pakistan (I'm actually unsure as to how we lost a million people in the graphic below. I thought all stats were for 18 and above).

Indeed this is an elite educated group (3% of the population). I don't have similar stats for Indonesia or Malaysia, but it will be interesting to see if there are differences in gender fractions and/or education levels. In Malaysia, the distribution between different religious/ethnic groups will also be fascinating.

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