لبنانُ! أَوَّلُكَ الدّنيا، وآخِرُكَ الدنيا&#8221; 
&#8220;وبعدَك لا أُفْقٌ ولا شُهُبُ 
الياس أبو شبكة (١٩٠٣-١٩٤٧)
“Lebanon, you are the beginning of the world and the end of the world 
And beyond you, there are neither horizons nor meteors” (author’s translation) 
– Elias Abou Chabakeh, Lebanese poet (1903-1947)

I remembered Abou Chabakeh’s lines, saturated in deep-seated parochialism and singular self-sufficiency, when I introduced my Brit Lit students to worldmaking, imagined and forged by literature and art. This concept draws on the work of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1988), who sees in cultural expressions a confluence of material and intellectual forces shaping and conditioning real and fictional worlds – their boundaries, their past, present, and future. To Abou Chabakeh, writing in the aftermath of France’s imperialist formation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, the fledgling nation-state contained the world in its entirety: a world in a poem. Quite tellingly, Abou Chabakeh’s planetary fantasy of national triumph is completely detached from the larger Arab struggle for decolonisation. His ideal stands alone: insular, superior, wall-erecting – one that I would escape as far as I could: socially, intellectually, and emotionally.
Teaching is like that, sometimes; it infuses memories into the texts we are mining. At its core, teaching is a form of listening – listening to others and sometimes, listening to the ghosts that haunt us. Abou Chabakeh’s nationalist poetry haunts me. I, a child of the Civil War, recall reciting this nostalgic, nativist incantation as a quasi-pledge of allegiance to a venerated world I arrived into when it had already been lost. By tracing the vocabulary of empire, borders and nation-building threading through British literary history, I reflect on the foundational fictions that the patriotic poetry of Abou Chabakeh tells itself about Lebanon and its place in the world. I thought I left this world behind, ossified and mythified, and I resent its undiminished tug on my psyche.
It seems apt that I started planning this course, one that promises to cross boundaries and generic time periods, merely weeks after returning from a harrowing trip to visit my ailing dad in Lebanon. You see, for the last few years, my country of origin has suffered calamities big and small, tragic and sometimes bordering on the farcical: from medicine shortage, to a fuel crisis, to price inflation, the list of state-sanctioned crises grows by the day. Amid rampant political and financial corruption, the losses, the ruins are hard to tally. My parents, like so many, many others, live a life of perpetual precarity: they have lost their lives’ savings; they purchase privately-hauled water; they ration their food; they self-medicate; they queue up for long hours to buy gasoline, cars clogging the highway. Perhaps metaphorically, their once happy, healthy chickens stopped laying eggs. They tell me, even if unconvincingly, that their lives are in God’s hands. Mashallah and alhamdulillah.

In preparation for my trip, I buy vitamin supplements and painkillers in bulk. I order rechargeable flashlights and batteries online. I stock my suitcases with mundane items like deodorant, shampoo, and dish soap. I bring my mother an assortment of bonbons and chocolates, now delicacies she cannot afford. I resist the urge to compare myself to a character in a dystopian novel. Fictive hellscapes are my community&#8217;s daily reality. There is no catharsis here – only a raw and visceral collision with a damaged world.
Like Abou Chabakeh fantasy of a cosmic Lebanon, Beowulf’s Herot, the fictional mead-hall where major events in the early medieval poem take place, is construed as the “wonder of the world”. I tell my students we should feel uneasy about the concept of imago mundi, or a place as the image of the world. Mythologising a place, idealising a homeland, whether it is Herot, Lebanon, or the United States, engenders hierarchy. If only a select few are deemed privy to this fantastical, edenic topography, then a de facto need for border policing and criminalisation follows suit. Put differently, border-making justifies racist violence to ensure that those considered unworthy and disposable in this hierarchy of differentiation are denied entry into this fantastical world of wonder and abundance.
My students are understandably perplexed. We are, after all, troubling the dance of power, knowledge, and resistance between the privileged and the deracinated, the entitled and the non-entitled.

The jolt of recognition returns in our lesson on pre-modern cartography, which is inspired by <a href="https://youtu.be/RGgRgHJ9AhE">Nedda Mehdizadeh</a>’s capacious pedagogy. My class examines the performative speech act of putting the word “America” on <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html">Martin Waldseemüller&#8217;s world map</a> for the first time in 1507 as a form of violent worldmaking. Indeed, the act of naming is a power move; it inscribes the settler colonial project of white Europeans in the Americas into existence. It is an origin story, a “birth certificate” as the Library of Congress calls it, predicated on the genocide of Indigenous populations, the forced migration and labour of enslaved Africans, and the extraction of land resources. More importantly, the fiction of totality that maps communicate constitutes an act of “worlding” (cf. <a href="https://postcolonial.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/spivak_readingarchive.pdf">Spivak 1985</a>); one that erases the memory, subjectivity, and geography of non-white people under the holistic banner of the “world”. The same imperial forces that legitimised settler colonialism in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, arbitrarily divided the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the outset of the twentieth century. The French and English, as victors of World War I, performed a similar act of domination that reordered the world and cemented white European imperialism at the top of the global hierarchy. They surveyed lands and drew borders across Greater Syria that aligned with their self-interest and crushed native world-building aspirations. By its very essence, the long history of map-making tells a recurrent story of power and displacement.

Further on, when we look at the <a href="https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/mappa-mundi/">Hereford Mappa Mundi</a> (ca. 1300) and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/al-idrisi/">Il-Idrisi’s world map</a> (1154) side by side, my students and I grapple with what it means to have two maps that position different geographical places as their focal centres – Jerusalem in the first, and Mecca, in the second. While the Mappa Mundi follows the three divisions of Asia, Europe, and Africa common in European medieval world maps, Al-Idrissi’s world is divided into the seven climates after Ptolomy, where the geographical vistas inhabited by Arabs appear as most viable, fertile. How can we see the medieval past, my class asked, through Arab and Muslim eyes? To what extent can we trouble a hermetically-sealed system of knowledge production that lionises Europe as the epicentre of worldmaking?
Literary history affords the space and scope to ruminate over these questions. It engages in worldmaking by dwelling on the stories that shape known and imagined worlds. In other words, our worlds are animated by what we mythologise, who we alienate and dehumanise, how we define our personhood, and where from our deepest desires and fears come. I understand people’s hesitation – scepticism, even – about drawing parallels between different temporalities and geographies, seeing in this enfolding of time and space an anachronism or an oversimplification. However, unless we actively reframe the questions we ask, reconceive the stories we tell, and open up the publics we serve, we will continue to recreate that hierarchical world that has been bequeathed to us by hegemonic knowledge producers. In this light, Puck’s famous line in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “to put a girdle round about the earth,” reveals its sinister underbelly. Puck’s colonial fantasy to circumnavigate and stake the world in forty minutes frames worldmaking in lyrical language. Indeed, Puck’s beautiful imagery conceals the colonial forces that destroy Indigenous ecologies and erect extractive systems. Encoded in the language of wonder, desire and expansion is the undercurrent of violence intrinsic to the imperial project. In other words, the back-seam of pre-modern European exploration is racial exploitation.

For another lesson, my dear friend Matthew Harrison suggested that I teach the early medieval poem, <a href="https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/">&#8216;The Ruin&#8217;</a> to inhabit this sense of utter loss, of living a life amid the rubble of the past. In class, we dwell on these profoundly moving lines:
     [&#8230;] The halls of the city 
     once were bright: there were many bath-houses, 
     a lofty treasury of peaked roofs, many troop-roads, many mead-halls 
     filled with human-joys until that terrible chance changed all that.
In this early medieval poem, we encounter layers of grief, echoing and multiplying. My students and I finally share a brief moment of mutual affirmation. The struggle, the “terrible chance”, that we collectively, albeit unequally, endured during the pandemic makes us empathise, albeit selectively, with this overwhelming sense of suffering. Our losses of “human joys” operate as a shared language.
And my thoughts drift back to my communities in Lebanon, and the stirring urge to affirm their lives amid the litany of devastation: the port explosion of 2020; the ongoing financial collapse; the ravages of the pandemic; and the dispossession of migrant workers and refugees. Paradoxically, their losses refuse to be romanticised: “No poetry in the ashes,” as the poet Suhair Hamad tells us. Teaching is like that, sometimes. It holds space for the impossibility of rendering tragedies as artistically coherent moments in time.
As we contemplate the value of literature in the face of calamity, my students and I wonder about the stories that will emerge out of this moment of enormous loss? What traumas will we pass down? What shapes will our ruins take? What phantoms will we release? What fragments will we leave behind, about what we had and who we lost? And then, suddenly, amid the engulfing sense of destruction, a fragile question lingers as a testament to the intense emotional bonds that poetry affords: can we open ourselves to the possibility of forging a different, more just world? In the aftermath of disaster, we are left with the fragile hope that our worldmaking would be transformed by the possibilities of a radical imagination and creative practices; by the freedom to tell stories and love fiercely; and by dreams of being with, in, and for a borderless world.
&nbsp;
<pre>Photo Credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eternal_Sabah_Mural_on_Assaf_building_in_Hamra,Beirut_-_Nightshot.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></pre>

Eternal_Sabah_Mural_on_Assaf_building_in_Hamra,Beirut_-_Nightshot

Reflecting on Lebanon’s current moment is a chance to step into multiple worlds to take down borders and forge more just ones.

The world in a poem: Notes on displacement and diaspora

Iraqi photographer Maythem Ridha intimately captures Morocco’s shades and hues 
Maythem Ridha opened his exhibition Beyond Moments: Morocco in <a href="http://www.artsrichmond.org.uk/event-detail.php?eventid=6282&amp;catid=2&amp;id=40">Isleworth’s Redlees Studios</a>. A cluster of buildings with airy, light interiors, give the impression of an artist’s village, providing a serene backdrop to this exhibition. Opening over three days, with sun-dappled photographs lining the walls, it is a journey through Morocco’s backstreets and lesser-seen landscapes. Vivid and vibrant, the photographs travel from mountains to suburban villages to ghettos and encampments. The familiar Moroccan backdrops of crowded bazaars, a blended mass of turquoise and bronze, are there alongside less commonly seen images of landfill sites and extreme poverty and isolation in rural villages. The colours are, as expected, dazzling and the editing fantastic, imbuing an almost painted quality to many of the photographs. 
As a first generation Iraqi professional photographer and filmmaker, Maythem is something of a rarity. His recent exhibition focused on his travels in Morocco, a country he reports having been to several times since his teenage years. His exhibition follows on from previous photography projects centred in Morocco and around the Middle East, including his native Iraq, and deviates from other projects focused around more abstract themes relating to the interface between the environment and the man-made world. Instead, he moves away from landscape and hones in on people and individuals as his subject matter. The exhibition is very much testament to this. There is an almost three-dimensional effect in the intimate way with which he has captured these often un-tapped-into communities. 
Alongside his prints, he also debuted his first published book <a href="http://maythemridha.com/beyondmoments">Beyond Moments: Morocco</a>, which is a beautifully set out collection of all his photographs as well as other prints not included in the exhibition. There is a real pride emanating from him about this project, now being translated into both French and Arabic to reach the very communities it so beautifully captures. 
I had a short interview with Maythem where he took me through his journey, starting with his childhood inspiration for photography in the form of his uncle’s old camera with which everything was documented. At the age of nine he moved to the UK from Iraq and was limited by language in communicating with other children. Thus, photos and visual communication became his only channel. He started taking photography seriously aged 12 after he was gifted a camera. By 16 he was earning extra pocket money photographing school events and selling the photos to parents. His career continued to flourish following this precocious start, starting work at MBC just as Middle East television began to increase in influence, in turn nurturing his talent and enabling him to become a successful filmmaker. Throughout, photography remained his passion. He has now undertaken several photography projects including photographed communities and landscapes across the Middle East. 
There is something of a loss of the arts amongst first and second generation Iraqis in particular. Often raised by parents with strong memories of a fractured homeland and intent on fostering life, hope and opportunity for their children, much of their persuasion centred around clear vocational routes. An unfortunate by-product of this is the notion of the arts as inherently financially unstable, appearing to grow at times into something of a cultural taboo when creative pursuits like photography are mentioned. Maythem therefore stands as quite the inspiration for second-generation immigrant Middle Eastern children. I spoke to him about the photography course which he now runs successfully, taking students both abroad on field trips and in this country. It was heartening to learn that the number of ethnic minority students has increased over the years. So the opportunities grow and the skill-set branches out, both for second and third generation children of immigrants and for the communities they photograph. 
We spoke at length about the trust that he seeks to build with the communities he worked with. His photographs are stark. A naked eye into communities: Berber weddings; children from ghettoes against graffitied walls; women squinting in the sunlight, mistrustful and guarded. This intimacy and trust comes, he tells me, from his ability to communicate in linguistic and cultural terms. His fellow western photographers were unable to reach as far in, or win trust quite so easily. Herein lies the significance of diverse backgrounds in the arts – only then can we also engage diverse backgrounds. The patchwork of humanity grows once connection is formed, and so relationships expand. And we, as viewers, are granted precious entry to worlds we may never have otherwise known. 
Having won the <a href="http://muslimnews.co.uk/news/uk/winners-muslim-news-awards-excellence-2017/">AlHambra Award for Excellence in Arts</a>, Maythem continues to run masterclasses and workshops in photography and filmmaking. He is heavily involved in international projects, and spoke of returning to his native Iraq as the possible focus of future photography endeavours. Iraq, he tells me, is so poorly represented outside of newsreels and disaster footage. As his photobook is translated and published in two other languages, he seeks to open this latest exhibition in Morocco itself as well as further out in the Middle East. His unique position will continue, as he tells me, “…to open barriers. They believe I see things from their perspective rather than as an outsider. And in turn, I portray the communities how I would want my communities, so misunderstood, to be portrayed.” This can only bode well, then, for a new era of photography in the Arab world, by the Arab world. 
You can purchase new photobook by Maythem Ridha here: <a href="http://maythemridha.com/beyondmoments" target="_blank" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en-GB&amp;q=http://maythemridha.com/beyondmoments&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1501829704298000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEW1u06UOWqnZ6aMAw251MSNVwZhw" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://maythemridha.com/beyondmoments</a>. 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/BeyondMomentsMorocco">Follow &#8216;Beyond Moments&#8217; on Facebook here.</a> 
<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Maythem-Ridha.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-12853" src="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Maythem-Ridha-819x1024.jpg" alt="Maythem Ridha - Photography" width="350" height="438" /></a>
<pre><a href="http://maythemridha.com/beyondmoments">Featured photography: (c) Copyright Maythem Ridha</a></pre>

Portraits and Landscapes in ‘Beyond Moments: Morocco’

Early-20th century nostalgia and romanticised archeology narratives ignore colonialism and exclude gender and race  
&nbsp; 
Over the last few months of the U.S. presidential election, one candidate in particular has referenced Syria and Iraq so frequently that one might mistake him for a scholar of Middle East Studies. He is not. 
On the political stage, Benghazi, Aleppo and Mosul are emptied of all meaning as real places where actual people live. Instead, place-names become signs for right-wing conspiracy theories, or props in an elaborate pretense that <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/10/02/trump-vs-clinton-on-debate-night/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Donald Trump</a> – or the average voter, for that matter – is well-informed about U.S. foreign policy. We are not. 
The flattening of Muslims and Muslim-majority countries into negative stereotypes is not exclusive to the United States, of course. The majority of UK citizens found the idea of Syrian refugees crossing its borders so abhorrent that they were <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/06/29/editorial-the-brexit-die-is-cast/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">willing to leave the EU,</a> sink the entire British economy, and call it patriotism. Indeed, British culture is so rife with racist rhetoric that it permeates even that most British of art forms – <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/10/06/from-the-nation-to-the-stars-at-the-60th-bfi-london-film-festival/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the period drama</a>. 
*** 
Years after the series ended, ITV’s <a href="https://itvstudios.com/programmes/agatha-christie-s-poirot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Agatha Christie’s Poirot</a> (1989 – 2013), starring David Suchet, is a perennial favourite among fans who are drawn in by equal parts mystery and aesthetic. The 1920s and 30s look far more stylish on screen than they perhaps ever did in reality, even for the most wealthy aesthetes. For added glamour, one of Poirot’s favourite pastimes is travelling to archaeological digs throughout the Middle East and North Africa. 
In episodes set in Egypt (‘Death on the Nile’, ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’), Iraq (‘Murder in Mesopotamia’), or Syria (‘Appointment with Death’, though the novel is set in Jordan), Poirot’s class status is clearly marked by his three-piece summer suit in varying shades of sandstone, a straw homburg, and a small lapel pin in the shape of a vase with flowers, which is as much of a trademark as his waxed moustache. 
Poirot’s dapper attire is not so unlike the sartorial sensibilities of Sir Max Mallowan, renowned English archaeologist and second husband of Agatha Christie. Her first marriage, to Archibald Christie, ended badly, with her husband’s infidelity and her own mysterious disappearance. Afterwards, perhaps to escape scandal, Christie went on an extensive tour of Mesopotamia, or present-day Iraq. It was at Ur, famous for its ziggurat and as the birthplace of Abraham, that she met Mallowan. Over the decades that followed until her death, the couple travelled extensively, and she frequently assisted in her husband’s excavations, which informed her novels and, to a lesser extent, the television series. 
But the books aren’t really about the Middle East or archaeology, and even Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir uses archaeology as a metaphor for digging in the past. She writes in the preface: “A final warning, so that there will be no disappointment. This is not a profound book–it will give you no interesting sidelights on archaeology, there will be no beautiful descriptions of scenery, no treating of economical problems, no racial reflections, no history.” This kind of disclaimer is standard boiler-plate language for women writing non-fiction in the early-20th century: women should avoid all claims of expertise, and so Poirot becomes Christie’s alter-ego, emphasis on the ego. 
For all of Poirot’s posturing as the world’s most clever detective, Christie’s novels aren’t incredibly profound or informative either. She is great at dialogue (though some of the best lines in the show&#8211;as when Dr. Leidner says in ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’, “All I ever wanted to do was dig in the earth and find the secrets that time has buried there.” – never appear in the books), but her descriptions of place are rather sparse. This might be surprising given the show’s lush sets, but Christie’s novels are very much of their time and genre. Popular fiction after World War I abandoned the rich detail associated with Victorian literature; instead, Christie’s novels read almost like plays – there is plenty of dialogue, a few stage directions, and everything else is just flat backdrop. By contrast, the ITV programme works so well because, paradoxically, the modern television camera sees the world through a strangely Victorian eye – every detail is captured, every object is in focus, and every textile preserves its texture. 
Like Christie’s memoir, Agatha Christie’s Poirot does not treat economic problems either, though the disparity is obvious, and there’s no historical background, but as for “racial reflections” the series gives more than it perhaps intends. In the archaeology episodes, we see the (almost always male) locals in three classic aesthetic models: large crowds of manual labourers or diggers to add a sense of sublime scale to the digs; the picturesque peasant; or the mysterious suspect hiding in the shadows. These are the same archetypes used throughout British travel literature. In other words, locals are simply racial stereotypes, used as props and plot devices to push along the narratives of the largely Anglo ensemble. 
In order to buy into the romance of archaeology, we must ignore the fact that it is (or at least was) largely a colonial project, and that the discoveries we praise would not be possible without the invisible labour of the local populations. In order for the fantasy to work, we must excise the problematic aspects that make us uncomfortably complicit. The alternative is to acknowledge the fact that our idealisation of archaeology in the early-20th century is built on nostalgia – we only remember what we want to remember – and nostalgia is frequently only accessible via white privilege. We see this nostalgia playing out in nationalistic calls to close border or “make America great again”. 
I’m not suggesting that we abandon Poirot or other programmes that feature problematic treatments of race, gender or sexuality. There would be nothing left to watch. But we should be more aware of the ways in which these two-dimensional racial stereotypes permeate our culture, and ever more vigilant when we hear them in the mouths of politicians.
<pre>Image from: http://bit.ly/2esOXL0</pre>

Digging up Nostalgia: Archeology and Racism in Agatha Christie’s Poirot

Female domestic workers in Oman suffer extreme hardship with forced labour, abuse and little or no recourse to legal assistance  
&nbsp; 
“She kicked me and I fell on my chest. [Then] she picked up my head by grabbing my hair,” Mamata told me. “They [the family] beat me mercilessly. I became numb from all the beating.” 
Mamata, a domestic worker from Bangladesh, spoke with me in 2015 in a run-down building in Muscat, Oman’s capital, about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her employers. She, like many other domestic workers, told me a story of coercion, exploitation, and abuse in Oman, a country where she never even intended to be. 
The ordeal of Mamata, whose name we changed for her security, began with her paying some GBP £700 to a recruitment agent in Bangladesh to secure her a £150-per-month domestic worker job in the United Arab Emirates. Yet just a week after she arrived in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, a medical test revealed that she has a blood disorder, so her employer returned her to the recruitment agency in the UAE. 
The agents took her to their office in Al Ain, a town that straddles the UAE-Oman border. She was there for 25 days, along with other women, until the agents told her to go with an employer to Oman. Mamata pleaded that she did not want to go, but the agent replied, “Die here then.” She begged her new employer too, but he told her, “I bought you.” He took her to Oman, where he forced her to work 21 hours a day with no rest and no day off for a family of 10, including 6 young children. He and his family only allowed her one phone call in two months, did not provide enough food, paid her nothing, and beat her. 
More than 140,000 female migrant domestic workers are in Oman. Many receive decent salaries and have good working conditions, but others, like Mamata, face a far bleaker reality. 
My colleague and I interviewed 59 migrant domestic workers in Oman for a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/13/oman-domestic-workers-trafficked-trapped" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Human Rights Watch report</a> released this past July. Most said that their employers had confiscated their passports even though Oman prohibits that, making it harder to leave them if they’re abusive. Many said their employers did not pay them their full salaries, forced them to work excessively long hours without breaks or days off, or denied them adequate food and living conditions. Some said their employers physically abused them; a few described sexual abuse. Sadly, Mamata’s fate may not have been any different if she had remained in the UAE. In <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/10/22/i-already-bought-you/abuse-and-exploitation-female-migrant-domestic-workers-united">an earlier report</a>, we documented similar abuses against domestic workers in the UAE. 
Some workers we interviewed in Oman described abuses that amounted to trafficking into forced labour. They said they applied for jobs in the UAE, but after arriving there, recruitment agents or employers forced or coerced them into crossing the porous border into Oman with employers who exploited and abused them. 
Embassy officials of Asian countries where some of the UAE domestic workers come from told me that Omani and other Gulf country employers often travel to Al Ain on Fridays to find a domestic worker. One said that women, many of whom had travelled to the UAE for domestic work, were confined by the recruiting agencies and sometimes “put on display” for potential employers. Another said that it is “just like window shopping.” Employers who get domestic workers this way often evade legal requirements for hiring foreign labour, and this deprives workers of even minimal protections. 
An Indonesian embassy official in Oman told me that 60 out of 100 women whom the embassy had sheltered in April 2015 after they fled abusive employers had come to Oman by crossing the UAE border. They did not know the workers were in the country, and so they had no way to ensure that employers offered health insurance or complied with other protection measures such as verifying that employers can pay their salaries. 
Domestic workers have fewer protections than other workers in Gulf states, where countries such as Oman and the UAE explicitly exclude them from their labour laws. Moreover, abuses against domestic workers are facilitated by Oman’s abusive kafala (visa sponsorship) system. This system, in force in many Gulf states, ties migrant domestic workers’ visas to their employers. Workers cannot change jobs without their current employer’s permission, and they risk imprisonment and deportation for “absconding” if they leave, even if they are fleeing abuse. 
Some domestic workers who fled abuse in Oman told us that police not only failed to help them, but sometimes made matters worse. Mamata said that when she first escaped. she went to the police in Oman for help. They returned her to her employer, who beat her and locked her in a room for eight days with only dates and water. Mamata was awaiting her return home, but had received no redress for the abuse, when I met her. 
Oman, the UAE, and other Gulf countries should reform their immigration and labour laws to protect domestic workers’ rights, and cooperate on investigating cases of trafficking. Otherwise more women like Mamata will end up trafficked and trapped. 
Featured Image: A migrant domestic worker watches over a child playing in the Magic Planet, City Centre Muscat, a shopping mall in Oman. © 2015 Rothna Begum/Human Rights Watch

Trafficked and Trapped in Oman

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seeks an alternative to its dependence on the petroleum sector and the House of Abdul Wahab 
&nbsp; 
From the time of its establishment in 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has always been recognised as one of the most powerful members of the Gulf states. With a rapidly growing economy on the international stage, success has been credited to the oil booms in the 1930s which led to Saudi Arabia becoming the largest exporter of oil in the world. That said, in recent developments, the Kingdom has come to the realisation that its once most valuable and profitable natural resource can no longer be its only source of income. 
A young prince with a vision 
Confronted with plummeting oil prices which has created a budget deficit spiralling to over 13 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product (GDP), the country was forced to mete out funds from its coffers, consuming roughly $116 billion of its foreign currency reserves in a matter of just one year. It appears that money has been leaking out of Saudi Arabia following the Arab Spring era, with the <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/01/22/britain-and-saudi-the-shame-of-2-8bn-of-arms-sales/">Saudi-led war in Yemen</a> diverting roughly 8 per cent of the annual GDP. Since the Yemen war, the country has been using up its foreign reserves at an alarmingly high rate. While it is no secret that Saudi Arabia has always relied copiously on the petroleum sector for a significant portion of its state budget, and nearly 100 per cent of its earnings come from exports, extreme circumstances like these beg the question of whether or not experts and the Saudi government itself ever predicted such a possible collapse to its economy. 
Taking heed to possible insolvency being only a few years away, 30-year-old Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently decided to take matters into his own hands, announcing plans for a major restructuring of the Saudi government and its economic affairs. Having witnessed saturated oil markets with cheap prices, new reforms indicate plans involving a shift from unrefined petroleum to developing renewable energy. The deputy crown prince has reason to believe such transformations will help achieve what he refers to as his generation’s “different dreams” of a <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2016/01/14/the-climate-justice-movement-will-thrive-despite-the-failures-of-paris/">post-carbon future</a>. 
Last month, the Saudi government released the <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/features/2016/04/26/Full-text-of-Saudi-Arabia-s-Vision-2030.html">Vision 2030</a> highlighting the afore-mentioned reforms and restructuring. The main aim of the vision is to generate a significant amount of revenue from means other than petroleum. A number of action plans have already been put into place by reducing considerable subsidies for commodities such as gasoline, electricity and water. In fact, the price of retail gas was raised by almost 50 per cent, translating into a spike from 60 cents a gallon to about 90 cents. Furthermore, there is speculation regarding the possible implementation of an income tax in addition to a VAT and further levies on items such as luxury goods and sugary drinks. However, according to a statement made by Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf, the Kingdom has <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/news/no-income-tax-vat-starts-2018">no plans to enforce income tax</a> on its people but has made the decision to introduce VAT by 2018 as agreed on at the 102nd meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) finance ministers which was held in Riyadh. 
Quick fix solution 
The current position of Saudi Arabia is a difficult one where the country’s only feasible export can no longer sufficiently pay the bills to sustain the nation. The deputy crown prince, however, aims to change such bleak perceptions of the Kingdom by raising funds at a time of low oil prices, announcing plans to make shares of Saudi ARAMCO – a state-owned oil company – open for public purchase. Sceptics are not too happy with the privatisation of the state’s largest asset even though the <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-aramco-ipo-could-be-5-of-value-1461256171">total shares of the IPO</a> amount to less than 5 per cent of the company potentially being valued at $2 trillion. 
Taking a look at the bigger picture has some people wondering what the rationale or end game is behind such an unprecedented move. Why is Saudi Arabia taking such actions now when they had 80 years to do so? Perhaps they see the IPO as a quick fix solution to the plummeting oil prices in the market. 
Wahhabism and social reforms 
Considered the power behind the throne, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a vision that not only focuses on economic reforms, but also on social restructuring, a plan which he claims will work towards promoting and reinvigorating social development in order to build a much stronger and more productive society. The new reforms programme intends to introduce a modern curriculum focused on rigorous standards in literacy, numeracy, skills and character development. What’s more is that the prince has spoken about providing more freedom and rights to women, proof of which can be seen in the <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/saudi-arabia-strips-religious-police-arresting-power-160413141418824.html">new ban issued to the Saudi religious police</a> stopping them from making any arrests without obtaining assistance from other authorities. 
These social transformations are potentially going in a positive direction, but the truth of the matter is that things are not always as simple as they may seem. All this would call for a massive breach of a historic pact the House of Al Saud made with the House of Abdul Wahab in which Al Saud agreed to protect and promote the doctrines of the Wahhabi movement, while Ibn Wahhab would support the ruler with power and monolithic control of the Kingdom in exchange for clerical power in matters such as education and the judiciary, in addition to segregation of women. As part of this status quo, for instance, the Minister of Religious Affairs has always been from the Al-Sheikh family, a descendant of the house of Ibn Wahhab. 
The extremely conservative religious movement known as Wahhabism has often been referred to as the predominant feature of Saudi culture. So much so, that one can argue that education has always been the vital binding element that connects the religious clergy with wider state bureaucracy. With education as a powerful agent of socialisation, the clergy are at the forefront of creating a national vision of the state’s values which are tailored to the official narrative of the state. They play a major role in writing school materials and preparing textbooks which are in accordance with the religio-political parameter of the Wahhabi-Saudi coalition. 
With that in mind, the government may be providing more social freedom and rights in the country, but educational and curriculum reforms will prove to be a much greater challenge. Clerical control over the curriculum at school and university results in generating Islamic extremists among Saudi youth, which may translate into domestic security issues. Such control is also producing graduates that have a weak understanding of numeracy, foreign language development and other skills that may be required to find employment. In other words, Wahhabi ideals are serving as barriers to economic reforms as they are hindering progress, as well as holding back women in the workforce. 
As such, the Saudi government is currently cornered; it must consider the consequences of upsetting the House of Abdul Wahab in order to sustain the economy. What the future holds for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its plans for development is something only time will tell.
<pre>Image from: http://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/oil_0205.jpg </pre>

Saudi Arabia: Saving the Economy from Collapse

The profitability of the war in Yemen has kept Britain and Saudi on exceptionally close terms 
&nbsp; 
When Saudi authorities opened the year 2016 with a mass execution, they did so to propagate a message, loud and clear; that despite the political and financial challenges the country may be facing, all matters will continue as normal. 
<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/saudi-announces-execution-47-terrorists-160102072458873.html">Forty-seven people were killed</a> on 2nd January, in a barbaric assault that saw the slaying of political prisoners, some of who were killed simply for the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-executions-the-political-protesters-who-were-killed-and-those-still-on-death-row-a6795016.html">&#8216;crime&#8217; of attending demonstrations</a>. The diplomatic fallout has exacerbated tensions in the region and seen a breakdown of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran. 
At the same time, the intensifying Saudi-led bombardment of Yemen has created a humanitarian catastrophe. The bombing began 300 days ago, and, since then, over 5000 people have been killed and vital infrastructure has been destroyed. The British Red Cross said that the conflict has left the country on <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/michael-van-koesveld/yemen-british-red-cross_b_8955076.html">&#8216;the precipice of disaster’</a>. Not even hospitals are safe. A <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-led-air-strikes-hit-centre-for-blind-people-and-commerce-building-in-yemen-a6799166.html">care centre for the blind</a> and <a href="http://www.msf.org/article/yemen-another-msf-supported-hospital-bombed">three MSF medical facilities</a> have been damaged by bombs in the last three months alone. 
Reports from <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/yemen-151007015252750.html">Amnesty International</a> and <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/11/26/yemen-coalition-fails-investigate-unlawful-airstrikes">Human Rights Watch</a> have accused the Saudi air force of violating international humanitarian law, but few governments have been listening. 
The UK, for instance, has fully supported and cooperated with the destruction. At Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this week, the SNP’s Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, made the point that the UK has been an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10153466421341939/">active participant</a> in the conflict, and it’s easy to see why. Right from the start, Foreign Secretary <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/yemen/11500518/UK-will-support-Saudi-led-assault-on-Yemeni-rebels-but-not-engaging-in-combat.html">Philip Hammond pledged</a> to &#8220;support the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat”. Since the conflict began the UK has licensed <a href="https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences/licence?rating=Military&amp;region=Saudi+Arabia&amp;date_from=2015-03&amp;date_to=2015-09">£2.8 billion of arms</a> to the Saudi government. UK military personnel have helped Saudi authorities to <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/foreign-secretary-uk-helping-saudi-led-yemen-campaign-36234269">identify targets</a> and, according to Defence News, UK bombs earmarked for the RAF have been transferred to Saudi Arabia to <a href="http://www.defensenews.com/story/breaking-news/2015/07/16/britain-diverts-bombs-destined--raf--help-saudi-fight--yemen/30236031/">aid the bombing</a>. 
Of course, the issue of UK support extends far beyond the actions of this particular Conservative government. Over the last 40 years, various UK governments have built a special military relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 
The last time there was any real scrutiny of the UK weapons trade with Saudi was in 2004, when the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/15/saudiarabia.armstrade">Serious Fraud Office</a> began looking into corruption relating to arms sales to the regime. The investigation threatened to unearth a litany of embarrassing details, but, after a concerted lobbying effort, including <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/court-condemns-blair-for-halting-saudi-arms-inquiry-807793.html">interventions by Tony Blair</a> and the attorney general, it was dropped. Shortly after, <a href="http://www.standard.co.uk/news/saudis-seal-20-billion-deal-to-buy-72-eurofighters-from-bae-6683427.html">a deal was signed</a> to sell billions of pounds worth of fighter jets to the regime. 
Another outcome of this cooperation has been the high level of integration of UK and Saudi military programmes. About <a href="https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/saudi-arabia/modsap">240 civil servants</a> and military personnel from the UK’s Ministry of Defence currently work to support military contracts through the Ministry of Defence Saudi Armed Forces Programme and the Saudi Arabia National Guard Communications Project. 
Over recent months, serious allegations emerged that Britain helped lobby behind the scenes to secure Saudi Arabia&#8217;s election to the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/uk-and-saudi-arabia-made-secret-deal-to-exchange-votes-for-human-rights-council-seats-leaked-a6673491.html">UN Human Rights Council</a>; a membership which would be laughable if the on-going consequences weren&#8217;t so serious. Furthermore, it is, perhaps, no surprise that Saudi was the only major death penalty state to be omitted from the UK&#8217;s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-told-diplomats-not-to-challenge-saudi-arabia-over-death-penalty-a6796546.html">anti-death penalty strategy</a>. Perhaps none of this hypocrisy is surprising when the Foreign Office has admitted that human rights are no longer a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/human-rights-are-no-longer-a-top-priority-for-the-government-says-foreign-office-chief-a6677661.html">&#8220;top priority&#8221;</a> for the government. 
The consistently uncritical political and military support that Britain offers to Saudi Arabia is not just immoral – it may well be illegal. A recent legal opinion from Matrix Chambers, commissioned by Safer World and Amnesty International found that <a href="http://www.saferworld.org.uk/news-and-views/news-article/683-press-release-uk-government-breaking-the-law-supplying-arms-to-saudi-say-leading-lawyers">the </a>UK government is <a href="https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/countries/saudi-arabia/modsap">breaking national, EU and international law</a> and policy by supplying weapons <a href="http://www.saferworld.org.uk/news-and-views/news-article/683-press-release-uk-government-breaking-the-law-supplying-arms-to-saudi-say-leading-lawyers">for use in Yemen</a>. 
That is one of the reasons why Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and our lawyers at Leigh Day have announced that a <a href="https://www.caat.org.uk/media/press-releases/2016-01-11">pre-action letter is being issued</a> to the government to challenge its decision to export arms to Saudi Arabia, in light of the growing evidence that Saudi forces are violating international humanitarian law. We are calling on the government to suspend all licences for military equipment that may be used in Yemen, pending the outcome of a full review as to whether the export of military equipment is compatible with the EU arms control legislation. 
Fawning political and business support of governments like the UK serves to fuel the Saudi regime and makes the chances of long-term peace in the region even more remote. Saudi is not just buying weapons – it’s also buying this <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2013/12/18/from-westminster-to-the-gulf-the-uk-arms-industry-is-everywhere/">western endorsement</a> of its actions. The result is that Britain is both ignoring the abuses taking place and helping to facilitate them. 
The bottom line is that as long as the Saudi government enjoys the political and military support of some of the most powerful western nations, oppression and destruction will continue. Violence will be the norm, and innocent Saudi and Yemeni citizens will continue to pay the price.
<pre>Image from: http://sputniknews.com/europe/20151217/1031900958/uk-government-saudi-arabia-arms-exports-illegal.html</pre>

Britain and Saudi: The Shame of £2.8bn of Arms Sales

Despite Turkey and the international community, inhabitants of Kobanê maintain a strong and united voice of resistance that surpasses imposed borders 
&nbsp; 
A few elderly women stand on a mountain, wearing traditional Kurdish clothes and the recognisable white headscarf. In front of them is a wire mesh fence. One woman holds a megaphone in her hands. You cannot see those beyond the fence, but it is obvious that it is a desperate attempt at communication. This weak, almost symbolic, fence happens to be the border between Turkey and Syria. 
The black and white photograph has stuck with me since I saw it for the first time. It shows the reality of Kurdistan. A reality in which artificial borders have separated lovers, families, tribes and entire villages and cities. These borders go back to the end of World War I, when new techniques of colonial mapmaking changed political geographies and the understanding of statehood. For the lives of those inhabiting the region, this has meant nothing less than division, separation and, consequently, the loss of identity. The Turkish-Syrian border was drawn along railroad tracks, for instance. Colonial powers decided that the railroad tracks would suffice in the territorial delineation of the new nation states. So one day, inhabitants living on one side of the railroad found themselves part of what the Turks called Suruç, and those living on the other side became Syrian citizens of Ayn al-Arab, despite the fact that they were all Kurdish and all from the same city &#8211; Kobanê. 
It is this city, as insignificant as colonial powers thought it would be, which is now occupying headlines all around the world. The Kurdish YPG and YPJ (People’s Protection Units) in Rojava, northern Syria, have been fighting against IS for more than two years now, while international powers are still debating how to approach the crisis and whether or not to support the Kurds. In the meantime, the Turkish military have positioned tanks at the Turkish-Syrian border and have watched from a distance as huge clouds of smoke rise from the city. Islamic State has been literally knocking on Turkey’s door, but no action has been taken to repel them as the weeks have gone by. Instead, Turkey’s AKP government, the Justice and Development Party, has denied any responsibility to support the Kurdish resistance. Statements from government officials predicted the fall of Kobanê, and made suggestions that there was no difference between the YPG/J and IS, so it has increasingly appeared as if Turkey has been counting on IS to eliminate any signs of Kurdish self-administration and autonomy in Rojava. 
&nbsp; 
<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/border-in-qamislo-nusaybin-1975.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter wp-image-11104" src="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/border-in-qamislo-nusaybin-1975.jpg" alt="border in qamislo nusaybin 1975" width="350" height="233" /></a> 
&nbsp; 
The Kurds in Rojava have managed to establish a semi-protected and autonomous region in the midst of the Syrian war. With three cantons, of which Kobanê is one, a radical democratic experiment was launched for the first time, based on gender equality, direct democratic principles and full representation of all societal groups organised in a council system. This project was ideologically attached to the concept of a democratic confederal system for the whole Middle East, first devised by Abduallah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who has lived on a prison island in Turkey since 1999. Kobanê for the Kurds, therefore, is not only a city that is under attack, but it stands symbolically for the possibility of Kurdish autonomy beyond the establishment of another nation state. 
However, a Kurdish entity based on inclusive, gender-egalitarian, grassroots democratic principles right next to Turkey continues to be regarded as a direct threat to the integrity of the Turkish nation state. While the international community was expecting Turkey to take an active role in providing a humanitarian corridor and facilitating the transport of ammunition and weapons to Kobanê, all that the Turkish government did was to set conditions for their support there: the Kurds should join the Syrian-Arab opposition; the PYD, the political arm of the YPG/J, should distance itself from the PKK; the three cantons of Rojava should disintegrate; and finally, a buffer zone should be established in northern Syria, which would mean a Turkish occupation of Rojava. Despite the fact that these conditions are morally questionable, they are also unacceptable to Kurds. Once more, the Turkish state proved that even the idea of a Kurdish entity owning political rights inside or outside the Turkish borders will be directly targeted by oppressive actions. Thus, protests in solidarity with Kobanê in Turkey, especially in Kurdish cities like Diyarbakir and Mardin, were met with massive police violence, causing the death of 48 civilians. 
Turkey, as a country with the highest Kurdish population, a violent history of ethnic conflict with the Kurds, and an ongoing, fragile peace process with the PKK, cannot just watch from a distance as a murderous group calling itself Islamic State attempts to massacre tens of thousands of Kurdish people across the border. It also cannot disassociate those living inside Turkey from the people resisting in Kobanê. When Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, stated that Diyarbakir has nothing to do with Kobanê, he was wrong. Resistance in Kobanê echoes across the border and is going to highly influence the development of the Kurdish question in Turkey. The recent events in and around Kobanê have shown that the artificial borders created by the Sykes Picot Agreement in 1916 are not functioning any more. Those who claim that Turkey has no responsibility are, therefore, not only sticking to a nation state paradigm that disregards the realities on the ground, but are also repeating Turkish state propaganda. 
Every time Kobanê is mentioned in the news, I think of those women in the photograph using a megaphone to speak to their families across the border. The world has witnessed how the resistance of Kobanê has become a voice uniting those who have been separated by artificial borders. According to a Kurdish saying, you can brew a tea in Suruç and drink it in Kobanê. This is how attached the geography, people, culture and history of the region are to each other. This is also how close Kobanê’s liberation is today.
<pre>Featured image: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/meet-kurdish-women-fighting-isis-syria-n199821</pre>

Kobanê’s Liberation Is Near

Knee-jerk bombing of ISIL is not a long term solution to their atrocities; a more human politics is needed 
&nbsp; 
The beheading of British aid worker David Haines on September 13 was the latest monstrosity carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). For British Muslims, it was doubly distressing that this evil act was carried out, apparently, by a British Muslim. The Muslim community here unanimously condemned this barbarism. 
From a moral and theological point of view, an entire community or religion should not be blamed for the actions of a crazy few. But all too often, when people see evil emanating from some Muslims, the potential is there to unfairly put the whole community in the dock. 
There are now fears that ISIL&#8217;s extremism is <a class="InternalLink" href="http://rt.com/uk/188672-isis-right-extremism-uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">fuelling Islamophobia and a far-right backlash </a>in the UK. While others have denied there is a growth in the actual number of far-right activists, most observers seem to agree that there is a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment across the UK. This is a big worry for Muslims and a huge burden on our social and political leadership. And of course ISIL&#8217;s rise also re-emphasises the danger of sectarian tensions within the Muslim community. Thankfully, David Haines&#8217; brother, Mike Haines, quoted verses from the Quran and made it clear by saying: &#8220;The <a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11095810/The-Muslim-faith-is-not-to-blame-for-Islamic-States-brutal-murder-of-my-brother-says-Mike-Haines.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Muslim faith is not to blame for ISIL</a>, nor is it the fault of people of Middle Eastern descent.&#8221; 
Global crisis 
ISIL has, in fact, created a global crisis and presented world leaders with a challenge they cannot afford to ignore: They must hold their nerve and the civilised world needs to find creative, political, and more importantly, human ways of solving this problem of nihilism in our midst. For that is what ISIL is: a nihilistic movement that is the enemy of hope and togetherness. 
How the global community handles this barbarity is a big question. Certainly Muslims worldwide have unanimously rejected ISIL&#8217;s publicity-seeking terror antics, endlessly repeating that it is a million miles away from Islam&#8217;s teachings. 
The easiest option for some trigger-happy leaders would be to bomb ISIL into the stone age. This may temporarily halt or reduce its power, but it will come back again or re-emerge in another name. 
Violence in the Middle East will not simply go away without ethical politics in the region. We must not forget how al-Qaeda emerged in the 1990s, due in part to a political vacuum in Afghanistan; the result was the Taliban regime that gave shelter to the terrorist group. 
It is now clear that the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a recipe for the influx of al-Qaeda into Iraq that has now morphed into the more vicious ISIL. With swaths of land in Iraq and Syria under its control, it has plunged the Middle East into an even more serious predicament than before &#8211; one in which the viciousness of al-Qaeda and the Assad regime is all too easy to forget. 
Common sense 
Common sense and natural wisdom suggest that a replay of the post-9/11 knee-jerk reactions, and another display of &#8220;shock and awe&#8221; firepower by the US and its allies, would be the worst step: This will give ISIL the propaganda coup it needs and deepen the crisis for all involved. 
US President Barack Obama has at least grasped that reality and said that <a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/09/obama-us-will-not-fight-ground-war-iraq-2014917152136499184.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">US forces will not fight another ground war </a>in Iraq. This is a welcome declaration, but there are big holes in the US-led strategy in the current crisis. With the United States&#8217; resumption of &#8220;the long war&#8221; in Iraq and possibly in Syria, a new open-ended &#8220;war on terror&#8221; (WoT) appears to have started. 
By waging this endless war, the US appears to be digging its heels in the Middle East sand. Gone are the days when the world sighed with relief at Obama&#8217;s declaration in 2010 that the<a class="InternalLink" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/7772598/Barack-Obama-declares-the-War-on-Terror-is-over.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> &#8220;war on terror&#8221; was over</a>. Very few people now believe him. 
The Middle East needs some respite from violence. The US can be a catalyst for this if it decides to become a fair player in the region, with a consistent people-friendly policy. By siding with authoritarian regimes depending on military might alone, the US has so far made things worse in this region. It is an irony that western democracies have one rule, a robust democracy, for their own people but different ones for others. 
You can kill terrorists through fire power, but slaying the demons of terrorism needs something more &#8211; a human dimension in politics, as well as accountability, and allowing local citizens a stake in their public affairs. 
Limitless injustice 
When citizens see only limitless injustice orchestrated by their corrupt and incompetent leaders, sustained by foreign players, the result is a vicious circle of despotism and violence. In an inter-connected global village with instant communication, no country can remain insulated from another. By ignoring others&#8217; peril, we sow the seeds of our own peril at a future stage. 
There are positive examples of global cooperation. Powerful and rich countries &#8211; governments and private citizens alike &#8211; have dug deep to help fellow human beings in developing countries. Britain leads in this area, devoting up to 0.7 percent of its GDP to foreign aid. 
Why can&#8217;t this happen in the political field of weaker countries? Why do the powerful nations often go &#8220;fishing in the muddy waters&#8221; in other parts of the world? The rise of ISIL could have been thwarted if the US had insisted earlier on a non-sectarian inclusive government in Iraq and if mainstream political opposition to Syria&#8217;s brutal regime had received timely support. No wonder some cynics and conspiracy theorists can feel free to accuse the US and its allies of giving ISIL a free hand, so that the terror group can then be used as a bogeyman to continue a long war in the Middle East. 
The emergence of violent extremism and nihilism in some parts of the Muslim world is primarily due to the failure of politics, exacerbated by the harmful influence of foreign powers. Although al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, Boko Haram and ISIL speak in the language of Islam, they have emerged in an authoritarian, corrupt, and incompetent political system. 
We are in the midst of a generational and geopolitical crisis in the Middle East. Until the Arab world can institute minimum democratic accountability and establish basic rights for its people, the region will remain unstable and a breeding ground for violence. As it stands, this will not happen until the US and its close allies stop supporting or propping up brutal regimes. 
Image: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10892898/Iraq-crisis-Q-and-A-Who-or-what-is-ISIS-Is-it-part-of-al-Qaeda.html

Countering the Demon of Terrorism

The roots of ISIS leave few unstained 
&nbsp; 
ISIS (also known as ISIL) is the acronym for the terrorist organisation known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levant">the Levant</a>). Since June 2014, the group has been referring to itself simply as the Islamic State (IS), and has conquered a large swath of land that straddles the Syria-Iraq border with an estimated area equivalent to the state of Jordan. 
The Iraq War and Syrian Civil War 
ISIS has its origins in Iraq’s Al-Qaeda offshoot which, in 2006 began calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). Though Al-Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq prior to the 2003 Iraq War, and was indeed hostile to the regime of Saddam Hussein; in the chaotic aftermath of the war, Al-Qaeda was able to establish itself as a terrorist force in the country. While Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, it is the Bush administration’s choice to start a second Gulf War that should be seen as one of the most important causal acts in creating the precursors of ISIS in Iraq. 
In addition to a destabilised Iraq, the Syrian uprisings have also been an important factor. The current conflict started after incipient peaceful protests against the Assad regime in early 2011 were met with violent state repression. Such repression helped create increasingly radicalised opposition groups that countered the transgressions of the Assad regime with similarly gruesome crimes. It is this violent anarchy in Syria, which persists to this day on a horrifying scale, that has provided fertile ground for the establishment of ISIS. 
The Rise of Sectarian Tensions 
Perhaps the most immediate cause for the extraordinarily rapid expansion of ISIS in these regions is that it has faced almost no resistance from the populations in the primarily Sunni territories it has conquered. This is because, with the rise of bitter sectarianism between the Shi‘a and Sunni populations following the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, both the Sunni majority in Syria and minority in Iraq have suffered much persecution at the hands of the ruling regimes. 
Iraq’s most important leader of the last decade, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, had become <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2014/06/mosul_s_collapse_is_nouri_al_maliki_s_fault_iraq_s_prime_minister_failed.html">notorious</a> for his calculated attacks against Sunni political leaders and populations, exacerbating sectarian tensions and alienating Sunni regions that felt powerless and disenfranchised. Similarly, in Syria, most of the opposition targeted by the Assad regime is Sunni. In the territories conquered by ISIS, with its virulent anti-Shi‘ism, the tables have now turned completely. 
Of course, no geopolitical situation of this scale ever has a single cause. Some go back in time and blame the postcolonial dismemberment of the region. ISIS appears <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/25/map-isis-hates/">particularly exercised</a> by the ‘evils’ of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. One could also cite the <a href="http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/the_west/">long history of interference</a> of major Western powers, most notably the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_policy_in_the_Middle_East">United States</a>, which has tended to support brutal dictators in the region, who in turn have kept civil society severely emasculated. 
Regional powers also hold a good deal of the blame in dealing with the aftermath of the illegal American invasion. The problem with the blame game, however, is two-fold. Firstly, superpowers never accept blame, but rather act in accordance with the insightful <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/260802-crime-once-exposed-has-no-refuge-but-in-audacity">remark</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus">Tacitus</a>, that ‘their crimes once exposed have no refuge except in audacity’. 
Secondly, it is always possible to go back further into history, taking another step along the chain of events that led to the current predicament. This allows people’s biases to influence which starting point they choose, however specious it may be. Hence, much of the mainstream western media effectively blames the same region that they <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15234-how-the-media-fueled-the-war-in-iraq">clamorously</a> and disastrously <a href="http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/iraq-and-the-media/">demanded</a> be invaded in 2003. 
Is ISIS popular among Muslims? 
An important question arises as to the popularity of ISIS among Muslims worldwide. Among a global population of around 1.6 billion Muslims, even according to the highest estimates, <a href="http://rt.com/news/183048-isis-grow-expand-jihadist/">ISIS forces</a> make up a negligible 0.0006% of the Muslim populace. And yet they are by far the largest Muslim terrorist organisation by numbers. Most Muslims around the world are horrified at their behaviour, which has been <a href="http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/08/21/muslim-leaders-have-roundly-denounced-islamic-s/200498">condemned</a> by Muslim leaders and organisations the world over. 
The only place they seem to have support is among some Sunnis in parts of Iraq and Syria, but this is widely acknowledged to be due to their opposition to the Iraqi and Syrian regimes that have been <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/18/sectarian-conflict-iraq-maliki-us">persecuting</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/world/middleeast/in-homs-syria-sectarian-battles-stir-fears-of-civil-war.html?pagewanted=all">the</a> <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-syria-killing-family-idUSTRE80Q06J20120127">Sunni</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-iraq-a-sunni-revolt-raises-specter-of-new-war/2014/01/06/280f9216-7714-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html">opposition</a> <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21580618-islamists-government-proving-harder-opposition-power-religion">for</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/world/middleeast/fading-hopes-of-unity-in-iraq-as-sectarian-tensions-rise.html?pagewanted=all">many years</a>. The popularity of ISIS among these Sunni groups at present is almost certainly not because of the sudden popularity of jihadist ideology, but because of the manner in which Sunnis have been terrorised in both Syria and Iraq over the past few years. 
Under such circumstances, ISIS, who <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-leader-preaches-holy-war-abu-bakr-albaghdadi-puts-persecution-of-shiasat-heart-of-his-ideology-ahead-of-push-on-baghdad-9590571.html">persecute the Shi‘a</a> at every opportunity, can present themselves as saviours of persecuted Sunnis. The grave danger this entails is that it can only make ISIS more popular in the Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq. Perhaps the most effective way to prevent the growth of ISIS is to do what we can to prevent the ongoing cycles of violence in both Syria and Iraq that only exacerbate sectarian tensions in the region. Sadly, the cycles of violence seem destined to persist for the foreseeable future, at least in Syria, given the lack of any meaningful efforts to put an end to the violence on the part of international powers. 
There’s no question that ISIS plays up its Islamic bone fides. But can a group that claims to be Islamic automatically be considered representative of Islam as followed by the majority of the world’s Muslims? For many commentators, this is simply taken to be the case, particularly by those who are not experts on Islam. The vast majority of the world’s Muslims, by contrast, will do what they can to dissuade others from arriving at the conclusion that Islam plays a central role in the formation of such organisations. 
A Bleak Future? 
The reality is that all ideologies, religious or otherwise, are liable to have both moderate and extreme manifestations. The European Enlightenment, seen as a legacy to be proud by much of modern Western civilization, gave us Secular Liberalism, but it also gave us Communism, Fascism, and Nazism. Christianity is the modern world’s largest religion, and is a source of solace for millions, but there also exists the extreme Christian right in the US, whose Presidential candidate of choice, George W. Bush, helped create a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Tables">death toll in Iraq</a> of appalling proportions—far greater than what any extremist non-state actor in the 21st century has managed to rack up. 
Ultimately, the negligence and paralysis of the international community, alongside the inefficacy of the region’s states in the face of the Syrian conflict has permitted the creation of horrors that may haunt us for many years to come. When all sides have blood on their hands, who can be a saviour?
<pre>Image from: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/16/terrifying-rise-of-isis-iraq-executions</pre>

Understanding ISIS and the Prospects for Peace

ISIS is yet another addition to decades of cruelty suffered by the Middle East; the West cannot ignore its role in the crises 
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The Arab world, the heart of ancient civilisation and birthplace of the three Abrahamic faiths, is now haunted by a mounting monstrosity: the so-called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">Islamic State</a> (IS). Their <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28862268" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">latest online video release</a> purporting to show the beheading of US journalist James Foley by a killer with a British accent is shocking. Muslims across the world have expressed their abhorrence to this group; the main British Muslim umbrella group, the MCB, has called their actions <a href="http://www.mcb.org.uk/not-in-our-name-british-muslims-condemn-the-barbarity-of-isis/" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">psychopathic violence</a>. 
IS&#8217;s atrocities are just a horrible addition to many years of cruelty in the region. For decades tin pot dictators, power-hungry militaries and monarchical autocrats have played havoc with their own people &#8211; killing opponents, bulldozing cities, gassing villages, pilfering state wealth, and above all, allowing foreign powers to turn the region into a theatre of war and anarchy. Some did this in the name of Arab nationalism and others used religion as a political ploy. 
All this started with the dismal social degeneration of the once powerful Ottoman Empire and its disastrous support for Germany in WW1 a century ago. The political naivety of the collapsing Ottomans and mindboggling Arab opportunism was then used by the British Empire to orchestrate an anti-Ottoman revolt from its Arab provinces. In a secret <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">Sykes-Picot Agreement</a> Britain and France decided to bring strategically important Ottoman Arab territories into their sphere of influence; with artificial boundaries they created pliant Arab states. 
<a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2014/07/15/world-war-i-and-the-arab-revolts/">WW1</a> caused death and destruction on an industrial scale; most deceitfully it sowed the seed of long term enmity between the Arab people. The worst case was in historic Palestine which, because of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration,_1917" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">Balfour Declaration</a>, created a generational conflict between two people &#8211; the Jews and Muslims. 
Fast forward: today the Middle East is reaping what was sown 100 years ago. The reign of terror in Baathist Syria and Iraq, military autocracy sapping the energy of Egyptian people and depravity of Gulf monarchies (with varying degrees) have some links with European colonial enterprise designed to milk Arab wealth. 
The continuous brutalisation of the Palestinian people and Israeli illegal settlement expansion &#8211; with direct or indirect support from the US and its allies &#8211; has proved long term lethal. <a href="http://www.the-platform.org.uk/2014/07/20/palestines-mountains-of-blood-and-shattered-bones/">Gaza carnages</a> by the Israeli military machine every few years is one such example. 
However, the latest nail in the fractured Arab body came from the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which took place in spite of international outcry. Driven by a neoconservative agenda and with breathtaking arrogance, the US jettisoned all international legality in Iraq; it was imperial hubris at its worst. Under a US &#8216;shock and awe&#8217; barbarity Iraq, once a centre of Muslim civilisation, saw a replay of Mongol savagery of 1258. The Geneva Convention was thrown out of the window and the world witnessed the death, destruction and humiliation of a people by an occupying power. 
When the world&#8217;s sole superpower adopts a &#8216;might is right&#8217; policy, autocratic forces elsewhere find cues to do the same to their adversaries; the result is a &#8216;Law of the Jungle&#8217; and loss of moral compass that we see now in many parts of the world. 
The demonic evils of the IS, which is neither Islamic nor a state, has horrified us all. By terrorising and killing ordinary people and posting revolting images online, the group is handing over massive propaganda weapons to Islamophobes everywhere. 
We must not forget the fact that IS is, in-part, a by-product of a brutal and immoral invasion of an independent Iraq by America, not dissimilar to the way Al-Qaeda emerged after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 
Dangerous proxy wars are now haunting Iraq and Syria, following sectarian lines In spite of historic theological and political differences between Sunni and Shia Islam, the Muslim world was spared from a bloodletting that Europe saw between the two branches of Christianity in the Middle Ages. The current Sunni-Shia violence, though a sign of extreme degeneration within today&#8217;s Arabs, has something sinister behind it &#8211; the impact of foreign domination. 
Nobody expects the US and its close allies to come and rescue the Arabs from their current misery; but it is for their own &#8216;national interest&#8217; in an inter-connected world that these global powers avoid replicating their past misdeeds. Beggaring the neighbour is not only unethical, but also counter-productive in the long run. The Arabs expect some degree of ethics in the Middle East policy from the US and its allies; but what they see now is double standard. Is the blood of ordinary people killed by IS&#8217;s cruelty in Iraq different from the blood of innocent people in Cairo&#8217;s <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/08/12/egypt-rab-killings-likely-crimes-against-humanity" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">Rab&#8217;a massacre</a> last year? 
Iraq is trying to form a <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/iraq-new-pm-urges-country-unite-2014815111338737983.html" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">unity government</a> under domestic and international pressure, it is vital America and its allies make sure their humanitarian assistance does not end up in another &#8216;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_creep" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">mission creep</a>&#8216;. 
America, still an <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21601535-no-other-country-comes-close-americas-hard-power-its-lead-slipping-unrivalled" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">unrivalled global military force</a>, has an extra obligation to be fair for the sake of world peace. Like a wheel global power rotates, the US will one day lose its supremacy; common wisdom demands it does not remain on the wrong side of history for so long. 
Meanwhile the Arabs will not be in such a perilous state forever. They have a uniquely rich religious heritage to stand up and have also a history of shaping destiny themselves when they are at their worst. What they probably most need now is a new breed of trusted leadership with vision, wisdom and political acumen. They have missed a golden opportunity of the 2011 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring" target="_hplink" rel="noopener noreferrer">Arab Spring</a> due to the dearth of this political leadership, and also because of conspiratorial vested interests. But one day, hopefully not too long in future, they will rise up again and unshackle themselves from this continuing humiliation. 
No light may now be visible at the end of the Middle East tunnel, but it is just a matter of time when this new force will rise from the ashes.
<pre>Image from: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/iraq-turmoil/isis-scud-dud-missile-likely-not-operational-us-officials-say-n145916</pre>