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Ed Webb

Oman's national unity racks up high cultural costs as local languages fall silent - Al-... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...-under-risk-of-extinction.html

Oman language languages culture identities nationalism

shared by Ed Webb on 26 May 21 - Cached
  • In Oman, the Gulf Cooperation Council country with the greatest linguistic diversity, eight of the country’s 10 languages are threatened or dying
  • the minority languages in Oman belong to three families: the Indo-Iranian Kumzari, Lawati (also known as Khojki), Zadjali and Balochi; the Modern South Arabian Harsusi, Bathari, Hobyot, Mehri and Jabbali; and the Bantu language Swahili. Only Balochi and Swahili have enough world speakers to be considered safe from extinction.
  • Some of the risks these languages face are due to the structural reforms — mainly in the field of education — instigated by Sultan Qaboos bin Said for the last five decades to promote national unity over a constellation of identities scattered across the state, with an emphasis on language. Ever since a coup orchestrated by British intelligence in July 1970 overthrew Sultan Qaboos’s father, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the state's official language, Arabic, has been a key element of this newly crafted Omani identity. 
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  • Oman's efforts to increase literacy rates have further strengthened the use of Arabic as the language of education. Other mother tongues were not included in the curricula, even as secondary languages, in the regions where they were widely used. It hastened the decline of local languages, as their use became limited to the family and local community. As the number of public schools has grown steadily from one in 1951 to more than 1,100 in 2017, Al Jahdhami reports an "intense exposure to Arabic" among the youth and a shift toward the language.
  • the young generations simply ask, “What would I learn this for?” because outside of the home, Arabic is the predominant means of communication
  • Across Oman's Dhofar mountain range, between 25,000 and 50,000 people who belong to different tribes and clans speak Jabbali (or Shehri), which literally means "the language of the mountain." However, although the youth are proud of having a language of their own, with its colorful vocabulary for nature and the mountains, their language proficiency is much lower than that of the older generations. This is partly because the young generation, educated in Arabic, employs a mixture of Jabbali and Arabic. Furthermore, the internet and TV — whose content is predominantly if not exclusively in Arabic — are aggravating the loss of linguistic skills among young Omanis. 
  • In the north, the tribal community in the village of Kumzar tries to hold on to its language, Kumzari. At 5,000 speakers, UNESCO considers Kumzari severely endangered. It is a Southwestern Iranian language that is heavily influenced by Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hindi and English.
  • To save ancestral traditions and reach out to Kanim’s tech-savvy generation, a Dhofar-born singer has chosen to broadcast his Jabbali music on YouTube.
  • a project led by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture is researching the languages ​​spoken in the sultanate and another, by the Department of Culture at Oman’s Royal Court, is working on Oman's dead languages — ones that no longer have any speakers
  • Local and international academics are working to document those languages before their remains disappear entirely, mainly in Dhofar and in the mountainous peninsula of Musandam, which overlooks the Strait of Hormuz.
Ed Webb

Omani authorities block access to online magazine "Mowatin" - IFEX - 0 views

www.ifex.org/...block-access-magazine

Oman GCC censorship media authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 10 May 17 - Cached
  • Launched in June 2013, Mowatin is an independent Omani magazine that covers a variety of topics in Oman and the Arabian Gulf including politics, human rights and the economy. In January 2016, the magazine announced a suspension of its activities due to "circumstances beyond its control", in particular its desire to "guarantee the safety" of its journalists and writers. The magazine's journalists were subjected to pressures and harassment from Omani authorities, in particular the Internal Security Services (ISS), the country's national security intelligence agency. In a video published on 25 April, the magazine announced that it would resume publishing from London, on 3 May on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. However, hours after resuming publication, the magazine and human rights groups reported that the website was blocked inside Oman.
Ed Webb

Press release archive: About NPG - 0 views

www.nature.com/...nme.html

media Arab Arabs science

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Nature Middle East launches today at www.nature.com/naturemiddleeast. The new website from Nature Publishing Group (NPG) showcases scientific and medical research from the Arabic-speaking Middle East region and is continuously updated with articles in English and Arabic. The King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC), at King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences (KSAU-HS), Saudi Arabia, is sponsoring Nature Middle East.
  • "We are proud to be launching Nature Middle East, which reflects our growing commitment to a region with a proud scientific history and a promising future," comments David Swinbanks, Publishing Director for NPG. "We believe this launch is particularly timely, as nations from across the region increase their investment in science and medical research facilities and programmes. Nature Middle East will be the place to keep in touch with these exciting new developments."
  • Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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  • Nature Middle East Editor Mohammed Yahia has been actively promoting science in the Middle East region for a number of years. Prior to joining Nature Middle East, Mohammed was the MENA region coordinator for the website SciDev.Net and has worked as a reporter, editor, and consultant.
  • following the launch of Nature India in February 2008 and Nature China in 2007
Ed Webb

MERIA: The Coming Transformation of the Muslim World - 0 views

eduwebb.pbwiki.com/...meria99_eid01.html

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • what they think
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09
       
      To what extent has this ever really been possible? To the extent that it has, are things really so different now?
  • Today, the major impetus for change in religious and political values comes from below
  • Distinctive to the modern era is that discourse and debate about Muslim tradition involves people on a mass scale. It also necessarily involves an awareness of other Muslim and non-Muslim traditions. Mass education and mass communication in the modern world facilitate an awareness of the new and unconventional. In changing the style and scale of possible discourse, they reconfigure the nature of religious thought and action, create new forms of public space, and encourage debate over meaning.
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  • We are still in the early stages of understanding how different media — including print, television, radio, cassettes, and music — influence groups and individuals, encouraging unity in some contexts and fragmentation in others,
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09
       
      Indeed - this has been a theme we have encountered more than once during this course.
  • the secularist Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm, debated Shaykh Yusifal-Qaradawi, a conservative religious intellectual, on Qatar’s al-Jazira Satellite TV in May 1997. For the first time in the memory of many viewers, the religious conservative came across as the weaker, more defensive voice.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09
       
      I met Sadiq in Beirut - interesting person, protected somewhat by belonging to one of the prestigious old Damascus families.
  • Fethullah Glen
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09
       
      Gülen, not Glen
  • The result is a collapse of earlier, hierarchical notions of religious authority based on claims to the mastery of fixed bodies of religious texts. Even when there are state-appointed religious authorities-as in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Egypt-there no longer is any guarantee that their word will be heeded, or even that they themselves will follow the lead of the regime. No one group or type of leader in contemporary Muslim societies possesses a monopoly on the management of the sacred.
  • Publicly shared ideas of community, identity, and leadership take new shapes in such engagements, even as many communities and authorities claim an unchanged continuity with the past. Mass education, so important in the development of nationalism in an earlier era, and a proliferation of media and means of communication have multiplied the possibilities for creating communities and networks among them, dissolving prior barriers of space and distance and opening new grounds for interaction and mutual recognition.
Ed Webb

The Death of the Palestinian Cause Has Been Greatly Exaggerated | Newlines Magazine - 0 views

newlinesmag.com/...e-has-been-greatly-exaggerated

Israel Palestine israelpalestine KSA Saudi UAE Morocco Sudan Egypt Jordan Syria media diplomacy analysis nationalism

shared by Ed Webb on 22 May 21 - No Cached
  • For the last 10 years, Western (and even Arab) pundits have repeatedly questioned the place of Palestine in the pan-Arab psyche. They surmised that the Arab Spring had refocused Arab minds on their problems at home. They assumed that battling tyrannical regimes and their security apparatuses, reforming corrupt polities and decrepit health care and education systems, combating terrorism and religious extremism, whittling back the power of the military, and overcoming economic challenges like corruption and unemployment would take precedence over an unsolved and apparently unsolvable cause.
  • reforming the Arab world’s political systems and the security and patronage networks that keep them in power and allow them to dominate their populations appears to be just as arduous a task as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
  • The difference now is not that Arab populaces have abandoned Palestine. Western and regional observers say the muted outrage over affronts like American support for the annexation of the Golan Heights or recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or even the Abraham Accords and the subsequent sycophantic embrace of Israel in the Gulf is an indicator of Arab public opinion, that it signals a loss of interest in the cause.It is not. Arabs are of course not of a single mind on any particular issue, nor is it possible to gauge public opinion under tyrannical regimes. But it is indicative of the fact that these authoritarians no longer see the pan-Arab Palestinian cause and supporting it as vital to their survival. They have discovered that inward-looking, nationalistic pride is the key to enduring in perpetuity. It is the final step in the dismantling of pan-Arabism as a political force, one that will shape the region’s fortunes and its states’ alliances in the years and decades to come.
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  • Nowhere is this shift in attitude more abjectly transparent than in the Gulf states’ media outlets, which hew closely to the state line and even go beyond it in an attempt to out-hawk official policy, which by comparison appears reasonable and measured.
  • an obvious and transparent outgrowth of the Gulf states’ normalization deals with Israel, though it is curious to me why they feel the need to amplify Israel’s narrative of the conflict if they did not think public opinion was already on the side of normalization
  • Jordan violently suppressed demonstrators protesting the attacks on Gaza, who apparently did not receive the memo that 27 years should have been enough time to accept Israel’s position on the conflict. In Egypt, despite its testy relationship with Hamas and its participation in the blockade of Gaza, it is still political and social suicide to publicly embrace normalization as a concept.
  • There was great presumption and folly in the grandiose naming of a convenient political deal between unelected monarchs and a premier accused of bribery and corruption, which was brokered by an American president who paid hush money to a porn star, after the patriarch of the prophets of Israel and Islam.
  • few Arab leaders have ever actually done anything for the Palestinians beyond rhetorical support for the cause, but they were happy to use the prospect of Palestine to keep their populations in check. The late former President Hafez al-Assad imposed a multi-decade state of emergency and mobilization to justify his tyrannical hold over Syria while awaiting the mother of all battles with the enemy, all without firing a single shot across the border since 1973. The leader of the beating heart of Arabism intervened in Lebanon’s civil war and had no qualms massacring pan-Arab nationalists and their Palestinian allies, or to recruit his Amal militia allies to starve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. His son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, negotiated with Israel via intermediaries, ready to sell out his allies in Iran and Hezbollah, even as he declared his fealty to the resistance.
  • The Gulf states have long had backchannels and secret dealings with the Israelis and developed a penchant for Israeli digital surveillance tools. Egypt needed Israel to destroy extremist militants in Sinai. And Morocco, Oman, and Qatar all had different levels of diplomatic ties.
  • We don’t know broadly whether a majority of Arabs care about Palestine or not, though every indicator points to the fact that they still do
  • Riyadh’s media outlets have taken on a prominent role in expressing public sympathy for Israel and its positions
  • In Saudi Arabia, a monumental shift is underway to neuter the power of the clerical establishment in favor of a more nationalistic vision of progress that gives primacy to Saudi identity. According to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, in a recent interview, this identity derives from religious heritage but also from cultural and historic traditions. MBS has defanged the hated Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, introduced social reforms that dismantle some of the restrictions on women, detained numerous clerics who criticized his policies, both foreign and domestic, and has been elevated by his surrogates into an almost messianic figure sent to renew the faith and empower Saudi identity through KPI-infused economic progress initiatives like Vision 2030. He has also, of course, arrested those who sought to pursue activism and reform and those who criticized the pace and manner of his revolution.
  • where nationalist pride is intermingled with the quality of life and performance metrics of a technocratic capitalist state, albeit one where the reins are held by only a handful of families
Ed Webb

Qatar World Cup set to be major windfall for tourist-ready Dubai | Middle East Eye - 1 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...-cup-looms-money-spinner-dubai

Qatar UAE football soccer worldcup sport sports tourism economy

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Sep 22 - Cached
  • With little investment the UAE, and in particular Dubai, stands to gain if, as expected, supporters opt to stay in the tourism hotspot instead of tiny Gulf neighbour Qatar during the November-December tournament.
  • Dubai's more permissive environment - including a wider availability of alcohol - could entice fans
  • Budget airline flydubai will run at least 30 return flights a day to Doha, just an hour away, part of a daily airlift of 160 shuttle services from cities in the resource-rich Gulf.
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  • Any economic windfall, and reflected glory from the first World Cup on Arab soil, will come less than two years after Doha and the UAE were at odds over a regional blockade that isolated Qatar from its neighbours.
  • The UAE is also offering multiple-entry visas at the nominal fee of 100 dirhams ($27) to people with tickets for World Cup matches.
  • One Dubai hotel, on the man-made, frond-shaped Palm island, will be given over entirely to football fans.
  • Shuttle flights will also run from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman to relieve pressure on accommodation in Doha, a city of 2.4 million. But "relative to other Gulf states, Dubai does hold an advantage with its standing as a major tourist destination already",
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