Morning Report: June 18, 2007

Friends and allies: In an ancient city, old friendships come under new strain. How to build lasting bonds with the right people?

The death of Alexandria. Big Pharaoh:

For you who don’t know the history of this city, Alexandria was equated with its European counterparts because of its beauty. Today only remnants remind us of this beauty.

I remember a few years ago my mother took me to see her Italian grandfather’s old house in Alexandria. We went up the flat and knocked on the door. An office boy opened the door informing us that the apartment now houses a trading company. We entered the flat and my mom started walking around the flat telling me what each room used to be. “From this window I used to tiptoe and order zalabya (a kind of oriental sweet pastry) from the sweet shop” she told me.

I will never forgot this visit. A visit to the past. I felt so depressed. Knowing Egypt’s past and looking at its state now is what crushes me the most. ...

Hamza Hendawi:

The only women in Alexandria who don’t wear the Islamic veil are Christians and a small minority of Muslims.

Women have long stopped wearing swimsuits on the city’s popular beaches. Those who wish to take a swim do so under the cover of pre-dawn darkness.

“Alexandrians have lost their traditional ties to the beach and sea,” lamented Mona Abdel-Salam, a 42-year-old independent journalist, who says she would wear a swimsuit only on exclusive private beaches or at the pools in luxury hotels.

Most of the city’s famous bars, restaurants and night spots are no longer in business, their owners long ago returned to Europe for good. Only a few – mostly elderly people – remain from the once prosperous and large expatriate community of Greeks, Cypriots, Italians, French and Armenians who once made Alexandria Egypt’s most cosmopolitan city.

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest Islamist group, has more lawmakers elected from Alexandria than from any other city. ...

Hendawi ascribes the rise of Islamic fundamentalism to "authoritarian rule, chronic economic woes and a culture of corruption".

Commentary. Via ThreatsWatch, here's Seth Leibsohn in NRO on Gaza:

A democracy showing weakness where terrorists thrive is a sure recipe for disaster if only one condition is met: Cede land to the terrorists and encourage the democracy to withdraw. The Middle East is now in the balance between forces of composition and forces of decomposition. Just as the world community, and many in America, did not want Israel in Gaza, and now it has Iran and Hamas there, the world community, and many in America, no longer want the U.S. in Iraq. But what would be left as Sunni Baathists, al Qaeda, and Iranian militias have staked their claims to that country? We can leave, that is the easy thing to do. But look at Gaza once more, and ask: What will come next?

One thing to keep in mind about the Middle East is that there's a consistent pattern of tension between two opposing forces: secular (ethnic, usually Arab) nationalism and religious fundamentalism. This morning's post from Big Pharaoh illustrates this, as does the recent Fatah/Hamas conflict. For Westerners, the temptation in the past has been to see the one as a bulwark against the other, or even to play the two against each other (the most notorious example being the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s).

But there's another alternative. Here's the Tharwa Community:

The Tharwa Project is an independent initiative that seeks to provide a free platform for the discussion and dissemination of ideas that can contribute to raising the standards of civic awareness in the Muslim World, especially the Broader Middle East and North Africa Region.

The main aim of the Project is to help shed some much needed lights on the aspirations and concerns of the various ethnic communities inhabiting the Region, be they religious, linguistic or national. In doing so, Tharwa hopes to facilitate the unfolding processes of modernization, democratization and peacebuilding in the Region by giving such critical and sensitive issues the attention that they need and merit, seeing that they indeed lie at the very heart of the current thrust for change.

Indeed, Tharwa seeks to foster better relations and establish free channels for communication and dialogue between minority groups and the majority population in each individual country and across the Region. ...

Egypt, Gaza, and the West Bank may be heading for dark days. The West's true ally in the Middle East is neither Arab totalitarianism nor Islamic fascism, but liberal democracy.